Without a word, they started to dance.
“It was a visual negotiation,” said Alan Emanuel Pierson, who caught Paul Nikolai Melnikow’s eye as they sat next to each other in October 2016 for a “queer prom.”
The event was staged about 20 hours into the performance artist Taylor Mac’s 24-hour marathon, “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” at St. Ann’s Warehouse, a performing arts space in Brooklyn. (The 246-song cycle began in 1776 at noon the day before.)
“It was exciting, awkward, definitely a little intoxicating,” said Mr. Pierson, as they slow danced to a ballad interpretation of Ted Nugent’s “Snakeskin Cowboys” by Matt Ray, the event’s music director and arranger.
They didn’t leave each other’s side for the rest of the performance, and Mr. Pierson asked for Mr. Melnikow’s email address.
“Our pretty charged email penpalship reminded me of college,” Mr. Melnikow said.
Over the next few weeks, he met Mr. Pierson, who was then in a longstanding relationship, twice — for coffee and a concert.
“Platonic with a spark,” is how Mr. Pierson described it.
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Mr. Melnikow, 45, grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., and holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brown. He is the chief executive of Curvewise, a digital anthropometry company that provides body measurements for apparel sizing systems. He also works as Mr. Pierson’s manager, agent and occasional collaborator.
Mr. Pierson, 51, is a 2026 Grammy-nominated artistic director and conductor who grew up in Chicago. He holds bachelor’s degrees in physics and music from M.I.T. and earned a doctorate in conducting from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.
His 20-member new music ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, performs innovative versions of contemporary works, including premieres by John Adams and Steve Reich. He is also a director of the Contemporary Music Ensemble at Northwestern Bienen School of Music in Evanston, Ill., and has collaborated across disciplines, including the singer Erykah Badu.
In November, Mr. Melnikow, curious but confused over the relationship, and depressed over the outcome of the presidential election, simply stopped answering Mr. Pierson’s emails.
Five months later, in March 2017, soon after Mr. Pierson ended his previous relationship, he asked Mr. Melnikow on a real date — a performance of John Adams’s “The Gospel According to the Other Mary” at Carnegie Hall. Mr. Melnikow gladly said yes and suggested dinner at Kashkaval Garden, a Mediterranean restaurant nearby.
At the concert, Mr. Pierson, musician that he is, kept looking over to gauge Mr. Melnikow’s reaction, and liked what he saw.
While Mr. Melnikow took the subway home to Park Slope, Brooklyn, Mr. Pierson headed to Riverdale in the Bronx, and emailed him in transit, asking him to the Nonesuch celebration of Bob Hurwitz, retiring as the record label’s president, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the next evening.
Mr. Melnikow, already going with a couple of friends, suggested they all grab dinner at 67 Burger in Fort Greene nearby. He later joined Mr. Pierson for the after-party.
“It was tremendously exciting,” said Mr. Melnikow, who tried to stay grounded as he met the composers Donnacha Dennehy and Steve Reich, and quite literally bumped into Mandy Patinkin.
Mr. Melnikow asked him over for dinner the following weekend, and that afternoon, as they walked through Prospect Park, impressed him by picking chives, which later showed up in a salad. They also had a first kiss that evening.
In 2018, they moved into an apartment near Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, which they purchased right before Covid hit. That “was when our home began to feel like a home,” said Mr. Melnikow, who helped create the “Ten Thousand Birds/Ten Thousand Screens” video project with Alarm Will Sound.
Over the years, they said they also built a “chosen family.” Central to their “chosen family” is Pyper, a 32-year-old artist who is transmasculine and grew up Mormon in Utah Valley, and whom the couple plan to adopt this year.
“Do you want to get married?” Mr. Melnikow asked Mr. Pierson in August 2025 while they visited his parents in Syracuse, and quickly added, more formally: “Will you marry me, Alan Pierson?”
A couple of weeks later, on a summer night, the couple wandered through Prospect Park, banging on metal objects during a percussion-filled stroll, before Mr. Pierson casually proposed on their way home.
On Jan. 3, Taylor Mac, a Universal Life minister whom they consider their “spiritual godmother,” officiated before 50 guests in the Lighthouse Lounge at Admiral at the Lake in Chicago, Mr. Pierson’s parents’ retirement residence.
The wedding theme was “chosen family/queer prom,” and their first dance was to Matt Ray’s version of “Snakeskin Cowboys,” performed by Taylor Mac — the same song he sang the night the couple first met.
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