Welcome to The Knowledge Project.
I'm your host, Shane Parrish, curator behind Fernum Street Blog, which is an intellectual hub of interestingness covering topics like human misjudgment, decision -making, strategy, philosophy, and today, beauty and music.
The Knowledge Project allows me to interview amazing people from around the world to deconstruct why they're good at what they do and get inside their head.
It's more conversation than prescription.
It's about seeing the world the way they see it.
On this episode, I have Alexander Shelley, the music director for the National Arts Center's orchestra.
This conversation took place in his office at the National Arts Center in downtown Ottawa.
Shelley's leading a new era for the National Arts Center's orchestra is currently in his seventh year as chief conductor of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra.
In January 2015, he was named principal associate conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
Alexander is simply amazing, and this conversation is off the charts.
We're going to explore a host of fascinating topics, including what goes through his mind as he walks out of the dressing room and assumes the podium, the architecture of music, the necessity of art and beauty and culture.
He's even going to break down the beauty of Beethoven's fifth symphony for us and explain why it's so famous.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
As a fan of classical music, I've been looking forward to this interview for a long time.
Thank you. Can you walk me through what goes through your mind from the time you leave the dressing room until the time you reach the stage?
Well, that's a very good question.
Often, it's only a very short walk.
Normally, it's 10 -15 seconds to get from the dressing room to the stage, depending on the building.
Every conductor has a different way of going about these things.
I think I'm lucky to have quite a compartmentalized mind, so I can quite quickly switch from one thing to another and then feel very focused on the next thing.
So I'm fairly comfortable, let's say, up until a few seconds before I go on stage, having conversations with people.
But it's important in the moment that I walk out that I'm in exactly the frame of mind required for whatever the piece is.
The wonderful thing about music in general, and in my case, classical music, is that it could be so many different things.
Last week, we performed here Brahms's Requiem, which requires a particular kind of focus and a connection with one's soft underbelly emotionally, if you see what I mean.
And then sometimes, we'll be performing things like this evening, we have a concert with Bizet Carmen, which is a very different kind of music.
It's more a bally. There are moments of great tenderness, but it is a very different kind of story.
And so I try and focus into that.
But ultimately, in that walk, I try to set myself into the right frame of mind for the music.
When you're up on stage, and you first pick up the baton, what's going through your mind?
So I mean, first and foremost, I'm thinking about creating a sense on stage through my body language, through my eye contact, through everything about the way I am that prepares us.
And by us, I mean, first and foremost, the orchestra, but then of course, the audience for the beginning of the journey and the journey being this piece, a piece of music exists in time.
You are taken on a journey, which is going to take, let's say, in the case of the Requiem, that we did an hour and 15 minutes.
And I have to, before I give the first downbeat, before I start the piece, create the conditions a certain kind of silence.
Let's say there are pieces you can walk on stage, bow to the audience, turn and give a downbeat.
Everyone's still clapping, but it's that kind of music, bam, it's something that explodes off the stage.
But if it's going to be a really long and very intimate and very intense journey, it's sometimes nice to create a true silence beforehand.
This kind of focused silence, and it's one of the things I love about, the many things I love about giving concerts, is this shared experience.
I mean, that's for me, what is so important about live music.
And you can see parallels between concert halls and religious spaces.
If you go to a cathedral, you don't necessarily have to be a believer to sense something special happening when it's full of people, and when there's a silence, let's say, after a prayer.
You don't necessarily have to believe in the idea of the God of that given faith, but there is a great beauty in that shared silence, that collective silence, that collective experience that we all recognize.
And it has different manifestations.
It could be a ballgame as well.
It could be a hockey game, that sense of joy, 20 ,000 people being joyful.
So I try to focus the energy of the orchestra, the energy of the audience, to where it needs to be to begin the piece.
And then I'm thinking, of course, of the opening measures of the piece, and how we want to perform them.
But with works with bigger structures and longer journeys, I always have an eye on where we're going.
That's my job, is also to be the navigator through these bigger works.
As you're conducting with the eye to where you're going with the piece, what do you focus on while the music is actually playing?
Well, the interesting thing about describing what a conductor does is that you, at any given point, have to be prepared to do a lot of different things.
So there's the, let's say, the very simple craftsmanship of a conductor.
You need to be able to give a beat that, however you do it, makes clear to the orchestra what the rhythmic impulses are of the music.
Now, in contrast to the majority of pop music or folk music, jazz, pretty much any other world, there are lots of works in classical music and moments within works of classical music where the pulse is movable.
It's what we call rubato, so give and take within the music.
So a conductor there has to lead that sense of give and take.
And it's a very beautiful thing.
When it's functioning correctly, it's a symbiosis between me and the 80 musicians on stage.
In fact, I find one of the most beautiful things that humans do.
You have sitting in an orchestra, 80 people who are absolute experts of what they do.
They start when they're four, four or five years old playing instruments.
Then they go and study it.
They do degrees and master's degrees.
And then they go into the profession.
I mean, there are so few professions where you can say that.
Lawyers don't start studying law at four and so on and so forth.
