 I'm very happy to be here. I'm Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts and it is more than an honor and more than a joy to get to be with you. Thank you. I'm Maron Alsop, you know, but I will tell you anyway, she's an American conductor and a violinist and she is currently music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and conductor of honor of the Sao Paulo State Symphony Orchestra and chief conductor of Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and so many, so many other things. She's really one of the most renowned conductors in the world. She travels extensively conducting, teaching, advocating for diverse youth groups and for orchestras composed of youth as you saw last night and for women conductors in particular. Those of you who were at the International Call for Unity and Joy concert last night I think will agree that it was one of the great experiences of our lives and I say this as someone whose plane was five hours late and who was on the Davos bus while the concert was happening and watching it on my phone and weeping. I told Maron I'm in the bus and I was just weeping. It was so beautiful with the European Union Youth Orchestra and the choir of the Sao Paulo Symphony and soloists from so many different countries. It was just a statement about what the arts can do, what music can do, what humans can do together. It was so my first question or my first topic to talk about I live in a world of many art forms theater and visual art writing but I have always thought even though it's not my expertise that music of all forms was the most immediate to the human organism that we respond to music it comes right into our bodies, right into our senses, right into our spirit more directly than any other form and also translates across culture more directly and more immediately. So I just as someone who's spent her life living it I just thought I'd start there and ask you your thinking on that. Sure well I think that we're all born hot wired for music. You know when people say to me well oh I'm tone deaf you know or I can't carry tuna I can't sing I really want to go back with them in history to who to that person that told them that because that is not true. Every single human being can sing can feel music we're just it's just and when people also people feel feel sometimes hesitant in coming to enjoy classical music because they don't know enough they don't feel educated enough and I say but that's not you don't need any education because you're human so you can experience the beauty of music and everyone has a song that reminds them of something or a melody and you're transported that's the you know music can it can connect with us so directly it's almost like a dream you know and transport you to another time in your life or another place or another another planet in a way. So my teacher my mentor Leonard Bernstein if you ever watch him there he did the Norton lectures at Harvard and he postulated that the first human word was not spoken it was sung and I agree you know and when you think about kids they're always intoning you know language comes from from singing really you don't just suddenly speak a word you have them you have to really work it through a lot so I think music is just it's part of being human so I think that's why it's able to transcend those boundaries. What you said just now is so correct that music can take you back in time it can it can move you to sometimes very painful things and sometimes very joyful things and there are times when you just can't listen to something because it reminds you of people or a time in your life or a loss it's just so it goes right to pain and then there's music that the minute you hear it everything seems to go away and you just feel elated I always think that music somehow defies gravity in a way that it's like grace you know it just takes away the weightiness you know and you think about you think about when you were a teenager or if you have teenage kids that you know music is a it's a rebellion it's a way of expressing yourself it's a way of uniting you with your peers so I mean it's a very very very powerful medium I think and a way of making you feel that you're not young anymore when you can't relate to the generation the music of a particular new generation when you think wow I just I can't hear that I don't get it right I get it or I don't get it but I don't want to get it or you know something about you just resist it you know it's like whoa why is this happening now yeah definitely um you've spoken about the when you went to a Leonard Bernstein concert before he became your mentor and friend and you were with your father who was a musician and you you just knew I want to do that I want to be a conductor so I'm curious like what you saw that made you think that's what I want to do you know it's I'm always amazed at the musicians that come from I have a very good friend who grew up on a turkey farm and she plays the viola now I I don't know how you get from a turkey farm to playing the viola that to me is really that's something magical I really I was born my both of my parents were professional musicians so you know they didn't necessarily want a child they needed a pianist so that's why I was born and that's why they had you yeah they needed a trio so that was the idea um and and I hated the piano and so make a long story short I I retired from piano when I was six and uh then I uh then they tricked me into playing the violin but luckily I loved playing the violin uh you know and and that made me also understand that for every child there is an instrument so if you played an instrument growing up another thing I'd like to go back with you and you know it didn't click it's because it wasn't your instrument I really believe that's true it was true of the accordion for me I have to say well it's probably a relief for everyone around you too but that was the Polish the Polish thing um so uh and I love playing the violin and I loved I I got pretty good and I when I was about eight I I was in Juilliard pre-college you know no pressure from my parents and um I love playing the orchestra I love the sound and but they the director called my parents in because everyone was complaining about some kid in some little kid in the back of the second violence who was trying to lead the whole orchestra so you know I was already thinking oh this classical music thing is just not going to work out for me it's so many rules to follow even even for me then and luckily my dad took me to a concert shortly thereafter I think I was about nine years old and the guy came out to conduct and he first he was he was wearing a turtleneck which I thought oh that's different and then he turned around and started talking to us about the music and sharing you know why he why we should listen to this piece what was interesting about it uh that was really interesting to me and then he turned around and started jumping around like a crazy person and I thought oh I can be the conductor and not get in any trouble and have fun so that was it for me I was sold and but and that was Leonard Bernstein who was conducting um who then you worked with very much right yeah I mean he eventually I eventually became his student