Musical America Blogs

By: Edna Landau

The summer is a special time for many of us, presenting an opportunity to take a break from our normal routine and relax sufficiently to enable us to reassume our job responsibilities with increased vigor and renewed enthusiasm. For those who are graduating, the summer may offer the possibility for self-reflection and preparation for new roads that lie ahead. It can also offer a great opportunity to network, make new friends, and experiment with new artistic initiatives. Recognizing the great significance of this moment in their students’ lives, music schools and conservatories go to great lengths to arrange for distinguished artists and exemplary role models to address the graduates as they embark on this next step of their professional careers. A review of recent commencement addresses revealed a level of eloquence and wisdom that impressed me greatly and inspired me to incorporate various excerpts into my last blog post of the academic year. I strongly encourage our readers to savor these speeches in their entirety. Each and every one of them is remarkable.

A little less than a week ago, I watched the Juilliard School’s 109^th Commencement Exercises online.  The beloved mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who was awarded an Honorary Doctorate, delivered the Commencement Address. Remarking at the outset that it took her until age 29 to obtain management, she enumerated “four truths” related to her personal odyssey as a singer that she hoped would empower the graduates, when confronted with challenges in their artistic lives, to transform themselves and the world. Among them were the following:

You will never make it. That’s the bad news, but the “shift” I invite you to make is to see it as fabulous, outstanding news, for I don’t believe there is actually an “it.”  “It” doesn’t exist for an Artist. One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, right here, right now, is to decide, without apology, to commit to the JOURNEY, and not to the outcome. The outcome will almost always fall short of your expectations, and if you’re chasing that elusive, often deceptive goal, you’re likely in for a very tough road, for there will always be that one note that could have soared more freely, the one line reading that could have been just that much more truthful, that third arabesque which could have been slightly more extended, that one adagio which could have been just a touch more magical. There will always be more freedom to acquire and more truth to uncover. As an artist, you will never arrive at a fixed destination. THIS is the glory and the reward of striving to master your craft and embarking on the path of curiosity and imagination, while being tireless in your pursuit of something greater than yourself.

It’s not about you. You may not yet realize it, but you haven’t signed up for a life of glory and adulation (although that MAY well come, and I wish with every fiber of my being, that it WILL come in the right form for every single one of you)…The Truth is, you have signed up for a life of service by going into the Arts. And the life-altering results of that service in other people’s lives will NEVER disappear as fame unquestionably will.

The world needs you…We need you to remind us what unbridled, unfiltered, childlike exuberance feels like, so we remember, without apology or disclaimer, to laugh, to play, to FLY and to stop taking EVERYTHING so damn seriously…Fly out of this building armed with the knowledge that YOU make a difference, that your art is NECESSARY, and that the world is eagerly awaiting to hear what YOU have to say.

NICHOLAS McGEGAN, SAN FRANCISCO CONSERVATORY COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS, 2013

Very soon, you will be going out into the world, perhaps to study further, perhaps to audition for orchestras and opera companies, or perhaps to begin a career teaching future students to love and be skilled in music. It is vital to keep extending your horizons, keep experimenting, keep questioning…It is all very well to know a lot about what we might call the “how” of music, but more important is the “why”: to strive to understand the meaning of the music you perform, to give it heart and soul, to let it sing with your personal voice…Challenging oneself, pushing boundaries, not accepting the status quo, are certainly not the safe options or some rosy path to success. But the easy way is also perhaps the shallowest and sometimes leads nowhere…To quote from Mark Twain: “Life is short, break the rules, forgive quickly…love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything that made you smile. Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did.”

ERIC BOOTH, NEW ENGLAND CONSERVATORY COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS, 2012

Your job is not to go play the hell out of the music you will play for the rest of your years. Your job is to be an agent of artistic experience…You can play perfectly, but if I didn’t make a personally relevant connection, if my sense of the world didn’t expand, art didn’t happen…We need you to expand your toolkit beyond the marvelous musical skills you have developed to make great music, to be irrepressibly curious, unstoppably experimental in using all the tools and discovering more, to open up these works of art.

