A Juilliard-trained violinist playing with the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet, and later the first conductor ever to win a MacArthur genius grant, applied to Juilliard's conducting program and was rejected three times. This episode traces Marin Alsop from her 1956 birth to two professional string players in New York City, through Juilliard's pre-college division, a detour into mathematics at Yale, and her bachelor's and master's in violin, to the era's mythology of the maestro as an older European man and the pseudo-scientific claims that women lacked the upper body strength or booming voice to command an orchestra.

The conversation follows her DIY response: founding the New York String Ensemble in 1981, the female jazz group String Fever, and the fifty-piece Concordia orchestra in 1984, all funded by gigs like the Phili ...