Maestro JoAnn Falletta Transcript (029)
MICHAEL J. PRATT: Hello, my name is Michael Pratt, and I am right now in my 43rd year as Conductor of the Princeton University Orchestra. You are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. Pete was a member of the violin section of the Princeton Orchestra from 1993 to 1997, and he accompanied us on two of our early European tours, to England in 1994 and to Central Europe in 1996. I was a student with JoAnn Falletta years ago at the Aspen Music Festival and it was apparent even then that she was a rising star. I can’t wait to hear what she and Pete are going to discuss today. So welcome, and enjoy the show!
PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra Music Director JoAnn Falletta.
JOANN FALLETTA: As the conductor, your job really is to create a landscape where the musicians can excel. That’s the job: always offering different possibilities, different ideas, coaching in a way, encouraging the musicians to stretch themselves, or to go for it, or take chances, be free.
[VO]: We talk about why everyone should make music …
FALLETTA: Playing an instrument changes people. It helps the brain develop. It helps you learn self-confidence, it helps you learn what’s important, what beauty is about, why things that are great take time. A person who is playing in a band or an orchestra learns very quickly that you’re a team player, and that’s important. And it’s important to listen, it’s important to be patient, it’s important to work at things.
[VO]: Why conducting means learning all the time …
FALLETTA: As a conductor, you’re on this path always of learning. You’re always learning and you’re always getting closer to what it’s about. So that sort of unending road, I think, is a beautiful way to live your life. I love that idea that I will keep studying and learning things and being surprised by things—seeing them for the first time, even though I’ve conducted it many times. That’s the process of a conductor. You start learning and you just continue to learn.
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[02:50]
[VO]: I don’t think it’s going too far to say that, as a rule, and across the board, folks here in Sunny Buffalo are fans of chicken wings, the Bills, the Sabres, and JoAnn Falletta. If you look at the timeline of Buffalo that greets travelers at our airport, you’ll see Falletta’s inauguration as conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in 1999 just a few ticks after the invention of the Buffalo wing at Frank and Teressa’s Anchor Bar in 1964. It’s not just that Buffalonians are proud to have appointed the first woman to conduct a major American orchestra. JoAnn Falletta is a Grammy Award -winning artist who has been compared to some of the greatest conductors of the 20th century—legends like Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski, and (one of her former teachers at Juilliard) Leonard Bernstein. Maestro Falletta is Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, and also the Connie and Marc Jacobson Music Director Laureate of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and Principal Guest Conductor of the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina and Artistic Adviser to the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra. She has guest-conducted all over North America and around the world, including many of the most prominent orchestras in Europe, Asia, and South America. With a discography of nearly 120 titles, Falletta is a leading recording artist for Naxos. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has served by presidential appointment as a member of the National Council on the Arts during the Bush 43 and Obama Administrations, and has received many prestigious conducting awards. She has introduced over 500 works by American composers, including well over 100 world premieres. In 2019, Performance Today named her Classical Woman of the Year, calling her a “tireless champion” and lauding her “unique combination of artistic authority and compassion, compelling musicianship and humanity.” She is a fierce advocate for young conductors, and for the power of music for all people. Finally, I’ll add as a radio junkie who has mainlined National Public Radio since I was in sixth grade that Robert Siegel, host of NPR’s All Things Considered for 30 years, ranked his 2013 interview with JoAnn Falletta as one of his top 10 favorite music interviews of all time. So I was pretty pumped to get the chance to talk with JoAnn earlier this month! We spoke on October 1st at the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s administrative home in Clement House, a stunning 106-year-old Tudor Revival mansion on Delaware Avenue near downtown Buffalo. The music room where we sat was designed especially for the original owner, Carolyn Jewett Tripp Clement, who played harp, piano, and organ. Check out the video companion to this episode for a look at this beautiful space. Details about all the wonderful music I get to include will be available on the show page for this episode, but for now, everything until the last few minutes is presented courtesy of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and JoAnn Falletta, Music Director.
[06:23]
HORN: JoAnn, thanks so much for joining me today. As somebody who first attended a Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra concert when I was 4, and who first saw you on the podium at about age 17, in 1992, in Denver where my father was living at the time, because he thought it was important for his violinist son to see a first-rate conductor who was a woman—you were conducting what was then known as the Denver Chamber Orchestra—it’s a real thrill and an honor to speak with you.
