Geoffrey Pope

Conductor Geoffrey Pope’s dynamic career spans continents, genres, and musical disciplines. Recognized through numerous appointments, commissions, and awards as a conductor and composer, Pope seeks to present provocative, inclusive, and engaging performances that have a strong cultural impact. He holds an academic position at UC Irvine as an Assistant Professor of Teaching, where he is Director of Orchestral Studies and conducts the UCI Symphony and Opera.

Much of Pope’s professional conducting work builds upon the standard repertoire, exploring contemporary music, opera, and multimedia spheres including art installations and film scores. Recent achievements in concert music have included the Los Angeles premiere of John Williams’ Prelude and Scherzo, a piano concerto written for Gloria Cheng and Lang Lang, as well as the release of the album COUNTING by composer Noah Meites and including members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. He is conductor and music director of the immersive work Music in Light, an extravaganza choreographed to some of history’s most enduring pieces, mounted initially in Macau, China. Recorded by an orchestra of Southern California’s finest musicians—and augmented by film, laser projections, and haptics—the installation has brought classical music to thousands of visitors.

Pope has been a prominent member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Upbeat Live faculty since 2024 and has lectured at dozens of concerts led by conductors including Gustavo Dudamel, Zubin Mehta, and Paavo Järvi; guest artists Yuja Wang, Renaud Capuçon, and Seong-Jin Cho; and composers Thomas Adès, Carlos Simon, and William Marsey. He is praised for his technical detail and ability to engage audiences of a range of musical proficiency and perspectives. Rather than broadly contextualizing, his lectures delve into intricacies of composers’ specific choices and idiosyncrasies as a means to reach a deeper understanding of musical works, often through the overlapping lenses of conductor, composer, orchestrator, and forensic musicologist. Many of Pope’s lectures and artist interviews are released as podcasts on the orchestra’s own Grammy®-winning label and are free to the public.

In the music industry, Pope maintains an ongoing presence worldwide as a session conductor, orchestrator, and forensic musicologist through Musical Problem-Solver LLC, a boutique consulting organization he founded in 2022. He is active in the studios of Los Angeles and Europe, and is the only American and regular guest conductor on the conducting staff of the Budapest Scoring Orchestra. Pope’s recent recording credits have included the upcoming second season of Dark Matter (Mac Quayle, composer), Palm Royale (Jeff Toyne, composer; winner of the 2026 ASCAP Composers’ Choice Award), Game of Thrones: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (Dan Romer, composer), The Legend of Vox Machina (Neal Acree, composer), and the season finale arc of IT: Welcome to Derry (Benjamin Wallfisch, composer). Pope’s video game conducting includes portions of League of Legends and Honor of Kings, among others. As an orchestrator, his credits include work on projects as wide-ranging as The Woman King (Terence Blanchard, composer), Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight (Robert Lydecker, composer; Emmy-winner), and Dust Bunny (Isa Summers, composer). Alongside music industry veteran Judith Finell, with whom Pope has worked intermittently since 2017, he recently served as a music consultant for the film Sinners (Ludwig Göransson, composer), and performed analysis crucial to winning Ambrosetti v. Oregon Catholic Press on behalf of the defendant in federal court. His forensic musicology work as a sole practitioner typically centers on copyright infringement risk-assessment for composers and studios, as well as prior art and scènes à faire defenses in litigation.

Pope’s other notable work includes performances of the Britten operas The Rape of Lucretia—with “energy and flair” (Boston Classical Review), leading a “warm and expressive rendering of Britten’s complicated score” (Boston Musical Intelligencer)—and The Turn of the Screw. Subsequent to performing Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, he led the premiere recording of Corey Field’s The Trial of Benjamin Britten, a monodrama in nine scenes, which was highly reviewed in the journal of the International Horn Society. Past performances include Puccini’s La bohème with Valley Opera and Performing Arts, the premiere of David Reyes’ Aztec opera El Circo Anahuac as a guest conductor at UCLA, an acclaimed series of performances of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire throughout the Denver Metropolitan Area, and the first English language production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd in Budapest, Hungary. His concert music recordings appear on independent commercial and academic labels including New Focus Records, Open Space, Orenda Records, and Perspectives on New Music. His film soundtrack albums appear on large labels including Sony Masterworks, Walt Disney Records, Universal Studios Music, and Warner Bros. WaterTower Music.

Dr. Pope’s degrees in composition and conducting were completed at USC, UCLA, and the Eastman School of Music, where he was awarded the prestigious Walter Hagen Conducting Prize. As a student at these institutions, he premiered over one hundred student and faculty works, and remains particularly honored to have conducted the music of Oliver Knussen, John Adams, Tristan Murail, Steven Stucky, and Hilary Tann for those guest composers during residencies and symposiums. While a doctoral conducting student at UCLA, Pope presented symphonic programs including an exploration of connections between music of Richard Wagner and Bernard Herrmann. His scholarly interests include Viennese music of the early twentieth century, and the role of diegetic music in the evolution of sonic spatialization. His dissertation addressed the evolving role of instrumental music written to be performed onstage (Bühnenmusik, or banda) in German language opera, and the coordination issues involved in its execution and synchronization with the orchestra pit. Pope’s dissertation was used as a primary support document in the Vienna State Opera musicians’ petition to declare Bühnenmusik as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. Building upon some of these musical concepts, his upcoming article on Bernard Herrmann’s final two scores (Brian De Palma’s Obsession and Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver) concerns the divergent uses of spatialization in establishing teleology and atmosphere, respectively.

Pope has been a guest faculty member at Chapman University and California State University, Long Beach, and has lectured at other institutions including the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. Early in the pandemic, he was appointed the music directorship of the Beach Cities Symphony, a position he left in 2025 after receiving his tenure track appointment at UC Irvine. At UCI, in addition to conducting the Symphony and Opera, he mentors several undergraduate and graduate students individually in conducting, composition, and orchestration in addition to teaching courses in those fields. Of these students, his recent UCI Symphony assistant conductors both received multiple offers to graduate orchestral conducting programs. Pope is currently President-Elect of the Western Region of the College Orchestra Directors Association (CODA).

More information: www.geoffreypopemusic.com and musicalproblemsolver.com