John Axelrod 22/11/2024

This was our talk with John Axelrod, Swiss-American conductor, entrepreneur, a chef-enthusiast, a family man, and a great guy.
To learn more about John, take a look at his web-page CMO: Conducting Masterclass Online, where you can watch masterclass videos about repertoire recorded by him and other conductors, sign up for masterclasses and conduction classes. Or, check out his YouTube channel.

Luciano Gatelli (LG):
I was listening to Bernstein’s “Young people's concerts” and I was amazed how he's able to talk about music in such a profound way, but it's very objective and simple in a way too, it doesn't get too complex. Would you like to elaborate?

John Axelrod (JA):
I think that that was the goal of course, and he was a great communicator. The three things to understand about Bernstein is when I met him and studied with him I was only a teenager and he was as capable of talking in an educated way, inspiring adults and older generation audiences as much as he was able to inspire and educate young people. That capacity to communicate in a direct way is one of the reasons why his program was so successful. But you also have to understand that it was so successful because he utilized the distribution of music through new technology which was television at the time. So one of the things that has made certain, let's say, individuals or personalities or organizations successful in the distribution of music and the performance of music has been the usage of the available technology and what it could offer.

Back in the days of Toscanini it was the radio and so Toscanini became a household name because of the radio. Stokowski became a household name because of cinema and Fantasia (Disney cartoon). When we get to television, remember at the time of the 1950s, 1960s there were only three television stations in the United States. That's it. There was no cable TV. There was no internet. People got their entertainment and their information from the television and Leonard Bernstein's charismatic personality was able to create the kind of program that families would come around the television on a Sunday afternoon and watch his program. Classical music had a much higher market share than it has today. Although the available technology of today has statistically shown that more people listen to classical music today than any other time in history and that's because of YouTube and Spotify and other streaming platforms. The question is whether those people who listen to music today on those platforms are actually audiences of the live performance of classical music and there's a big discrepancy.

What Leonard Bernstein was able to do in the 1950s, 60s with his young people's concerts is he was able to create an entire generation of audiences for the live performance of classical music. That audience for the live performance of classical music is now old and gray and they did not necessarily give the same values to their children and grandchildren. So the challenge that orchestras have today is that we're all on the same level on the internet as everybody else. Nobody has a monopoly. There are plenty of charismatic individuals but some have more subscribers than others. Some have more likes than others. But that doesn't become a currency in a real concrete form for bringing new audiences into the concert hall. So I would have to say that Bernstein was probably the greatest educator of the 20th century but that's the 20th century and I'm not certain that Bernstein would be able to have done exactly the same thing in the 21st century. So he was a man of his time. And the third thing that I can say is that he was very clear about what makes music connect to that audience, not just from a performer's perspective. You know we would ask “Should I be a musician?” And he would say well you've already answered the question. If you have to ask that question you've already answered it. If you're a musician - you're a musician. It's like the air you breathe. But for audiences he gave them a reason to listen to the music. He gave them an understanding of the reason why musicians give reason to what the composers actually created. Otherwise it's just black dots on a page. And as I often tell my own conducting students after having learned this from Lenny - we as the musicians have all the same information on the same page. We all have the same black dots. So I know what you know and you know what I know. And the challenge in terms of an interpretation is to try to discover what it is that we don't know and that we can discover together. And I'm reminded of a phrase that Carl Jung the psychologist once said, that children know the answers to everything. And we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out the right questions to ask. And I think Lenny understood this very well. And he was great at understanding what those questions are and helping us to then learn those answers.

Mikhail Bugaev(MB):
It brings me to the question I have. So, if the score we have is like a hypertext, it has an unlimited amount of links to other things. And what's your approach to the interpretation in that way? Because first of all we had a clearly amazing week and we enjoyed working with you very much. And we were discussing with Luciano, trying to prepare for this meeting with you, how effective you were in sending us those links, what a specific moment in music means to you relative to some other piece of music or some other idea.

