What the future holds for the field s talented young professionals. By Heidi Waleson. 34 Winter 2010 Early Music America. Marie Dalby.

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1 YOUNG EARLY MUSIC PERFORMERS By Heidi Waleson Marie Dalby Avi Stein Andrew Fouts Joshua Copeland Liam Byrne Mahan Esfahani Linda Pearse Tobie Miller Debra Nagy Yulia Van Doren What the future holds for the field s talented young professionals 34 Winter 2010 Early Music America

2 had his early music conversion experience. Paul O Dette s office was at the end of the hall, past the organ practice rooms, Stein recalls. I saw the collegium rehearsals going on, and I wanted to play in it. Paul said I would have to learn figured bass, so I took Arthur Haas s figured bass class and started to play harpsichord and organ in the collegium. That led to further study in France, at USC, and finally D.M. studies at Indiana in organ and harpsichord. Today, Stein, 34, leads a hectic, multifaceted musical life. Based in Manhattan, thanks to the subsidized apartment that comes with his job as a church music director and organist, he spends several days a week at Yale, where he teaches harpsichord, coaches voice students at the Institute for Sacred Music, and accompanies Baroque string players and the undergraduate Baroque opera project. He performs as part of the trio Repast and started 4x4, his own minifestival of concerts. There are harpsichord gigs in and out of town. In 2008, he conducted his first opera, leading a small instrumental ensemble in The Coronation of Poppea at Le Poisson Rouge with a small startup company. He s had about five days off in the last year. Stein and his contemporaries see an early music field that is in some ways quite different from the one their predecessors entered 25 years ago. If historical performance isn t quite mainstream, it is making strides in that direction. The launch of Juilliard s historical performance program raised the profile for con- LOOK AHEAD AVI STEIN WAS an undergraduate servatory training. Existing programs are organ student at Eastman when he Stein and his contemporaries see an early music field that is in some ways quite different from the one their predecessors entered 25 years ago. If historical performance isn t quite mainstream, it is making strides in that direction. also expanding at institutions like Yale, Eastman, and Indiana. There is an extensive network of performers and scholars all over North America. Some performance groups, like the 30-year-old Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, have been around for a long time, and new ones are every day being formed. Technology that was undreamed of a quarter century ago offers immense opportunities for scholarship, recording, education, and promotion. How will all this unfold in the next 25 years? As they look ahead, young performers say that they are optimistic. Many of them are finding plenty of work. Take Andrew Fouts, 31, who also discovered Baroque violin through the Eastman collegium. He jokes that a friend told him that it was an easy A, but then he discovered that I felt liberated by the Baroque violin. There s so much freedom of motion in playing, and it translates to the approach to music. After a few years of freelance work, playing both Baroque and modern violin, Fouts auditioned for and won the violin position in Chatham Baroque, where he has a solid economic and artistic base, plus the opportunity to work with other ensembles. He still has his modern violin, but he uses it as an extra instrument for repertoire requiring scordatura tuning. Debra Nagy, 31, a Baroque oboist who also teaches at Case Western Reserve University, estimates that she is on the road 145 days a year, playing with such ensembles as Apollo s Fire, REBEL, and Tempesta di Mare; she also has a sideline in late Medieval music and plays in the shawm band Ciaramella. Nagy has not played modern oboe since her senior recital at Oberlin, which she split between Baroque and modern oboe. I wonder if the life of freelancers is consistent through the ages, she says. I m a big believer in the phoenix syndrome great ensembles existed 20 years ago, and others rise to take their place. Even though I m a freelancer, my income is really quite stable. I play with different groups, but it comes out to about the same number. Young historical performance players are also getting recognition. In 2008, Mahan Esfahani, now 26, became the first harpsichordist to be named a BBC New Generation Artist. Esfahani, who discovered the historical instrument collection while studying musicology at Stanford, is now based at Oxford, where he is artist-in-residence, and works mostly in the UK and Europe. He has a busy concert schedule, with solo and concerto engagements including Wigmore Hall and the BBC Proms, and he plays modern music as well. There is a ton of opportunity out there if you keep one thing in mind: some of the most receptive audiences, who came to like this instrument and this music a lot, are audiences that American promoters would be most afraid of selling it to people who bought a piano series, or one of the mainstream classical series, he says. Esfahani thinks that breaking out of the early music niche is essential for the field. As a niche, I don t see it as being viable for all that long. Your very good violinist coming out of conservatory has studied Baroque practice. Singers every one has Baroque pieces in their bag of arias. A friend of mine who is singing at the Vienna State Opera can do Early Music America Winter