JOHN ADAMS, THE JUILLIARD SCHOOL COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS, 2011

We need the artistic experience to pull us right out of our skins. In order to achieve that element of surprise, you have to set up expectation…Your expertise in setting up expectations depends on two factors that would at first glance seem to be contradictory: one is supreme technical mastery, mastery of a kind that is so secure and so thoroughly internalized that it functions at an almost subliminal level. And another is a gift for the outrageous, having the willingness and readiness to make that sudden, spontaneous departure from the norm—the ability to depart from the script and make the unexpected leap out of the box, and to do it when it’s least expected. Such a gift is impossible to teach. It has to come from the core of the artist’s personality…You have to be restless, searching, ready and willing to take risks.

ROBERT LEVIN, CURTIS INSTITUTE OF MUSIC COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS, 2009

You need to understand that an art which does not renew itself is an art which becomes dry and museum-like and will ultimately lose relevance for its audience…No matter how much you like improvising cadenzas in Beethoven or Mozart concertos, as I do, you commission pieces year-in and year-out. You have to do that! You have to make our art new…Go out to the race track and bet on a horse. Choose the composer or composers that speak to you. Play their music. Go to the barricades. Fight for them. If your horse comes in, you become part of music history. You become the Joseph Joachim, who premiered Brahms and Schumann and Dvorak. You become that person of the twenty-first century. And if you don’t, you still fought the good battle…Make the music new. Make it indispensable. Make it as exhilarating and terrifying as life really is.

AUDRA McDONALD, THE JUILLIARD SCHOOL COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS, 2007

My time at Juilliard was confusing and full of angst… I just felt like I was on the wrong path. Looking back, I realize that I was so directly on my path that NASA couldn’t have charted it any better. My path had nothing to do with what others wanted me to be or do. It had even less to do with what I thought I wanted. My path was the road to joy. Loving what I do gives me the joy I didn’t think to seek. Joy gives me the courage to persevere.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can.

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With these words of wisdom, I take leave of all of our readers until September. I thank all of you for your loyalty and wish you a most enjoyable and fulfilling summer.

By: Edna Landau

A new record release is a cause for celebration. Most artists arrange a party to which they invite press, industry contacts and friends. There is food and drink, the artist performs a bit, and recordings (often autographed) are given to the guests. Not so pianist Simone Dinnerstein, at least for her most recent recording, J.S. Bach’s Inventions and Sinfonias (Sony Classical). Ms. Dinnerstein is celebrating her newest recording by going “Bachpacking” to ten New York area schools, in which she is doing as many as three presentations a day, and seven schools in Washington, D.C.  Her interactions with the students are up close and personal, intentionally taking place in the classroom, rather than in large auditoriums. “Bachpacking” refers to the digital Yamaha keyboard that she anticipated transporting  to schools that don’t have their own pianos, but which Yamaha kindly delivered. Although educational initiatives have been a cornerstone of Ms. Dinnerstein’s career to date, I was so moved by her decision to share her music in this way that I contacted her publicist, Christina Jensen, to find out more and to see if I might be able to attend one of her classes.

