Interview with Leonard Slatkin
by Bethany Tillerson (photo credit: Yun Han)

We were honored to interview Leonard Slatkin for June 5th’s My Life in Music program! Slatkin has been a prominent force in the world of classical music for over 50 years, having served as Music Director of the Orchestre National de Lyon, Conductor Laureate of the St. Louis Symphony, and guest conductor of the Manhattan School of Music Symphony and Yale Philharmonia. In this interview, he speaks about his career and his outlook on music with Rob Kennedy and Naomi Lambert.

KENNEDY: Tell our listeners about your early years and training as a musician.

SLATKIN: My father was the concertmaster of the orchestra at 20th Century Fox, the founder of the Hollywood String Quartet. He was the conductor of the Hollywood Bowl and the Concert Arts Orchestras. He was a producer. He was an arranger. He had a lot going on. Sadly, he died at the age of 47 when I was 19. My mother, Eleanor Aller, was the first cellist at Warner Brothers Studios. She was the first woman to ever hold the title position in one of the eleven studio orchestras. She would go on to be the lead cellist for so many of the film composers that one knows and loves, whether it was Korngold or Max Steiner or John Williams. She would retire when she was sixty years old. She used to say, “I never want people to say I knew Eleanor Aller when she played well.” She died at the age of 78. I had a brother who passed away just a few months ago. He was the principal cello at the City Ballet Orchestra, and we used to play often together.

Our household was full of all kinds of musical treats because my parents did not limit themselves to the classical music world. What would happen is in the daytime they would go to the studios and do the work there, come home, have dinner. Then two more musicians would show up and they would rehearse quartets. But because of the diversity of the music they played, our household would have guests like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Korngold, Max Steiner, Sinatra, or Nat King Cole. Almost anybody who was in Los Angeles came to our house, and many of them played on our piano, which I’m fortunate still to have. I’m almost afraid to touch it because of the history that’s contained.

As for me, I started on violin when I was three, realized I wouldn’t be as good as my father, so I quit; then at the age of eight, I studied piano, realized I wouldn’t be as good as my uncle, so I quit. Then I took up viola because nobody else in the family played it, then eventually gravitated to composition. I began conducting in high school when I would arrange music for the school shows, but I didn’t do it seriously until after my father passed away. I was 20 and went on to study at The Juilliard School with Jean Morel and the Aspen School with Walter Susskind. Susskind invited me to be the Assistant Conductor in St. Louis. I spent about ten years in secondary positions, either associate principal or principal guest, and then I was asked to go to New Orleans to be the Music Director for about two years. Then a call came for me to return to St. Louis as the Music Director. Normally that doesn’t happen. I think just a few of us have actually done that. But I knew the musicians well, and for a long time we had a wonderful relationship. I went from there to Washington, D.C. and then to Detroit. And along the way, I had opportunities to work as Chief Conductor at the BBC and as Music Director at Lyon. And I also had the very good fortune to be able to work with almost every great orchestra in the world. So it’s been a really nice, wonderful journey filled with memories and great musical events, but also some fine personal relationships as well.

LAMBERT: You’ve worked in what one might call smaller cities like Detroit and Nashville, where the role of the orchestra is really important in the community. Having professional musicians at a certain level really enriches everyone. Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve been involved in those cities’ cultural lives and why you think that might be important?

SLATKIN: Well, almost all of my music directorships have been in cities that are not considered the upper echelon, or at least they weren’t at the time. So that included St. Louis, Detroit, and probably Washington, D.C. It was not thought of as being a particularly musically cultured orchestra. And then there was Lyon, not the top orchestra in France in terms of reputation, but I think musically they were there. I knew pretty early on that this was the role I could play; I became good at building an orchestra and putting the pieces together, finding the right combination. To some degree, I had a big advantage because these were all cities where you could take chances. You didn’t worry quite so much that you were under the microscope all the time, as you would be in New York or Boston or Vienna. So I took the opportunity to get involved and lived in all those communities where I worked.

I still think that’s incredibly valuable today, maybe even more today. A lot of what we’re seeing has to do with the end of the music director as we’ve known it. When I started, I was doing 20 weeks a year with my orchestras. Now you’re lucky if your music director is there 12 weeks of the year. It’s a world of guest conductors. It’s a world of Pops. It’s a world of film scores, and all kinds of other things. Another big change, and one that I think is sad, is that during my first year as assistant in St. Louis, I did 83 children’s concerts. That’s a lot. Today, the young people’s concerts are maybe four or five weeks at the most. Some of the top orchestras don’t even do them anymore. We just think back to the Bernstein series that he did for young people that were televised and really captured so much of what we were.

