Darin Atwater - talking injury recovery and storytelling

Darin Atwater is a composer, conductor, and pianist best known as the founder and leader of Baltimore's groundbreaking ensemble Soulful Symphony. As an educator, he now serves as Distinguished Visiting Faculty at The Peabody Conservatory. In this conversation, we'll discuss how a severe hand injury he experienced last year which forced him to reassess the relationship with his music, audiences, and students. We explore how personal and artistic identify are affected by one's ability to perform and engage with their instrument and creativity, and how recovery has informed his work moving forward. He gave a moving talk at the Performing Arts Medical Association (PAMA) conference in 2025, putting a human face on the topic of work-limiting injuries and medical care for performing artists. Needless to say, his invitation to Talking Ears was sent within minutes after this address, and we are confident you'll hear why in this episode. For your listening pleasure, we’ll be hearing selections from the Soulful Symphony’s 2009 release, Song in a Strange Land. We cannot stress this enough: stop everything and go listen to Soulful Symphony's incredible body of work.