Here is a brief excerpt from an article by James R. Oesterrich for The New York Times after he attended a performance by Roger Nierenberg and the Music Paradigm Program for workers of New York-Presbyterian Hospital on September 17, 2014.To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Photo Credit: Chris Lee

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I couldn’t have been more skeptical. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The conductor Roger Nierenberg took his Music Paradigm, an elaborate show-and-tell executive learning class based heavily on role playing, to the Kaplan Penthouse at Lincoln Center recently for an audience of nursing directors from New York-Presbyterian Hospital. I had witnessed far too many slick, self-serving attempts to use musical pap as a tool for spiritual uplift or personal motivation, and Mr. Nierenberg, I thought, might as well have been selling snake oil.

But no, I quickly realized, he was making real music and making good sense.

“An orchestra is a great place to model organizational dysfunction,” he said at the outset without apparent irony.

Mr. Nierenberg, 67, had with him 26 string players, mostly from the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, who took seats front and center, surrounded by the nurses, but stood when they performed. He had rehearsed the players straightforwardly in Samuel Barber’s soulful Adagio for Strings for an hour beforehand, but he had not prepared them in any other way for the unscripted event about to unfold.

Now, he continued to rehearse them in public, running through snippets and discussing those with players and audience alike, drawing lessons in leadership from the work of the conductor and the interactions of the players.

More and more, he did model dysfunction. He showed how a performance might be adversely affected if the conductor micromanaged with his baton, eyes and gestures, or if the conductor were simply disengaged or fidgety.

He had the players shift their focus to a particular colleague and attune their playing to complement one another’s. He had them perform with a conductor, then without a conductor and with eyes closed, to show how adept they were at intuitively adjusting to others on their own.

He had them start the piece at different tempos of their choice and alter tempos spontaneously, slowing down, perhaps, in midstream. The musicians were called on to speak as well as play, and audience members were occasionally drafted into action.

The watchword throughout was listening: players listening to one another and to the conductor, but just as much, the conductor listening to the players, how they sound, what they say.

This went on for some 75 minutes. Then the orchestra, with Mr. Nierenberg in place, performed the Adagio complete, beautifully, and departed to huge applause.

Mr. Nierenberg and the audience stayed behind for a half-hour and discussed what had just happened, the nurses in tones equally disbelieving and enraptured.

It takes a healthy ego to take on a project like this. (Then again, it takes a healthy ego to be a conductor, period.) Mr. Nierenberg is presumably trying to model the best podium skills and behavior as well as the worst. Does he have the goods?

“Absolutely,” said David Chan, who has been a concertmaster in the Met Orchestra since 2000. (Mr. Nierenberg is Roddy to Mr. Chan and other Met players, not because he has conducted them but because his wife, Deborah Hoffman, who died in February, was the Met’s principal harpist for many years.)

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Here’s a direct link to the complete article.

Roger Nierenberg is a highly successful conductor who has performed with some of the most distinguished orchestras in America and Europe. Through his interactive program, The Music Paradigm, he has taught hundreds of top companies around the world how to improve their leadership skills and teamwork. Maestro: A Surprising Story About Leading by Listening is his first book. To check out my interview of Roger, please click here.