The agony and the ecstasy
Jonathan Stockhammer, who recently joined the Maestro Arts roster, reflects on his earliest memories of musical ecstasy, the challenge of finding his own sound, and knowing when to get out of the way
What are your earliest memories of music?
My father played in Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and then Los Angeles Philharmonic, and my mother was a flute player in various orchestras. They were both professors and rehearsed chamber music in the house, so classical music was always present. I remember going to my dad’s LA Philharmonic rehearsals and concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in summer, and my mum played in pit orchestras, so I watched Evita hundreds of times and had a passion for musicals.
My strongest childhood memories are of listening to Beatles recordings. My mum played me their albums, and I had my own record player. I remember lying on the floor when I was about five, listening to Revolver and feeling a kind of ecstasy.
Where do you stand on the Paul or John question?
At this point in my life, I don’t think there is a question. However, when I was in my rock-band phase in my 20s and 30s, I avoided Paul McCartney concerts. I thought, ‘That’s not the Beatles. That’s Paul McCartney. I don’t like Wings.’ I finally went to a Paul McCartney concert in Cologne about 15 years ago, and I soaked my shirt with tears. Since then, I’ve gone to six or seven of his concerts, including in Liverpool and the Albert Hall.
I can’t compare Paul and John. I love how they work together, and how two personalities can cause something that might not have happened organically without both of them. I’m fascinated by these kinds of relationships. They’re not as present in the classical field as they could be. As promoters and festival planners, we don’t look enough for these tensions – the clashes and jealousies that could fire something interesting.
How might these clashes work in classical music?
I got close once with Helmut Lachenmann and Wolfgang Rihm, who are a kind of McCartney and Lennon of their generation of classical music. Rihm was very generous, his melodies are lush and he had an incredible craft in building structure. Lachenmann writes ten bars of music at a time and everything’s crossed out, but there’s a good reason for every note. They were totally different but liked each other, so I went to Rihm and suggested they each write songs that the other would get to challenge and edit. Wolfgang said, ‘I’m in. Let’s do this.’ Lachenmann’s response was, ‘That’s a brilliant idea, but I’m overcommitted for the next ten years.’ Unfortunately, I didn’t pursue it.
Back in the 70s and 80s, when promoters and concert managers weren’t only obsessed with clicks, there was more openness to such ideas: ‘If she plays Debussy like this, what would happen if she had a Nielsen cycle?’ or ‘What if we get this interesting artist and try something new?’ That spirit might be lacking in the safe programming that we see today. There’s less of a search for what could be exciting or fresh, or what no one has done before.
Do you think audiences can feel the same ecstasy with classical music that you found with the Beatles?
Absolutely. Last summer, I conducted Mahler’s Second Symphony in Korea. A young person came up to me afterward and spoke about their experience of hearing the symphony live. They described being moved by a moment in the third movement and said they had cried for the rest of it. We sat together for about half an hour, and I mostly listened to what the music had meant to them. I could totally relate to it. I get that feeling with any number of composers, and sometimes with music that isn’t even on my top ten list, but is just beautifully performed.
How did you learn to be a conductor?
I used to go to the LA Philharmonic five times a week, because I was in love with the way the solo trumpet Thomas Stevens played. He was also a jazz player and was always in the moment, and he had a liquid vibrato. He told me, ‘If you’re interested in music and conducting, you’ve got to study composition, because then you understand the architecture.’ He took me to meet Erich Leinsdorf, who also told me to study counterpoint and composition. So I composed, without imagining myself as a composer.
At school, people discovered that I was good at leading new music – or that I was so used to being made fun of that I wasn’t fazed when people realised how incompetent I was when I stood up in front of them, as others might have been. I often conducted student pieces.
Conducting new music is about figuring out how to make it effective, rather than just how to play it technically. What is the composer going for? When you do that alongside the composer or for yourself, you develop a craft. By working with new music and composers, you also get out of the ‘holy testament’ approach to composers. You try things out, which is what Brahms, Mahler and The Beatles did – it’s all the same continuum. It’s about being excited and noticing what’s working, as well as reading the audience. Even if you’re not looking at them, you sense a building tension or restlessness. That’s the important connection between composing and becoming a conductor.
What are some of the key things you’ve learnt from people who have mentored you?
The great thing about working with Esa-Pekka Salonen during my formative years was watching a consummate professional: always prepared and humble, and gentlemanly with everyone he worked with. He has the ease and ability to place elements and ideas in time in a natural, spontaneous way, achieving what the score demands while also being fresh. He does it with a combination of body and hand language, and an intellect that is unique. All you can learn from him is, ‘Don’t do that, because it’s his’, otherwise you’re just going to copy him. I’ve spent 20 years psychoanalysing all the Esa-Pekka out of me, and I say that with huge amounts of respect.