3 YOUNG PERFORMERS LOOK AHEAD Baroque repertoire and also Berio. That well-rounded musician will make life difficult for people who push themselves into a niche. Players are also noticing that their modern instrument colleagues are interested in what they do. It s promising that a lot of modern musicians are amenable to historical performance practice, Fouts says. I ve been hired to lead orchestras playing modern instruments, and I find people to be receptive you don t get the feeling that they think what we do is BS. Sometimes they are nervous. They want to learn, but they don t know where to begin and are a little shy about it. And it s cool that they explore it, and bring it back to the modern orchestra situations, and share it with their friends, so the interest grows exponentially. Linda Pearse, 35, who spent a number of years studying and playing sackbut in Europe and is now at Indiana getting a doctorate in brass pedagogy and modern trombone in addition to performing and teaching sackbut, points out that the divide between early instrument and modern instrument performance may cease to be the yawning gap it was once thought to be. In 25 years, it s possible that the term early music may not be so relevant, she says. We have entered the 21st century, and the 19th century is farther away. As we get farther away from the date of Bach s death, all that material in between becomes early music. I think it is possible that we will start calling everyone performance practice specialists. I specialize in 16th and 17th century; others might do 18th century or 19th. In Basel, the orchestra hired a freelance Baroque ensemble to do the Monteverdi Vespers. It was a shock to those salaried orchestra musicians. If that continues to happen, the justification of having a Romantic orchestra that only does one kind of performance practice loses its validity. Still, there is an enormous amount of work yet to be done in exploring earlier music, and the relationship between scholarship and performance continues to draw closer. Debra Nagy says, I m encouraged by a younger generation of true performer-scholars, people who are getting Ph.D.s and are able to negotiate the musicology world, but also get respect for performance. And some of the more interesting scholarship looks at music through the physical act of playing, like Elisabeth Le Guin s book Boccherini s Body. New tools In addition to playing the hurdygurdy and the recorder, Tobie Miller, 28, who is based in Basel, pursues studies in organology, including a thesis on the early history of the hurdy-gurdy. The more we learn, the more we can understand the context of the music and also Players are also noticing that their modern instrument colleagues are interested in what they do. It s promising that a lot of modern musicians are amenable to historical performance practice, Andrew Fouts says. understand the instruments better, she says. In organology, you re looking at iconography, and understanding how the instruments were constructed and used, and working with instrument makers. Instrument-making is really evolving, as the makers find new ways to do things like the new technique to make low, unwound gut strings that sound really good. Or Medieval recorders, constructed based on iconography, that don t sound anything like what we associate with the Baroque recorder, which means we have a long way to go to understand how to play them. There are still a lot of missing links, and that s what keeps it interesting. The explosion of technology has wrought perhaps the most dramatic changes in historical performance. Players seeking new repertoire can go online to comb through searchable catalogues of collections and look at manuscripts that they would once have had to travel to Sweden or Italy to peruse. Musicians make their own new editions and assemble scores from parts and share them online. Avi Stein says he found an obscure 18th-century French opera composer in Yale s Beinecke Library, put the name into the Bibliothèque nationale catalogue, and found scores. Stein has been able to make his own new editions of works by checking earlier editions against manuscripts that are much more readily available. Gambist Marie Dalby, 30, actually has a day job in technology. She is on the content team at Inkling, a West Coast startup that creates an ipad platform for textbooks. Dalby sees the kind of enhancements that the company does as having enormous potential for historical performance scholarship and performance. You can access so much more, and you can do comparative studies of material you would not have known existed, she says. Technology has now put recording within the grasp of anyone who can raise a few thousand dollars, not just the fortunate few with recording contracts. Dissemination of such recordings is also much easier one doesn t even need a