FALLETTA: Well, thank you, Peter. It’s great to speak with you. And you just gave me a wonderful memory, because the Denver Chamber Orchestra was actually my very first job. I was still in school at Juilliard going back and forth between school and Denver. I fell in love with Denver and I loved that orchestra, but that was my very first position as music director. And I have so many good memories of that. So I’m glad you were part of that.
HORN: Me too. Because we’re talking here in the fall 2020, I wanted to start by asking about another trailblazer who has fans around the world, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died two weeks ago. She was famously passionate about opera. She said in one of the documentaries about her, “Most of the time, even when I go to sleep, I’m thinking about legal problems. But when I go to the opera, I’m just lost in it.” The love of opera that she shared with Justice Antonin Scalia was one of the commonalities that helped the two forge a strong friendship despite their often diametrically opposed views on the law. Do you have thoughts that you’d like to share about Justice Ginsburg specifically, or about the power of music as refuge, or about music as a force that brings people together?
FALLETTA: Well, let me start with the Justice first, because I had the great privilege of being with her twice in my life, and I will never forget that. One was at Chautauqua—
[VO]: The Chautauqua Institution is a nonprofit education center and summer resort located in the westernmost corner of New York State, about an hour and a half southwest of Buffalo.
FALLETTA: —where she had been there to speak, and there was a little reception to meet her. I was told very strictly by the host that I was to spend 30 seconds only because there was an enormous line, as you can imagine—it was enormous, to say hello to the Justice. And so: just introduce myself to her and say a few words and leave. So I did. I tried! I said a few words, and when I told her I was the conductor of the BPO, that was the end. All she wanted to talk about was music! And she was talking about how she was brought up listening to music and how much it meant to her and about the opera … but of course I was violating my 30-second time there and I could see the hostess really, you know, just furious at me behind the Justice, but she didn’t want to stop talking about music. She loved music. And I saw her then when she came to Buffalo and spoke at UB Law School. And I was actually backstage with her when our string quartet was playing a Mozart quartet. And I was watching her as she was listening offstage. The two of us were offstage. And you could see that she went almost into another place when she was listening to music. It was as if she drew in and just focused on what she was hearing. It was very moving to see that. So for her, music—I wouldn’t say it was a respite. I mean, it excited her, but it was a world where she could exist maybe on another level. And I’m not surprised, because you know, she was so brilliant—I mean just talking to her, I don’t think she forgot anything about the law or about a case that she was involved in her entire life. She knew every detail. And I think part of that comes from music, and loving music. There’s a tie-in between someone like her and the attention to detail that she had, and her absolute passion for music.
[10:54]
HORN: Because this is a show about what and how and why we learn, I want to focus on different dimensions of learning music and learning about music. You have spoken about your belief in the importance for young people to learn music not just for the purpose of becoming musicians, but for their development as full human beings. Would you say some more about that?
FALLETTA: I believe so strongly in this, Peter, and I’m happy to talk more about it. I mean, one of the things I tell parents and grandparents is I really believe the greatest gift you can give your child is an experience with a musical instrument, playing a musical instrument. And that’s not because I want to create more and more and more musicians! But playing an instrument changes people. It helps the brain develop, and you don’t even realize your brain is working when you’re learning music because it’s so joyful. It helps you learn self-confidence, it helps you learn what’s important, what beauty is about, why things that are great take time. A person who is playing in a band or an orchestra learns very quickly that you’re a team player, and that’s important. And it’s important to listen, it’s important to be patient, it’s important to work at things. And then the end result is so amazingly beautiful for them. So I think it changes people. Most of all, it gives people a sense of the world in a different way, an interest in other people, an interest in other music, because with music there’s never one way of doing it. There’s never one way of singing. There’s never one way of playing. So young people learn that there are many voices in the world and they’re all beautiful, and that kind of interest in humanity and just sharing with other people and acceptance of other people, embracing other people comes from an experience in the arts—especially music.
[13:11]
HORN: Some of my favorite experiences as a human being happened as a member of an orchestra, early on with the Greater Buffalo Youth Orchestra here in town and continuing through college and beyond for a few years, so it’s possible that I have a little bit clearer understanding than people who have never played in an orchestra about what the work of conducting actually entails—it’s possible that I do!—because I do think for lots of folks it’s a little bit of a black box, like, What exactly is she doing up there? So to put a finer point on that, what is the difference for you in terms of your own work in preparing to conduct a world premiere, like Ken Fuchs’ Spiritualist (for which you won a 2019 Grammy, incidentally). It’s a new work that nobody’s ever heard before, right? How do you imagine that? What is your process as opposed to getting ready to conduct Beethoven’s Ninth, which almost everybody has heard before—and you’ve got to have classic recordings or performances that have made an impression on you. How do you approach that in terms of your preparation?
