Welcome to the Common Time Podcast, a show designed to give music educators practical, inspiring ideas for you and your program. Each week we sit down with world class educators, composers, and conductors to talk about teaching, leadership and building programs that thrive without burning yourself out. So whether you're a band, orchestra, or choir director, our goal is simple to help you grow and stay inspired and remember why you fell in love with teaching music in the first place. This is season 4, and we're diving even deeper. More real conversations, more actionable takeaways, and more voices shaping the future of music education. Let's get into the episode. Our guest today is Professor Michael Haithcock. Welcome, Professor.
Thank you. It's good to be here.
We're so happy to have you on the podcast. So Professor Haithcock is the Arthur F, or now Professor Emeritus of Music and former Director of Bands of the University of Michigan. And we could not be more delighted to share his expertise and knowledge and just ask some questions. So, John, why don't you get us started?
Thanks, David. Hi Michael, it's it's always good to see you. Thanks for being here. So I'm just going to start off right away by asking about your just because you've you've had such a distinguished career as a conductor and as a teacher and has a mentor to many people, including myself. So looking back, what kind of moments or decisions kind of shaped who you've become on the podium?
Well, do you have how many weeks do we have? Yeah, that's a broad question. I, I appreciate the compliment of having distinguished career. I, I think, you know, one of the things I tried to do in all the roles that you mentioned is be the same person off the podium that I was on the podium, same person in the hallways. You know, it doesn't mean that everyone was always happy with me or whatever, but you know, just having a consistency of approach, being direct, being honest, you know, just not having to look over your shoulder wondering why you did that last time and this, this time and that, that sort of thing. And I, I think the, the core values of that came from my parents and grandparents of the first generation college students. My parent, my grandparents were born in late 1800s. My parents were born in the 30s right after the Depression. And there was a sense of if you're going to do it, do it right. In my upbringing, there was, you know, we, we weren't, we weren't kidding around with whatever it was, at least to the best of our abilities. And my abilities in certain high school subjects were much concern to my parents. But I think that work ethic that my grandparents who, who came from farms into the cotton mills of North Carolina to work, you know, really transferred both genetically, perhaps, but also in terms of my, my observations growing up, because I, I've always felt the need to fulfill my commitments and, and, you know, be sure that, that I was 100% prepared and, and ready, ready to be a service. I, I think my, my parents really wanted me to be a church musician and I took piano for 12 years all through from Grade 1 to 12. I took organ for the last four years. I had a church job my last two years at a small Methodist Church where I played the organ and did the choir. And that pretty much convinced me that I did not want to do that. I always enamored with the high school band and I studied, I learned to play the saxophone, but I studied, you know, flute, clarinet, horn and baritone in the summer, you know, summer band programs. And you know, my goal in life was to replace my high school band director when you retired. Go. My 91 year old mother still says that I didn't quite achieve. But I think I think, you know, I like a lot of kids. My parents and I went in to talk to my high school band director and my dad said, well, you know, he wants to be a band director and follow in your footsteps. And, you know, what should we do? And he's didn't blink. He said you should go to East Carolina University. So I did. It's the only school I applied to. And I got in and I had the good fortune of having some really great teachers. I had a conducting teacher who was a Michigan graduate, a student of Elizabeth H Green, who played principal trombone in the Symphony band under Rubelli, was a classmate of H Robert Reynolds. And he made sure I was really well schooled in the ways of my green saxophone teacher was a young whippersnapper named Jim Hulick, who was probably the highest artistic influence of my life. And we remain good friends today, 60 years later. He's just now retiring from teaching in his early 80s. And then the band director there, Herbert Carter, was very influential. He ran what was called Symphonic Wind Ensemble, which is kind of what Northwestern does, where it's a small band, not so much rotation of parts and that sort of stuff. But you know, I was going to college between 1972 and 1976 and he was playing Persichetti and Husa and Schumann and those kind of pieces. We did play Lancashire Posey, but you know, he was playing what at the time was, you know, knew and we didn't do very many transcriptions, although we did, you know, we did candy, we did festive overture. But I got a sense between the saxophone repertoire needing to grow and the, the modeling of a Herb Carter in the wind ensemble that this pursuit of, of repertoire was something that really interested me. So I was going to graduate and, and I went back to school after Christmas in early 1976. And I went in and told Mr. Hulick, hey, I've decided to stay at East Carolina and get my master's degree because I can earn another $1000 a year. This is when starting teaching salaries were $9000, right? And I could do it this summer, a year, if you, if you do the math, John, $10,000 in today's dollars works out to the mid 50s.
Yeah. OK, great. So you can, you know, got it wasn't quite as wasn't quite as poverty here. Just like yeah, yeah, yeah. $9000 Wow you can buy a loaf of bread for a nickel.
So, you know, going way back. So I, I told him this and he didn't say much. And then the next day after the wind ensemble rehearsal, we rehearse four days a week for an hour and 10 minutes. On the way out of the rehearsal, Herbert Carter came over to me and said, I want you to come to my office. So I'm thinking, well, what have I done? You know, I don't think I've had a bad rehearsal or whatever. So I went in there and there's Hulick, and there's Bob Haas, the orchestra conductor. He was the conductor teacher. And they basically said to me, you can't stay here. You've got everything out of the school you can get, you need to go someplace else. And Carter handed me a slip of paper. That was an assistantship advertisement to Baylor University, and he pointed to the name on the assistantship advertisement. He said this guy, Richard Floyd, had a fantastic high school band. His high school band played the Dawson Panetta. And he said you go down there and study with this guy for two years and you can have any high school job in North Carolina you want. So I called the phone number. The assistantship was still open. I applied. Never been to Waco, didn't even really realize Baylor was a Baptist school and wound up getting the assistantship and moving to Texas to stay two years. It took me 25 years to graduate. So you know, that's that's a long winded answer to your question. But I think all those little dominoes fell in such a way that my path is probably not repeatable in some ways, in some ways that everyone experiences certain kind of mentors that help propel them along the way. But, you know, when I was this church job stuff, I, I didn't want to do that for profession, but I learned a lot from it. And I did it when I was in college and I did it for a couple years, the first few years on the faculty at Baylor, because you have to learn how to work with people and you have to learn how to, you know, deal with a structure. You have to learn how to, to rehearse ahead. You can't just rehearse for the moment. And you have to learn what you can actually accomplish and what that tenor is never going to sing in tune. So you, you know, you, you kind of have to have to figure all this stuff out. And I think those lessons, you know, proved to be extremely valuable to me as I as I went through my, my 45 years of college teaching.