Medics don't start studying medicine at four.
You study elements a bit like language and physics and math and things.
But musicians are very, very specifically trained.
And you have these masters of what they're doing sitting in an orchestra together.
In the best case scenario, they start to behave like a flock of birds.
When you see a flock of birds moving around, you're not quite sure who's leading at what's happening.
So there's the element of being able at any given point, let's say that symbiosis breaks and suddenly somebody's not together with someone else to know what to do, to instinctively be able to react to get people back together, just the coordination of 80 people on stage.
And I think the correct state of mind for a conductor while performing is even though I don't meditate, I have a close friend who meditated when he was growing up.
And he just used to describe it to me.
And actually, the experience of conducting is very similar.
You are in a state of very, very high focus where you're ideally not thinking about a specific element.
You are channeling.
You're allowing it to happen.
But at any given point, you could switch into, okay, the second violins need my help or this has got a little bit slow or this is a little on the quick side.
I need to readjust.
Sort of doing things that, well, let's say the flow has been broken that you can just come out of that state for a moment, solve it and then go back into it.
That's the ideal. And so at any given point, I could be thinking about a thousand different things.
I also sense the focus of an audience and that is very much part of a performance.
One of the beautiful things about live performance again is that we musicians on stage play and perform differently depending on how an audience is reacting.
What decisions does the conductor make versus the musician in the chair?
What's the relationship between the conductor, the audience, the music and the musician?
Well, in an ideal world and this happens regularly.
I mean, it is ideal, but we're actually able to do it.
It's not a question of having to make those choices.
So when things are working well, a conductor and orchestra are in this state of absolute coordination where the music is speaking the way it needs to speak so that I don't feel like I'm having to do something unnatural to accommodate one of the players and they don't feel like they're having to do something
unnatural to accommodate the flow that I've brought the music into.
But one can as a conductor, let's say you're not in that ideal state, one can view this very differently.
My personal approach in front of any given orchestra is to try and respect as far as possible within the parameters of how the work is constructed, how I analyze the work, to respect nuances that come from the players.
So you will, for example, I mentioned that we're doing a piece by Bizet tonight, some music from Carmen.
There are a lot of very beautiful solos for individual instruments, long solos, like a sung aria, but from the instrumentalists within the orchestra.
At that moment, they're playing as soloists.
They're sitting within the orchestra, but they're soloists.
Now, I believe very strongly that if you trust the musicians and you respect them, you have to also allow them the freedom to express how they feel a phrase.
Now, normally, you set as a conductor the parameters.
So let's say the tempo, the speed of the music makes a big difference.
So if I start one of the movements quicker than this soloist in the orchestra would intuitively do it, you might hear that the way he or she plays it.
You might hear that they feel a little rushed the way they're phrasing.
So if you're sensitive as a conductor, what you'll try and do is then just slow the music a little to try and create the right conditions for them while maintaining whatever reasoning you had behind doing it at the original tempo.
Sometimes that's to do with the architecture of a movement.
So we can maybe talk about the architecture of music in a moment, but put simply a phrase like a sentence or a movement like a chapter, or a work like a book or a play always has an architecture, a great piece or even just a good piece has an architecture, a point where it starts that it builds towards
and then the sort of afterglow.
Within that, all the phrases, all the little movements, chapters, they have their own inner structure.
And the work as a conductor, when you're preparing a piece, is simply trying to understand with as much clarity and lucidity as possible how a composer has done this.
And then you try and realize that.
So often, in fact, normally one will choose a tempo that one feels appropriately represents what's happening in this architecture.
But that's something, like I said, if you're working with an individual who really feels that particular phrase differently, you have to try and be, or at least I feel like I want to be accommodating.
Now there is another school where you say, no, absolutely not.
There's only one tempo in which this works and you have to fit into it.
It's a slightly more dictatorial school if you like.
And both of these schools bear wonderful results when done well, and they can also have terrible results.
I assume they were like freedom more.
Well, you say that.
That would seem to be logical.
But if you, among a group of 80 people, are expecting consensus on anything, then you're living in a different world from the world I live in.
Because in any walk of life, no matter how expert people are, if you get a group of even 10 people together, they're not going to think the same thing about the same stuff.
So, yes, there are a lot of people who love that idea of collaboration.
There are others who feel very strongly that the dictatorial element is vital.
And frankly, as a conductor, you have to have both elements up your sleeve.
It doesn't mean you have to be rude to people, although that's also an option.
There have been some very rude conductors, but you have to sometimes just draw a line with an orchestra for the sake of the group, because if decisions are constantly hanging in the air, then nothing ever gets done.
So you have to draw the line.
Let's talk more about the architecture of music and how it relates to how the audience feels it and experiences it.
Sure. Classical music is something that's always wonderful to talk about and very difficult to talk about because it is so many different things.
It encompasses 500 years of music, and the ideals and the aesthetics of medieval times are very different to the Baroque period or the Classical period or Romantic period.
And the forms and the structures that were used in music have changed a lot over the years.