I learned that the Inventions were the first keyboard pieces that Simone Dinnerstein remembers hearing, at the age of nine. She wanted to play one of them but her teacher said she wasn’t ready. When she did begin to study the Bach works, they were a window for her into the world of counterpoint since, until then, music had always seemed to her to be about melody and accompaniment. Bach wrote the Inventions in 1723 as a musical guide for keyboard players and they are often thought of as training pieces. Simone speaks of the Inventions and Sinfonias as “marvels in demonstrating just how potent counterpoint is as an aid to expression”. In one class of fifth graders, she compared the roles of two hands in a Bach piece to a Jay-Z –Justin Timberlake duet, hitting a home run with the students. In the 50-minute class I attended at the Thurgood Marshall Academy for Learning and Social Change on West 135^th street in New York City, she compared listening to a Bach Invention, which may be totally new to the listener, to watching a foreign language film. Even if you don’t understand the language, if you start to watch the action and facial expressions, you begin to get the gist of what is going on. In the Bach, you can listen to what each hand is doing and start to understand how the piece is constructed. Simone divided the class in half and had students from both groups describe what they heard from each hand. The students also enthusiastically participated in rhythmic and singing exercises to enhance their understanding of the music. All in all, she played four Inventions and one of the Goldberg Variations. Discipline was exemplary, owing largely to the advance preparation done by the class’s dedicated music teacher, Salima Swain. The crowning glory of this project was to be a daytime concert at Miller Theater for all of the students Simone visited. Arrangements had been made for them to come by bus and subway to hear selected works from her nighttime concert at the theater the following day. Unfortunately, the concert was canceled due to a heavy snow storm. The program would have included Nico Muhly’s You Can’t Get There From Here, written especially for Ms. Dinnerstein, a part of George Crumb’s Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik, which features some playing inside the piano, and of course, some Bach Inventions. She would have spoken about some of the pieces and, wanting the students to have a true concert experience, she was planning to wear concert dress and perform with concert lighting. No such special concert has been planned for Washington, D.C., but the Washington Performing Arts Society, which is presenting Ms. Dinnerstein at the Kennedy Center, helped coordinate her school visits and has offered free tickets to her recital to students in the classes she is visiting.

What forces were involved in pulling off such an ambitious project? Simone downplays the scope of it, explaining that she just started working on it about a month before it was to happen. Since she was playing her only New York concert of the season at the Miller Theater, she approached them for introductions to schools around the city. She contacted the principals and music teachers at the various schools herself and arranged all the scheduling. Sony Classical International in Berlin engaged a New York based videographer, Tristan Cook, to make a “Bachpacking” video. Sony Masterworks in New York provided transportation to the various schools and also provided copies of Simone’s new CD to the teachers.  Katy Vickers at Christina Jensen’s office worked to secure media waivers from all of the students participating in “Bachpacking”, clearing the way to invite media coverage. These included News Channel 12 Bronx, News Channel 12 Brooklyn, and NY1. As a result, a host of New York City teachers have been in touch regarding a second tour. There are additional interviews set up around Simone’s upcoming national recital tour, and it is her hope that presenters on future tours will work with her to organize similar school concerts in their area. Of course, central to all of this is Simone’s passion for weaving an educational component into her ongoing concert and recording activity. She credits her mother, Renée Dinnerstein, as her inspiration. She described her as “an amazing teacher who worked day and night and, as an educational consultant, still goes into the schools to share her experience with teachers.” Simone’s mother made a point of talking about her work at home and stressed the importance of education, a point that was clearly not lost on her daughter.

I asked Simone whether she had been presented with any interesting questions by the students during her school visits. She said that they hadn’t been about music but one third grade student asked if she had to practice on her birthday. Another asked if her hands hurt after she plays and a third, whether she has to wear sunglasses on the street because of paparazzi (!). While we can’t know how much of a future musical impact she made on the young students during her whirlwind educational week, judging from the faces and energetic body language I observed, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if someday, some of them will tell the next generation that the door to their appreciation of classical music was opened by a famous pianist who came to their school to share her love of Bach.

© Edna Landau 2014

By: Edna Landau

It is no secret that a large number of today’s most successful arts administrators in music at one point studied an instrument, voice, conducting or composition but moved on in a different direction that was inspired by their earlier experience. Not one of the many individuals I know made this choice out of feelings of inadequacy or, even worse, failure, yet it is still comparatively rare for music school or conservatory students to be exposed to their stories and the joy they experience in their current careers. I have chosen to spotlight two such individuals whose current occupations hearken back to defining moments in their younger lives.

Shauna Quill, Executive Director of the New York Youth Symphony, is a shining example of someone who has leveraged a multiplicity of skills to serve with distinction in each of the positions she has occupied in the music industry. I first met Shauna when she was Associate Artistic Administrator at the Aspen Music Festival and School. (She later moved into the Artistic Administrator position.) We were also in touch when she became Executive Director of University of Chicago Presents, where highlights of her tenure (2007-2011) were the UCP’s first-ever music festival, dedicated to Olivier Messiaen, and “The Soviet Arts Experience”, a sixteen month interdisciplinary celebration of artists’ responses to the Politburo, which she conceived of and spearheaded and which involved 25 Chicago arts organizations. In September 2011, she may have surprised some people when she accepted the position of Executive Director of the New York Youth Symphony. My own curiosity about this prompted me to invite Shauna to lunch, at which time the impetus for her move became clearer.

