Classical Uprising: Dr. Emily Isaacson Is Immersing Maine in Classical Music

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to, or watching, Radio Maine. Today I have with me Dr. Emily Isaacson, who is the founder and Artistic Director of Classical Uprising. Thanks for coming in today.

Emily Isaacson: Thanks so much for having me.

Lisa Belisle: So you and I go way back, way before you became Dr. Emily Isaacson, and your kind of doctoring is actually a little bit different than the kind of doctoring that I do.

Emily Isaacson: Yes. Although I like to say that you're healing bodies and that I'm trying to heal souls, so we have that connection. But yes, I have a doctorate in conducting and in music literature.

Lisa Belisle: That was quite a bit of work to get that.

Emily Isaacson: Oh my Lord, yes. I now teach at Bowdoin College and work with college students a lot. I tell them to think hard before going to graduate school, because it is not only a big investment of time but really emotional resources. My graduate school experience was brutal. Given the industry that I'm in, it was actually good training. But it made for some very unhappy times, and I'm really grateful I met my husband before I started that program, because I needed all the support networks I could get to get through that.

Lisa Belisle: Well, in that short couple of sentences there's just a lot to unpack there.

Emily Isaacson: (Laughs) Sorry.

Lisa Belisle: No, I think it's completely fine. I'm interested in the word brutal. Tell me what you mean by that.

Emily Isaacson: So the way conducting graduate school works is that, in the same way that you would write an essay and then get critiqued either in person or by a red pen by your professor, that's happening with your conducting, your music analysis, your musicianship analysis, but in front of an ensemble of anywhere from 12 to a hundred people. And so it's this very public critique, and conducting is a very old boys' club, old world industry. The critique words are not couched in a compliment. There's no compliment sandwich happening there. It's direct, and if you're lucky it's specific, so that it's something that you can actually take away. But I would say, with my primary mentor in my doctoral program, the closest I ever got to a compliment was that it didn't suck as much as I thought it was going to. So that was graduate school. It's also a really tiny program. I went to the University of Illinois for my doctorate. It's a school of 60,000, but there were only six people in my program. Three were accepted every year. Only half of my professors spoke English fluently, and we were sort of pitted against each other. The way the program was designed, we were fighting for podium time. So there was not a lot of love coming from our teachers, and there was not a lot of love towards each other, because we were fighting for the same opportunities. So I'm really grateful. I have great friends. I'm grateful I met my husband beforehand, and I love ice cream. So there we go.

Lisa Belisle: So I guess I'm most interested in this idea that, in this day and age, one would think it would be difficult to go through an educational experience and have that level of competitive enmity toward your fellow students. And it sounds like maybe a little from the professors toward the students.

Emily Isaacson: Absolutely. Yes.

Lisa Belisle: So why do you think that conducting is, I don't want to say allowed to get away with it, because that sounds a little critical, but why do you think that particular program is still in that mode of education?

Emily Isaacson: That's a great question, and actually not something that anyone else has asked me. So bravo, Dr. Belisle. I think two things. One is that there's been a real generational shift in the last 10 years, really quite recently, and it's still happening right now. A lot of the professors, and the way of education that I experienced, were established in the seventies and eighties, and professors hang on for a really, really long time. So I do think that some of that is changing. But especially orchestral conducting and the orchestra world is extremely hierarchical. If you think about it, Verdi's Requiem was just at the BSO this weekend, and they did a brilliant job. But there's more than 200 people on that stage, depending on the size of the ensemble. And the conductor is the dictator, no question. You might collaborate with a concertmistress or concertmaster a little bit, but it's not a dialogue or a collaborative process in the way that you would expect a C-suite or other industries to be. And that's one of the things that I've really tried to change in my organization, Classical Uprising, because I don't think that's the best formula for making great art and great music. I also don't think that's conducive to the society and era that we live in. If 200 people are on stage and only one person gets to be in charge, and guess what, most of the time they're white men, often from Europe, older white men, that really limits who is setting the narrative and who is telling the narrative, giving the descriptions. And so in my organization and in my artistic process, I really strive to be collaborative. I'm very upfront at the beginning of my rehearsals with my orchestras. I'll say, I am one of many talented artists in this group, and I look forward to hearing your ideas. I'm here to mediate an artistic conversation and to make it efficient. But we're all in this together. And I think that's a real chamber music approach, which is why orchestra players, or just musicians in general, really love chamber music, because it's a more democratic musical conversation. I try to bring that ethos to large ensemble work.

