Full Transcript for Band Maestros

own life, and it is well supported by the athletic department and the upper administration. Michael Shapiro: You do have a great orchestra too, because I know my friend Gerard Schwarz is now there, and I was thrilled when he joined you, because Jerry is... I mean my God. And the composition... I've gone through the whole structure of the school and it's fascinating to me. Plus I spent every summer in Miami Beach when my grandparents lived there for like 10 years, so I have a feeling... Michael Shapiro: David Kehler, I have a question for you. I'm curious about university culture, and it's very different from what I experienced in the so-called professional orchestra world, and chamber music and opera and so forth. But when I visited you in Kennesaw and gone into the school and taught kids and been throughout the whole situation... some people have been saying I should start talking about universities in the era of COVID-19, and I don't want to do that today. We've all been through it, and I was through it personally as you all know. So the question is: university culture now, for a state university like Kennesaw, in music, do you see any immediate changes, or where this is all going? David Kehler: In related to COVID? Michael Shapiro: In related to COVID as a kind of a linchpin or a change in where we are. I mean, I have seen it from some other people in your industry that I've been talking to, but do you have any particular Georgian response? David Kehler: Well, I can speak about what we're experiencing here right now. We're 30 miles north of downtown Atlanta, we're a suburb of the Atlanta metropolitan area, so we're a very big county, Cobb County, with a school that's grown 20,000 kids in the last 10 years. So we're a big school of almost 40,000 students. Our school is actually growing right now, even through COVID. We have a record number of music students coming into the School of Music this year. In fact, I have a horn player who's coming to KSU instead of going to the San Francisco Conservatory this fall because they fear it's going to be online, and if they're from this area they're going to stay here and save some money and take advantage of the cost. Michael Shapiro: Well, California has a better governor than you do. David Kehler: I will make no comment on that here. Michael Shapiro: Speaking from the outside, that's absolutely true. David Kehler: We won't talk about your governor either. Please, if we start talking about it it's going to turn dark. But I think in the short term it's going to be a lot different for lots of places. I think we're going to be a beneficiary of this challenge because we're a very affordable public institution in a nice area, and I think there are going to be people that choose to stay closer to home. One of the challenges I've had in the past is kids leave to go elsewhere. I do worry for all of us in public education and in the arts in particular, with the long-term implications of this and funding, and I worry for all of us to have funding and support in the future. Michael Shapiro: I think it's a big problem. I want to shift to repertoire a little bit. First, Albert Nguyen of University of Memphis, and then I'll shift back to Kevin Sedatole. Albert, you and I had the most incredible experience. I first met you because of an agent I had in the South who introduced me to you about my Frankenstein score, which you conducted with the band—the band version that I had conducted with the Dallas Winds. Michael Shapiro: Now what I find very interesting is that when I went down to see you the first time, we were talking because I love, you know, I grew up with Louis Armstrong and the great jazz musicians, seeing them live in New York, Coleman Hawkins, it's a long list. But I also am very interested in blues, and we started talking about your love of blues, and the love of Memphis blues that you have being an Arkansas boy. So I went to Beale Street on your recommendation, and I hung out with Blind Mississippi Morris, who is the greatest harp player in the world, harmonica player, and he's blind and he's overweight and he's got a beautiful wife by the name of Harmony, you cannot make this stuff up. And he plays in a rib joint where I had ribs and beer and chicken, Southern style, and listened to this genius. The great thing that happened was I brought him to school like two or three years later, and he appeared not only with your band but with your players and we had rehearsals and we got him an award from the mayor. And I wrote a piece, "Old Mississippi Sings the Blues," which you premiered, and Dave Kehler also played, for band, specifically for band, incorporating the ethos of a night with Blind Mississippi Morris. Michael Shapiro: So that was one example of expansion of repertoire organically from the community. Where do you want to go with the organic growth of the band repertoire for music that is written for band from the people? What do you see going with this, because I see a change? Albert Nguyen: Yeah, there's a huge change. I think a lot of it is directly related to what we're seeing right now. We're going to see a major change in how small bands operate because we're having amazing composers writing flex pieces for the ensemble now. Composers who at one point may not have been accessible to smaller schools, because we're forced in this small chamber-like weird funky instrumentation, this is a hole that is getting filled in a very meaningful way. With the idea that we have a large number of disenfranchised people amongst us, disenfranchised humans, which means their music is suppressed, their voices are suppressed, we're starting to see courage within composers and courage within conductors to ask for all of this to come out. Albert Nguyen: I don't mean to say that this is unique to me, not necessarily, because I think other people perhaps feel the same way about who they are and where they've come from. But for me personally, what this has done