physical product. Soprano Yulia Van Doren, 26, pointed out gleefully that in late August Seraphic Fire s self-released recording of the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 went to number one on the itunes classical chart, thanks to vigorous Facebook traffic about it among members and friends. Mahan Esfahani believes that the ease of video recording and sharing is even good for the concert business. I think the Internet and YouTube is a godsend for classical music in general. Now that there s YouTube, people expect live performance. They watch videos, and they say I want that experience. Technology may be especially key in helping to spread the word in the U.S., where historical performance is still less prevalent than it is in Europe. Tobie Miller says that living in Basel is a practical choice because of its central location. U.S.-based performers must travel greater distances, and the opportunities are neither as numerous nor as wellfunded as their European counterparts. Still, they are there. Baritone Joshua 36 Winter 2010 Early Music America

4 Copeland, 27, who completed a master s degree at Yale s Institute for Sacred Music, is finding a good bit of Baroque work, and not only in the east and west coast centers. I have a group of friends with a project going in North Carolina, and I did a St. John Passion in Nashville, he says. Copeland also sings with Seraphic Fire in Miami. Copeland particularly likes work that combines singing in the ensemble with the solos. A lot of the interesting music is in the ensemble work, he says. It s so much more collaborative than just having the four people up front sitting on the stage. I enjoy the collegiality. The real fun is making the music together. I d like to see the concert work in the U.S. get stronger, and the best way to do that is stay and participate in it. So I m starting relationships with as many of the ensembles as I can. He recognizes that being a concert singer in the U.S. is an even more challenging career route than that of a young opera singer, who can look to young artist programs at opera companies to provide some economic stability. Still, he says, I m optimistic that there s a future in this stuff. We ve learned so much from Judy Malafronte, Ellen Hargis, Julianne Baird, Bill Sharp, Robert Mealy, and we re ambitious to keep these ensembles going and start up projects of our own. There s a group of us, all in our late 20s, that feel the same way. One of that group is Yulia Van Doren, who discovered early music by chance while she was a student at the New England Conservatory, she took a Baroque opera workshop in Seattle with Stephen Stubbs. Though she feels that most voice teachers still have little stylistic understanding of Baroque singing, she says, I see the early music singing world becoming more and more mainstream. If you look at the opera schedules, many of them have at least a Handel opera on the season. Recently, on the Amazon classical chart, the first seven discs were crossover, and number eight was Patricia Petibon s disc of Baroque Italian arias. Baroque is not a side thing. She sees this as a change in just the last few years. When I started exploring this repertoire, the impression I got from the majority of people in the business was that people sang it because their voices were too small for regular repertoire. Now, people like Renée Fleming and Natalie Dessay sing this music. Rebel, rebel Still, some of the younger players wonder if the increasing acceptance of historical performance in the academy and the marketplace may result in some loss of the questing spirit that made the movement what it is. Avi Stein says, I hope early music does not lose that sense of self-discovery and iconoclasm that it had. When a style and a culture becomes developed and institutionalized, it can lose that. So much of what early music was about was rebelling against the self-contained, standard classical tradition, where you did what the teacher taught you, not what the sources say. Now, historical performance students Some of the younger players wonder if the increasing acceptance of historical performance in the academy and the marketplace may result in some loss of the questing spirit that made the movement what it is. are doing what the teachers tell them, so they get received knowledge, rather than the sense of individual exploration. Technology also represents a double-edged sword: things are so readily available that you have to combat the tendency to sit back and let it come to you. When I was at USC, I started an ensemble called La Monica with a bunch of great players. We d pull music off the library shelves and photocopy it, and then four times a week, at 10 at night, we d go to a harpsichord maker s studio one block from Skid Row in downtown LA, where the street life was mostly middle-aged Mexican transvestites. We d just read through stuff and come up with new programs. I don t see people doing that, even in school, when they have time. So much is recorded now, they can just listen and choose. Liam Byrne, 28, an Indiana University -trained viol player, teaches at London s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, is a member of