But a lot of that goes back to how we’ve lost our way in terms of not just music education, but arts education, particularly in our public schools. When I got to Detroit, I sat down with a supervisor and he bragged that 30% of the schools in the Detroit area had music programs and 70% didn’t. It’s a far cry from when I was a kid in L.A. I went to public school all my life, and in my high school, we had three choruses, we had two bands, we had an orchestra, and we had a composer-in-residence. It was just a wonderful time. And that was not the exception, it was the rule in the California system back in the fifties and early sixties. So that’s all very different now.

The Music Director needs to be a part of the community. You need to be seen in the grocery store, hauling the trash out, going to a sports event. To me, that remains a very vital part of what the job should be. It’s difficult to interact with the public if they don’t see you all the time. If we look back, usually the civic leaders and business leaders had the kind of background where they knew about the arts and they were patrons or audience members. So not only did they give their assistance financially, you could talk to them about sculpture, painting, architecture, and music. Today’s leaders of corporations and other businesses don’t have that because they didn’t have it as part of education. And that makes it a little more difficult to go out there and ask for money or explain why you think your organization is so valuable, and this is all part of what I did during the majority of my tenure.

KENNEDY: Maestro, you’ve been a champion of contemporary composers, but you’re also a composer yourself. Can you tell our listeners how your careers as a conductor and a composer intersect?

SLATKIN: Well, composing started before conducting. Once I started playing piano, I began to develop improvisational skills, doing jazz and playing in lounges, somewhat illegally; in fact, quite illegally. But the idea that you could create something that didn’t exist before was always intriguing to me. In fact, I studied composition with one of the great teachers in Los Angeles. His name was Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. It might not be a familiar name to listeners, but he wrote over 200 film scores and taught virtually all the composers of the great film eras, from Jerry Goldsmith to John Williams. So I kept the compositional end going. And then in my early years here in St. Louis, I wrote a few pieces, then things got busy and I couldn’t devote the time to it. Over the last ten years or so, recently I got the bug to branch out, so I wrote bigger pieces, works that actually have been played by other orchestras and conductors. Nothing was ever commissioned. I just wrote them because I wanted to write them. And of course, being a Music Director, if I felt like programming them, I could if I thought they were good enough. And now I’m actually being asked and receiving commissions to write music.

Another point that people might find interesting is that when I conduct a piece of mine, I have to step back and I can’t think of myself as being the same person who wrote the piece. I have to approach my music the same as I would any other composer. I have to look at it. I have to listen carefully because every orchestra is different. Every orchestra brings their own personality, their own instincts, and sometimes an orchestra will have a better idea about a phrasing or a dynamic, something I hadn’t thought of. Acoustics play a role, too. We have to take into account the reverberation time, how dry a hall might be, and whatever limitations an orchestra might have. I’m still the conductor first and the composing tends to come second. The problem now that I have is my wife is a composer, so I have to balance programming her music with mine!

LAMBERT: Could you talk a little bit about The Raven based on the Poe poem and your decision to have a narrator and the orchestra? How did that come together?

SLATKIN: In 1971, I was in my third year of being the assistant in St. Louis, and I was looking up people who were from the city. It’s quite an extraordinary group of actors, singers, artists, writers, and I didn’t realize that the actor Vincent Price had come from here. That name may not be familiar to everybody, but people of a certain generation can’t forget him. And those who listen to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” will know his voice immediately.

He was remarkable. I loved him, so I thought, I wonder if he’d be interested if I sat down and wrote a piece based on Edgar Allan Poe. One of the reasons for this is a very unusual story. When my father died, I was only 19. He died on a Friday night, and on Saturday my school friends came over to pay their respects and one of them said, “Let’s go to the movies.” And the film that we went to see was called The Raven, and it starred Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre and Vincent Price. It always stayed in my mind because my friends knew exactly what I needed for a couple of hours to get away.

I also thought that there weren’t that many pieces written for both narrator and orchestra. We have things like The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Peter and the Wolf, Carnival of the Animals, which are lighter pieces. I thought, What if I gave the idea of a narrator as the soloist, where you would normally be doing a concerto, and make it a virtuoso vehicle? So this piece is not quite a half hour long, and there are five works. Each one is for a different section of the orchestra, which then come together at the end. For my 75th birthday, we performed it at Manhattan School of Music with Alec Baldwin and recorded it, so it’s out there for the whole public to enjoy. In a way, it was meant as fun, but it’s also meant as a serious piece to give the narrator a true virtuoso vehicle.