has forced me to figure out who I am and what culture identifies me, what music identifies me. Michael Shapiro: I understand, and that's something a lot of people are reaching for. Albert Nguyen: Right, and I think I can't be the only one that feels this way. Teaching in Memphis, my African American students, some of them think that we're supposed to learn music one way, and to learn it the classical European way really puts them off, you know, we lose majors sometimes because they think that we're trying to force them into a peg, a hole that they don't fit. And then, you know, I'm looking around and I see my students on their TikToks and on their Instagrams, and they're improvising way better than I could possibly imagine. They have all sorts of talents that if we would just look at them a little more closely and ask them what else they do besides Western classical music, we would discover that we sort of misidentified what musical talent is. Michael Shapiro: Well, we did that with Blind Mississippi Morris where the kids were riffing with him. Albert Nguyen: Right, and so it's, you know, I would say that that was a really big moment for me, to hear a person like Blind Mississippi Morris talk about performing passionate music with B.B. King, performing with Howlin' Wolf, playing next to our students and saying, "I want to teach you about music, and the only way you're going to do it is to sit next to me and play it." Michael Shapiro: And they did! Remember in the rehearsal when they started, it was interesting for all the maestros here, that they were very scared, and then he says "do this, do that," and then boom! They jumped in. Michael Shapiro: Kevin Sedatole, I want to switch now to a whole another subject, and it is writing for the band, from someone experienced in this as a composer. 10 years ago I will tell you I did not know how to write for band. I grew up in orchestral music at Juilliard and Mannes, and Leopold Stokowski, Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan, these were my people in my early days. But when I started writing for band and now I have a good number of band pieces, I realized with the help of some of the people that are talking to us today, that it's a different perspective. Vincent Persichetti was my teacher, the divergent mentor, you all know, and the fifth symphony and so forth. And Vincent was one of the early people, maybe Percy Grainger before him, that realized that writing for band is a different instrument. Writing for wind ensemble is a different way of going, not only the combinations but just the way the instruments work. I'm sure you have given thought to this. So I want to know where you are now with this in response to pieces that you get, because you must get dozens of things. Where do you come out with all of this? What would you tell composers that may be watching this, what should they be looking for? What should they do? Kevin Sedatole: Well, we all get new music every... well maybe not now, but when

things were normal, every single week, maybe every day we're getting something new. I would differ with you: you already knew how to write for band, you just didn't realize it. You just had to take the strings away and you were writing for band. That's the whole point behind Fennell's movement towards wind ensemble, was for clarity's sake, and so musicians felt more valid in what they were doing instead of sitting in a large symphonic band where there were 24 clarinets where you could be playing Mozart in the middle of something else and no one would ever know. So I honestly really think it's more about what people's connotation of band was. "Oh, that's the big band that plays in the gazebo at the park, you know, and they play marches and overtures and polkas and novelty kind of music." Particularly East Coast people. Michael Shapiro: I'm sorry. Kevin Sedatole: No, it's just, there were not a ton of public school bands on the East Coast, it just didn't exist. Michael Shapiro: We had the Goldman Band, you know, that's what we had in New York as a so-called professional band. Kevin Sedatole: But there was a lot of time before the Goldman Band ever happened that people's influence in terms of what band would be considered... All of the New York composers have that same idea. I mean we've all played Corigliano's music and he had no idea about band and just pretty much had to be forced into writing for it, or someone else had to write it for him until he understood, "Oh, this is not as difficult as I'm making it out to be. I just don't know what some of these instruments are." That's part of the problem, you know, how do you write for a saxophone, how do you write for a euphonium player, you know, and I don't know the ranges of all of this. Like, that can all be dealt with. Michael Shapiro: John's a close, close friend. I was with him at the premiere of Circus Maximus at Carnegie Hall, and afterwards we went to dinner. A small group—Jerry was not with us because he had to be with the kids. And I remember John saying, "They rehearsed! They knew their parts!" And this is a guy that I've been with with major orchestras, we're very good friends, and he comes back and wants to shoot himself because it wasn't properly rehearsed. So, you know, you guys rehearse, and you learn your parts, which is for us composers, it's a dream. Kevin Sedatole: Almost every major composer that I've worked with, that's the same story. Like I remember Bill Bolcom sitting in rehearsal, he goes, "You have no idea how much this is appreciated by composers, that you guys take time." Michael Shapiro: Oh we do, we do. Kevin Sedatole: He said, "You know, on the totem pole, we are at the bottom in the orchestral world." And he goes like, "Well, we don't exist without you guys, and you don't exist without us." So you are in the generation of the building of the repertoire. Michael Shapiro: And I want to speak to Robert Carnochan next, if I may, and then I'll shift to Sarah. Robert, I'm

