The first question is, I guess, what is, as they say in the world of the superhero movies, what is the origin story of this particular book? How did it come to pass? Well, first of all, Joshua, I would like to say that it's mutually a great honor to be sitting here with you. Joshua just reminded me that come January he will have been writing for the San Francisco Chronicle for 32 years. And in this day and age, that is amazing. So congratulations for that. The origins of the book, as we were lightly discussing yesterday, were unusual because even though I'm often asked to write, the purpose is limited. Usually I write the introduction to a season brochure or something and welcome the various subscribers to the season or I've become quite skillful at writing grant applications. But I do draw upon the fact that words are very, very special if you can use them well. And they are one of the primary sources of communication that we have. The actual genesis of this book came from a number of speeches that I was giving to defend my orchestra and defend my opera house in Munich, Bavaria. At that particular time there was a proposed wave of budget cuts which were meant to go through and quite oppositely I was arguing for a budget increase, not a budget cut. And what alarmed me the most was a kind of a redefining of what reality was. I mean in this day I guess we've become used to it but in five years ago it was sort of a new concept. The suggestion was through many, many speeches that I had heard given through political leaders. This goes across borders not only in Germany. Was that somehow classical music was not really deserving of support from either the state or from any sort of philanthropical organizations because it was only pertinent to a small section of society and that society it was implied was an elite part of the society, a segment that had access to education or higher lifestyle or more leisure time. This of course has nothing to do with the genesis of what we today call classical music, the age of enlightenment from say the late 1700s through up until the early 21st century. You might call that the genesis of our great great repertoire which now continues through the 20th century until today that age of enlightenment was where this idea of the symphony was formed, the idea of symphonies was formed, expressions of those ideals of the age of enlightenment or the ideals of the revolutions that were taking place at the time. Equality, brotherhood and freedom, these great ideals of the French Revolution. It is out of this cradle that the whole society develops such that people turn to classical music for help, for assistance, for support. That has nothing to do with the elite segment of the society. At that time, at the time of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Bach, there were many closed societies, the aristocracy, the court, the church. These were societies that were generally closed to the open public and the art that the court, the art that the aristocracy and the church created is a part of our repertoire today. But it wasn't easily accessible by the general public and what was so wild and radical about these great Haydn performances in London or the subsequent concerts of Mozart in his later life or the great subscription concerts of Beethoven is that they were open to everyone and the musicians played, not in court attire, but they played in tails. Tails was the blue jeans of the day. The merchants had to work so they cut away the frack as it was called so that they could lift heavy boxes, maybe ride a horse, tend to their customers. This working class attire became the attire of the symphony orchestra. We sometimes forget that today. But the whole basis of where the idea of the symphonic arts came from was equality and freedom and brotherhood. That's a theme that somehow is relevant for every time that we live in. No matter what society we are, oppression in various forms do exist and we need to have something like classical music that rises above to help us never forget that freedom and equality are really the basis of humanity. So when I heard this through various politicians I really saw a red flag and that became the basis of a series of speeches that I gave very, very much defending the role of the opera, defending the role of the Philharmonic Orchestra and a publisher happened to be in the house in one of these speeches and he said, yes, Mr. Nagani, you should really write this down and put it in a book and if you do I will publish it and that was how the book came to be. Thank you. So as a result of that, one of the great themes I see running through this entire book and you've just alluded to is this sort of anxiety or concern about what the place of classical music and indeed the high arts in general, the fine arts in general are going to be in a modern society and there are pages in this book in which you're sort of full of gloom and pessimism about it or concern, let's say, and other pages where you're quite exultant about the importance of music and they kind of go back and forth and I feel the mood shifting as I go through it. One of the things you mentioned is a quote from Schiller saying that art has always been compelled to defend itself against the idol of utility. So this notion that art has to justify its place in society is not a new one, it's not postmodern, it's not 20th century, it goes all the way back. So how do you balance those two strains in your own thinking of sort of... I think the gloominess or the pessimism, it doesn't have so much to do with that I was sort of in a bad mood that day. I think it's more tied to what aspects of classical music we're speaking of. As I often tell my programming stuff, if there is somehow a problem selling Beethoven, it is not Beethoven's fault. We can take that as a fundamental given. Looking around now, almost 2020, I would say it's a time to be very optimistic. There are so many great and visionary composers writing today that I would have never have imagined would be there, bear in mind that my own education and development took place towards the end of the 20th century and at that time, naturally, we all thought the Alvin Garde was the Alvin Garde and when it was over then we'd go in somehow in a different direction back to neoclassic. But this young generation of composers is brilliant and it's supported with an equally brilliant of fantastic performers very, very young performers. Gifted technically free, they are no longer bound by the limitations that our generation was bound by, so spontaneous and so charismatic. On the side of performing classical music and the classical music's future in terms of having the repertoire go on, it is a time that I honestly feel we can be very, very optimistic. Speaking about the institutions, however, that are given the responsibility to carry classical music forward and to make it accessible to a general public, I'm not sure if these institutions will continue in the form that they are today or they have been, say, in the post-war years. I'm not sure if they'll continue without radical adaptation to our times and maybe some of the darker moments come out of