ROCHESTER TEN | TIMOTHY LONG

Age: 57
Hometown: Holdenville, Oklahoma
Current residence: Rochester and New York City
Occupation: Artistic and music director of opera at Eastman School of Music; assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera

There is a boy in Oklahoma. A toddler listening to the Beethoven his mother plays, making a piano out of anything he can find. The music is emotional and encompassing; before he has the words to describe it, music is a feeling.

“I never, ever foresaw any of it,” Timothy Long, who is of Muscogee Creek and Choctaw descent, said. “I just loved to play piano.”

Long’s mother discovered Beethoven while sick at an Indian Tuberculosis Sanitarium after catching the disease at an orphanage.

“She’d only play Beethoven for us as toddlers, with no real intention of us becoming musicians,” he said.

Now the artistic and music director of opera at his alma mater, Eastman School of Music, as well as assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, Long admits many miracles had to happen to get here, from the upright piano someone gifted his minister grandfather to the 15-year-old girl new to teaching who became his first instructor.

“To [that teacher’s] great credit,” Long said, “she called the teacher of the students who always beat her at competitions and convinced her to listen to me. I auditioned for her, and she cleared her schedule. Wednesday nights we would drive [to Oklahoma City] and my father or mother would sit in the car for two to three hours then drive me back home.”

The classical world is demanding. It demands money, access, education and time. It’s overwhelmingly white due to those factors. Steadily, though, Long made his way.

“Because of my love of music, I clawed my way to a position in this world, and I want others to have this opportunity,” he said.

Long performed first as a musician and is now more often a conductor. He started coaching piano first at Juilliard then Yale, where he conducted his first opera. The transition was difficult and emotional, something no one warned him about. But Long, who wears ribbon shirts during special performances to represent his Indigenous identity, has since conducted all over the world, including in the only existing theater where Mozart did the same. In 2017, Long conducted “Missing,” an opera about the thousands of missing Indigenous women.

“In this world I’ve found, especially up to “Missing,” I would be the first and only Native person [someone] met,” Long says. “So I was an exception, not a part of the Native community. After ‘Missing,’ it became my duty for people to think about us every time they saw us anywhere. Not for me, but for the millions of people who have no voices.”

This mission reached a pitch during 2020, when Long said people started reaching out for music created by Indigenous artists. At the time, there wasn’t a repertoire for their songs, so Long and his father-in-law, Randy Plimpton, started work on the “North American Indigenous Songbook” under the Plimpton Foundation.

“We brought together Native composers from across the country to create original works,” Plimpton wrote in an email. “This idea of Tim’s is unique and has never been done before — to bring Native and Indigenous musicians into one songbook, which will be available to anyone interested in performing these pieces.”

Additionally, as part of the foundation, two singers of Native descent in Oklahoma are awarded the Timothy Long Prize each year. The Prize’s first recipient just graduated with her Master’s from Juilliard.

Long has also turned his attention to composing something of his own. The work, titled “Sky Mother,” will combine various languages: Chuctow, Houdenasuennee and of course, Beethoven, the artist that started it all for Long.

“It’s a combination of the creation story of Sky Woman juxtaposed with my mother’s memoirs of growing up in the orphanage and sanatorium,” he said. “They’re both about loss and regaining a new world with hope.”

Being a musician the way Long is leaves imprints — a bruised neck from practicing violin all night, hands that seem to morph around keyboards — but to him all of this has been worth it, for the music that carries him through and the music he loves.

“Still, I am obsessed.” theplimptonfoundation.org

Jessica L. Pavia is a contributor to CITY.