but he was my hero I had two posters on my wall a big one of Leonard Bernstein and then a smaller one of the Beatles so that was that was my musical you know inclination and it it's ironic because um Bernstein loved the Beatles and one night when I was on tour with him he played every single Beatles song for me he knew every word at the piano I wish before cell phones you know I wish I had a but I have it at least in my head there's a video somewhere that I watched when I was trying to learn more about you and he rushes you you're very young and you're conducting and he rushes up on the stage yeah when I finish and he runs up I thought oh I held my breath because I thought did he knock you over almost I mean he was like just came on the stage right yeah he would not done well in the me too moment you know I mean he had no sense of personal space at all whatsoever he was always and he was like he'd be coming everybody like look out here he comes like no kisses okay not yeah he was crazy to jump up on this day all right okay so now um you do a lot of master classes for women conductors and I think they're fascinating and if any of you are interested in this topic at all you should watch them because I learned a lot just conceptually about conducting from watching you and what I was so interested in particularly was with one woman conductor where you stand next to her and you make her breathe with you that she's not breathing correctly so I wish to just talk about that because it made me think well if the orchestra is an organism functioning together is the conductor the breath the lungs is the conductor the head the brain like it it was it's such an interesting idea that if you are not breathing then maybe the orchestra can't breathe but I just wanted to talk about I mean conducting is such a it's such an abstract thing because I'm you know no matter how much I wave my arms I make no sound you know and so so it's completely dependent on trying to enable the people around me to be the best they can be but the minute you lift your arm well usually something happens yeah um whether it's good or I can't you know that that's that's something to debate but um it's all about it's all about body language I mean that's the first thing gesture and I can watch five young conductors and any of you could do it too it would be clearly obvious with this same piece same orchestra and I guarantee you you could also tell sounds completely different and it's it's because of the way they move the way they breathe the way it's very individualistic you know very dependent on all of those things and so breathing is important because if you're going to invite someone to play that is playing a wind instrument or brass instrument if you don't breathe the sound is tight and if your gesture is is harsh the sound is also harsh and the musicians aren't necessarily even aware of this but you can hear it and so I mean it's a complex thing and then of course when you add the societal interpretation of gesture from women which is very different from the same gesture from a man is interpreted very differently than it is from a woman so you know when when my female students will come and conduct and you know sort of dainty like that I said oh no no no can't do that because then it's it's girly or it's lightweight or whatever but when a guy guy does that it's sensitive I mean it's it's I have no I have no judgment on it it's just the way society looks at things differently and when a woman you know really wants to get a big sound you know there's a there's a line that if you cross everybody it's like you know you're called the b word so you have to really figure out does that translate into all languages yes I think so I don't know in German it might be no but I think so it's very it's very interesting and and and also also it's always every day is something new because the organism constantly changes I work with a different orchestra almost every week so it's a different being why do you think there is so much resistance so has been historically to women as conductors what you know is it like women directors of film where it's just a leadership issue that men just simply don't want women at the helm or do you think there's something intrinsic to the nature of music classical music oh no I think it's I really think it's a it's a comfort level I mean this is I'm always asked this question of course I my response usually is well I'm probably not the right person to ask you should ask some of the men that question because for me I you know I want to promote women in this field but I think that as a society it takes a long time for us to be comfortable with role roles especially with different looking people in roles I mean I tried to think back when I was growing up when I was a kid you know it was always two white guys on TV anchoring the news that's what it was and then sort of gradually like this one woman Barbara Walter she came in you know and that was really uncomfortable for a while and then we got over that and they let Jane Paulie through you know what I mean so couple women and then then everybody got comfortable with one man one woman then it then it morphed you know so that we saw more people of color and this and that and now I think it's just it just takes volume of seeing people in certain roles to become comfortable but from my perspective I assumed naively that there would be a lot more women coming into my field as I was going but then five years past in 10 years 15 years I said well this is ridiculous and if I don't do something about it who will change this landscape so in 2002 I started a fellowship for women conductors and I named it after my my non-musical mentor the gentleman that helped me start my first orchestra Tommy Otaki he's a he owned ankline clothing he's not in music at all he didn't even like classical music actually but he liked you you know for some reason and he supported the orchestra and so this fellowship has really I think helped quite a lot because it's very important that the women conducting isn't like anything else you you can't practice it unless you have 20 or 40 friends that come over every day you know there's no instrument so at a large apartment yeah you really you need a lot a lot a lot of beer but so that's a huge challenge so you can't get opportunities and the most important thing to me is that you you have to have the chance to fail in order to become successful and if you only have one chance you know it doesn't go well especially in a profession where it's not predisposed to want you to succeed necessarily so it becomes even more difficult to to fail in public there's that yeah there's that talk also about I mean you're changing the profession so many ways sort of its activist part of your life and and and it's a totality in your life which makes it even more wonderful can you talk about the youth orchestras and how what you've been thinking about that and what motivated that and and then we'll watch a small clip of Sao Paulo oh sure um well I I think it goes back to this you know when I had to play the piano and I hated the piano that's that's part of it um wanting also wanting every kid to have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument and learn an instrument that they liked and also I I'm motivated by wanting to see the same diversity on stage that I see in in my community and that's definitely missing in in the orchestras because not every child has the same opportunity to access you know playing an instrument so when I went to Baltimore in 2007 I um I thought why don't why don't we try to start a program that can give access to these young kids and especially in West Baltimore and so I started with 30 30 kids in one school and now we have 2000 kids playing musical instruments and our our very first class has just graduated from high school it's just graduating from high school and our first or kid it's called orchestra kids um or kid our first or kid was accepted I couldn't believe it to the heart school of music on the flute I mean I thought it would take generations you know forward to really sink in and she sent me a note a couple days ago that she she loved school and she sent me her grades in the email because she made the honor roll the president's list and you know to me this is um this is really important when I see these kids playing I realize that you know it's only it's all about access that's all it is every kid has this capacity every human being has this capacity and it's so unfortunate that we as a society can't create equal opportunity for everyone so let's um watch this clip of um the sapella orchestra I'm not sure what this is is this about the um oh did you I project yes and we're gonna we're gonna shift over to that amazing project which is actually um really brings together I think everything that we've been talking about and and everything you've been doing just strikes me one of the most fabulous projects I think you've heard about almost ever so are are you gonna do it okay it's just a minute little snapshot yeah I want to um I'd like to talk about this project because it's so astounding to me um the symbolism of the ninth symphony uh and the way that it has always been conjured uh in so many different situations in the fall of the Berlin Wall and Tiananmen Square I mean so many times when people want to talk about freedom they they think about that so I wanted to ask you like where this idea to make this global ode to joy and for Beethoven's this 250th even where did it even come from how did it begin as an idea well I think that um you know for me the the themes Beethoven as a as a human being is symbolic for me of of of all that I aspire to I mean someone who someone who suffered I mean he knew in his early 20s that he was losing his hearing and he knew certainly by the time he was 30 years old that it was going to be a very slow progressive inevitable process and I can't imagine can you imagine losing the one thing that makes you complete in that kind of painful way and of course he went through a period of tremendous depression and even wrote a suicide note and to his brothers and somehow found a reason to exist and stay alive and he refused any kind of treatment anything that would um cloud his creative capacity he wouldn't go near and he found the will to really push through this and find more inner strength and start to hear internally you know his own world and this is why I really believe that this is why he was able to transcend any other composer because he wasn't judging it anymore it was all created internally and so by the time he writes his ninth symphony there's a legend legendary story that he was conducting and I guess he it was a disaster because everybody just said just don't look up and you'll be all right don't look at the conductor he was you know because he couldn't hear anything so um but at the end of the piece the mezzo soprano had to turn him around so that he could see the ovation because he couldn't hear it and everyone in the audience then realized that he was completely deaf and to write this music under that circumstance and also to always all of his pieces have the same subtext it's just like any author you know you you write different novels but they all have the same themes always because we are who we are and his themes are about hope and optimism and unity and joy and the things that connect also because I think he felt so isolated as an individual because he was cut off from everybody and and he longed for that connection and this is a piece about connection it's about of course the themes are about joy and the Schiller text which was written the in in the late 1700s but he went back to that text because it had this this theme of of joy and the idea of freedom was really an important concept particularly at that moment you know when when you weren't allowed to really think about this so um also I have to say that when the Berlin Wall came down and my mentor Bernstein was there and gathered an orchestra from around the world and acquire from around the world and change the word um Freud a joy to fry height freedom I thought you know this is emblematic of what Beethoven would have wanted and I think that all of these things together made me think about creating a Beethoven 9th symphony with a text on the same themes but texts that would resonate with different cultures so this is in Portuguese so may not resonate so so well but when we did it in Sao Paulo I could see the connection and maybe last night you could see the connection that the choir had to the text because it's their language when we do it in Baltimore I've had a friend who's a rap artist named wordsmith so we have a text by a rap artist um when we do it in um in Africa it's going to be in Zulu when when we do it in uh Carnegie Hall it's it's by the former poet laureate of the United States so the text change and also what you don't see from that is that we're adding interstitial music between the movements and before the symphony begins to try to tell the story in a way that really brings it close to the people listening it's so it's such an incredible idea because we talked about the Tracy K Smith text that will be in Carnegie Hall and the last part of her text um is asking forgiveness of the earth from humans and it it I think it will bring the house down when people hear it because it's so beautifully written and this notion that you can take something which is so classical which is this theme of our whole event this conversation and make it so immediate and contemporary and flexible because I think the implication of classical is that it's it's set in some way historically set and to take it and show this elasticity and that it can become completely relevant and the illusions to God can be can be completely transformed by other cultures and other languages and I think I would love to be there when it's sung in Zulu in South Africa which is a society that's fought so hard for freedom and it's going to be so moving to people in a way that it would never be if it were sung in in German but you know maybe I mean for me maybe it goes back to being eight years old and you know being told don't don't have so much fun with classical music and and I also think that I think that Beethoven didn't look at his music as a museum piece you know he looked at it as a living breathing reflection of the time he lived in and so I I hope he he's enjoying it I think we're done thank you very much thank you