the perspective that we oftentimes, in our heavy responsibilities and our duties fulfill our responsibility or expectations, we can sometimes forget what the core is that really excites and motivates the next generation. I remember my own parents would seem to forget that pretty often when I was young. There are some basic, even though there are many, many sort of triggers which motivate or inspire the next generation, there are some constants and that would be no compromise. I hated it when my father said, yes, well, can't, you know, we're just going to have to compromise here. You can't have what you want and however, you may just get enough that you'd be satisfied somewhere we need to find the middle ground. I really hated compromise. The other was mediocre quality. If you offer a child the choice between the very best quality, superior quality if possible, or some sort of make-do thing, normally speaking the child without any sort of formal education will choose that which is of a higher quality. Another given is basically whatever status quo is, the next generation doesn't want to have anything to do with it. Until this day I have a physical reaction when someone says, well, that's the way it has always been done, because of course what that really means is not the way it's always been done, but it's been done that way as long as you can remember. Always and as long as you can remember are two different things. Status quo is death to creativity. Naturally, when a very young child is limited by only choices within the status quo, it will lead to at some point a great revolution. These aspects, as they begin to threaten programming or the way that an institution thinks, it will signal that at a certain time these institutions will pass into irrelevance for the times. It can be a very, very dangerous and sad phenomenon to see what some thing or some person or some phenomenon that was very, very dear to you somehow become oriented into a situation where it loses, clearly is losing its relevance. And I think that's something that we as performers need to constantly question to make sure that we stay true to these fundamental and intrinsic elements of what creativity really means and stands for. So through the book I think the dialogue does shift. I speak about institutions and as most people here know, of course, I spend most of my creative time within very large and very heavy institutions. So it's not that this is something that I'm suggesting that these institutions are somehow wrong or that they don't serve the public. No, not at all. On the other hand, they allow things that normally would not be possible. It's only if they lose the connection to the very purpose why they're existing that you can become concerned. But I mean I would say couldn't we connect those two things that you just mentioned which is to say the extraordinary creativity and inventiveness and daring of this new generation of composers and performers and the need for institutions like Symphony Orchestra's opera companies to adapt and reorient themselves to that pole star of, in other words, let the creative voices guide the dialogue and the institutions react as necessary rather than the other way around. Absolutely and that's why many of us are engaged in trying to make sure that these institutions have both the artistic substance and also the financial security so that they can really dare to go on into the future. How's it going? Well, at the moment I'm permanently tied with two organizations and they're doing very, very well. We are beyond sold out, beyond capacity performances and financially I don't want to say too much because it's bad luck I think but for the moment we both of these houses have colossal surpluses. Wow. But you know I've been in Montreal for 16 years, it didn't happen overnight. Right. And the same thing for Humboldt. So I'm going to, since you mentioned Montreal I'm going to just jump ahead a bit taking my planned questions out of order a little bit. One of the things that fascinated me in your discussion of your time in Montreal, especially your early days in Montreal, was the sort of realization or the aha moment that one of the ways to bring the population there around was to think about and talk about classical music through a lens that was flavored by the population's enthusiasm for sports and particularly ice hockey and that that was sort of the civic, forgive me if I'm, if I'm characterized, mischaracterized. We're missing a few steps in there I think. But you describe how the hockey analogy was a kind of a conceptual breakthrough for you in your planning there. Have I just invented this out of hope? Did I dream this? It sounds pretty foreign to me, but there are certain elements that, yes, the ice hockey element is definitely there in Quebec. No, the challenge when I came to Quebec two years before I was meant to begin, it was a very funny conversation because my French is acceptable, but Quebec is very different, Quebec-wise very different. And we were communicating but sort of in little starts and stops. The administrative director was trying to explain to me that there was a big problem. There's a big problem because the orchestra had lost a large amount of its public through a lot of miscommunication during the separation of a very, very rich and successful era where Chateau de Toile and the orchestra going on into the future. And that separation was very noisy. And because of it, the orchestra lost a lot of its public and the public that it did have, my colleague was explaining that, yes, every year they don't come back. Lesson, every year the numbers that come back are less. And I said, oh well, that's a problem. She said, yes, yes it is a problem. I said, well, does it have to do with performance standards? Does it have to do with programming? And she said, no, no, they don't come back. And I said, yes, I understand that they don't come back. And she said, we have a lot of gray hair. And I said, yes, yes, I understand we have a lot of gray hair. And she said, and they don't come back. And so I finally said, I'm not really following you here. And she said, Mr. Nagano, they are dying. So we had an aging subships and base and it wasn't being renewed. And every year a couple of folks would pass away. So the numbers were going down and that was my beginning. I felt that it was important to just carefully look at everything. And one of the things that we looked at was the fundamental repertoire that was being programmed. And certain parts of the repertoire were played and you could say even overplayed because the same titles would come back year after year after year with great frequency. And other parts of the great repertoire were strikingly absent. So for example, Johann Sebastian Bach. There was very, very few records or performances, even the passions that never been performed for 40 years. Franz Josef Haydn was not really there. Beethoven was not really there. Besides the Fifth Symphony and the Ninth, few performances were given. They could find no record of the First Symphony ever being done in all of the archives. The Second Symphony was done 45 years ago, 50 years ago. Schubert, besides