The U is Silent; We Aren’t Podcast-Episode 2
Where Passion Meets Precision: The Heifetz Experience
It’s often said you can’t teach passion, but we’ve found that’s not quite true. In Episode 2, we sit down with Heifetz Music Institute‘s President and CEO, Benjamin Roe, to discuss how this renowned classical music institute came to welcome the world’s most talented and promising young musicians to the town of Staunton, VA every summer and, in the process, establish artistic identity for performers and the community, alike.
About This Podcast
The U may be silent, but Staunton has a lot to say. Join Visit Staunton as we sit down with inspiring individuals at the top of their craft. We’re chatting about what drives their passion, the actions behind the impact, and a little about the place where they’re making it all happen.
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Transcript
Welcome to episode No. 2 of the the you is silent we aren’t podcast, the podcast by Visit Staunton right here in Staunton, Virginia, where we sit down with, with people of great passion and innovation and hear their story of why and how.And we are so excited to talk to somebody today that really encapsulates all of that, Ben Roe, who is the president and CEO of the Heifetz Music Institute, located right here in Staten. Thank you so much for joining us today. Pleasure to be here.Samantha. Yeah, now you have a long history of working with a microphone and, and television and broadcast and radio and you have a this is like, this is like home turf, yeah, this is a little bit like home turf.Right now I actually host a radio show called Heifetz On Air. And it’s kind of fun to get back in the business cause I was in public broadcasting, as you note, for three plus decades working for National Public Radio in Washington, WGVH in Boston, and WDAV and Charlotte, North Carolina.So, yeah, it’s always fun to come back and be in a studio in front of, you know knobs, dials, switches and microphones. Some people are like, oh, this is intimidating. You’re like, feels like home feels like home that’s right that’s right well, thank you.I’m so glad you’re here. And I guess just to kind of start out, can you give us a little bit of overview, kind of two fold of, of your work? With Heifetz and Heifetz Music Institute as a whole.Well, I’ve been here in Staunton since 2014 and we’re about to go into our 29th season of the Heifetz Institute this summer.And we have been here in Staunton since 2012. And I would say that really the kind of maturation of the institute really happened. It just everything seemed to fall into place once we moved to Staunton, Virginia.We had been in New Hampshire before that and actually started out in Howard County, Maryland, which is where the institute was in its early years.Its first year. Daniel Heifetz, who’s the founder, a cousin of Yasha Heifetz, not the same. So they are related but distantly.And Daniel actually took lessons from Yasha very early on in his career. But he founded the institute in the summer of 1996 and literally had about a dozen violinists who sort of came to his back door.And they had stayed in host housing that has since morphed into, this summer, we will have something like 170 students. They come from all over the world playing violin, Viola and cello. These are all essentially pre professional young artists who play exceptionally well.And of course we’ll get into it, but there’s some things that we do at the Hyde Institute, we think that will really kind of turbo charge their career, um, preparedness.Yes, I would, I would love to talk about that because Heifetz is just like, it is so, no, it’s really not hard to define, but it is something so out of the box from what we think of as, as a, a skill and a music incubator and, and technique and workshop and, and learning program. Given that, I mean, it is many of the top emerging artists from around the world that, that come here to a town of 25,000 people, that’s right. Throughout the summer, they spend their time with us.They work incredibly hard, but, um, you guys really have a different approach to, to learning and teaching these young artists because there’s always this saying that I, I think a lot of people here growing up of, well, you can’t teach passion, right? And you guys say, no, no, that’s not true. Can you, can you talk about like what Heifetz does?It’s so different because you really do, like, you teach the passion, you teach the energy. Well, you’ve really hit the nail on the head.Samantha, I would say first that, that in essence, that these are like young Olympians and that and that in the summertime, Staunton is a little bit of an Olympic village.I mean, we have students who come from 15 different countries, usually about 23, 25 different states. And they’re all here different cultures, different approaches and, you know, different language skills.Yeah. And, and we’re here to tell them that playing your fiddle really well, um, that and$5 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks, right? That it is not, um, a guarantee that you’re gonna have a career. Um, these days, we really have to think about teaching the entire musician.It was a wonderful line that a board member once said about the Heifetz Institute said that the students come in like stick figures and they leave like moving works of art. And that’s really what we’re trying to do is this is the charisma part, this is the passion part is how do you translate?How do you engage an audience? How do you translate those notes on a page and make them come alive? How do you make them relevant and resonate with an audience in the 21st