And that's a wonderful trajectory. Like just seeing, I've never heard all of those pieces put together. I knew I've known where you've been in some of the background and not fully. So that's I, I appreciate the, the insight. And it kind of makes me think about where I was thinking this next question could go because I was, you mentioned that part of your mentorship was seeing, you know, how you could help these other individuals, but your legacy largely lives in your students now they're out doing various things have been quite successful from Baylor to the University of Michigan. So you just mentioned value. So when you think about your work with young conductors and younger musicians, what, what are the values that mattered most to you beyond the, you know, the notes and the rhythms and stuff? We're going to going to get out of the way, of course, but yeah, kind of holistically, yeah.
I, I, I mean, John's heard me say some of these things numerous times. I, I, I, I, I didn't know this early, this quote early in my career, but I, I keep coming back to it as a mantra for what I tried to do. And that is the Maya Angelou quote. You know, they may remember what you did, they remember, they may remember what you said, but they'll always remember how you made them feel. And, you know, I, I had experiences as an undergraduate student and that made me feel awful. And I had those that made me feel great. And it wasn't so much about how successful I was in the class or whether I thought the teacher liked me. It was just the way, you know, the, the instruction was delivered and how I could follow, you know, the, what needed to be done and, and, and get a get a grip, so to speak, on what the curriculum was. And so when I became the first ever assistant director of bands at Baylor after those two years of master's degree, my fear of failure was kind of off the charts because I, you know, I had no business in that job. I mean, they offered me the job because I was cheap and available. And they were going to do it for one year and then one year turned into 4. But, you know, I, I had just been a grad student there. So half the students knew me as this grad student. So how was I going to position myself as all of a sudden this, this new faculty member? And I think that's really where I started to tie together the, the values that I had learned from my family, the modeling I'd had from these wonderful teachers in high school and also at ECU and the, the church experience, how, how to work with people. And so, you know, if I want to, if I try to nutshell it, I, I think I developed a, a concept I called the cycle of trust. And I would, I would give this speech to the Symphony band every semester because to me it was like a, it was like a contractor, a covenant or, or, you know, a deal, whatever you want, whatever you want to think about it. But I wanted them to know that the most important thing to me was that I got to know them as people. I didn't want to walk down the hall and say, oh, you played third clarinet. I wanted to be able to call somebody by name, know why they came to Michigan. I knew that at Baylor because I was so heavily involved in summer camps and recruiting. But when I came to Michigan, I didn't know that at all. So I decided to do this with the entire 76 piece band. The at the first rehearsal, I made this announcement and, and over the next three weeks, I met everybody individually because I wanted to get to know them as, as people, because I think and all these relationships I've been describing, it was the, it was the personal touch, if you will, that may gave me confidence and trust in the advice I was getting and the instruction I was getting and knowing that I could go to these mentors at any time and seek help as I needed it. So this cycle of trust concept to me, the most important thing was I know you as a person. I care about you as a person. And then I will do anything I can to help you. No stone left unturned. I will attend your recital. I will write your letters of recommendation. If you want me to hear you play for an audition, I will do it any, any way in which I can help people because that's the way people treated me. And, you know, I wasn't, I was really busy, but I was never too, I never wanted to give the impression that I was too busy to be of service. I, I think that's a vibe that a lot of conductors give off and it's not something that is part of my, my makeup. I also understood, largely because of my children, that their time and their talent was a significant asset. And so one of the best gifts you can give to someone is the way you spend time with them. And the other gift you can give them related to time is not wasting it, you know. So using every minute of every rehearsal professionally, you know, and with a clear plan, something I called Eagle Vision, being able to go from, you know, step one through the end product, knowing exactly how we're going to spend the time. There's just, there's, there's a in addition to trust, there's a respect that develops from that. I respect you, you respect me. We respect the process. You come in every day. You know how to, you know, you know that there's a plan. It's much easier to prepare when you know what the plan is than if you just come in with this open-ended where we're going to, we're going to do something for two hours. And, you know, I think all those things I tried to, I tried to put into practice, I'm talking about the Symphony band right now. But I also tried to put those things into practice with the graduate conducting students, with my faculty colleagues so that, you know, it wasn't, I only care about the Symphony band. I spent an enormous amount of time on other things administratively and pedagogically. And you know, again, who you are across the board people see. And I wanted there to be a, you know, a consistency that people could trust me no matter what the role. And you know, it's interesting, all these students of mine and, you know, conducting students to go out and teach. They come, they tell me in their first days on the job, hey, I did these getting to know you appointments and the students can't believe it. Right. You know, so I think again, I think that the, the respect and trust that the approach garnered opens the door for so many things. And that was, you know, if you're going to, if you're going to push somebody in it, like in a graduate conducting studio, I, I always, always use the term best possible. Well, that's good, but it's not as good as it can be and it's not as good as you can do. And I often said to people, if I stop asking you to improve, then I've given up. And I, I didn't have people give up on me. And that still resonates to me after all these years. So I mean, I don't know a bit, David, I don't know if I've answered your question.
No, you absolutely have. Those little things, you know, it's interesting. My doctor was Steve Davis, who was at Michigan for a time and we would have DOB one O 1 talks as well. And I know where those come from. And in one of those, I do remember him talking about those meetings with students. And I did that every time following that. And it made a huge difference of setting up at the beginning of the semester when I first got to the University of Houston, the first thing I did. So I have to get to know these students. I've I've been out of Texas for a decade. It's different. And it was very impactful. And it came from, I'm certain that it came from a DOB one O 1 talk probably 10 or 15 years prior with Steve Davis. So it's it all resonates with me for sure.
I, I save, I still have all of the DOB one O 1 emails, Mike that you sent me, but I'm going to change topics just a tad bit. You are, are known for everything that you just said, but also specifically your, your knowledge of the repertoire, I think is unparalleled in our profession from anyone that I've ever known. And because we, we talked together for 15 years, I've, I have seen you think about and create thoughtful, cohesive concert programs and, and, and I always respected that at the highest level. So my question for you it is, do you have advice for anyone about as they shape a program, what question should like guide their choices emotionally, musically, educationally, I mean all the things. Do you have any advice or how did you do it and how do you teach others to also do that?