Lisa Belisle: So I want to back up just a little bit, because I know some of the people who watch this or listen to this show are art fans, and some of them are just fans of Radio Maine. We don't have that many people who are specifically music fans. So tell me, what is chamber music, and how does that compare to orchestral music or ensemble music? What are some of the definitions there?

Emily Isaacson: So all these terms are a little bit flexible in the 21st century. I would say that historically chamber music would be 10 or fewer people. If you think about the string quartet's rise in the 18th and 19th century, there's a lot of piano sonatas, four, five, six people. Once you get above 12, it's really hard to be self-led, and that's where an orchestra or a conductor comes in. There was this shift that happened in the late 19th century where either music was very small, so that it could be performed in the home or the court, or it was enormous to show off the splendor of riches. So that dichotomy really extended into the beginning of the 21st century. Now it's a lot more mixed. You see groups like A Far Cry, that's a string orchestra of 20. So really the term doesn't mean quite as much, but it usually means whether there is a conductor or not.

Lisa Belisle: So it sounds like, partially, the leadership style can shift as a result of the size of the group.

Emily Isaacson: But not always. Yes.

Lisa Belisle: So how does one get collaborative leadership in a larger group, in an orchestral group, aside from framing the conversation in the way that you've described? We are all artists here, and I'm here to mediate a conversation.

Emily Isaacson: So I have over a decade of training in studying scores, in waving my arms around, in understanding the historical and social aspects that were behind the music, in the theory of music. But I have far less training in articulation and, gosh, all sorts of really technical aspects of the instruments that make a big difference, or they make a small difference, but to us they feel like a big difference to the way that a musical phrase is approached or is attacked. So I'll turn to my concertmistress and I'll say, how should we bow that? Hopefully we're having that conversation ahead of time. Should we do that articulation here, and what's the feeling there? What do you think? Should we be taking this up tempo a little bit more? Or especially in Baroque music, there's a lot of conversation. So one of the things that's so cool about Baroque music is that not all the music that you hear is written out, only some of it. And so there's this group in the orchestra called the continuo, that is cello, harpsichord, and bass usually. And they're figuring it out as they go. What chords should we play? Should we put a seventh in there? Which of the three of us are playing at that moment? And so rather than saying, this is how I'd like it to be, I say, let's try this, I don't think that worked, what should we try next? And that's how I do a collaborative approach.

Lisa Belisle: So what you're trying to do is enable people to work to their highest potential for the benefit of the larger group, and to take ownership.

Emily Isaacson: And to take ownership.

Lisa Belisle: Oh, that's interesting.

Emily Isaacson: So if somebody is going to decide to bow in a certain way, you want them to really commit to that, and to decide that this is what's right for the purpose that you're trying to achieve. I think it's more that sometimes my job as a conductor is to make people pay attention to this moment. We've all got so much going on in our lives, and professional musicians have a different gig every couple of days, and they're practicing for one gig while they're at another gig. So my job is, this is the most important thing in your life right now, commit to this moment and this art. So it's not so much that I want them to commit to the bowing, because that is the ultimate truth telling, but more that in saying, I've really thought about this and I think this is the bowing that we should use, it means they're committing to this musical experience and this artistic performance as compared to the other things.

Lisa Belisle: I think that's a really great distinction. And I'm guessing that it probably is more challenging to be a conductor in this day and age than before we had all of the digital information bits coming at us all of the time in the rest of our lives.

Emily Isaacson: It is and it isn't. I would say from inside the industry, in terms of working with other professional colleagues, we do a lot of swapping scores and markings digitally. And so that's actually really effective and helpful. It's really wonderful to be able to say, check out this recording, and rather than emailing me a cassette, I can just go on Spotify and look it up. So in the industry I think it's really beneficial. What's challenging is running an organization and building audiences. I really feel that my biggest competitors, Classical Uprising's biggest competitors, are not other arts organizations, but Netflix and Billy's birthday party. I am competing for people's attention. I'm competing to get people out of their houses, out of their jammies, and to come to something and to commit to something ahead of time by registering or buying tickets for it. And to say, our family has Billy's birthday party, but we're also going to go do this thing, because this is important in our lives. And that's where I think the digital age makes things difficult, because it's so easy to stay at home and sort of passively absorb culture.