FALLETTA: It’s a very interesting question. You know, it’s in some ways very much alike. I mean, as the conductor, your job really is to create a landscape where the musicians can excel. Sometimes people tend to think of the conductor as the boss on the top of the triangle, but it’s not like that. The conductor is someone who’s always offering different possibilities, different ideas, coaching in a way, encouraging the musicians to think out of the box, or to stretch themselves, or to go for it, or take chances, be free. And that’s true whether you’re playing a Beethoven symphony that they’ve played already maybe several hundred times, or a new piece by Ken Fuchs. It’s all about going back to the score and seeing what the composer is telling us with those notes on the page. But when we have the opportunity, as we do with a new piece of music, of having the composer with us, that is something very special because all of a sudden, we become part of that compositional process. I usually ask the composer to stay with me on the stage and talk to us, you know, about things that he’s not sure of, or things he’d like to try again, or things he’d like to change: a different tempo or a different dynamic level. That’s really very interesting because we are living in the moment in that piece. It’s almost as if it’s coming to life and we’re part of that. But in a way we have to do that even with Beethoven and Mozart, we have to find our voice in that music. I mean, we know what the composer has written, and we’re very true to that, but there’s a lot of space for individual interpretation, in every single musician’s part and in the conductor’s overview of a piece.
HORN: So for example, you receive the score that—since we’ve mentioned this piece Spiritualist [by Kenneth Fuchs]—it’s a single piece, or is it a collection?
FALLETTA: It was a collection on the disc.
HORN: Is there any kind of like MIDI version of that that’s sent along with it? Are you looking at it? Are you just looking at the score and beginning to hear it? Do you go to the piano and play?
FALLETTA: Well usually for me, I like to try and hear it in silence, because that means I can actually screen out everything else, and hear in my head how the piece is put together. Usually composers send you a MIDI, but I have to confess, I don’t like to listen to it because—
HORN: It’s terrible!
FALLETTA: You’re absolutely right. It doesn’t have any color in it, you know? So you’re sort of listening to something electronic that doesn’t have color.
[VO]: Aight, so MIDI is short for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, which is basically a way for different electronic instruments and computers to talk to each other. What you’re hearing is an example sent to me last fall by playwright and composer Tom Dudzick for a show we were working on called Christmas Over the Tavern. This was the only recording he had because he was reworking this number from a solo to a duet. It’s almost impossible to tell from this MIDI recording that the song would eventually be quite beautiful!
FALLETTA: I mean, [MIDI has] gotten better as we’ve gotten more sophisticated about doing it, but to me, imagining the sound is the best way. But even the composer will tell you, as much as he’s imagined the sound and as much as he’s probably played it on the piano and heard it on the MIDI, when the orchestra plays, it’s like it’s technicolor all of a sudden. All of a sudden, it’s a different thing. It’s a different language. He recognizes that it’s his piece, but it comes alive.
[18:21]
HORN: In addition to the decades-long relationships you’ve established with orchestras in Buffalo and Virginia—not to mention the four years you were also Principal Conductor of the Ulster Orchestra in Northern Ireland—you’ve also guest-conducted dozens of orchestras all over the world, from throughout the U.S. and all over Europe as well as South America, Africa, and Asia—pretty much wherever there’s an orchestra. I’m interested in how you go in for a relatively short stint, like a week, and establish rapport with these people who don’t know you and you don’t know them. Of course, top-tier instrumental soloists, they also tour all over the world—a concert violinist or pianist, right—playing concerti and making music with strangers. But as a conductor, you’re there to lead this group, so it’s almost like the CEO of Apple going in and taking over Microsoft for a week. If you’re only with a group of musicians for this short time, what have you learned about how to establish that rapport that enables you to be able to communicate with a new group of people—even leaving aside for a moment whether you happen you speak the same language when you’re talking about the music?
