Full Transcript for Deborah Borda, former President, New York Philharmonic

Nachtmusik, and I wore it out. And so she thought, well, Deborah's interested. So she took me to a concert, and we went to Carnegie Hall. And I'm not real tall, but at any rate, we sat at the very top, and I remember climbing up the stairs to Carnegie Hall. It was as if I was climbing a ladder. I was so little, and then we were so far away, the orchestra looked about that big. So I remember asking my mother, Are these real or is this a toy orchestra? But then they started to play, and the sound was like that Leonard Bernstein was conducting. I went back and looked it up later on from the date, and I just I sort of your why in your life? 00:04:07.973 --> 00:04:16.108 loved it. I feel like I almost always loved it. And then when I went to school, I thought, well, I'm going to play an instrument. 00:04:16.170 --> 00:04:35.466 And so we lined up to get our instruments, and I wanted to have the flute because it was small and easy to carry. So by the time I got there, there were two instruments left, a French horn and a violin. Well, that was an easy decision. I took the lighter one, and that was it. 00:04:31.745 --> 00:04:48.519 That was how I I came to love music. You know, playing in an orchestra, which I did, it's like a team sport. I didn't play sports because I was a music nerd, but it was like, it was like, our team, and you do have to function as a team. 00:04:48.540 --> 00:05:01.800 I have a question for you, if you don't mind going into the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra where you were, yeah, the musical director at the time saying, I guess a woman couldn't do the job and your offer was So what advice would you give to rescinded. 00:05:01.439 --> 00:05:41.653 It's a terrible story, and I feel free to tell it because, and I will name the person. He has passed away, and he was very famous. It was Lorin Mazzel, one of the most famous conductors in the world, and at the time, at Pittsburgh orchestra is one of our great American orchestras, and they recruited me, and I flew to Pittsburgh, and I thought it was a very nice city. I met with the board members, I met with the orchestra. We It was great. It was going to be a fantastic partnership. And it was a big step up, because at that point, I would have been the first woman to run one of the big 10 orchestras. So they said, This is just great. We're so excited. 00:05:41.714 --> 00:06:16.490 We need you to fly to London to meet Maestro Michelle. So I go, Great, okay. And I remember, I stayed at the Savoy Hotel just to meet him in the river room at four o'clock on such and such a date. I get all ready. And, you know, I go down, in those days, you only wear dresses, I'll tell you. And I went down. I sat there, four o'clock, 415-430-445 o'clock. Okay, maybe it was off by an hour. 515 530 I got up and I went upstairs, and I called the chairman of the board, this wonderful guy, Ben Obert, and I said, something really wrong that went wrong. I don't get it. 00:06:16.552 --> 00:06:56.521 And he said, let me

call you back. So he called me back later, and he said, tomorrow morning or afternoon at this time, go to this address in London, and he'll meet you there. So we get there, it was like no place. And I thought, Oh, they gave me the wrong address. And then suddenly a door opened and a cellist came out with a cello case. So I said, aha. So I rushed in, and Mazzel was rehearsing, and I go up to him afterwards, and he said, come upstairs to my studio. And I remember we got there, and he sat down, and he took out a box, and he said, I'm going to have a cigar. Would you care for one? No, thank you. So he said, Tell me about yourself. 00:06:56.583 --> 00:07:14.185 So, you know, I told him, I tried to tell him very concisely, and also to compliment him such a great maestro. Because you've always got to do that with certain the old time maestro, Maestro. And after four or five minutes, he those facing roadblocks in their careers, especially one that said, That's a wonderful story. 00:07:10.456 --> 00:07:17.607 Thank you so much, and you're going to have a wonderful career. I know it. Thank you. 00:07:17.668 --> 00:07:25.064 Goodbye. So I went back to the to the hotel, and I called chairman, Benno Barrett, and I said, this is not going to work. 00:07:25.125 --> 00:07:40.160 He goes, I already heard it's not going to work anyway. It's not you, it's him. I said, it's me too. And so that was it, and it was I mean, to have had a job offered to you, to be flown to London to finalize the deal. But it just, it really hurt. 00:07:45.595 --> 00:08:34.404 feels like it's beyond your control, Like, well, they use they often are a two pieces advice. Key one, take another road, go another path. I mean, that's there are. There are almost always alternatives. So that's one, just take another way. And the other thing is, I know it's almost sounds, but not all this word, because we use it so much now to talk about kids and people, but if you're going to have an important job, you have to have resilience. I hesitate to use that word, but in fact, it's a really good word. It means something. And so it was difficult for me to get my first presidency of an orchestra, and I had to go my first big job as president and CEO. I had to go to a smaller orchestra. But I thought, okay, there's a wonderful orchestra. 