{"id":605,"date":"2020-07-23T16:07:47","date_gmt":"2020-07-23T16:07:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elissagayle.ebersold.org\/blog\/?p=605"},"modified":"2020-07-23T18:14:28","modified_gmt":"2020-07-23T18:14:28","slug":"a-conversation-with-maestro-david-alan-miller-virtuoso-of-an-albany-tradition-part-1-of-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/elissagayle.ebersold.org\/blog\/2020\/07\/a-conversation-with-maestro-david-alan-miller-virtuoso-of-an-albany-tradition-part-1-of-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A CONVERSATION WITH MAESTRO DAVID ALAN MILLER, VIRTUOSO OF AN ALBANY TRADITION (PART 1 OF 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Initially written for and posted Nippertown<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Albany Symphony Orchestra has been a staple of the Capital District\u2019s cultural and music scene for nearly a century. Since its inception in 1930, the ASO has been home to eight music directors, though none whose tenure has been as long as the current director and conductor, Maestro David Alan Miller. Under the guided swish of his baton, the UC Berkeley and Julliard graduate has produced a vast majority of the symphony\u2019s recordings, and for them earned three Grammy nominations and one Grammy win. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For nearly 30 years, Miller has not only brought his musical prowess and passion to the orchestra, but also his creative and avant-garde approach to orchestral traditions. Somewhat analogous to his animated personality, he offers audiences not only classical favorites, but a balance of a diverse range of contemporary, even theatrical compositions often played on-location in atypical venues. Miller continues to bring life and modernity to a centuries-old musical tradition, and will expertly entertain music-lovers of all ages while doing so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo by Gary Gold<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Elissa Ebersold: I\u2019d like to know about your true start with music, long before your graduate and post-grad studies. How did you fall in love with music, and how did that love translate to a desire to become a maestro?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maestro David Alan Miller (MM): Well that\u2019s a very good, big question. I grew up in Los Angeles in the San Fernando valley. My dad had been an opera singer, and my mom was an educational psychologist and sociologist, and because of that we all played instruments as kids. My sister, and my cousins who lived next door\u2014we all picked up an instrument. My dad, in addition to having been a professional singer, was a cantor at a large synagogue in The Valley, and was a high school music teacher; he was a vocal music teacher. He had access to all the instruments, and so he would bring home the instruments and we would try them. My sister played the cello, and I played the trombone. My cousin Alan played the cello, and Cousin Mitch played the horn. It was very musical. We all played a little bit of piano; we all had piano lessons at some point or another. I was steeped in music because my father was a singer. I went to public school and took a lot of lessons on all the various instruments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was about fifteen, I began to think I might want a career in music. I didn\u2019t feel, though I was a pretty good trombonist, that I necessarily wanted to be a professional<\/em> trombonist. So I started casting about for other careers in music. Not sure how I happened upon the idea of conducting, but it seemed neat because you could do all these different things, and it involved a lot of different aspects of one\u2019s mind that just<\/em> playing an instrument doesn\u2019t always [do]. It involves psychology and understanding history, and composition, and style. [There\u2019s] a lot of psychology when you\u2019re dealing with a whole room full of very educated, trained musicians. So I asked my dad for conducting lessons when I was fifteen, and he graciously found me a wonderful 87-year-old Austrian conductor who happened to live in Hollywood. And I started taking conducting lessons, and more seriously started taking piano lessons, viola lessons, composition lessons, and went to college for music. So that was really how my musical childhood evolved. But I was very much steeped in it because it was ubiquitous; it was everywhere in my childhood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

EE: You said there\u2019s all these different aspects to conducting that aren\u2019t necessarily music-centric, like psychology. Was there a particular one that you gravitated more towards as interest outside of the music, or was it more the sum of its parts?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MM: At first I think it was the excitement of being in charge of the whole music creation. My dad and I, when I was a kid, he would sit with records and listen to Beethoven\u2019s symphonies with this funny little series of complete scores. You could see these miniature scores in a book, and it would give an arrow that would show you where the theme was. So as you listened you could follow the theme. In a way I was sort of destined to fall in love with that idea of the whole orchestra\u2014to be in charge, and to be the inspirer of the group. But I don\u2019t think I had any understanding when I started out of the multiplicity, of the multifaceted nature of what a conductor does. I had some sense of it, but I think as I studied it more deeply in high school and then college, I began to understand just what a perfect field it was for me. All these other interests I have, like history and literature and languages, fed into this knowledge base that a conductor needs and wants. So I think what happened is it evolved into understanding what a multifaceted field it is.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n