Conductor’s Roundtable with Mei-Ann Chen & David Alan Miller

Melissa Ngan:

Hello, I’m Melissa Ngan, President and CEO of the American Composers Orchestra, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the professional development webinar series co-presented by the American Composers Orchestra and the American Composers Forum. I’m really excited for today’s panel. We have a round table with conductors Mei-Ann Chen and David Allen Miller moderated by ACO’s very own artistic director Derek Bermel. Couple of little technical reminders today: please do feel free to use the Q&A button, located right below your video, to submit your questions to the panelists. We’ll have some time to answer those within the last 15 minutes of the webinar. And also please feel free to use the chat function to say hello, to interact with your fellow attendees, and let us know where you’re coming from. It’ll be a great space for us to get to know each other. This panel will be recorded and available on ACO’s youtube and ACF’s website. And I’d also like to thank those who made this webinar series possible the Virginia B. Toulman Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and individual donors. And last but not least, a huge thank you goes out to ACF staff Billy Lackey, Laura Kreider, Damian Strange, and Vanessa Rose and ACO staff Jade Zhang, Aiden Feltkamp, Lindsey Werking, and Derek Bermel. And speaking of which — Derek Bermel…when he comes on camera — oh you did it!

Derek Bermel:

Here I am. Thank you, Melissa, and welcome to our guests today, Mei-Ann Chen and David Alan Miller. It’s really great to have you both with us and I’m very excited for this talk because it’s rare that, you know, composers get a chance to hear straight from the source of the conductors, you know, just what’s going on in those minds of yours, and I think this will be really, really interesting, especially being that you’re two great champions of music. I should mention that Mei-Ann Chen is the conductor and music director of the Chicago Sinfonietta and the artistic director and conductor for the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra Summer Festival, and so, and David Alan Miller, multi-Grammy award-winning conductor and music director of the Albany Symphony. Thank you, welcome to both of you.

David Alan Miller:

Great to be with you, Derek and Melissa and Mei-Ann. Hi everybody, so happy to be here.

Mei-Ann Chen:

It’s amazing reunion of old friends and dear friends and meeting new friends. Thank you, Melissa for your introduction, and Derek, go blue!

Derek Bermel:

Go blue, that’s right, yeah, taking it to, taking it to the big ten. We, yes, we are both graduates of the University of Michigan so, so nice to be thinking about that, and by the way, for those of you who are signing in from many different places in the world potentially, please let us know where you are, who you are, and please make sure to ask questions, you know, put them into the chat and we’ll try to get to them as the session goes on today. So please, you know, let us know about, you know, your concerns, things you’re thinking about, whether you’re a composer, conductor, performer, or an audience member who loves what these people do. Mei-Ann, I just wanted to start with you because you’ve got this — David’s got the homey background behind him — but Mei-Ann, you’ve got this beautiful concert hall can you tell us a little bit about that? It’s quite special.

Mei-Ann:

Absolutely, I’m happy to. The concert hall you see behind me is the new concert hall called Weiwuying in my hometown of Taiwan, Kaohsiung, now has the largest arts complex since November of 2018. It used to be an old military base, and then now they turn that into four different venues. And I’m proud to say it’s one of the best of concert halls in Asia right now. Berlin Phil, Vienna Phil have already toured there, and so hopefully one of these days, post-COVID, that, you know, that we can welcome many of you to Taiwan to experience this wonderful vineyard style, but the sound is incredible, almost every sound gets equal sonic experience. So hopefully one of these days, welcome to Taiwan for the dumplings and the concert hall.

Derek Bermel:

I saw the video that you showed me about that hall, and it’s just incredible, the work that’s gone into that. Was new music, was contemporary music very much on the minds of the architects and all the folks who built it? It’s just an enormous amount of work this has taken.

Mei-Ann Chen:

Yes, and I believe there’s a recent article on the league news about this venue, and the artistic director is an incredible Taiwanese conductor who has stay, who has given up his position in Germany to really envision the new art center for Taiwan and for Kaohsiung, and so new music is definitely very much for front of his visions. I don’t want to, you know, break the news for them, but I think they’re envisioning new music festival coming up, to be announced, and I did the Taiwanese premiere of Anna Klein’s Masquerade in my recent program there. And so, absolutely, I think, I think you will start to notice this new festival taking place in Taiwan in the future.

Derek Bermel:

That’s great, actually Anna Cline is a composer who ACO has has performed and championed, and she was actually one of the the co-curators for the SONiC festival several years ago, so that’s great that you’re bringing American music around the world, and as David Alan Miller has done. David, you have two extraordinary venues there in Albany, one of them being that beautiful Troy, historical, Troy Savings Bank Hall, and then you have, in a very different way, you have EMPAC. Can you talk about how those have, you know, kind of come into your programming plans, and how have these halls inspired you in any ways?

David Alan Miller:

Yeah, hey Derek, yeah, it is kind of uncanny and a little weird in a way in that the Troy Music Hall is one of the legendary concert venues in the world and certainly in the country, and in fact when George Szell used to tour the Cleveland Orchestra of the northeast, he would insist on their playing a concert in the music hall even though the stage is really narrow and they would have to, like, jam themselves in, simply because he wanted the Cleveland Orchestra members to hear the acoustic of the space. So it’s been around, you know, since the 1870s really, and has this amazing, if you’ve never been, the hall has this amazing organ loft which acts as sort of an unbelievable megaphone sending the sound out into the hall. It’s about a 1,200 seat hall. But then remarkably, RPI, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the engineering school up on the hill about six blocks away from there, decided about 10 years ago to build this gorgeous — sounds similar to what Mei-Ann is describing — gorgeous arts complex within another amazing 1,200 seat hall, but super modern, you know, unbelievably worked out, and to do sonic experiments as well as concerts, and it’s just kind of weird that they put these two concert halls, these two ideal concert halls within like six blocks of each other in Troy, New York. So, we do kind of design programming, we do all of our recording in those two halls, and the bigger things we put in the EMPAC, it’s called the EMPAC Hall at RPI, and the more traditional things we put in Troy, but, and also the bigger things, we put in just the bigger things, and also the kind of more ultra-modern things because there’s so many possibilities at EMPAC, but they’re both just gorgeous acoustics and really interesting spaces, so we do design a lot of things around them. And at the end of every season — Derek, as you well know — we do a big, like, week-long American Music Festival and we’ll feature, like, 50 works by 35 composers, and we do that mainly at EMPAC at RPI, because it’s got a lot of other little venues around it: an opera house and two black boxes and things like that. So it’s just a bounty of riches, it’s amazing.