the great C major and the young finished, was pretty much non-existent. So these funny gaps. So we decided to address this. But since there was not really an audience for Beethoven, not really an audience for Mahler, for example. In the words of my colleagues, they were box office poison. Gustav Mahler, nobody wanted to hear Mahler. If you were to perform Strauss, it was kind of iffy. So the question was, again, if people don't come to a Beethoven concert, it's not Beethoven's fault. Somehow the way that is being performed, the level that is being performed, the energy through which is being performed, the integrity of how it's performed and how it's presented somehow, is not offering a mirror so that when the audience comes they identify with it. They see themselves. So to come to your point of the ice hockey, there were two concerts that season that were very important to me. One was an old Beethoven concert. And the other was to re-explore Ein Heldenleben, so a Strauss concert. So how do you make Beethoven relevant for Quebec? Beethoven never visited Quebec, so you can't say that there was an anniversary year of when he came and gave a lecture at the Montreal University. But what was interesting through just simply reading and research was that the great expansion of Quebec took place during the Napoleonic Empire. And particularly Montreal had an enormous burst of growth right around the time of the expansion of the empire, which of course included the bombardment of Vienna. And the bombardment of Vienna at that time affected very, very dramatically Beethoven. You could say that during the influence of the French Empire at that time, what was being heard in Paris and Vienna was being heard in Montreal. So that was the kind of bridge that we had. And the ideals of the French Revolution, which at least in the early years, Napoleon was fighting for before he declared himself emperor, somehow those ideals ring very, very true in the province of Quebec. So the program we designed so that our public could see themselves in the mirror of the music was all Beethoven, the overture to Egmont, followed by incidental music to Egmont, intermission and the Fifth Symphony. And the focus was on revolution. The Egmont story itself is based on Goethe, of course, a very complex Goethe story, maybe at least for me, not the most successful Goethe story. But it paralleled very closely the incident in Rwanda, the genocide incident, the United Nations forces, which you may remember, they were headed by someone from Quebec, someone from Montreal, named General Romain Delaire. Delaire still had a residence in Montreal. And following the Rwanda controversy, genocide, it was greatly discussed in international affairs because General Delaire needed to take decisions that were unsanctioned by the leadership of the United Nations and very, very controversial for a military person to take these decisions, but he was trying to avert what appeared to him was certain genocide. It created a very, very difficult period for him and his career within the military. And this was something that the Montrealers followed very closely. The Egmont story is something similar. Religious beliefs taking a priority which became politicized and led to massive wars and heroism because of these wars. It was very easy to adapt that story to the travails of General Delaire. And we asked General Delaire to come and to share his story as a basis for the thread that would link together the incidental music of Egmont. And following the intermission then of course was freedom, the Fifth Symphony. That was a turning point for our audiences because suddenly the music of Beethoven had a certain pertinence to their heritage, their way of thinking, the way they have perceived and treated by the rest of the world, their history. It was a very simple thing for us to do but trying to do an all-Batoven program under the illumination of a way that was sensitive to the anthropological past of Quebec, that was the point. The other concert was Anhelden-Leven, Strauss, of course, heavily influenced by Nietzsche. And I did discuss with my colleagues if I should give a lecture on Nietzsche. And they said, no, Mr. Nagano, no, you don't want to do that, no one's going to listen to you. And if they did, they won't understand what you're saying. And even if you speak French, they won't understand what you're saying. So I really wanted our public to have a new perspective on Anhelden-Leven. It was a new addition at the time. And the orchestra had not played the Anhelden-Leven for many, many years. So right at that time, one of the great hockey legends of the Canadian ice hockey team was undergoing public controversy. It was tragic because he was a beloved figure and idolized by every kid that went out onto the ice hockey. He wanted just to be like this great hero. And the problem was that he had retired and retired in the greatest of glory, but his son had a run-in with the law because of drug abuse. And there were some crimes that were done that were violent crimes. And the shadow that brought on this great legendary hockey player's personal life and his family was a very heavy burden. He was being interviewed and asked to defend his son. He was all being played out in public. Very, very emotional. It placed in everyone's mind the reality that being a sports hero is not all just fun. There are certain aspects that come with offering your life to the public that sometimes with intense scrutiny you're being obliged to pay a price that maybe normal people wouldn't have to pay. These themes, of course, are very strong within the Nietzsche philosophy behind Ein Heldenleben. Of course, Ein Heldenleben is a complex piece because it also deals with Strauss and how he perceives himself personally with his wife, how he perceives his wife. Let's not forget that the main villains in Heldenleben are the music critics. That's right. That very interesting relationship between Strauss and his critics. But anchored in, of course, a much deeper platform. So, as a parallel piece to Ein Heldenleben, I commissioned a work. And the work that I commissioned was from a well-known Quebec composer. A 21st century piece, brand new. And I asked, instead of having a tradition of solos, would you please include spoken text instead? And I went to the Canadian ice hockey team and I asked them to assemble a list of all the living legends to whom I would assign a speaking part of this piece. So, the hockey organization supported this initiative really very enthusiastically because that explained that I'm just trying to bring a broader dialogue, a broader narrative of everything that's going on with this difficult period for the sports hero. And the sports hero, his colleagues did respond and every legendary ice hockey player of the last 20 years agreed to come on to the stage. And they read their lines. It was actually very moving because they took it so seriously and memorized these lines. It reminded me of, for those of you who are old enough to remember the song We Are the World, where a pop star would come in and sing two words and that sort of disappeared. It was a little bit like that. But