century? So we use a lot of different techniques.This is sort of the secret sauce of the Heifetz Institute. But, but a student that comes to the Heifetz Institute knows that we’re gonna push them outside of their comfort zone. The comfort zone is you go to a classical music concert and you see four guys sitting there and their heads are buried in their stands and they’re playing very well, but it’s not connecting with you. It’s not your fault.That’s what we’re trying to teach these musicians. How do you really get beyond the stage and really connect with an audience? How do you how do you translate the passion that’s already there in the music to an audience? So we work on a lot of different techniques and skills for them to learn.That some of them are quite obvious if you come to your first Heifetz concert, which is really kind of an event, is that we require every student, no matter what their English skills are, no matter what their background is, they have to introduce their piece before they play it. And we work with them on preparing their little speeches and their introductions. And for many of them, believe it or not, that is more terrifying then playing, you know, the Devil’s Trill Sonata, that, that is what, that that sort of gives them cold sweats.To help them get used to it, though, to help them learn about, we even practice things like how do you enter an exit stage? How do you bow? What clothes do you wear?How do you interact with an audience? One thing you also notice is that our performers do not play with music. We require them to play from memory when they’re playing a solo piece. You’ll notice that when they come on stage, they don’t sit down in a nice comfy chair like this. Okay?We let the cello sit on a chair, but the violinists and the violas have to stand while they play because we believe that it’s better for your posture, it’s better for your connection, it’s better for your visibility and engagement with the audience.Cellists actually don’t get away with it that easily because we put them on a platform so that they can be at more eye level with the other performers too. Okay. So one thing that we do in the off season is we build these little cello platforms.Yeah. But we work on a lot of these. We’re really kind of thinking about, we’re, we even think about how quickly we do our stage changes.We’re really trying to think about how a Heifetz concert is just not your ordinary classical music concert. It’s fast paced. It’s engaging. It really is. It’s rewarding.Yeah. And you get to learn about the personalities of these young performers. When we have a student who comes here from Australia and they’ve seen Staunton, they’ve seen the Mary Baldwin sign on our videos, and they say, that’s where I wanna be. I wanna be there under that sign.I wanna be in Francis Auditorium. I wanna be in Staunton cause I hear about the incredible walkability of the town, how it’s only a couple of blocks to go from their dorm down to, we shan’t name names here, but there’s some very nice pizza shops and coffee shops and ice cream shops.Yeah, absolutely. And so they love this. And, and their parents who might be in Taiwan or Korea or Uzbekistan who can see this image of Staunton that they have. They may not know about Charlottesville, but they know about Staunton, Virginia. Sure.Yeah. I love something you said too, because it always stands out to me at any of the Heifetz performances, is the fact that students introduce their work and they take that time.And, um, especially when I, I taught and directed theater, that was something that even, even from the theater side, it always, a lot of times made, made students very nervous, more nervous than the monologue, right in an audition, it was slating their piece, right when they have to come in and say their name, right? Um.And it was always it was something that mattered so much to me as a director is teaching, especially young people in a younger generation, that your words matter, your space matters, your time matters, and how you use that matters for people witnessing it too.And just taking ownership and confidence of that time where they were themselves before the craft. Also it, it really, I think it instills so much in them, especially as they’re, they’re learning and they’re molding in their younger age. Um.So I think that’s such an incredible piece that you guys, you’re not only shaping the musician, you’re shaping the person. And that’s really what it comes down to Samantha. I mean, in essence, you know what excited me about coming to the Heifetz Institute in the first place?When I worked at NPR, I was very fortunate to work with absolute A-list personalities. I mean, I could, you know, have we did a lot of sessions with Yoyo Ma, with Joshua Bell, with Paul McCartney, and with Bob Dylan, Lyle Lovett. I mean, some fantastic musicians. Just a couple, you know, casual name, no, but it was, it’s amazing.Working at NPR was, yeah, a great privilege. And, and I know I have great memories of that, but at the same time, I love. Now I feel like I’m sort of at the head end, you know, that Bach in German means wellspring or foundation. And, and in essence, that’s what we’re doing at the Heifetz Institute. We are seeing these young artists and we’re trying to say, no, you don’t want to imitate Yoyo Ma. We want you to become yourself. What is your artistic personality now? I don’t know about you, but, you know, when I was sixteen, I wasn’t sure I had it all quite figured out. Um.So we’re, we’re in essence challenging adolescence to, as you’re saying, to own their own space, yeah, to become their own selves. Um.And for them, some