Derek Bermel:

Well you’ve told me that Troy is the Brooklyn of Upstate New York. I mean—

David Alan Miller:

Except it’s getting more expensive than Brooklyn, that’s the only problem.

Derek Bermel:

I think of Brooklyn as the Troy of New York City.

David Alan Miller:

So if you have time, run out and do it this week, come on up, we’d love to have you. Everybody, not just Derek. But yeah it’s really, it’s really — certainly pre-pandemic, it was becoming this amazing Mecca, and I think now post-pandemic it will again. You know, there was a big article in the paper last week about the Hudson Valley, and all sorts of people moving up from the city, and, you know, we’re kind of the northern end of the Hudson Valley, but I think we’re seeing a lot of people coming up here as well.

Derek Bermel:

The Albany Symphony has had such an incredible record of championing American music in particular and new music in general. But, can you speak to us about, I mean, what, when did that start? I know that you even started, before your Albany Symphony days you were at the New York Youth Symphony, which also has a great tradition of performing American work and commissioning American work every year, and can you talk about how you got particularly interested in this kind of work and in the work of composers of your generation and generations before and after.

David Alan Miller:

Sure. I don’t know, I don’t want to go into too much detail or I’ll run the clock, I don’t want to run the clock. But I conducted the New York Youth Symphony right when I got to Juilliard as a masters student, the second year I was able to become the conductor of the New York Youth Symphony which was kind of moribund at the time, and we did a lot of things. I was 20 at the time, and so we did a lot of things to buck it up. And I had this idea that the way to get a critic to show up to all the concerts was to play a new piece of music on each concert, and Barry Goldberg, legendary manager who was there for 27 years or so, he, I had hired him in my second year and he devised this whole series called First Music, where in fact on every single concert we commissioned a young American composer to write an eight-minute piece that opened the Carnegie Hall concert. And so I kind of started, I’m ashamed to say, as a marketing ploy, but it was so wonderful. Not only was it so successful at getting noticed, but it was so wonderful for me to meet, I mean in that first year it was Aaron Kernis and David Lang, and the second year was Michael Torke and, you know, Michael Daugherty and Julia Wolfe and everybody, all sorts of really great composers of our generation, even a little earlier, got First Music commissions, and I began to have so much fun and it was so exciting for me to have living composers to talk to and to work with and, you know, we would rehearse these pieces over ten weeks, every week, and with these kids, some of whom were 12 years old. And so we really got enmeshed in it, and then I went out to LA to be the assistant, and then the associate conductor with the Philharmonic there, and I remember when I got there John Harbison was out there as composer in residence, and I was so excited to meet him, and he said, “Oh yeah, I know all about you. I’ve gotten all these tapes” — at the time — “from all the composers who had First Music commissions.” So I just kind of fell into it, and then I just found that it was the most satisfying work. And so in Albany, you know, really, not only do we play all the great figures, the leading figures, like yourself, of the contemporary music world — and I see lots of my friends on the stream there — but we really have come to specialize in discovering, like you do at ACO, new generations of emerging American composers. And that’s been the most satisfying work we do up here.

Derek Bermel:

Well I want to get back to you on the question of 10 weeks of rehearsal for a piece, because I know that that is something very special about the youth orchestra. But, you know, I want to ask Mei-Ann — at the Chicago Sinfonietta, can you tell us a little bit about your journey, because you also had an interesting journey into conducting itself, with Ben Zander and folks like that, and you’re, you know, you had quite a unique, you know, starting off, you played multiple instruments, and can you tell us a little bit about how you got really intrigued by, you got the new music bug, the Chicago Sinfonietta now does, you know, really have a specialty in so many composers — women composers, composers of color — it’s really invigorated the scene, I think, in Chicago. So can you talk us through that a little bit?

Mei-Ann Chen:

Absolutely. You know, it’s, I probably owe the beginning of my conducting experience to the composers at New England Conservatory. I mean, that was one of the ways, I realized, I could get podium time, is that I could help the composers put together pieces regardless of how good the pieces were, you know? I just thought that was a chance to benefit them, but also to benefit myself in terms of, you know, getting an instrument to conduct. I mean, that’s the hardest thing, I think, for any young conductors. And so I have cultivated that relationships early on, even though it hasn’t occurred to me that is a wonderful thing to champion, you know, like David’s story, I wish I was in the midst of all these great minds and amazing minds, and I was probably with a lot of wonderful classmates, but I was rather shy, and so it was, the new music was sort of a bridge to open up this whole world about conducting, for me. Because I — literally, you have to be a personnel manager, a librarian, and working with the composer trying to get what the composer had in their head. I think that, to me, is still one of the hardest thing, is to get in the head of the creator, because I view my role as an interpreter, and I would never want to get in the way of the composers creating, because I do want to give them that freedom to run with. And so, after I’ve gotten my my start in conducting, the new music never felt far away. My subscription with Atlanta Symphony actually, the composers right here joining us, Shiwang, who now lives in Dallas Symphony, Dallas area, was, I think, recommended to Atlanta Symphony through American Composers Forum probably, through Evans Mirageas, which is a wonderful as well, and so it’s wonderful to continue to champion for composers whose voice is not usually heard, and that just became front and center when I took over Chicago Sinfonietta, you know. You probably remember 2006 front page of New York Times, and I remember being a young conductor myself thinking, “What is this crazy group that commissioned a concertina for cell phone and orchestra?” And that was before cell phone was a household item, and not not knowing, years later I would actually be heading this crazy, wonderfully crazy orchestra in championing for composers of color, particularly, since, you know, the women’s movement, the metoo movement, really help us to really focus on championing for women composers, which has occupied less than two percent in recent seasons, and now the orchestra as an industry has really taken up, you know, the cue of really championing for more. I wanted to show, if it’s okay, because I also, may I share the screen?