the public, of course, they came in throngs. We sold out the house many, many times over to see their great sports stars and their reward was to hear Ein Heldt and lay them. And most of them had never heard a classical music concert in their life. And acute listening to the straws was unlike, it was a tension unlike we never had before. And as you can imagine, the piece is a great work. And the result of the audience, of course, was very enthusiastic for the Don Pierre work for ice hockey players. But it was thunderous for Ein Heldt and lay them. On paper, it looks like Negano commissioned a new work, contemporary music, together with a standard war horse, Ein Heldt and lay them. But in reality, again, we tried to have just a certain sensitivity to the societal fabric that holds that community together. So that, again, if the public were to come to one of our symphony concerts, they would identify with what they heard and identify with how we were playing these pieces, with whom we were playing these pieces. So that's how the ice hockey element came. Everyone remembers, funnily enough, the ice hockey piece, but everyone has forgotten Ein Heldt. That's always the way. So I want to come to the beginning of your book, which begins with this very lovely and moving sort of memoir of your childhood in Morrow Bay, and what happened there to turn it into a little oasis of music. And for those who haven't read the book, maybe you can tell us a little bit about, I don't even know how to pronounce it, Wachtung, of course, Shelley? Very good, yes. Okay, and if you can tell them about what happened, and then I'm going to come back to you with a follow-up question. Okay. Just for those who aren't familiar with the narrative. Mr. Coricelli or Professor Coricelli came from Tbilisi, Georgia. It's the same area, the same city where Joseph Stalin came from. And he was the son of the intendant of the Staatstheater, the Staatsoper, so the big theater, the big opera house in central Tbilisi. Mr. Coricelli's father was a very dynamic leader, and the house at that time was the center of everything that took place in Tbilisi. It was a meeting point for the intellectual community of Tbilisi and at the same time a place that everyone else would gather, just simply to share an experience. And with the politics of Joseph Stalin becoming more and more controversial, this is during the early 1930s, late 1920s, Mr. Coricelli's father took to the stage to publicly question the wisdom of the direction the Soviet Union was going. And Mr. Coricelli remembers meeting then Joseph Stalin, who came, said him on his knee, said really nice things to him, offered him a piece of candy, and then assassinated his father. And the mother, who survived, sent Coricelli and his brother out of Tbilisi. And it seemed that it would be possible for him to get an education in Munich. So he moved to Munich and went into the Conservatory, the Hochschulen, and was proving to be an outstanding pianist, an outstanding performer. But unfortunately for Mr. Coricelli, just as he was beginning to, his reputation was beginning to take root in Bavaria, a young politician whose name was Adolf Hitler was just beginning to rise in popularity and presence. And because of that, Coricelli had to run for his life. And he lost his brother on the way. It's a very, it's a typical refugee story. He found his way to the French coast, was able to get on a boat to the United States, had a couple of sponsors who helped him when he arrived and when he arrived, he was told, forget about becoming a concert pianist. You've got to make a living.  Everyone has to earn a living here. So Mr. Coricelli, he did abandon his performing career and he went to the place where education was free, the University of California. I received his education and got his teaching degree. The first job that he was offered, he accepted. That job was in a little dumpy fishing town called Morro Bay, California. And he arrived and discovered pretty much of just a town like a village where the children pretty much came from one of two segments of society. Either they were the children of farmers or they were the children of fishermen. A couple of the children were children of merchants, but overwhelmingly it was fishermen and cattle ranchers and farmers. So he fought for funding and one funding to build a conservatory in Morro Bay, a real conservatory, pianos. And he established two orchestras and three concert bands. And what I think is the most remarkable thing is he was able to convince the young children, myself included, that if you were cool, you could play a musical instrument. And if you were uncool, you could not. So the pressure was really there. And I had studied the piano and I became a private student of Mr. Coricelli, but that's not a real instrument. I wanted to play in the orchestra. I wanted to play in the concert band. And so through him, and in not one generation, but three generations, three and a half generations, of children, their children's children, their children's children's children, and then yet another generation after that, all came up under through this conservatory. And the conservatory was pretty... It was tough. Classes at the elementary school would begin around 9 o'clock. So we had to be in the conservatory at 7 and work for two hours before going to classes and then usually school that out to 33 o'clock. And we go back and have orchestra practice every day from 3.30 until 6 o'clock. And this is every day five days a week. And for those of us who showed a particular keen interest, Mr. Coricelli would open up his home studio during the weekends where we would have recitals, we'd play for each other, study theory, study analysis, European history, painting, the visual arts of which he was also very, very active. What it offered me personally was an option. At that time, popular culture was becoming very, very visible. It was through the 1950s, 1960s, explosion of media capacity, television advertising became much more sophisticated than it ever had been in the past. And therefore popular culture was really being offered as the way forward. In my childhood, for example, it was the big surfing wave. I'm not sure if you remember the Beach Boys or these folks, and it was very, very fashionable if you could surf. And I remember sitting in Mr. Coricelli's studio because through the window you could look down at the beach, he lived on a mountain and you could still see the beach. These really cool blonde-headed guys on the beach with beautiful partners and they were all surfing. And I was playing the Mozart C Major Sonata and I was going, somehow this doesn't go together. Mozart C Major Sonata and this image of surfing down on the beach. So I complained to Mr. Coricelli.  