of that, that’s terrifying, but it’s also incredibly rewarding. And the thing is it’s happening in public, yeah, um, so that it’s true that you can see our, we have scholarship teams. It helps support particular students. So people band together to pay for a scholarship for a student. And so they get to interact with them over the course of the six weeks.And for, it’s no exaggeration to say that for some of these students, it is a transformative experience, yeah, that what happens in six weeks here will stay with them for the rest of their lives. Friendships that they make.I’ve already been to a couple of weddings of people that met at Heifetz. Oh, so, it really is something that we see, is where a little bit of magic can happen.Yeah, I love that, especially coming off of a recent episode. We talk about magic in Staten as a whole here. And it really is, it’s in so many different crevices.I am curious from the technical side, right, cause there may be students listening or parents listening of, of hopeful participants of Heights. What is, what’s the selection process like?Like, what what would make one student stand out more than another when it’s coming to the audition and selection process? Mischief and magic. Nailed it.Yeah, actually, it’s, this was one of the first surprises I had coming to the Heifetz Institute, which is that, um, you know the sort of the in the job application process or people applying to go to a university. It’s like, what the heck, I might just get in.It was astonishing to discover that virtually every applicant to the Heifetz Institute is qualified to come to the institute. In other words, they’ve been playing their instrument for at least a decade, even the eight year olds.But, but, you know, that they’re extremely qualified and sometimes the decisions are agonizing because you’ve got students who, um, they can all play. It’s very rare when there’s a student who’s just like, sort of can’t really compete with at the level that the others do. Generally speaking, we’re looking for intangibles. Sometimes what’s the promise, what’s the potential? But they’re all extremely good players. Um, so, but, but it’s, it’s agonizing because of course, we make people apply year after year and there may be a year where we have a student that was successful in previous years doesn’t quite make the grade this year.So, and of course there’s teacher recommendations. There’s the fact that students who are alumnae who wish to return generally gonna look at them more favorably because they’ve gone through the program and they wanna come back. I mean, that is about the best endorsement you can, you can ask for. Um, but we’re in the throws of it right now actually. So that, that means that it’s really tricky business.And, you know, at being on the front end of it, I have to make the financial aid decisions.And of course, that always is a, it’s tricky, you know, back in my day to just to complain about being old that well tuition was a lot lower, but I would not dream of calling up my college and saying, yeah, I don’t like the tuition that you’re offering me, so I need more money.Believe me that now, as in my role and I am at a certain age, I have to negotiate with 19 year olds about their tuition.Interesting. Yeah, yeah, but I know students are certainly encouraged to even in the audition to like test maybe out of the box materials and, and, and to showcase. Like, okay, can you try try different stuff too, which is always, oh, that’s right.Interesting, that’s right. But so much of what happens is this is I noticed a real change post covid or during Covid. We actually stayed open during Covid. We switched to a virtual institute which was one of the very first festivals to do so. And we wound up with 100 students all studying online. We had nine different time zones to negotiate.It was a real challenge, but we did it. Talk about logistics, oh, the logistics were, I mean, literally our scheduler had three screens open and felt like an air traffic controller trying to figure out who was where.Cause you might have a student who had a lesson with a teacher in the Pacific time zone one week and then the next week the eastern time zone and then another week in European time zone.So it was really it was a huge challenge. What I was gonna say was that the, we noticed a distinct change in the repertoire selections that students were much more interested in kind of exploring different genres and new realms of music. Cause often times they’re coming here and they’re learning to play the classics.And, and there’s something that’s really very stimulating about the fact that you’re hearing a group of 16 year old students and they’re playing a Beethoven string quartet for the first time and they’re playing it at an extremely high level. And there is that there is that palpable visceral sense of discovery that you hear in a Heifetz concert with these students saying, wow, this divorce shot guy, he knew what he was doing. Yeah, yeah, and I am curious from your standpoint too. So I love when Heifetz is in session. It is so fun. Cause a lot of times, not all, many, many students come here on their own and they’re very well protected and guided and nurtured along the way too. But a lot of families join, especially international families will join students for 6 weeks and that’s right.And I love coming in the morning, especially in Staunton because they’re, they’re out, they’re, they’re ready to explore.And there is such a great energy during the Heifetz season at like 7:00am. I love going downtown, so our office is downtown, um, and I’ll swing by somewhere for breakfast and there’s