Get Used to It: Ep. 92, "Voices of Our Lives: Nan Washburn"

[ __ ] [Applause] [Music] hi welcome to get used to it i'm sheila kuhl your host des and uh as we do occasionally in this uh series of shows we're having as our guest one person today for the whole hour we call these series voices of our lives and today we're very very fortunate to have nan washburn with us who many of you may have heard on npr recently talking about the lives of plight of fate of women orchestra conductors in america at this time and more specifically perhaps women who are lesbians who are conductors of which there must be a really small group nan is the music director and conductor of the plymouth symphony in michigan and also the artistic director and conductor of the west hollywood california orchestra welcome nan thank you very much well i was intrigued uh hearing your story and you know what you've had to say uh over the years about your work and i thought perhaps other people would be intrigued as well but to start kind of early tell us a little bit about your growing up where did you grow up and uh the story will eventually take us to you know why music right you actually ask very hard questions most people want to know what i did last week and it's just like you're asking well what did i do when i was eight and nine um i come from a fairly large family five siblings i grew up in in ventura california um and uh my parents still live there and are subscribers to the west hollywood orchestra um it's a bit of a schlep but they come in they love it they love it tails that's right that's right um and i all of us were given music lessons and encouraged to play my my parents aren't musicians so they they love it and but they just insisted everybody take a year of piano and then they could choose another instrument if they wanted to and i took piano i it was okay it was kind of fun but i really wanted to play the flute so age nine i started playing flute and it was my older sister is a cpa and also sings choruses a lot and but she was always considered the smart one you know and i had to do something different so aside from climbing trees and riding unicycles and things i i really was focused on music fairly early on because i they told me i was kind of good at it and i you know little ego got a little bit raised there but it was my mother actually that really kind of nudged me the the next notch um to audition for the local youth orchestra in ventura and i did that when i was 13 i think so the youth orchestra in ventura is like a city sponsored orchestra it was at the time it was the county-wide uh youth orchestra connected to the ventra county symphony that orchestra has now merged with the new west or has become the new west symphony so it's it doesn't carry the same name but at the time long ago um it was uh you know the youth orchestra in in ventura county and uh so i i think i mentioned yes this yesterday that i i auditioned and i made next to the last chair out of i don't know seven flute players or something but i i had my eye on the first flute and uh i became the chair not the person that's right i wanted the chair i wanted the solos and and i worked very hard i also uh was able to meet a very important person in my life of my my first real flute teacher burnett atkinson who really nudged me along and uh so i got to be first loot then and then within two years after that um he had brought me into the ventura county symphony as a club player so so you were 15 or 16 16 yeah in the county symphony right right you must have been one of the youngest i was the i was they had a couple of others in the string section um but yeah it was it was it was exciting i mean having your teacher playing all those those wonderful solos of course i had to be right on top of things or i really heard about it it wasn't like i could come in and you know oh this is kind of fun it had to be top notch and i still have fear of forgetting a pencil if i don't have a pencil with me at a rehearsal i just cooked goose you know what it means it's instilled in you by your teeth absolutely yes i think i saw you at a rehearsal one time and i didn't have a pencil right oh talking to your uh to the players about whether they had brought pencils with them it's very important how important because you have to write you know little things you are a stickler for details i know yes which is probably why you became a conductor but it's too quick to get to that that's right yes well in a way i think i think it's very interesting because i think i can understand i think what a person who plays a flute a flutist does i've seen that i have absolutely no comprehension except to see somebody from the back doing this what a conductor does or how they do it and so i'm interested in how you might have gone how why you might have transitioned from what was a player to a conductor it was a very slow transition because i didn't even make the first step into a beginning conducting class until i turned 30. which is way past the age when i mean i was told then if you weren't a successful conductor by age 26 you might as well forget it of course i had to forget it because i mean i couldn't you would never be questioned again that's right that's right so um basically i have sort of a three-part uh way of my venture into that um area of conducting because i was really set on being an orchestral flutist and what i realized is i loved orchestral music i i like playing solos like with just piano or something but i love the orchestra and so i i'm all my degrees uc santa barbara a bachelor's there and then i also studied the music academy of the west in santa barbara and then did a masters at new england conservatory in boston all in flute performance very very very specific and actually at the time that i was studying flute when student conductors would get up and do things we all snickered because we thought they couldn't play their instruments that's why they became a conductor so my and i i wasn't working always with people that were very knowledgeable and very skilled with conduct as conductors i mean a lot of um i think there's been a whole generation of or many generations i should say where if you were a good musician and you studied and learned a score you could be a conductor if you just had the nerve to get up there and do it what's happened in this century is that it there has been created this technique this this actual thing that skill you need to