But to talk about one of the forms of architecture that's most prevalent in classical music—and it's actually a big part of pop music as well—is the idea of themes recurring and then changing, developing.
Now, if we think of a pop song, what will quite often happen in, let's say, jazz or gospel or pop is you will have a tune stated that's kind of related to the home base, the home key that you started in.
Then you'll have a little journey to another related key, and then you'll normally go back to the home key.
So the architecture of that is kind of A, B, A.
Now, there's sort of psychological elements involved in that.
If one wanted, one could simply just write notes that have no relation to one another and you never come back to what you started with.
But the coherence of a piece of music, whether it's a four -minute pop song or a, you know, one -hour, 15 -minute requiem, has to do with recognizing elements again, and DNA.
You know, we all enjoy that.
Let's say we go to, or we listen to a lecture.
It's nice at the beginning of a lecture for some clear statements to be made that are recognizable.
Somebody makes a statement, X and then Y, then they start the lecture.
But then they'll refer back to X, then they'll refer back to Y, and you're like, ah, I see that point, and I see that point.
Now... So you have some sort of landscape to navigate by?
You have some landscape, yeah.
I like to think of it as the DNA of the piece, the stuff of which it's made.
Now, I'll talk a little bit more about that in detail in a second, but you and I think a lot of our listeners will know about Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
They will have heard of it.
You know, it's a famous piece, and they probably have asked themselves, well, why is it so famous?
One of the reasons is that he takes two notes and one rhythm and creates an entire symphony out of it.
So, ba -ba -ba -ba -bom, yeah, just that.
The next three notes, the next four notes are ba -ba -ba -ba -bom, so you can already see the relationship.
It's the same interval, but just down one step.
And then it goes ba -ba -ba -ba, ba -ba -ba -ba, ba -ba -ba -ba.
It's the same idea.
It's the DNA. It's like a tiny little cell, and that builds, ba -ba -ba -ba -ba -ba -ba -ba -ba, ba -ba -ba -ba -bom, ba -ba -ba -ba -bom, ba -ba -ba -ba -bom, beem, da -da -da -da.
So, in fact, you're not listening to lots of different phrases.
You're listening to one idea that's growing like in a petri dish.
It's starting to grow into some kind of entity, you know, like those sort of genetics experiments they do with computers to see what will happen to certain forms.
And he then builds the whole first movement out of that interval.
But then he takes the second movement and writes the theme, ta -da -dee -m, ti -da -da -dee -dum.
If you take ti -da -da -da -da -da, ti -la -m, all the way through that theme, this interval that you heard at the very beginning of the piece comes up, and the third movement, pa -da -di -dee, ta -da -di -la -deem.
Again, there's this little interval that the brain, even when you're not thinking, oh wow, that's the interval, you're subconscious like we do all the time in life.
We recognize shapes and forms.
Your subconscious is taking it in, and the same thing happens in the fourth movement.
So, the reason that musicians are so fascinated by this piece, and why it's such an incredibly strong compositional statement, is because in an almost unprecedented fashion, he uses a tiny amount of material to create something incredibly grand.
It's through that efficiency of use of material that we actually find, without maybe being able to articulate it, that the symphony has a lot of cohesion.
It takes us on a journey where we feel somehow that we understand intuitively relationships.
It feels very tautly argued.
That's one of the reasons, because actually everywhere, if you start to analyze the score, it's related back to this one theme.
By the way, his fourth symphony is related to the same theme as well.
This guy was mental.
I mean, he wrote one symphony based on it, and then the fourth symphony it starts...
It's also a third interval, and creates a whole symphony out of that.
So, he was incredible at his use of material.
But to get back to the architecture which you're asking about.
So, there's a thing that we call, in classical music, sonata form.
Now, sonata form is really a mechanism for implanting these ideas, like these little bits of DNA in listeners' minds, so that then a composer can use them to make a story.
And the way that sonata form works is that you have the statement of a theme.
It could be a melody, and then you have let's say, 20 measures or 30 measures of a little bit of transition, but not material that's very important.
And then you have the statement of a theme which generally contrasts or complements the first theme, so that they're clearly different.
And a listener will hear, oh, that's a nice tune.
Something like that, you know.
That's the first theme, yeah?
And then you'll have a second theme which is contrasting.
And then that whole section, so the theme, little transition, second theme, with a little bit of stuff afterwards, gets repeated.
So, we have then an opportunity to hear it one more time, and it becomes ingrained.
Then we reach the end of the repetition, and it goes into what's called the development section.
And what happens there is that the composer takes these ideas that he's ingrained in our minds, and he starts to play with them and vary them.
Sometimes he'll stick one above the other, or she'll stick one above the other, invert them, write new harmonies, break up the tune into something smaller, smaller pieces, and develop it.
Now, it could go somewhere dark, it could go somewhere bright, he could do anything with it.
And then he leads back to that original section again.
So you hear, once again, stated the original theme and then the second theme.
Now, and just to finish that thought, then he writes what's called the coda, which is just a short, you know, after glow.
It's the stuff that comes at the end of the argument about everything.