And he said, you're not having fun. And I said, well, it's not the same as being on the beach and playing. And he said, well, you are playing. And he used that as an entryway into this very simple introductory sonata. The repertoire was standard repertoire of Bach, Mozart. And he encouraged me to use the imagination that all children are given with. And the imagination triggered by that studio with the great paintings that we were surrounded, the great books, the great private seminars that we as five, six, seven-year-old children had. It allowed all of us, who were his private students to, for those moments that we were in a studio, we could take a trip. I spent those hours in Vienna. I spent those hours in Paris, in Rome, in Milano, in Berlin, in Bavaria, where of course Coricelli spent part of his life. And I saw the images and I played the music and for those hours and hours and hours I was no longer in moral pay. I had the great privilege of escaping the small town with all of its dynamics, which a small town, living in a small town is not all positive. I mean, gossip and sort of saying bad things about other people that they could get very, very intense. Whatever you did, your neighbors were talking about it the next day. Somehow, for not only myself, but I would say this generation of children that grew up with him through classical music as he taught it, which as I've alluded to was very strict for a high, high-discipline, quotient concentration was required. We were given the option to leave moral pay. So I always thought you were a surfer kid. Did I make that up? Is that a misconception on my part? When I wasn't playing the piano, I was surfing. All right. Well, the reason I wanted to bring this up is a wonderful description that you give in the book and honestly, it reads sort of like a fairy tale. There's a kind of a sprinkling of magic on top of it where this description of moral pay turning into this little Vienna by the Pacific and music in every home and all of this. And I thought, yes, I read this and I thought, yes, it's possible to bring classical music into the lives of the children of farmers and the children of fishermen. And I had this moment of great surging optimism and belief in it. And then a little voice in my head said, yeah, but you need Coricelli. You need that one sort of magical magician type to make that happen. And it doesn't happen in the next town over. So did you feel and do you feel that there was something singular and miraculous about that particular experience that might not have been replicable elsewhere or conversely, is it the kind of thing that could happen anywhere with just the right combination of factors? Most of us, we've throughout the evolution of our lives, I think we can point to a set of teachers or a set of professors or guides that somehow helped us negotiate a way through. And they had an unusually strong impact in how we found our way forward. And I, like most people, yes, consider myself very, very privileged to have had a series of great teachers along the way. And it's also true that not everyone is a gifted teacher. It is a very, very specialized art form to really effectively teach what you know to another generation. And most of the teachers we have are not so talented. They're all the other names that we've forgotten along the way. But thank goodness that we've had those few personalities, those few great sources of inspiration that point us forward. So yes, I take your point really well at that particular time. And you're also right, the town next door didn't have that. I think we're just very fortunate to have had that impulse there. But I, once again, I would say it was not unique to that time. LC-STAMA, for example, was another great example of a tremendous personality and a tremendous talent, sending a generation of kids out into the world with great perspectives. And we see that repeating itself in different forms in different places. I would also like to add that when I go to Russia, yes, yes, of course I perform in the great cities, but sometimes through the various friends and colleagues that I have will perform in decidedly unglamorous parts. When I tour some parts of China or some parts of Canada, for example, the recent tour we took a few months ago up to the North Pole and visited the Indigenous people, the Indigenous tribes, communities, you discover a level of listening that will take your breath away. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with economics or what is available in terms of resources. In fact, sometimes it's just opposite. If you accept that koska music is an expression of the purest forms of humanity that we have and you attach a certain value to humanity, which I feel we all do as preoccupied as we are in our modern world of consumption because primarily we just think about consuming all of the time, most of us will catch ourselves and attach a fundamental value to humanity. That is the universal part of music's content and playing in these places where people don't have access to regular, beautiful concert halls or opera houses if ever, like in Kujoak where we just were, they had never seen a violin before, they had never seen a trumpet before. Sometimes the level of listening is astonishing to take your breath away. Do we have time for one more question before we go on? I just wanted to talk a little bit about this wonderful section in these sections of this book. One of the through lines in addition to the autobiography and the philosophy is a series of essays about the composers that are your particular musical heroes, even though it's interesting you wrote in the beginning of the book that when people ask you your favorite composer, it sort of strikes you as, quote, a superficial and banal question. And yet here this seems to be in some way an answer to that superficial and banal question and I'll just give you the list. It's Bach, Schoenberg, Beethoven, Messian, Brueckner, Bernstein, and Ives, which is, I have no issue with that. I mean, these are your heroes, but I mean, it's interesting to see you kind of make that list and choose these and not those and those and not these and tell us about how that process was, how you arrived at those names perhaps at the expense of others. Well, I should probably qualify or explain this. As you know, Joshua, you're writing sometimes subject to editing by the editor. Okay. I did have a great chapter on Mozart, which was taken away. So there are a few names that really I would have liked to have been there, but in the interest of the length of the book, they just disappeared. On the other hand, the composers that I chose were names that constantly find their ways into my repertoire again and again and again and have been a part of the repertoire since really I've been a child, including Anton Brueckner. And these composers, for whatever reason, they come back at various phases of my life and they come back in ways that the composers offer different kinds of perspectives than they did the last time, that they were active in my repertoire. So that was primarily why I chose them. Got it. All right. That was a short one, so I'm going to ask one more question. This is because I have you here. And this is a question that plagues me and has plagued me for years and for decades, and I'm no closer to an answer, but I ask every wise person I meet what their perspective on it is. And that is this. Why, in your view, is it the case that classical music, contemporary classical music, is such a hard sell to educated, sophisticated audiences who gobble