♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello, and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
♪ Theme music ♪
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Brianna Matzke,
a pianist, musical director, and music educator based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
You can find the resources mentioned by Brianna Matzke during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
["Tremor" by Brianna Matzke]
I'm fine.
My hands just shake a little bit sometimes.
It's nothing.
These are my hands.
There's nothing wrong.
[She closes a drawer.]
It's genetic.
There's nothing wrong.
[She is pouring coffee.]
No, I didn't have too much to drink last night.
My hands just shake a little bit.
No, I'm not nervous.
I have essential tremor.
♪ Piano music - "Rêverie" by Claude Debussy ♪
I don't notice it at all when I'm playing on the keys.
When I play the piano is when I'm my most authentic self.
My shaking hands
are at the heart of that.
I'm not broken.
Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, I am with Brianna Matzke, who is a pianist, a musical director,
and a music educator based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Hi, Brianna.
Hi. Thank you for having me.
Well, thank you for dedicating a bit of your time in your busy schedule
that I know is very busy to have this conversation.
I always start these episodes by asking
about you, about our guest today.
So would you mind providing a bit of background?
Where did your journey start as a musician?
Thank you.
Sure.
Your introduction to me was a great introduction to what I do.
I wear many hats, but I started my musical life as a pianist.
I grew up in Small Town, Minnesota.
As I was growing up, I was always...
This happens in a small town.
I was always the piano girl in town.
When it came time to choose what to do for going to the university,
I decided to get a music degree, went to the University of Kansas,
which is still in the Midwest, but a very different part of the Midwest
from Minnesota, for my undergraduate,
and got a degree in Piano Performance, and then moved to Cincinnati,
where I started grad school, master's and doctorate here.
I didn't think I would...
When I moved here, I didn't think I would stay in Cincinnati.
But once I got here, got to know the city, I loved it here.
And so once I finished my graduate work, I did everything I could to stay
and was very lucky to find a position at a small liberal arts school nearby to Cincinnati.
That's where I teach now.
But you don't only teach, right?
You do so many different things.
That's right.
My specialization as a performer is what has led me
to all the other work that I do now.
All through grad school, one of the things that I did a lot
was collaborate with the composers who are also going to school with me.
They'd have a new piece that they'd written for piano,
and they needed someone to perform it, to record it, whatever it might be.
And I didn't think that...
As I was doing that in grad school, I didn't think that that would
ever be professionally viable for me.
But then as it came time to finish grad school,
some of my mentors encouraged me to develop some projects that
involved me commissioning new music from composers
and performing that and developing those projects
in a way that was conscious of not only being innovative in an art sense,
but also innovative in how it involved the community.
That work of commissioning composers gradually expanded to commissioning
other artists as well and working with other community organizations.
Just by necessity of being able to make those projects happen,
I learned how to fundraise and how to be an arts administrator.
Over time, I've been asked to step in to leadership roles
in some various arts organizations.
Now, I'm lucky enough to serve as
the executive director for something
called concertnova, which is a chamber music concert series
and collective here in Cincinnati.
I also am the President and CEO of the International Foundation
for Contemporary Music.
Our flagship program is something called the Cortona Sessions for New Music,
which is a two-week summer music educational program for emerging
professional performers and composers working on contemporary classical music.
That happens in the Netherlands every year.
I also - this project of commissioning artists and composers
is called the Response Project.
I'm the Artistic Director of that project.
So yes, I do stay very busy.
concertnova, it has been around for many years, right? If I read correctly on the website.
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
This is our 18th season, which is amazing.
Founded 18 years ago.
The thing that's so interesting to me about concertnova is it was started
with the idea to take classical music out of the concert hall and to put it
in unexpected contexts and to do interdisciplinary collaboration.
At the time when that happened, 18 years ago, they were one of
the only organizations that I know of anywhere doing that work.
Now, that's become a much more common thing.
But when concertnova started, they were on the forefront of that idea.
So where are you going?
What's the typical example of a concert by concertnova outside the concert hall?
When people ask me that question, I don't have an answer for you because
every concertnova event looks different.
If you've been to one concertnova event, then you've been
to one concertnova event.
There's nothing typical about it at all.
We perform in the forest.
We perform at the beer brewery.
We perform in the art museum, on the street corner.
Whatever the idea is behind the music, however we want to bring it
to the community, that's where where we bring it.
Everything's different all the time.
That sounds very nice.
It's really fun.
I just had a meeting this morning about our next season, Season 19.
One of the ideas for a concert is to do a roller-skating rink concert.
(Laughs.)
We'll see if we can make that happen.
What about the Response Project?
What led you to create that project?
I mentioned that a little bit earlier.
I was finishing grad school, and I had done a lot of work
with composers through grad school.
I didn't think it was viable as a professional avenue.
But I knew that also what I had been studying for
my doctoral degree recitals and things like wasn't that interesting to me.
When you get a degree in piano performance, you study Bach and Brahms
and Beethoven and Chopin and Liszt.
Great music.
I love to play that music, but I didn't feel artistically authentic
in performing that myself.
I didn't feel fully myself.
So this was 2014.
In 2013, as I was approaching the end of my studies, I went to a music festival
here in Cincinnati put on by a person
named Bryce Dessner, who's the guitarist
for a rock band called The National, and also a classical composer.
He, for this festival called MusicNOW, brought together
artists and musicians from all genres.
It was sort of... genre went out the window for this.
He just brought together all these musicians he thought were interesting
and put them on the stage together to make music together, performing their own
projects, but also making new projects specifically for that festival.
Maybe it sounds silly to say now, but I really didn't realize
up until I saw that festival that that kind of creativity was possible,
something that was alive, was very relevant, very contemporary, and
irrespective of genre, just existed as a creative product.
I was really inspired by that.
That was where I began to come up with the idea for The Response Project.
It grew from there.
I knew I wanted to work with other creative people
to make something new together.
The model for that generated out of
that initial spark of an idea.
Over time, it started out - The first response project I ever did,
I just e-mailed five of my friends who were composers that I had
worked with before and asked them what they would like to respond to.
They ended up selecting a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen called Mikrophonie One.
Not to get too in the weeds about it, but
it's experimental electroacoustic music making.
They wrote a response to that for me to perform five new pieces on solo piano.
At the end of that project, after I had premiered it,
somebody said to me, Brianna, this could be The Response Project.
This is great. This is a great model. This could be the thing that you're known for.
I hadn't realized that that was what I had made, but somebody else said that to me.
I decided to do another one.
I chose a different response point, a different set of composers, and then
brought in some visual artists for the next one.
Again, it went really well, was able to get some grant funding.
Then I did another one.
And another one and another one.
More people came to me and said, I want to be part of this next Response Project.
That's how it's grown over the years.
It has been 10 years.
It has been 10.
I can't believe it.
So every set of Response Project has its own name or its own setting?
Yeah. Every response project is centered around a pre-existing artwork or pre-existing
idea that I choose as the response point, and all the artists involved
in the project are free to create new artwork in response
to that in whatever way they wish.
Is there one of these pieces?
It's very hard because all of these pieces, you
interpreted them and you gave something from yourself in these interpretations.
But if there is one of these or two of these that really marked you,
what would be these pieces?
Out of all the response projects...
Well, you reached out to me for this because of one of the Response Projects,
my most recent one, the Tremor Project.
That's certainly what comes to mind when you ask this question, because
the Tremor Project is my most personal Response Project by far.
All the other Response Projects were responses to...
We did a response to a Bob Dylan album.
We did a response to the compositions of Pauline Oliveros.
But for this one, Tremor, I asked
all the artists to respond to something about me.
Should I tell the story of Tremor?
Oh, yes, please.
In 2020, I was diagnosed with a neurological condition
called essential tremor.
This is a condition that causes
parts of the body to shake, and
it affects - Everyone who has essential tremor, it affects them differently.
For me, it causes my hands to shake most often.
When I was diagnosed in 2020, I'd been visibly shaking
for quite a while before that.
But once I was officially diagnosed and I knew what it was,
it really freaked me out.
I wasn't sure how to process it, I didn't know how to move forward,
if I should start telling people or if I should keep it a secret.
I was very afraid for my career.
I was afraid of the stigma associated with
having shaking hands as a professional
performing classical musician, and also just the stigma of having
shaking hands in general and what people assume when your hands shake.
I decided that the best way for me to move forward
and process what was happening to me was to do the same thing that I always do,
which is use creativity and collaboration to figure out the world.
I decided to do a Response Project about tremor.
The first person that I called
to develop the idea for Tremor,
once I knew I wanted to do a Response Project, was Molly Joyce,
who had already been a collaborator with me on two other Response Projects.