FALLETTA: It’s a very intense and wonderful experience. And I’m lucky in that when I go and guest-conduct, I usually spend a week with the orchestra. So it’s more time with them than a guest pianist might have, or a guest artist who comes in just for a day or two and plays. So I’m working with them. And I can be in a place where I know really no one, especially when I go to Europe to an orchestra, I might not know anyone in the orchestra. But it is truly true that music is an international language. And the idea is that we all know the music, but we don’t know each other. And how that happens, I think, for me, it’s in an environment of great openness. When I step on the podium for the first time, I am interested in them. And I think if they know that, they’re anxious to tell me who they are. Now, they don’t say that in words, but they’re anxious to— I might say to them, “I’ve heard so many wonderful things from my colleagues about this orchestra. I’ve really been looking forward to working with you.” Then they want to show you how wonderful they are—and they are! And your reason for being there, of course, it’s always the music and them. So if you’re involved in listening to them, if it’s really a team, it can be an incredible experience. I mean, I suppose there are conductors—maybe very famous ones who go to an orchestra with an aura of such grandeur that there can’t really be a connection because they’re on a platform of greatness. But if you go as a colleague, and as someone who believes in this music and loves this music and wants to make music with them, and appreciates what they’re doing, and leaves room for them to do it their way— Sometimes people ask me about conductors and what they do. Just as you said, a lot of people don’t know what a conductor does. Does the orchestra really need you? Are they looking at you? And I try and tell them that they might think about a director of a play. Let’s say the director’s directing Hamlet and he has all of his very wonderful actors there. And each one of those actors has a very strong idea of their role. You know, that Hamlet may be committed to an angrier approach to his dilemma, or another one may be to a more private and confused approach. The director who has an overall idea of the piece wants all of that to shine through. He wants the talent, or she wants the talents of those individual players to be there, to be front and center. So it means that the conductor has to have flexibility. And I think when I go to an orchestra I don’t know, I think that I want them to tell me something about themselves, and about how they play this piece. One of the prime examples is when I go to Europe a lot, they ask me to bring a piece by an American composer. Very often, they want to hear Gershwin, or Copland. They want to play that. They don’t play it that often, and it’s really fun for them. And they play it in a different way than we do in the United States, since we kind of toss that music off, because we know the vernacular, you know, it’s just the way we talk. That’s how we play this music. For them, they approach it like they might approach a Brahms symphony. And it’s very different—
HORN: So maybe a little stricter time?
FALLETTA: Stricter …
HORN: Or something like that. As opposed to swinging something?
FALLETTA: The swinging is very difficult because it’s something that you have to not think about, and Americans do it without thinking about it. [The European players] think about it, they want to do it. So it comes across, in a way, as more thinking going on than actually just living the music. But it’s very beautiful, because what they’re conveying to me is a respect and a kind of very special feeling they have for this music that they rarely appreciate. And I like to let that bloom. If the cellos really want to play a section like a Mahler symphony, and it’s Gershwin and maybe that’s not how Gershwin would have heard it in that way, it’s okay, because they’re translating that music into their vernacular. And I think that’s what’s beautiful sometimes about accepting gifts from the orchestra and giving them gifts back, and giving them ideas. Sometimes I will say, you know, “Generally we move it here a little bit.” Okay. And then they’ll try it. So it’s really a conversation that we’re always having—not always in words. I mean, sometimes we do speak to each other in words, in a rehearsal of course. But very often it’s just the way I’m leading them and they’re responding. It’s a very intense conversation.
[24:44]
HORN: This past February, the Irish composer and conductor Eímear Noone became the first woman to conduct the orchestra at the Oscars, an awards show that has been going on since 1929. So this was the 92nd Oscars, first female conductor. My ears perked up when I heard Michel Martin interviewing her on All Things Considered, partially because of the subject area, and partially because Michel Martin is one of my favorite interviewers. Martin cited the study by Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy finding that in 2019—just last year—in the 21 top orchestras in the U.S., only 16 out of 142 conductors were women. You, of course, were one of those 16, becoming the first woman, in fact, to lead a major symphony orchestra in the U.S. with your appointment here in Buffalo in 1999. When Noone was asked about this disparity, she said she gets asked the question all the time—and having watched just this morning your interview on CBS Sunday Morning from the early ‘90s, I know you’ve been fielding this question for at least three decades, so I’m trying not to ask it in particularly this way! So I wanted to share two other things that she said that stuck with me. One was that she felt when she was studying that she didn’t get the same encouragement as her male peers. I know that you had to campaign for about a year to be able to—
FALLETTA: —to be accepted into the program at Mannes [School of Music].