just this like not only a it’s not a busy buzz, right? It’s not when just people are around, there’s an intrigue of people that are visiting or are interested in the community of exploring, of learning, of sharing thoughts and conversation. And there’s just such a great energy when Heifetz is in session. So I guess for you, I’m just curious why, why Staunton why does Heifetz work in Staunton? Yeah, because it, it really, that’s what I say where I think something magical really happened that the combination of the walkability and the distinction that the downtown brings that you’ve got the Split Banana, and you’ve got an olive oil store, and you’ve got antique stores and you’ve got this fantastic French bakery, and, and you’ve got three coffee shops not named Starbucks.I mean, so it’s it, there’s people come here and they go like, wow, this is great. And to your point that we’ll have, we have students sometimes as young as 7 years old. And for any students who are under the age of ten, we require them to live off campus with their parents.They’re really not mature enough to be in a dorm. So, and, and the parents and in this era of telecommuting, they say, oh, okay, so we’ll have a family from Hong Kong and they’ll be staying at a hotel and they’ll be downtown and they’ll have a chance to wander the shops and to use good internet and like, what’s not to like, so it becomes a family vacation, as they’re here with, with their students.And I, I know what you mean though, about that, that energy that when people come here, they almost kind of can’t believe it because it also kind of feeds into that, particularly through a foreign lens of the mythology of small town America. I mean, Staunton really kind of embodies that right?Yeah, you’ve got friendly people, you’ve got nice shops, it’s all very walkable. Um, and for parents who might be nervous about their parent, their students and their sons and daughters going far away, they look at Staunton and they say, oh, what a nice place. You know, it’s not scary, do you guys?Does that play a role in your consideration of how you program or how you run of the relationship with the community? Is that, is the community part of, of how you guys, it’s absolutely part of our marketing.Okay, in, in other words, what we present about the Heifetz Institute, there are some festivals that are either in areas that are a little too urban and, and not considered safe that way or that are way too rural.Yeah, in other words, that you’re kind of locked away in, you know, that kind of our pendulum swing one way or the other. Well, you know, those, those old, for example, we recoil at the idea of being called a summer camp. We are not a summer camp, we’re a summer program.And the reason with that is that the, when people say summer camp, there’s an image of kind of a, maybe a musty old cabin with a screen door and, and it’s not really heated and mosquitoes and you might be by a lake and, but, yeah, and you know, there’s canoeing and, you know, it’s just it’s not quite the same vibe of what we present.I mean, the, we have serious fun, but these kids here are earnestly deadly serious about what they do. When we have some of the best string teaching faculty from around the world who come here and they love coming to Staunton, they love being in the hotel.We like to talk about concierge service for our faculty because the Perfect Circle is the best students want the best faculty.Yeah, the best faculty wanna have good students to teach. So often times, we’ve seen this time and time again where a student will come here, say from Southern California and they study with a teacher like maybe our artistic director Nicholas Kitchen and they say, oh my goodness, that is the teacher I want. And they wind up enrolling at New England Conservatory where he teaches.So there’s a lot of recruitment that goes on as well as kind of students that are potential students at both the, the, undergraduate and the graduate level looking for the next great teacher for them as they try to advance their professional career.So there’s a, there’s a lot of, of factors, but what ties it all together is being here in Staunton. Yeah, let me ask you why classical, why stream classical, why this genre specifically that you guys are in? Well, that is sort of the Vineyard in which we toil, and part of that is that classical music.I’ve been asked this question a lot in my career, and my definition of classical music is a very simple one. It is music that lasts that is music that lasts that is a good line, that is fantastic.Well, and I mean that very seriously, which is music that, that last beyond its own time, beyond its own genre.One thing about Johannes Sebastian Bach is that you can play it on a steel band, you can play it on a xylophone, you can play it on a Jew harp, and it’s Bach, it’s great music. You’re not gonna be able to do that with Britney Spears, and this not, not to take anything away from Britney Spears.But, but there, there is a role for for more ephemeral music and, and that, that we all enjoy it, but it’s hard to imagine.Well, think about 60s music like the Beatles. Beatles songs will go on forever. That is, that’s another in 100 years. That’s all classical music. What Paul Simon writes and Joni Mitchell write is classical music.But if you think of Jerry and the pacemakers, probably not so, and I know I’m dating myself with that reference, but that’s okay. The idea is that there is a durability to it. There, there is a brilliance to the writing. There is an emotional depth to the writing that, that sticks around.So when you are studying and learning, when you are an