00:08:34.404 --> 00:08:48.384 Was the St Paul Chamber Orchestra. I will go and take a I will do this because I believe in it artistically, and then I can prove myself. So it's taken on the road. There's a roadblock if you're driving you figure out another way to go. 00:08:48.384 --> 00:09:02.830 Throughout your career, you've been at the helm of a lot of the world's most prestigious arts organizations. How do you define moral leadership, and how has it shaped the approach that you have to leading the world in music and beyond music, 00:09:03.009 --> 00:09:07.090 Moral leadership. 00:09:03.009 --> 00:10:15.445 It's really two key components, and the first one is simple honesty. It requires honesty, supreme honesty with yourself, but honesty with others. And I just that is the core to me. And what that relates to is knowing, and this is again relating to your, your being the primary adjudicator of this, which is knowing what you feel is acceptable behavior and acceptable standards. This is very important now in saying that there is another aspect that as I got older, I started to think about, and honestly, at the beginning of my career, I don't think I was good at it. A couple of things I wasn't good at, but just kindness, kindness and two kinds of kindness again, and it starts with. Kindness to yourself. Don't always beat yourself up about everything, because those of us who are high achievers are hoping to be we do that. But the other is, if you can do that, you can start to extend that kindness to others. 00:10:15.745 --> 00:11:01.375 Deborah, we're so grateful you joined us for the HOW Summit in New York City in December of 2024 and you shared a wonderful story on the panel about extending trust and loyalty to your orchestra while you were searching for a new musical director for the LA Philharmonic, you were dedicated to not just making a decision, but also including the orchestra members in that decision to get excited about it. Maybe you could share with us the example of the situation and how you brought them into that decision making inclusively, and also how you, in a sense, broke down the old bureaucratic and hierarchical kind of decision making that was of the past to be more of a shared decision making for the future. 00:11:01.779 --> 00:12:37.840 I was at the LA Philharmonic for 17 years, at a certain point, the 12th year or something, and, you know, it was going, couldn't have been going better. But I wasn't happy. I was felt like, somehow I'm not doing my Sundays, not satisfying me in this job. And I I realized actually, and I started to come to it, and then it really gelled for me when I was a Hauser fellow, that I was very used to an old fashioned way of managing because my wonderful mentor was one of my best friends today, who'd been the president of the San Francisco Symphony, and this is a long time ago. So in those days, we had very top down management. So his name is Peter past rush. Wonderful man. Still was in San Francisco. And so we would have our senior vice presidents, and we'd meet once a week, and we would bring the problems to to him, and he would give us an answer, and it was sort of okay. And I mean, yes, we learned he was a wonderful teacher, because he would ask him questions. I mean, I learned everything from him, but I was used to this, and I was trying to manage in the same way. But times had changed, and I had changed, so we were running a music director search, and that's always a big, big deal in an orchestra, especially at a big, famous orchestra. And two years before that, I had seen the most remarkable talent I had ever seen. His name was Gustavo Dudamel. He was 23

years old, and he had just won the international model competition. 00:12:33.174 --> 00:12:54.279 And we brought him at the first day I tried to book him. He didn't have a manager. The second day he had three or four, and so we brought him back a couple of times. Because one of the things I made a promise to the orchestra about is I would never hire a conductor and especially a music director unless they felt good about it. 00:12:54.279 --> 00:13:06.625 They had to agree. Because this, you know, this guy stands a woman now stands in front of them for weeks on end. And there has to be, has to be a synergy. 00:13:02.065 --> 00:13:06.625 So I said, Okay, I have an idea. 00:13:07.524 --> 00:13:44.934 I think we, we should go. You should go see him. He's conducting in Rome this week. We will fly the committee over and meet with him. You know, have dinner with him. Spend some time with him. Go to his rehearsal, and then come back and tell me what you think. They said, Well, aren't you going with us? And I said, No, I will not go with you. I need you to go and help me with this decision. Please come back and tell me what you think. I trust you. Now that was like, and when I told my felt, my colleagues, you didn't go. We can't believe it. I go. I just they came back. They said, Yeah, he's the man. 00:13:44.934 --> 00:14:18.639 You've led organizations through a lot of rough seas. And as we know, and Dov Seidman, our founder and chair, often says, you know, it's not the smooth seas that make the sailor, it's the rough seas. You've led through some tough, rough seas like COVID, a lot of financial crises. And we all know that leadership is requiring of us to lead and guide others through these difficult times. Share with us a moment when you elevated and inspired your team during a significant challenge and maybe made these challenges into opportunities. 