So, the architecture of a movement in sonata form, which is what pretty much all symphonies are written in and sonata is anyway for solo instruments, is tune, second tune, repeat the whole thing, ingrain it in your mind, then the development where it's played with, and changed, and altered, and then
a return to that original section.
So if you like, it's A -A -B -A, and then the little coda, which is C.
Now, if you go back to listen to early symphonies, let's say Haydn, or Mozart, or, you know, anybody from around that early classical period, as it's called.
These themes and the little transitions are very readily recognisable, you know, it's really easy to see them.
And if one's interested in kind of testing out what I just described, that would be a good place to start.
Take one of these Haydn symphonies and just listen to it, or Mozart and say, ah, okay, that theme I recognise, I don't really know what's happening now, okay, there's a tune, oh, and that's the one again, you know.
Because what then happened, is sort of a simplification of the history of music, is that that form was developed and changed.
So the periods between the first tune and the second tune got bigger.
The whole A section, where you have tune one and tune two got longer, developments got longer.
And what then happened also that the return to the original material sometimes changed, so that there wasn't a return to the same material, or when it did come back it was completely transformed.
So that's an example of architecture, what's called sonata form in music, and that's just one example of many different types of form.
But as a general rule, pretty much every work in the classical canon is in some kind of recognisable form, that will then be distorted.
And again, stop me if you're getting that.
No, this is amazing.
But again, you know, if you take, if you take portrait, you know, painting, and then you look at what someone like Picasso did, it's useful to be able to reference, if you'd never seen any painting before in your life and you saw what Picasso did, your relationship would be different to if you saw what happened
in Renaissance portrait painting as you come into then the 19th century, into the 20th century.
And you see that of course the figures, the portraits that he created have a relationship back to that, but he's changed and developed form and he's simplified certain things, he's added a different aesthetic, you know, cubism, and you can do that with music as well, as long as one has the opportunity
to sort of learn a little bit about what these early forms are, you can see how composers then changed.
The way that you're exposed to the music itself shapes how you see the music and relate to it.
Exactly. And this is what, you know, this is something that's very important to me.
Music like painting or whatever, poetry, books, of course you can just read a book and it just, you have your reaction to it, you don't, as long as you speak English or French or whatever language you're reading it in, you don't necessarily need to know anything formal about how it's constructed, or about the history,
or about the context that the writer wrote in, and the same with painting.
But pretty much every great book, great painting, great piece of music, if you scratch the surface, if you have someone, for example, I'm always happy to do it, someone who could start to talk to you about what's below the surface, then actually they become, each work becomes a universe in itself, and you
can spend an awful lot of time kind of playing around in this universe, in this sandpit, and that's why symphonies are so beautiful and so wonderful, because they are entities that have an awful lot of depth.
It's not just the sound of them, it's the arguments that go on within them.
So if you can imagine that once you take two themes, of course it's nothing tangible, you can't say what theme A means X, theme B means Y, but there will still be a discourse between those themes.
Attention almost. Exactly, attention, which actually reflects, we don't necessarily put every thought that goes through our mind into words in our mind, but we still have feelings and emotions that do have tensions, do have, you know, and that's what the world of music is ultimately about, and it's
why I think a lot of people, very understandably, sometimes can't find vocabulary when talking about music.
I think it gets to music, they're like, I kind of like it, it's cool, you know, and that's understandable, because it's so abstract.
I enjoy having the opportunity to point out that there's actually an awful lot of form in music.
It's like maths, it really is like maths, that's why a lot of mathematicians love music as well, because it's all about structures and forms and about relationships, and I had one of my closest friends, he studied maths at Oxford, and remember us having this discussion, when he sees an elegant argument
in maths, for him, it has aesthetic qualities.
He finds it beautiful, and I find the same thing when I'm studying a piece of music, I'm not playing it, I'm studying it, I find the craftsmanship and the argument that's happening on the page also very beautiful, and because I love it so much, I always want to art in your life, so not only music, but literature
and poetry, and how does that?
Well, one of the, I'm not one of those people who says, oh, you know, the modern world is blah, bad, or whatever, I think the modern world is absolutely amazing, and I think we live in a time of opportunities to learn and exist, pretty much second to none ever, it's an amazing time.
One of the things I find sad sometimes though is that we tend to speak as if the world of the arts and the world of the sciences are unrelated, or somehow, you know, one has utility, the other one is kind of, well, if you've got a bit of time off, you know, getting involved in the arts is kind of cute,
whereas my life, I mean, I live what I think is a very practical life, you know, I, like everybody else, and I just live and do, and, you know, I like efficiencies, I like learning about, science has always had, I've loved physics all my life, and, but for me, art, it involves just as much of the analytical
side that I, I know from physics and from the sciences when I studied it, as anything else, and yet, it is this, this point, and it's something very fundamental about being human, that we actually create through very controlled and very precise thought, the conditions for creating beauty, that's why,
again, if you look at paintings, it's no coincidence that often the proportions in great paintings will be very similar between them, you know, the sort of golden, golden ratio, the golden ratio, thank you very much, and for me, hand in hand, that's why I love, there's a lot of wisdom in this sort of ying
and yang circle, that you can't have arts on one hand, and everything else on the other, it is one, and you tend to see that everywhere, this sense of balance, this is what maths is, the equal sign is essentially the same thing, it's a Western version of ying and yang, it's saying, you have to have a balance,
and so for me, the role of arts is life, and sciences is life, and they belong together, when I study a score, the first thing I do is scientific, I analyze it, I try to comprehend it and understand it, in order that, when I come to performance, it's so internalized that I'm free from it again, just
like when you learn a language, people, you know, oh shit, I got to learn all this vocabulary, and I don't understand the grammar, and you have to put your head down, you have to understand it in an intellectual sense, and then forget about it.