Well, I think I learned a lot about programming by going to a lot of concerts. I went to a lot of concerts at Baylor of, of the orchestra, of the choirs, of my faculty colleagues and student recitals. And here in Ann Arbor, there is a, you know, an embarrassment of riches, of concerts you can attend. And I think I just over the years sorted out what made a concert enjoyable to me. So if I go hear the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in December and it's an all Brahms concert, that's fabulous. It's all Brahms. It's, you know, the pick of the litter of, if you will, if you're putting together a middle school band concert, then, you know, really what do students need to learn as opposed to what do the students like? And I did the balance in that I think is really crucial in the in the lower grades. My wife taught piano for years and you would hear these kids come in and struggle with a Bach invention. And then they would, you know, get to play a show tune or some pop tune that, you know, they learned and again, the balance of that. So when I tried to put together programs both at Baylor and the and the Michigan Symphony Band programs, to me it was always about the balance. So I remember doing music for Prague at a Texas Music Educators Association Conference concert in 1995. Well, that's a, you know, the band crowd knows that piece. And but I also did Lincolnshire Posey and the string a lot for session. So there was a wide variety of sounds and that was one of the things I learned from going to choral concerts is that, you know, a choirs, A choirs, a choir, but how do you program in such a way so that the choir doesn't sound the same piece after piece after piece? And I, I think one of the shortcomings for mini band concerts is that the pieces sound too much the same because they're, you know, cut from the same cloth. So as different as Persichetti and William Schumann are, they're really in a way cut from the same cloth. So, you know, if you John Mackey and, and Steve Bryant, they are different, yes, but they are also cut from the same cloth. So how do you, how do you balance what the audience is going to experience? And both at Baylor and at Michigan, I did that by using the historical repertoire and rotating players doing things one apart as well as a full ensemble. So you have the complete range of music history at your disposal. And you know, I didn't want an audience at Michigan to, to feel that we were only going to do small stuff because of the tradition of the of the band. So when I came to Michigan and I was pretty upfront, I'm going to merge the Eastman Wind Ensemble tradition with the University of Michigan Symphony band tradition. And that's why we wound up doing, I called it 8 to 80, so we could do a full, full band piece with 80 players, which is still 44 people less than rubella used in his last years. But you know, in today's world, that's a full band. So I just think constantly thinking about the balance. And I always wanted people to feel welcomed to the concert, not affronted at the beginning of the concert. And I always wanted to feel had people feel they were leaving at the end with something that made them want to come back, not wonder what that was. And, you know, there's there they are, you know, depending on the person and the person's musical experience that can mean different things. But I use this metaphor. I called Maude and Mabel. Those are the people that come in off the street free because they've lived in Ann Arbor for years and they've been coming to Symphony band concerts for years. Some of the, some of the people I would talk to, you know, I came to Symphony band concerts when I was a kid because my parents, you know, had played for William D Rivelli or my parents came to Rivelli concerts, etcetera, etcetera. So I, I think all those things kind of go into the mix now in terms of, and I'll, I'll give you an example. You know, music for Prague, I mentioned before is a piece I love and I, I think it's a, a masterpiece in, in any genre. And I did it on my first concert at Michigan because it was a piece that Bob had not done in years. And there was a connection with Michigan and Husa. So I, I got Carell to come and he, you know, he, he Ravelli had actually been quite a champion of Prague in, at a time when Ravelli did no other new music. So as a matter of fact, he did it with the Texas Allstate once, I think the early 70s. And you know, that was, that was a huge deal. So that was the last piece on the concert. Great work. Carell gave a little speech and Todd it all together with the his experience with Husa and Bob and myself. And it was a really a wonderful thing. But I don't think every concert where you do Prague, Prague has to be the last piece. I mean, if you think about it emotionally, you might think about it in, in a way. But as the Cold War ebbed, that emotional context wasn't always quite the same. So the last couple times I did it, I did it at the end of the first half and gave the intermission space for people to absorb it emotionally. Or you know what, what react to it however they wanted to react to it. You can never do that with Circus Maximus. You fired none that's going to end the concert. And even the piece like was like a Fourth Symphony. I mean, it's, you know, you don't just, you just don't follow that up. But I think you have to think about all those, you have to think about all the ramifications of that. And I always wanted the my studio colleagues to feel that when they came to a Symphony band concert, they actually got to hear their students, not just in the total, but is there a place on the concert where this section is featured? Is there a solo for this? And you can't make, you can't make that happen all across the board. But you have to do it in such a way where people feel like their students are being, you know, entrusted with serious material. It's much easier to do that in the orchestra. It's getting increasingly easier to do that in the band world because thanks to, you know, Copeland and Dahl and Schwatner and Cole Grass, it is so much less 2D writing now all the time. But I think, I think those are all things that I wanted to think about. And, you know, we have this incredible composition faculty tradition at Michigan. And so I would think about, well, is this piece going to pass muster with those people's ears? It's not that they're going to like every piece, but do they, can they respect the composer's output or they just feel it's just this is a band throw away. So that's a lot to think about. I spent an incredible amount of time building programs at Baylor, had a different challenge, which was what are the strengths of the ensemble? You know, who's going to be there next year when I'm trying to plan this. But I think one of the things that I learned to do was to plan holistically. I mentioned the phrase Eagle vision earlier. I learned how to plan the year, you know, layout what I called anchor pieces, like the greatest pieces in the repertoire. Is it the Mozart Serenade? Is it Lincolnshire Posey? Is it Prague at Hinneman Symphony? Whatever. Spread them out over 4 years, Spread them out within a year, Program around them. I'm not. I really don't like this fad of themes. I see a lot of programs where people back themselves in the corners trying to make a theme work. You know, there are occasions where I thought a theme was appropriate, like honoring the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination in 2018, you know, honoring some, you know, anniversary of the University of Michigan. I mean, there's all different kind of ways in which a situation can make a theme work. But if an orchestra says Dudamel does Russia, well, there's a whole lot of things to choose from. So you know, they, and sometimes if you look at orchestra programs, you know, they have a, a masthead of a theme. You look underneath it and it's, you know, really. So I think they're, there's been a lot of trying to copycat orchestra publicities in a in a way that I think sometimes undermines a student experience. I mean, it's certainly possible to craft thematic concerts, but whenever I used a theme, the theme always came from the music I decided to select, and mostly it was for the poster. I didn't necessarily expect an audience member to go, oh, I get it.
