“I grew up in a family where we didn’t feel physically well if we went a few days without listening to music,” he says.

Though he still enjoys playing the piano, his primary instrument became the trumpet, which he played throughout college both independently and in the Bach Society Orchestra. At Harvard, he tapped into a small community of musicians, many of whom lived with him in Dunster House, known in the days before randomization as the hub of student musical talent.

He wrote for The Crimson, reviewing the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra’s concerts with the precision of an expert; in one review, he analyzed the quality of a soloist’s intonation and criticized the orchestra for failing to “negotiate heavily scored passages, while retaining delicacy and clarity.”

Golan says that some of the more common complaints about Harvard today—that it can be overwhelming and unfriendly to the arts—were not the case during his four years.

“It felt like a fairly small, intimate place to me,” he says, adding that he was the third of three brothers to attend. “I was part of a music community that was pretty congenial and tight.”

Accordingly, he says he divided most of him time between his studies and his trumpet.

In his four years, Golan completed both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in European Renaissance Studies—writing his thesis in his junior year on the development of confraternities out of secular, guild-based fraternities and then moving onto a Knox Fellowship at Oxford.

He says that Harvard was at the “cutting edge” of scholarship on that time period, lessening the formal break between the Middle Ages and the Renasissance.

“New movements have a lot of baggage from the immediate past,” Golan says. “And that also helps in negotiation in New York cultural circles.”

But Golan also ventured outside Harvard’s libraries and practice rooms to explore other interests.

He travelled to Italy, the former Yugoslavia, Turkey and the Netherlands as a writer for Let’s Go. He developed the first edition of Let’s Go Italy and after college briefly tested travel writing as a profession.

He says he has always enjoyed developing several interests at once, a freedom he said he had more in his first year than in his later ones. And it is a freedom he has tried to maintain throughout his life.

“I actually loved my first year at Harvard, that sense of freshness and of exploration I thought was great,” he says. “I have tried to structure my life to be more like freshman year. I am always meeting a lot of new people, discussing a lot of new potential.”

His friends also recognize this trait in him, saying that it is well-suited to his profession. Laura H. Pomerantz, Principal of PBS Realty Advisers in New York City who also serves on the board of Carnegie Hall and chairs the Special Events committee, describes him as “analytical and responsible” and a skilled diplomat.

She has known Golan for nearly all of his tenure at Carnegie, meeting him first at a Luciano Pavarotti concert, where she said his love for music and his love for his job were clear.

“When you are dealing with the many different kinds of people that he deals with—from individuals to corporations to governments—it really does take a very strong interpersonal skills as well as a level of professionalism,” she says.

And this year, he is taking his work abroad, moving with his wife and two daughters to Jerusalem, where his wife will complete part of her education as a rabbinical student.

He says he welcomes the change of pace from his New York life, which often keeps him away from home 14 hours a day. And given his previous travelling experiences, including the initially difficult transition from his Boston roots to the artistic and electric center of music he found in New York, Golan says he’s excited for the move.

“I probably have the ability to really fall in love with my current surroundings and to move on without too many regrets,” he says.

—Staff writer Alexandra N. Atiya can be reached at atiya@fas.harvard.edu.