It's not that it's not there, it's not like when you're speaking French fluently, there's no relationship to the intellect, it's just that you laid the groundwork, and then you're freed from it, and that's for me, what all art is about too, and it's why it's so worthwhile, I just, it drives me absolutely
nuts, absolutely nuts, this idea that arts in school is an optional extra, it belies a complete misunderstanding of what the arts are, because if you're doing it properly, you have to engage your intellectual mind, as well as, in fact, I don't know what the other mind is supposed to be, the intellectual
mind also takes flight, you know, that is what the mind is, it's thought, and it's engaging with ideas that may be abstract, but they're still ideas, you know, they're still part of the intellectual sphere, and quite apart from that, I think in a time where there is either complete skepticism about religion,
or it seems to me, more dogma than ever, and more fanaticism than ever, the arts offer, I think, a very healthy philosophy for talking about the transcendental, that thing that we all think about all the time, and something that religion offers an answer to, but a lot of composers, or put differently,
philosophers like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, and also ancient Greek philosophers, they were fascinated by music, and they found that it played a unique role in life, because of its abstract nature, Schopenhauer famously believed that, you know, he had these two worlds, the phenomenal world and the nominal world,
the phenomenal world being the world that we live in, that we experience, and the nominal world being the ideal or idealized world, the world of ideas, where we have, you know, forms like Plato thought of them, that we can never, as soon as we interact with it, it ceases to be, because it's now the phenomenal
world. But he felt that music was a, and of course it's a little fantastical, but he felt that music was a gateway to that, because actually we all experience when we're listening to music, we do experience, and it can be pop music, it can be jazz, it can be classical music, something which you can find
ways to articulate in words, but in fact you can't.
It is something that is outside the realms of sort of definition as we normally understand it, and through that form of, if you like, the mysticism involved in music.
You can also get in touch with quite a lot of things that are involved in religion and other forms of mysticism, and have a conversation around it, because in music that's allowed.
You can, it's non -dogmatic conversation about, okay, what is that next experience?
We, as musicians, we have to understand the intellectual, the construct, the architecture, the all of the physics around sound and how to blend sounds and do that, but then the next level up, why are certain pieces there?
What are they trying to express?
So if music is being taught right, you, as a young person, engage all parts of your brain, all parts of your brain, and the idea that that's an optional extra is tragic, it's just a terrible misunderstanding, and hopefully that'll change.
I'm an optimist. I love that answer, because it seems more and more culturally we view this as optional, or not something that's necessary to live a full and meaningful life.
And I don't know what it was yesterday, I was, there was something going around on Facebook, it was, I think it's from the States, it was a quote from probably one of the presidential hopefuls saying, a great country deserves great culture, which is a very interesting way to phrase it, because countries
are only really great if they have great culture.
It's not like it's then, you have a great country and then you add culture.
It's all part of the same, yeah.
When we look back at history, we don't, you know, count how much money different the civilizations have, because it's all relative anyway, what fascinates us is their cultural output, you know, when we think about great European countries, we think about, you know, when you think about England, of course
you can think about political stuff, you think about Shakespeare though, or you think about Goethe in Germany or Schiller, or you think about the great Chinese writers of old and Japanese as well, we don't say, well, how many millions of dollars they have in modern money and therefore they were a good
culture, or a good country.
So yeah. How would you like people to leave one of your symphonies?
What would be, what would be your, I feel satisfied if somebody came up to you after and said, that moved me, like what would you change me at?
So every concert is a different experience because we may be doing in one concert really like virtuosic, loud music, that's fast, and if we do that, I want people to come out and say, that was awesome.
It was like a roller coaster ride.
I didn't know that an orchestra could do that and blew my ears off and stuff.
If we're doing a very intimate piece, I hope that people will come and say, that really moved me.
I found that this experience came to mind or I was taken to a place that I hadn't felt.
It's like you're touching something inside them that they didn't know existed.
Exactly. But there is no one experience you will have in a concert with us, with a symphony orchestra.
It will always depend on what the music is and with Bizet, I hope that the concert we're doing tonight, I hope they'll have the sense that they're transported a little bit to Spain.
It's like taking a mini break without having to spend the money.
You can smell the sangria.
If only we had the weather.
Exactly. If only we had the weather.
For those listening, there's about two, three feet of snow outside it.
There was a huge storm yesterday.
