Isaiah Jackson was born in Richmond, Virginia, and enjoyed a professional conducting career that spanned 35 years, with titled positions on four continents including music directorships in Boston and in London, where he was Music Director of the Royal Ballet, Covent Garden.
After completing his AB at Harvard (Eliot House '66, Russian Studies) and five years of post-graduate study at Stanford and Juilliard, Isaiah led many distinguished orchestras abroad, including the Berliner Symphoniker, Vienna Symphony, BBC Concert Orchestra, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Roma RAI, and the orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. A facility with languages enabled him to lead rehearsals in the musicians' native language, including an international youth orchestra to whose musicians he spoke consecutively in French, German, Russian, and English.
In the US, he reveled in conducting the New York Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra, plus the orchestras of Los Angeles, Sydney, and Toronto, in the great halls of the world: Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall, Berlin's Die Philharmonie, Vienna's Musikverein, Sydney's Opera House. He founded The Gospel Project, conducting local community gospel choirs in concert with their city's professional orchestras — an initiative that stretched across the US and abroad, from Brisbane to Liverpool.
Isaiah returned to Boston in 2002 to conduct the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, regularly filling Sanders Theater, and deepened his Harvard affiliation, serving as a Fellow at the Du Bois Institute and as Musician in Residence at the Memorial Church.
After becoming deaf, he served as Professor of Composition at Berklee College of Music for 15 years, earning the title of Professor Emeritus after his retirement in 2022. His favorite course, A Vision of Music's Future, challenged students each semester to name their favorite genre, then consider three of its components: where it stood presently, how it arrived at this juncture, and what its future might hold.
Isaiah lived in Cambridge from 2002 until moving to Berkeley, CA just before his death in 2025. He was predeceased by his wife, Helen Tuntland Jackson, in 2021, and is survived by his brother, Morgan (AB '69, MD '73), his son, Benjamin T. Jackson (Harvard AB '03, Stanford MBA/JD '10); his daughters, Katharine Jackson Hobbs (Harvard AB '04, Stanford MBA '09) and Caroline Jackson (Harvard AB '06, Stanford MA, JD '11); and six grandchildren.
