Thomas Cabaniss: Transcript
Thomas Cabaniss:
School programs at the time, we really sat down and said, okay, how can we really change this? How can we reverse the idea of children coming in and simply sitting and listening? Let's really make this an experience where kids come out of it not saying how much they enjoyed or didn't enjoy the concert, but they are asking other people, "How do you think I did? How was I?" Right? Because it's a very different stance when you feel like you're an active participant, a performer.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman. This podcast strives to inspire you through the personal stories of a diversity of musicians worldwide with in-depth conversations and great music that reveal the depth and breadth to a life and music. Thomas Cabaniss is a wonderful American composer of works for opera, theater, dance, film, and the concert stage. He's been a member of the faculty of the Julliard School since 1998 and leads the Lullaby project at Carnegie Hall, serving young parents in shelters, hospitals, and prisons with collaboratively created songs for their children. We talked about all this and much more, including his work creating Carnegie Hall's Link Up. I was curious about these many facets to Thomas's life as both a composer and educator, and you'll find this episode has gorgeous inspiring music of his as well as great stories from his diverse career as a teaching artist, working with music educators, students of all ages and meaningful outreach in the community. You'll hear performances from pianists, Michael Shinn and Jessica Chow Shinn, singer Joyce DiDonato, and towards the beginning of the episode, you'll hear some of Thomas's great music for String Quartet performed by the Charleston Symphony String Quartet. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on all the platforms, and I've also linked the transcript to my website, leahroseman.com. Finally, before we get into the episode, did you know that this podcast is in Season Four and that I send out a weekly email newsletter where you can get access to Sneak Peeks of upcoming guests and be inspired by highlights from the archive? Have a look at the description of this episode where you'll find all the links, including the support link to buy this independent podcaster a coffee. Now, to the episode.
Hi Thomas. Thanks so much for joining me here today.
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah, my pleasure.
Leah Roseman:
I see you're at your piano and you'll be talking about some of your beautiful piano music and different inspiring projects you've been involved with. But let's start with the String Quartet recordings. Parma Records is releasing all of your string quartets, and I listened to the first record, which has just been released. So I'm curious, have you played string instruments as at all, because you play write really well for strings?
Thomas Cabaniss:
In the fourth grade, I started as a cellist, but I quickly transferred onto the piano once I sort of got the sense that I was interested in writing music and didn't continue with the cello, but I still love string instruments and love them then and love them now.
Leah Roseman:
So the first string quartet on this record was from 1990, and then there was a bit of hiatus. Was there a commission or is a reason why you'd written that early string quartet?
Thomas Cabaniss:
No, the first string quartet I really wrote on spec. I wrote it because I really wanted to write one, and the reason that I got started on it was I had been doing some work in opera and I worked with a director named Graham Vick who was doing Madam Butterfly at the English National Opera. That was at the end of the eighties, and we had become friends and he gave me a copy of the Janacek string quartets, which I did not know. I loved the Bartok string quartets, I loved, you know Haydn, I loved the stuff that I had studied so far in school, but I didn't know the Janacek quartets. And when I listened to them, I was riding, I remember riding on a train up the Hudson River, and I just kind of broke into tears and said to myself, I have to write a string quartet. I didn't realize I needed to write a string quartet.
But at that moment it became clear, and so I had no performance on the horizon. I had friends of mine were in the Alexander String Quartet, but they were getting ready to move out to the west coast, and so I wasn't sure whether they would play it or not, but I still said, no, I'm just going to write it anyway. And luckily about after I finished it, I submitted it to the Charles Ives Center for American Music, and I won an award where I was invited to go there and have the piece performed as part of a festival that Charlie Castleman was running. So I got to hear it right away. So I feel very lucky in that way.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I really feel for composers, a lot of the times people write things and don't get it heard or not in a professional setting. Now, in terms of tracks from this record, can we talk about the Four Elements the Earth? Maybe you could speak to your idea behind that.
Thomas Cabaniss:
So this is a much more recent quartet, but interestingly also connected to my friend Graham Vick. So this is many, many years later. Graham and I remained friends and he died of COVID-19 in London in the summer of 2021, and I was just devastated and I, on my books, on my plan was to write another quartet, my fifth string quartet over the summer, but I hadn't begun it yet when I got this news, and I guess I figured I tried to think about Graham's last year, which he spent mostly on the aisle of Crete. That's where they were isolating, and he had not gotten a vaccine yet. They hadn't come out yet at that point in early, late 20, early 21. So they were still there in their place on Crete, and he tragically came back to London to get his vaccine, but before he got it, he contracted the disease and died.
But thinking about his last year on Crete, I began to think about the Mediterranean again, about our earth, our planet. I was thinking about climate change and the climate crisis because so much of many of the conversations that we were having in arts education was about how could teaching artists and arts educators address climate change? What could we do? And I guess all of those things sort of came together to made me think about, well, I could structure this quartet in kind of the classical Greek elements, earth, air, fire, water, and I sketched out a scenario for the quartet and then began working on it.
Leah Roseman:
Well, it's really powerful. Is there something you'd like to include? I was thinking the quartet, they put out a video of the end of water, which might be nice. A few people watch on YouTube. And for those listeners, it's nice if they can see something.
Thomas Cabaniss:
That would be lovely.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
You're about to here an excerpt from String Quartet number five, Four Elements, the last section from the final movement Water performed by the Charleston Symphony String Quartet. Please check the description of this episode to find all the links.(music)
And the first violinist in that quartet, Yuri Becker. So he's also Artistic Director of Charleston Symphony where you're originally from.
Thomas Cabaniss:
Correct.
Leah Roseman:
Do you have a longstanding association with him?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah, so Yuri is somebody that I met in the last 10 years. The orchestra went through some very difficult times. They actually went out of business for a year and in, I don't know, maybe this is 15 years ago or so, they were having very difficult times. Yuri had been the concert master during that transition, and he was really the person who sort of kept the fire going for the Charleston Symphony. And I met him, I guess just after they started back up again, I had offered said to them, look, as you're getting started again, I do these concerts at Carnegie Hall where I'm the composer in residence and the host for Link Up, and these concerts are done all over the place, and if you want to do these concerts in Charleston, we'll give you all the materials for free and this will at least get you up and running with being able to do concerts for schools, et cetera.