Derek Bermel:

You’re welcome to share the screen as long as they set you up to do that. Are you set up now to share? Yes!

Mei-Ann Chen:

Well, first of all, I think before we go too much into the chart I want to show you, I think we need to congratulate our wonderful colleague here David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony for the amazing Grammy win. And let me show you another, I just had it, but I’m sorry, I had to restart my screen, but I wanted to show, this is incredible championing for this, I don’t know if you can see it, I think that’s pretty amazing achievement for any conductor championing for new music and getting recognized for it. And so David Alan Miller, sorry if I embarrass you. I just wanted to share that because as I was trying to google for material to share, I just thought that is really cool in terms of new music and really being the forefront of it. And so another fun chart, if you allow me to share this incredible work by the — sorry my computer is a little slow — Institute for Composer Diversity. And I’m scrolling down hopefully in a speed that’s okay for everybody. So this is from 1920, and let me blow out this chart. It’s really small to see, but I want to talk about the first two tied at 32 percent: River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, with which I serve as the artistic partner, and Albany Symphony. They tie at 32 percent of the programming championing for women in their 19/20 season. The Chicago Sinfonietta, we were the second place, 5 out of 19 works. The year before, well actually the17-18 season, that was before the woman composers became a trend, we were at 43 with our Project W. I’ll talk about that in in a second. Let me show you another chart, and I don’t know if you know that David Alan Miller, in terms of this chart, that’s incredible for Albany Symphony to really lead the country. So this is Chicago Sinfonietta, and this is for repertoire representing musicians of color, and I just wanted to show you that 58 percent. That’s pretty remarkable in terms of the Chicago Sinfonietta in our three decades has consistently championing for musicians that’s underrepresented in the standard repertoire. So anyway, I will stop this for now and I’ll let you respond to what I just said.

Derek Bermel:

Well it’s absolutely fabulous, I mean it’s just, it’s great that we have the, representing the top three on that first chart, we have you two, who represent, really, because you’re of course, as I didn’t even mention, in my two sentence opening bio, you’re also an artistic partner, the main artistic partner at ROCO, and so that’s another one of your positions that you hold. So the fact that you’re doing programming and David is doing this kind of programming is, you know, just shows that we have two of the leading minds in this area. So that’s pretty exciting, and thanks for doing PR for David by the way.

David Alan Miller:

That was really nice. Yeah, I’m hiring you Mei-Ann, you’re great.

Derek Bermel:

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a conductor do PR for another conductor like that. That might be a first as well.

David Alan Miller:

Usually just violence, they just do violence, you know.

Mei-Ann Chen:

I just, I was just so amazed by how much David has done over the decades, and so it’s just, it’s so much that I had I have to actually bookmark them, because if I have all the windows open it will crash my computer.

So now David, I just so admire how, I mean how do you, if it’s okay for me to ask this question, Derek, how do you find the support around championing for new music you seem to have found, you know, such a great support and great team to support you to champion for that, which is, I think, you know, a lot of orchestras would love to have that.

David Alan Miller:

Well, as Derek sort of began to mention, I mean, the Albany Symphony had a whole history of championing the music of our time before I got here. You know, I’ve been here almost, this is my 30th year next year, but even before that in the 1970s, this wonderful crazy board chair who was at Albany for many, many years and now owns and runs Albany Music, the record company, Peter Kermani, he saw all these smaller and mid-sized orchestras having terrible financial trouble and trying to figure out how to be relevant and trying to figure out how to serve their community. And being a fanatical new music lover, he just declared, “If we go out of business, we’re going to go out of business playing new music.” And he started just playing all of his favorite composers, and so when I, when the job was open and I applied, the Albany Symphony already had this great reputation as a bastion of of living music. It happened that a lot of the music that Peter had the workshop play, I’m not sure was such top drawer music, so there were a few years there at the beginning where I really had to kind of build trust with the audience. And we can talk about that, because of course, you know, I mean, unfortunately, as Mei-Ann knows so well, we performers, we conductors who run orchestras, we always have to be at least somewhat aware of marketing. Can we convince our audience to come to this concert? Will people want to come to this concert? Will people have a good time at this concert? So not that, you know, we only play likeable pieces or pieces that we think will be populist, but we always kind of have in the back of our heads, as any good performer interpreter from Mozart and before to the present always has, you know, how will this music go over? So there was a period during which I sort of began to do more of the repertoire that I love, you know, of people like Michael Torke and Derek and Joan Tower and various composers like that, John Harbison and John Corliano. But really we’ve broadened that to really be about all sorts of new voices, and with new voices, part of the excitement is hearing a lot of different styles and views. So I’ve been very lucky in Albany in that Albany already had a tradition of kind of innovation and of not being afraid of living music. In fact, now I would say it’s the opposite, if I ever do a concert where there isn’t a new work, the audience is kind of upset and they say, “Well, where’s the new piece? We didn’t get to meet a new composer?” And so it’s, we’ve really flipped the whole thing on its head and I think that we’re certainly not the only ones, and you Mei-Ann, and your orchestras, and many of my colleagues have really managed to do that. I think it’s a very exciting time. I hope the composers on the chat all agree that, you know, things are really opening up, and I think, in a strange way, the pandemic has allowed us all to do even an additional reset of, you know, what do we want to be going forward? Embracing diversity, embracing composers who happen to be women, embracing more equity across the field. I think it’s a very exciting time for living music, because let’s face it, most of the famous classical composers are dead white European males, so it’s not surprising that those charts are so severe when you look at them, because that’s most of the repertoire that our orchestras have been playing, and this may be an opportunity for us to really reset.