aspiring musician, there is nothing greater than learning a Beethoven string quartet. Um, and it will reveal itself to you time and time again after you play it.And you can play a pop record for three minutes and you, you can know, cause I do, and I know every chord and I know every lick. You can play a Beethoven quartet and will never quite sound the same way twice.And that is where the whole kind of magic comes in of playing in a string quartet or discovering and what these teachers spend so much time and the students spend so much time practicing is maybe you hold that note here, maybe you stretch that out here, maybe you make that staccato and not so legato that there are so many different interpretive ideas that can go into a piece of music. And that’s different than being a studio producer when you’re trying to get just that exact right sound.There’s a great story about Ray Charles. And you think about Ray Charles, a brilliant musician, but he would be doing take after take of something like Georgia in my, on my mind and in every take, he would put the same hitch in his voice and the same wail of agony, cause, you know, he worked on it.And, and that’s where you hear this, this great recording. Um, but one reason why it’s a studio recording and not a live recording is because there’s one sound that people wanna hear.So many times people will go to a pop concert, and they’ll be disappointed. Because they wanna hear that, that, that hit song exactly like the record.They want to hear exactly like the record, which is often times almost impossible to do. And this is where we have, you have those scandals when when basically you’re, you’re hearing somebody play live, and it’s 98% pre recorded sure, and 2% live.Yeah, it’s the combination of, okay, yeah, the performance and the art. Where does, where does that come together yeah, and I think, I think that’s what you guys do very well.And you mentioned it a little bit a minute ago. I like to talk about it, cause I think it’s something that makes people ask all the time, like, what makes Heifetz so different?What, like, why is it one of one basically, yeah, what you guys do, but you guys work not only with the individual performers. And, and I know they all have a lot of one on one time, but they are also partner together in different dynamics too. Do you wanna talk?That’s right. Well, so that we are, you know, there’s some festivals you can go to and, and you will play in an orchestra and you can be sort of just a face in the crowd.It is impossible to hide of the Heifetz Institute. We really focus a great deal of care and attention on each individual student, and I’ll give you a couple of examples to, to your question.Every student that’s enrolled plays has solo opportunities and chamber music opportunities, and usually in a string quartet, although in the juniors, it could be different combinations.But the idea is for them to focus both on playing solo and to be performing collaboratively in a chamber ensemble, which is a whole different kind of skill set. Um.What we’re not though is an orchestra. So the only time that you hear everybody playing together is the very last concert when we put everybody together and we call it the Heifetz band and we play a piece that will just kind of melt your face it’s so amazing to hear everybody playing together.Yeah. Um, but this is again, that kind of individual focus. We do something here which is unique among every single festival in the world, which is that we, everybody has dress rehearsals.But what we have is something that we call tape and listen where you might be. You’re gonna play the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto on Friday’s stars of tomorrow concert. But before you do that 24 hours beforehand, you go into the empty auditorium, you and your pianist and you play it.And then the technician, the multimedia producer, hands you a little SD card and you walk downstairs into the artistic director’s studio and there the two of you review that performance together. So the artistic director sits with every single student before they play and reviews their performance. And, and it isn’t like just giving notes, it is letting the student imagine themselves presenting that and how that looks and getting used to seeing how they are actually conveying.So they can say, you know, I really was too loud in that part or man, I really kind of rushed through that that section, didn’t I? And then they talk about it a little bit, but the confidence of that gives them walking into the auditorium the next night is incalculable.And but it also shows you, though I think about the commitment on the part of the artistic director to every single student to do that. And you just said you have 100 and, yeah, change. It’s kind of, yeah, it’s kind of amazing, that is incredible.Yeah, it’s not just you’re part of this, yeah, you, yeah, are part of this also.Yeah, well, to give you a contrast, so when I was 15, I cared about two things. I cared about music and I cared about hockey. So I went to Phil Esposito Hockey camp cause this was the days of the Big Bad Bruins and hockey was the big thing.Yeah, so I went to hockey camp, and it was the Phil Esposito Hockey Camp. And on the very last day of the hockey camp, Phil Despresito showed up to say, you go get them guys. And that was the extent of Phil Despresito’s involvement in the hockey camp. That does not happen at the Heifetz Institute. No, it’s not just a video that plays.Yeah, well, there’s something else too. That, that I think is, is relevant in this day and age.And sort of talking about that because you ask me why classical one