JA: I think I understand your question. But I want to segue from his(LG) question and how music has used technology for the distribution of that information. After Bernstein came Karajan with the compact disc. So he was the ambassador of digital technology. By the time we finally got to the internet there were quite a few people who invested heavily in trying to be that next Bernstein of the next technology. His protege Michael Tilson Thomas created a website called “Keeping the score” , for example. Which talked about interpreting the music, on the internet. They spent I can't even begin to tell you the budget. But the problem is that if you don't know that it's online nobody's going to watch it. Everybody's equal. And there are people who buy likes and buy reviews and buy subscribers. So you never quite know what's honest and what's not. And of course, when you see somebody has 20 million subscribers, you go ‘What? Why?’ and click and they now have 20 million one subscribers and so on.

The answer to your question is very simple. We have to remember that music, aside from its capacity to connect to our souls in a way that probably fewer concrete forms of communication are able to do, music actually encompasses every single subject that we study in school. So when we hear about education ministries or secretary of education or education boards cutting the budget and cutting programs of music in school education, they're handicapping those students for their future development. Let me explain why. Because music is mathematics. Music is literature. Music is history. Music is biology. Music is chemistry. Music is physics. Music is a sport. Music ... the list can go on. Every single subject. It is also Art. It is a perfect balance of intangible and tangible, of the abstract and the concrete.

For example, you cannot touch my voice as I speak. You have your instrument in your hands, you have a concrete manifestation of that instrument, but as we all know from that hilarious comment from Heifetz when somebody said: “Oh, your Stradivarius sounds so good!”, and he holds it up to his ear and says “I don’t hear anything.” You make the music, but you have concrete experience with the instrument in your hand. When I speak, you cannot touch the voice, but there is still sound. So there is something abstract in its ability to communicate internally to our imagination, our emotions, our soul. And at the same time there's something very concrete about actually having a physical experience with that music being made, and that can only happen really in live performance, although somebody can also hold their iPhone or hold the speaker of their computer. They can also have a concrete experience.

What I try to argue simply is this - if you're going to interpret a piece of music, you have to have the full picture, you have to approach a piece of music just like it is a subject that you study at your school, and you have to analyze every aspect of the curriculum of that school within the interpretation. One of the challenges that many musicians have when they're auditioning for orchestras or preparing for auditions is they have these excerpts that they have to prepare and they play only those notes that are in that excerpt to make it perfect for the audition, but they don't know anything else beyond those notes that are printed on the staff, so if the conductor or one of the other musicians of the members of the jury were to ask that musician in the audition: “When you're playing this excerpt who else is playing in the orchestra that you have to be aware of?” and if that person can't answer that question they're not going to pass the audition. If they were to ask: “You're playing this as if it was Mozart but can you give me the idea of when this was composed and where it was composed and why it was composed and to whom it was composed?”, and if the person that the musician cannot answer those questions then it is like a tip of the iceberg you only have a small little surface of the understanding of that music and as we know interpretation is far more than the surface.

You have to go beneath the notes, you have to go around the notes, you have to go over the notes, under the notes, through the notes, and part of that is approaching it like a curriculum of your school. You have to know the historical context, you have to know the biography, you have to know the ‘who what when where why how’ and when we're going through the rehearsal process to achieve that interpretation, those are the actual questions that I try to answer for the musicians as we're going through that process ‘who what when where why how’. When we do that, we have a better understanding of the framework, of the dimensions, of the multi dimensions in which the music exists both on an abstract timeless level and on a concrete, place in time, level. There's the reality and there is the ideal, there is security and there is freedom, and once you have all of that information, you have security and through that security comes the freedom to interpret.

MB: At the rehearsals you were very clear with your ideas and instructions to how you want it to be performed, even if in some moments your interpretation was quite different from the traditional version.

JA: I think everybody's fingerprints are unique...