When we did the Requiem last week, and I was happy to get this feedback from a lot of members of the audience, you wanted to be a sort of transcendental experience.
You wanted to be a moment, which frankly we have so seldom in life, of maybe reflecting on what is going to come and the relationship with life and death.
Pretty fundamental things but that in the sort of rush and hectic of everyday life, one doesn't often have a lot of repose to think about.
And also as a collective to have that experience.
To sense the people around you also in that space.
So I always hope for a reaction that relates to the music we were performing.
And I want people to be taken on journeys and have experiences that they can't readily do anywhere else.
Because I believe that's something that we offer.
What is your passion and love for music?
How did that originate?
Was that innate? You were born with it and it started so young.
Is it something you developed over time because of your love of math and music?
How did that manifest itself in you?
Well, as is often the case with musicians, not always of course, but often just like with medics and dentists, I come from musical family.
And when I was in the womb, my parents were playing concerts, two pianos.
My mum's a pianist, my dad's a pianist and conductor.
So I was bouncing around and they're listening to Rachmaninoff and Mozart and stuff, which I'm sure has an effect as you're gestating, so to speak.
And then it was all around me when I was born.
It was just your life.
But a lot of people rebelled against that too, right?
That could have happened.
And my parents, perhaps this is why I didn't have my parents, they viewed it in a very healthy fashion.
They never pushed me into music.
I wanted to learn instruments and I did.
And my mum told me piano and my grandma told me cello.
But they wanted me to go to a normal inverted comma school, so not a music specialist school, which a lot of my friends did, because the families were friends with musician families as well.
They wanted me to go to a school where I would learn all subjects in detail, that it wasn't just about becoming a musician.
They always said to me, look, you won't be able to make it as a musician unless you wake up in the morning with this burning desire to practice.
Do you think that broad -based education made you a better conductor or musician?
Versus the more specialized.
Sure. I mean, I wouldn't want to...
I think, for my personal roots, I wouldn't want to say anything against anyone who went to specialized because there are so many great musicians who went to specialist schools.
For me personally, looking back, I think it was absolutely the right choice because when you...
I love when I learn a symphony or I learn a new work, going through the doors that it opens to literature and to history and to philosophy and stuff, that really interests me.
And I think maybe I was given at school more tools to be able to access that.
So for me, the broader -based education was definitely a positive.
How does that path shape how you pick people to play in the orchestra?
Well, I mean, firstly, it's not the case that I hand pick everybody who plays in the orchestra.
We have an audition process and that's fairly democratic.
I have a veto right, but it's a democratic process and we all as a collective are looking for certain skills and certain things.
First and foremost, people need to be able to play their instrument very well.
I would assume that technical proficiency is almost a given in this.
Yeah, although there are different levels and everybody's at a high level who comes.
They're fantastic instrumentalists and then it's, as with any profession, it's that final...
The new ones. ... 0 .5 % of the nuance.
But then what happens in orchestra is there's the so -called probation period.
I mean, firstly, in an audition, they will play solo repertory.
They'll play a concerto and a sonata.
Then they'll play excerpts from the orchestral repertoire, famously difficult excerpts where we can hear certain things.
But then in the probation period, firstly, there's the opportunity to experience what they're like actually in the orchestra, how they gel with the rest of their group physically in terms of sound and timing.
But then there's also the opportunity for the colleagues in the orchestra to get to know them.
It's a big family. If you imagine going to an office, but instead of sitting at your desk, every time you type a letter, someone else has to type it exactly the same time with you.
And that through your movement, you have to be able to coordinate in real time all day with the people around you.
That any time you make a mistake, it immediately has effect on everybody else.
Any time you're inspirational, it immediately has an effect on everybody else.
That closeness is what happens in an orchestra every day for the 40 years that people sit in an orchestra.
So it's a unique job.
And the reliance on one another is also unique.
So that probationary period is very important also to get a sense of will this work longer term.
It's not just about being a great player.
It's about having the right mindset to function within that very special set of conditions.
And one hopes always that we find people who will make the sum greater than the parts as well.
It's almost I would imagine, it's almost like a transplant, right?
People come in and it either takes or it's almost immediately rejected.
That's a nice analogy.
What was it like taking over an orchestra that you had no part in?
You recently took over this one.
What was that like coming into that?
Walking into something that has already been created and shaped largely without you.
And then having to assume a leadership position in that.
Well, one of the nice things about the way the process works, appointed me as music director is that I had the opportunity really quite a long time ago, I think it's six, seven, eight years, maybe now seven years to first meet the orchestra.
I came as a guest conductor and we got on well, there was nice chemistry.
So I came back and then came back again and I did an opera here and I did lots of concerts.
So we built a relationship.
What sometimes happens with conductors is that it's like those sort of dating sites or you know, you have a dinner and you fall in love or you kind of say, right, that's not the right person.
Now that means sometimes music directors are appointed having only visited an orchestra once and then come back very briefly and that can work out beautifully.
It's like that love at first sight thing.
But you can also say after a couple of extra further visits, like, oh, what have I done?
Here we had a different route and I knew the orchestra very well.