Yeah. Yeah, sure, they're. Doing through the looking glass, let me. Go Oh, that's funny. Just digging into slightly more on that because you mentioned at Baylor that you were looking at sort of the, the needs of the changing ensemble as well. So I'm curious because a lot of our audiences, middle school, high school directors, we have people to listen to the college level. But in terms of programming, how would you, how do you think about and how would you advise someone in terms of balancing the artistic ambition that you might have for the ensemble with the actual developmental needs of the ensemble?
Well, again, I think you, you hit on the word balance, which I think is key. You know, many years ago, Don Hunsberger published an article in the Instrumentalist that was about a four year curriculum. And I don't remember the pieces, but he was like, you know, these are pieces that every high school wind band should could play. It wasn't outrageously difficult. It was like kind of meat and potatoes and you could add to with other things. But then his point was, you know, if you if you if you cycle through these meat and potatoes, then you can add and subtract, but you're not reinventing the wheel every generation of students because, you know, my kids went through the 8th grade and they read the same book four years apart. So the teachers expertise was, you know, apparent. And I think always chasing the new leads to some problems in the, in the way that you're thinking about it. So that's one aspect of the way I'd answer the question. The other thing is I think you have to sit down and think pretty heavily if you can about the strengths and weakness of your ensemble. So if you're doing 8th grade band, what have your, what are these people who are coming into your band played? What is the 9th grade and 10th grade look like ahead of them? What do they need to go So focusing on growing them where it serves the overall program of the cluster, if you will, to use a Texas term, I think is really important. If you're in one of those stepping stone positions, you know, the methodology of how you teach notes and rhythms and all that sort of stuff. That's that's that's kind of out of the purview of this question. I'll show that fits in. But I think that if you, if you don't have a vision for what the student should be doing at the end of that eighth grade year, then you're just sort of shooting blind. And I think with that vision, I mentioned the term eagle vision before. If you can look above the year at like an eagle soaring rather than a chicken, you know, poking, you know, at the next level, then you have a, you have a much better chance to actually think through the thing. So maybe you have 3 or 4 different pieces that have the same concepts in mind and maybe you pass some of them out and they don't work. You pass others out, but you have an idea of what it is these pieces are going to teach the students. And you know, I think that seems so logical to me. I'm just surprised if more people don't seem to think that way. And, you know, I never taught in the public schools and I have not had a lot of experience with it in recent years. But, you know, anecdotally what I hear from people in terms of how they're thinking about programming and what they're putting in front of their students, I think those are things that could help. And if I was the head high school band director, you know, depending on how the relationship with the principal and the supervisor and all that, I would certainly want to have a, a backward facing view of what was being programmed. You know, if you want to play, you know, slow and pretty Irish tune. Are you playing air for band, even though it's very old? Are you playing other pieces, you know, that prepare at an appropriate grade level the concepts of tone production, blend and balance, intonation and all that sort of stuff? If you want to play fast and furious for band, then are you developing the, the technique along the way, not just to play fast and furious with six months of rehearsal, but you know, developing the actual technical skill through whatever you're doing to be able to do that at the high school level. And I think one last thing I would say, and this is particularly true at the upper levels of high school. If every rehearsal students feel like they're pushing the rock up the mountain to get these pieces that are really, really hard learned, that's really a tough sell. I think, you know, I would go into some band halls in Texas and hear somebody say, OK, you guys put your horns up for 20 minutes and do your homework. I'm going to, I'm going to work over here with the clarinets for whatever. And yeah, the clarinets needed it, but is that a good use of everybody's time? And, you know, maybe in the kids view it is because they got to do the homework. But I just think sometimes the, the, the, I think you use the word artistic ambition. The artistic ambition gets, you know, people get ahead of their skis. I went to work with a high school band near the end of my time at Baylor, and their repertoire was The Marked of Symphonic Metamorphosis and Bells for Stokowski by Michael Doherty. No, it wasn't. That wasn't that wasn't written yet. It was Niagara Falls and they had two horns. So that to me is a classic example of ambition, getting ahead of the skis.
Yeah. Well it's very interesting you mentioned that Hunsberger article. I've not read that, but that concept has percolated in my mind since my doctorate and having to do 4 year programming that the project was four years of programming. What does that look like for you in picking what are your anchor pieces and going through and building programs around those and deciding what it is? And this is, this is obviously a, an imaginary ensemble. So it was, I didn't know the ensemble yet, but just in my mind thinking through like, what would I, how would I think about this? And you're right, I don't think, I don't see that happening at in public education really at all. You kind of program toward a festival and then you switch gears to outside and then you do that again at the end of the year, but not thinking holistically about what the curriculum looks like. And even to your point, within a cluster, what did it look like from 6th grade through 12th grade?
And it's. Important for us, for anybody listening to think about it, this, this should be done even at the middle school level, at the cluster where I used to teach, we used to, we used to, to kind of think like this. Back at the time I had them for three years, what are the pieces that I am expected to, to be able to prepare the students to go to the high school experience, the anchor pieces. We didn't call them that at the time, but that's exactly what it is, you know, just trying to make sure that we pick the pieces that the students should know. We were able to prepare those skills by teaching other pieces in a very diligent way, you know, so for anybody listening, this is possible. I mean, this is possible even in a small school setting, in large school setting, at the middle school, high school, college level, it is so important. So no.
