Peter Bay – The Creativity of Interpretation
Peter Bay – The Creativity of Interpretation
I have so many questions to ask Beethoven and Mozart about a certain piece.It’s not possible, which is why I so value working with creators who are alive today.
Peter Bay, the conductor of the Austin Symphony Orchestra, has been a fixture of the Austin creative scene since the early nineties. I met Peter five years ago when he was conducting a music festival in Hot Springs, Arkansas and I was giving a talk and creating an interactive exhibit there. When we first met, I was blown away by his modesty and quiet, intelligent personality. I had grown up thinking of conductors as people with larger-than-life, brash, bombastic personalities. Peter feels like the opposite of that. In his years in Austin, he has completely transformed the Austin Symphony Orchestra into a community treasure fitting for the Live Music Capitol of the World.
Listen to the podcast and learn more about Peter and his thoughts on creativity, working with composers and the interpretation of classical music.
Here are the contemporary composers that Peter mentioned in the interview. They are all definitely worth a listen:
John Adams | Mason Bates | Dan Welcher
Peter Bay working on a score| ATX UnBoundPeter Bay working at home with his catPeter Bay in his audio library | ATX UnBoundPeter’s Record PlayerAustin Symphony Orchestra Conductor Peter Bay working on a scoreAustin Symphony Orchestra Conductor Peter Bay working on a scoreAt the symphony with Peter Bay and Mela Sarajane DailyAustin Symphony Orchestra Conductor Peter Bay working on a score
Background Music: Goldberg Variations Aria & Variation 11 by JS Bach; Songs Without Words #1 by Mendelssohn; Isabel by N GudaPerformed by N Guda
Transcript:
Peter Bay: I have so many questions to ask Beethoven and Mozart about a certain piece. It’s not possible, which is why I really value working with a creator that is alive, that I can question, that can teach me something about how music should go.
Nelson Guda: Welcome to ATX UnBound! I’m Nelson Guda – Artist, former scientist and your host for ATX UnBound. A podcast from unbound online that explores the creative world of Austin, Texas – one of the fastest growing creative cities in the US. Today’s episode is really meaningful to me personally. This interview is with Peter Bay the conductor of the Austin Symphony Orchestra. I actually did this interview with Peter over a year ago, but I was trying to make it into a video and I was never able to get the video overlay of the Symphony Orchestra to go along with it, so I’ve decided to publish it as a podcast.
Nelson: Peter’s one of those people who is absolutely incredible at what he does and yet kind of unbelievably modest about himself and his career. I was really excited to talk to him about conducting and how you got started and what his instrument was and what he thinks about the creative side or conducting. I’ve only known Peter for a few years, but when I came to Austin about the same time and I’ve been able to see the symphony orchestra grow and change a mature under his leadership and it is truly a phenomenal change.
Peter: One of the first questions I asked Peter was, what instrument did he play in? How did he get into conducting? How does somebody get into conducting? I, I just really don’t have any idea. So let’s start the interview from there.
I’m a flutist, and I did not come to the flute until my freshman year in high school, which for a musician is way too late. But I had the um, the disadvantage of growing up in an apartment building or to two different apartment buildings, neither of which allowed instruments because they, you know, the neighbors don’t want to hear banging away at a trumpet or a drum or God forbid a piano or some loud instruments.
So I went to high school. I’m only having had an experience as a chorister. I sang in a boy’s and men’s choir in Washington DC as a kid, and then when my voice changed, I stayed for a few more years, so I started off as a choir singer, but my, my goal really was to be an orchestra conductor since I was nine. Usually that’s followed by a laugh! Like that’s, that’s a very bizarre thing for a kid to want to do and it is.
Peter: But again, that’s where television comes into play. Having seen Leonard Bernstein on television, I had, I had exposure to a conductor as a child because CBS, the CBS network had the audacity and the smarts to put a Leonard Bernstein young people’s concert with the New York Philharmonic on four times a year on network television. Of course, these were Sunday afternoons, but, um, having been able to see a conductor, have a conductor talk to an audience of young people and explain how music works, how music is put together, what is American music? And to have a conductor like him with his persona, with is over the top passion for conducting. And having the camera on his face while he was conducting and just seeing the excitement he had. I just latched onto that so easily. Like, this is cool, this is exciting. I want to do that.
This. There’s an odd story, but the, the… I had as a kid, I couldn’t get conducting lessons because no conductor, conducting teacher would take a kid. Seriously. I mean you have to really learn how to play an instrument and learn the ins and outs of music. But the one thing that I have to say that was a major influence in my youth was the local public library.
The library had many, many records and I grew up listening to records, but they a lot of records that I didn’t have, but they had a small, a shelf of miniature scores. Now I don’t know why they had these scores. It’s the only public library, like a neighborhood public library that had orchestral scores. Like why did they have these? Where did they get them? It didn’t matter, but they had an array of scores from Bach to Mozart, Haydn, Copeland, some contemporary things, but mostly classical things. And it wasn’t all orchestral stuff, there were Hayden string quartets, it could be a Mozart symphony or a piano concerto.
Peter: And so when I got interested in conducting as a nine year old, what I would do is I borrow three or four of these scores to, to try to figure out how they worked. And of course I couldn’t. I took out a recording of a heightened symphony. I remember this very well. The clocks symphony, 101. Took the record out from the library and the score, put the record on and open the score. And there’s, you know, how the scores are set up. There’s a line for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, timpani, violin, one violin, viola, cello and bass. So I listened to the music, uh, try to make heads or tails of the score and I would always start looking at the top line only. But the flute doesn’t always have the melody. Sometimes the melody goes to the clarinet and the flute stops playing.
So, you know, it was, follow the bouncing note. I’d look at one line and jump down to this line and go back up to the line. Sometimes four lines of players were playing the same thing, so after time I could see more peripherally how the score worked and that’s, that’s how I developed a sense of score. Reading was basically just by trial and error, trying to read these lines of music all at once.
So it’s not, it’s not unusual to me, but I had this exposure to music. I had this exposure to Bernstein, and there are a lot of conductors of my generation, my age group who all point to Bernstein saying if they hadn’t seen him somehow, whether it was live in concert or seeing those television broadcast, they may not have had a career in, as a conductor. Or they may have had a career in music, but he was such a major influence to hundreds… literally hundreds of conductors currently working.
But you can’t really be a conductor unless you, you have mastered some instrument, preferably an orchestral instrument because you work with orchestras. Piano of course is fine. Uh, there are a few singers that have become conductors Placido Domingo is one. And he’s the only one that I can think of currently that had a decent career as a singer, conductor.
But mostly, conductors are instrumentalists. And um, so I was behind the eight ball when I started flute. I was, uh, my muscles were not developed, or it was too late to develop them in the way a fourth grader you know starts the violin or the piano and, or four year old even. So, um, in high school I was very, very behind. And I had to catch up quickly, but I knew my career as a musician would not be as an instrumentalist. I gave up the instrument by the time I was in graduate school .
Peter: Oh, by the time, you know, I went to the peabody institute in Baltimore and that’s a music conservatory. And the flutists that were there could play circles around me. But I would say that the conducting students that were there may not have had the same kind of experience I’ve had because that was my goal as a kid. So I learned about conducting, I watched conductors, I read about conductors, I did whatever I could with a pencil, learning the beat patterns, studying scores while others were learning their piano scales or violin arpeggios or things like that.
Nelson: That’s fascinating. You know, I just can’t imagine working through a score without a piano for example.
Peter: Well, I can, I, I don’t play piano in public, but I can figure out chords and melodies on the piano. I have electronic piano in my
