The New York Philharmonic Has a Principal Horn Again. The Chair Had Waited Eight Years, Eight Months and Twelve Days for One.

On 11 September 2026, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks, Slipped Disc reported that David Cooper had joined the New York Philharmonic as its principal horn, and carried his own post marking "my first concert".

He is the first principal horn the orchestra has appointed since Philip Myers's departure in 2017, on every source Cadenza checked, listed at the foot of this piece.

David Cooper's appointment was announced on 30 May 2026 and, by his own account, he has passed his trial period. The New York Philharmonic spells his name David Cooper on its own artist page, which is worth saying because at least one outlet, Slipped Disc, has called him David Alan Cooper. The orchestra's own spelling is the one this piece uses.

How long the chair waited

Philip Myers held the principal horn chair from January 1980. He held it for more than thirty-seven years.

Cadenza found no announcement that he had left. On 3 August 2017 Slipped Disc reported that his job was being advertised in the AFM's International Musician while he was still listed on the orchestra's website. On 14 September it reported that he was missing from an online campaign, the New York Philharmonic All-Stars, and on 19 September it reported that the orchestra had deleted him from its website the night before, 18 September, with "no public statement or explanation". That deletion is the clearest dated marker of his departure on the public record.

Take that date as the start and the announcement of Cooper's appointment as the end.

More than eight and a half years. Not the round nine that is easy to write, and not the decade one Slipped Disc commenter guessed at. Eight years, eight months and twelve days, between two documented dates.

The gap had two halves, and they were different

This is the part that makes the number mean something.

Richard Deane has been the orchestra's associate principal horn since September 2014. From 2017 he was formally Acting Principal Horn, and he held that title until 2022. So from 2017 to 2022, on his own dates, the chair had somebody in it with a title that said so, even if the title said acting.

The years from 2022 to the appointment in May 2026 had no principal, and Cadenza found no acting principal named for them in the sources it checked. In May 2023 The New York Times, quoted by Slipped Disc, described the position as "currently vacant".

Roughly five years of a stand-in with a name for the job, then roughly four with no name at all. That is a different thing from a vacancy, and it is a different thing again from a chair that is filled. An orchestra can run like that, and this one did, through the whole of Jaap van Zweden's tenure as music director, from 2018 to 2024, until Gustavo Dudamel made the appointment.

What the audition page says

The New York Philharmonic publishes a figure itself, on the audition page for this very position, which was still online when Cadenza checked on 24 September 2026.

"Base scale is $190,698 for the 52-week 2025-2026 season," it says. That is the orchestra's own number, on its own site. The same sentence appears, word for word, on the orchestra's audition pages for associate principal trumpet and principal oboe, as archived in November 2025, so Cadenza reads it as the orchestra's general base scale rather than a figure specific to this chair.

Set that against the gap. A chair advertised with a published base scale of $190,698 a year, in the orchestra that plays at Lincoln Center, went without a permanent holder for the better part of a decade.

The audition, and the one detail that says most

The audition the orchestra advertised for the chair is dated and public: the orchestra posted the dates itself. Neither the orchestra's page for Cooper nor the Slipped Disc and Violin Channel reports of his appointment say he was appointed through it, as Cadenza read them on 24 September 2026.

Four months and twenty-five days from the closing date to the announcement. As recently as 3 October 2025 Slipped Disc counted the principal horn chair among seven player vacancies at the orchestra.

Cooper arrives from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he was associate principal horn.

But the detail that says most about those years is a guest booking. In May 2023, with the chair still unfilled, the New York Philharmonic brought in Stefan Dohr to sit in it. Dohr is the principal horn of the Berlin Philharmonic. Cadenza's reading is that an orchestra that brings in the first horn of the Berlin Philharmonic to cover a vacancy is not an orchestra short of options, but one that had not yet found the person it wanted to appoint permanently, which is a different problem and a more respectable one.

What is not known, and is not going in this piece

Cadenza found no public statement by the orchestra or by Myers giving the reason he left, or the precise date, in Slipped Disc's 2017 reports, on the orchestra's pages or in the other sources listed below, as of 24 September 2026.

The 2017 coverage carries unconfirmed chatter in its comment threads, disputed in the same threads, and none of it is going to be repeated here. A thirty-seven-year principal horn of the New York Philharmonic is entitled to have the reason for his departure remain his own business unless he or the orchestra chooses otherwise, and, on everything Cadenza found by 24 September 2026, neither has. What is on the record is the advertisement, the website deletion, the date, and the silence.