David, I wondered. There were two things that I required every graduate student to go through in addition to in addition to, you know, the recitals and all that sort of stuff, the curricular components. And one was a four year programming project and their assignment was to program four years of concerts for the Michigan Symphony Band. And they had to produce a top 50 list which they had sprinkled through that and they would submit programs and they had to send a rehearsal model. So my instruction was if a piece is 5 minutes long, you can use 12 to 15 minutes. If a piece is 20 minutes long, you can use 40 minutes. Unless you can tell me that the piece has repetition, that you know, you know, that sort of thing. Because I think what often happens with programming is that people stack pieces together without any clue how they're going to rehearse it. You know. Start at the top, go to the problems that you know, then you work your way through it. And usually the burden for that, whether it's in college or 8th grade falls on the student. And so the rehearsal model, to me, I would see these rehearsal models and I would say there's no way this can work. And if you have wins in the ball and Schwanter mounts rising nowhere on the same concert, the brass will run over in the parking lot if percussion don't get to you first because they have to move all that stuff. And you don't allow any time for that in the rehearsal. And it was, you know, these are doctor students, smart people. They would go, oh, yeah. So I would go through every program like that with a fine tooth comb. And I would sometimes say, you know, this piece is not a Symphony band piece. It's, it might be, you know, for a lesser ensemble. But you know, I, I use that mod, I use that process as a way of teaching wind literature because the way to learn wind literature is not through a chronological investigation anymore because you have this enormous set of resources that are available to you on the Internet. So curiosity and willing to spend the time to explore is the key to growing your repertoire knowledge. And I think that's another thing that's missing at some levels of programming. I heard Somatso's band play this festival last year. I'm going to do it this year. This that sometimes works. But do you really think through that at, at a depth of appreciation for what you're asking your students to do? Or do you just do it because you thought the piece would fit? And, you know, I, I realized that, you know, there's a lot of Gray area here that I, I'm, I'm just opposing his bookends. But I, I think, I think that's, it's all part and parcel to providing your students the best experience. And you know, I, I don't think I ever had anyone say this to me when I was a student, but I felt like my faculty members served me as a student. I didn't serve them. So one of the mantras I tried to use at Michigan and at Baylor and, and implore my graduate students who were going to go out and do things is your job is to serve the students. If you do that, you serve the institution. If you start getting students to serve you or trying to get the institution to serve you, the wheels will come off fairly quickly. So good news with that.
So specifically I'd like to change topics slightly to talk about Lincolnshire Posy, which is a piece that I don't think anyone has a better knowledge of than a use. So like what first drew you to the piece and then also what keys you wanting to go even deeper into it?
Well, I think there are a lot of people, John, that would argue with you about the knowledge statement of Lincolnshire. I think there's a lot of different people who know Lincolnshire incredibly well. I played Lincolnshire in college and that was my first exposure to Granger and I, you know, I love the harmonies, I love the orchestration. I don't remember anything about the performance. I just remember it was really good. And I, like a lot of people in that vintage had Eastman Winn Ensemble recordings and Eastman Winn Ensemble Another's Winn Ensemble were the only two recordings you could get. I mean, unless it was a vanity CD put out by Crest Records or Mark or something. So I always felt drawn to the piece. And as a saxophone player, the way he used the saxophones was appealing. So when I had my, you know, start at Baylor, I did the piece a few times and always felt, you know, the challenges of getting it played well. And then I was going to do it in 1995 at TMEA and I'm going to pause there and back up. So in 1985 I went to the Herbert Bloomstadt Orchestral Conducting Institute and Bloomstadt was just about to take over as the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony. He had this month long thing at a 7th Day Adventist College in Loma Linda, CA. And you know, he, it was a conducting workshop, but it was also a deep dive into how someone who's that level of professional conductor looks at scores. And you know, I had good theory chops thanks to East Carolina. I had good lessons from Dick Floyd about how to study scores and, and you know, particularly pedagogically. And I had been to workshops with Don Hunsberger and Bob Reynolds early in my career where they talked about various methodologies for score study. But this guy came — Bloomstad came in and would take these like Beethoven Fourth Symphony and he would take it apart like the composer. I mean, he talked about how Beethoven did what he did, what he did and why he did it. And so those three questions, how, what, why became sort of a curiosity churning point for me. And so mainly I increasingly got comfortable with the analytical skills of what, you know, what is the chords, was this, that and the other. But the why would a composer do something became an increasingly curious thing with me. So I'm getting ready to do Lincolnshire Posey at TMEA — I think it might have been the 3rd or 4th time I'd done it — and I'd kind of gotten over the meter changes. And you know, I knew all this and all that. I wasn't scared of it like it was the first time I did it. And you know, we had Fennell come to Baylor and I remember talking to him at great length at my house one night about his interactions with Grainger and all that sort of stuff. And just a few things he said prompted my curiosity about the stories. And in my opinion, if you look at the score, he says in his notes that he used these tunes to keep alive the folk songs and all those who sang them, which, yes, I get that. But if you look at the stories, there is real literary merit in the stories. And I begin to ask myself, well, why does he do the opening of the first movement this way? Is it in the second movement — is it verse, chorus, verse, no chorus? Is it verse, verse? I mean, you know, what is it here? And you can go through every movement, sort of ask yourself the questions. How is this different than Molly on the Shore? How is this different than, you know, the other folks on short bursts he did in other places? And I started by going over to a friend of mine who taught medieval literature in the English department at Baylor and asking questions about these folk song stories, the ended words which I had gotten somehow along the way. And the guy said to me, yeah, this is classic medieval literature. You got to remember these people didn't read and write, you know, they didn't have a recording device. So this oral tradition — and if you look at the first verse of every story, it tells you who, what, when and where. It was down in the valley, a fair maid