Derek Bermel:

I love how you’re talking about taking people out of their comfort zone and bringing them a new comfort zone, so that’s interesting. I mean, how do you choose programs, David? I mean you, talk through some of the most interesting programs you’ve done recently, and that could be with the Albany Symphony, but it could be with the Dogs of Desire, your new music ensemble that’s kind of rough and ready, and, or it could be, you know, programs that you’ve taken as a guest conductor elsewhere.

David Alan Miller:

Yeah, I don’t know. A little afraid to get too much into this, into specifics, but I love what Mei-Ann said, this idea of, with living composers, you know, you really get to interact with them and talk to them, and if you’re commissioning a piece you can even ask. You may not be, they may not follow your direction, you can ask for a piece about a specific thing. So for example, you know, we’ve been doing a lot of — I’m very passionate about history and particularly regional history, so we’ve done these wonderful summer festivals linked to our American Music Festival, maybe the most celebrated of was in 2017, the summer we did something called Water Music — Water Music New York, Water Music NY, and we commissioned seven brilliant emerging composers, each to partner with a different community along the Erie Canal, which stretches, as you probably know, from Albany to Buffalo, 330 miles, and sort of bisects the entire state of New York. And we basically put these seven composers, each of them, in a different community along the canal and they spent three months living and working in that community and collaborating with a performing group in the community. And then we created these half-hour long pieces, and the orchestra and I floated — we bust, but then we actually played some of the concerts on barges and in the canal. It was the 200th anniversary, the bicentennial of the canal. 2017 was the kickoff, and we played these seven incredible world premieres, each one in and four on the waterfront, the community in which it was conceived and collaborating with a performing arts group in that community. Choruses and dance companies and children’s theater and various things, folk culture workshops. And so we had these incredible pieces and we played on, every night we would arrive at — it was a week, the Fourth of July week — every night we’d arrive in a different community and we’d have a quick rehearsal in the afternoon with the performing collaborating group and with the composer and with the orchestra, and then we play this magnificent piece. And at the beginning we played Handel’s Water Music, and afterwards we did, like, pop stuff and fireworks. And it was just this huge fabulous cultural happening, but it was really around the idea of composers of today creating site-specific art. And that was very powerful. So that kind of thing I love to do. And then the other — I won’t get into detail — but the other kind of thing I love to do is, I very often ask a composer — Joan Tower and George Tsontakis are two who come to mind — and I remember Chris Rouse did an amazing one for us. I kind of called it informally Inside the Composer’s Brain. I would have the composer kind of co-curate the piece about his or her influences. We played a big piece in the middle that was, you know, their piece. So with Chris Rouse, the first one of those we did, we did his great violin concerto, and he had us play Vaughn Williams, the fantasia, because he was a big Vaughn Williams guy, he had us play the Roman Carnival Overture, he’s a big Berlioz guy, and we finished with the Strauss Rosenkavalier suite because that was the first piece of classical music he ever fell in love with. And hearing his piece surrounded by those other pieces, it’s sort of the contextualization of it was so powerful. And so I love doing concerts like that, where you really place a great new work in some kind of context.

Derek Bermel:

Well it’s really nice to hear how you’re centering the composer in those discussions and —

David Alan Miller:

The composer is at the center, don’t you know that, Derek?! Always!

Derek Bermel:

Well, you know, you don’t always feel like that as a composer in the music world, because you feel like a little peripheral sometimes when — I mean of course you know that the music was all written by composers, but sometimes, especially as an American composer, you don’t really feel at the center of things, for — understandably, as you were talking about that — most of the repertoire is by long dead white males from Europe, you know, so even living white males from America feel a little bit estranged from that. But, you know, but I think that, you know, another thing that you touched on, David, is the fact that so much of what you do is informed by things that you really want your audience to connect with and the community to connect with in extramusical ways. And Mei-Ann, you’ve done a lot of programming in this way, really focused — I mean especially with the Chicago Sinfonietta — that’s very focused on the community in which you are. And so can you talk a little bit about that, and then also about how that differs, maybe, from the programming that you might do with ROCO, or programming that you might do in Taiwan, you know, with different orchestras or other places around the world where you’ve been?

Mei-Ann Chen:

Yeah, sure Derek. You know, part of my, also, love for new music comes from being a young conductor. And, you know, after i won the Malko Competition in Denmark, doors were open like I never envisioned before. And so, often time I was approached to get to conduct a certain program, and I don’t know why they probably heard about, I never said no, so it was one premiere after another. And I’ll share a fun story of my first Swedish experience. I think one of your questions is about the differences of audiences in various continents — I have a fun story later for you. But now, let me talk about, sort of, you know — I love what David talked about, site specific. I mean, we did try to have ChiScape, sort of inspired by Jennifer Higdon’s project with Atlanta Symphony, the cityscape idea. And so we have four composers — let me show you, not this one — can I share the screen again? Let me see if i can do this.

Derek Bermel:

Sure, of course.

Mei-Ann Chen:

