{"id":607,"date":"2020-07-23T18:13:54","date_gmt":"2020-07-23T18:13:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elissagayle.ebersold.org\/blog\/?p=607"},"modified":"2020-07-23T18:57:42","modified_gmt":"2020-07-23T18:57:42","slug":"a-conversation-with-maestro-david-alan-miller-virtuoso-of-an-albany-tradition-part-2-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-2-of-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A CONVERSATION WITH MAESTRO DAVID ALAN MILLER, VIRTUOSO OF AN ALBANY TRADITION (PART 2 OF 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is part two of an exclusive two-part interview with Director and Conductor of the Albany Symphony Orchestra, Maestro David Alan Miller (MM) on Nippertown<\/em>. Read Part 1 here<\/a>. Part two can be found on Nippertown<\/em> here<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

Elissa Ebersold: How do you go about finding a composer or commissioning someone? How do you discover these individuals to write these pieces for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Maestro David Alan Miller: Well I have a whole network of people I go to. Mainly professors at the great music schools and people who really have their pulse on who is emerging in the orchestral music world or the concert music world. There are certain friends I\u2019ve developed over the years at all ages and stages who just have their own networks of knowing who is up-and-coming, and what\u2019s happening. I rely a great deal on them, and I do a great deal of listening. The contemporary orchestral music world, certainly in America, is sadly much smaller than you might imagine. At any given time there aren\u2019t thousands of incredible composers coming up. There may only be tens or hundreds of them. So getting your head around who\u2019s exciting and emerging is not impossible. You\u2019re just always listening, and asking, and going to concerts and being inquisitive. I find I get a really good sense of who\u2019s exciting. But there certainly are many emerging composers whose music I haven\u2019t played or certainly haven\u2019t discovered. It becomes a fun and wonderful exercise to try to identify exciting new voices. And, after thirty-plus years, I have a great community of creative artists and composers with whom I\u2019m very close. If you track our programming over X number of years, I come back to the same composers frequently. I\u2019m always trying to involve and present exciting new voices, particularly with these more adventurous projects. The Water Music was all young, emerging composers. Some of them are still in graduate school, most of them are just out of graduate school. In most of our projects like Water Music I feature young emerging composers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

EE: Is there a musician or composer you would love to have but have not had the opportunity to get yet?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MM: I think there are many, but I\u2019m very practical and pragmatic. The nice thing is that I don\u2019t need to commission composers to play their music. There are countless existing pieces. For example, if there\u2019s a celebrated composer I can\u2019t afford to commission a piece from, I can always play his or her music. There\u2019s a great number of performers and composers I\u2019d love to work with, but I haven\u2019t had a chance to. I keep lists, and I\u2019m working through them. But I wouldn\u2019t say there\u2019s one great composer or performing artist I\u2019ve always wanted to work with more than another. That doesn\u2019t really come to mind. I\u2019ve had a wonderful opportunity to work with most of the great artists I want to work with. That\u2019s been really satisfying. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