Fretwork, and is dedicated to his multidisciplinary performance collective, The Rare Theatricall, which creates new works based on old music. He too is concerned that the institutionalization of early music may leach the excitement and originality out of the field and considers the idea of early music professionalism to be a problematic term. I feel it s very important for our generation not to evaluate our successes and failures by comparison with the career model of the generation that went before, he says. Our teachers had the early music boom, when the idea of historical accuracy was a selling point in itself and the recording industry was lucrative. Among my peers, I see frustration with there not being work the way there was 20 years ago, but this obsession with work clouds our identities as artists. Byrne worries that his contemporaries equate success with how much they are paid. A few years ago, I began to realize that every performance opportunity is something to be treasured not just a source of income or a way to gain status. We should keep working in the same exploratory, experimental mindset as our teachers have, re-examining treatises, experimenting with historical instrument setup, thinking about what the concept of authenticity means to us in our performance. The great danger is that we find a pretty piece of music, show up in the concert hall, and play it. That s not going to make anything vibrant. Yulia Van Doren, inspired by jazz musicians, certainly isn t sitting back. She thinks that early music will become wilder, that it will become standard practice to ornament on the spot. I m not interested in being a museum, she says. We have 21st-century ears. We young performers have this amazing wealth of knowledge, unearthed by the first generations of early music scholars and performers. Now it s our job to continue it and make it personal. When I go to a concert, I want to hear a personal expression, not just a perfect interpretation. As today s young players look to the future, they are thinking about how they Continued on page 56 Early Music America Winter

5 YOUNG PERFORMERS LOOK AHEAD Continued from page 37 and their colleagues can make the early music world grow, particularly in North America. I suspect, I hope, there will be a lot more small, grass roots early music ensembles springing up all over the country, says Debra Nagy. I hope that the people getting trained at Juilliard, Oberlin, McGill, or USC don t confine themselves to New York or San Francisco, but go back to the places where they grew up, where it s less expensive to live, and have careers that will flourish in a different way, rather than trying to compete for the same continuo jobs. I was heartened to see that a couple of people started a Baroque orchestra in Louisville, Kentucky that s what should happen. Linda Pearse would like to see an apprenticeship program for young professionals, and an El Sistema-like education program created for early music. That outreach to underserved communities will give us relevance, she says. Marie Dalby, who will become the youngest president of the Viola da Gamba Society of America in 2012, also feels that getting more people to play is an important way to build the early music world. We have been able to attract new people, in the age Marie Dalby, who will become the youngest president of the Viola da Gamba Society of America in 2012, also feels that getting more people to play is an important way to build the early music world. group, by giving them a chance to try the instruments, she says. Making music is inherently social and fun. Early music is shouldering the idea of getting musicmaking back into the culture today because entry is at a technical level that s feasible and everybody gets the good bits. And hand in hand with having more amateurs, I think we re going to see an explosion of performances, and people starting new groups and giving multi-disciplinary presentations that can be housed in different kinds of institutions. Working with books in the tech world, I see that a book is not just a book any more. You have to bring in other things show the picture, hear the words, the music. Folks are getting used to that, and they don t want to experience it in just one way. Early music is poised to do that and play at a high level. There are increasing opportunities to study. You don t have to go to Europe we have players, teachers, and musicologists who are starting to feed into these jobs at institutions, and it s bringing more hands-on awareness. There s not just one dusty record any more, but all these CDs, and more opportunities for people to get turned on to early music. A frequent contributor to EMAg over the years, Heidi Waleson is the opera critic for the Wall St. Journal. in Seattle March 2011 The American Handel Festival Pacific Musicworks, Stephen Stubbs; Tudor Choir, Doug Fullington: Esther Boston Early Music Festival: Acis and Galatea Early Music Guild, Portland Baroque, Les Voix Baroques: Bach St. John Passion Seattle Symphony, Nicholas McGegan Seattle Baroque Orchestra, Ingrid Matthews Seattle Pro Musica, Karen P. Thomas Plus workshops, scholarly papers, and more: 56 Winter 2010 Early Music America