A. Scott Wood is Music Director and Conductor of the Arlington Philharmonic and the Amadeus Orchestra. He is also Director of Orchestral Activities at The George Washington University’s Corcoran School of Arts and Design. The Virginia Commission for the Arts lauded him as “an incredible talent.” In 2023 the International Conductors Guild met in Valencia, Spain, and elected Wood to their board of directors, and he was subsequently recognized by GWU for this distinguished membership.
In demand as a guest conductor, Maestro Wood recently led the Israel Symphony Orchestra Rishon LeZion in Tel Aviv. He performed with Grammy-winning and Oscar-nominated film composer Terence Blanchard and led the Wolf Trap Orchestra with legendary Bollywood singer Asha Bhosle. Other guest appearances have included the Orchestra Society of Philadelphia, the Brevard (North Carolina) Philharmonic, the Virginia Commonwealth University Symphony, the Rutgers Sinfonia, the University of Houston Orchestra and Chorale (at the Kennedy Center), the Washington Symphonic Brass, and the McLean Symphony. He has collaborated with Bowen-McCauley Dance, conducted the Kennedy Center’s popular Messiah Sing-Along and worked with many choral ensembles, including the Army Chorus, the Navy Sea Chanters, the National Cathedral Singers, the Vienna Choral Society, the Reston Chorale, the Fairfax Choral Society, the Washington National Opera Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists. The Washington Post noted his conducting as eliciting a “warm and admirably clear” tone and “fine sense of shade and color”. His Fanfare for a New Beginning was nationally broadcast on C-SPAN television.
Sought after as an educator, Wood is the distinguished holder of the Roeckelein Chair in Music at the National Cathedral School and St. Albans School, where he serves as Director of Instrumental Music and chair of the Music Department; the school also awarded him a fellowship in recognition of outstanding teachers and their lifelong impact on students. He has worked with aspiring young musicians in the American Youth Philharmonic and the Shenandoah Valley, Potomac Valley, Chesapeake, Prince William, and D.C. Youth Orchestras, as well as George Mason University’s Potomac Arts Academy and numerous honors orchestras. Wood’s work in the area of music education earned him the Fairfax Symphony Serage Award for Music Education. He has been honored by the Arlington branch of the American Association of University Women for his contributions to the arts in Arlington.
Maestro Wood has also been engaged as a lecturer for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and National Philharmonic at the Strathmore Performing Arts Center, and has spoken at the Smithsonian Institution, the Goethe-Institut, the Concurso di Canto Lirico in Peru, for Encore Learning, Johns Hopkins University’s OASIS, and the Borders College of Classical Knowledge. He has advised the prestigious Chesapeake Chamber Music Competition—a biennial international event—and served as judge for the Washington Area Music Awards (the “Wammies”) and OnStage Korea at the Korean Cultural Center. In 2021, the Voice of America spotlighted Maestro Wood to tell the story of orchestras returning to live performances in the wake of the COVID pandemic (https://tinyurl.com/VOAOrchestraReturns).
Born into a military family, Wood traveled extensively as a young man and learned piano and trumpet in a German Musikverein. While attending the University of Illinois, he went to London as a finalist in the International Trumpet Guild Solo Competition and toured extensively in Europe and Russia. He subsequently was a fellow at the International Conductors Workshop in the Czech Republic and the Conductors Institute of South Carolina, was the recipient of the first-ever conducting fellowship given jointly by the League of American Orchestras and Chorus America, and received a grant for study in Italy.