acquire in order to actually really do it well as a orchestral performer you said you went to the new england conservatory it must have been very competitive very competitive so at that point in your life i mean you know you're despite the fact that you said your sister might have been characterized as the smart one my experience of you is that you're the smart one or at least one of the smart ones and to make the decision this isn't just something you were doing while you were in high school and you were also good at math and you know other subject matters you had to decide music was going to be what you did that must have been difficult in its own way i mean i don't know whether you can see in advance how difficult it's going to be but most families say oh don't be a musician you'll never make a dime well i think some of that is also that's what parents definitely say now and i had trouble actually teaching at a certain point because there are so few jobs and it is so competitive however if it was just strictly competitive just for whoever's the best that would be one thing but what i found out and i was very rather naive because i've been really under the care of my flute teacher who had brought me into these orchestras and just nurtured me along and then i went off to new england conservatory and i found out that uh things were a little different you know all of a sudden it was how i looked made a big difference and i really found out that being from california was not a good thing yeah new england california california is bad in new england i know so that was a curious thing in fact i even knew a flute player who had been the piccolo player for a year with the san francisco symphony that was also kind of not encouraged at new england well but the the flute as an instrument is a more acceptable instrument for women at least i've seen a number of you know young girls and and then women who play the flute conducting is not as acceptable a place for women at least from what i've seen and i only assume since this is the way i look at things there must be some glass ceiling there must be some kind of barrier i don't know if it's about flutists don't become conductors or women don't become conductors so how did you what was your transition and how did that work well again it took a long time i i had worked with a couple of very very fine conductors and i knew what should be happening up there i'd worked with a whole bunch of horrible conductors and i knew because i had been grouping my flute students together because all the time that i was playing i was also teaching to be in flute choirs so i actually was you know moving my arms and getting everybody play together so i had a little hit of that and i i kind of liked it and i knew that i needed to kind of look at that but it's um it's something that is um it's just so ethereal you know the conducting thing i don't know it's very it's still a mystery to me i don't know but the um the women issue is certainly an issue i and we spoke about this earlier too that i had seen some women conductors there were very few when i started and most everybody was a lot larger person and so i also came away with the idea that if you weren't a guy you had to kind of have some presence that that people recognized or paid attention to um so i i wasn't really until um several years later after i i actually met joanne faletta bringing her in recruiting her to be with the women's philharmonic which i was a co-founder of that i realized that you didn't have to be tall you just needed a very large podium and so now i have it written into my contracts that they have to have a certain height otherwise the players are all kind of like trying to trying to see and it makes a huge difference yes i understand when i was cheering the california assembly i had to also stand on the step because otherwise you know you're going right all right that's it you're breaking the rules nobody can nobody can see you so i totally understand but still you had to make the decision and i'm really interested in that okay um because here you are at the new england conservatory uh thinking you're going to be a flutist or you know a orchestral performer something changed yes i realized first of all it was very political in terms of who got where i started looking and thinking about music in a much larger way flute is a one i love the flute i miss playing a lot um but it's just one line especially if you're talking about orchestral music you're just one line and i think oh that second bassoon oh that's great wow and i started definitely paying much more attention to a lot you know the bigger picture um but it really was with my work with the women's philharmonic um this was after graduate school uh where two of the other co-founders of the women's philharmonic in san francisco approached me with the idea of let's start this orchestra and i had just come from boston and there had been a very wonderful but failed attempt called the new england women's symphony all women just playing women composers and it was very different from there's actually a whole history of women's orchestras but they were many of them arose out of world war ii when a lot of the men were off fighting and they were more uh women's social clubs than they were you know uh coming out of 1980 you know we're here to make a point especially when it came to women composers and along the road i had done some women's studies classes when they first appeared at uc santa barbara and uh gotten very intrigued with the the history of women in in music in the us and going through some articles and looking at some things i actually found out for the first time light bulb uh that there were and had been many women composers i mean hundreds and hundreds and thousands and and we'd never ever heard of them in music school so i actually came to conducting and and my real excitement about doing programming and shaping the whole thing see conductor is just what you do on stage and putting the performance together a music director and an artistic director have these two titles it's the same get to shape the whole season you know choose the guest artist pick every piece and really put something together that i think of as a real a whole artistic thing in itself and we were talking earlier that i like to think of each program as a good meal that you know from top to finish that's very very carefully planned so did the women's symphony in