LAMBERT: Of course, we’re lovers of radio, and you also have a long relationship with radio. With so much alternative entertainment, can you share how you see radio continuing to contribute to the classical world?

SLATKIN: When I was young, I used to walk from our house to a radio station called KAFC. It was the classical voice of Los Angeles, and I spent hours listening to the on-air personalities. Radio, to me, was the window for your mind. Today, we live in a primarily visual age. The comedian and social commentator Lewis Black gave a marvelous routine about the time when MTV took over the halftime of the Super Bowl. He said, among other things, that MTV was to music as KFC is to chicken. It led into talking about how when you have your radio on, a song would come on, and in the past you might be reminded of a person you met who would end up meaning something important in your life or a tragedy that might have happened or something favorable. Today, for most young people, if a song comes on, they flash to the video of that song. They don’t use their imagination as we did when we were younger. That’s what radio does that no other medium can do.

I had a show in St. Louis in the late 60’s. It was four hours, live every Thursday. Four years ago, I resuscitated the show, but with a different format for the 21st century. So I have a program which you can hear online called “The Slatkin Shuffle”. The old show was quite diverse. You never knew what I was going to play; it could be classical, jazz, folk, rock, comedy, whatever. And the new one also does that, but the 21st-century twist is that I take my cue from close to 25,000 songs on my iPad. I put them in shuffle mode and we just listen to whatever comes up next, and I comment on what’s playing. The idea that imagination needs to come into play here is something you usually can’t do in a visual medium.

Ever since I can remember, people kept talking about radio as being dead. And yet, as you just pointed out, there are more alternatives now than there ever have been. You can listen to radio from all over the world. But most people don’t take advantage of it, and I think they should. Maybe if we had the opportunity to listen to more via the worldwide media, maybe we wouldn’t have quite so many problems as we have in the world, because we would understand what others are thinking and feeling. We would get news from different perspectives. Again, that idea of creating the pictures in your head is crucially important today. More now than ever before, the idea that our young people in particular are devoid of imagination in so many respects to me is one of the great tragedies of our time.

KENNEDY: Maestro, what advice would you give to a young person aspiring to be a classical musician today?

SLATKIN: Well, you have to be realistic. The market is tough. I would say you shouldn’t limit yourself to classical music. Keep your mind open to all kinds of music and all kinds of possibilities. So if you think you’d like to play the piano, don’t just think of those exercises you have to play to get your technique in there. Think of what you can do to expand your mind, to do more creative things. And another thing that’s going to be important is the way young people communicate to their audiences. I’ve been advocating now for a couple of years that conservatories teach classes in verbal communication with their audiences. People need this now–they need to hear from the artists, they need to understand what music means. So if I’m a young musician, I have to think about not only satisfying myself as a musician and wanting to know more, but opening up my world.

Maybe here’s where a story might help. I got to know the conductor Carlo Maria Giulini quite well. He was a very marvelous spiritual conductor. He really delved deep into the music. He told me a story about a time when he was having a heart operation, and he was told it was possible that it might not turn out successfully. And when he awoke, he vowed that he would make music a part of his life, not his life a part of music. So young people shouldn’t just focus only on music. It’s a big world out there and music has to relate to everything else that’s going on in life.

Musicians have this opportunity to do something that nobody else can do. Poets and artists have a direct communication with the people who are receiving their art. They’re using words. They’re immediately responsive to the people who are viewing or listening. Musicians are the go-between. The composer has written something and the audience is listening to it. We look at these circles and these lines and we have to have some way to bring meaning to them. In some way we are doing something that doctors wish they could do. We’re taking something inanimate that may have existed hundreds of years ago and bringing it to life. A doctor’s role, of course, is to sustain life, but ours is to bring music to life. And I think if you use that philosophy–entertain yourself, educate yourself, and remember that you are able to communicate in a way that literally no other art can do–perhaps that is how we can succeed in growing as we move forward in the 21st century.

Join us for Leonard Slatkin’s interview at 7 p.m. on Monday, June 5th! Stream online on TheClassicalStation.org, tune your radio to 89.7 FM, or download our App!