Molly is a wonderful composer and creative performing artist herself who
uses disability as a creative source
in her work and uses her creativity
to illustrate and illuminate and dispel
misconceptions about disability.
I called her because I knew I wanted to use this project to explore
ideas of ability and disability as it relates to artistic expression.
But I didn't know if my condition
qualified to enter that space.
And I talked with her about it. I said, Can I do this?
Is it okay if I make a project about ability and disability?
She said, Yes, please! Please do this.
She helped me shape it a little bit.
Then I selected, with her consultation, I selected some more composers
to write music for me in addition to her contribution.
I sought out a community organization to work with for visual art for the project.
I'm so lucky they said, yes, the organization who worked with this
is called Visionaries & Voices.
It's an art studio for adults with disabilities here in Cincinnati, where
they can go and be mentored and supported in their career as a visual artist.
It's a wonderful place, and they helped me find five artists to work with there.
I also got to work with a sound artist named Britni Bicknaver,
who lives with a stutter.
She interviewed all of the artists from Visionaries and Voices and developed
these lovely audio interview portraits that have become a part
of the project as well.
Tremor turned into as the final product
a multimedia concert where
I play the piano, we look at the visual art, we listen to the interviews
with the artists, and I talk about the project a bit as a whole.
I've taken that concert on tour around the US.
It was very scary to present this at first, very vulnerable
to admit what I was going through.
I have been just blown away by how people have been reacting to it and
their curiosity and their gratitude.
It's been really wonderful.
Were you able to exchange with,
I guess, the surroundings of these visual artists, for example?
Because being part of a project with multiple artistic practices
is something that they might not see every day or live every day.
Were you able to exchange with the teams who work with them,
with the other artists, and maybe the families, something like that?
Yeah.
The process of developing the visual art component of this was really fun.
I visited visited the space, the studio, for Visionaries & Voices
multiple times, and started out just having personal
one-on-one conversations with the artists, talking about their experience
with art and their disability
and how they related to my tremor
and how they felt that it would manifest in their art making to respond to the fact
that I have a tremor as a musician.
Those conversations were great.
Then from there, the artists listened to some of the music
that I've made in the past
and used that as a creative generation
for their own visual art making.
Then we put all of the art pieces
up in an exhibition here in Cincinnati,
and we invited all the artists to the opening reception for the exhibition.
They got to come and bring their loved ones with them.
We performed some music at the exhibition and shared the
audio interviews from the artists with the audience.
It was really lovely.
Yeah, a lot of interaction.
The composers were there?
The composers were...
No, I don't think any of the composers were at that reception.
The composers for this project, unlike the visual artists, the composers
for this project are located all over the country, and
it was difficult to get them all there for that particular event.
They've been at different performances of this project.
I've met all the composers somewhere along the line,
but they weren't there for that.
So where did you tour with this project?
I've done all over different parts of Ohio.
I got to go to Boston and Vermont.
I've done Chicago, Minnesota, and Kansas City.
I'm so lucky that I was granted a sabbatical for my teaching
at the college this last fall, and that was my project to go on tour.
Those were all the performances that I managed to squeeze in one semester.
I'll be performing it one more time in a few weeks here at the end of...
We're talking on January 20th, and I'll be performing at the end
of January here in Cincinnati again.
I don't have any other dates booked for this project, but
I'd love to continue performing it.
It's certainly worth taking to other parts of the country and world.
We'll see what happens.
Very nice.
Well, you're also traveling outside the States
for the International Foundation for Contemporary Music, as you were mentioning.
This is in Holland for the Cortona Sessions.
That's right.
How did you manage to do that in your academic year every year?
Well, I'm really lucky with that position
that I have a team of people
working alongside me to make that happen.
Everyone really generously gives of their time and energy to support
the administration of that project.
I'd certainly would not be able to do it alone.
No, it'd be impossible.
Can you tell us a bit more about that, the Cortona Sessions,
and also the foundation itself?
Sure. I'd be happy to tell you.
The Cortona Sessions, like I said, it's the flagship project of the IFCM.
It was founded in 2010.
It's called the Cortona Sessions because it used to happen
every summer in Cortona Italy.
It's a program for composers and performers who are interested
in contemporary music to come together and be mentored
in that professional interest.
It lasts for two weeks.