thing, I mean, so yes, you’ve got these people playing on 100 or 200 year old instruments, playing music written 200 or 300 or 100 or 50 years ago.And why? Well, for one thing that is developing AI, developing artistic intelligence there you go. It’s something that can’t be replicated.Yeah, right, the, the, the effort that goes into doing that, um, is the value of that translates. We hope that they’re gonna have careers in music. But we’ve had several people go to law school who have attended or taught at the Heifetz Institute.They say the law school is easier, sure, because in one sense, what you’re an, actually a lot of them do coding too, because you learn, you have to learn what you know, learning a, a great piece of music is learning about the patterns, learning about the scales, learning about the slight variations. And those slight variations, of course, are, that’s like reading case law. Oh, they changed the tense here. Oh, they thought this. Right. So, in some ways, it’s teaching a kind of intelligence and knowledge that can’t really be done any other way. But I think that’s the magic of the arts. And in many different sectors of the arts, whether it be music or if it’s theater, or if it’s paint, whatever sector it may be, there’s so many. Writing is, there’s so many that the essence is first listening and listening to yourself, listening to another person, and then there’s the component of action and reaction. Yeah, that, that’s something you don’t always get directly in a textbook, but it takes all these things you learn and puts it out into the world. And how do you respond to it when it’s in the world? Yeah, and, and I think it’s such, I’m always an advocate from, like, there’s art will teach, teach your young people about life, and it will, and it will prepare people for life.And I think that’s why we see it translate so well into other fields. Even if they don’t go into music or performance later, why they are succeeding in, in law or coding or medicine.Yes, because they’ve, they’ve grown up putting their work out into the world, listening and being prepared for how do you send it out, how do you take it when it comes back?And let us not forget that, that little word discipline, you know, that whether it’s you know, practicing your scales I remember once we, we take students out on tour and, and of course we do a little Q&A and they’re playing with schools and other things.And I remember at one time, a student said, well, did your mom force you to practice every day? I said, well, they also force me to brush my teeth, and they force me to have a meal, and they force me to go to school.So, yeah, but, you know, you know, so part of this though is learning those, you know, when people ask me for advice, I mean, the one, the few things that I say is find something that you love to do, find, because you’re gonna spend too much time doing it, so you better love it, yeah, right, so that you’re just the hours that you need to invest to be good at anything.Yeah, and so that you want to be, be understanding what it takes to do that. There are many cases of students who have great natural talent, but when 90% of it comes for you really easily, finding that other 10% people don’t sometimes understand how to do that.And part of what we try to teach at the institute, we didn’t even get into this yet as we do something called performance and practice analytics, where we try to help out students who hit those walls. Because if you’re an aspiring musician, you’re gonna hit walls, you’re gonna hit all kinds of them and you have to learn how to get past that plateau, how to relieve the tension in your body, which is why we teach yoga.You know, there’s, there’s a lot that goes into and there’s a lot that goes into trying to forge it’s a difficult line of business and, and for many that do pursue it professionally, the aspect that you are, your business also, right, there’s, there’s that component. So you guys really do look at it from every dimension, almost. I mean, I get to come sit in the performance and enjoy it and say, wow, that was amazing. But behind the scenes, you guys really are looking at it from every single dimension of what goes into it and trying also not to overload them. No, which is, that’s a fine line, I bet. Oh, it’s, it’s a very, very fine line. Yeah, the, the students will come here and they will be, they’ll be worn out by the end. Yeah, but, I mean, in a good way, but, but it’s, it is a challenge to all the things.I mean, people say you should really do a program about X I said, yes, we, we could do that, but then we’d have to not do something else, and that’s always, and that’s always a challenge but one thing that is true about the Heifetz Institute that we’re proud of and encourage you to come and hear it for yourself is when you come to the Heifetz Institute, you’re going to play. You know, that, that sometimes it, I think of the analogy of like pushing the little chicks out of the nest, right? That, um, we, in the course of a summer of six weeks in the summer will do 50+ concerts. So the students come here knowing that they’re gonna get really great shots at playing and they want to. There are some, some places where that are not as performance intensive, but for us, all of these things that we’re teaching, they come together in the concert hall.That is really the sort of the crucible where this, we, we have the instrumental lessons with these, these highly sought after teachers, we have all the communication classes we’ve been talking about, like the public speaking and the yoga and the movement, the improvisation, the freedom of expression, those