MB: So to my other question, I would like to ask you how you get this certainty? As a conductor you deal with a big group of people that you need to convince in one second to do it your way and not many people capable of it, in general. How do you develop that skill? Is it just hard work studying that curriculum you were talking about earlier, and getting that interpretation to the point of certainty, where you don't have any doubts and it becomes kind of easy?

LG: It is a compliment, but I tried to do a string orchestra at the university here and I had so many wonderful ideas, but as soon as I talked to people I saw some doubtful looks like "What is that?” and I stopped and I thought...

JA: Well, times have changed of course, with the development of the institutionalization of the orchestra, with the development of musicians’ union to protect the rights of musicians. Gone are the days that you could have a Toscanini temper tantrum on the podium. When you look on youtube at videos of Carlos Klaiber rehearsing, or Karajan rehearsing, they talked a lot, and that kind of talking doesn't go over too well among orchestras today.

Again, I refer back to the ‘who what when where why how’. Here's probably from my perspective the greatest blessing of being a musician and how a conductor can use this for the purposes of communicating and interpretation to musicians as well as to an audience, and that is a rather buddhic idea - we exist in the moment, and when you're in the moment, you only have time to analyze the ‘who what when where why how’ in that moment, you can't come in with a preconditioned choreography. You can't come in with an expectation saying “Well I know the music, I have these notes, they have these notes. Why aren't they playing these notes correctly?” And you certainly can't come into an orchestra and try to teach the orchestra, especially a professional orchestra, because most likely the professional orchestra has played the piece a thousand times more than you've conducted, unless, of course, you are already a great maestro. But as we have seen over the last let's say 20 years 25 years conductors are getting younger and younger on the podium. There's more access to education, and opportunities for female conductors, for minority conductors, and that's all wonderful and well and good, but the point is, they have to have the opportunity to conduct a Brahms symphony not once not twice not three times but really 30 40 50 times. And when Bruno Walter said you must conduct for 25 years before you begin to really understand Mozart's music, which is a marvelous phrase, and when we listen to Mozart we think “It's so simple, why does it take 25 years to really understand it?” Well, because sometimes the most profound philosophies are the most simple to understand, but you cannot understand that philosophy until you've lived a full life.

While a conductor can get up and technically conduct a Mahler symphony, if they don't have an understanding of life and death, if they don't have an awareness of those absolutes of existence, if they don't have a comprehension of the emergence of psychoanalysis at that period of time (when Mahler was composing that, in fact, he even visited Freud), if you don't have a full awareness of where the world was in the fin de siècle (term for ending the 1800’s) and how it was changing and evolving, if you don't have these things, you really cannot conduct Mahler's music effectively, because you won't be able to fully understand the depth of the intention.

I love what Krystian Zimerman, the pianist, has once said about why we do what we do - “It's our purpose to give reason to what the composer composed, it simply is not just to put the music in front of us, but our purpose is to perform with reason what the composer composed. Gone are the days, where every composer was conducting and performing their own music. Now you can count on both hands the number of great composer-conductors, that's it. Even the art of improvisation is lost, so we don't have it the way it was so central to the development of musicians at the time of Bach, all the way through Bernstein.

LG: I was talking about that he (Bernstein) was probably the last one, right?

JA: There are a few other improvisers. You can also say aleatoric, modern John Cage music was improvised because it's just all by chance. But in terms of the actual capacity to be a composer-improviser, when George Gershwin composed “Rhapsody in Blue” within two weeks, took it out on tour, and changed it every night, improvised every night. When I toured with Lang Lang and Herbie Hancock playing Rhapsody in Blue for two pianos it started out with Herbie Improvising, like a jazz musician, and Lang Lang playing the security of all those notes. But Lang Lang wanted to learn to improvise, and Herbie wanted to once again read the notes, so they began to teach each other. By the end of the tour, it was Herbie who's reading the notes and Lang Lang was improvising. So it was a fascinating evolution.