HORN: To pursue conducting, so that’s got to resonate. But then the other thing that I had never thought about that’s particular to conducting—she said there’s only so much preparation and practice you can do without an orchestra. Part of learning to conduct entails failing very publicly. So you hope you do it in a rehearsal and not at the concert, but even in a rehearsal, you’re doing it, failing, with 80 to 110 people, whatever—it’s a large group of people who are there! As a learning process it’s really much more public than just about anything I can think of.
FALLETTA: You hit on one of the oddest learning processes there are, and that is conducting. Because one, you really don’t start conducting when you’re in grammar school or high school. I mean, you don’t do that. So the first time you’re actually in front of an orchestra, if you’re lucky, you’re in college, as I was. I mean, I was maybe 19 years old or something, but I’d never conducted before. My first impression when I lifted the baton and gave the downbeat and the orchestra played was one of amazement. I didn’t even know if they would play! I mean, I never experienced that.
HORN: This thing [the baton] works!
FALLETTA: Yes, that’s it! I never experienced going like this [gestures a downbeat] and having the beautiful sound of Scheherazade all around me. I mean, it was Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. But you’re right. It’s exactly that: you’re doing it for the first time, but all of these players in this orchestra, even though they’re young people too, in school, they’ve been playing since they were four or five years old. They are experts. Already at the age of 18 and 19, they are experts. And you are the only person who is doing it for the first time. But you have to learn that way. I mean, you go into the experience having studied and studied and studied and studied by yourself. And then, of course, you go in and it’s completely different than you thought. The first time I conducted, in this one time I’m telling you about, I was just so amazed at how beautifully the orchestra was playing that I was listening to them, and I was getting slower and slower and slower. Finally, they stopped playing and they just looked at me and my teacher was so angry. I remember he said, “You’re supposed to be leading them! You’re not supposed to be listening!” So, how do you learn that? You learn it by making a lot of mistakes. And hopefully there are positions like assistant conductors and associate conductors, and we have an apprentice conductorship that we’ve developed here in Buffalo, where we invite young conductors who are in graduate school to come and spend many weeks with us and to actually work with the orchestra, and to see from it the inside. How does an orchestra think? How do they work? What is successful? What are the difficulties that come up? And the fact that they’ve spent so many weeks with us prepares them, I hope, for the time that they are having their own first performance with their orchestra. But you learn while you’re doing in a way, I think this is wonderful. And I hope you agree with me, because as a conductor, you’re on this path, always, of learning. You never really get to the end where you say, “Well, now I know Dvořák Ninth. I don’t have to worry about it anymore!” No, you’re always learning. And you’re always getting closer to what it’s about. Listening to the musicians you learn different ideas, just through listening. You get closer to what the score is. You know, a conductor once told me that we never really know the score. We just get a little closer to what it means every time we study it. That sort of unending road, I think, is a beautiful way to live your life. I love that idea that I will keep studying and learning things and being surprised by things—seeing them for the first time, even though I’ve conducted it many times. That’s the process of the conductor. You start learning and you just continue to learn.
HORN: Are there scores that you try that you try to do by heart, as opposed to—I mean, I imagine if it’s a brand new piece … you know, well, I actually don’t know the answer to that. I’m going to stop talking!
FALLETTA: There are certain things that I don’t do ever by memory—a concerto, for instance.
The soloist needs to feel that if anything goes wrong, we know where we are and I can help the orchestra get back on track by calling out a number or something like this. (That rarely happens. I’ve never done that.) But with symphonies that I know well, I do like to conduct by memory because it means that I can actually have more visual contact with the players. They’re always having visual contact with me, but I can have visual contact with them. That’s more continuous. And I feel that we get a more vibrant product because we’re connected more closely to each other. So I enjoy doing that. I can’t do it with every piece, but I do enjoy doing that. And there’s always a connection in any case.
[31:59]
HORN: To return to the difficulty that you had in terms of advocating for yourself to be taken seriously as a conductor in school, to be able to enter the program as a woman. With Noone’s comments here, in terms of education or training or access—you just mentioned the apprenticeship program—what needs to change in order to continue to have more women, more people of color on the podium, so it’s not just this field that’s been dominated by White, mostly European, men for so long?