san francisco uh did they play only women composers we actually did uh we featured women composers but then we also did standard repertoire um that had been i think my idea with the i thought that that it could also build the orchestra and there's something less scary if somebody can come and hear a beethoven symphony or something that then you give them the other you know that's scary yeah they've never heard yeah i'm fine i really believe in sandwiching or any kind of packaging to lure people in to hear something that they're afraid to listen to by afraid you mean i never heard of that person i don't know if i'm going to be wasting my time yeah i don't know what it's like or if i like right and that is exactly what a lot of people say when you say come to an orchestra concert i don't know anything about it i don't know i don't know if i'd like it it i i think you have to know a bunch of stuff and and i no don't have to know a bunch of stuff do you like music if you like music come down you know come to the show and and you'll have a good time so how did you then come to um be hired by the the plymouth symphony in michigan and the west hollywood orchestra i mean i'll bet you a lot of people in west hollywood don't know there's a west hollywood orchestra or if they do may not have ever uh you know come to hear it not to mention the rest of us around in los angeles and plymouth also i mean we know nothing in california about michigan but i'm sure you in michigan know plenty about plymouth how does one then do you audition do you hear about openings i mean how did you come to be the musical director of both of these orchestras well both of them had job descriptions posted in national i think for national publications specific trade ones the american symphony orchestra league conductors guild things like that uh where those openings are posted i think the west hollywood orchestra had it posted with the association of california symphonies which has a job listing i think every every month that comes out and so that's where you you hear about those it's almost a job in its inner self just to put an application out there there were 167 applicants for plymouth i think there were only 30 for uh for west hollywood but i've been in searches where i was a finalist where there were 300 plus application applicants and you you get down to be a finalist in five and you've already you know done so much but just trying to get that one one top job well i am i'm also of course interested in my guests because they are all gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender i mean that's part of why i want to do the show is to let people see the you know the great variety in our community but i'm also interested in the way that intersects as an aspect of one's life or and sort of what we experience out in the world in our various professions once it's known so going back a little bit when how did you first experience your own sort of knowledge about that that you were a lesbian and how how how did that impact your life as you were thinking about your work in music well i kind of figured it out when i was 18 19 something like that um but i was playing you know and and uh i'm just an orchestra musician there were a lot of gay people around me i instantly kind of got to be part of the club you know and it was it was actually very nice um and i and then of course i after graduate school doing the women's philharmonic i mean everybody kind of assumed a lot of things about that orchestra even though a great number of the women uh if not most of the women were straight but there was an assumption there and so for 10 years of my life as i was there people just you know were convinced and and i didn't have to say anything so it's just like okay she's a lesbian yeah so what uh so it wasn't until i i left that organization to be a music director for the first time and it was a music director of an orchestra in sacramento and um i realized that that that could have an impact uh and i kind of i i not exactly retreated the closet i mean but it there was a down playing a serious downplaying of that and um when i gone to guest conduct certainly in remote parts of the country where things like that are never discussed um i downplay it you know and i actually i it was funny because i talked to a wonderful composer out lesbian composer who is absolutely one of the top composers right now jennifer higdon and um i was just so impressed that in the you know national publications that she was out there talking about this and i said you know i just you've really inspired me you know and i just would really i'm kind of tiptoeing out and and she goes oh man if i were a conductor i couldn't imagine doing that i was like thanks a lot i'm out here hanging just so it's um it's a tricky thing and uh certainly it's very very difficult as a woman um i'm finding it's also difficult because of the height thing somebody mentioned that that's an issue so a short woman lesbian you get three strikes well and i like contemporary music oh oh that must be the worst yeah sometimes that that's so it's never i'm never sure what it is um but i've i've been a finalist many many times and a number of times i was told i didn't quite fit the profile of who they were looking for so one time and laramie as i recall well in thereabouts yeah yeah we wonder what the profile was i don't want to misjudge that community but i imagine that it must be it's sometimes it is difficult to know i mean in any artist because you're going to lose jobs right if you're an actor you're going to lose jobs you're going to lose more than you get and there are many different factors and i don't know which one because i'm not saying it's not a factor but i'm saying i'm sure you never know they always say you don't fit the profile right you know um but also i i know another job i heard back from the orchestra that i worked them too hard that the the guy that got the job just said you play great and and i i want them to sound great so i i do push very nicely but i insist on on a level if if i'm conducting i that's that's the scary part is that as a conductor you have to you're trying to shape this whole thing but if they're not watching you really are sunk you you have no control really of what comes out of their instruments so it's a very odd profession well you were i'm trying to remember the piece that you were preparing several months ago that was uh you there was