And so they took me up on it and they came to New York, they saw the concerts that we did at Carnegie Hall. They signed on to doing the package down in Charleston. And so I said, if you do it, I'll go down and I will contribute my hosting for free. At least as we get started now, they're paying me, they've got a little better footing going on now. But Yuri was the Concertmaster and kind of again, sort of a driving force with the orchestra. At that time, Ken Lamb was the music director, and then after Ken left, he's now running the Julliard Tianjin orchestral program in China. But after he left, Yuri took over as artistic director and has been trying a very different model there without kind of an ongoing music director at the moment, but really bringing in kind of higher powered sort of guest conductors. They've had Pinky Zukerman and Gerard Schwartz and William Edins and all kinds of people coming in to guest conduct. So yeah, I've really enjoyed getting to know Yuri, and it started just doing those school concerts.
Leah Roseman:
This next musical selection is the Movement Fire, the third movement from Four Elements, Thomas Cabanniss', String Quartet number five, performed by the Charleston Symphony String Quartet.(music)
Okay. Well, you mentioned the Link Up program. Would you like to speak to that project and what it's meant to you?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah, so I've worked with orchestras really throughout my career. I started with the New York Chamber Symphony and Gerard Schwartz back at the 92nd Street Y and the early nineties. I went on to work with the New York Philharmonic, both as a Teaching Artist and then as Education Director. And all the time that I was doing that, I kept having a vision of what I thought a young person's concert, a school's concert could really be. And at the New York Philharmonic, honestly, I was able to experiment with a couple of little elements, but the environment was not right for the kind of full scale wholesale change that I was looking for. And so I left, in 2004, I left and I did about a four year stint with the Philadelphia Orchestra in a position that was ostensibly just about experimentation, and that's really, we tried a lot of different things in the school concerts and in the family concerts and all really, really helpful and useful information, but I still wasn't quite there yet.
And then in 2010, Carnegie hired me as the Composer in Residence and the Host and said, and basically along with, at the time, it was a horn player named Misty Toll, who was running the school programs at the time. We really sat down and said, okay, how can we really this? How can we reverse the idea of children coming in and simply sitting and listening, how can we turn this into a fully interactive where the kids are involved in basically every single piece in a very intentional and purposeful way? I've been doing a bunch of work with recorders in the schools, not by choice really to begin with. It was Kurt Mazur at the Philharmonic who kind of insisted on using recorders. And initially I thought, oh, this is going to be a nightmare, some old German idea that we're trying to transplant onto an urban bunch of students, but it didn't turn out that way. Actually, students really love being able to play a simple melodic instrument at that age level. We were able to do really cool and inventive things with it. So part of the thing of Link Up was like, let's take that idea and let's put it on steroids. Let's make sure that every song has a part. Let's backwards map it. Instead of saying, how can we fit this into what the orchestra plays? Let's design things that the orchestra plays that have children at their center. And so if we need to transpose things and change keys and shorten things and make different kinds of arrangements for pieces, let's do it. Let's write new things for it. Let's really make this an experience where kids come out of it not saying how much they enjoyed or didn't enjoy the concert, but they are asking other people, how do you think I did? How was I? Because it's a very different stance when you feel like you're an active participant, a performer.
Leah Roseman:
So how does this work? Is there singing and instruments?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yes, exactly. So with each song, for instance, the song that I wrote initially, which was the Invitational song, which now is sort of the theme song of Link up around the world is called Come to Play, and it has three vocal parts. Each of those parts can also be played easily on the recorder, and there are domain, it's a domain project. So in other words, there's a simple part that can be done with if you just know three notes, if you just know GA and B on the recorder, there's a part that you can do that's a little bit harder, that has an octave stretch. And then there's another part that's quite syncopated and has a high E, so it takes a greater skill. And generally speaking, we split those along the third, fourth and fifth grade level, but it's all done in collaboration with music teachers. So I never write anything or arrange anything or design anything without focus group testing it beforehand in classrooms with music teachers giving critique and feedback.
Leah Roseman:
I spoke with an Australian musician, Philip Griffin, and he had been involved in New Zealand for a number of years with the ukulele program in schools. He said, it's just huge there. They have these huge ukulele orchestras. What do you think about the ukulele in schools?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah, great. I think it's great, and I've learned about that program. And in fact, we did Link Up in New Zealand with the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra, and yeah, I think there's some amazing things going on down in Australia with the Lullaby Project too. But I think yes, ukuleles in school, any of these simple melodic instruments. I mean, we also invite kids to bring their violins to Carnegie Hall and play their parts from Link Up. So when we're doing that, and we've even done it with full band compliments, so people have been playing their parts, playing the tuba. There are all kinds of possibilities, but I love the ukulele.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So how did this spread around the world, this program?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Well, basically Carnegie started, it had a few partners that it began with over the years, but once we inverted the formula of it in 2010, Carnegie offered it basically for free to orchestras around the country and said, you're going to have to pay for the buses and you're going to have to pay for the orchestra. And I mean, that still is a cost that you're going to, but we will provide the script, the music, all the arrangements, the curriculum materials, and the professional development, and we'll invite you. This was the really cool thing that Carnegie did was that they said, we'll invite you to come for two nights to New York. You will come and you'll learn some of the material yourself. You'll attend a Link Up concert, and you'll have a kind of a conference around the Link Up concert with other orchestra administrators and educators. And so people were enticed by that.
That was the kind of the draw, if you will, the kind of the bait. And yeah, then they fell in love with it, and then it sort of spread word of mouth. People just said, oh, you need to check out this Link Up thing. It's amazing. And we also gave people a lot of flexibility. We said, if you don't want to do a particular piece, or maybe you want to feature the concerto winner or something that you already have that's ongoing, and it doesn't, then go ahead, just work it out. In other words, you can customize it. We don't insist on a package. We have elements that we think work really, really well, and they've been tested in classrooms and in the concert hall, but if you want to customize it yourself, go right ahead.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, you mentioned the Lullaby Project, which of course I want to ask you about. So you be very close to your heart.
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yes. Yeah, this is work that, again, came out of my work as a Teaching Artist and my desire to see musical creativity at the center of music teaching, not just in schools, but also for people in senior centers and in prisons and in hospitals. I feel like musical creativity is, it's the way that we actually learn the most about the people we want to engage with. And so that was really part of all of my work. I was doing a songwriting project with kids who had HIV at a hospital in the Bronx. So public hospital was working alongside a psychologist who was running an afterschool group for kids who were having difficulty adhering to their medications. And so they were in this special weekly meeting with the psychologist to talk through their issues, and we basically attached a songwriting workshop to it so that after they had their regular meeting, they'd have an hour and a half to hang out, have a snack and work on a song.
We had a band that was ready to help and then perform their pieces at the end of the process. And we did it over, I think it was a 12 week songwriting workshop. And it was great. We had a good time, and we did a couple of concerts. One was in the evening for the parents and families and friends of these young songwriters, and then one of them was for the hospital staff. So we did it at lunchtime. It was a brown bag concert, and people came, and when we did it, there was somebody, there was a nurse and a social worker who'd come together from the OB GYN department of the hospital, and they were very moved by the concert. And afterwards they said, is there any way you could do something like this for our pregnant teens? There's so much stigma surrounding pregnancy at their age and so much complexity with their families and so on, but these are all pregnant teens who are deciding to keep their children and we need to give them support and so on.
And so I said, sure, but maybe it should be a lullaby. It could be our 12 week songwriting thing that we did. I said, but maybe actually it's simpler than that. Maybe it's really just a song for the baby. And so we talked about ways in which that might help with mother infant attachment, and we did a little pilot project then in 2011 and started the project, and it was, again, as soon as we did it, the first one, we knew, and our colleagues at Carnegie Hall knew that we were kind of onto something and they immediately hired researchers to come in and take a look at what we were doing, but also so that we could begin to create the language for spread. And that was from the beginning, something that we thought about how could we get other people interested in this idea? And also recognizing we weren't the only ones who were doing it. There were a lot of people working with lullabies around the world. We also realized there was a lot of research that we needed to do.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Do you think, Thomas, that music accesses the emotions so directly and also that kind of creativity people can access flow and that helps with anxiety and stress?
Thomas Cabaniss:
I do. And I think with what we found with the Lullaby project is that since the object of your songwriting is so close and personal and deeply personal, that one of the things that it does in terms of the relationship between the professional musician and the young mother or young family that's working on it is that you go to a deep place really fast, faster than in other kinds of circumstances. Teaching artists are always in the business of trying to think of ice breakers and way to get people to be more comfortable with each other, it's just funny. And Lullaby, It almost doesn't exist. It's kind of like you've come there to do a very specific thing to work on a song for your child. It's like, it just goes right there.
Leah Roseman:
Are there stories you can recall that were sort of unexpected as part of that project?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Many, many. And I guess one of them that sticks out is we started a group at the same hospital where we began the project in the Bronx, and we had, I think it was a small group. It was five, maybe five women who we're working together on separate songs. But even in that short period of time, which was really, I don't know, I think it must have been maybe we spent 12 hours together, 15 hours together, something like that. But in that time, the group formed so in such a strong that these young women, some of them who were in foster programs and who were about to age out of that, they all ended up moving in together and raising their children together, at least for the first couple of years. And we've kept in touch with some of those moms. And who would've thought in such a short period of time that people would feel comfortable enough to say, Hey, let's get a place
Leah Roseman:
That's really touching. In terms of sharing some of that music. I know that you've had some famous singers record some of these songs. I mean, is there something we could share as part of this episode? Some of those lullabies?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Sure. I mean, I have to say that our biggest champion right away, right out of the gate, I think two years into the project was Joyce DiDonato, the soprano, Mezzo soprano. And she immediately said, what can I do? And we said, well, come learn a couple of these songs and sing them in a concert. And so she did, I think in 2000, even 14, something like that. And so on the album Hopes and Dreams, there are a couple of the cuts that any of the cuts with Joyce would be great. But there also, there's a Fiona Apple one that I particularly love, can't wait to.
Leah Roseman:
I heard that.
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah, the Fiona Apple. So that was a good one. But yeah, any of the ones with Joyce would be great.
Leah Roseman:
You're about to hear Singer Joyce DiDonato, performing one of the lullabies from the Lullaby project on the album Hopes and Dreams. This composition is entitled, Peace by Tamilles Fernandez with Dierdre Struck.(music)
Joyce DiDonato singing words of Tamilles Fernandez:
At first I thought, what am I going to do? How can I tell people the truth? Even so I already knew that I was meant to be with you, my dear, I have so many questions soon to be answered, will you play soccer just like your daddy does? Am I squishing you when I sleep at night? I'm wishing you peace tonight When I first saw your little face, oh how I cried to see your face. You so small yet you're all I ever needed to erase my fears. You were yawning and smiling in the bright morning. Suddenly I saw the light open up in me, and you gave me the peace so now I'm giving it back to you. I'm wishing you peace tonight Peace now, peace now. Go to sleep now.
Leah Roseman:
Thank you for that. Let's talk about Tiny Bits of Outrageous Love and your association. I love, love, love that album, and also the solo, the Sketches of Venasque. So Michael Shinn and Jessica Chow Shinn, you got to know them over a period of time working with them, different projects.
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yes. So Michael was my office mate in the theory department at Julliard. We just happened to be sitting next to each other. Very nice guy, really liked him. And kind of early on in our office sharing, I don't know exactly how this happened, but we were just sitting there one day and he sort of shyly, maybe not so shyly, confided that he'd gone out with a really lovely woman and that he'd had a really great time and that she was beautiful and so on. And I said, that's terrific. And I said, tell me about her. And he said, and she's studying in the collaborative piano department at Julliard. And I said, well, yeah, totally makes sense. I said, if you really want this to work out, Michael, you got to play with her. You have to play the piano with her. And he says, well, but I'm a soloist.