No, not that one, sorry. Let me share the right one, a little small screen here. Okay, so we had four young composers: Armando Bayolo, Vivian Fung, originally from Canada, Jonathan Bailey Holland, and Chris Rogerson, both — the Chicago Architecture Foundation actually provided 20-some buildings. You know the Chicago boat tour, architectural boat tours, very famous pre-pandemic, in terms of that’s a must do as a tourist. And so they both, they each took up a building that they feel so inclined to, then wrote something to consist of this ChiScape for us. But we also, I think the biggest, I don’t know if i can jump to this — can you see Project W on your screen? Okay, this is, actually I couldn’t take the whole credit. The musicians, the board, our volunteers, we all came together and said what should we do for our 30th anniversary in honor of Maestro Paul Freeman who founded Sinfonietta in 1987 as the most diverse orchestra at that time in North America. And so the program that he handed the baton to me was a program featuring women composers, so we took that as a hint, and so we feature — I’m gonna scroll slowly, hopefully for you — Clarice Assad, I’ve been a fan of the Assad brothers, and Clarice actually studied in Chicago and now returned to Chicago, so we thought that would be a really fun thing to commission her. Reena Esmail — I have to thank Alicia Lawyer at ROCO for introducing Rena to me, and I’ll talk about ROCO in a second. So Rena actually wrote for us a brand new work and changed the title in the middle of it because the MeToo movement was just so resonating with her, and so we have her change the title to #metoo. You will actually hear her sing the raga that became the piece. Her singing the raga was sort of a high point for me on this recording. Jennifer Higdon, a dear friend, I got to know from Atlanta Symphony. I assisted her Singing Room, for Jennifer Koh and the Atlanta Symphony and Chorus, and so I said to Jennifer after I conducted her Dance Card in Houston with ROCO, I said “Jennifer, could we sign on as a co-commission?” and, you know, Jennifer told me that was the piece flying off her shelf during the pandemic, because everybody wants to do something. It was written for string, there are five movements, you can create a set of whatever movement you choose to, for whatever length you want to. And so there’s also Jessie Montgomery, I should show you. There’s Jessie Montgomery, let me see if I — that’s ROCO, give me a second, I have to, sorry, let me stop the sharing here so I can manage. So Project W, let me, let me share this, give me a second, sorry, for my, for my small screen. This is the actual Project W we did with Cedille Records who has recorded Sinfonia over the years. The African-American Heritage Series are sort of my bible to go to when I was a young conductor working with Atlanta Symphony, Baltimore symphony which has both a large African-American community. So we championed these five Florence Price, the first African-American woman whose work being premiered by a major symphony when Chicago Symphony premiered her symphony in 1933, then Rena, then Jennifer Higdon, and Clarice Assad, and Jessie Montgomery Coincident Dances, really just combining all her wonderful exposure to the various musical styles living in New York, and you know, so many orchestras are performing her Starburst for strings, I was going to actually make that in my Helsinki Philharmonic debut just a few days ago, but unfortunately got postponed to later due to COVID. And so the Project W has really been fun in terms of championing for women. But let me talk about another wonderful way of getting to know new works, because sometimes it come to me as a recommendation, and so here let me show you the fun ROCO recording, which has your work in there Derek! And so this is Visions Take Flight with ROCO, and that’s Alicia Lawyer in the red high heels, and here are the composers: Kareem Azam, Reena Esmail, Teen Murti for string orchestra, Derek Bermel, and your, I have to say your Murmurations, II. Gliding Over Algiers, that is just beyond sublime. I mean, the orchestra just love that so much. Anthony DiLorenzo, Marcus Maroney, concerto for chamber orchestras. And these pieces were chosen because they were the favorite of the ROCO musicians, and all pieces commissioned by ROCO, so I want to say, you know, kudos to Alicia Lawyer and ROCO for having commissioned over a hundred new works in their short 16 years of seasons. And so, for any new composers out there, Alicia, sorry I’m doing this to you, hey, send your pieces to ROCO and you may get programmed.

Derek Bermel:

Well and, ROCO is an interesting model because it’s run by its musicians. Its founder, Alicia, is a musician in the orchestra, and there are a number of places like that which are actually not conductor-run: the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra being one, Kyu-Young Kim, Orpheus being another. And, I mean, there are a number of orchestras around the country even — well, I mean, I could go on, but I think it’s an interesting model to consider for orchestras that are not necessarily run by a music director, notwithstanding — I mean, because not everybody—

David Alan Miller:

How do they do that? It must be terrible, oh my God!

Derek Bermel:

Not everyone is like you two, who is so energized — yeah.

David Alan Miller:

So what else, Derek, do people — I gather we have mainly composers on the on the call.

Derek Bermel:

Yeah, well, you know, one thing that people have written in is that they’re wondering about about what happens with programming. Because, for example, you see some of the same names coming up, because, David, you and Mei-Ann, you have programmed and a lot of orchestras have programmed some of these composers on the list. And so the question is, you know, what about, how do you find out about composers nobody else knows about, and maybe composers who aren’t as much in the spotlight, and how do you come upon those programs, and where do you, where have you found spaces for folks who might really just fit your particular interest or your particular taste? David, have you, can you think of someone like that? Or, you don’t have to say any names, but — about your programming, about the way you do programming?

David Alan Miller:

There’s this one guy who, whenever I need a specific kind of composer, I’ll be like, I need, you know, latinx, the composer’s born between 19, 2003 and 2004, from Guatemala, and he always gave me like a list of like 35 composers — and that person, of course, is you, Derek Bermel! Because you, of course — I don’t want to shift the blame to you and have everybody only contact you, but you’re at the epicenter of all this stuff, and it’s amazing to me how every year whenever I ask for any kind of a list, you always have a lot of new people, and so I would almost throw that back at you. But I would say, you know, you are the, you’re the gold standard of the people I’m always in touch with. And having now done this for many years, and I’m sure Mei-Ann has the same kind of thing, there are just a great number of people I go to for guidance. Really just, not even to tell me who exactly I should be commissioning, but to sort of tell me, you know, who they think is interesting, which of their students have emerged. I actually had this funny experience with Aaron Kernis, my last time trawling for composers, I wrote to Aaron as an old friend of mine who teaches at Yale. And he sent me a whole list of composers, and I said, “None of these are your students at Yale!” He said, “Oh yeah, no, we just were going through, you know, candidates and these people looked really good.” And I was like, “Well, why wouldn’t you send me your students?” So. “I thought maybe you knew my students.” And so it’s kind of, but I mean, I have this —

Derek Bermel:

After all that Yale tuition?

