#70 - Mike Ross: “Music Saved My Life,” Living Like a Composer, Passionate Generalism, and Krannert Center

Mike Ross is the Director of Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois. When we asked him what he would work on if he had all the time in the world, his answer was simple: “Exactly what I’m doing.

Just more of it.” Ross did not grow up planning to run one of the country’s major university performing arts centers. As a young person, he had to choose between two things he loved: architecture and music.

He chose music, became a high school music teacher, fell deeply into composition, earned his doctorate, and eventually found himself helping build the Miller Theatre at Columbia University before coming to Illinois. But underneath that career is a much bigger philosophy.

Ross believes the purpose of the arts is to “deepen the value of being”—to make the experience of being alive richer, more connected, and more meaningful. That idea takes the conversation far beyond music.

We talk about why people become unhappy when their personal values fall out of alignment with the institutions they work for, why universities push people toward specialization, and why Ross describes himself instead as a “passionate generalist.” He argues that becoming excellent at one thing matters, but that something is lost when we begin believing we are only allowed to be one thing. For Ross, art offers a way back toward connection.

A concert can be intensely personal while simultaneously being shared with hundreds of strangers. People with completely different politics, beliefs, backgrounds, and lives can gather in the same room and, for a few moments, experience something together.

Ross sees that as one possible antidote to the fragmentation and disconnection of modern life. We also talk about gratitude, happiness, spirituality, climate change, rhetoric, authenticity, quantum physics, architecture, creativity, and why the misuse of words bothers him so much.

Perhaps most interestingly, Ross explains how decades of composing music changed the way he approaches almost everything else. Composition involves energy, texture, density, structure, tension, release, iteration, editing, knowing when to keep working and knowing when to walk away.

Ross now finds himself using many of those same instincts when thinking about organizations, programming, leadership, and life itself. The conversation eventually arrives at a deceptively simple question: how should a young person build a life they are proud of?

Ross’s answer is not to follow a predetermined formula. Believe that such a life is possible.

Be aware of the human tendency to limit yourself. Keep looking for possibilities you have not considered yet.

And above all, keep inquiring. Because, as Ross puts it, curiosity may be one of the things that provides us with fulfillment over time. *EPISODE LINKS:* - Mike Ross' UIUC Website: - Krannert Center for the Performing Arts: