- Page One:News from the LA Phil
- Music Education:“Music for All”
- Music Makers:Five ‘Takes’ with Gustavo Dudamel
- Programming:One Night/Two World Premieres
- Behind the Scenes:A Conversation with Composer Steven Stucky
Five ‘Takes’ with Gustavo Dudamel
Gustavo DudamelIn Los Angeles to perform with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and to take part in the Philharmonic’s Music for All symposium, Gustavo Dudamel spoke with Gail Eichenthal about conducting, his first music, and the experience of coming up through El Sistema. The following are excerpts from their conversation, with Dudamel’s remarks translated from Spanish.
... on El Sistema
EICHENTHAL: Why do you suppose music is so well-suited to rescue children from poverty from the streets? What does music teach besides rhythm and pitch, and so forth?
DUDAMEL: Music is an art and a natural human element that makes children who are attracted to it see the possibility of change in their lives. When a child who comes from a community of poverty and little means, then starts creating music within an orchestra, he vindicates himself. He becomes a new image for his community. That is what creates the change in the child.
EICHENTHAL: And I suppose it’s also about feeling less isolated and feeling like you’re part of something? You’re working together towards something — literally — toward Beethoven, toward Mozart.
DUDAMEL: The orchestra is a small community, you know? And you learn a lot playing in an orchestra. One learns a lot about how to develop outside in the community. Because in the end, if you see it objectively, the orchestra is a perfect community. You all share a certain goal — to make good music. It may be that your partner doesn’t have the same vision for the sheet music that you have, but you need to listen to her or him in order to come to an agreement. That adjustment makes a community of the orchestra.
EICHENTHAL: What about the kids who do not become professional musicians as you did? What does El Sistema do for them?
DUDAMEL: The mere fact that a child has contact with music makes him a musician for life. If you go to a concert in Venezuela, you will see an audience of 2,000 or 2,500 people. Eighty percent of the attendees are under 25 years old, and the great majority have gone through an orchestra, so they are a cultivated audience. They know what’s being done on stage. And it’s true — you can’t have 250,000 or 300,000 children all making music professionally, but even when they develop in other careers, like engineering or medicine, they retain a musical culture and sensibility.
EICHENTHAL: Could El Sistema have worked without substantial government support? Could this miracle have happened without Dr. Abreu?
DUDAMEL: I don’t think it would have been possible without Abreu. The orchestra is his family. He lives for El Sistema. And that makes him convincing to others. It’s impossible not to support something so real and palpable. At first they called him crazy. Play music? With young Venezuelan children? Especially with poor children. Impossible with such an elitist culture. But he was convinced it was going to work, and gave the children the opportunity. No one else has called him crazy ever since. And no one has stopped supporting him.
... on his first music
EICHENTHAL: How old were you when you started and what was your first instrument?
DUDAMEL: I wanted to play trombone, but it was difficult — I was four years old! My father is a musician. He played trombone in a youth orchestra and also in a salsa group. I was in love with the salsa. This choice was difficult! I was, “What do I want to do? Classical or salsa? Salsa or classical? I tried to play the trombone, but it was so big for my arms, you know? Either someone had to blow or someone had to move the slide!
EICHENTHAL: You needed two people!
DUDAMEL: Yes! I started to study music with my father when I was four. I was five I began to study in El Sistema. Then, at ten years old, I started to play the violin. I’d been studying for five years, waiting for a beautiful golden trombone, when a teacher came to me and said, “Can you try this instrument?” I was, like, “What? This is wood! I wanted the golden color. The violin was too dark!” But when they gave me the instrument, I was like, “Okay, I want to play the violin.” And that’s my story.
EICHENTHAL: How much did you practice?
DUDAMEL: The violin? A lot. It’s very difficult to play an instrument at a high level. You need to dedicate a lot of time. When you’re a kid, you don’t notice because you’re having fun. This is the beautiful thing. You need to keep this feeling — the feeling that you’re just doing what you really enjoy.
... on conducting
EICHENTHAL: Is it true that you lined up toys and conducted them when you were young?