Lisa Belisle: So how do you get people to pay attention? If you're a conductor and you're waving your arms about, clearly that is a means of getting people to pay attention. But there is some point where that's not really going to translate into the rest of the world, because I don't think that everybody pays attention to the waving of the arms. How have you brought people to see Classical Uprising? What generates interest and makes people excited?

Emily Isaacson: I would actually say that if I can get them to watch me wave my arms, then I've already won. When you come to an event, almost always people say that it was amazing, I'm so glad I was here, this is the best part of my month. So it's really, again, getting people off their couches, out their doors, and committing to coming. We spent a lot of time at Classical Uprising thinking about that. What is it that people need in their lives right now? A lot of classical music was clearly created before the digital era. So Mendelssohn, for example, would throw these awesome parties in his greenhouse, and all of his community would come, and it was social. It's not happening every night. It is a highlight, and you're looking for cultural and intellectual stimulation, because you might have books but you don't have television or radio. Now we've got all these other things, and so we really ask ourselves, what is it that this day and age, this community, this moment in history craves? I think it's community. There's all this science that shows that social media distances us from each other, and that while we have all these opportunities to connect, they often are not meaningful connections, there's a real wall there. And so we really highlight the social and community aspect of live performance. Sometimes that's about really putting it at the forefront. For example, what we do at the Portland Bach Experience, which is our June festival. We hold a carnival concert, and it's a street fair. We're performing in the outdoors, but we also invite upwards of 30 other arts organizations, educational organizations, artisans, food trucks, breweries to come. And it's a multi-hour event, and it's like a house party. Come whenever you want, leave whenever you want, and enjoy. The music is part of the fabric there. We just did a salon concert at Portland Art Gallery, and we built in time to socialize. So doors open a half an hour early, you show up, you get a glass of wine, you walk around this gallery, you talk about the art with the person next to you, but you also meet new people. We've had a lot of friendships develop out of those kinds of experiences, and we build in time for them to have conversations with the musicians. It's a much more intimate experience because, again, I think bringing down that wall, not just between each other but between us and the art. How do you get intimate? How do you get connected to the art makers again? So I think I've lost a little bit of track of what the original question was at this early hour, but that's what we're working on, is how to make meaningful connection, meaningful music for people.

Lisa Belisle: One of the things I know that the Portland Art Gallery does really well is to connect people to art wherever they're coming from. Some people are true collectors and connoisseurs and have a lot of background in art history, for example. Others are really just standing in front of a piece and saying, wow, I feel really touched by this Ann Trainor Domingue piece, for example. So in your case, I'm going to think there must be a parallel, because there are some people that know a lot about music and actually know what Baroque is if you bring it up, and other people who are just like, well, I can connect with that for whatever reason, there's something about that. So how do you bridge the divide? How do you speak those different dialects to the different types of people who you're trying to bring in?

Emily Isaacson: That's a great question, and I love that you said dialects, because what we do at Classical Uprising is we say we're going to present the same great music, and it's going to be great music, but we're going to package it differently depending on what your needs are. So as you said, there's still a community of nerds, whether it's art history nerds or music nerds, and they really geek out about this stuff and they want to dive deep. So we do traditional concerts or these salon experiences for them. But then it's important to me that people see classical music not as vitamin C, vitamin culture, something that they're supposed to go to or experience to raise their children well or because it's good for their health or whatever, but because it's really entertaining, and it's exciting, or it's inspiring, or it creates a space in their heart in a way that something else does. So a lot of what we do is repackage the same music in different contexts. So for example, we do this thing called Flight of the Bumble Beer, where we work with a brewery and we do a flight of five beers, five-ounce beers, with a flight of five-minute pieces of music. And we pair the beer profile and the musical profile together. That's sort of a signal to the audience that, okay, this is different. So you don't need to know anything, come if you like music, but also come if you like beer, and because this is kind of a quirky thing that you've not heard of before, maybe you can just show up if you don't like either and expect that something cool and funky is going to happen there. Or we do a program called Bach and Ben's Yoga, where it's a silently led yoga class to a Bach cello suite overlooking the Eastern Prom or in the middle of a public park. And again, these are trying to create more than one entry point. Music is one of the entry points, but whether it's food or experience or family friendly or the environment, a secondary entry point so that you'll give it a shot. And what I strive for the most is to put classical music in really unexpected places so that people's expectation of what a classical music concert is gets disrupted, and they don't know what to do anymore, and therefore they just open their heart to the artistic experience. And I think that's really the most powerful, when you can shed all the expectations and just be with the art, whether it's standing in front of the painting or being in a musical experience.