I said, you're crazy. Play some piano fourhand. That's the way, that's how to. And he said, well, if you wrote me something to play. And so I did. I wrote a piece called Mechanicals that the two of them did together. And mostly it was almost a joke between us because it called on lots of athletics in the piano fourhands business of reaching over the other person and so on. It was very much kind of getting in and out of people's space. But they played that piece a couple times in New York City and had a great time, and then they ended up getting engaged and then married. So we've had a long relationship that way, and they jokingly referred to me as a cupid of theirs.
Leah Roseman:
Now, the theme in Tiny Bits about Outrageous Love relates to your wife, Deborah, do you want to speak to that?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Sure. Well, so after we did Mechanicals, we decided that the next thing that we should do is I should write another piece for them. And we weren't quite sure, was it going to be two pianos? Was it going to be piano fourhand? We weren't sure. In the meantime, Michael and Jessica had started a music festival called Piano Sonoma, which has grown immensely since its first days, and it's now out at Sonoma State at the Green Center for Music out there and every summer, and it's become a big thing. They were doing a salon kind of performance to raise money. And so they invited me and I went and they played the Brahms Waltz's for Piano fourhand. And I just had one of these experiences, those kind of lift you out of your seat experiences when you're listening to a piece of music as an audience member.
And it was especially the one in a major, I think it's number 15, I heard that piece and I was like, oh, that's what I need to write. I need to write. It's like a little jewel. It's like such a perfect little piece of music. It's not long. It uses repeats. It's just kind of a miniature, but it's so amazing. I need to write some things like that. And as I was walking, I remember from the Yamaha Piano Salon, which is on fifth Avenue and 54th Street, and I was walking over to the train. Somehow in my head I thought, that's what I want to write. A little jewel, a little, a tiny bit. It just needs to be a tiny bit. And I had also been reading, there's a, now I'm going to muff the title, but it's Dave Edgar's book, A Heartbreaking book of a Staggering Genius, or I don't remember something like that.
I just read that book about six months beforehand. And I thought, oh, so I play with that idea a little bit, maybe that's the title of the piece, Tiny Bits of Outrageous Love. And I immediately sort of sketched it out on the, then I got on the train and I basically wrote, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. I want it to be the story of a relationship, and here's what each one will be. And I think I have little titles to each one of them, which I remember I kept in small case letters. I was still thinking tiny bits. I pretty much then just wrote the piece.
Leah Roseman:
I really love it. I've listened to it several times. I was hoping we could, well actually Lovesong. They have a video of that. If you want to check with them, you could share that.
Thomas Cabaniss:
Sure.
Leah Roseman:
It'd be nice to see them play. And also the last one two, number seven. I really love that one.
Thomas Cabaniss:
Happy to.
Leah Roseman:
You're About to Hear Lovesong, miniature number three from Tiny Bits of Outrageous Love for Piano Fourhand performed by Michael Shinn and Jessica Chow Shinn.(music)
And so your wife is a psychiatrist, but also sings, right?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yes. Well, she's a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst. She's a violinist and a singer. And yeah, she's amazing.
Leah Roseman:
And the theme you had written for her, it was like an in?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah, so we had this thing, we met when we were in college. We met even before college started, but when the dining room wasn't open, we ended up, we always joke, it's true. We met in a Dunkin' Donuts in New Haven. That's where we met because the dining halls weren't open. So we've known each other a long time. And when we were in college, I don't know how this happened, but somehow we invented this little musical theme that we would whistle to each other if we were in a crowd especially, and we were trying to find each other. David Lewin, who was my music composition teacher at the time, teased me about it because I also included it in a string quartet piece that I was working on at the time. And he said, oh, that's your Jesus Christ superstar theme. It was triadic, and it had sort of a feel like that. But yeah, we would just whistle this tune to each other to kind of find each other. And actually now, the shocking thing about, I have two children, and they only discovered when this piece came out that this theme preceded them. They thought it was just the family tune.
Wait a minute, before we were born? Yes, yes. There was a story before you were born.
Leah Roseman:
This next composition is the last movement from Tiny Bits of Outrageous Love entitled Two Performed by Michael Shin and Jessica Chow Shinn.(music)
Yeah, my husband's a musician as well. And there's a few little family tunes or little songs we'd written for the kids. But you must have, beyond Lullabies, you must have written some music for your children.
Thomas Cabaniss:
Oh, sure. And as they were learning, we would write little fourhands pieces together sometimes with the kids and, and my son, William, is a wonderful songwriter and music creator out on the West Coast now.
Leah Roseman:
So your music, I really love it, but I am always a little scared with new music, I have to admit, because a lot of it is hard to listen to or very dense harmonically. I have to play a lot of this music in orchestra, and it might take 10 times through to start to make sense of it. But your music is not like that. Do you think that's related to your music theater background, or is it a conscious choice?
Thomas Cabaniss:
I mean, yeah, sure. Right, because you hear all kinds of things. You hear all the world opens up to you as a musician. You hear all the things, the ways that music could be. But yeah, I guess I loved, I grew up on musical theater and pop music and all the music that I was listening to as a teenager, it's stuck with me. That music. And that all was very based on the idea of a melody that was memorable and could be shared in a way. And that also all of the music was quite groove based. And so that sense of wanting to have something that has a kind of consistency, not always, but that has a kind of feel or a vibe to it, where a steady pulse is an important expressive element. That's always been important to me too. At different moments in my life. I've sort of broken things up more or less, depending on what I was working on. But yeah, I don't know. I love tunes.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Now, you went to Yale, right? A previous guest of my series, Adam Blau. He's younger than you, so you wouldn't know him, but I found it interesting. He was saying the official courses at Yale were not so much what he was interested in, but all the acapella groups, all the other stuff that was happening was what really made that experience amazing musically. Did you have a similar feeling about it?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah, I did theater. I did theater. Actually, the truth is, I mean, embarrassingly, I auditioned for the Spiz Winks, which was an acapella group at Yale. And I didn't get in whatever, I didn't, I didn't make the cut. And also, I brought into school with me a real interest in the theater. I'd been doing a lot of theater when I was in high school, and so I continued to do theater at Yale. But as a composer and anybody who was doing anything, I'd show up on their doorstep and say, Hey, can I write music for your production of whatever it was? And I ended up doing music for the Caucasian Chalk Circle and Cherry Orchard and Measure For Measure and Music directed three Penny Opera. And I felt like that was where the real learning was. I mean, look, I took courses. I took a music history course, and I took music theory and had really great people, and that was all really interesting. But the theater was the place where, first of all, you had to create the music. It had to be done. It immediately got an audience, it immediately got reaction. And you were working with, I mean, all the people that I worked with when I was at college, they're now professionals working in New York and around the country. So I feel like we were all sort of growing up together and teaching each other.
