Time We Discuss: What It's Really Like as a Conductor (Robert Emery)

Transcription

(Music)

Robert Emery: So I would say if you've got that passion and that burning passion inside you to make music, use it, but be realistic and know that you are a business. Just like …

Dan: Today on Time We Discuss, I have Robert Emery with me and it's time to discuss what it's like being a conductor. Robert, thank you for joining me today.

Robert Emery: My pleasure, thanks for having me.

Dan: Absolutely, this is gonna be great. So you are a conductor of many kinds, orchestral, choir, theater. So let's start with the very, very basics. What is a conductor actually doing? Sometimes you see them up there, they're waving their arms wildly, they might be dancing a little bit. They really get into it sometimes. What are you actually doing up there?

Robert Emery: I get paid to wave a stick. Is the short answer. The long answer is a bit more complicated, but basically when you've got a group of musicians, it would be a nightmare for that whole group to have all of the ideas of what speed they should play at, how loud they should play, what the motivation is behind the music. Are they angry? Are they sad? Are they romantic? Are they passionate? Are they simple and plain? You've gotta have somebody dictating that sort of stuff to have all of the players play in the same style at the same time. And you have to have somebody in control of that. And that's fundamentally what I do with my hands, with my stick. If it's orchestral stuff, if I'm working in theater, I don't always use a stick. Sometimes I'm conducting from the piano as well. And so essentially the conductor is there to control what the audience are hearing.

Dan: Okay, so let's talk about your typical day as a conductor. When you're not actually on stage conducting, what are some of the other things that a conductor is gonna be doing?

Robert Emery: For me conducting is probably about 10, 15% of my work. So the other 75, 80, 85% is all about making music. It's just in different ways. So I could be in a recording studio, making music in a recording studio. I could be playing the piano. I could be composing. Today, for instance, I've done seven hours straight writing a load of music for an orchestra. That's gonna play in Switzerland in June. But I gotta write it all. And it takes days and days and weeks and weeks to write all the music. Sometimes I'm working on other projects, writing musicals, finding things to write music about. Sometimes I'm arranging other people's music. I'm working with a pop band at the moment, doing some work with them, just sort of consulting and advising them of how to make their music a bit more interesting. It's a whole hodgepodge of things. It's great. There's no one day that's the same.

Dan: Let's go back to when you're on stage and you have people, I've said this before on my show, I'm very, very musically inclined, very strong music background. So even listening, I know what's going on, even if I'm not familiar with the piece, by watching the Conductor, I could definitely pick up on different things. What are some of the things that, someone, if they're not familiar with reading music, what are some things they can pick up from watching the Conductor? What are some of the takeaways, some of the basic things they can learn and make the music more enjoyable by watching the conductor?

Robert Emery: The conductor has sort of two fundamental jobs to do at the end of the day. One is to beat time. And that's so everybody starts at the same time and hopefully finishes at the same time and they all play in the same tempo. And so that's what the beating of time is. That's a sort of physical waving your hand up and down. When you do a downbeat, so when you start higher and then you throw your arm or your hand down, that's usually beat one of every bar. So that's the main pulse, that's the main beat. And so that helps keep everybody playing at the same tempo. But the rest of your body and also your arms, is there about trying to coax what you need out of musicians. So maybe they're playing a bit too loud. Maybe you need to be able to hear a pin drop in the audience and you need this quiet, intense sound. Well, there's ways we communicate with our body. We know it's proven that body language is more than 70% of how we communicate. Not our words, in fact, is body language. And so if you think about that when you're making music with an orchestra or a choir, then it's the exact same thing. It's that body language of a conductor to the group of musicians in front saying, this is what I need you to do. And either you're doing it amazingly well or you're not doing it well enough and you have to try harder.

Dan: Now let's talk about the different types of ensembles. So you said that you conduct for an orchestra, theater. Do you need to take different training to conduct for these different groups or is it pretty much once you can do it for one group, you can do it for another group?

