Out of Rich Darkness

Ralf Schmid is a pianist, arranger, composer, big band leader, and seeker of new sounds and techniques. He has performed internationally as a soloist and with his ensemble, Bossarenova Trio. He’s led the big bands of Copenhagen, Hamburg, Berlin, Stuttgart and Frankfurt and has collaborated with musicians of various genres including Whitney Houston, Daniel Hope, Herbie Hancock, Natalie Cole, and many more. His musical theater piece “A Distant Drum” was premiered at Carnegie Hall and in South Africa. Most recently, he has been performing shows that involve two grand pianos and two gloves equipped with digital sensors that allow him to create live effects using gestures in the air; in 2019 he used this setup to record his solo album Pyanook.

Ralf is a prolific YouTuber and Instagrammer, and during the lockdown of 2020, he began a live stream series of remote song collaborations with singer Paula Morelenbaum among others, and a series called ‘soil music,’ which draws attention to the current climate crisis.

This conversation took place on November 22nd, 2021.

We spoke to him about:

• Spontaneous music-making in the family as a child
• Reading the room
• Switching roles between ‘captains’ and followers in an ensemble
• Letting go of expectations to maintain artistic integrity
• When technical things go wrong
• Vulnerability as a performer
• Developing his show Pyanook with 2 grand pianos on stage
• Working with ensembles that improvise and use live electronics
• His new piano concerto
• Music as a mirror of our present reality
• Creativity as a means of activism
• Finding his message as a soloist
• Life as a musician in New York in the 1990s
• Striving for more equality and diversity in positions of power

Check out his recently released single Soil Music

Gavin Bryars: Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet

Bon Iver: Blindsided

Portico Quartet: Knee-Deep in the North Sea

J.S. Bach: Matthäus-Passion, BW 244

J.S. Bach: The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, Glen Gould

The Swingle Singers: Jazz Sebastian Bach

Our conversation with Johannes Schöllhorn, composer and professor of composition at the Music University of Freiburg, is at turns deeply philosophical, thought-provoking, and playful.

Johannes Schöllhorn is a prolific composer, a conductor of leading ensembles and orchestras around the world, and also a teacher. His many compositions include works for musical theater, orchestra, chamber music ensembles, solo players, and original arrangements and instrumentations.

This conversation took place on November 8th, 2021, and we spoke to him about:

• His very first experience with music
• Being IN sound as opposed to listening TO it
• Creating special moments for the ear when viewing art
• What he would have done if he hadn’t become a musician
• Cultivating an “unconscious rhythm”
• The importance of dreams and being “out of time”
• Conceiving of art as a person
• Deep flaws in our music education system and why such a strong focus on the past is, in fact, a betrayal of the past
• Genius as a partner
• His interests outside of music, including writing a book!

His book Karte, Uhr und Partitur is now available.

Cathy Milliken is an oboist, composer, and visionary educator who takes great joy in facilitating creativity and participation. She has won international recognition as a leading composer, creative director, performer and educational program consultant. She was a founding member of the Ensemble Modern Frankfurt.

As a composer, she has been commissioned by the Berliner Staatsoper, Donaueschinger Musiktage, South Bank Centre London, The Experimental Electronic Studio of Freiburg, Concerto Köln, and Musica Viva of Munich, to name just a few of many.

From 2005 – 2012, Cathy Milliken was Director of the Education Program of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Participatory compositional projects in recent years have taken her to South Africa, Japan, and Oman. She is part of the creative team for the Munich Biennale for Music Theatre and serves as an honorary member of advisory boards for the German Music Council and the Goethe Institute. Her collaborative composition Stadtlied (City Song) was premiered in the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg in 2019.

Elena last saw Cathy in October 2020 at the Radialsystem in Berlin, where her work Ode for All was premiered as part of a celebration of Beethoven’s 250th birthday. It was originally supposed to be a work for six female choirs from across Eastern Europe all composing and improvising their own odes to joy, and in the end, because of the pandemic, it became a video installation featuring the soloists of those choirs, which was very moving.