Leah Roseman:
If we could backtrack a little bit to your childhood. I heard you tell a story about your early piano lessons, which was kind of sad. And then you got sort of a later start, actually, in a way.
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I did. And so I actually spent a lot of my upper elementary time just doing sports and music came a little bit later. I got the theater was the thing that really got me was I did a production of the King, and I started to take some piano lessons. And pretty much right from the moment I was able to really sit down and have time at the keyboard, I began to play by ear. And that allowed me to do a lot of different things, but including songwriting, so that I wrote a little pop opera when I was in the ninth grade when I was 14 years old. And we produced it, and we did several performances of it. And I'm still friends with many of the people who were in that cast.
Leah Roseman:
Fabulous. But when you first started, when you were very young, I'd heard you tell a story in another interview that you were six years old. You wanted piano lessons.
Thomas Cabaniss:
Oh, that story. Yes, yes, yes. Well, I wanted to play the piano desperately when I was quite young, when I was in the first grade. And I begged to my parents. So they rented a piano. The piano arrived. The only person they could figure out for me to take lessons from was the organist at our church. Yeah, he was very. He was not a nice man, and obviously a talented musician, but impatient with young children and impatient with me. And I don't think I was an easy student, kind of hyperactive, whatever. And so, yes, my mother walked into a lesson when he was using a ruler to hit my hands, I don't know, correcting my hand position or just generally punishing me. I'm not sure what it was, but my mother was horrified, and she was like, this is it. No more piano teacher, no more piano.
The piano was sent back to the Fox Music House of Charleston, which was the rental place at the time, and still is, I think. And yeah, so I was distraught. I was very sad that the piano had been ejected from extruded from our house, and I continued to beg for the piano. It took another five years, and then we finally moved away to a different neighborhood. My mother actually then met a teacher who was a much nicer person who happened to live down the street. And I could bike there without any real trouble. And so I was able to finally start up again around 11 or 12.
Leah Roseman:
It's interesting to me the story, because let's say you had continued with this teacher, who knows what problems you would've had, but maybe you would've become a pianist primarily instead of a composer, primarily.
Thomas Cabaniss:
That's quite possible. Yeah. I don't know. I think I certainly look at my colleagues who started really young and have the kinds of chops I wish I had now. And there's part of me that's kind of jealous. I didn't have that sort of training. By the time I really started to play, I could play enough by ear that I was making, it was all the shortcuts. It's like, oh, the Hanon exercises. I don't think so. Oh, the scales. Well, a little, but I mean, I could do so much by ear that I didn't do the kind of rigorous practice over time that would've allowed me to be, certainly to be a concert pianist, that's not. I play enough. I play in my classes at Julliard, but I practice, if I'm playing a segment of a piece of music to demonstrate something, when I'm doing a music theory class at Julliard, I definitely practice before I go in. I don't mess around because I need to.
Leah Roseman:
In your approach to teaching music theory, do you try to engage, similar to the way we were talking about just bringing kids into an orchestra concert, do you try to engage your students so that they're creating and not just passively, you know what I mean?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah. We actually have, in my theory classes, we do it as a course and lab. So we meet twice a week. So on Tuesdays is course, so they have homework to do, they have reading to do, and we practice analytic concepts and study music together in that Tuesday meeting. But on Fridays, there's always a creative assignment. And what I say to them is it's a brief radical experiment in which you're working. It could be anything pitch class, set theory, or classic serialism, or I'm doing an elective right now that's called Time Benders. And we work on innovations in rhythm and time in the 21st century. And the lab for last Friday was called Hints of Eternity. How can you use your instrument, a solo piece to hint at eternity? What are the things that you can do? And of course, we're studying Messiaen and we're, a variety of other things, but we're really looking at those ideas. But there's always a lab on Friday where the students make up their own things.
Leah Roseman:
That's really wonderful to hear. And you also teach dance students. I was curious about that.
Thomas Cabaniss:
That's where I just came from. I had a class with the dancers this morning. They have a performance tonight, so they're kind of nervous. And that was a good energy to have in the room today. But yes, I've worked with the dancers. I always worked with the first year dancers. They're like 18 years old. They've just come out of high school. They're extremely talented dancers, but they don't necessarily have musical training. Some do and some don't. Some might've been in choir or musical theater or something like that in high school, but most of them have really switched over to dance so intensively that even if they did study an instrument early on, they've given it up. They're really dancing so many hours a day now. And also to get into Julliard, they needed to do that kind of intense work. So our class music studies for dance is a chance for them to really think about the connections between music and dance and to learn something about the different genres. So we study songs. We study opera. Right now we're studying instrumental music. So we're studying the Bach cello suites and through the lens of baroque dances. So today, for instance, they were doing presentations on the different Baroque dances of a Baroque suite.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. You have lucky students. That sounds great.
Thomas Cabaniss:
We have a good time.
Leah Roseman:
Hi. Just a short break from the episode, which I hope you're enjoying so far. If you want to check out over a hundred episodes you may have missed in addition to your podcast player or YouTube, I have an extensive website, leahroseman.com with show notes, transcripts, the complete catalog of episodes, and you can sign up there for my weekly newsletter to get access to sneak peaks of upcoming guests. Please do share your favorite episodes with your friends. Follow me on social media and share my posts. And if you can spare a few dollars to help support the series, that would be amazing. And you can find that link in the show notes. I'm an independent podcaster, and I really do need the help of my listeners. Now, back to the episode.