To return back to your question, to the moment that we are in, in making music. Because we're governed by a rehearsal schedule, we only have a certain amount of time to rehearse and we have to achieve certain results within that certain time, and we hope to be able to have a connection with human beings in front of us. Bernstein said to my family I would be a conductor not a concert pianist because I like people too much, and he was absolutely right - a conductor must like people because people play the instruments. We play the people, so if we understand human relations, human dynamics, not just as a coach or a psychologist, or a teacher, or all these different CEO or all these different kinds of titles that one can wear. But more specifically, to understand how to listen to the music and respond in the moment, that buddhic moment, to a ‘Who what when where why how?’ questions. We don't have time to go on some elaborate expression. There's only one time I think in the course of our rehearsals that I made comments to the English Horn about the solo of the romance in the Franck, but that was relevant for how she might be able to phrase that music and where this music is really coming from. We must understand that Franck was criticized deeply for orchestrating for the Cor Anglais. Even though Saint-Saëns puts Cor Anglais into his music and many other composers have put Cor Anglais into the music. Let's not forget that Wagner put the English Horn in the opening of act three of Tristan - one of the great solos for Cor Anglais.

When you understand all of that and you're in that moment, and you hear what is happening in the moment, you can quickly identify: Okay, with all due respect, “Viola, viola!” - our famous Celibidache moment . Who, what? This note, where - this bar, this beat, when? After this second beat, what is and why is the problem? How do we fix it? ‘Who what when where why how?’ - boom! Get it done quickly and move on, as long as that is consistent with the overall understanding of the music.

And I just want to return to something that I said before - you cannot come in with a preconceived choreography or a preconceived idea. Everything is fluid and everything is topical. I wrote a book about this, actually the first book that I wrote. Originally in German, published by Henschel/Schott, it was eventually published in English on Naxos. It was called "Making beautiful music together", with perspectives from the conductor. (In English the title is " Symphony Orchestra in Crisis ")

It was actually an anthropology of the orchestra, because you can take the same César Franck symphony, the same Brahms symphony, the same Beethoven symphony, the same music, and you go from country to country, culture to culture. Same symphony, different interpretations. Why? Because you are adapting to the musicians who are making the music in front of you, and the cultural and anthropological dynamics of those musicians. The same César Franck symphony in Brazil might be different from making it in France or Germany, or Switzerland, or Japan, or Russia, or any other country, Even if you have multiple nationalities in that orchestra.

MB: Basically the orchestra has an accent, in a way?

JA: Yes, the orchestra is your canvas, the orchestra is your instrument. You know, you can pick up ten different violas and they're all gonna sound different to you. Eventually, you're gonna figure out how you want to play Berlioz “Harold and Italy” on each of those violas, but you have to adapt to that instrument, and it's the same thing, culturally speaking. I speak in stereotypes and it was something that I spoke about in my book. You can take that Brahms symphony and you go to Italy, and of course, you're gonna be affected by Italian culture. Maybe it's not as precise as you might want it to be but it's going to be very passionate. You do the same symphony in Switzerland - maybe it's not as passionate as you would like, but it's absolutely going to be precise.

MB: So, basically, you adjust your expectations and your interpretations to get the best result possible in that particular moment?

JA: Not a little bit, a lot of it. That is right. And also you'll have experience learning lessons the hard way with human relations. Young conductors have to make those mistakes. They have to learn on the job. They have to learn why this musician might not be happy. They have to learn why this particular section is not doing well. They have to learn why that particular brass player is not playing well, because he's got a blister on his lip. They have to learn about why this musician hasn't spoken to that musician in 17 years. They have to. Why was this musician married to this musician and won't speak to each other anymore? You have to learn about the dynamics of an orchestra and adapt to those socially relevant cultural experiences within the orchestra, in order to arrive to an interpretation. That gives reason to what the composer intended.