They knew me very well.
I don't think there was a sense of, okay, this could not work or this.
I think we both felt confident about what we were getting into.
So I knew the players well.
I knew the institution well.
And so I felt very comfortable about what I was getting into.
My predecessor, Pinker Succoman did an astonishing job of building this orchestra, appointed such great players over the course of his tenure.
And I mean, it's been said before one of the jobs of a conductor is, you know, it's like being presented with a beautiful garden.
You need to make sure that what you're given remains beautifully trimmed and everything's very healthy as well as then developing new areas.
And in that context, I mean, repertory.
So, you know, extending the repertoire of the orchestra, trying out, you know, to extend this metaphor, you know, taking a new patch of land and then growing a new bit of garden there while maintaining what was left behind.
It's almost like a painting, I would imagine, that's like half done at every stage and you're taking it over and you're changing it a bit, but you need to kind of continue.
Exactly. And I think Pinker Succoman is one of the great living musicians.
He gave so much integrity to this orchestra, so much integrity and the sound of the orchestra.
And I'm very aware that that's, you know, I've been passed on a little treasure there.
And in all our rehearses, I'm very aware of taking care that we maintain that because that's part of the heritage of the orchestra as well.
It's a beautiful thing to be able to continue a heritage.
And then to, as you say, add and develop.
So, how much say, or is this dependent on the particular orchestra, but how much say does the orchestra have and who the conductor is?
Well, the orchestra was, a committee from the orchestra was very much involved in the choice of who's the next music director, as in me.
And what happens is when you have guest conduct, this happens all over the world, when guest conductors come for a week, the orchestra gets forms to fill out, where they comment on rehearsal technique, conducting technique, whether they felt the person was inspiring or not.
And so, they hand those forms in and then the administration goes through the feedback and then they make decisions as to whether to invite the person again.
It's an amazing system.
If you imagine at the end of every week, an office manager would have all his employees give feedback forms.
That's quite intense, but that's how it works with conductors.
It's a very interesting position to be in because on the one hand, you need to lead the group and sometimes that involves saying things that they may not want to hear.
On the other hand, as a guest conductor, you know that they're going to fill out forms at the end of the week saying, I hate this guy or I love this guy.
But you can't, I mean, I just never think about it.
You can't think about it.
Otherwise, you can't function.
I just do the job as I feel it has to be done and people like it, they like it.
And so, what sort of feedback do you get now with the musicians?
I don't imagine there's forums weekly, but what are the interactions?
Like, are you trying to...
Well, we're a big team and dialogue is very important to me.
And I think the musicians here know that they can come and talk to me at any point about anything.
And one of the many things I love about this orchestra here in Ottawa is that they're very accomplished musicians and they're very serious, in the best sense, people.
They know what we're doing.
They have a huge skillset and they hear when things don't work in rehearsal.
They have ideas of how to correct it, and we all do.
And I find we were able to talk like grownups with one another, that didn't work.
How do we fix it? Let's do this and this.
They're very well prepared.
I'm always very well prepared.
That's all we can expect of one another that we know our material.
And I try and keep the dialogue open.
So I talk a lot with the concert master, Yosuke, here.
We talk about how things are going, this and this.
And as long as you keep that dialogue open, nothing too grave can ever happen because you see things coming.
And so that's how it works now.
It's a sort of conversational basis between rehearsals before and after.
What's your favorite part of conducting an orchestra outside of the actual performance?
Well, that's a very good question.
I think in terms of my interaction with an orchestra, I mean, I love the stuff that I do on my own, the studying of scores, that I find very, very rewarding.
I do find it in my roles as music director and chief conductor, like I have here or in Germany, I find it incredibly rewarding being part of the development of an institution.
So having a longer term ambition for an institution and then trying to do whatever you can to make that happen, to have the sense that you are a sort of guardian of an institution for a while and that it's your responsibility to keep it healthy and to develop it.
That's lovely. That strikes me that musicians would feel the same way.
They're individually talented, but they want to be or feel a part of something greater than themselves.
That's absolutely right.
And the thing is, well, it definitely is and I find, I mean, I love guest conducting.
It's fun to go to places and meet an orchestra for a week.
You never need a bag boy, let me know.
Exactly. But the most fruitful part for me is those long -term relationships, where you can really see that you've done something for an institution, for an entity.
And I love the responsibility of that as well.
One of the things I love in this job is not only the responsibility to the orchestra, but the fact that we're a national art center is this discussion around, okay, how can we fulfill that?
What is our role in society and how can we be vocal about what's great about music and bring it to as many people as possible?
That's a lovely job to have.
What would you say is the role of the orchestra in society?
Well, I think that this particular orchestra has, in fact, sort of four different levels on which we work.
We work for the city, so put simply, we need to be a great orchestra that people can come and listen to in the city and hear interesting pieces performed very well.
And I want us to create a narrative around our program so that people who maybe don't feel like they know anything about classical music, they can come to a concert and they know what is the narrative behind this program.
So I like to do the pre -concert talks, I like us to write sort of interesting texts about it.