up the latest in the visual arts, in literature, in film, in theater? Why is the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art the size that it is and the San Francisco contemporary music players the size that it is with no disrespect to an organization for whom I have great fondness? But clearly there's some way in which that sophisticated, educated thirst for the new in the arts is unevenly distributed among the various arts. And it feels like it's a tangential question or it's a connected question to the one that you grapple with in the book, which is to say, what is the role of classical music in contemporary society? How is this, do you have any? Maybe just a couple of observations. For most of the literature that we considered standard repertoire, at the time it was written, it was contemporary music, and people came. As recently, I met a woman when I was studying in Paris with Messian, who remembered, she was very, very old, but she remembered the premiere of Sacre du Printon, and she was telling me what that was like. And she said, ah, yeah, Paris, that was such a great city back in those days. And I said, okay, yeah. And she said, yes, yes. On any given evening, you could hear four or five performances of new music. So as recently as, yeah, the beginning of the 20th century, people wanted to hear what was new, and yes, Sacre was a riot, it was a scandal, but it was fun. It was really great to have been there, and she was so happy to have been there. Messian himself, related with great joy that he had made a scandal with Conor Cromy. He said, yes, can you imagine? I was so afraid because people were so violent after the performance that I waited an extra hour before sneaking out of the théâtre du Champs-Élysées. And he said, they were waiting for me, and they had taken off their shoes, and they hit me on the head. And he wasn't depressed at all. He was really happy that he had made a scandal. So that's one thing that we tend to forget, is that most of the great repertoire that we refer to today, when it was written, it was brand new, and it created huge emotional and spontaneous reactions. Even the ninth symphony of Beethoven, it was maybe not what you would consider a great success. One of the articles openly lamented that the fact that, oh, our great maestro has lost his hearing, that's probably why we can't make any sense out of the ninth symphony. It's just... Or the premiere of Bizet's Carmen, which was met with just... It was a flop, a complete flop. So part of it was the excitement of being there. That's one, maybe, observation. The second observation is most of what is being created or written at any given moment in history is not very good. What we remember is, are those works through consensus, consensus of the public, of critics, of performers, that over time, well, this particular piece is maintaining its relevance so it's actually not tied to fashion. It's not tied to a certain period or an era. It's above time. It's become a masterpiece. And that takes a long time before a work enters into that repertoire. Everything else is pretty much forgotten and usually for good reason, and that includes our own time today. Most of what's being written is probably not very good. You just have to accept that. The third observation I would make is that whenever I do... Usually when I do a new work or premiere, it is very successful and sold out. So the most recent great commission that I did was the opening of the Elbphilharmonie, our new concert hall in Hamburg, and the program that I took for the opening, it's our home, it's our hall, was I commissioned a new piece by Jörg Wittmann called Arche, or Ark as in Noah's Ark, and I asked Jörg to remember the great Hamburg tradition, which is, for me anyway, it's a humbling tradition. Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Frederick Handel, Carl-Philipp Emmanuel Bach, Telemann, these were all my predecessors, Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler. So at the time that Handel was there, he was writing these great oratorials based on stories from the Old Testament. And so I asked Jörg to honor our tradition, write a new piece, but somehow makes a reference to the great Hamburg past. So he wrote Noah's Ark, Arche. And it was a very, very... One of the things I first remarked to myself was, ooh, this is going to be expensive, because there were not one chorus, but three choruses. They were not just a soprano and a baritone, but there was a boy soprano and two children speakers. There was a double-sized orchestra and a chamber orchestra, and I thought, God, this is really expensive, this is humbling. But on the other hand, it was timed where Jörg was really hitting a pinnacle of a phase of composition where he and I both felt that, on this occasion, could be something very special. And it exploded. And today, still, for those of us in Hamburg, we reference that piece as one of the signatures of the opening of the Alphalamone, and everyone is waiting, and next year will be the fifth anniversary of the Hall. And of course, we're bringing back Arche, and it's sold out immediately. I think what we should do always as performers is take what it is that we offer to our public pretty seriously. It needs to be more than, I like this piece, or it needs to be more than, oh, this is interesting. Our audiences, as always throughout all of time, are highly, highly sensitive to quality. An audience, even of children, instinctively feel when something is being, when the wool is being pulled over their eyes, you could just feel if something has integrity or quality or not. And above and beyond that, not only taking the time to really carefully study whether or not a work has compositional integrity, but to be truly honest and say, I like this piece, I love this piece, and to be able to explain why. If you can't convince an orchestra of your colleagues to fully engage with a performance, the piece doesn't have a chance. How is the public supposed to positively react to a piece if the colleagues aren't inspired? And how are the colleagues not to be inspired if you yourself are not inspired? And somehow if those basis, subjective and objective phenomenon all say green light, it's a much better chance that the public is going to embrace the work because so many people who believe in the piece are sharing it with their hearts. I think that's why it's a bit difficult sometimes because you have to say no to so many people that normally you would like to say yes, and that can be tried not to be offensive, but it is offensive. I think it's... Yeah, you sometimes don't end up very popular. Well, that's the price of fame and the price of maestrohood. So speaking of the public, I think it's time to open the question, the floor to questions. And Ricardo has a microphone and... Oh, there's microphones here. Let's start right here. Long time no see. Hi. So we've talked extensively about the first part of your talk, which is how do we program? What is responsible programming? What is good music versus bad music? In this country, we have the productions we do. I mean, you've worked with people like Romeo Castellucci, people who do