Lisa Belisle: So I believe that when I interviewed you a few years back, your children were quite a bit younger, and they're nine and six now. That's right. You and your husband have a nine and six year old. So have you found that their appreciation of music has changed over time, or does it look different than it once did?

Emily Isaacson: So I think one of the really great things I've been able to give my kids, and also their friends and our community, is feeling like classical music and attending live performances is a totally normal thing. That you go trick or treating, and you go to cookie decorating parties at Christmas, and you go to concerts. So my son is six, but since he was four, he could tell you the difference between a cello and a bass. They feel very comfortable around music. They also think that conductors are women, that they don't see any gender divide, and that they feel like this is their space. We had an awesome concert last spring. It was the US premiere of a piece by a composer who, while she was here in residency with us, won German Artist of the Year. Her name is Shelly Grave, and it's this really edgy classical music meets punk rock, meets choral hymn, meets jazz. Everything was just so dynamic, and we did it in this very spacious area down at Thompson's Point. And in the middle of the concert, my son just started break dancing, because that was his emotional and physical response to the music. And I love that. I think that that hasn't changed. One thing that we're talking a lot about right now with our kids getting a little bit older is that it actually takes a ton of work to be a good musician. It's not sexy like soccer, where you can score a goal early on and feel that buzz. When you're just starting out learning to play an instrument, there's a lot of grunt work, and while pushing kids to do that was something that was totally appropriate in parenting a hundred years ago or even 50 years ago, there's a lot more questions about that now. So I think there's more of a disjunct for them now about, okay, I feel really comfortable around this music, but how do I become a part of it? Do I have to work really hard? Am I a listener? Am I a participant? So I think that that's the piece that has changed. So I'm putting more of an emphasis than ever on showing how fun it is to make music, that it is a team sport in making, showing how art, artists, and instruments work together. Not just taking down the barriers to access and to presentation, but also, hey, a simple melody can be really beautiful. It doesn't have to be something super complicated. So I would say that's changed.

Lisa Belisle: So the last thing I want to ask about is something that we started the conversation with, and that is teaching. Because what I hear from you is actually communication and education, although that sounds a little bit like a professor on a box, that's not what I intended it to be, is a pretty big part of what you do. You're outreach, it's communication, it's relational, and you are actually doing this at Bowdoin College, which, as you know, is my alma mater. So thank you very much for doing that.

Emily Isaacson: My pleasure.

Lisa Belisle: I know you grew up not that far away from Bowdoin College. So tell me what it is like to translate your experience, your work, your love, your passion into a classroom setting, and generate that same sort of excitement for the students that you teach, without even knowing what their potential futures may hold.