In the old days there were those conductors who said ‘this is the way it's done’. And they went to an orchestra and said ‘You do it my way or you take the highway. This is how you play this music’. And some orchestras would say ‘okay’, some orchestras would say ‘no’. The famous story that I wrote about in my book of Karajan with the Cleveland Orchestra at the invitation of George Szell. They did Prokofiev 5, one of Karajan’s signature pieces, and he comes in and says ‘Good morning. Rehearsal number 73, third movement, please’. Everybody's like ‘wow’. They didn't start at the beginning. This is the Cleveland Orchestra, what? Rehearsal number 73, third movement. Imagine, I come in and I say to you ‘I want rehearsal 73, third movement’. When I first meet you, regardless of who I am, you're asking yourself: ‘What is this all about?’ They turn the pages, they finally get there, with the grumbling and murmuring in the orchestra. It's the moment in Prokofiev 5 where you have to play very high. He would give an upbeat, they would play - ‘Stop! More vibrato. - Stop! A little bit more on the fingerboard! - Stop! More pressure on the finger, less on the bow! - Stop’. He would keep correcting, keep correcting, keep correcting them. Finally he said, ‘Play the first note fermata’. Just the first note, and I don't know exactly how long it took, but you could imagine that it lasted a long time, felt like it. Finally when he stopped, he said: “That is the sound I want for this symphony and I want you to remember that sound throughout the symphony. That's the way it's played.” And they started at the beginning and they played through the symphony without stopping. When they finished, Szell said: "It took me ten years to create the sound of the Cleveland Orchestra. You just changed it in three minutes." The musicians didn't appreciate it. When they came to rehearsal number 73 in the third movement of the concert, they did not play intentionally what he had asked for. And he never conducted another American Orchestra again. Because it's America. It's our right to do what we want. You can't impose your will on us. Maybe in the older days it was possible. Even Mahler and Toscanini, when they were in the U.S., they had their difficulties. So, you know, they were just paid more.

I think that the important thing to understand is that the music is timeless and relevant for every single generation in which it's performed. And the reason why we play Beethoven and Brahms over and over again, it's not just because they're masterpieces, but because this music speaks to us in our time and for all time. It will answer those questions that we need to ask, whether it's 1950, 2000, 2050, and the years ahead. Hopefully there will be orchestras to play it. But what is certain is that as we go through this evolution of history with this core repertoire, and with the new repertoire that becomes part of the repertoire, contemporary pieces that suddenly, 50 years later, become core repertoire. Nobody liked Frank’s Symphony when it was premiered. It is in the time after he was dead it became a core repertoire piece. There are many pieces of repertoire that were like that, that were not accepted in the lifetime and only afterwards. So, it's up to us to be the ambassadors, the custodians, the communicators of that music. And it's relevant to the time in which we live, but we have to adapt to those circumstances of the time. And that also includes when we are on the podium in a rehearsal and how we communicate that to the musicians in order to achieve that result.

LG: Just talking a little bit away from that, the purpose of this idea of this interview... We talked a lot about music when we were colleagues in Michigan. And I found it, all of a sudden, people in professional orchestras here don't talk about music as much. I don't know if you agree with me.

JA: I will say that the greatest prohibition for people to come to the concert hall is that they feel they don't know anything about it. And as we did yesterday, we won't do it tonight because we were told for protocol not to do it. But as I did yesterday, I came out to talk to the audience and share with them a little bit of information that's not in the concert program. And people very much appreciate it. That prohibition is that people don't know enough about the music, so they don't talk about it. They don't go to the concert hall. They don't feel that they are qualified. But again, if you treat music like the curriculum of your school, well then you'll know everything you need to know about it. And you can recognize that it is in your best interest, it's in your welfare, to integrate classical music into your culture. Now it doesn't always have to be classical music. Lenny said the same thing that Ellington said, and Berg said, there's great music and there's not great music. Just discover the great music and your life is going to be wonderful. It doesn't have to be classical, it could be pop, it could be jazz, it could be rock. There's great music out there. But what makes great music? That's an entirely other question.