did dwell. She lived with her uncle. They all knew her well, etcetera. So, you know, I started looking at those stories and then going through the verses and going, well, that's interesting. Well, wait a minute. And so I came to the point of view — and this is something that I really go back to the Bloomstad thing. Bloomstad's big thing was you ask the questions. Why? Because that guides you to make an interpretive, subjective decision. You can objectively identify what, and you can objectively identify whether it's right and wrong. But the path to an interpretation is asking yourself why. Why must it sound like this? Why would the composer do it? Why do you want this certain expression? And so that why question loomed very large. So, you know, I came up with a schematic of how I felt Granger had told the stories. And you know, again, if you go back to the first movement, it was on the Monday morning before the break of day. Well, it's three — you know, it's a metaphor. How many Musketeers were there? But really there were 4. But the story is 3, right? And so is the candy bar. So he uses — he takes the tune and everybody's pitch is — it's called Renaissance planing. Everybody is playing the melody and it just creates the chords. So the chords aren't the deal. It's the tune in three different places representing the metaphorical nautical figure of three. So you just go, and then, you know, measure 32, it changes and there's church harmony underneath because the woman in the story is saying William, William, William, won't you marry me. There's two places in the entire piece he uses church harmony. I mean, you just — there's all these things that to me just became so obvious. So I decided — what the hell, I'm going to — can I say that on a podcast? What the hell, I'm going to. I'm going to present these ideas at Midwest. So I did the routine of applying to present a clinic thing and they put me in a small room about the size of a phone booth and, you know, I had a piano and I worked through some of these things and there were surprisingly few people, but some of the people that were there were very important. They were directors of bands at big schools who came up to me and said, I've done this piece for years and never thought about this stuff. One person kicked off and said, you're crazy. This is an instrumental piece. There's nothing vocal about this. It doesn't really matter. I think what I tried to do with the handout I created for Midwest, and I've used many times since, is not to say this is the only way to look at Lincolnshire Posey, but to say this is a way. It is a point of view. And you have to find a way in your score study to get past the analytical notion of what did the composer do and get to the real point of art, which is why did the composer do that? Why does it need to sound this way? And so I've used Lincolnshire Posey in numerous workshops because people who don't have a band that can play Lincolnshire Posey usually know Lincolnshire Posey. People who do have a band that can play Lincolnshire Posey sometimes haven't thought about these things. So it's just an easy vehicle because of the knowledge of the piece, but also because in my judgement, things are so blatantly obvious when you get down to the level that I'm talking about that it's a good way of making the point about the point of view. I will say that I did a performance in 2007 here of Dionysiacs and it was for the CBDNA national Conference later that summer. I had somebody come up to me at a workshop — a student at the workshop — and say, my teacher told me that you did a performance of Dionysiacs at CBDNA in Ann Arbor that messed with the traditional band interpretation of Dionysiacs. And I'd like to know under what authority you did that. So in one of my better moments, I said the score, and walked off because I didn't want to get deeper into this.
Don't get in the weeds, yeah?
But I think, you know, one of the problems that we often have in the band area, which is not the case in the orchestra world, is that I played it like this, I listened to the North Texas recording like this, I listened to that on my way to work, that's how I conducted — you know, and it has nothing to do with the quality of those performances. It is that you're doing somebody else's performance. And if you talk to people about — I'm going to, John may be too — we're going to hear the Chicago Symphony on Monday night play Beethoven 7. Well, you can start a bar fight over tempos in Beethoven pretty fast.
He probably can, yeah.
Yeah, well, he was certainly was at the bar, but — you know, people get all worked up over anything that's just not standard operating procedure, which I just find to be so disappointing. So one of the things I've really tried to hammer with all of my graduate conducting students is, yeah, you got to fix things. You got to fix the problems. But what do you have to say? And why do you want it to feel this way? And can you show that? Can you express that gesturally? Because to me, the gesture and the answer to the why questions are inextricably linked.
You know, as you uncovered more through your study about Grainger and the folk song singers that are underneath Lincolnshire Posey, did that affect the way you rehearsed and presented that to your students?
Sure, yeah. I mean, if you've got the quartet to start the opening of Movement Three, why the hell would he do that to us? Those octaves in this canon — and what it is, is a metaphor for something that cannot be resolved, because you have the people who are starving that need to poach to feed their family and you have the people who are the protectors of the land who have to, you know, fend off the poachers. And that's how they get paid to feed their families. So there's this conflict. In fact, the first 3 songs are about moral conflict. If you look at the stories, the first 3 songs are about moral conflict. The last three songs are about person to person conflict. So I think Grainger sets up, you know, this conundrum by the way he uses the canon at the beginning and the end of Movement 3. Because there's no resolution. The only movement that ends with a happy ending is Movement 6, right? So, you know, there's so many details of specific instrument choices, specific harmonic choices. And with all Grainger folks on things, it's melodic — you know, you hear the melody right away in each of these. But then once you get past that, it's the variation. That's where all the good stuff is. And that, to my ear and my eye, is all driven by the stories. And so back to your question, David, if you know that, then it helps you to rehearse — you know, not so much telling the stories all the time, but this is why Granger did this. This is what's happening. And you can isolate things in such a way — so for example, that but I'm bump — that's basically gypsy music. So who stole a young lady? Three gypsies. They stole me and took me away. So, you know, once you get the tambourine in that and put up that but, and why don't you put it in the horns, the hardest instrument in the band to do that with? Who knows? But you know, that's kind of how it all wraps up.
I love that. It's fantastic. So then just to take a step back about — I mean, the story you told about Dionysiacs and the person asking you about changing the performance practice — are there times where a composer's score is very detailed and so how do you navigate honoring a composer's intent while still allowing space for your own musical voice?