Emily Isaacson: Yeah, great question. So I think one of the challenges is the same with audiences, which is just getting their attention. Very few of them are music majors. So when they've got three or four other competing classes with assignments, how do I make them be present and care about this? I also think that they're in a really interesting developmental moment, that is so competitive to get into college. And Bowdoin is such an incredible college, and hard to get into, that these students have been working so hard for the last four or five years of their life. And now, I wouldn't say they've arrived, but they've crossed a major hurdle. And so to really help them connect, not just with the, did you do this correctly, or can you sing this scale appropriately or whatnot, but what does it mean to make art? What does it mean to be expressive? I'm drawing upon a much longer period of time of emotions and experiences to respond to the music, but how can I make that meaningful to them in their moment in time? I also think at Bowdoin, and throughout the United States right now, there's a real focus on decentering the western canon of classical music. And on the one hand, I totally agree with that for all the reasons that I'm sure lots of people on the show and in other places have talked about, not the least of which is there's some really awesome contemporary music that's responding to this moment in time. And I love doing that kind of work. What is music that is responding to all the crazy things that we're going through right now? But I am really inspired by the fact that 300, 400 years ago, people were essentially living the same lives. They were going to work every day, they were loving their partners, they were raising their children, all of these things, and they were creating art that expressed their moment of time. And so I get a lot of inspiration from feeling like, wow, isn't this amazing that we're part of this species that just exists over, I don't know, some scientists will be able to tell you how many years, but for me, I'm thinking about four, five hundred years of musical tradition, and that I can sing or play a piece of music from hundreds of years ago and kind of time travel and tap into that moment. And that's true even more with pieces of music that actually approach the same life experiences in really different ways. So I'm going to totally nerd out here for a moment, but one of my favorite pieces of music is Heinrich Schütz's Musikalische Exequien, which was written during the Thirty Years' War. Everyone around him is dying, whether it's from war or famine or disease. I mean, it's just so horrible. We think of death as this horrible thing, especially having gone through COVID very recently, but in fact in the Lutheran tradition, and during his time, death was a release. Death is, now I don't have to worry about all of these things, and I can't wait to get to heaven and to be a part of this beautiful life. I think that is really comforting, to have that juxtaposition of approach. When I'm singing that piece of music or conducting that piece of music, I'm time traveling not just to a historical moment, but also to kind of a psychological moment that I can choose whether or not to accept or be a part of. That feeds my intellectual and spiritual curiosity in a different way. I try to make those things available to my students as well. It's not just what you're learning in your classrooms and on TikTok, but let's enter the world of learning in all these other ways through music. And I feel so lucky I get to do that work.

Lisa Belisle: I think it's really important to be able to, while we're simultaneously decentering, remember that each of these traditions still have some validity. I think what often seems to come across is that by decentering we give away any centering. I think that it causes all of us to feel a little bit more unstable. So if there's a way that we can continue to value that center, but also be able to be open to other musical traditions. Or, I'm thinking of my daughter Abby, and she did her master's in history, and she has a huge interest in food history. So her way of connecting to the past is kind of food and how things are done.

Emily Isaacson: That's very cool. We should do a project together.

Lisa Belisle: Yeah. Well, I actually think you'd really like her.

Emily Isaacson: Abby, if you're hearing this, call me.

Lisa Belisle: That's right. She lives right near you, by the way.

Emily Isaacson: Woo. Anyway.

Lisa Belisle: Possibilities. So I do think that what you're describing is an interesting thing, that we can maintain respect for all, and it's also challenging, because it does require that we kind of have an open mind and also be okay with who we are and some of the traditions that we ourselves have.

Emily Isaacson: I agree with you except for one word, this respect word. In so much of history, and of classical music and high art, it is at an arm's distance. And so yes, we can respect it, but can we also learn from it and embrace it and have it speak to us in this moment? A lot of the work that I do is putting traditional or classical pieces, historical pieces, in context and dialogue with either a contemporary experience like beer, although they were drinking way more beer back then, or contemporary music. And I think that it's that kind of connection that says we're all just human no matter what the age and science around us, we're the same humans. And that's really powerful to me.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I appreciate your clarifying the word choice. I think that you're right. I think words are very important. Words that meant one thing when I was going through my training, they mean something very different now. So always being aware of the nuance when it comes to communication is important. And so the idea of respect, putting things at arm's length, I think that's a great kind of delineation that you've created.

Emily Isaacson: Well, thank you. I think a lot about these things.

Lisa Belisle: Yes. Well, honestly, I do too.

Emily Isaacson: I see a bottle of wine in our future.

Lisa Belisle: That very well could be, with some classical music apparently.

Emily Isaacson: Yes.

Lisa Belisle: I encourage people to look up Classical Uprising, which is based in Portland, and also spend some time thinking about getting to know Dr. Emily Isaacson, who is the wonderful founder and artistic director of Classical Uprising. Emily, thank you so much for coming in and talking to me today.

Emily Isaacson: Thank you. And I would offer, if you go on our website, I have a playlist that has classical and other kinds of music, and that's a really great entry point to exploring connections and also seeing what peaks your curiosity.

Lisa Belisle: Okay, there's my homework. And for those of you who are listening or watching, there's some homework for you, too. And maybe listen to the playlist on your way to the Portland Art Gallery, where you can also enjoy some wonderful art. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you have been listening to, or watching, Radio Maine.