Before joining the work force, Shauna Quill was a flutist who studied for a year at Columbia University and then transferred to Carnegie Mellon University, where she studied with Julius Baker and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Music Performance with University Honors. While in Pittsburgh, she rehearsed and performed in the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony every Sunday for three years. She spoke very movingly of what it was like to play in Heinz Hall, have sectional rehearsals with Pittsburgh Symphony players, and even to use their music stands or a stray pencil left behind. The PYS created a sense of community during her college years and she still has good friends from those days. Shauna’s original plan was to obtain a master’s degree at Carnegie Mellon but after experiencing four years of performance-related injuries, she decided against it. Her first jobs were as a paralegal, and then as an artist and publicity manager with Herbert H. Breslin, Inc.  When the New York Youth Symphony position opened up in 2011, Shauna saw an opportunity for a more balanced personal life than she had in Chicago, with the possibility of spending greater time with her husband and two young children. She had warm recollections of spending six months in the NYYS Chamber Program while a student at Columbia University. Today the symphony offers tuition free participation in five programs (orchestra, chamber music, composition, conducting and jazz) to its players who are between the ages of 12 and 22. It has over 5000 alumni, five of whom are currently trustees. Each of the NYYS’s orchestra programs at Carnegie Hall and Queens College every season includes a world premiere of a work written by a composer participating in the symphony’s First Music Program. To this wonderful initiative, Shauna has added a program of hour-long workshops after select orchestra rehearsals on topics such as Careers in the Arts, Preparing for Auditions, and Alexander Technique which are open to participants in all of the NYYS programs, as well as their parents. She explained to me that in her view “the goal of the youth orchestra experience is to create musical citizens, not future conservatory students.” She wants the orchestra to offer them resources for making future decisions and to ensure that music will be part of their lives forever. It would seem that this goal should be 100% attainable with such a caring and inspired leader at the helm and the thrill of the NYSS’s program participants’ own experiences, performing in such august venues as Carnegie Hall and Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Composer Bill Holab, owner of Bill Holab Music, never envisioned running his own business. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he pursued a double major in English Language and Literature and in Music Composition. He subsequently took classes at Juilliard and studied composition with David Diamond. At Juilliard, he saw an ad on the bulletin board for a part-time draftsperson with musical knowledge. He got the position and simultaneously continued to compose. His career path led him to various publishing houses where he learned about engraving, a skill which he wanted to have as a composer. By the time he started working at G. Schirmer as Senior Editor, he was growing increasingly frustrated with the constant need to promote himself as a composer in order to attract commissions and performances of his music. When he left Schirmer ten years later (where he had advanced to Director of Publications), he decided to devote all of his time to engraving and typesetting music books for publishers and composers. Two years later, he was approached by composer Osvaldo Golijov, who had left his publisher, to see if he would handle his rentals and sales. The answer was initially negative but Mr. Golijov twisted Holab’s arm. This marked the birth of Bill Holab Music. Fortunately for the new enterprise, Mr. Golijov’s career virtually exploded just at that time. Holab really took to the work and found it to be a nice complement to all the production work he was doing as an engraver. His efforts were noticed by other composers and before long his little company grew considerably larger than he had ever anticipated. He was surprised to discover that although he dreaded having to hustle his own music, he loved being a publishing agent for other composers. Today, he lists twenty-four composers on his website, to whom he offers an array of services, including engraving (now in the form of computer-based note setting that is expertly laid out, based on many years of experience).  He calls the individual composer pages on his website “passive promotion” as they are not the primary focus of his efforts, although they are undeniably important. He also gives generously of his time to participating in workshops for young composers.