The composers write a brand new composition for a performance premiere
at the sessions, and the performers come with interest in collaborating
with the composers on the premiere of those works.
One thing that makes us stand apart is
we offer a conducting track of study
as well, so young conductors can come and be mentored.
There's very specific skills that come along with conducting contemporary chamber music
that we mentor them in.
We also offer a track of study for preformed chamber music ensembles
who want to specialize in contemporary music to come and study with us
and be mentored and coached, not only in their music making, but also
on the more business side of what it takes to run a chamber music ensemble.
One thing that we pride ourselves on
at the Cortona Sessions is...
Our focus is on artistic excellence, absolutely,
but we never sacrifice the feeling of safety,
welcoming, warmth, friendship, compassion
for the sake of some artistic ideal.
Our focus is on community.
My first interaction with the Cortona Sessions back in 2018,
I came as their resident piano fellow, so I was more on the student side of things.
I was so surprised to find that the faculty at the Cortona Sessions,
they didn't hold themselves separate from the students.
It wasn't like this hierarchical feeling where it's faculty up here and students
down here, and we must pay homage or something like that.
It was not like that at all.
It was a feeling of collaboration and mutual support, mutual interest.
We're all learning from each other.
The only thing that sets the faculty apart is just
that they've been doing this longer.
I found that so helpful and welcoming and supportive.
I have continued to try to operate in that spirit, and I'm really proud that
we continue to offer that spirit of community.
How many applicants do you take each year?
Our program has room for about 45 people.
That breaks down to three or four
preformed ensembles, about 12 composers,
two or three conductors, and then the rest are performers.
The instrumentation that we focus on is what's known as the bureau ensemble.
That would be flute, saxophone, clarinet, violin, cello,
percussion, piano, and voice.
Very impressive.
Thank you. It's a really interesting challenge to run a program like that because
I'm talking about issues of welcoming and
trying to create a feeling of safety for
as many identities as we possibly can.
It's difficult to...
Nobody can ever do that perfectly.
We can always try to do better.
But from a financial standpoint, making a summer program of study
like that financially accessible to people is a continual challenge.
There are not many institutions out there who are interested in
supporting a program like that financially.
It just is not the priority of a lot of foundations or philanthropists
for whatever reason.
But it does cost money to run a program like that.
That's been an ongoing challenge.
It's the financial side of the accessibility.
Well, yeah.
Especially right now, you have someone who's coming to the game who is not
really fond of arts, your new president
who is really today as we are speaking.
You know, I was so grateful that
we decided to schedule this interview
on Inauguration Day.
For me, it's a welcome distraction.
I'm not focusing on those ceremonies right now.
Very good.
Well, I have also a question about you as a pedagogue, as a music educator.
So I will...
You mentioned that you have this tremor.
As an educator, how did it change your own education practices or
your conversations with the students, maybe?
Did it change something?
Oh, that's a really interesting question.
I've never thought about that before.
Here's what I can tell you it did change for me.
I'll have to think about the educator part of it.
But when I started the Tremor Project,
I admittedly had not directly
interacted with ideas of disability
or research around disability,
really at all, not very much at all.
I had a wrong belief in my head
before I started the Tremor Project,
and this was wrong, but I really did think
that people who lived with disability,
it was a firmly defined category.
There are people with disability and people without disability.
It was separate categories that could be defined.
As part of that separateness, I think I thought that there was some outreach
that needed to happen to connect those two separated categories.
But what I discovered is actually disability is a part of everybody's life,
and there's no separation at all.
It's a spectrum of a sort.
But I realized how closely we all live with it every day.
It's just these unjust, poorly designed social structures and things
that separate us from each other.
And so I guess as an educator, that realization,
perhaps over time, it's changed how I
approach my students just to realize
you never know what somebody is going through
internally, in other parts of their lives, whatever it might be.
You don't know when there's neurodivergence or chronic pain or somebody else
in their family who's dealing with things and they're a caregiver.
I think I just operate with a different baseline of compassion and understanding
as a result of doing this project.
It's too bad that I didn't realize that before, but I'm glad
it brought me to that realization.
I hope that this project is bringing
other people to that realization as well.
Also, I think that with the conversations you must have had with Molly Joyce,
who's really working on the idea of duality,
of how do we conceive disability,
the part that is working vs the part that is not,
the part that we say vs the part that we don't say.