Well, I think there's so many different ways to answer that, but I'll give it my best shot. You know, I recorded 10 commercial CDs at Michigan and we have this thriving YouTube channel. And my goals in doing that was to archive primary sources. So we did a lot of pieces that, you know, weren't Michigan commissions or whatever, but there was a huge chunk of those where the composer was involved in the process of not only writing the piece and rehearsals, but in the recording process. So anybody who wants to know how Bill Baulkham wanted the Symphony, here you go. You know, Michael Doherty, here you go. And I felt that was really important because we only have conjecture about Mozart and Beethoven. We have, you know, lots of writings from various people at the time. And there's this terrific book by a guy named Clyde Brown about performance practice in that harmony music era. But you have to absorb that information and then process it into your own. And I think what enough people don't do is look at the information in the score and think about it practically. So if I'm in a space that's really boomy and the composer says 176, I can go 168 or 164 and the audience is going to feel like it's 176. If I go into a space that's very dry and the composer said 60, I may have to go 68 or 72 to create the same feeling. And I'll never forget Don Hunsberger telling a bunch of us at a conducting workshop in the early 80s, if I get a brand new score from one of the Michigan or Eastman faculty members and they have a tempo, I tell them I'm going to take 8 down or 8 up, depending on how this goes. And you've got to live with that. So I think the MIDI has been a really bad thing for interpretation because people get MIDIs, composers get stuck on the MIDI tempo. But I've never met a band yet that is as inhuman as a MIDI. So you have to be real about it. And you know, Stravinsky famously said, well, there is no interpretation in my music. It's all, you know, bah. Then you listen to conductors do the same piece three ways and it's different every time. People, you know, want to look at Hindemith like, you know, he's part of the Munsters or something. But if you watch him conduct the Chicago Symphony, he adds traditional classical expression to things. So if you want to go one way, you can do that. That's what the score says. But if you want to go another way, that's OK too. Because that's kind of how Hindemith — and Schoenberg too — how they would have done it, because they had the intuition that people would come from Vienna like they did, right, and have that same background. So, you know, listening to lots of pieces outside the band, pieces you're doing by those composers — and if there's not pieces in other genres that might tell you something, listening to people sing. One of the things I learned most from Bob Reynolds long time ago at this conducting workshop I did with him in 1980 is — he had a score to a Strauss art song and he played two or three different singers doing it and just asked us to track what the difference was. They were all great, but they were different. And you know, I think when we try to imitate as opposed to interpret, the imitation track keeps you thinking inside about what somebody else did. If you develop this interpretation idea that I was talking about earlier — the why, why does it need to sound this way — then I think it's much easier to be authentically yourself artistically. I don't think people should do things that are stylistically way out of bounds. But I also don't think people should be chained to the fencepost of how it's always been done. I remember I did a performance of the entire Symphonic Metamorphosis in 2014 or so, and I decided that I was going to try really emphasizing the original piano pieces in the way I brought this to life, which meant in my mind that there was a greater continuity as opposed to everybody just waiting for the March. So, you know, we did it. The performance is really good. It's still up on YouTube and you see these comments — well, the March is too slow. OK, the March is slower than it usually is, but who defines too slow? And you know, same thing with Rocky Point Holiday. I mean, I hear people do Rocky Point Holiday and you can't hear anything except noise because it's just so fast. And, you know, I did Rocky Point Holiday a little slower in the cavernous space of Hill Auditorium — too slow, way too slow, what's he thinking about? You know, that sort of stuff, which is — people have the right to express their opinion. But you just learn, I think, to be independently artistic. And, you know, I think turning off other people's recordings — not watching all the time on YouTube when you're in the midst of studying something and trying to come up with your own point of view — and I keep coming back to that phrase, point of view. That's where the interpretation is. I mean, Bob Reynolds would say, how do you feel about the music? He wasn't talking about if you liked it. He wasn't talking about if they were in tune or together. He was talking about how do you want this to go? And he would say to people in the Reynolds Conducting Institute at Midwest, I don't know how you feel about the music. And what he was really saying is, what's your point of view here? If you've got one, you're not showing it.
That's very true. We're running short on time.
So I'm going to jump to just a broad question for our listeners and it's thinking from just a point of advice, you know, for young conductors or individuals that are trying to build a meaningful program, a lasting program and career, what would broad advice, you know, would you provide?
Well, I, I, I, I mean, this sounds cliche, but keep the main thing, the main thing. Why did you get into doing this? Why, why are you teaching it? Was it competition? If that's so, you know, go for it. But if it was music and playing and you know, the love of the instrument that got you into this, then keep, keep focusing on that. I, I, I, I find, you know, and the other thing is this, go back, this Maya Angelou quote. How do you make people feel when you're pursuing what you think is your artistic goals? And if people are feeling bad and dropping out and parents are in an uproar, maybe, maybe you take a deep breath and I know you, you know, it's, it's, you know, there's a, there's a vision and a standard and all that sort of stuff. So I'm not talking about diminishing the, the hopes and dreams of what can be accomplished either individually or for your program, but how do you get there? And I've always been a, a, a person who thought about process leading to product, not product only, only, only product. Because I think, you know, in my experience observing people for all those years in Texas and, you know, colleagues in the universities and out and about, people who are only focused on the product but not focused on the process tend to get into more trouble. And one of the things I always said to the Symphony Band is that this is a laboratory of professionalism. You can learn to be professional without getting paid. You can get paid in situation that's not very professional. So what does it take to be professional? Now, if you're in an eighth grade band, what is this a laboratory of? It may not be a laboratory of professionalism, but is it a laboratory of experiencing music, or is it a laboratory of making a wanted festival? What? Why are we here? And that's what I mean by the main thing, right?
I love that. So, so Michael, here is the part of the podcast where we ask all of our guests a couple standing questions. So I'll take the first. Do you have a soapbox topic? And it could be about anything. It can be about music, conducting, life.
Soapbox topic OK, let me see. It'd be easy to be political and I'll refrain from that, OK Yeah. I, I mean, I, I, you know, I this is partly related to all we've been talking about. And when I say keep the main thing, the main thing, and I, I told you earlier, I've been married for 50 years and I've had a partner in life who been willing to, you know, make the sacrifices to, to move here and move there and, and all that sort of stuff. But also really helped keep me grounded, you know, just being able to balance of the demands of the job with the opportunities for the family life and being home for dinner, all those sorts of things that, you know, when we had our kids are now 46 and 42. You know, just, I would just encourage everybody who's involved in Bandit, It's not you're not curing cancer. We're not doing brain surgery. You know, try to be as invested in the quality of your personal life as you are in the quality of your professional life.
That's great advice. That's it's very interesting. We've had a couple of mental health professionals on the podcast and that's been a theme. And everyone was more mental health, one was more physical health. That kind of a lot aligned with mental health. It was about taking care of yourself and finding time for yourself.
Yeah. So yeah, absolutely. Not on social media. Not there.
So second question, is there a particular book or books that have inspired you in your journey? Again, doesn't have to be musical, can just be something that you'd share with our listeners.
