Our workshops and sessions are for intermediate and advanced musicians who are committed to elevating their performance skills. If you're passionate about achieving deeply moving musical performances and you’re ready to embrace a rigorous, methodical approach, then Symphonic Laboratory is for you.

We are based in San Francisco, California. Exact location details for workshops, classes, and orchestral intensives are given to participants only.

Our orchestral intensives range from one to six weeks long and usually focus on a single piece of music.

We are focused on one thing: learning and using the methods of the world’s top professional musicians to create performances that deeply move people.

The core premise is that music can be played in such a way that the nature of our experience is altered. The default nature of the present moment is expanded. The boundaries between self and world are blurred.

This can be achieved when our sound (loudness, timing, articulation and color) participates in the same musical motion inherent in the harmony, melody, and rhythm given by the composer. And when each of us takes responsibility for awareness and empathetic playing.

The intellectual foundation is based on knowledge of how our brains construct emotions, and how time works in human experience. Using this knowledge, we create conditions that allow us to directly experience a higher level of reality via playing great music.

Laboratory founder Paul Smith has spent the last several decades exploring and refining these techniques and methods to make them easier to understand and more effective to use.

We are a group of highly curious, intermediate and advanced musicians who come together to learn how to create musical performances that deeply move people.

We focus on a single piece of music and learn how the harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic energy work together, and how our sound participates in and supports that energy. We rehearse the music with an awareness of more than just our own parts.

Sessions are led by guest teachers, and by Paul Smith, a former student of Leonard Bernstein and Sergiu Celibidache. His mission is to pass on what they taught him about creating great musical performances so you can perform on the highest level—just as the world’s top professional musicians do.

Each session starts with understanding what musical motion is in the score. What is the fundamental line? The harmonic motion? The rhythmic energy? We make sure we also know what roles the various sounds and parts play in the unfolding motion.

When we start to play the piece, our facilitator keeps us on track, holding us accountable to actually produce the sounds aligned with what’s requested in the score.