Thomas Cabaniss:
If we could talk about the idea of Teaching Artists and how you got into this and how this differs from being a music teacher in the classic space.
Sure. Well, I've done both. I've been a music teacher, but Teaching Artist much longer. I did one year of being a traditional school music teacher out of college, but quickly realized I, number one, I wanted to compose more. I wanted more flexibility in my schedule, and I was looking around for different possibilities. And a friend of mine said, oh, you should check out the Lincoln Center Institute. They have some flexible gigs. And so I have to admit that my interest in it to begin with was totally selfish. It just was about, can I get some work that is interesting and fun to do, but flexible in terms of its schedule? And really, that was it. I was looking for something that would compliment my composing time. And the money was pretty good. The people were very nice. I auditioned and they offered me a role in doing this work, and I was happy to learn about it. I didn't really know anything about teaching artistry, had never heard the term before, but they were interested in the time in promoting notions of aesthetic education.
And this is really where the work of art is the focus of everything you do. And Lincoln Center had an interest in this. They were thinking this was a way that they could help students prepare to come to the opera or to the symphony, or to the ballet, or to the theater. They could really, by focusing in on a work of art in a particular way. And so there was a very clear model that had been sort of worked out by the folks at Lincoln Center Institute. And we knew that we would have two to three sessions in a classroom prior to the students witnessing or engaging with a work of art. And then we'd have one session afterwards. So we'd go in, we'd do some process oriented work that was focused on that. Whatever the work of art was, they would have their performance or their visit to the museum or whatever it was. It could sometimes be a concert where the musicians were coming to their school to play in the school auditorium. And then we would do a reflective session with them afterwards on basically how was that experience, and what connections were you able to make between the work we did prior and to the work once you engage with it in the performance or on the wall?
Leah Roseman:
What do you mean by process oriented work?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Well, such a good question. I mean, some of them could be really creative activities. So for instance, we were studying the Schubert Quartettsatz, right? This nine minute long kind of all in one miniature string quartet and beautiful, beautiful piece. And with the teachers, we decided that two things were really important. One was that the students needed to get some hands-on feeling of what it was like to play a string instrument, even though they were in the second grade and were not playing violins and violas and cellos. So what could we do? So we decided we would build instruments, we would build kind of shoebox instruments, but that had suspended rubber bands for different pitches. And we would experiment with that, trying to make the best possible shoebox instrument we could. And then once we did that, we would do some improvisatory activities that really got at the Schubert, which my interest in it was important was the kids hearing the way that instruments could play in, for instance, parallel harmony. I really wanted them to be just experience the joy of that and the knowledge of that rather than the piece just kind of washing over them. I wanted them to get inside of it a little bit. So we did that. We did a little unit where that's what the students did. They used their rubber band instruments, but they also, we did it so that we created different kinds of conversations. So sometimes there were fights, sometimes there were interruptions, sometimes there were moments of harmonious friendship.
To our delight, I think the teacher's delight and mine too, was the students were able to, in the Schubert, they were going, oh, that's the part where they're in love. That's where the two violins are in love. And they were playing in six or thirds or whatever it was. So that's kind of an example of it. But every work of art is different. And so then in a way, every unit of study, which is what we would call them, every unit of study was different too.
Leah Roseman:
And you've worked quite a bit with music teachers as well, right?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah, a lot. Yeah. At Carnegie Hall, we've been doing the music educators workshop there for several years. Joanna Massey, who runs the programs there, started it. And I've been a faculty member with lots of different musicians. And we had both during the year program where once a month on a Saturday, music teachers come together to share best practices, take different classes or workshops. And so I've done workshops in musical creativity as part of the music educators workshop. And that allows me to work with really just inspiring educators from New York. But then in the summer, we do one where anybody can come from anywhere, and we have a much wider audience from across the country, so.
Leah Roseman:
Do you find a lot of them are struggling with burnout and maybe aren't playing or singing away from school because it's so intense, their days in the classroom?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yes. And so one of the things that we did immediately in response to that was that we formed our own ensembles. So as part of this, people sing in a choir, they play in a band. There's a jazz improv ensemble. I think there's a percussion group. So we're trying to make space for that, where it has been harder for them to do that. But I mean, at the same time, I think of somebody like Kevin Leblanc, who is a trumpet player and teaches at LaGuardia in New York City, which is kind of the arts high school, the fame high school. And he has his own big band. And I mean, he's a musician at such a high level, but he's also one of our workshop participants. He loves it because learning from folks there too.
Leah Roseman:
And are you using improvisation with them?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah, we do. We do. And I especially have been doing workshops on vocal improv. Not so much instrumental improv for me, but I do a lot of circle singing and facilitation, that kind of vocal improv, Bobby McFaren, Rhiannon, a variety of people who have done that work.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. And you've written operas for toddlers?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yes. Operas for babies. Who knew I had no, I mean, this one really came out of left field, but it came out of the Lullaby project.
I was doing the Lullaby project, and as I said, one of the things I knew immediately was that we had a lot to learn from other people who were already working with lullaby around the world. In different, Australia, there's a lot of lullaby work that goes on there, in the Nordic countries in Norway and Sweden and Denmark, really interesting things. And in London, a friend of mine said, oh, you have to check out this radio interview show on BBC three, I think it was. And this was back in, I think, 2014, 15, something like that. And we'd just been doing the Lullaby project for a few. And they described a project in London Hospital, which was a multicultural exchange project with lullabies. So these were a lot of immigrant mothers who had come to the UK who were on a ward together in London Hospital, and they were teaching each other all of these lullabies in different languages.