something to do with a foreign language oh yeah beethoven nine oh yeah yeah yeah yeah that one and also fannie mendelson oratorio there were two i was doing actually one week apart um so i had to get coached luckily my partner speaks german fluently and coached me a great deal to be able to to pronounce these uh things and be able to work with the chorus because you have to also be able to direct choruses when you combine the two in with with orchestra but it was um it was quite an undertaking this beethoven 9 just by itself is such a physical uh it's almost an hour long just by itself um actually if you take some things really really slow you can make it an hour and 15 minutes luckily for the orchestra i like zippy tempos in in this style and uh but it was physically grueling to to actually do it i mean it's and and musically such a challenge um and you think oh beethoven everybody's done it but it's hard it's really hard well and the fact that everybody's done it doesn't mean that everybody's done it the way you're going to do it i was interested when you said you're playing the flute but you hear the best soon and you think now that's an interesting it must be multiplied by you know every number of instruments yes as you prepare i mean do you hear this in your head as you and i imagine you know make notes to yourself on the uh on the whatever on the music well it's it's a a multi-layered thing some of the first thing i do i i'm marking scores i'm looking for phrases just like i know you sing you go for what's the phrase where am i going to breathe all of that stuff and you just want to make sense of the music of where it goes and you kind of work out chunks and and for modern music if if you have to do a 5 8 bar or something that's not just a regular old pattern you want to make sure that you can see that i mark entrances of of instruments and you have to be able to memorize a lot of that and a lot of the the work as you think of geometric patterns like it's going from second clarinet to first flute where they are in the orchestra it's really horrible when you go to a new orchestra and they switch positions it's it kind of throws you for a loop a little bit they can do that but now the orchestras that you conduct are basically community orchestras um they kind of belong to the cities in which they're located is that the way with orchestras all across the country i mean when we think about oh there's an orchestra or a philharmonic or the symphony orchestra is it always sponsored by a city or is it privately funded i mean how do orchestras work well i think more often than not they are attached to a geographic and specifically a town or or community um the women's philharmonic what it we actually originally named it bay area women's philharmonic so it was a little bit broader it wasn't san francisco but then they wanted actually after i left they did drop the bay area to be a more national kind of thing uh there are american composers orchestra and there's some specialty orchestras that and do they tour that sometimes and they do recordings and things like that but they go after they usually have a broader um mission than just providing excellent music for the community and to just to clarify that within the american symphony orchestra league to say a community orchestra um often means a very specific uh dollar amount and usually equated with not very good so i always say based in the community or community based um but absolutely connected to the community and i think that's what's important that our town has an orchestra and it was with that spirit that the plymouth symphony was created 57 years ago and the west hollywood orchestra only three years ago you know and i think it it really coincides with the city coming of age how old is it now 15 something yeah something there and it's they also really wanted to um this was actually a city commission i think that that came up with the original idea and uh that then mayor john heilman with the idea of bridging the many diverse communities within west hollywood specifically the most prominent being the gay and lesbian community and the russian-speaking community and we've done it it's really i mean i have to have my little russian dictionary sometimes but but in several of the players in the um the orchestra will translate but it's really wonderful mix of people and what's interesting it brought together groups of people in west hollywood but it also drew in a lot of musicians who were very eager to see something new and different and and i had said early on that i didn't want this just to be like you know every other orchestra in the la area only for west hollywood that somehow the image of west hollywood is bigger and grander somehow and the actual job description that i you know applied for was said cultural diversity inclusive kinds of programs multilingual educational concerts um commissioning of new works and all of these things that just like that's me so i you know and so i see that it really is the job that i've been waiting for in in a lot of ways we just have to grow it a little bit more and are there professional musicians and sort of volunteer partners we have a combination yes um and that's a challenge but it is also very exciting and the the professionals that work with the orchestra are all very community spirited too and they actually volunteer their time a lot too um but it's we've been very careful in bringing together groups of people that really want to play together and uh like me they have to like me um and that they have to enjoy doing different music if they just want to do a beethoven symphony all the time or just this we're not the orchestra but if they want to come and and uh have something very very unique and that's how we met is doing something rather unique right you as a narrative yeah peace and uh that well i described this to a conducting class a couple weeks ago the extra things that i had to do as a conductor um in order to pull that piece off including uh having me slumped down you had to go to sleep for a party oh it was horrible yeah and then i actually got to tell my uh former conducting teacher yeah and i queued him with my head on purpose because i was a big no-no in conducting class doing this right right but well it's interesting i a number of people that i've spoken to on this show and you know in our community talk about their sort of um outsider um lives not just by virtue of what they