00:14:19.919 --> 00:15:23.850 Well, of course, I think this is the fifth anniversary today as we speak of covid and the American and world shut down. So we, we, I talked to my my colleagues at the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall, and we decided it just wasn't safe. We had to shut down. So we called the mayor of New York at that time, de Blasio, and he said, No, no, you have to keep going. This is this. And we and we said we are going to announce tomorrow at noon, that we are stopping ceasing operations till we know what's happening. And so guiding people through a couple of really difficult things. The first was, you know, calming the. Orchestra and putting them on temporary leave, and the next thing was figuring out how to get the entire office onto zoom so that we could all work remotely and they didn't want to come in. I mean, everybody was scared out of their minds. But for the orchestra, something else happened, which was the 106 members of the New York Philharmonic are our family. 00:15:20.789 --> 00:15:23.850 They're the core of what we do. 00:15:24.149 --> 00:15:54.600 And so I went to the board and I said, we cannot stop paying them. We have to continue their health care. And the board - they were wonderful. The board, I said, this is our this is our family. This is our product also. So they agreed. But then what I had to do was because we just couldn't continue it at the full salaries. I had to, first of all, lay off a number of staff members, all the production staff members, and that was really difficult, although the government was very positive and did help them out. 00:15:50.715 --> 00:18:04.065 But then I negotiated a new contract by zoom with the orchestra. And that was, they were, they were great. But it was, it was a very difficult moment. So people about a couple of major things happened. One was that we were about to renovate David Geffen Hall, which had been 50, 40, years in the making. And so working with my partner, Henry Timms, who was the president and CEO of Lincoln Center. We set upon an audacious plan, which was that, since we were going to be closed down, and we figured we would be closed down for a year and a half, it was middle of the year, we knew the next we would try to do an accelerated process and open the hall quickly. Um, but that meant we had to raise $450 million and, you know, we did, and we did it by zoom. So that was the people felt positive we saw, you know, this is, you know, the veritable lemonade out of lemons. But then there were other things. The orchestra became very, they were very, you know, their life is playing and coming together. So two things, they themselves. We encouraged them to think of a special project. The entire orchestra came together on Zoom and played Bolero, and it was an amazing performance. We had millions of downloads. But then as the summer came, it was, they were really it was difficult, and so we had an idea, which was, we would start something called bandwagon, and we would get a big truck and paint it bright colors, and we would drive around the city with musicians, and we could amplify it and do pop up concerts all over. Well, people started signing up like that. It was great. We did in the five boroughs, close to 100 concerts all over, and they were very moving, because I remember we were one really tricky area of Brooklyn, and we pulled up and we and they started to play, and people were laughing and making fun of somebody, and then they got quiet. And then I noticed two things. When they did a wall, people started to dance with each other, but in the other the more sadder music. 00:18:04.065 --> 00:18:23.190 I noticed a man crying, and I just, you know, it gave us all so much hope. And it was, it was a very special time, a sad time, but a time where we saw hope, and we brought hope and the beauty of music and that flame of humanity to people, even people who thought, Oh, this is they loved it. 00:18:23.190 --> 00:18:48.674 Thank you for sharing that with us. It's elevating just to hear this story as you think back and knowing how tough those times were, but