curious down in Miami, which I know very, very well. It's a cosmopolitan area with a large South American population going back to when I was a kid, and I had to learn Español in order to survive. It was kind of an Español-Yiddish, which was very interesting in my case, in Miami Beach, in the early days. And that's before Miami Beach was cool. Robert Carnochan: Some might not say it's cool right now, but... Michael Shapiro: Not anymore, it was cool and then it wasn't cool. But I'm curious about Miami, because the city of Miami is a distinctly cool place, enjoying tremendous wealth, and the question of global warming is very much on everybody's mind there. But I'm curious, in that kind of metropolitan area, which is different from some of these other folks on this podcast other than Memphis perhaps. Are there special needs in a place like Miami where you have that South American influx and a very sophisticated, driven kind of culture, a very financial culture too, and a fun culture? Robert Carnochan: Yeah, it's a very fun culture, and the diversity is greater here than any other place I've lived in my life. And that brings with it I think a lot of challenges, because it is hard to cater to a certain culture because there are so many different certain cultures. Certainly the culture of South America is alive and well. There is a lot to do in Miami, and there are a lot of organizations that are trying to find their own niche. So the audience is being pulled in many, many, many different ways. So it's difficult to actually attract and cultivate an audience, I think, in the city because of all those factors. Repertoire certainly can help drive that and help build that, and that's something that I and my colleagues at the school want to do more of, in getting into South America and bringing some of that music to this region more. Michael Shapiro: There are some schools up north that are bringing in people from Asia primarily, and this is cynically said, because of money, because of contributions from Asian countries, particularly China. I've seen that with other schools here. What you're talking about, what I like to hear is what you're saying is a more organic response. Michael Shapiro: If I can switch to Sarah McKoin please. Sarah, I'm just curious of anything at this point—you've been through this a while, although you're considerably younger than I am—is next generations, what you're considering imparting to the children, young adults who are now going through a really radical transformation time. When they come back to see you whenever it is this coming fall or spring, what are you going to impart to them that might be a little different? Sarah McKoin: I'm not sure I have anything different, but I definitely feel more appreciation. I think they feel more appreciation. The thing that struck me when the whole COVID thing hit, was how much they wanted to be together. A lot of people just sort of stopped seeing their ensembles, and we met, and even if

it was to talk, we were kind of figuring out, crowdsourced how to get together. But the overall arch of that to me was very apparent that they want to be together and they want to make music and they want to create. A couple of weeks ago I reached out to everybody and said, "Hey, if you want to get on and just chat, you can." I had probably about 20 kids show up, just to hang out and talk. They want to be together and they want to perform. Sarah McKoin: And so I think embracing that, this is in a weird way, I haven't worked through it yet, but it's allowing me to think a little bit differently about performance. It's making me think about performance, what's relevant to them, we talked about the diversity, that's one thing, and what other ways do they find relevant that we can help them with in terms of other goals of performance, or different goals of performance than we might be accustomed to, and just a large ensemble experience. And so I've been wrestling with those sorts of things for actually what we're going to do in the fall and probably the spring as well. But it's been a little bit freeing in a way to be able to think that way, thinking out of the box. Sarah McKoin: Yeah, trying. And I think for them, at least my students... sometimes I say people make fun of Lubbock and all that stuff, but it's, if you get 'em, you got 'em. And they want to be together, they want to learn, they want to do all those things. And they don't have all the temptations that Miami has, you know. So if you get 'em, you got 'em, and you can create a different kind of culture. And it's an opportunity that we have together, and the fact that they want to, that's what I want to be able to capitalize on, to figure out how we can be relevant to them and give back moving forward. Michael Shapiro: Well, I'm curious of Dave Kehler at this point. David, musically I've been down to your school, I had a