In this episode, we talk about:

• How the pandemic influenced her listening and creating
• Working with female choirs from Eastern Europe in her project Ode for All
• Meeting in Istanbul (watch the video)
• “Improvisers” vs. “readers”
• Bringing very different people together to create new synergies
• How she got into facilitating composition
• Her book Zukunft@Bphil
• How the design of a project should be like a composition
• Planning a project the way you would plan a party to make everyone feel welcome and valuable: have a structure and then throw it away if necessary
• The importance of having enough time in order to transport people out of their everyday
• How improvising helps all performers, even if it’s only playing in your own room
• The importance of good friends to help pick you up if a concert didn’t go so well, and of people who challenge you
• Knowing the difference between challenging and destructive
• Prejudice, intentional or not, against female composers
• Switching from creator to performer

We talk about Steph’s latest album “Supersense” (listen here: https://stephrichards.bandcamp.com/album/supersense), her creative process, and how one of her goals is creating music that you can almost taste!

We also speak to Steph about concerts as spell casting, which includes taking things into consideration like the temperature of the room. We discuss what can be learned from commercial music, why building a rich community is so essential, and the idea that “you are what you eat” as an artist.

We also talk about the best time for musicians to take risks and what risk-taking has to do with artistry. We explore the following questions: what does it mean to think past our own instruments? What can we learn from musicians who play other instruments, and what role can different materials play in our music-making?

https://www.stephrichards.com

I, Elena, first met Stella Whalley at an the Obras artist residency in Portugal, where I learned so much about what art can be and how different artists work. Stella struck me as an artist who uses everything that comes into her life as material for her work, and even years later, I remembered her story of how she used a hereditary shake of her hand as part of a piece of video art.

Stella describes herself as an artist who produces work in response to space and place, to architecture and environment, to objects and materials, archaeological references and archives, and to local histories and narratives. She has exhibited at Empire II of the Venice Biennale 2017, at the Nakanojo Biennale Japan 2015, the Wilson Gallery Cheltenham, the Victoria & Albert Museum London, and the Birmingham City Art Gallery.

In this first part of our conversation, we talk about using your mistakes, getting audience feedback, and how a disaster transformed Stella's life and work. Stella talks about releasing the personal attachment to what you are creating in order to be able to see everything that happens to you as material for your work.

This episode is a continuation of last week’s conversation with the wonderful Jason Alexander Holmes, director of the Cincinnati Boychoir. These are some of the topics we cover in this conversation:

• connecting to people at a deeper level
• The perils of adventurous programming
• Fear of not looking like an expert
• Reflecting students’ backgrounds in programming
• Honoring cultures that are not our own
• Nourishing classical music through diversity
• Inclusivity

Our wonderful guest Jason Alexander Holmes is the artistic director of the Cincinnati Boychoir. Previously, he served as the director of educational programming at the Boston Children's Chorus, where he oversaw the musical and social education of over 400 singers.

Choirs under Jason's direction are consistently praised not only for their energetic yet unified tone and engaging performance, but also for the expressive ways in which singers use their voices and bodies to communicate. Additionally, Jason is known for innovate programming which celebrates the cultural context in which his choirs operate while encouraging singers and audiences alike to stretch their awareness by living in musical worlds to which they may not be accustomed.

Pedagogically, Jason is committed to implementing culturally responsive practices in music education and he has given many workshops and conference sessions on this topic. At the core of Jason's teaching and performing is the belief that we are all expressive and musical beings who deserve to witness and participate regularly in moments of truth and beauty.

This episode is the first part of a two-part conversation. Some of the topics covered here are:

• the communal aspect of music
• the way individuals contribute to a group
• being a Black person and leader in classical music
• finding a community that will embrace you
• what inclusion really means (caring about people)

The entrepreneur Anne-Therese Gennari began her career as a model and then, in 2017, she co-founded Role Models Management, a talent agency that puts ethics, sustainability, and social justice at the core of its business. She describes herself as a climate optimist and is about to start teaching a class in climate optimism.

We had a wonderful conversation about how to create change from within any industry, how to think about activism in an empowering way, and what music means in the context of envisioning a new world. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be starting our second season with this amazing young woman.