David Alan Miller:

Yeah, I know. But he eventually, I insisted that he send me a bunch, and he has wonderful students, as does Chris Theofanidis at Yale and all the Yale teachers. There are a lot of schools where different, you know, composers of my generation or your generation or even the older generation, you know, teach, and I just know they have wonderful students, And they’re, you know, they’re the obvious schools like USC, and Michigan, you’re wonderful, and alma mater, and Yale and Princeton and, you know, places like Juilliard and Curtis et cetera et cetera, Peabody. So I kind of trawl a very large, as large a world as I can, and I’m always in touch with, you know, all the other people in the industry: fellow conductors and artistic administrators. And so I’m able to kind of access a really broad network. But it is true that it’s very hard for someone who’s maybe not inside that network to break in. So, you know, in the old days you would just send your material, but I do think it’s really important, especially if there are young composers out there listening who want to know, like, how to access these networks, you really have to just be very friendly. You have to meet a lot of people and you have to go to concerts and you have to introduce yourself and you have to apply to different programs and you have to go to workshops and you have to really try to have people know who you are and what you do. And then hopefully they’ll help spread the word for you, or with you. So it’s very imperfect science, but, you know, my feeling is if you trawl widely enough — and actually the people who are most useful to me now are all these wonderful young composers we have commissioned, so you know, I mean, for example, there’s this wonderful Australian — not to name names but I’ll give you this as an example — Jack Frerer is a wonderful Australian-American composer who went to Juilliard and I guess now is at Yale, and he’s a wonderful composer. We’ve commissioned him. But he’s given me all sorts of wonderful names. He mentioned Tyson Davis to me, who’s just just starting out, pretty much, at Juilliard, and we commissioned him. And so, I actually talked to a lot of the emerging composers to tell me who their friends are and who they’ve heard, and that really broadens it a great deal as well.

Derek Bermel:

Yeah, and Mei-Ann — I mean David, I love how you describe your reaching out to a lot of people in the field. You know, Mei-Ann, how do we get beyond just academia for suggestion, or, you know, just other people who are also composers or conductors in the field, to expand, you know, the possibilities of symphonic music and concert music? I mean, how do we, how do we also draw on other genres of music and other potential — I mean, this is a tricky question because writing orchestra is a hard thing and not everybody can just, you can’t just kind of decide one day, “Okay, I’m gonna write an orchestra piece.” I mean, you need a lot of training or else you have to work with an orchestrator. But have you, you’ve been addressing this question sometimes as well, right?

Mei-Ann:

Yeah, I think, you know, to follow up on David’s recommendation, I think, I can’t stress how important word of mouth is in terms of, you know, networking. Because, you know, for example, one of our, one of our composer in residence this year is Kathryn Bostic, who became the first African-American woman admitted to the Hollywood Academy of Motion Pictures, and so she came to me through one of our musicians who have heard her August Wilson Symphony footage with Pittsburgh Symphony. And so I think I could say this, maybe same with David — we conductors, we have a lot of curiosities. I mean, I’m daily, I’m checking out composers that I don’t know, and I’ve, I would habitually google other orchestras just to see what people, what names pop up that I don’t know. And so I will highly recommend all the composers out there, whether you have started writing for orchestra, it really doesn’t matter to me, because I go from just listening to a whole bunch of things when I encounter a new name. I don’t just look for, “Does this person has an orchestra music?” I want to go from, I want to understand this person and what’s unique about this person, so I just listened to what I could find. And so, I want to say, you know, of this digital age, the website is so important. We just did a website session for all our fellows — instrumental, conducting — because I think that’s how people are surfing and find your information. And at the same time, if you could also have any bridge — I don’t know if there’s still call for score — I remember when I was music director with Memphis Symphony, we did a call for score in partnership with American Composers Forum, and we have decided that it’s going to be no names. Meaning, we’ll just receive the scores, and we — I actually play the recordings or MIDI file with the circle of friends, we have a Mei-Ann circle of friends. Everybody contribute a thousand dollars to be in this friend circle and most of them are not musicians, and they didn’t come to symphony because they loved Beethoven — it was more of a social gathering. And so, we literally played the MIDI file — and only I could read the score — without knowing any names of the composers. And so, there was one, there was one piece that didn’t make the cut, because it has to be connected to Dr. King’s speech for the Dream Project. One score stood out, I didn’t know who the composer was. I saved the score because it was so interesting, and lo and behold — this was, I wanted to say, 2013 — and, you know, I had to move all my score to Chicago and I kept that score. I didn’t know who the composer was. I kept that score, and lo and behold, about three years later when Alicia at ROCO invited me to do this debut album with them, it was Karim Al-Zand’s Visions from Another World. I mean, that’s just — when the piece is good, you have to be patient. If you have the patience, it’s going to get placed somehow, you just have to have faith. And you know, I have actually known that work much longer than, probably, given the actual score, pretty score from ROCO. But I think it’s important for young composers to know. And I should say this — I’ve been bombarded with composers, some messengers and all that. I’m not sure that’s the most effective way, because I think when there’s not, when we get too many, we ended up just not able to see everything. So I will say, you know, treat this relationship also, like, with common sense. Start with your web page, but also find — start to build networks with friends that you know. It’s amazing how many classmates I run into. Derek, you and I at U of M. But also, every orchestra I walk into, there’s someone that I went to school with. So start building your network that way, and maybe start with small. Like, if someone really believes in your work, cultivate that. Write for that person and have that person start to champion your work. And if you have inner patience and keep working at it, I would say bake bread in every oven.

David Alan Miller:

Right, and I would say — Mei-Ann that’s perfect — I, just to follow on that, I’ve been so impressed in the last 10 or 15 years at the incredible blossoming of all these composer collectives. I mean it happens particularly in New York and Brooklyn and — but I know that, you know, people who are done with school or out of school who didn’t go to school, you know, are banding together. The pandemic put a little wrinkle in it, but I hope it’s all going to flourish again, and I think it did virtually during the pandemic as well. But there’s so many wonderful groups of young composers who aren’t waiting. You know, it’s very much like the model that caused Bang on a Can to come into existence. When you hear David and Michael and Julie talk about it, you know, they say, “Well, we just decided we couldn’t sit around waiting for the New York Philharmonic to discover us, so we created our own festival.” And I think young composers today are really taking that idea to heart. And it’s true that the more you create and the more you share with other creators, and there’s this wonderful collaborative feeling between composers that’s not so competitive anymore, I think, and that’s so healthy. So I think the more different kinds of networks — as she says, bake bread in as many ovens as you can — the better. And then you know you’ll always be successful, I think, if you’re diversified enough.