FALLETTA: Well, the most important thing, I think, is to help those people earlier in their career path, not when they’re in their 20s already and trying to find a job in an orchestra, or trying to become a conductor of a symphony. They need guidance. They need help when they’re younger, even in middle school, high school … when they’re just forming their ideas about music and forming their ideas about conducting—that’s when they need mentorship programs. And I’m seeing more of them start—for men and women now. But I don’t think there are enough. That’s why we founded this program in Buffalo. So essentially people can come up, not knowing everything, not knowing how to conduct this piece, not knowing why this tempo is the right one, but learning in a safe environment. As you mentioned, when you’re performing, it’s public, and yet there you are learning. So we try to bring people into the situation earlier where they can watch, they can try with an orchestra that knows the situation and knows that we are part of the learning process for them, and we’re helping them. We’re going to do next summer, for instance, a week-long conducting workshop for women only, to give them time to see about themselves, how they feel comfortable in front of a conductor and what to expect from the orchestra.
HORN: Will that be the BPO?
FALLETTA: The BPO is going to do that this summer.
HORN: Wow!
FALLETTA: So it’s exciting for us to do that. And one of the wonderful things that young conductors tell me when they leave our program—they’re usually finished with school and auditioning for jobs—they say, “Since we spent so much time with the BPO and getting to know everyone and inside life at the BPO onstage with you every day, we will never be afraid of an orchestra again!” That’s saying a lot, because young conductors are rightly afraid! They’re just afraid to do this for the first time. And these people have that experience that at least let them live inside an orchestra for a while and realize, “Okay, I could be comfortable here. You know, I think I could fit in. I think I could learn and be able to do a job at the beginning that will help me develop.” So that’s what we need to do.
[VO]: Danish composer Carl Nielsen himself titled his fourth symphony “The Inextinguishable” to, in his words, “indicate … what only Music itself is able to express fully: the elementary will of life.” So I’m going to go ahead and let this lil’ bit allegretto movement roll on beneath a brief word from Lyceum, the education podcast consortium of which Point of Learning is proud to be a member. Right after that, back with the finale of my conversation with Maestro Falletta.
ZACHARY DAVIS: Hi, I’m Zachary Davis. I’m the host of two podcasts: Ministry of Ideas, which explores the philosophy behind everyday concepts, and Writ Large, a new podcast about the books that changed the world. I love educational podcasts. I love listening to them and talking about them. I want everyone to have that chance. And so I’ve built a new platform called Lyceum, which makes it easy to discover great educational podcasts and have conversations about them. There are more than a million podcasts out there. We’ve done the hard work of sifting through them and finding only the very best education shows to listen to, shows like the one you’re listening to right now. So if you love learning, download Lyceum today on the App Store or Google Play, or visit us at lyceum.fm.
[36:51]
HORN: I don’t have the stats on this, but I believe most conductors come to the podium with primary expertise in piano or violin, or both. You come as a guitarist. Guitar, of course, enjoys a beautiful tradition in classical music, as it does in most kinds of music I know about, but it’s not, for instance, a standard instrument in orchestras. So I wonder if you have thoughts about how your experience with the guitar, your relationship with the guitar, has influenced your approach as a conductor?
FALLETTA: Well, I think it has. You know, [guitar] is my primary instrument, although I did study cello and piano as well. But the guitar is the one that I started as a child and stays with me, and I think it’s actually helped me in two great ways. First of all, as a guitarist, you’re very often accompanying people—a voice or flute or violin—you’re playing chamber music. And since you are playing the harmonic background, the harmonic fabric of the piece, you’re always listening to someone else and following them. And really, in a sense, that’s what a conductor is always doing. You’re leading, but you’re leading because you’re listening to the oboe play a solo and giving them enough time to take a breath and then go on, or you’re listening to the pianist right behind you or next to you, how he’s approaching the tempo of the Beethoven concerto and you’re right with him. So that listening skill has been very helpful. But more than that, I think guitar, as you know—and people can imagine this—like several instruments, it doesn’t have a sustaining ability. It’s like a harpsichord; once you pluck a string, it starts to dissipate. So since you can’t actually physically sustain a sound, you’re constantly finding ways of phrasing to connect things, phrasing forward, connecting notes to each other, making the line go forward, thinking of the end of the phrase and thinking that way as a guitarist, where you’re thinking of making the music flow forward and tell that story … because you’ve developed those kinds of mental processes, you’re thinking always in the orchestra of music flowing forward, of the architecture, of the orchestra. And for a conductor, I think that might be the single greatest attribute you need. When you’re confronting a Mahler score that’s 90 minutes long, it somehow has to make sense, from the first note to the last. It has to be like a book that you open and as you’re going through it, everything falls into place and comes to an end. That’s what a symphony is. I mean, you do the same thing. So that sense of always connecting and building an architecture that goes forward, I think I learned from the guitar, and I certainly use it every day in conducting, of thinking where the music is going.