do but mostly by virtue of the fact that they grew up gay or lesbian and dealing with it yourself and then having other people deal with it that it makes you feel like an outsider and as a young person that can be a real negative but many people have said as they got older it actually was quite freeing in a way and i was thinking about that when you were talking about programming and the way the particular job description appealed to you but also the way you put together programs i mean you're very innovative and what you said earlier about i want people to come in and hear things that they might be scared to come in and hear i think you mean jan never heard of that or that's a new person talk about programming here and in plymouth and other places you've done well i think maybe it is stemming from the fact that being an outsider you want to kind of see more people like you you know represented on a concert so it can't be all dead european white men you know i mean there's there's that so i have you know the women's philharmonic was very specific i became an expert on women composers i reconstructed scores his historical not hysterical historical scores and i did a lot of real hands-on work which is what how i started doing the conducting thing but when i left that orchestra and went to the one in sacramento my predecessor there had already been doing very multicultural kinds of programs and there was an emphasis on minority composers and again an emphasis on contemporary american composers so all along with the women's philharmonic then with the camellia symphony later with orchestra sonoma and now with plymouth symphony i've been acquiring ascap awards for um programming of contemporary music and those are handed out by the american symphony orchestra league at national conferences each year and just got my 14th wow which i think is a good thing because i was kind of stuck on 13 for five years so it was nice to get a new one and it was also nice because at that point with plymouth i didn't seek out to like just do lots and lots of contemporary music i actually was building it through but we we did new pieces on our children's programs and i had it you know integrated uh but it's not for me anymore just okay to just do let's represent women composers i need to really showcase all of you know the composers types in california so it's very freeing and very fun i'm hoping to do a work next next season with west hollywood with a including tycho drums and um we're you know it's i just love those kinds of combinations of something new and different and to me it's it's more people who have maybe less classical music experience are more drawn in to those kinds of things those what i consider crossover than just a strict you know mozart symphony and but if you bring them in with that and play mozart you know what's not to like with mozart right exactly well the the venue in west hollywood in my personal opinion leaves a lot to be desired i mean you know it's a good auditorium you can hear the sound more or less but um would be wonderful to have some kind of performance space we would love that and i think that's one of the difficult things in with the orchestra right now is trying to find a venue where we can actually fit and and grow with the venue we've actually it's been used because we've we've been performing at west hollywood park auditorium fiesta hall fairfax high school beverly hills high school and the pacific design center and outside santa monica boulevard so we've we've tried you know many many different venues and and anybody's ear that i can get in in the planners for the future of west hollywood i'm always saying performing arts center please please performing arts center we'd really love it we would really love it um they all think it's a great idea you know it's just the balancing of the money at hand um man sort of looking around the country and maybe even around the world we talked about the fact that there really are not that many women who are given the opportunity to conduct symphony orchestras or you know other kinds of uh musical big musical collections um you some of your colleagues and you have talked on the radio kind of about this say more about this i mean you're not a whiner and you're not saying oh they didn't hire me because i'm a woman but i think it'd be interesting to our viewers to know a little bit about this glass ceiling and how you perceive it well i think it's interesting that in the um i think it was in 1985 when the women's philharmonic was doing a search for a new conductor uh when we did you know get joined valetta there were we i i really beat the bushes and came up with 40 names um and they were international there were a number that applied from europe and israel and but that was it we that was all the women we could knew about at all that were doing any kind of conducting there are so many actually there are a lot of women conductors right now but they are in smaller orchestras and university positions youth orchestras and it's it's harder and harder to get up through the different ranks of orchestras and what was really interesting is that um marin alsup is one of the she's probably at the height of of all of us and has has just really done some extraordinary work she's the music director of the colorado symphony cabrillo music festival here in california and just this year was uh given the was the first woman to conduct one of the major orchestras in england the bournemouth symphony there so she is well on her way and she was doing this interview on npr as was i and her thought being where she is working a lot now was that since they had had a woman prime minister of margaret thatcher that they were going to be more accepting of having women in those top positions and she predicts that once we have a woman president volunteers that we would have more women conductors being given that top those top jobs well it is interesting because we don't have a lot of imagination i don't think about what people can do until we see them do it um i think it's no secret that i'm not a big fan of the bush administration but watching colin powell or condoleeza rice whose politics i don't like particularly but i have to confess that you can no longer fail to imagine an african-american in those important right positions and i know it's the same you know with women until we had women on the supreme court people couldn't even imagine that a woman could be a