That silence is itself part of the story. An orchestra that publishes its base scale to the dollar has not, in anything Cadenza found, published a sentence about the departure of the man who had led its horn section since 1980.

Cooper's first concert

His own post, as Slipped Disc reproduced it on 11 September, was short: "From the day I passed the trial period and my first concert! What an honor to be part of the amazing New York Philharmonic and appointed by the one and only Gustavo Dudamel."

The post does not say which concert it marks. Slipped Disc published it at 11.16am New York time on 11 September, more than four hours before that afternoon's memorial concert for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks, Sounds of Remembrance, which the orchestra listed for 3.30pm at the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center, with Dudamel conducting. On Cadenza's reading, the memorial concert cannot be the one the post describes. The night before, 10 September, was the orchestra's listed season opener at Radio City Music Hall, the concert with which, in the orchestra's words, Dudamel "kicks off his inaugural season" as the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Music & Artistic Director, the title the orchestra gives him in full. His Inaugural Gala, by the orchestra's listing, is on 30 September at David Geffen Hall.

Five days after the memorial concert, on 16 September, Dudamel opened the subscription season at David Geffen Hall with a programme of John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls, the world premiere of Zosha Di Castri's Invisible House and Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony.

Reviewing that opening, David Wright wrote in New York Classical Review that Dudamel "exhibited courage and wide-ranging imagination in two complex new scores." Neither that review nor David Patrick Stearns's for Classical Voice North America on 21 September mentions Cooper or the horns, as Cadenza read them on 24 September.

In October 2025 it was an audition notice

This chair began as a posted vacancy with dates and a repertoire list, and it was posted with the orchestra's base scale attached. In Cadenza's view, publishing the number is the single most useful thing an orchestra can do for the players considering whether to fly across a continent and take the screen.

Cadenza carries auditions and vacancies with open deadlines, free to musicians, on its jobs board, and competitions on its competitions board. In September 2026 it has been counting what orchestras actually pay and what they publish, from the San Francisco Opera settlement to the season that opened around the world.

The question the orchestra will be asked next is not about the appointment, which looks like a good one. It is about the gap. An orchestra that can tell a prospective candidate its base scale to the dollar could also say how long it intends a first chair to stand empty, and what it will do differently next time.

Sources: the New York Philharmonic's own artist page for David Cooper, which is the authority for the spelling of his name; the orchestra's own principal horn audition page, which states the base scale of $190,698 for the 52-week 2025-26 season, and its audition pages for associate principal trumpet and principal oboe as archived by the Internet Archive in November 2025, which state the same figure; the orchestra's own page for Richard Deane and his own site for the dates of his associate principal and acting principal roles; the orchestra's own listings for 10 September, 11 September, 16 to 19 September and 30 September 2026; Slipped Disc's reports of 3 August 2017, 14 September 2017, 19 September 2017, 21 May 2023, 3 October 2025, 30 May 2026 and 11 September 2026, whose page gives its publication time; the Berlin Philharmonic's page for Stefan Dohr; the Los Angeles Philharmonic's page for David Cooper; The Violin Channel's report of 1 June 2026 on his appointment; and PAC NYC for its location. Philip Myers's tenure from January 1980 and the removal of his profile from the orchestra's website on the night of 18 September 2017 are as reported at the time by Slipped Disc; Cadenza found no institutional statement about his departure, and none of the unconfirmed explanations that circulated in 2017 is reported here. David Cooper's quotation is from his own public post as reproduced by Slipped Disc on 11 September 2026. David Wright's assessment is from his review in New York Classical Review; David Patrick Stearns's is in Classical Voice North America. The interval of 8 years, 8 months and 12 days is Cadenza's arithmetic from the two dated events above.

Correction, 24 September 2026: an earlier version of this article said Cooper's first concert as principal horn was the 11 September memorial concert, and measured the gap to that date as 8 years, 11 months and 24 days. His post marking his first concert was published before that concert began and does not name the concert, so the gap is now measured to the announcement of his appointment on 30 May 2026. The earlier version also attributed to the orchestra a New York Classical Review judgement made about Dudamel, called the 10 September Radio City concert Dudamel's inaugural gala (the orchestra lists its Inaugural Gala for 30 September), placed the Perelman Performing Arts Center a few hundred metres from the World Trade Center site rather than at it, and described the $190,698 base scale as the pay for this chair. It also said the advertised audition had produced Cooper's appointment; neither the orchestra's page for him nor the reports of his appointment that Cadenza read say so.

Cover photograph: David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, the New York Philharmonic's home. Photographed 14 March 2024 by D. Benjamin Miller, released under CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.