HORN: And I know that you have a guitar competition, isn’t that right? And where’s that?
FALLETTA: That’s here in Buffalo. The Buffalo Philharmonic, we have every other year an international guitar competition and fantastic guitarists from all over the world. It’s just amazing. And many of the people who are coming here from Asia and Europe and South America are coming to the United States for the first time. And I think it’s a point of pride for us that they meet the USA in Buffalo and the people of Buffalo.
[41:03]
HORN: The orchestra, of course, has this civic dimension as well. How do you think about the relationship between the orchestra and the larger community, and your role in helping to bring more people to understand who may not have had this deep connection? I was very fortunate, again, as I said, to begin going to the Philharmonic and starting to feel comfortable in Kleinhans [Music Hall] when I was a little baby, but not everybody has that, you know. So, in terms of that relationship of helping people get to know the orchestra and connect with it—
FALLETTA: Well, that’s a big part of my job. We realize the orchestra only exists for Buffalo. I mean, we don’t exist for ourselves. We exist for this community, Buffalo and Western New York. That’s why we’re here. And we’re very conscious of how we began, which I think for us has meant a great deal. We were started as a Works Progress Administration orchestra. It wasn’t an orchestra that was founded by a wealthy board, or a very, very wealthy individual. It was started by the government simply to give people jobs. I mean, they desperately needed work. Musicians desperately needed work. And also to provide a kind of comfort for people who were really struggling in the Great Depression. So we started as an orchestra of the people in a very modest way. And I think the Buffalo Philharmonic has always maintained that connection with the city and the region, that we are here for you. That’s our meaning. So that’s why we play music. And that’s why we play music that runs the gamut of a Mahler symphony to a children’s concert, to a concert for tiny children who come with their parents, to holiday concerts, to pops concerts, to all kinds of concerts, even concerts for people who have special needs and can’t always be quiet listening to a concert. We have special concerts for people with those special needs. So that’s why we exist: we exist to serve everyone in Buffalo. So part of my job, my mission, is to let people know that Kleinhans is their hall, and the Buffalo Philharmonic is their orchestra, and the doors are open for them. I mean, literally anyone who wants to go to a Buffalo Philharmonic concert can go. There are ways of finding a way to get there, no matter what your economic situation. Our ticket prices we keep deliberately low so that anyone in this community can somehow find a way to come and be with us—free concerts, as well—because that’s our only reason to exist.
[44:04]
HORN: You just spoke about the efforts that you and the orchestra have traditionally made to continue to connect with audiences. You know, I’d have to say for me, one of the strong examples of a conductor leading that effort would be Leonard Bernstein. And I know that he is a luminary figure in your life. I’m thinking about his concerts for young people, is that right?
FALLETTA: Young People’s Concerts, yes.
HORN: I always want to say like Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, but that’s something else!
FALLETTA: He did. So many of them brilliant ones!
HORN: And you did some master classes with him. Was that at Juilliard?
FALLETTA: Yes, because Maestro Bernstein lived in New York. So occasionally he would come over to Juilliard to give us master classes, and we were a very small conducting class, maybe four or five of us at any time in the class. And we were always terrified because Leonard Bernstein was one of those people who was larger than life, you know! And he actually was a lot shorter than people think he was, but he seemed enormous. He had a beautiful, leonine head, just gorgeous! He would walk into the room, you know, usually with his sweater tied around his neck and this little cigarette holder, and the room was electrified. I mean, he was a person of such charisma and such strong personality. And when he would be working with us, everyone was crammed into our rehearsal room. Usually we rehearsed, it was just ourselves, you know, with our conductor. But no, on the day that he was going to be there, not only all the musicians came in, but the dancers, the actors, I mean, they were also studying at Juilliard. The faculty, everyone was in that room just to be in his presence! And he was very, very gentle to us. I mean, you can imagine it was a stressful situation for us, and I think he realized that, but he taught us one thing that I think is probably the most important thing to know as a conductor. And that is, it’s not about how you beat or the pattern. It’s not about how you hold your baton. It’s not about where you’re looking or how you’re moving around. None of that. It’s all about the emotion in the music. That’s all it’s about. And one of the most memorable lessons we had was when he was teaching us the opera Carmen. And of course we were worried about were we being clear and were we like looking around at the right people [in the orchestra]. And he said, “You know what you have to be thinking? You’re in the bull ring and the sun is beating down on you. And the crowd is screaming and you can smell the blood of the bull on the sand. That’s what you have to be thinking, that your heart is pounding and you’re in the middle of this unbelievably intense music and this life and death situation. So that’s what it’s about. It’s not about how you’re beating.” He was right. People now can see videos of him and he was so into the music, he became the music, he became the Mahler symphony or the Brahms symphony or Carmen. He became the music. And that really is what it’s all about: to become somehow the vessel, to communicate that to the orchestra, and together then, to the audience.