Mei-Ann Chen:

May I share one of my favorite projects that I have seen you do, David? May I share this, the Sleeping Giant Collective? I mean, that’s pretty mind-boggling, because, I think, I always think of composer — sorry, let me scroll slowly — I always think of composers as individual mind, and they only care about his or her own work. But when I saw this, it was like, “Wow, how did they do it?” And so — I don’t know if I blow it big enough, you know, for everybody to see. Do you want to talk about that at all, David?

David Alan Miller:

Just briefly. This was a group of guys who met each other at Yale. Sadly, they’re all white males of a similar, I guess socioeconomic bracket. These days, they could never have succeeded. But back then — whenever that was, eight years ago — they, when they finished school, they all moved to Brooklyn and became this cooperative called Sleeping Giant. And I had played, you know, a lot of Ted Hearne’s music, and so we developed a three-year residency that was just a wonderful thing, that Meet the Composer, at the time I guess it was called, funded. And they did these amazing, amazing three years of programming with us individually and together, and it was — and we did a whole reimagining of the Mozart Requiem where each of them re-, each of them orchestrated a different movement from the Mozart Requiem, and we just did amazing programs with them. It was quite extraordinary. And, you know, they’re all becoming rather celebrated composers, not just Andrew Norman and Timo and Ted and Robert and Jacob, I mean, they’re all, — Chris — they’re all fantastic.

Derek Bermel:

Well there’s — yeah, I think you’ve both been quite creative with all these different kinds of projects that you do. You know, there were some questions about, you know, there — it’s interesting, because the question about identity comes up a lot, and there’s a question about identity from both sides, about how to kind of balance things, and how you find composers and what do you value in music, and, I mean, it’s — we probably don’t enough have time to get into all these things. But I’m, you know, I’m not so sure that it’s an either/or proposition — I don’t want to answer this for you — but I think that there’s really space for everything, and of course, you as conductors have to be thinking about so many different things: about audience, about, you know, about, of course about the music that you might love, but also just about — you have you have so many aspects: the musicians who are playing, you have to think about the board, you have to think about where you stand in a kind of historical sense, in the, you know, in the orchestra world. And do you think that that you can and are having an effect on larger issues in the orchestra world? And what do you think, so, you know, there was a question about what’s the best way to have an effect on the larger, kind of, orchestra world, if you feel that there needs to be more representation, if you feel that perhaps maybe there’s becoming too much representation of young composers as opposed to older composers, who as they said, may not have PR agents or may not have connections to academia? What do you think about these questions?

David Alan Miller:

Let me just say, before I say anything — I was dating myself, it’s New Music USA. I was sort of grasping for Meet the Composer, I don’t even remember if it was still called — but it’s what is New Music USA that gave us the amazing funding for that Sleeping Giant Residency. So God bless them, they’re such a great institution. I just want to answer that briefly by saying, now that I’ve been doing this for a few decades — a number of decades — I really believe in practice, and by practice, I mean the Buddhist meaning of practice, not like sitting at the piano doing scales, that you don’t — you know, you can preach and preaching is fine, and we should all, you know, stand by what we believe, but in my experience, you do what you believe is right and you keep doing it, and then eventually, you know, maybe history will catch up with you. And if you don’t do it, if you just talk and don’t do, then you’re not going to have any impact. But one of the things I feel most wonder-, most proud about in Albany — and it’s not just me, it’s the Albany Symphony, and the culture of the place, and the musicians, and the board, and the leadership and all that, and the community and the public — you know, we just love living composers and love our American composers and love to discover new composers and hear new voices. And so we just practiced that, and what I’ve been so delighted in in the last few years especially — apropos what Mei-Ann was just talking about about more representation of composers who are women and composers who are people of color — is that, well yes, obviously it’s become a really central issue, as it should have become 50 or 100 or 200 years ago. And maybe there’s a little bit of, you know, going over extremely strongly in that direction, so suddenly all the white male middle-aged composers are a little neglected, but that’s an understandable corrective. But to me, just believing in what you do and doing it as passionately as you can. And, you know, we’re all in the business of trying to bring great music into the world or trying to bring great spiritual musical activities to the world, and as long as you’re doing that it’s powerful. I’ve always been — we were having that discussion earlier about about, you know, you were saying Derek, you know, a lot of composers feel, living composers feel peripheral, like you barely get on the program and you barely get rehearsed and you barely get this and barely you really get that. To me, that is a recent, I mean looking historically, that’s a recent phenomenon. I mean in Mozart’s time, who would ever have thought of playing a piece by a dead composer? I mean that was just a weird-ass idea. And that continued really through the beginning of the 20th century, that, you know, dead composers were considered kind of a novelty for much of the time, and it’s only in this century — and obviously there are lots of market forces and things like that that have caused the absolute flip, where now the living composer is the peripheral one. But my whole agenda and Albany’s whole agenda has really been to flip that back to where it should be. Exactly — just like I was talking about, you know, build a concert around Joan Tower. You know, Joan Tower shouldn’t be the opener for a concert about Berlioz. It should be, you know, Berlioz shines light on Joan Tower. So I think it’s about practice.

Derek Bermel:

That’s wonderful. And, I mean, Mei-Ann, you can answer to that, but I was also curious just to tell us about interesting Taiwanese composers and what you’ve been doing. Obviously, you have that beautiful hall behind you, as we remarked on at the beginning. And, you know, what are some of the things that you might be doing there, or plans that you have over there as well?

Mei-Ann Chen:

Well actually, if I may, I’ve championed Taiwanese composers, especially when I guest conduct in Taiwan, but I have, actually the Taiwanese orchestra are really interested in me bringing American composers, because, you know, they have plenty of other conductors in Taiwan that could champion for the Taiwanese representation. And so I’d like to just mention, you know, and I have your season queue up as well David, so if you want to talk about that as well—

David Alan Miller:

I think we’re running out of time.