supreme court justice right and once they were you saw a lot more appointments around state supreme courts and you know other sort of places in the justice department and finally of course we had a woman attorney general for a while so i definitely resonate you know to what you've said but there must be a much smaller group of lesbians who are doing this work and maybe because given what you've said there may be more than we know about because it's not a great area in which people are out i think actually the numbers are relative to how many women conductors i would say given who i know we're at least a third of the women if not half so it's actually a larger but you know there's no we can't talk about it as much no i understand and certainly i'm not saying gee tell me who they are but i don't know i have this theory and it's probably a bad kind of prejudice because some of my best friends are straight women but there seems to be sometimes a certain kind of energy that um that lesbians have that almost make them more acceptable in some circumstances i'm kind of treading on a little bit thin ice here maybe with you know with a million people out there but it almost makes them more acceptable to some of the guys not that we are like guys but i found this very interesting because i was the first woman ever to be the speaker pro tem in our assembly and your job mainly is running the floor during floor sessions the next woman speaker pro tem was one of the only other lesbians who was elected to the california legislature chris kehoe now i know other women could do it but sometimes in watching chris and just some tapes of myself i feel like there is a slightly different energy there and i don't know whether that allows you to be seen more easily in a position of authority that's generally given to males i don't want to say it's been easy but once you're hired you know what i mean right i don't know i i've been giving it a lot of thought because we chatted earlier this week um but i almost wonder if it has to do with just uh accepting your truth and and having to fight so hard for a lot of things that it kind of makes you spunky or something um it's possible it's it's um it's hard to say you know i you know i don't know exactly how i come off i mean i have videotapes of my performances and such because i'm i'm more certainly not heavy-handed i i said work orchestra is hard but but i uh it's it's not i know a lot of other conductors that are are more um uh driven in terms of control and being kind of you know and i i'm not that way but it is interesting of all the women that a a full third would be lesbians right no i understand and i'm not saying you know let's wrap them up but um because i would think if there's a certain concern about being out and yet women are drifting to do it yeah you know that it's um well i think there is something i i maybe once you you accept that part of yourself that like watch out you know i can do it um but it took me a long time i mean i was very very very shy and at age 30 was when i actually enrolled in my very first beginning conducting class absolute beginning and i i didn't want to be bad because i'd seen too many bad conductors and i didn't want any orchestras laughing at me so i had to be really good before i you know really ventured out too far has anyone ever threatened to out you in a way that um made you either abandon a course of action no not specifically no i actually had male stalkers i had one so you know as i said i've been kind of in and out and around um but it's uh i now you know duck the uh the question i'm still i had an interview um the other day where um they wanted to include my um uh are you married you know and that's a loaded question from me because because you've been with your partner a long time yeah over 15 years right yeah so it's um it's a very tricky thing and yet i don't i don't i don't really want to have there's part of it is that it's my life you know and i still remember being in the grocery store and i don't know grocery shopping i'm schlepping around and you know oh you want this oh yeah and someone came up and said are you nan washburn i'm sure you get this all the time and it's just like i'm in this mode of just buying my groceries i don't want you looking at what i'm buying you know just go away i'm off duty now sounds so horrible but it's that maybe he didn't wear the tails everywhere that's right it probably wouldn't be recognized so much actually doesn't happen that often but well it's just it just you know especially having and i still am a shy person it's just hard to be out all the time in in all ways well i hope so i mean you just moved to west hollywood uh yesterday yesterday yes yesterday not that you haven't been here because conducting the orchestra i mean that was the other thing that was interesting to me is to know how many people divide their time because you can't earn a living right mostly being the conductor of one orchestra or maybe even two i mean for you to be flying back and forth from michigan to california in order to be the conductor of two orchestras which you're still going to do and plymouth i think gave you a hard time about moving to california because they absolutely wanted you to live there and be of the community every orchestra wants you to be there really full time and whether or not they can pay you for that is is usually the concern but plymouth is okay i mean i've been there three years i've gone to all the rotary clubs i've done so much in the community um that all needs to happen so they're they're realizing that i need to be able to do more of the conducting and and maybe perhaps a little bit less of all the other kinds of things now in west hollywood i need to be here more we need to really build the orchestra there's so much excitement and so much potential for the organization but it's hard work putting an orchestra together and i think that the the founders the steering committee originally putting it together hadn't any idea how difficult it was and of course it takes a lot of money and we have to work very hard and with only three years under our belt we're just starting to be able to apply for grant money so we finally got our grant into the l.a county arts commission and the california arts council and we were awarded for both of those and we're very happy about it but just you know making it through the big grants uh grant applications is a challenge when you