And it just sounded fascinating to me. And so I called up the group that was responsible for doing it in London. It was Spitalfields music. They very nicely said, yes, you should really see if you can make a meeting with our lead teaching artist, whose name is Zoe Palmer, and she can tell you about exactly how this work, how it went down. And so I made us kind of cold, emailed her and made kind of a Skype interview with her, and we immediately just hit it off. It was like, oh, we're doing the same work. How did this work if you tried that? And so on. And we had a great time talking to each other. And at the end of that call, she said, oh, yes, and I also make rumpus operas. And I said, what is a rumpus opera? And she said, oh, well, they're for babies, operas for babies.
I said, that just sounds ridiculous. Are you kidding me? She said, no, no, no. I'll send you some video, and she will testify to this. I was very skeptical. I was like, this sounds like horrible children's theater to me, and has nothing worse than horrible children's theater, in my opinion, of all the art forms. Horrible children's theater is just unbearable to me. And so I was like, okay, alright, but I'll look. And so she sent me the video and I actually thought they were fantastic. It was very freeform. There was a lot of improvisation, a lot of spontaneity. But the musicians were quite good. There were vocalists and there were instrumentalists, and they were just all on top of it. They just knew how to make the moment joyful. And the parents were really into it. And I just was like, oh, we need to make one of these. We need to make one of these at Carnegie Hall. I have a vocal improv ensemble called Moving Star, and we could do it. And so basically, I pitched it to the Carnegie Hall folks and they gave us a commission, and we made our first one in 2017 called OTOYOTOY.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I heard a bit of that. It was really cool. So I was just thinking, I've spoken with a lot of composers who've written for kids TV and cartoons, and most kids shows are just, it's basically musical theater. There's so much singing.
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah, that's right.
Leah Roseman:
So it doesn't seem that strange to me, but I'm just curious in terms of sets or how complicated these productions are.
Thomas Cabaniss:
They can be extremely simple. They can be very low tech DIY production. I have to say, one of the things that happened over the pandemic was that we got a little bit nervous about obviously going back live with parents and babies and all of the things that come with just kind of being around each other, germs. And it's already a concern for very young children anyway, just because of your ability to hold off bacteria, et cetera. And so we were concerned about that. And the project that we had been working on, we'd sort of had this idea of there being thousands of little objects, like a mandala of objects, was the idea of the show. And so we thought, well, maybe this is not the right moment for that show. Maybe we need to do something different. And I had been working with a projection designer for Link Up who was fabulous, all the stuff on the back wall of Carnegie Hall where the music was scrolling live so the kids could play their recorders and their violins and sing and so on.
And also just really gorgeous imaginative projections. And so I asked this designer, Dan Scully, if he would help us think about how we could maybe create some of the same ideas with projections. And he immediately said, oh yes, we'll put a projection projector on the ceiling. Everything will be on the floor. The babies will be able to crawl around in it, and in fact, they'll be in the set in a certain way. And he created a gorgeous show with lights and projections and this kind of center wheel, which created a kind of mandala, a kind of wonder wheel at the beginning. And it moved. It was spinning, but it was light, it was projection. It wasn't, they weren't objects. And so, I dunno, it, they can be fancy too, I guess is the answer is they can be fancy too.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I was just thinking, I've been to a couple of art things where they did those kind of projections, and it's very immersive. It's wonderful how far we've come with the technology.
Thomas Cabaniss:
Agreed.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So what are your views on bringing in new audiences to orchestra concerts and choir concerts in that whole world?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah, I mean, interestingly, right now I'm working on a project, which is, it's kind of an open house jam and for orchestras, and it's literally, that's what it's for. And the idea is modular. So the idea of it is, Leah, you're a string player.
Leah Roseman:
I'm a violinist. Yeah.
Thomas Cabaniss:
And so you would be in a room with your violin, and you would have a bit of audience that was devoted to you. They would come to you. There would be, I don't know, it could be anywhere from 10 people to say 30, I don't know. But they would come and you would spend some time with them playing for them, and you would play whatever you wanted to play your favorite things that you think show off the instrument. But you would end with a little miniature that I've written called a single clap for violin. And then when you're finished with that, you would take your group with you to the next room, which is where the string quintet is. So there've been four other rooms with similar things going on with each of the players playing solos. And then you'd come in and you'd play all of their solos, but now arrange for all five instruments.
And then there's an intermission. And afterwards, when you come in, there's a big orchestra piece that has everybody but uses the same solos and the same music. But I guess the idea of it is, right, is how can we invite people in, really get them to understand who people are individually in an orchestra, who they are as musicians, what they do technically, but also what drives them, what moves them to make the music that they make, and to see also how that gradually grows into all the possibilities that are there once an orchestra is assembled, once the full orchestra is assembled. So I'm interested in all kinds of ideas that will do that, that will get people in and hooked. I think it's one thing to bring people in, to get them for a kind of crossover idea or to get them in with their children, because often that is a way that new audiences are coming in, is that they're bringing their children.
They think like, oh, they need to have this experience. They also need to go to a museum. They also need to travel to, I don't know, national parks or whatever. We went to Algonquin Park when we felt like they needed to go to Canada to Algonquin Park. We just felt they needed to. And so that's true. But I also feel like what we're not so great at doing is right now what we are challenged is how do we hook people? How do we really get our talons in there? And I feel like that's an interesting problem to me. How can orchestras do that? What are the kinds of projects and performances that will do that?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I mean, certainly there's different ideas to bring in different recent immigrant groups and just trying to find different demographics. But I have seen a change since the pandemic. I think some of the older people maybe haven't come back, have you seen a similar switch in New York concerts?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah, well, absolutely. Because right, what's happened, right? I mean, the pandemic sort of taught us that there's a lot that you can do at your screen at home. And so there's a lot of that of defaulting like Well, I can get something kind of like that on my screen, and if I already did invest a little more money in improving my sound and my screen, because that was all there was at the time. I think it's a big issue. It's a big issue.
Leah Roseman:
And how do you feel about the way that people should talk or not talk to the audience in classical concerts?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah, there was one time a time during my work as an arts education, both as an administrator and as a teaching artist, where I literally was getting hired to do nothing else but coach musicians in speaking to audiences. And in fact, I did it for the Orchestra of St. Luke's and for the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. And I was happy to do it. I really was. And the musicians are terrific. They were all interested in trying to figure it out. But I guess for me, the main thing is I just don't like the default in one way or another. I think it's not a binary question. In other words, sometimes it's great to have a musician turned around or conductor turned around and say something to kind of prepare the moment for this piece because the circumstances require it. It's actually important. If you don't do it, they're going to be a lot of people sort of boxed out of it in some way, but it's not always right.