pushbounderings, and do meaningful theater. And I feel like there's an attempt in this country to have theater with some meaning and a lot of theater with no meaning, but very little theater with a lot of meaning, which is the inverse of what's going on in many, many fantastic upper houses in Europe, Germany in particular. What do you think is the pathway forward away from auto shank productions in the U.S. and the stuff that's easy to market? Auto shank slam. I was just... Otto's a very good friend of mine, so... Listen, I grew up on auto shank. I just think there's other stuff out there, too. Of course, if it were an easy question to answer, everyone would do it. So it's not a very easy question. You must accept the fact that what is pertinent within the context of Hamburg or Berlin or Munich is not automatically pertinent to a life experience or a societal experience. In Quebec or New York or San Francisco, that has to be accepted. It's not to say that the repertoire itself doesn't have meaning if it's presented in the right way as Josh and I have discussed, but its interpretation draws upon certain givens in the societal structure. On some level, the performance of the classical arts or classical art forms partly is a memory culture. It refers back to heritage. It refers back to ancestors. It refers back to history, older history. Why? It's because we derive our own self-identities through the history. I consider myself a San Franciscoan because I've lived here, I was born in Alta Bates and basically lived here my entire life. Part of how I define myself is the Pacific Ocean, the Golden Gate Bridge and those wonderful events that help define San Francisco history. That is different from what defines Las Vegas and its brilliant development. That's different from what defines Montreal. Very, very different. I guess one of the most important things is just to assume that just because something doesn't work in one particular stage is going to automatically be transferable and understood. It's just, I guess, a little bit of sensitivity. Sometimes the answer is yes. Very often times the answer is no. But if it's no, if the collaborator is living as with Romeo, Castellucci, you can actually pick up the telephone and say, hey, let's adapt this. With performers or composers who are passed away, it's more difficult to pick up the telephone and ask if you can change it. But with living interpreters, that is always an option, which is just to be sensitive. Right here? Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Yes, thank you for coming back to San Francisco. Since you've been leader of ensembles for many, many years and have been in touch with new composers, I just wanted to find out your feeling. Are there a couple composers or maybe specific pieces that you think that the general public has not caught on to or has heard and rejected that you think they're misguided and that you would like to put forward in particular? You know, I'm just a musician, just a conductor, so I can't, I don't want to take a position of offering lofty insights. I can say that at different times we all have access to a shifting or a different set of parameters. That's why on my piano and on my desk sit a big stack of scores that are regarded as great masterpieces, great literature, and I somehow don't get it yet. So from my desk or from the piano I'll actually from time to time just sort of sit down and open up one of these scores and look at it. And surprisingly, sometimes a score will suddenly make sense after not making any sense for decades. I somehow finally get it. That was, for example, what happened with Wagner as a composition student studied Wagner, of course, and it took me a long, long time before I could open up Ziegfried and completely immerse myself into it. So I guess one leaves room for the fact that you hope that as you get older your perspective's widen and you can there's more of a place or right timing to have access to literature that might not be there. But one of the pieces to come directly to your point which at the moment I'm kind of pushing very, very hard is a piece that I heard performed here for the first time by Ligeti, Ligeti called San Francisco Polyphony. And at the time I was a composition student and boy that was a very stimulating listen but I really didn't fully grasp what was going on and that score sat on my desk for many, many years. I returned to the score ten years ago and went through a series of performances and really admired the piece very much and then it went back on my piano and a year ago I looked at the score and somehow it was in bright loud living color and I thought, now maybe is the time I've have whatever the right approach to the work where I am able to access certain sources of insights that maybe maybe it's a moment to reintroduce San Francisco Polyphony to a much broader audience. It's a completely under-appreciated piece as far as I can tell. In his catalogue it doesn't get a lot of love. It doesn't get a lot of love but at the moment I'm sort of on a crusade. So maybe that's one piece that I've if you hear me perform here that I'm performing please come and give the piece a chance. I'm a composition student and I would like to know how you got from playing piano to conducting and how you work with an orchestra. The question was how did I get from playing the piano and being a composition student to working as a professional conductor? I think that was the question. On one level I guess I've been conducting as long as I can think because with this professor whom I was speaking of he was also our church choir director and he led the children's choir which I was a member of when I was five and because later on 10, 11 because I could play the piano I oftentimes would be assigned to conduct the younger kids and teach them the music. So in a way through the church structure conducting was unveiled as a very unglamorous task. It was simply meant to keep time and actually help everyone stay together which maybe in hindsight is a pretty good basis for conducting, keep everyone together. But I'd never really thought seriously about becoming a conductor as a profession and it came to a head when I was a composition student at San Francisco State University I had a pair of very, very influential teachers Henry Arnaudak and Grosvenor Cooper really brilliant teachers great and inspired composers and part of the dream of every composition student is to actually hear their piece be performed and I was able to convince my poor classmates to be guinea pigs and I would conduct them and they would play my pieces and they would offer generously their criticism of my pieces and my fellow composition students were going hey well yeah do you mind doing that for my piece and so gradually I was conducting all of the time and it was primary the repertoire of my classmates and myself and then the teacher saying well gee you know would you mind conducting my piece on one of these performances and so I started doing that and then it spread outside of the school and slowly and gradually I was just conducting a lot and so people started calling me a conductor and that's kind of how it