LG: You are a great communicator, and I feel like I want to develop this kind of talk with people. After Poulenc, I said to one of my colleagues, I think everybody should play the ‘Dialogues des carmélites’ in order to understand Poulenc. And the answer to that was: “I think we all need a vacation”. Oh, damn it. Let's talk about harmony in Poulenc, the taste for the strange chords and the taste for the moves that he creates with harmony. That's why the idea of talking about music we have in mind.

JA: Let's talk a little bit about Poulenc and about these harmonies. I mean, he was a member of Les Six, it was a time of Paris, of music coming out of France, of which Ravel was kind of a member, not really a member. In fact, if you really want to discover the music of this period of which Poulenc was a contributor, here is an incredible story. When you say that people don't talk about music. So, I'm a music director of a National Orchestra in France. And I discovered that there was a piece in 1927 called "L'éventail de Jeanne ", the fan of Jean. You've never heard of it. Don't be upset because 99.9% of the world has never heard of it. And yet it is an absolute masterpiece of a suite of music, of small little dances composed by all these members of Les Six, for a woman, a very influential woman, who had her own children's ballet theater in Paris. And convinced, cajoled, seduced, whatever she did, all of these composers, to agree to write two/three-minute little dances. And Poulenc wrote a Pastourelle, and you look at the score, and you have all these others: Ravel wrote the fanfare (the overture). And it's a suite of dances. Milhaud wrote a little piece, and he was very upset because they thought they were doing something for this beautiful woman. And in the end, it was premiered in the Opera de Paris in 1927. Milhaud was very upset that his debut was for a little children's dance in the Opera de Paris. But when I was a music director of a French orchestra, I said: "Why don't we record the L'éventail de Jeanne?" They all said, "What? What's that?" The French didn't even know their own music. They didn't even talk about their own music in this way. It was an English orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, that recorded it, the only recording of it in 1988. So we became the first French orchestra to actually record this French masterpiece of dances by one of the most important groups of French composers who experimented with harmony, with folk music, with cabaret music, with jazz, with so many other different formats that were emerging in the time of the roaring 20s post-World War I, in between the two wars. And the dynamics of society, and the emergence of technology and industry as a result of that.

So, you know, people don't talk about music, and yet they do. But here's another unfortunate circumstance. More people are listening to classical music than any other time in history because of YouTube. But there have been some surveys about that, and they've asked, "Okay, do you listen to classical music on YouTube?" "Oh, yes, yes, I do. I do. I love it." "Well, tell us about it. Tell us about the music you listen to. Who do you listen to?" "Oh, I don't know. I put it on for 10 hours while I'm sleeping." Or “I put it on while I'm studying”, or “I put it on while I'm cooking, or making love, or whatever."

Okay, fair enough. Some people come to the concert hall just to go to sleep. "But, okay, do you remember anything about the videos you may have watched?" The one person today that people know the most is Yuja Wang." And the majority of answers is that they have no idea what piece of music she was playing on the video that they watched, but they remember the dress she was wearing. So that gives you an idea of how things have changed in our society. And if we as a cultural institution want to adapt to those changes of society, well, your podcast is a good way of adapting to using the technology available to you, to distribute the information, to get listeners interested in what's going on. But, of course, we want to have a wider audience. I think that there are several ways to do that. And I've been doing it for 25 years in a variety of different capacities. As a founder of an orchestra, as a music director, as a guest conductor, as an entrepreneur, as a philanthropist, as a producer, as a composer, as a... I've worn a lot of hats, so I can see it from many different angles. And I have certain prescriptions that I think might be helpful. In fact, one that I started in Houston in the 1990s, Orchestra X for developing Young Audiences for Classical Music, many of the non-traditional presentations we did at that time are now being adopted by orchestras today. So I know it was prescient. I know it was transitive. Because now I see that people are doing it. They all arrive to the same idea. Maybe we were just a little bit ahead of that curve.