She does such an amazing job in trying to conceptualize that
into her music compositions.
As a musician then,
more than as a pedagogue, as a music educator,
these conversations must have been the triggering point of you trying to change
your own conception of disability, right?
Yeah.
Once I started telling people that I have essential trauma, one of the questions
that immediately comes up as the next question that they have
when I say, Well, I have essential tremors.
People always say, Oh, my gosh.
Well, how do you play piano then?
How? That must be really difficult.
And my answer is actually,
it's not that difficult
because I live with it every day.
I'm never not shaking.
If the tremor is affecting my artistry,
I don't really know that it is because
I'm just not aware of it because I don't know what it means to play piano without shaking hands.
It's possible that if I woke up tomorrow
without the tremor, I would have to
relearn my artistry and develop a new approach to the piano.
That would be actually more difficult than just living with the tremor.
One of the composers for this project is this wonderful woman named Adele -
Adeliia Faizullina, who's a blind from birth composer.
When we were chatting about the project, she said to me, Well, you know, Brianna,
it's not like when I wake up in the morning, the first thing
I think is, Oh, no, I'm blind!
You know... (Laughs.)
Most of the time, these conditions,
we don't think about it.
The difficulty comes in when the world is not able to welcome us,
even though we're fully comfortable in our own bodies.
Again, that's another point that I'm trying to illuminate with the project.
When it comes to performing and working
in classical music, specifically,
there's an obsession with virtuosity in classical music.
I hate the way that it's traditionally
defined as physical mastery, playing
faster and louder than anybody else.
I think that's boring, and I think it's a harmful way to look at mastery.
It separates us from humanity, I think,
and I'm much more interested in a virtuosic -
a virtuosity of expression and authenticity
and vulnerability and heart-to-heart connection through the music.
Anyway, these are all things...
I'm rambling now, but those are all things that I think about with this project, definitely.
Well, I have a question that is kind of related.
In the way we conceive a disability in our social life today that is, as you say it,
people discover that it's not really the conception that they had for a long
time because in society, we are taught that this is the way.
There are organizations
with multiple artists who work in
the field of disability and music.
We frequently speak when we meet, I'm one of them.
I'm a wheelchair user, I'm a singer.
Some people say, Okay, so how do you sing if you're not standing?
Things like that, which is what?
Okay, I just sing. Oh, yeah.
But it triggered conversations about the way accessibility and disability
is seen in the arts itself.
I love this question because everybody has a different answer to this question.
What does accessibility or working in a world where you have
touched disability culture, what does it mean to you?
Hard question, I know.
It's a big question.
How to put it into words?
The more we can welcome...
and...
Gosh, even the word welcoming bothers me sometimes
because there's a connotation of otherness in the word welcome.
You were out here, and now we brought you in here.
Welcome. I just mean that beautiful things to me...
Art to me is about accessing beauty, but beauty to me is not something
that's perfect.
It's not something that is virtuosic.
This effort of accessibility and welcoming,
it makes everything more beautiful.
The artistic possibilities
when all voices are included, are...
it's just artistically more interesting.
I'm not being very good with my words about this, but
it makes everything better.
Molly's work is actually such a great example of this.
She taught me about how
when you are creating an artistic product
and you include accessibility measures in the artistic product, it enhances
the artistry of that product.
It's not a distraction from it.
It's part of the artistic interest of it.
Even just something as simple as the programs that I printed for
my Tremor program have braille on them.
Braille is beautiful.
It's a beautiful thing to touch and experience.
It's a beautiful thing. If you can see it, it's a beautiful thing
to see that texture added to the paper.
And so it's only enhancing what we're doing.
It's not an accessory.
I don't have a succinct way to say what I think about this, but
man, does it make things more beautiful.
It can only be better.
Right. There are many notions.
For example, there is this concept of universal design, which I really like.
Some people are struggling a bit with this concept of universal design.
But if you think of a product or a building or something that you use
every day and you don't think about making it accessible, you think about
making it usable by everybody.
Whatever you are, whatever if you're a child or if you're an adult
or if you are big or if you're tall or if you have, I don't know,
four fingers, it doesn't matter.
Everybody should be able to use this entrance or this building or this product
the same way, or at least an equivalent way, not exactly the same way.
I like that in arts, too.
