The Handel and Haydn Society has appointed bassoonist, educator, and arts administrator Lecolion Washington Jr. as the ensemble’s next president and CEO, effective Aug. 1.
For the past nine years, the Texas-born musician has been executive director at the Community Music Center of Boston, an arts education nonprofit that serves over 3,000 students throughout the city with classes at its South End headquarters and various school-based programs. During his tenure, the center’s net assets grew by 200 percent, and he headed up a fund-raising campaign that enabled the center’s expansion to a new 13,000-square-foot flagship facility in Roxbury’s Nubian Square, which is scheduled to open this fall.
In a phone interview, Washington said he’d been watching H+H for some time, impressed with its musical excellence and educational offerings. “It’s a beautiful place to be able to try innovative things,” he said.
In a statement, board chair Judith Verhave said that both the search committee and the board of governors voted unanimously to approve Washington’s appointment, which she called “a testament to the extraordinary confidence this organization has in his vision.”
Before moving to Boston in 2017 to lead CMCB, Washington was based in Memphis, where he was a professor of bassoon at the University of Memphis and co-founded PRIZM Ensemble, a Memphis-based organization focused on chamber-music education for local youth. The H+H position represents a welcome “return to the performing arts” for him, at a time when many classical performance organizations are focused on attracting and retaining new audiences, he said.
“Everyone’s trying different things. They’re trying it with repertoire. They’re trying it with storytelling. They’re trying it with staffing. But no one seems to have found the perfect right answer, and I think in many ways there isn’t one,” said Washington. “You probably need some version of all of those things.”
But he thinks H+H is positioned well to “solve for a lot of things the entire sector is trying to solve for,” he said. “Because of its history, it has this core of people who are connected to it.”
Bass Dana Whiteside, a veteran member of the Handel and Haydn Chorus who served on the search committee, said he was excited about Washington’s style of leadership as well as the local connections he brings to the role.
“He’s very steeped in Boston; he knows the Boston landscape; he has a wonderful reputation and rapport civically,” said Whiteside, who works in urban planning and development in addition to his career as a professional singer.
H+H had been looking for a “great convener” as its next executive leader; someone who could engage and collaborate with musicians and staff as well as interfacing with donors, said Whiteside. Washington “has an understanding of the ways that board, staff, and other constituencies have to be fully engaged and involved in the work of taking an organization to the next level.”
Washington, who succeeds David Snead as president and CEO, is the first Black person to hold an executive leadership role at the 211-year-old ensemble, the oldest continually running performing arts organization in the United States. “I name publicly that I am Black; many of my social networks are Black, and that is absolutely who I am. And I’m also a bassoonist, and because of that, it means I have been in predominantly white spaces my entire life.”
As he sees it, that background gives him “a certain type of cultural fluency; multiple versions of language and culture and ways of being that I very much understand,” he said. “For me, this is a really great moment to be able to activate that cultural fluency in service of this music that I love. And when I say I love it, I mean, I’ve devoted my entire life to it. This is not a passion project, or something I do on the periphery … or something based on theory. I believe it because I live it.”
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at az.madonna@globe.com. Follow her @knitandlisten.