have very tiny staff or none at all so what's the importance to a city or a town to have an orchestra well you can look at it different ways there is just the kind of the heart and soul and feel of the community for its own uh organizations arts organizations but there are actually lots of information that i think they probably do this with the bureau of visitors and conventions and such having an orchestra is actually economically very good for one's community and they've they've done studies about that that many uh companies and stuff will choose a city because they have an orchestra that's one of the things they may never go but that seems to be a criteria um certainly for um a lot of parents having an orchestra is a big deal and we are just now i've put together an education committee for the west hollywood orchestra and we're just starting to get our education program into the schools and we're really excited about that because i think we're going to to really bring in a whole other group of people i think a lot of parents wouldn't necessarily go to a concert for themselves but they will come to accompany their child because they think it's really important for the child to hear music and of course i'm i'm also after the parents that come in right so because i think that there's a you know a whole couple generations in there that didn't have a lot of music growing up in terms of anything other than popular music on the radio you know my parents generation listened to opera every saturday afternoon and had music in the schools and they had a basic understanding about uh classical music and an appreciation for it well we certainly lost that in our public schools i mean it's um they talk about budget they talk about basics they talk about fundamentals and believe me i know what they talk about because i have been on the education committee and see what can get required and therefore funded and what won't and the arts have just dropped off the edge of the and it's so sad i mean and aside from the fact that they're important by themselves and very important for you know our humanity but they really are important uh disciplines for kids in school i mean they they come out with the reports about listening to mozart and and learning an instrument and what it does to motor skills and and all the stuff with your brain and and uh but we keep talking till we're blooming in the face and it's it's sometimes an uphill battle it's just like but where's the bottom line you know and what are you you know self-produced uh see orchestras can't exist just by ticket sales so they they exist and spend money and we have to raise money so but it's uh it's something that i just am adamant that can't go away and and all orchesters across the country are having a challenge um recruiting uh new audience members a number of orchestras especially the large budget orchestras were very content to do whatever kinds of programs made their patrons very happy but now they're finding out that some of those same patrons are literally dying off the audiences are getting older and older and they can't seem to lure in younger audiences so it's it's a big mission well of course we get our music in so many different ways now that we it's very much like theater that you say well you know i listen on the radio or i uh download off the internet only legal music of course and so i'm not sure i need to go to live performances anymore and yet theater is very much alive certainly in los angeles and various of the larger cities including um smaller theaters i mean you can go to lots and lots and lots of different things and you'll see you know people are there and i think people think of going to the theater but don't necessarily think of going to an orchestral performance because we don't get as much of that i think on you know television or whatever whereas we would think about drama well also i think that people have had more experience with drama and they know how exciting a live play is as opposed to just i mean we all love movies and we love tv um and but it's it's something very special that happens that energy and i think that a live uh music performance is just it's electrifying it's just wonderful of course i get the best seat in the house which is no seat at all but it is such fabulous energy um i think that a lot of american orchestras especially have uh in their um quest for uh not all orchestras have done this but a lot of them got a little bit snooty and they got a little bit full of themselves and thought we're you know you should only behave in a certain way when you come to our concerts you should only wear certain things you should only make this much you have to make this much money in order to do that i there was definitely that that sense that you you had to already be there in order to be part of this gang and a lot of musicians i mean some of my dearest friends have gotten a little bored with with the actual putting on a concert and i can't i still don't understand that but i've seen i i have two two impressions when i go to a concert i love it i'm totally bored one out within five minutes i mean i have no tolerance for that kind of just uh mailing it in or you know punching in the time clock and and i think that that still is a little bit of the image of um of classical orchestras that you go and it's it's boring and uh i have really tried all the way through my career i i don't understand how you can just do that because it's just like such great stuff and you just have to be impassioned about it or you know why why don't you go be a banker or something well it was interesting i was up at in northern california along the coast mendocino last week in the mendocino music festival was going on and they had a huge tent with uh i don't even know why the acoustics were as fabulous as they were but they had some acoustic boards you know over the orchestra and out along the edges of the tent and all these wooden chairs set up and during the day they were having rehearsals for the performance that night or the night after of verdi's requiem and um you didn't pay anything to go in and sit and watch the rehearsals and so my sister and i went and sat down she's the president of the sacramento youth symphony and so has had an interest in this as well and we were just fascinated by the rehearsal i don't think they got more than i couldn't even tell you how many bars you know but i mean i never saw them turn a page