Can Music Save the World? Ronald C. Gunnell Thinks So, and He’s Doing It as President of the Garibay Institute
Ronald C. Gunnell does not traffic in abstractions. He trades in moments—the kind that linger, improbable and intimate, long after the room has emptied. A handshake that doesn’t end. A bouquet of white roses punctuated by a single red bloom. A conductor’s baton resting in the hands of a dying legend. If Gunnell’s career has followed any discernible arc, it is this: the steady accumulation of human connection, rendered at the highest levels of power, culture, and faith.
“I started out,” he says with a laugh that carries both humility and disbelief, “the trunk of a car.”
It’s not a metaphor. After a promising but ill-fated early foray into real estate—“the broker turned out to be not the most honest individual… he took and scouted it off and left me dry”—Gunnell found himself scanning newspaper classifieds. Two listings caught his eye: one for a healthcare role he didn’t understand, and another managing a restaurant he’d never heard of. He chose the former.
“I had no idea what FHP stood for,” he admits. Within a year, he had discovered the mechanics of the American healthcare system. Within ten, he and his partner had built Health Benefits America into what he calls “the nation’s largest benefits outsourcing company,” serving Fortune 50 giants and managing “about 10 million employees’ retirees over the course of 10 years.”
Stevie Wonder and Ronald C. Gunnell
By 1996, the company was acquired by ADP. Gunnell stayed on briefly, but something else was already calling. Music—long a quiet undercurrent—surged to the foreground.
“A month later… I auditioned for the Tabernacle Choir,” he says. “Through a miracle… I got in.”
That miracle would become a second life. In 2000, following the construction of a 21,000-seat conference center in Salt Lake City, Gunnell was summoned by church leadership with a mandate that would define the next quarter century of his career:
Gunnell recalls Gordon B. Hinckley, President of the Church, saying, ‘‘I envisioned the world’s greatest artists coming… and we’re calling you to make that happen.”
Gunnell did exactly that. For 26 years, as Executive Producer for Global Talent, he curated a parade of cultural luminaries—Andrea Bocelli, Renée Fleming, Stevie Wonder, and many more—transforming the choir’s Christmas concerts into a global phenomenon. But what distinguished his approach wasn’t access. It was intimacy.
Consider Angela Lansbury. Initially rebuffed by her agent, Gunnell bypassed the machinery of Hollywood and reached for something older, more personal.
“I sent her three dozen white roses with one red rose in the middle… and a note that just said, ‘Angela, we need you.’”
Three days later, she called him herself—from a supermarket.
“‘Is it too late for me to accept this invitation?’”
She came. She performed. And for the next 25 years, Gunnell sent her flowers every birthday. When she died at 96, her son called to deliver a final message: she had “never forgotten you or your friendship.”
This is Gunnell’s currency: not transactions, but resonance.
Ivete Sangalo and Ronald C. Gunnell.
The same instinct guided his improbable courtship of Walter Cronkite. Faced with a six-figure speaking fee he couldn’t pay, Gunnell improvised an offer on the spot:
“What if we invited him… to conduct the Tabernacle Choir?”
The answer came instantly—“He screamed yes”—and the result was a moment so meaningful that, as Gunnell later learned, Cronkite spent his final days reliving it.
“He was watching the video… he had his baton in his hand… and as soon as that song ended, he laid his baton down, and he went to sleep.”
These are not anecdotes for Gunnell; they are proof points. Evidence of a philosophy he now carries into his most ambitious chapter yet: his presidency of the Garibay Institute for Systems Diplomacy.
Founded by music producer Fernando Garibay, the Los Angeles–based think tank operates at an unusual intersection—culture, governance, and innovation—drawing in world leaders, academics, artists, and faith figures. Gunnell describes its mission in deceptively simple terms:
“Our true mission really is to be peacemakers.”
But the method is anything but conventional. Where traditional diplomacy leans on policy and power, Gunnell is advancing what he calls “systems diplomacy”—a framework rooted in shared human experience. Music, food, sport, and art become the conduits.
“Who doesn’t like music?” he asks. “Who doesn’t like… culinary?… These are all emotion-driven… not driven by a computer. They’re driven by the soul of a human being.”
This emphasis on the “soul” is not incidental. Gunnell is acutely aware of the technological moment we inhabit.
“Artificial intelligence… is going to overtake how we do things in major ways,” he says. “But… what drives the human race is this notion of purity of heart… and that… does not come from a computer.”
At the Institute, that philosophy translates into action. Gunnell and Garibay move fluidly between Vatican corridors, Chinese cultural ministries, and concert halls in London, assembling unlikely coalitions. They meet with cardinals and imams, government officials and global artists, always searching for common ground.
Pope Leo XIV and Ronald C. Gunnell.
In Rome, Gunnell recently found himself face-to-face with the Pope. The encounter, as with so many in his life, became a study in human connection over protocol.
“I have waited 70 years for this moment,” he told him.
They spoke about music, about humanitarian work, about the Choir. When Gunnell offered a Christmas concert recording, he assumed it would vanish into the Vatican archives. Instead, the Pope intervened.
Turning to his aides, he ordered it delivered to his residence. Weeks later, Gunnell learned the Pope had indeed watched it.
“I just thought that was the coolest thing ever.”
If these moments feel cinematic, it’s because Gunnell experiences them that way—each one a small, luminous argument for a different kind of global engagement. Not hard power, which he sees dominating headlines, but something quieter and more enduring.
“The world’s going through hard power in terrible ways,” he says. “And we’re trying to shift this… to soft power… something reachable to every human being.”
That reach is expanding. The Institute is developing projects in China, where a UNESCO-designated music region seeks global prominence; in India, where interfaith tensions call for cultural bridges; and in the Middle East, where dialogue through the arts offers rare neutral ground. Collaborations with global artists aim to connect audiences numbering in the hundreds of millions.
Gerald “Jerry” Inzerillo and Ronald C. Gunnell.
