Joshua Kosman:

A tribute to conductor Michael Morgan

There were many things to love about Michael Morgan, the Oakland Symphony music director who died Friday, Aug. 20, at 63. Yet what I kept coming back to as the news first sank in was his giggle.

Michael had a high-pitched, sonorous, pealing laugh that would frequently burst into a conversation, sometimes at unpredictable junctures. It was joyous and silly; it was not remotely dignified. It didn’t sound like anything you’d expect to hear from the mouth of an orchestra leader.

But of course, Michael was never very interested in conforming to anyone else’s idea of what a conductor should be. About the music he was very serious indeed. He was a dedicated worker and a gifted collaborator, one who could bring out the best in anyone who came into the Oakland Symphony’s orbit. And he was powerfully committed to making his orchestra a community resource for the entire population of the city.

But the maestro mystique never meant much to Michael. Give him some music and good conversation, and the laughter would begin.

The giggle wasn’t just for private consumption, either. Anyone who attended concerts at the Paramount Theatre encountered it sooner or later, and usually sooner. Before each concert, Michael would say a few words of introduction, and often his style of humor — a distinctive blend of dad jokes and deadpan camp — would win the audience over.

And by the time the music began in earnest, whether it was Brahms, or Shostakovich, or a world premiere by a local composer, everyone was already in a good mood.

For me, that mood lingered throughout any interaction I ever had with Michael. He always took my calls when I reached out for a quote, or a tip, or some background information, and we’d often find ourselves chatting at length about a variety of topics, both musical and not. He was remarkably at ease talking with the press — a function of being, as far as I could tell, deeply comfortable in his own skin.

One of the best gifts he gave me was that he never read reviews — or at least he claimed not to, which amounted to the same thing. That meant that whatever I wrote about a performance, there was no risk that he would take offense or be hurt. It also meant that when our paths crossed again, we could take up where we’d left off without any lingering bad feeling.

Michael was an excellent conductor, but more than that, he was a superb music director. His overall ambition was less to perform the symphonies of Beethoven or Schubert well — though naturally that was also part of the plan — than to find ways for the Oakland Symphony to be a force for good, in both the artistic and the civic arena.

That’s why his programming was so restless and innovative, so devoted to championing the work of the underrepresented and the little-known. The “Notes From ...” series, which threw a spotlight each season on a different ethnic or national community in Oakland — Vietnamese, Iranian, Mexican — was a model of community engagement. His forays into music theater, including concert performances of Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” and Frank Loesser’s “Guys and Dolls,” showed what an orchestra could do without losing its central identity.

It took a long time before other local musical organizations figured out how much Michael had to offer. The San Francisco Symphony, most notably, treated him with studious disregard for decades before bringing him on board during the pandemic to recast the “Notes From ...” concept into virtual form as “Currents.” (To be fair, he was also scheduled to make an overdue guestconducting debut with the orchestra in 2020 until the pandemic intervened.)

In recent years, though, he seemed to be moving comfortably and gracefully into his role as a local elder statesman. West Edge Opera tapped him to help curate its commissioning project, Aperture. When the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Symphony created the Emerging Black Composers Project, Michael was a natural choice to lend his expertise.

It helped that he was actually here, a resolutely local resource in an increasingly far-flung world. Because that, in the end, was the greatest strength of Michael’s legacy — the importance of place, of creating an artistic institution that would mirror and support and be treasured by the community it was a part of. The inextricable bond between Oakland and the Oakland Symphony is something permanent that Michael leaves behind him.

And of course, memories of his laugh, which has been a consolation to me — and perhaps to others as well — amid the tears.

Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic. Email: jkosman@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoshuaKosman

Omid Zoufonoun / Oakland Symphony Oakland Symphony Music Director Michael Morgan (right) shares a laugh with comedian W. Kamau Bell, who collaborated with him on a symphony event. Morgan died Aug. 20 at age 63.