DUDAMEL: Yes, this was funny because they would buy me toys to play with, but I ended up doing music with them. I had a game of Legos that came with some little toys. I would place my chairs around and then sit there and conduct them.
EICHENTHAL: Conduct the Legos?
DUDAMEL: Well, I was directing big orchestras, because I would play a record, a CD of the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna, L.A. Philharmonic, Chicago, all these big orchestras. I would put on my CD and start conducting, and it sounded really good.
EICHENTHAL: When did you decide to transfer those skills to actually conducting an orchestra? When did you have that vision?
DUDAMEL: I always had that vision, but one day, when I was 12 years old, I was waiting around to rehearse with a chamber orchestra. The director hadn’t arrived, and it had been 15 minutes already, when I just got up and started rehearsing everyone. Everybody laughed; I did, too. But at a certain point, we just got to work. I felt very good about it, and they felt good, too. The director finally arrived, and when he saw how well it had gone with the rehearsal, he gave me the concert to conduct, and made me the assistant conductor.
EICHENTHAL: At 12.
DUDAMEL: Sí.
EICHENTHAL: You’ve said that humility is probably the most important ingredient for a conductor, which is pretty shocking in a way. I gather what you’re saying is that you’re serving the composer and the art.
DUDAMEL: Absolutely. What can a conductor do without an orchestra? A conductor — I don’t know how to say this any better — seen in a radical way, is just one more musician in the orchestra. Yes, the orchestra is his instrument, but he is part of that group. When you take off by yourself and say, “I am,” you’re separating yourself from the musicians, the composer, the audience, everyone. So the humbler you are and more rooted to the ground, the more real and more related to the art you’ll be.
EICHENTHAL: How do you keep the passion going with the kids in the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra?
DUDAMEL: For them to make music is not a job. It’s their life. That’s what makes the difference.
... on mentors
EICHENTHAL: You’ve had some amazing teachers, not only Dr. Abreu, but great musicians like Simon Rattle, Claudio Abbado, and Daniel Barenboim. When you know the technique, when you know how to beat time and you know the rhythm, what is there more to learn about conducting?
DUDAMEL: The most important thing that I have learned from them is always to be humble with music. When I was studying Mahler’s Fifth with Claudio, he was studying it as if it was the first time. Same thing with Simon. He has a natural energy that’s very special, and a searching vision. That’s what music is, it’s a constant search. And from Daniel, of course — Daniel is a very special person, because he has a gigantic mind. Like the other two, of course. He has a gigantic capacity to see the music in different areas, in different lines. He can play a recital today and conduct an opera on the same night. Then he can sit down and tell you about the relationship between music and the world. It’s that capacity they all have to relate everything to music.
...on the future
EICHENTHAL: A lot of kids growing up in Los Angeles are very distant from the world of classical music. How do we build audiences and bring them in? How do we make classical music not such an elitist sort of art?
DUDAMEL: In our times, it’s easier to sit down and listen to a song that lasts three or four minutes than to sit and listen to a Mahler symphony that’s 90 minutes long. Classical music, if you want to call it that, is not just the music that we’re hearing, it’s also everything it implies, historically. The reason for that small song comes from Mahler, Mozart, Bach, Palestrina. When kids see something beyond the symphony that’s putting them to sleep, when they feel it’s something important, they are attracted immediately. And that’s the challenge we face. It’s our mission as musicians of a new generation to attract all that youth — by making music.
EICHENTHAL: When you become the music director of the L.A. Philharmonic in 2009, how do you see your role intersecting with this new initiative to build youth orchestras?
DUDAMEL: I’m very happy about this, extremely happy to be a part of this —first of all because the Los Angeles Philharmonic is a great orchestra, full of energy and full of love for music — and to participate in a program of helping children of low means, very much like the project of which I am a product. You will see it in the concert next Thursday [November 1, 2007] — 200 young musicians who are each part of that larger universe that is an orchestra. To help to do this here will be a beautiful challenge, and a challenge that I will take as a mission for life.