There are some foundations or organizations right now working on
inclusive concerts or adaptive concerts
where you have as many
possible elements in the room that makes you feel good attending a concert,
whatever where you're coming from or what
you identify yourself with, whatever.
You come here and you feel good and you have fun and you enjoy the music.
I love that concept, really.
Yeah. Yes!
Ok, good, you're jogging my brain a little bit with this spot because,
again, this is a lesson I learned through this project and something I feel
passionately about now is
you never know who has something to gain
from creating a universally designed experience.
You know, you can't...
If you go just to the idea
of an artistic product, you create
an artistic product, you cannot control how somebody receives that product.
You cannot control how they're going to connect to it.
I think that's also true for...
In my case, I do a ton of concert production.
You cannot control how someone's going to respond to that concert production.
Sometimes an accessibility measure that's designed to reach a specific
audience, it's valuable for other people for all kinds of reasons.
You just never know how that's going to strike somebody
and open them up to something.
I think it's really important.
Yeah, the universal design of concert experiences.
Absolutely.
Well, thank you.
I know it's always a tricky question, but in a way, it's...
people just have their own experience of it.
I'm very interested in learning about that.
Well, I have a last question for this interview, and it's about people
who might have motivated you or have brought something to your life.
Sometimes I say inspire you,
even if it's not always the inspiration like we...
Everybody has a different notion of inspiration, too.
But if you had people to think of who brought you something in your career
and launched you in a way where you are today, who would it be and why?
Yeah.
The person that immediately comes to mind
always is my first piano teacher.
I started lessons with her when I was seven years old
and continued until I was 16.
And she...
Growing up in Small Town, Minnesota,
for better or for worse, I felt
a little bit alone in who I was as an artist in that surrounding.
It's just by nature of a small population, I didn't feel that there were a lot
of people who felt the way about music and art and beauty the way I did.
But she was my sort of window.
Not only my window to the outside artistic world and what
was possible, but also she was my window
into myself and what I was capable of.
She was the one more than anybody else in my life who said, You can do this.
You have something to offer.
The world needs what you have to say.
And it took me a long time to believe her.
But man, to have that consistent voice
in my life for 10 years was everything.
When I was a little girl, I wanted so much to just be exactly like her, down to
wearing the same perfume and everything.
I still, in many ways, feel like that
about her, that the way that she lovingly
held a standard up for me and kept consistently telling me what was possible
for me in my life was really important.
What's her name?
Her name is Georgia Hanson.
She had cancer and passed away a few years ago.
It was really sad, but I remember her so fondly.
I'm lucky to still be in close touch with her whole family, and I'm
really grateful to know all of them.
It's important.
I think teachers in our lives are so important.
They form us and they make us what we are later in life.
We cannot value enough the position of a good teacher Yeah, for sure.
It's true.
You know, I do a ton of teaching.
The thing that I've been thinking about lately in my role as a teacher
is how the voices of my teachers are still in my head.
20, 30 years later, they're still there.
When I'm interacting interacting with my students, I try to interact
with them with that idea in mind.
It's easy to get frustrated as a teacher and feel like,
Oh, they're not getting it.
But maybe they'll get it in 25 years and
it's still a gift that you've given them.
I have to say, when it comes to being a teacher,
that was how I -
my original conception of my adult self was as a teacher.
When I was little, that was how I saw myself was as a teacher,
a piano teacher, specifically.
Even now, in all of the work that I do,
I think I'm still very much
deeply fulfilled by my work as a piano teacher.
The privilege of getting to sit
across from somebody week after week
after week for 45 minutes, dedicated time for years in their life.
You get to watch them grow from a child into an adult person.
You get to watch them discover themselves, and you get to see them use music
to form their identity and see where it falls into their identity.
They get to use music to express their place in the world.
That is such a cool, wonderful, privileged position to have.
I love that part of my job. Man, is it wonderful?
It's very inspiring.
Yes, I feel the same.
I know exactly what you're talking about.
Then leave a trace in these children
or adults that will make them think,
Oh, yeah, that was a great time.
I learned a lot.
Well, thank you so much for this conversation.
Have a good concert at the end of January
with the last date of your project.
I hope I can see it one day live.
Oh, that's so cool.
Yeah, that'd be wonderful.
Okay, Well, have a wonderful day
and have a great time
teaching and doing everything musical that you're doing.
Thank you so much. It was an honor to speak with you.
Thank you. Take care.
Bye.
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