looking back and celebrating you also have led some very diverse groups. If we could talk about that a little bit, I mean diversity in many ways, but musicians, administrators, you know, audiences, communities. How do you foster a culture in these deep values in every individual? 00:18:50.160 --> 00:19:50.519 I think, partly by believing in it and being able to speak about it. But let me give you an example. So in honor, this is at the New York Philharmonic of the 19th the signing of the 19th Amendment, which gave white women the right to vote. Finally, way after even the UK did it, we launched a project called Project 19, and it was commissioning 19 women to write major world premieres for the New York Philharmonic. And they did so, and it's been now it's project 32 because we keep going, because there's so many wonderful women conductors, but our very first, our very first composer that we commissioned is a woman named Tanya Leon. She was she had left Cuba when she was 19, an amazing, amazing woman, and she wrote a piece called stride, which was about her, the struggle of her native people in black, people in Cuba, beautiful piece, and she won the Pulitzer Prize for it that year. 00:19:46.170 --> 00:19:56.609 And the orchestra was we were all so proud. And so it's it's taking risks, but now you just you see the change. 00:19:56.839 --> 00:20:54.410 How do 00:20:11.640 --> 00:20:19.348 The arts in general, but especially for me, music, because it's wordless. We don't have to speak a language. 00:20:19.420 --> 00:20:41.192 We can anybody, any place in the world, can listen to a contemporary piece by Tanya Leon or Mozart, and love it. So it's, it's a particularly powerful form, also in that it's, it's slightly ritualistic, and that you go in a group and attend it, and you experience it together. 00:20:36.910 --> 00:21:28.449 You have to shut your iPhone off. I mean, it's, it's a moment where it's quite an abstract but visceral experience at the same time. And that's why I use that phrase before it's, it's, it expresses and keeps alive the how you think about music as a powerful, connected connector in flame of humanity. Are we? Are our audiences. We are sold out right now. People are really feeling a need for this, for, you know, for spiritual sustenance and intellectual sustenance. You know, Gustavo Dudamel taught me something. And one of the things it was wonderful. He was a great teacher for me, though he's many years younger, many different lessons I learned from him. But one of one of the keys is music is a fundamental human right. 00:21:24.308 --> 00:21:44.440 Music is a fundamental human right. And if you think about that, because it's so easy to push the arts to the side, say, I should be working in a refugee camp someplace to help people or in the south and poor, but in fact, music is a community service. 00:21:42.619 --> 00:21:44.059 and of itself. 00:21:44.240 --> 00:22:02.480 It's wonderful, and thank you for your flaming humanity. I know, as we wrap up our conversation, would you share with our listeners? And I know you've already touched on this, but what gives you hope? What is a message you'd like to share with our listeners, our learners, our leaders, about elevating and inspiring the world around them. 00:22:02.660 --> 00:23:55.984 It's difficult right now. It's difficult right now, but I think shutting out some of the incredible noise that's around us is very helpful. I'm spending less time on social media and watching, you know, news reports and focusing on areas or something that makes a difference to you, because we are essentially out of control. I mean, we don't control when we are born, we don't control when we die, and right now, we are in a period that may be of historic change, we don't know. So we have to find what makes our own lives. I mean, hopefully we'll find a way to return to our Constitution and democracy, and I hope the rest of the world does, but we have to find a way to live our lives in the meantime, and so that is pursuing outside of your job and in your job, what your passion is, what you're feeling passionate about. And if that's reading a book or watching reruns of I Love Lucy, you go ahead, you do it. The other thing I have found, but I found this before, but it's reassuring right now, is when we talk about respect, part of respect is treating everybody the same, and I think that is that is so important, and enjoying those interactions, you know, no matter if there, I read an article recently that said, like, if you have a conversation with the man on the corner who you're buying your blueberries from, um, you take joy from that, and he takes some joy and and so I find engaging in those conversations and those smaller human connections very encouraging, very encouraging. 00:23:56.164 --> 00:24:18.410 And I make I'm not, of course, running the New York Philharmonic, and we have a wonderful new president. But when I was president, one of the things that I would always do is, right before rehearsal, I just either be backstage or go out on the stage and just talk to people. And they would tell me about their son who was applying to Juilliard, or you know, or you know, NYU, and you know, their arm that hurt them. 00:24:18.410 --> 00:24:22.609 And it was, it was great. It was great. It just felt very human. 00:24:24.289 --> 00:24:28.055 And I think those we cannot ignore those little connections right now, 00:24:29.039 --> 00:24:43.799 Wonderful advice. And I just want to say thank you, Deborah Borda, for this HOW Conversation on moral leadership and elevating inspiring. I think our listeners, all of us, feel elevated inspired in your messaging and in the stories that you were willing to share. 00:24:43.799 --> 00:24:47.009 And thank you for being in common purpose and common cause. 00:24:47.009 --> 00:24:54.660 Wave making with us at the HOW Institute for Society. And thank you for giving your flame of humanity in your special way. 00:24:55.319 --> 00:24:57.089 Thanks so much. 00:24:55.319 --> 00:24:57.089 Great to see you.