Mei-Ann Chen:

I wanted to bring everybody’s awareness of something that I pushed forward during this pandemic. Because we almost lost our commissions, and so talking about what David was just talking about, actually we built our annual MLK concert around this new commission. It was by Joel Thompson, who wrote the Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, and when we performed that two years ago during our MLK concert, I was shocked to find out we were only the third performance, since it was already written, I think, back in 2015 or 16. And so I approached Joel and said, “Our audience loved your piece. Could we create something that’s close to your heart, given what’s happening?” You know, there was a black lives movement happening, and I do — we had a change of CEO, and our new CEO happened to be a childhood friend with Joel Thompson. And so one thing led to another, so he created this very powerful new piece, breathe/burn: an elegy, in memory of Breonna Taylor, featuring cello and orchestra. And, you know, our young rising star Ifetayo Ali-Landing, a daughter of our longtime founding member in the violin section — she, I’ve done her a great favor, she’s going to pitch this piece when other orchestras approach her and I’m going to pitch this piece to other orchestras I’m guest conducting. And so I think one of the issues I have found, so many pieces get played once, but I think this is a time and age where, obviously, commissioning fees are challenging, especially post pandemic. If orchestras could come together and we perform some of each other’s work, I think that will really help out some of the composers in terms of getting a second and the third performances.

Derek Bermel:

Wow, that’s incredible. You know, one thing that I actually discussed with Joel about this piece, because ACO is is performing at the Apollo Theater next year, Joel’s Seven Last Words — but you know, one thing that we discussed was that his work has choir and his work is written with triple winds, and that makes it very difficult for orchestras to program. And so I guess one easy programming thing is that some composers have multiple versions — not only some of the dead white male European composers — have multiple versions of their pieces because they knew that, you know, they might actually get the chance to to have them performed multiple times in different scenarios. And so I think that’s something composers can really think about, just what you mentioned. And maybe this new piece of Joel will be even more adaptable for other orchestras to be able to do. And I love that you’re doing this during the pandemic. David, do you, is there anything else you want to tell us about what you do? Because Albany’s been doing quite a bit during the pandemic.

David Alan Miller:

Yeah we’ve been just doing our regular subscription concerts. We just redesigned the season in August, and, you know, basically we’re doing them all with the orchestra co-locating but small orchestras but they’re — Mei-Ann, you’re so —

Derek Bermel:

There’s your publicist.

David Alan Miller:

I need to send you ten thousand dollars tomorrow for all of this, that’s amazing. So there’s our season, and what we did was, you know, we did a lot of arrangements of wonderful — like, we did a Mahler 4 that was just gorgeous, by an English guy named Farrington who has a whole bunch of of transcriptions, and Rachmaninoff third in this really compelling version for 25 musicians. But on every concert, as you’ll see — I mean, the next one’s coming up, we’ve got a world premiere by Tanner Porter and George Tsontakis, we were supposed to do the requiem, a new work that we’re doing next season, that — so we subbed in his famous second violin concerto. We’ve got, as you see, on the festival at the end, Nina Shakhar and Clarice and Molly Joyce and Alexis Lamb, and we had some Jessie Montgomery on with Caroline Shaw and Michael Torke with Viet Cuong. And so we’ve got just great, great stuff. The whole season’s been so much fun, it’s been hard for our musicians, as you can imagine, because we’re playing with, you know, between 15 and 30 musicians as opposed to between 50 and 80. So it’s a lot less revenue for our musicians. But we’ve managed to put on just beautiful concerts, and every concert has been built around a world premiere or a major recent new work, and we had Tyson Davis’s exciting new piece, and Carlos Bandera just wrote a beautiful piece for us. And — so lots of exciting stuff. So, we’re keeping the spirit of it all going. We’re playing all these concerts live in real time on the Saturday nights they were originally intended, with a pre-concert talk with the composer and a talk back with the audience doing chat afterwards. So it’s been really, it’s been really great and we’re just excited to be, you know, next year we’re going to be back in the concert hall, but we’ve already made a commitment, our board has made the commitment to spend the many, many tens of thousands of dollars to be able to present our programs virtually as well as live, so we’re going to be doing both next year. So that’s really exciting.

Derek Bermel:

Wow. Well, David and Mei-Ann, I want to thank you so much. Just, it’s so great to hear, and very inspiring, I think, for composers, but also for the rest of our audience. Thank you, audience, for being there for us and for spending this hour with these two great minds. And please look out for an email from us with a link to the recording of this webinar, and there’ll be a post webinar survey, which we may ask you to fill out, and you can check the chat which should have the link. So please take a few minutes to take that survey so that we can tailor our future programs to you. Join us for another webinar on April 21st at 3 p.m. It’s going to be — I should say 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, since people are tuning in from all over the place — for a panel about recording law and licensing. This one will have Chris Campbell, director of recordings at Innova, the lawyer, the music lawyer Ari Solitov, and producer Amir Anishim, who is going to talk — they’re all going to talk to about about the process of making recordings, why they’re important — I. think you probably know why they’re important, but — and all the different things that you can do to make that process easier for you as a composer or a performer in music, or a conductor. Thanks so much to ACF staff, American Composers Forum staff, especially Billy Lackey, thank you Billy, thank you Laura Kreider, who’s here with us on this production, thank you to Damian Strange, thank you to Vanessa Rose at the American Composers Forum, and thank you to all the staff at ACO: Aiden, Melissa, Lindsey, Jade, all my colleagues, Kevin, they’re doing great work. And thank you so much, David and Mei-Ann. This panel will be recorded and it’ll be available on ACO’s Youtube and the American Composers Forum’s website. Thank you both so much for sharing your knowledge and wisdom with us, and we’ll look forward to hearing your programs and seeing you back on stage.

David Alan Miller:

Thanks, great to be with you. Great to see you Mei-Ann.

Mei-Ann Chen:

Thank you for having me. Thank you, so great to see everyone.