Then we have the regional level, so, you know, looking beyond the bounds of Ottawa and to, you know, Gatineau and into Quebec and Ontario to think about how we can be in contact with as many close communities as possible.
Then we have the national remit, which is to of course be touring the country, taking projects, new creation projects, because we commission an awful lot of work to communities that don't maybe have symphony orchestras all the time.
And then we have our international role as a representative of the nation.
And each of those roles has different nuances, but each of them is very important.
But I feel also this is one of the reasons that new creation and commissioning Canadian composers and artists to work with us is very important, is that I've always felt we have in the UK, the BBC, you know, it's a nationally funded entity and we have several other orchestras that work for the BBC that are centrally
funded. And I think if you have a national arts centre and you have an orchestra, a national arts centre orchestra that receives funding from the central government that, yes, of course, we need to offer programs that fill our hall, but we also need to be able to take some of the risks that other institutions
can't, that don't receive the same funding.
So we need to be out there saying, we're a mouthpiece for Canadian creation, you know, offering a forum, a place where composers can come and they feel like they can work in partnership with us.
They can make mistakes if they need to make mistakes or they can simply present works that they've completed.
We workshop stuff here.
We put together a lot of artists, so it's interdisciplinary.
And that stuff, I feel, it needs to be along with presenting the core repertory brilliantly.
That also has to be at our core.
I noticed when I walked in, there was records on the floor.
Is that how you typically listen to music?
Actually, no, these records were here before we redid the office.
And they're just there because I like them.
But I listen to pretty much everything on my iPhone.
So I carry around because I'm travelling every week, I'm in a different place every week.
I just have iTunes, it's got thousands and thousands of tracks on my iTunes.
But everything, because I like to listen to everything.
I play jazz piano myself and I love pop music, I love jazz, I love trance and techno, I love, you know, Baroque music.
I love everything. That's good.
And I'm the judge of what I think is good.
Everybody's the judge of what they think.
Exactly. But no, I listen to music on my phone.
That's why I listen to it.
I don't even at home have a decent, you know, speaker system, because I basically just, you know, I'm A, never there.
And secondly, I listen on headphones.
Do you notice a difference in how you feel about the music if the exact same music was played, say on an iPhone versus a speaker system versus kind of...
Well, I do. I mean, look, I'm very lucky.
I get to stand in front of the best speaker system in the world every day, you know, 80 of the most beautiful instruments ever created, played by the best musicians in the world.
I mean, the sound where a conductor stands is pretty amazing.
So it's not like I have some friends, they have, you know, really amazing speaker system set up in their house and I go and listen to them.
And it's not like I don't care.
I think it's very cool, but I always want to say to them, hey, you should come stand where I stand for my job, you know.
So I have no problem listening on headphones.
I mean, I have a nice pair of, you know, like noise canceling headphones and they, you know, which are, by the way, great on planes if you're trying to sleep.
Speaking of standing at the front, do musicians in the orchestra ever stand at the front so they can hear what you hear?
Um, well, actually, I have to say that the spot that's better for listening to an orchestra is about 40 feet behind me, because they're the sound blends differently.
You have maybe not quite the level of impact that I get where I am, but the blended sound is better out there.
And musicians do go out there.
I mean, not enough because they have to play, you know, very useful.
I try and go out as much as possible into the hall, into the auditorium, about 30, 40 feet back to hear how the sounds blending.
But they do, wherever they can, take the opportunity to go out, and it's a very useful experience, because remember, when you're sitting in an orchestra, what you're hearing is sometimes completely weird.
So, you know, the oboist hears most loudly, the man or woman sitting next to him, and then the person does right, so another obo, another flute, the bassoons coming from behind him and the clarinet.
So there may be things that I'm hearing, or the audience is hearing, that they seem to be in complete sync with, that they can't necessarily hear themselves.
It's an amazing skill set to be an orchestral musician.
Must involve a lot of trust as well.
A huge amount of trust.
Super conscious of your time.
I know you're going to get running.
One final question.
When you go home at the end of a long day, what do you play on your iPhone?
I actually tend to, because I basically, whenever I'm not rehearsing, I'm studying, or I'm quickly eating something, and then I'm studying, and so I quite often will be listening to what I'm preparing for coming weeks.
But then, you know, I'll have suddenly 24 hours where it's not so stressful.
And then I, it could be anything.
I mean, depending on my mood, if it's a nice sunny day, I'll quite often put a bit of contemporary pop -ons and dance music and just kind of chill.
I love listening to Bill Evans, the jazz pianist.
I love his music if I'm sometimes reminisceless, back to old performances of my own, just to sort of hear them with fresh ears, you know, when it's been six months or a year since you did a performance.
It's quite nice to listen back and see what you like, what you don't like, what works.
But I do relish an eclectic mix of music, and it's what I love about music.
You know, we can, it's like a scent.
It's just the right thing for the right moment, you know, and I'm really non -dogmatic about it.
Thank you so much for your time.
This was an amazing conversation.
Well, did too. Thank you for having me.
Hey guys, this is Shane again.
Just a few more things before we wrap up.
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