What sets Bill Holab apart from some publishing companies, who provide some of the same services, is that he doesn’t assume any of the composer’s copyright ownership. He is happy to work alongside a manager or attorney and handle commissioning agreements and grand rights if one of them doesn’t. All of his services are offered with meticulous attention to detail and a strong desire to protect the composer’s rights in all situations. I contacted two of his clients – Michael Torke and Kevin Puts – both of whom had nothing but praise for their collaboration with him. Mr. Torke wrote: “I left a major international publishing company to work with Bill Holab in 2004. He harkens back to the age of 19^th century publishing, like Jurgenson was to Tchaikovsky, offering tremendous personal service and loyalty.” Kevin Puts commented: “Bill manages everything in my catalog with absolute professionalism. He has proven a trusted advisor for things from the mundane (layout of scores and parts, practical issues of scoring) to the artistic. I value our relationship highly.” Bill told me that it is his own background as a composer (he still finds a little time to write a few new works) that he feels makes him empathetic to his clients’ needs and able to successfully represent them. He loves the turn that his life has taken and finds tremendous fulfillment in his work each and every day.

© Edna Landau 2013

By: Edna Landau

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

Caroline Shaw is a typical 21^st century musician, except that she just won the Pulitzer Prize in Music  – at 30 years of age, the youngest recipient ever of this prestigious award.  Her remarkable prizewinning a cappella piece, Partita for Eight Voices, was written for Roomful of Teeth, a vocal group with whom she has sung since its founding in 2009. Ms. Shaw is a multi-talented individual who seems to excel in everything she does. Despite her new accolade, she will undoubtedly continue to refer to herself as a musician, rather than a composer. She surrounds herself with friends and musicians who, like her, enjoy multiple musical pursuits. Over the past week, I had the pleasure and privilege of speaking with not only Ms. Shaw, but with Brad Wells, Director of Vocal Activities and Artist in Residence at Williams College in Massachusetts, and also the founder and conductor of Roomful of Teeth, as well as Judd Greenstein, co-director of New Amsterdam Records/New Amsterdam Presents, and a prolific composer. He has written three of the works on Roomful of Teeth’s debut album, which was released by New Amsterdam Records in October 2012. Greenstein and Wells have been friends for over a decade. They are thrilled about Ms. Shaw’s well-deserved recognition and feel that it is a cause for communal celebration for all who were involved.

Caroline Shaw has both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in violin from Rice University and Yale University, respectively. She supported herself for a number of years by accompanying dance classes and was inspired to write some of her earliest pieces for the dancers. She couldn’t project at that time how her professional life might progress and decided that it would be good to have a doctoral degree under her belt. Once she realized that she didn’t want yet another degree in violin, she decided to apply to, and eventually enter, the doctoral program in composition at Princeton University, where she is still a graduate student. Several years earlier, she learned of the formation of a new vocal group of classically trained singers which was dedicated to exploring and mastering techniques of singing from around the world and commissioning and performing works to showcase those newly acquired techniques. Brad Wells called it Roomful of Teeth because he liked the rhythm of it (identical to BANG on a CAN), the allusion to chamber music in the word “room”, and the fact that teeth are the hardest and longest lasting bones in our bodies, symbolizing permanence. He remembers Caroline Shaw’s audition for the group, as he was taken with the fact that she was not a “single-minded singer”, and that she was a most interesting and versatile musician. Due to a close association between Williams College and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA), he was able to arrange for a three-week summer residency for Roomful of Teeth, during which its singers, hailing from different geographical locations, could live on campus and delve into the exploration of the new vocal techniques, taught by international experts from around the world. Three composers were invited in the first year (2009) to share the experience and write for the group in “real time”, literally submitting parts of new works within a day of absorbing what they had heard. It was during that first summer residency that Ms. Shaw wrote “Passacaglia”, one of four movements of her Pulitzer prizewinning piece, inspired by Baroque dance. The other three movements were written over two subsequent summers. When she decided to submit the piece to the Pulitzer Prize committee herself (unlike most submissions which are made by a publisher or commissioner of a new work), it was partly because she didn’t want anyone to know. She told me that her main motivation was for the esteemed jury to become familiar with Roomful of Teeth, but she also felt very strongly about the piece and felt that a $50 application fee was reasonable enough. The outcome brings wonderful validation to the efforts of New Amsterdam Records, a label dedicated to promoting a wider awareness of adventurous new compositions, written and performed by highly-trained musicians of diverse musical backgrounds and genres. It must also be a great source of pride to the 238 donors who supported the Kickstarter campaign that helped fund the recording, contributing a total of $14,405, which exceeded the group’s goal. In addition to writing for the group and helping to produce the recording, Judd Greenstein has also invited Roomful of Teeth to perform twice at the Ecstatic Music Festival, of which he is curator and Artistic Director. He commented to me that the world of new music feeds on itself in a most complementary and mutually supportive way, since composers become very involved with the musicians they write for, and the social and musical interaction is their reward for the many hours of solitude that characterize their day to day life.  Caroline Shaw told me that she would never have reached this point in her young career had she not been active in a variety of disciplines. In a time when today’s young musicians are being widely encouraged to think about their particular passion and identify their own unique “brand”, perhaps we should also leave room for those who feel compelled to pursue multiple passions, because the rewards would seem to be great.