And sometimes I think people, I just want to hear the music and there are sometimes and someone who's like, I have spoken to audiences and I've been asked to speak to audiences and asked to coach musicians to speak to audiences. And sometimes I'm in the audience going, shut up, stop it. Just play the, we are going to get it. This is not hard to figure out. Some music is really complicated or some music needs the context, but sometimes it really doesn't. And sometimes it's actually suffers from that. And so just play the tune. I mean, I guess I just think that's the thing is that what we need is discretion and good judgment and good taste about this thing and not a thing of what we always need to speak or we should never speak. I mean, I know the Cleveland has sort of, people have been writing about with Franz Welser-Möst and Cleveland because he never speaks. He just doesn't speak to the audience pretty much. And again, why never I get that. But also, but I do enjoy it when Cleveland just plays. I have to say, it doesn't bother me when they just play. It's okay with me. It's okay with me.
Leah Roseman:
And when the situation does call for someone to speak, what kind of coaching advice have you given to musicians?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Well, I mean, I think that really simple things like one relevance, right? Is it relevant what you're saying? Is it relevant? And is it going to open something up rather than shut something down? Right. I never want a musician or anybody to tell me what art means. And actually I am driven crazy by docents in museums. I just, don't tell me, just let me look at the painting. I'm interested in the contextual information, and I can read the card that's on the wall, but if you tell me that this is what it means, then that doesn't work for me. For some people it works beautifully. They love a docent, that's all they want to do is to go on the docent tour and God bless. But just not for me, I guess when we're talking about music, yeah, relevant. Is it relevant? Is it personal?
Is there a way that a personal kind of connection that you have as a musician can also be part of what you're talking about? And then all the things that are really important, which is brevity and the structure of no more than three ideas or three points. After that, we begin to lose whatever our attention, our ability to focus on that. And the main thing that I say to musicians is that you must insist on rehearsal that if you are using amplification, it must be adjusted and designed. It should not just be like whatever mic is on. I mean, we are mostly asked to speak in halls that are not designed for speaking. They're designed for music. And so then we end up speaking into these booming kinds of circumstances that really where the speaking doesn't land. And look, here we are on screen, right?
We're used to hearing the sound in a certain way, certain clarity, a certain forward kind of sense of volume. And if we don't get that from the stage, again, we can feel like we're in a sea. So I was like, you got to rehearse and you got to rehearse with the microphone. It's not the same. Rehearsing it off stage, that's not the same. You got to rehearse it with the microphone and with a designer or an audio person out there who can make adjustments and ideally with somebody else who's talking to that sound person and saying, no, no, no, we need more high end or No, no, no, it's too boomy. Fix it in a way that's almost more important. I hate to say it, but it's almost more important because at least then the audience has a chance of hearing the person.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I agree. So Thomas, in terms of your creative output and your process and your balance of time, because you do so many things, how does that work for you these days?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Well, look, I'm getting older, and so I am trying now to spend more of my time writing than I think I did over my thirties and forties, I think into my fifties and sixties. Now I am about to turn 62 and I'm feeling like I'm able to now, I don't know, spend more dedicated time on a daily basis and just kind of come to the office or the studio or however you think of it each day with clarity about what it is that I'm trying to do and doing it, which feels good. I mean, just that it feels like more of a fluid practice of composing and creating, and that feels good.
Leah Roseman:
So are you generally sitting at the piano and sketching things out by hand? And how do you physically go about putting it down?
Thomas Cabaniss:
Yeah, it's different each day. I wrote a piece a couple of, well, during the pandemic I wrote a piece called Songs from Joe's Chapel. It's a 40 minute cycle in each key in the Chopin version of you start major, then relative minor, and you do the circle of fifths, right? Each is a miniature, and so there are 24 little movements. When I was writing that, I had a really clear idea. I would come in, I knew what my key was that day. I would sit down at the piano and play for about an hour and a half, just play everything scales in that key ideas in that key. Maybe I had an idea, maybe I didn't, but I just played for an hour and a half and at the end of an hour and a half I was like, okay, what from that am I interests me? What could I work on? And I challenged myself to just write a miniature every single day that I was doing it. And I did it. I did that discipline. Now, I'm not always that disciplined, but when I am, I'm happy.
It's the kind of thing that I really, so where there's free improvisation and then a kind of sitting back and considering like, okay, how can I, I've been very inspired by the process of the writer, Jennifer Egan. She's an author who won the Pulitzer Prize a few years back for a book called, now I'm going to miss the title, but she just finished a book called The Candy House, which was kind of a sequel to that book. And she talks about her process in a different way because she's a writer, but she writes by hand, she does not use the computer at all to write, she just used yellow legal pads and pencils. And she free writes, free associative writing for a lot of her process. And that can go on for a long, long time before she types things up and begins to think about how she might structure it. And that sense of the permission of free improv seems really interesting to me as a composer.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, that's great. And are there other creative outlets you have need of or have fun with beyond music?
Thomas Cabaniss:
I am the cook in my family. It's just the way it worked out. My wife was a medical student and didn't have much time for preparing meals when she was in school, and so I just by default sort of became the cook. And so I love cooking. I love the daily challenge of it. I mean, I'm not a fancy cook, but I love the daily challenge of like, oh, I need to figure it out. We need to have a meal. And so I'd spend a lot of time looking at recipes. Since I'm from the low country of South Carolina, a lot of the cuisine that I'm interested in playing with and experimenting with and sometimes just making is stuff from South Carolina. It's a rice culture. It's a culture that very much influenced by African-American cooks, and so I love that.
Leah Roseman:
Cool. Well, thanks so much for this today. Really enjoyed speaking with you.
Thomas Cabaniss:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please do share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. The link is in the description. Have a wonderful week.