Yeah, I, well, there's a sort of a topic I would say I, I am because of a history teacher I had in a survey course on American history at East Carolina University. I've long become a student of American history and presidential politics, which, you know, it makes the current situation a little bit rough. So I've read a lot of biographies. I read a lot of military history. I've read a lot of social histories of conditions and what people did and, and how they had to deal with things. And it always makes me feel grateful for what we have. You know, the, I'm grateful to be living in this particular point in time, no matter how difficult it may seem in some ways, that what we have with technology, what we have with transportation, what we have with food sources. You know, if you read some of the things that the, you know, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, you know, World War One, World War 2, you know, I, it's just, it's just the things that people have sacrificed for us to have what we have now. That's a little bit of a soapbox, but it's also, it's also, you know, something that I have enjoyed reading over the years because of this teacher I had who inspired me. So at East Carolina and I, I've read more books in the last three years being a retired than I probably did in the 10 years before that because I have time. So I just, I think, you know, going back to the whole balance thing, the soapbox issue, I think if you have, if you have interest, whether it's, you know, a certain kind of exercise, a certain kind of sport or a certain kind of, of reading. And, and, you know, I also love to read murder mysteries. So I've read, you know, books by a woman in Tyre, French. I've read all the Robert Galbraith books. He was the, you know, a pen name of JK Rowling or the Corman Strike novels. And I've read novels by this Icelandic murder mystery writer. I wished I could pronounce his name, but it looks like an eye chart. We went to Iceland on vacation back in the fall and I found out about them. So I'm just constantly trying to read things that both interest and entertain me, but also then continue to educate me. A lot of biographies, you know, we went to Italy. I've, you know, I came back and read biographies of, of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and so many of the other, you know, Caesar, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great. Just trying to find out what it's been like to live on this planet all these years.
Yeah, that's the very interesting. I got to be honest, I, I did not have a good history teacher and I took history 4 times before I finally got out of it in my undergrad. I dropped it three times in my senior year. I had a TA and I went in and said, look man, I have to graduate. I'm probably teaching 65 students. I teach the marching band. There's a lot of things I was doing. I just need to see, can we work something out here? We got to that point and I regret that because now looking back, I enjoy reading history, historical novels especially, even if it's fiction, a historical fiction that's based around truth. I love them. But in an undergrad, that one experience, like my first, well, it started in high school and we made coaches that were teaching U.S. history and they'd rather be out of baseball field than talking to us. So I just never fell in love with it. I wish that was an opportunity. I still look back and go, I wish I'd read more because you're right. It does inform kind of where we are. If you're, you can say I'm grateful for this because.
So there's another, let me tell one more story this because I brought this up, this teacher, there's a guy named Willard still and I was in this hundred person, you know, big survey class and the guy walks in and he says you have an assigned seat. Somebody will check the role. If you're here, fine, I'm not going to waste your time calling the role. And we're going to start here. We're going to go there. And he would walk in every class and he'd just start telling stories. Felt like you were sitting with grandpa on the front porch. And I, I was enamored by the content. He, he made it feel like we were actually watching a movie or something, watching it or reenactment. And I thought, I want to teach like that guy. He never used notes. He looked everybody in the eye. He, you know, he was there early talk to people. And those are all things that weren't not unique to my experience as undergrad, but his ability to hold the room with that style was different than, you know, 20 people in a theory class or whatever, right? So I learned a lot by that. And I tried to be able to then, you know, recall that and build on that when I had to get up in front of talk to large groups of people and all that sort of stuff, you know, it try to try to read the room and hold it was a way I would phrase it. So 20 years later, I was back on campus to get this alumni award. And the person who was my host said, is there anything you want to do? And I said, yeah, do you know if this guy named Willard Steele is still around? And she goes, have no idea, but I'll check. So she came back to me a little bit later and said this is his last semester. You can see you tomorrow at 1:00. So that's awesome. I didn't know. Me from Adam, I was in his, you know, the 4th row of his class 20 years ago, right? So I went over to his office and I went in and, you know, we exchanged, you know, hello, how are you? And I explained to him how I had interacted with him and I, I told him, you know, how much his, his, his instruction had meant to me, both as a teacher and the things I tried to pick up and take away from that, But also my adult life history, you know, that's been 32 years ago, right? And so we had a very nice chat for about 1/2 an hour. And then I had to go do a rehearsal. So I was ready to take my leave. And he said, I really appreciate you coming by. It means a lot to me. And he said, you're young, you have a lot of years left. Don't ever forget today might be the day the light bulb goes off for that student. And I've, I've thought about that so many times, whether it's a, you know, in the Symphony band or in a graduate conducting seminar class or, you know, doing a workshop or something. You never know when somebody's going to go. Oh, oh, he said, teach, teach every day with missionary zeal because you never know when the light bulbs going to go off. And you know, I, that was to me a calling. And that's that's what I tried to do.
I think that's arguably the best answer we've ever had to that question. Ever, which makes this upcoming a little trivial after that because that's a good one. But so we always end with this question, Michael, which is arguably the most important. But what's your favorite time signature?
Well that there is a time signature is 1. You know, I think like a lot of people are probably had the most practice at 44.
We like that's. Well, that's the right answer. That's why we call it Cometime. That's fantastic. We've had a lot of different answers, but hardly anyone. We've had about two people say Cometime or 44. So you're one of a small group, but I think it's an elite group, you know, so.
You know, 24 is a little easier on the on the body, but you know.
That's true. That's so funny.
Well, professor Hayes cock, it has been a pleasure and just an honor to have you on and sharing with us as well as our listeners. But I've learned an immense amount today I'm I'm doing some finite metamorphosis in April and I'm already thinking about tempo and the fourth movement being what people think about like we got these other three moments. So you've gave me even given me some things to dig deeper in well.
You can go on that YouTube channel and listen to my Too Slow March. But I can see why you did it based on where it came from, you know it's. And the truth is, how many people actually know where those tunes came from?
Yeah, that's that's the sad point, you know, why is it like this? Well, oh, yeah. You mean that's that was piano music I've had.
Yeah, that was piano music and his piano. Music The. Research where Wilson who did the transcription interacted with Hindemith and you know this is all these right that whole. Why question is just really good.
I'm glad that came up today. That's so important. And I think, you know, I fall into this trap sometimes based on time constraints and a number of versals I have having stepped on the podium, not unprepared, but not the most prepared like you mentioned even at the very beginning about it's good, but could it be better? What's the best it can be, which is it's a constant challenge, I think for all of us, whether we're 8th grade band or doing a college ensemble. So I appreciate that coming to play today. But again, thank you so much for your time. We are very much. Michael, yeah.
It's really my pleasure and I good luck to you all.
And that's a wrap on today's episode. Thanks for spending part of your day with us on the Common Time Podcast. If today's conversation gave you something to think about or something to try with your students, we'd love for you to share this episode with a colleague. And you can also follow us on social media for episode clips, behind the scenes content, and updates to our upcoming guests. And if you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe so that you never miss an episode. Until next time, keep making music and keep making a difference.