Leonard Bopp is a conductor, trumpet player, concert producer, and educator based in New York City.
Fiercely committed to the music of our time, Leonard is the Founder and Artistic Director of the BlackBox Ensemble, a New York-based contemporary music ensemble devoted to producing culturally-resonant projects rooted in creative experimentation. Under his leadership, BlackBox has performed multiple world premieres by emerging composers, given performances at major museums, universities, and concert venues in NYC and beyond. They were also selected for Chamber Music America’s 2022 Ensemble Forward program, through which they were coached and mentored by Alan Pierson of Alarm Will Sound. Recent projects include a site-specific dance performance at the Clark Art Institute and the staged premiere of Borrowed Landscape, a dramatic play by tauchgold with original music by Dai Fujikura, at the Noguchi Museum in New York City. Upcoming projects include a reprise performance of Borrowed Landscape as part of a two-performance series at the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C, as well as performances on the University of South Carolina’s Southern Exposure series and at the Timucua Arts Foundation. He is also producing the ensemble’s inaugural BlackBox Fest, a weekend-long performance series in January 2024 including the ensemble’s debut at Roulette Intermedium.
Leonard recently studied at the 2023 Tanglewood Music Center Conducting Seminar and the Jorma Panula Masterclass with the MAV Symphony Orchestra in Budapest, Hungary. He also attended the International Divertimento Ensemble Academy Conducting Course in Milan, Italy, where he was selected to conduct the complete final concert of the academy at the Fabbrica del Vapore, leading the ensemble in George Benjamin’s “At First Light” and the Ligeti Piano Concerto. He will return to the Divertimento Ensemble as a guest conductor on their Milan concert series in February 2024. He previously studied at masterclasses with Johannes Wildner (University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna) and Ulrich Windfuhr (Hochschule für Musik, Hamburg.) In the summer of 2022, Leonard was selected as a recipient of the American Austrian Foundation/Faber Young Conductors Fellowship at the Salzburg Festival, where he was invited to observe rehearsals of the Vienna Philharmonic, opera productions, and visiting ensembles at the festival.
After graduating from The Juilliard School Pre-College Division, where he studied trumpet with Raymond Mase, Leonard attended Williams College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Music and English. Upon graduation, he was named the 2019 recipient of the Hubbard Hutchinson Fellowship in Music. He then earned his MM in Orchestral Conducting at the University of Michigan, where he was a graduate student conductor of the Life Sciences Orchestra, the orchestra of the university’s medical community, as well as the university’s non-major orchestras. He also taught a performance studies seminar as a graduate student instructor in the Department of Comparative Literature. Leonard remains a devoted educator, serving on the trumpet faculty at the 92nd Street Y and the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music’s Partners Division.