all come together in this generative program in the concert hall so you can practice your speech in front of me in class.Great. Now you have to go do it in front of an audience. So that really is, for us, is why it’s so that’s, again, sort of the special sauce of the Heifetz Institute. And I think what a, what a great opportunity for our community. I mean, we are so fortunate. Again, this is a town of 25,000 people. It’s a very artistic town, but it’s still a small town. And between Heifetz, between Staunton Music Festival and many other Staunton Jams, which is a different style, but there’s so many opportunities for the community and, and visitors. I mean, you don’t have to just be local to participate and as an audience have that performance. And you guys do an amazing job of the accessibility amongst it to have to have that in front of not only the performers but also our community really instilling us that we can enjoy this great music because there’s paid performances, there’s free performances, there’s daytime, there’s evening, there’s weekend, I mean, so many performances throughout the stretch that, um, I, I really do, I think because sometimes we, we talk about this with Shakespeare, I mean, we’re fortunate to have Blackfriars here. Sometimes when people think classical or they think Shakespeare for some reason, a lot of times people think like, oh, I’m not worthy to listen to that. And maybe worthy is not the right word, but we think, oh, I’m not experienced enough, or I’m not familiar enough with that style of music, or I, I haven’t studied it or whatever it might be. A lot of times people have this perception. And, and I think a lot of the programs in Staunton, and much credit to Heifetz, also really are chipping away at that perception from an audience standpoint, a community standpoint to say, nope, we are yours. Also Heifetz is Staunton’s, also the doors are open to, to receive and participate in this. Well, thank you for saying that. And you’re absolutely right, which is that there are, there’s, there’s no getting around the fact that there are social trappings around classical music, which have oftentimes worked to the formats, the genre’s detriment, right?That it’s something that you have to have a degree and advanced degree to understand it. And I hear a lot of people, I don’t know anything about music, but it doesn’t prevent them from going and seeing a movie, saying, yeah, it might have won an Oscar, I didn’t like it. Or they might go to an art show and say, yeah, might be Van Gogh, I hate it, right? But somehow they feel they’re not qualified to say, yeah, that Beethoven guy doesn’t do it for me, right? Okay, that’s fine. But, but it is why we work very hard leaving. We don’t expect everybody to come into Francis Auditorium or to Black Friars where we do concerts and always come to our door. So there is not a Sunday during the summer when we’re not playing at a church service somewhere with our musicians here in town. It, we go to the Rotary Club, we go to the Kiwanis Club, we go to senior centers, we go to schools for just that reason that we’re gonna bring the music to people who otherwise might not hear it. We also do a program at the public library. And, and what’s interesting is that the music itself, particularly with young people, with kids, that they don’t have all those barriers, right? They can get excited about the music. They don’t have the question of, am I worthy for art? Exactly. Yeah, they’re like, oh, that was fun. Yeah, and, you know you never know why do we do school programs, because there’s somebody there who’s gonna get, it’s going to light a match with him. It, it. And if you talk to people who are musicians so often, it’s because somebody came, I heard this person play and was like, something clicked. Yeah, so, um, but we very much value what we are in the community. That’s why we have a music shop here too. Yes, I view that as kind of a small d democratic public service, which is that we’ve been talking. We’re a string institute, right, but if you come into our music shop, we’ve got clarinet reeds, and we’ve got, you know, mouthpieces for tuba players. I got some great books for holiday gifts. And, but there’s the listening room as well, so you can all the LP, explore the sounds in there. It’s, it’s an amazing space and it’s really meant to be a community resource. You know. So we oh you know, we’ll get a call from a band director saying, quick, you know, we’re going off to the state regionals and our bassoonist, lost, needs a read. Can you open up? Sure. Yeah, no. So I mean, it’s not a lot of money in it. But the idea is it’s there as a resource so that if you are here in Staunton, you don’t have to drive to Harrisonburg or Charlottesville to get a read for your kid in 7th grade. But it’s also part of this idea of being part of the community. Yeah. I mean, I actually when I was hired by this job, there was a covenant in my contract that I had to live within 20 miles of Staunton. Cause a lot of people viewed, as it’s true in the industry, a lot of people view running a summer festival sort of like asking, asking a teacher, what do they do?You know, during the summer they have a vacation for three months, right? So a lot of people will though they’ll have their regular jobs somewhere and then they will come and run their summer festival in some nice summer location. I’m here year round. We have a full time staff that’s here year round.Yeah, um, and we’re really trying to stay involved and, and engaged with all the things here in the community, which is why we also do, we, our main business, of course, is our summer