EE: On your website, it\u2019s stated that a core value and mission of the ASO is to champion diversity, inclusion, and the furtherance of human rights. For you and the ASO, it is not merely virtue signaling. You follow through on these words, not only by posting statements on your site and socials, but also by bringing it to your music with performances with the diverse composers you feature, and projects things such as \u201cSing Out, NY,\u201d which was the aforementioned concert celebrating New York\u2019s civil rights movements. Championing these things, for whatever reason, is increasingly seen as divisive and political. As a leader in the music community, why do you feel it\u2019s important to act on these messages of inclusivity and simply not address it, as many organizations do in tumultuous times?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MM: I think it\u2019s divisive not to act. I would disagree with you. I think what\u2019s so exciting, particularly in the last month, but generally in the last few years, is what the current political climate is teaching us is that this is no way to be. In the future it will not be divisive. It\u2019ll be divisive to stick your head in the ground and act like these things don\u2019t need to be addressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EE: Sorry, I should have led with that it was a bit of a loaded question.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MM: I believe that the narrative of the present and the future is exceedingly positive. The past three and a half years have been a disaster for our country and for our civil society. And I think, I hope I\u2019m right, that in November we\u2019ll see that most Americans don\u2019t subscribe to that divisive rhetoric. And so having said that, what\u2019s been so moving and beautiful about the emphasis on Black Lives Matter in the last year, and frankly the last ten years or however long\u2014the past 170 years since the end of the Civil War\u2014I feel like maybe now some really profound changes are taking hold, changes that should have really taken hold right at the start of Reconstruction in 1865.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the things about the pandemic is that it\u2019s given me a lot of time to read. I\u2019ve read a lot of history and biographies. I\u2019ve read that beautiful Ron Chernow [biography of] Ulysses S. Grant that came out a couple of years ago, and I\u2019m now deep in David Blight\u2019s Frederick Douglass biography. What\u2019s so striking in reading the Grant biography is how right after slavery ended, how Grant, even given whatever his weaknesses were, really began to attempt to bring about real equality as he understood it. And was absolutely sabotaged by the angry south and the angry north, and by all the racist people in America of whom there were countless numbers of. But it\u2019s so striking that all the impulses were there 160 years ago. And then when you read about Frederick Douglass, even though I\u2019m not that far into the book yet, I\u2019m struck in reading about how all the things that we\u2019re talking about today with Black Lives Matter are identical to the things Frederick Douglass was saying. Not even in the 1870s, but in the 1840s, twenty years before the Civil War. The whole idea of our racist society, the whole way the society is set up that subjugates other people is just immoral. In a way, Frederick Douglass is the man of the moment. There was a fascinating article in the Washington Post<\/em> about the speech he gave when this terrible Lincoln monument was erected in 1876, in which Douglass basically said that Abe Lincoln wasn\u2019t the \u201cBlack Man\u2019s President.\u201d He was willing to do anything to maintain the Union, including maintain slavery. But Douglass with his idea, with just the moral imperative of how unjust it is to be subjugated to any other, speaks so much for the present. The idea that we have to have that conversation again 150 years later is just sad. It\u2019s very sad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our industry has evolved as a very not-diverse industry for a great number of reasons, and that\u2019s not acceptable to many of us in the industry. The League of American Orchestras has been really single-mindedly focused on these questions of equity, diversity, and equality over the last five-plus years. It isn\u2019t just the last month. But with the impetus of the last month, orchestras are really laser-focused on how we can change. I\u2019m the first to admit that when you look on the stage at the symphony it\u2019s still basically white, and that\u2019s not acceptable in our society in the year 2020. We\u2019re taking a great number of actions to try and address that and redress that. We have a very enlightened staff and board, and I believe in the next year or three years we will have made great strides. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

EE: That\u2019s really excellent and refreshing to hear. I very much appreciate your perspective.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MM: It\u2019s very much about what the people in the streets are talking about. It\u2019s endemic, institutionalized racism, and we can all individually say, \u201cI\u2019m not racist! I\u2019m progressive!\u201d but the way we have structured the culture reinforces racism. So I think that we, in my industry, are really, finally,<\/em> beginning to understand what that means. As I and many others have said, it\u2019s not enough to want<\/em> change. We have to take proactive measures. I really sense that in my industry and throughout society, looking at the motions of police forces and city councils in the last month, I really think these changes are beginning to happen in a meaningful way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

EE: I agree. This is a tipping point. It\u2019s wild to watch it unfold and to participate in history. To tie in with what you said a moment ago, I think that music has always been a reflection and critique of society, and politics, and everything else. So what you said about inclusivity and moving forward, it\u2019s important to have music reflect life, and change, and positivity.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MM: In a way, you\u2019ve put your finger on what\u2019s challenging about my industry. In the orchestra industry, probably 85% of what gets played is written by dead European people\u2014white European men. So changing that and making [what you said] true is very hard. In Albany I feel that we are very lucky because we have this culture of championing living composers, and so they can speak to our time. Of course Beethoven is timeless, and Beethoven speaks to all time. That\u2019s the nature of great art. But in terms of speaking to our own time, the beautiful thing about working with living artists is that you\u2019re fostering the creation of art in your own time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

EE: Can you talk about what it was like to win your first Grammy? What has been different about subsequent nominations?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MM: [LAUGHS] What\u2019s different is I keep losing! The terrible thing about winning the first time is that when you\u2019re only nominated and don\u2019t win, you feel bummed out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It really was<\/em> very magical. We\u2019ve been making recordings for a very long time with no expectation we\u2019d ever be nominated for a Grammy, let alone win one because the music we\u2019ve been recording is rather rarified new music by living American composers. It happened that this project was with a celebrated American composer, one of our greatest, John Corigliano\u2014who also has something of a profile in the world of film. He made a couple of very famous film scores like The Red Violin<\/em>. He had another one [called Altered States<\/em>] which was this trippy movie with William Hurt. He had some cache beyond the narrow world of concert music, in addition to being one of the most famous concert music composers in the world. So this was a project we did with him. When we were nominated, I was flabbergasted. It had never crossed my mind that we would ever get nominated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n