Professor Hogarth Helps Bring Playa Magic to SF Symphony’s 'Rite of Spring'

48 HILLS (SAN FRANCISCO) -- Wise also secured the talents of Hogarth and his musical-director wife Jeannie Psomas. Hogarth is a professor of Music at San Francisco State and fills in at the SF Symphony as a trumpet player, and Psomas has played clarinet with the symphony and teaches as well. All three—Wise is a flutist—met as students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Other symphony members and associates joined in, as well as players from around the world, to make an orchestra of 35. “A lot of people volunteered, but when they saw the score, they gracefully bowed out,” said Wise with a laugh. Wise said the Rite was also appropriate for Burning Man because first-timers—including conductor Hogarth in 2017—are called “virgins,” and traditionally have to lay down and make dust angels on the playa as a symbolic ritual. Hogarth added, “Burning Man is all about existing in a different community and making beauty out of this barren landscape. And I think Rite of Spring does that. It’s a very intense, raw piece, and it’s maintained that intensity for more than a century.”