wonderful residency there, and it's a great place. Where do you see the university going, in your specific in Georgia at this point, making a mark for this next generation that you're working with? David Kehler: Well, what I've tried to do, and ours is very young school, I mean we're the youngest school of all my colleagues here, and it was a commuter college just more than a dozen years ago. So what we're doing in music, I've tried to take advantage of where we're located. In the Atlanta metropolitan area, we've actually become partners with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Many of the ASO principal wind players are our teachers. Our students get very discounted tickets. So I've taken advantage of all the things Bob Spano has done with the Atlanta Composer Project, and when I hear pieces by Christopher Theofanidis or Jennifer Higdon or Michael Gandolfi, these are composers I eventually brought in to my students and connected with. Two of the three are very good friends. Yeah, and so I've commissioned a couple of them, we've done premieres, and it's always completely terrifying, but when I look at all the things I've tried to do here, those are the things I'm most proud of, and creating those opportunities. I've been able to do it simply because of where we're located and the opportunities that I've tried to connect my school to the city and to the Atlanta Symphony and all those players and composers. David Kehler: One other thing that just happened that I was hoping to do is I heard a piece a year and a half ago that the ASO did premier by this young composer in Australia, his name is Alex Turley. He's only 24, 23, he's in grad school, and he wrote this chamberesque piece for a combination of winds and strings, but it was really more of a winds piece. So I just googled him and found out he was a really young person and asked if he'd like to write his first band piece, and of course he's excited and we were going to do it, but funding ran out this year. COVID funds got pulled, I mean all the money got pulled for the university, so that's on hold. And this is kind of what we've all done, I mean I look at my friends and colleagues here, and I just hope that when our lives resume, hopefully a year from now, we can get back to creating art with new, fresh, exciting voices and diverse voices, and whatever our communities serve, trying to find more of those original artists to connect with our students. Michael Shapiro: You know, originally when I started, I got sick really early in this whole cycle, and so for a while I was in recovery mode and it was a bad story. But, you know, people were saying, "Aren't you writing a violin concerto?" I said yeah, but I didn't get to it because I didn't want to, and I wasn't alone, there was a feeling of malaise. But after I got better I jumped right back in and I'm fiercely trying to get this done now for Tim Fain, and it's feeling terrific to be back. And then I have an opera to do and other things. A composer can work now. For a performer, you have to be performing, as university professors, directors of bands, you have to work and get the kids moving. Michael Shapiro: The last question is to Albert, and then I will thank everyone. Albert, if we can hear you that would be nice. Thank you. Here we go. Hope. Let's talk about hope. I've been doing all of these interviews that I've been doing, and I will continue, I'm talking to somebody in Europe next week, two people in Europe. And we're talking about remembrance, we've done some of that today, we've talked about literature choices and spreading the available composers around that we want to talk to. But when I say the word hope to you, what does that mean to you musically? And as a father and husband? Albert Nguyen: It's hard to boil it all down. Um, but when I think about hope musically, and what we are doing, and I feel like what all of us in this room feel also responsible for, is to me that word is my mission. I think that all of us here are blessed with talents that allow us to communicate some things that are indescribable to other people. We are able to assemble crowds and energize them in ways that some others may not be able to. And so, because other people have allowed us to do these things, and where we are as a country, and where we are as humans, the word hope becomes my mission. That's what I feel like I need to be doing: creating opportunities to bring communities back together again in a safe way, spreading the words of hope, celebrating the victories of our students, the victories of people in general, looking for composers who send that message, who write that message. Albert Nguyen: But with hope I also believe in the idea of presenting truth. Because I think we can't lie about it, you know, we have to be truthful, and then in discovering the truth we can find out where we go from there, which then creates more hope. I don't know if I'm answering your question... Michael Shapiro: No, you have, in truth we find hope. I love that. Albert Nguyen: Deeply impactful, but that's kind of where I am. And that's my mission as a father. I don't want my students nor my children to feel that this is a terrible time. I can still make them smile. I can still make them happy. Michael Shapiro: Well, you've made me smile, and I will tell you that if you would all put on your audio at this point I will thank you. Thank Robert Carnochan, Kevin Sedatole, David Kehler, Albert Nguyen, and Sarah McKoin, of all over the country. All of you five, this has been a great joy. Thank you for joining Interplay: Conversations in Music with your host, Michael Shapiro.