HORN: With Carmen, of course, we’re talking about conducting the music from the opera, which has this story there in Seville. And, you know, there is a particular plot that goes along with it, but am I mistaken in thinking that—wasn’t it his view that, you know, say, let’s take something like Beethoven 5, right? That it was a mistake to attach a particular story to it? That it was what it was, and it wasn’t—am I mistaken?
FALLETTA: I think you’re absolutely right. In music like Beethoven, all the Beethoven symphonies were, you know, maybe the Ninth is a little different because it has words, but all of the symphonies generally are what we call abstract music: the composer is not revealing what it meant to him or what the meaning is. And the greatness of that is that everyone can feel their own story; whatever they’re feeling is right. But knowing about the piece, I mean, knowing that Beethoven was such an advocate for the individual common person, I mean that he lived his life railing against authority and the monarchy, and talking about that it’s what each individual has in his heart and in his mind that makes him great, knowing that puts all of his pieces in a different light. So yes, they don’t have really a story—
HORN: but it’s still the emotion that you’re connecting to. So you're, so you have an emotional connection to it. You’re translating that, you know, you’re interpreting that. And then together with the orchestra, translating this to the audience. Cool.
[49:24]
HORN: Elvis Costello once quipped that “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Translating music to words is hard. But I have to ask, just to hear what you say—picking a piece not quite at random; I was listening to it on the way over—conducting, say, the fourth movement of Dvořák New World Symphony, what does that feel like?
FALLETTA: It’s an amazing feeling! It’s an amazing feeling of joy, but part of it is also tied for me to the idea of Dvořák writing this as a gift to United States. I mean, Dvořák came here to teach Americans about music. You know, he was at that time the most famous composer in Europe, and yet he came to New York and lived for three years in New York, teaching young American musicians. It’s amazing that he gave so much of his life to do that. And at the end, he wrote this piece as a gift. So it’s “from the New World.” I mean, he’s writing this: Here I am in the New World, writing this from the New World. And it’s, and it's basically a symphony of power, of affirmation, of strength. Yes it sounds, of course, Bohemian, because that was his language. I mean, he would always sound Bohemian, but in it, I think he has a kind of sinew of the American character, which he loved. He loved his time with Americans. And he loved all Americans. He was really famous for always wanting to know African American spirituals and building music on that. Or even, he was constantly trying to find out about the music of Native Americans. What kind of music did they sing and play? So he was completely enmeshed in our country and this wa s his feeling about us. And it’s such a strong symphony, and it speaks to everyone all over the world, but I think to us as Americans, there’s something in there that we understand is based upon his experience here.
[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! My great thanks to JoAnn Falletta for taking the time to talk, and to Diana Martinusek, Patrick O’Herron, and all the staff and musicians at the BPO for their support of this episode. For information about the Buffalo Philharmonic’s current on-demand and soon-to-be-in-person (we hope) performances, visit bpo.org. A special shout-out to my mom, Gretchen Meister Brand, whose playing and touring with the BPO when I was a kid was a real inspiration. Thanks to Terry Fisher, Harry Jones, and John Parascak from Full Circle Studios for shooting stills and video of the interview at Clement House. The YouTube version, transcript and other supplementary materials are available from the show page for this episode. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music, and thanks to you for listening, subscribing, rating, and sharing the Point of Learning podcast with even just one person you know curious about what and how and why we learn. A proud member of the Lyceum education podcast consortium, Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and produced by me, here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn, and I just got trained as a poll worker for Erie County, so I wish you a healthy and redemptive election season! Back at you with a fresh episode just as soon as I can.