You have a lot of people that are listening to Classical Music on YouTube today, but they're not coming to the concert hall. So there's a disconnect in the currency. People think: "Oh, this orchestra has 20 million likes on their YouTube channel”. So certainly we must see that the concert hall is sold out, and it's not. Why? Well, the number one reason for that is because the internet is free. So why would they want to go and pay money to go and hear the music when they can just see or hear the music on their small little speaker? And for them, it's sufficient. You have to convince people why that live experience is more fulfilling than just the experience of listening to it, or sleeping to it, or cooking to it, or making love to it, or whatever. That's number one. Number two, if people have an expectation for the music to be free, and if there are either tax benefits for sponsorships or government subsidies to help pay for the organization, why not offer free concerts to fill the concert hall? And then once you get them to come to the water to drink, hopefully they like what they drink, and they're willing to pay for the upgrade. They're willing to pay for the experience after that. Some people do it, some people don't. In the end, what I think is going to happen.

And one last thing to say. I made a mention that you have sport and music as being somewhat parallel as one of the parts of that curriculum. You know, what's the difference between classical music and football? Here we have 500 people and they have 50,000 people, and that's really the only difference. They wear a uniform, you're wearing a uniform. They work as a team, we work as a team. They stretch and do exercises before a performance. We stretch and do exercises before a performance. The parallels between sport and music are almost identical. We have a great performance where we know that we performed it well with commitment and with belief for the audience. Well, they score the goal, they win the game. Our goal is to win the game. Our goal is to make a great performance serving the intention of the composer, and it's believable to the public that we win the game. So the parallels are there, and even sports medicine and performing arts medicine are basically the same. But when you explain to somebody, maybe there should be something like performing arts medicine. People scratch their heads and say, "What's that? What do you need doctors for?" You're playing Beethoven. That's your medicine. No. You have cervical or lower lumbar problems. If you're a ballet dancer, imagine all the problems they have physically. You're an opera singer, think about all the problems with the acid reflux and the vocal cords. The medical needs of performing arts are almost as great as the medical needs of athletes. And they retire at 40, and we play until we retire for life and sometimes even beyond. So performing arts medicine is a great idea. Where is it? Why don't they do it? Because we have 500 people and they have 50,000 people. There's a big difference.

So how do we turn that around? How do we get people to talk about music? How do we get it into the curriculum and the conversation, the way Bernstein did it, back to your first question, with his young people's concerts in that time when there was no competition. Today we're over-saturating with information. This podcast is going to be one of a million podcasts that people are going to be surfing the Internet for, deciding what they're going to want to listen to. So how do we do that? This is going to be the question of our time.

MB: In our orchestra here we have some free concerts and the attendance for those is great. It's very wonderful. People love it? Amazing. And yes, it is more difficult to bring audiences for regular concerts when it's paid. Especially when it's not Tchaikovsky or... But also with podcasts like that, do we need to kind of educate? How do we approach that educating moment, how do we include it into the conversation? I remember, for example, Brahms is one of my most favorite composers. I just love Brahms’ music, but when I was young, when I just started working in an orchestra at 20, every time I played Brahms, I could feel almost like an imposter syndrome, because I could feel that there is so much deepness in that music, emotional deepness, that I didn't have capacity for, because I was too young. And how do I play that music?

