MA Top 30 Professional: Alexander Serio

Executive Director
Sitka Music Festival

Physically, Sitka, Alaska—a town of 8,000 on an island off the south coast of Alaska—couldn’t be more different from Philadelphia, PA. As Alexander Serio puts it, Sitka’s stunning views of mountains and ocean feel “like living in the middle of National Geographic.”

But there’s a continuum among Serio’s work as executive director of the annual Sitka Music Festival, his ongoing role as a trumpet teacher in Philadelphia, and his previous job as director of a branch of that city’s venerable Settlement Music School. In all ways, he is trying to make music part of people’s everyday lives.

Founded in 1972 by a student of Jascha Heifetz, the month-long Sitka Music Festival has always drawn world-class performers. Since 2011 when cellist Zuill Bailey arrived as artistic director, the festival, held each June, has expanded its reach. It partners with Sitka Jazz Week and sponsors a three-week Cello Seminar that sends young cellists to perform in Sitka and beyond in venues ranging from bars to retirement homes and schools. This winter the festival will send the Galvin Cello Quartet on a 1,200-mile Alaskan tour, with performances in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Ketchikan, and Wasilla as well as Sitka.

“We try to put classical music in places you wouldn’t necessarily expect it,” says Serio, in the job since 2022. “Zuill played the complete Bach Cello Suites on a street downtown during Halloween one year. We put candy in his cello case to hand out to the kids.”

Starting out as a trumpet player, Serio eventually switched gears.

“I’m passionate about reaching more people. I realize that as a teacher and an administrator I can have a bigger effect, making this art form more accessible.

“People come to our concerts in their Xtrafus, which is the southeast Alaska kind of fishing boot. Some people even come in their fishing gear. Some people dress up. It’s really a very accessible kind of
environment. For Sitka and Ketchikan to hear chamber concerts with Grammy-winning artists, it’s really incredible.”