festival, but we are also, we do a holiday concert.We have Bach around the clock coming up. Um, we do a lot of touring and residencies, to really, sort of underscore both to present professional opportunities for our alums.Because we stay involved with their careers and helping to give them career opportunities and at the same time to really give back to the community.Yeah, I am curious from you for more of a personal standpoint, if you don’t mind asking. Cause I know we’ve touched on different points of your career. I mean, you’ve, you’ve done everything from working in broadcast to radio, in front and behind the scenes. You, you taught and done professor work and now leading an organization and, and, and a, the direction of an organization. I imagine there’s been some lessons along the way. Are there, are there any lessons in particular that really stand out that you, you often share with students or you just carry in general? Well, I mentioned the do what you love. I, I guess the other thing that, and this is sort of part of my own personality, but it’s served me pretty well, is that when a question came up, an opportunity came up, I said, yes, you know, when it was time to volunteer for something, I put my hand up because I wanted to learn. And, and I figured that that would sort of just give me more arrows in the quiver. So I’ve been the person to always step up when there’s a small group meeting, I said, I’ll take the notes, yeah, so I like to be, learn as much as I can about something, and to share that. And I also believe that, that the idea of not doing something casually and being ready to, being ready to say, this is what interests me and absorbed me and this I’m not so good at.And I think you also have not to be afraid of failure. You know, there was that sign, that famous saying by Albert Einstein that the Mark of a genius is that they will tell you their last failure. I was very fortunate when I first came to, to Staunton with the, with the institute is a lot of ideas that we had all seemed to work.We started these happy hours before our Celebrity Series concerts, we started doing concerts at the Black Friars, we started doing these Heifetz Hootenannies on Saturday nights. Just a lot of the techniques and things that we tried seem to click and to, and to resonate with people well, that isn’t always so. And there’s also plenty of things I’ve done which have not gone so well. Um, but you have to be willing to try and to innovate.If there’s anything that I see in all of my, kind of, stops along the way is that it’s always easier to say no and then to say yes. And I like to be the guy that says yes and has to figure out how to do it. Hmm, that’s a good way to put it.Hmm, thank you so much for your time today. I do wanna ask you, cause I know we talk about Heifetz being a summer program, but like you mentioned, it is really year round.So what, what do you guys have coming up? What we have coming up is that something that we do every March, which is a truly to get back to your idea of community, a community event is that we do a 12 hour Marathon celebrating Johannes Sebastian Bach. We call it Bach around the clock.It takes place at Christ Lutheran Church here in Staunton, which has a fantastic organ, beautiful and the acoustics, it’s like all encompassing. It’s amazing, it’s amazing. And and we go from 9:00am to nine PM.It is absolutely free. You are welcome to join us. Come in, come and go as, as you see fit. But, invariably the highlight is for the last hour, we call the cantata hour and my co director, Paul Weber puts together choir. We have an orchestra, we have an organ, and it’s just a, it’s a joyful sound and box music is so wide and varied that, that in the course of 12 hours, you won’t hear the same piece twice.Yeah. And it’s, it’s a, really a fantastic community event. And I’m so amazed to get back to a place of 25,000 people that we can do a truly credible 12 hours of Bach.And yes, there’s a lot of Heifetz teachers and students that are involved, but also a lot of people relates to the Charlottesville Guild of the American Guild of organists.Yes. Um, we have some great choirs locally. We have some wonderful performers from like Garth Newel Festival. So there’s a lot of great music making going on around here and they all come together in this community event.Yeah. And that is March 22nd. It’s always on the Saturday closest to Box’s birthday, which is usually the start of spring too. So it is Saturday, March 22nd from 9 to 9. And by the way, if you want to see the schedule, it is at Bacharoundtheclock.org. Nice. And of course, everybody can continue to follow and check out Heifetz’s Music Institute on your website. There’s full schedules that come out, especially when summer comes because there are performances, the Lord every day, almost just pick an hour and there, there will be one. Um, so great time to keep up with that.But thank you so much for your time, for your insight, for your work with Heifetz.We’re, we’re thankful that Heifetz is here in Staunton and we, we hope students continuing enjoying it, but also realizing that the public, like, what a treat for us that we, we get to have this time too to enjoy the music and the craft and the art from many of the best around the world. So thank you for, for your work and for being here in Saint.And we’re excited for first back around the clock and then, and then summertime. Oh, thanks so much, Samantha. Real pleasure to be here. Thank you. Alright, guys, thank you for joining us for the US silent. We aren’t. We will come to you again soon. Enjoy.
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