Myung-Whun Chung also has a compelling and unique sound. When I was studying with him, he told us how hard it was to put distance between himself and the years he spent assisting Giulini, because he loved that sound so much, and it took him a long time to accept that it was not his own sound.
With Bernard Haitink, I was always trying to understand how something so simple and seemingly unspectacular could produce such compelling, hypnotic moments. I love listening to recordings and concerts, and there’s a thirst to recreate sounds, which is not entirely wrong. Sometimes the line between what I do and what I'm copying from someone else is undefined, but I try to be aware of mannerisms. We all need to stay vigilant about that. As Stravinsky is supposed to have said, bad composers borrow and great composers steal.
What have you learnt about working with musicians?
Over the years, I’ve intentionally developed a template for working with colleagues in a setting that is not super-hierarchical, to allow their expertise to flourish. You have to be at home with yourself, so that you’re not an obstacle, and to be natural, in order to connect with the music, the musicians and the people in the concert hall.
In the end, we are all full of bullshit. That’s the human condition. We have illusions, dreams and aspirations, but we constantly have to weed out the bullshit. The less of it we bring to working with people, the better the chance we have to find some commonality that makes them tick. The less we are in the way of what makes them tick, the more exciting the process is. I practise getting out the way: not trying to be the middle point of everything, but just doing basic bourgeois good work – being reliable and down to earth. That is 90 per cent of the package.
What defines a good conducting technique?
Conducting technique is a combination of compelling leadership, physical communication, empathy, intuition and, above all, the way you react to problems intellectually. It’s the bridge between what you hear inside and what comes out, trying to get those as close as possible.
I don’t look at other conductors and measure their technique. We can’t tap into the inner ear of a conductor to know what they wanted and compare what came out, in order to judge their technique. You hear the result, but you can’t hear how it relates to what they desired. However, sometimes an orchestra notices that an artist is requesting something, and it seems obvious that would be obtainable if they were more efficient or gave them the necessary piece of information.
Stick technique is essential, but there are other ways of achieving many of the things that stick technique can achieve, and many artists do that. I marvel at people who can achieve things with their hands and their faces.
You have a special affinity with Mahler – can you explain why?
I got to know the Third Symphony when I was very young, through my parents’ love of it and hearing Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct and rehearse it when I was a teenager in Los Angeles. In my first year of university in Boston, I took the train to New York to hear the New York Philharmonic and Bernstein playing it. The concert was totally sold out, but I waited in the rain and got a ticket at the last minute. In those two hours, I felt like I had experienced deeper, stronger impressions and feelings than I had in my entire life.
Mahler builds a world of cities teeming with personalities, interactions and people, in a way that very few books do. You feel like you’ve had an exhaustive view of the universe. Mahler speaks to so many different emotional needs – sentimentality, rage, intense joy, let-down, yearning – in such an explicit way, in ways that few other composers could sustain over the arc of a piece.
In Mahler you have different arguments, and as a conductor you can choose to ride them in either subtle or more intense ways. How you do that changes the backbone of the entire piece. It’s not fragile music that breaks apart if you take one thing an inch or two too far, nor is it flabby German music where details don’t matter. It’s just right. It’s cerebral, but emotional and nervous, and it strives for salvation and an imagined resolution to all the world’s conflicts.
What advice do you have for a young conductor?
Conducting is obviously about communicating – with the score, artists and audiences – but that skill doesn’t necessarily grow by sitting in a room studying scores, knowing the most about that music or watching other conductors. Communication is about life experience.
More than anything else, a conductor must empathise with many different performers, professionals and audiences. The ability to understand quickly and communicate with these people – assessing their needs as well as their artistic framework – is the skill that makes everything come together. That’s basically what the conductor does: make everything work in the framework presented, which is not always an optimal one. That requires flexibility.
Precision is a tool and knowledge is helpful, but our job is to discover what is interesting. It’s like finding where the surf is breaking and exactly where the surfboard should be, between the wave and the foam – that’s what a conductor has to do. Fortunately, we don't have to make the sound. We work with incredibly skilled sound makers, so we can afford to ride that wave.
Jonathan Stockhammer conducts Seattle Symphony in Unsuk Chin's Rocaná, Szymanowski's Second Violin Concerto, with soloist Leila Josefowicz, and Stravinsky's Petrushka (5 and 7 November)