JA: People always make jokes about the fact that the majority of audiences are old and retired, that they have the discretionary income, they have all the time, and what else are they going to do? They come to the concert, so it's not entirely like that, because they've also lived long lives. They have an unconscious understanding about life to a certain extent, because they've lived that life. Think of it this way (I'll be a little bit psychological and philosophical): there's a reason why grandparents and babies get along really well. And it's not just they're not the parents, they don't have to be totally responsible, but there's a real reason why old people and babies get along real well, because they operate on an unconscious level. Babies are unconsciously incompetent. They just trip over their own feet and everybody's laughing, and it's just cute and adorable, because they're babies. They're unconscious, they're not even aware of time, they're not aware of good and bad, they're not aware of any of this, they have to learn all of that. Whereas we have the image, the idea of the older maestro, the sensei, the guru, the shaman, the priest, whatever you like to call it, it's white-haired, older, wiser, and operates also at an unconscious level, at an unconsciously competent level. So sometimes you see a conductor on stage totally free, and you know, what are they thinking about? They may be thinking about the breakfast they ate, who knows? I mean, it's so free what they're doing, it's an unconscious act at times. And adolescence, of course, is the most difficult time of life. Not just for pimples and puberty and everything else that you go through, it's because you're conscious, but you're still incompetent. So consciously incompetent is what adolescence is defined by. And then eventually you get to the adult phase of life where you spend the majority of your years, where you're consciously competent. So parents and adolescents often fight with each other, because they're operating on a conscious level between incompetency and competency. Old people and babies get on great because they're operating on an unconscious level. So that's why actually the majority of activities that orchestras do are focused on those two demographics, the older unconscious people and the younger unconscious people. Remember Jung said babies have all the answers. So they can understand that music already. It speaks to them at a deep level already. They just don't know how to verbalize it. They don't know that they know it, but they know it, because they already have the answers.

Our problem is the lost generation, those teenagers and the young adults. How do you get them into the audience? That's difficult because they're operating on a conscious level. Number two, it takes time to understand not just human relations, but the music itself, what's behind those notes, what's being asked of the musicians to play the music the way that it needs to be played. And being an audience member, it's the same way. It takes time for an audience member to reach a level of understanding of a piece of music to the degree where they are able to experience it with an authentic deep understanding on a spiritual level, on a physical level, on a psychological level.

We think we have our obligation to just weekly make concerts, do the performances, do the routine, build a subscriber base, get audiences and just do it as a service to the community. That's all well and good and that's what the government wants. It's a service to the community. But when audiences are hearing a piece of music for the first time, whether live or on a recording, and they're only hearing it one time, it is like the tip of the iceberg again. It's only on a surface level. One of the things that I did is conduct a program, for example, a new composer. I wouldn't do the obligatory one short ten-minute piece to start a concert program, before a concerto with a symphony. I would make a commitment to that composer and I'd say, "Okay, we're going to do five or six different pieces by that composer during the season. We're going to have chamber music. We're going to have conversations with the composer. We're going to do a number of different activities so that the public understands, that the orchestra feels committed to communicate to them who this person is and why this person is significant for them to understand, and why we are willing to roll the dice and bet that a hundred years from now people will still be listening to this composer's music. We're maybe wrong, but we're willing to make that gamble. Because if we don't make that gamble, if we don't take that risk, if we don't put all our money on the table, why should the public care? Instead, it's patronizing. “Oh, why did they program this piece by a composer I've never heard of?” Well, because the orchestra has an obligation to perform music by living composers. “Okay, well, why do they just compose it, present a ten-minute piece? And that's it? That's the last time we will hear from this composer again.” So we're not doing the service to the music of our time just by going through that kind of routine.

And the last thing I want to say is what role the governments and the sponsors should play in all of this. You know, governments want to return on their investments. They give you the money, you have to spend that money. If you don't spend that money and you have a surplus, you will have less money in the budget next year. So they want to see how that money becomes a return on that investment and we have to recalculate what that actually means. Otherwise, oh, we have a surplus. What are we going to do? Let's just resurface the tile of the dressing rooms. What does that do? What the sponsors benefit from is that there are countries that offer tax benefits, and there are countries that don't offer tax benefits. How can the sponsors be capable and committed to be part of the process of cultivating that audience rather than just reinforcing the notion that this is entertainment for the rich and charity for the poor? And as long as you maintain, as an orchestra, which has evolved as an institution over time, as long as it is maintained, this idea that it is entertainment for the rich, charity for the poor, we will have the same issues over and over and over again. I have ideas how we might be able to counter that, but I think we'll have to talk about it some other time, as we still have a concert to play.