How does Ms. Shaw expect her life to change as a result of this prize? Not all that much. She will probably write more music (a work for Roomful of Teeth and A Far Cry is already in the pipeline), but she will also be happy to focus more on her work with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), where she does most of her violin playing. She may not have much time to dedicate to her beloved, imperfectly pitched 50 cent flower pots, for which she has written some irresistible music (listen to “Boris Kerner” for cello and flower pots, performed by New Morse Code, and the more whimsical covers she wrote during the electrical failure brought about by Hurricane Sandy); however, she will have more time to discover new masterworks of art, literature and dance, which inform so much of her work. I personally would hope that she might set aside a little time to speak to today’s young generation of musicians (maybe only a few years younger than she) and personally share the advice she imparted to me for them: follow all of your interests, work hard, and be very kind to everyone. She might also suggest that they get out into the world as much as possible and share their joy of music making. Only two hours after speaking with me, Caroline Shaw was at the Strand Book Store, singing “I Want to Live Where You Live” from the new oratorio “Shelter” by David Lang, Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, along with fellow vocalists Martha Cluver and Mellissa Hughes, who together with her comprise Va Vocals. The group, which performs “in styles ranging from baroque to modern to pop”, has been described by radio station WQXR as “utterly unaffected and drop-dead stylish”. Perhaps she left there to play a late-night violin performance. I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

© Edna Landau 2013

By: Edna Landau

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

The New Year presents us with a wonderful opportunity to take stock of our individual goals and priorities and address them with renewed vigor and dedication. For many of us, these may include some of the following:

• creating a website or regularly updating an existing one
• taking a new set of professional photographs
• ordering business cards
• launching a Kickstarter campaign for an important project
• making a recording or demo CD
• maintaining contact with supporters and updating them on recent and upcoming activities
• launching a new concert series or exploring concert opportunities at existing venues
• starting a blog
• mapping out time to prepare for a competition or for key orchestral auditions
• adding a newly commissioned work to our repertoire
• exploring possibilities for study abroad
• creating a monthly budget and adopting a system to adhere to it
• making sure we are covered by health insurance
• working with a coach on public speaking and presentation skills

For arts administrators, they may include summoning up the courage to explore new professional opportunities after many years in the same job. Those interested in teaching might add seeking out experienced, successful teachers for specific tips and information about how they got started, or applying to a recognized teaching artist program.

Here are some that I have come up with for myself:

1. Try to go to at least one concert a month that offers music unfamiliar to me, preferably new music.
2. Read current arts news on www.musicalamerica.com or www.artsjournal.com every day.
3. Identify at least two new blogs that are relevant to my work and read them regularly.
4. Overcome my insecurities about social media and use it more effectively. Consider joining the large chorus of tweeters.
5. Update my contact list and website at least every three months.
6. Create a list of a minimum of 20 new individual or institutional contacts who I should get to know.
7. Dedicate at least one day a month to helping those less fortunate than I.
8. Begin to explore the possibility of writing an inspirational book about my rich and rewarding career odyssey of nearly forty years in artist management.

I would love to hear from some of our readers with their own thoughts about how to make 2013 a particularly successful, meaningful and inspiring year.

A very happy 2013 to all!

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

© Edna Landau 2013