happened it was very unglamorous are there any women composers significant women composers and also what's the difference between a symphonic orchestra and a philharmonic orchestra are there any women composers so that's an easy answer yes and there are even more over there are active today brilliant visionary composers who happen to be women it's just name a couple Helen Grimes who's emerging on the scene brilliant composer English woman Kaya Sarayaho from Finland brilliant master composer now Un Suk Chin from Korea one of the most visionary and sound oriented composers these are just a few names very very active and I would say composers who have taken a leadership role for their generations and they happen to be women the difference between a symphony and a philharmonic mostly has to do with with the roots of where the names come from philharmonic means to love primarily oriented to sound but really to love harmony to love togetherness so that's what philharmonic means from its Greek roots it's basically a group of people who come together to share this love of doing something together in this case it's sounding together symphony its roots come from sounding at the same time which of course is what a symphony is many many elements sounding together together at the same time the original meaning of the philharmonic and the symphony perhaps had to do with size a symphony can be something like in the case of Gabrielle a symphony can be a group of a very small group of brass players that play together a symphony can be we call them the inventions Johann Sebastian Bach symphony the inventions sounding together a symphony can be a Haydn orchestra it can be Carl Philippa Manimol Bach Rococo orchestra or it can be a Beethoven orchestra philharmonic is oftentimes we would assume that that's a fuller sized ensemble of quite a bit of representation within the winds and the brass and percussion section larger forces this philharmonic ensembles as far as I know nothing has been written for solo piano called philharmonic or nothing has been written during the Rococo or Baroque period called philharmonic but symphony has been with us for a long time philharmonic is perhaps a bit more modern even though it traces its roots back to Greek antiquity I'm not sure if that made any sense it sounded good let me just add something about women composers at the end of the year it's always false to me to sort of look back on the calendar year and say well here are the 10 best or the 15 best music events of the year and I did that recently for 2019 and what I found somewhat but not completely to my surprise was that almost all of the most exciting and most interesting and most satisfying musical events of this past year in the Bay Area that I had covered had been performances of music by women starting in January with a piece by Anna Torvaldsdottir and I told very recently a music festival of music by the Polish composer Gretzina Bacewicz and various events in between of living women women from the 19th century from the earliest 20th century an enormous repertoire of music by women that is underserved and underrepresented and is now finally at last coming to the fore in addition to the women that Kent just mentioned so let's all keep our ears out for those and I'm getting the thank you I think that's that's are you giving us the cutoff sign let's give him a big hand please well thank you so much Joshua Kaufmann thank you thank you very much thank you Josh may I just add one one point no one asked me why it's called expect the unexpected alright I didn't no and it has to do with music education and has to do with this nearly utopian description that you had spoken about and it's also meant to be a trigger word for an entire well not an entire maybe how long has it been since proposition 13 is that 1979 or something like that 40 years 50 years 40 years I guess so since proposition 13 as we some of you remember music education within the school system took a very very nasty hit and in many schools systems it just disappeared what does that mean that means that we have well at least two generations maybe two and a half generations of adults for whom Mozart has no meaning it's not even a question of whether you like or don't like Mozart it has no meaning or the famous story that I like to give my daughter is here is when she mentioned that she was going to be going to to a lesson and was going out the door and her roommate said what do you have and Karen said I have Beethoven one and her roommate said well actually I prefer Beethoven 3 and another roommate said I like Beethoven 3 Beethoven 2 is pretty good and my daughter was really surprised because these are not musicians and she said well gee I didn't realize you appreciated Beethoven they are the best they are the best and after extended discussion it came to the it came to the reality they were talking about a series of films about a Saint Bernard dog whose name was Beethoven and he was so successful that Hollywood did a series so they were referring to the third installment or the second installment these two generations for whom Beethoven has zero meaning and it was meant to show that actually Costco music why we teach it is not necessarily in fact usually it's not because we would like to develop the next Alfred Brandl or Yasha Heifetz or whomever we we teach music because primarily for two reasons one with the belief that through having a cultivated education makes our lives richer and the other reason is that through Costco music we become aware of a certain level of abstract thinking to be able to think in the future the present and the past at the same time problem solving if you play in an orchestra you resolve social issues too it's not very nice to say you're flat you're early you learn actually basic social skills playing in an orchestra there is respect for authority respect for societal tensions there are a number of reasons why we teach Costco music but what comes from those who do study and that's why some of these interviews were here and I'm not sure if you see but one of the people who gave an interview was Dr. Daniel Leviton one of the great and leading neurologists in the world Leviton has done enormous research on what happens to a child's brain as it develops and what Costco music does in terms of affecting that development is that there is a general observation that it allows a child to achieve a certain potential that in many cases was not even expected I think for many many people who study music they're equally surprised that something was possible when it was not possible that's from where the title comes expect the unexpected exposure to great repertoire, art music it is essentially a counterweight to everything that is temporary so that means fashion, mode consumption these are all temporary things they disappear over time if you buy an iPhone it usually becomes out of date within a finite amount of time it becomes irrelevant as a counterweight in a very very fast moving society that we live today something that is eternal offers us the wonderful ability to be able to actively expect the unexpected that's why I attach the title to this book