let me just put it that way in terms of the rehearsal but there's a huge chorus and the orchestra and you know they were and it was fascinating and i was thinking about this show because the conductor was telling them something and you would go oh how would they hear the difference or how does he know to say that you know it was it was fascinating um and i think people would do well to be able to just know about and access something more easily you know as we're wandering around in i don't know in the malls or wherever we go on the weekends if there was a way to experience that i don't know it seems to me you have to make so much of an effort to go to a concert in a way right well actually you bring up shopping malls i i've done many concerts in shopping oh talk about it yes oh i love in sacramento actually we did a traditional mother's day concert every year and the orchestra really didn't love it because acoustically it's like all over the place yeah and it's logistically a little bit tricky the idea was actually the shopping mall paid the orchestra to be there to bring in more shoppers it wasn't like the shopping stopped so it was uh but it was really fun it was very um kind of a mix of pops and and light classics uh very very well attended um was kind of a curious experience for me because we had the orchestra not in the traditional black again just kind of being spring colors or i can't remember what we had but anyway pretty much they looked a little bit nicer than maybe the shoppers but they pretty much blended in and for kind of getting on the inside track of what's going on the audience would circle the orchestra so they would be behind the orchestra watching me and turning all red and getting all hot and stuff but then they get i could tell they got a little funny when i would point you know in the direction to the player in one instance actually in terms of orchestras violins are over here and you've got cellos and then you have bases over here and i seen you know when i when you start the concert you like look to see where everybody is and i went and i did some big q over to the bases and they had moved because because you know the audience and there was a bunch of audience and they kind of went you know what are we supposed to do are we are we supposed to sing now what what so it had its challenges but that was inaccessible um people were walking by going to jcpenney's or wherever and oh my god there's an orchestra so i agree i if it were up to me i would be playing in the streets doing whatever it would take to demystify or make it more accessible so i know it's sort of strange because you think i we must be about halfway through now but it's almost actually been the whole hour only a few minutes remaining chatting so no no i i you know i've loved it and i i think it's it's very impressive what you've done and i think our community and our larger community should be very proud of the work that you're doing um so what is next i know not geographically because you're here and these two orchestra orchestras are definitely what you will attend to but maybe in terms of programming what is your dream in terms of what you will do and you know how you think that will impact the communities that your orchestras are in well i think doing a lot more of the same kinds of things but just things that i i can't do because it requires too much money you know the i'm always looking for something else a new commissioned work we've actually commissioned a couple pieces with west hollywood orchestra but i love to do more actually i'm speaking with a um a russian immigrant composer who lives in new york who's very interested in writing music for west hollywood and we're talking about you know the possibility of this and we're applying for grants and plymouth is also very interested in in having that see that's that's the advantage when you have the same music director that you can do both um so it would be doing more of those kinds of things plus things like i i'd really love to to commission a jazz guitar concerto there isn't one i'd love to have you know just those kind of unique things um west hollywood we're really looking to very soon do a recording of children's music which i think is again we need to to get more music out to kids now are there gay or lesbian composers that themselves don't get aired much i don't suppose in reading a music piece you'd go oh that must have been written by someone yeah but still would you give them a little more of a showcase i i definitely do but in in the case of a lot of gay male composers that's a lot of our favorite composers it's really a lot yeah so it's it's very easy to you know put together you know uh uh aaron copeland and bernstein and schubert and you know uh britain and you know there's lots and lots so they're very much more visible than a lot of composers um but i i we certainly love to do lots of featuring of gay composers but i think you know more specifically lesbian composers are less visible and i've had some instances where i do program them on the the performance but it's not they prefer me not really talking about the specifics still you know if their music gets heard it gets played it gets well interpreted absolutely um it helps no matter what we don't only say gee let's play lesbian music right because right we you know we wouldn't know well a lot of them will downplay it because i also don't want to have another label you know it's already hard again as women composers to get hurt um and and people are afraid that you know if they listen to a work by a lesbian composer that it will be so strange and so you know like they can't relate it's just like it's music you know get over yourself you know it's just what that is i have no idea but anyway well i like them all of course you do nan and thank you so much for being on the show and probably more importantly for being here with us now and uh with our orchestra in west hollywood and congratulations to michigan for uh retaining you and all the other cities that should have hired you too bad for them right um and uh to you thank you for joining us and uh remember there needs to be some music in your life and if there's an orchestra in your community an orchestra in your city in your town should support them and not only that remember to make your own music and get used to it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] 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