Robert Emery: No, it's really different skills to be honest with you. I'm just super lucky that I've had decent experience in across all of that. I conducted choirs from when I was about 12 years old. So I really grew up working with singers and conducting choirs. Then I started in musical theater when I was quite young. A lot of musical theater conductors, MDs, musical directors, they can't conduct in vertical as an orchestra. They don't have the experience to do that. I'm lucky when I was quite young as when I was 17, I think, or 16 when I first conducted an orchestra, I learned how to do that quite quickly from the basic understanding of it. And then just sort of every day is still a learning curve for me. So I get to do all of those things, but normally a choir conductor will pretty much stay in their lane and conduct a choir. A musical theater guy will pretty much concentrate on musical theater and a classical orchestral conductor will probably not touch musical theater. I like to cover all three. I have a in terms of getting bored quite quickly. So I like to try and keep things mixed up a bit to stop me from getting into trouble. That's the idea anyway.

Dan: I completely respect that because I'm kind of the same way. I'll be fully involved in a project. And then it's like, well, I have this other idea now. I gotta say, no, no, no, gotta stay focused. Okay, so that's cool. You talked about starting when you were younger, when you were around 12, I think you said. So now times may or may not have changed. To be a conductor now, is it possible to be a conductor now without getting any kind of formal university training? Or do you pretty much need that to be a conductor?

Robert Emery: You pretty much need some formal training to be a conductor. Most people don't train as a conductor. Most people train in an instrument and then they move on to conducting. So for me, I went to the Royal College of Music in London as a classical pianist. And then I moved over to conducting from there. So most people who end up being a conductor also have a fundamental training on a musical instrument of some sort. And then they progress on to being a conductor. I kind of fell into it by accident because I realized that if I wanted to try and be a concert pianist and tour the world as a piano player, it needs a certain type of personality. It needs a certain dedication that I absolutely didn't have. I didn't want to sit by myself in a practice room six or seven hours a day playing the piano. I thought, "Oh, that's a miserable life." And it's really difficult to earn any money like that. Whereas conducting is a bit more sociable. It's a bit more fun. You can earn a bit more money doing it in general. So that's why I sort of flipped over to be a conductor.

Dan: For someone that does that, they make that transition, they're a musician of some kind, they're able to make that leap and become a conductor. Typically, do they shift completely and they're a conductor now from now on? Or is it, no, they're still typically playing somewhere. What's that mix kind of like?

Robert Emery: It depends what field you're working in. If you're doing musical theater stuff, MDs usually then turn into MDs and they'll still play. I don't know any musical theater director, conductor who doesn't play piano, for instance. That's like a prerequisite. If you don't play piano, you pretty much can't be a musical director. Orchestral conducting is slightly different. When people turn into an orchestral conductor, they'll pretty much turn into that and just concentrate on that. Choir, it's almost impossible to make a living out of conducting a choir. So people tend to do that as a hobby or as an extra bit of pocket money, once a week going, I don't know, a couple of hundred dollars a week conducting a choir. But it's impossible, unless you're really, really at the top end to earn a living from that.

Dan: That is awesome. I love hearing stuff like that, hearing what could be different barriers and how real it is, because people might go in thinking one thing only to discover something else and it could be too late. So that's awesome, awesome to hear. I'm assuming different ensembles at differenthouses, I'm gonna call them. There's gonna be a different level of prestige that goes with each one. So as a conductor, how does someone like advance upward, like go from, you know, maybe you're typically conducting at, you know, a 200 seat auditorium to like a 500 seat or a thousand seat. How does one work their way up as a conductor?

Robert Emery: Luck. (Laughs) Luck and talent. But this is kind of the entertainment industry, full stop. Let me ask you a simple question. Taylor Swift, she's the most popular artist on the planet at the moment. There is nobody bigger than Taylor Swift. Simple answer, simple question to you is, do you think Taylor Swift is the very best singer in the world?

Dan: Me? I do not.

Robert Emery: There you go. No, there's no way she is. She's an excellent performer. Is she the best performer in the world? I think even that's questionable. But she does have a talent. Is she the very, very, very best at what she does? I honestly don't know whether she is, but that's kind of irrelevant because you can't get anywhere in the entertainment industry without the talent, but the rest of it is luck. And so there will only ever be one Taylor Swift. Under her, there will be, you know, 100,000 wannabe Taylor Swift's who are probably equally as good as singing as she is. They're equally as good as writing music. Will they ever fill out the Hollywood Bowl or Wembley Stadium or whatever it is? Probably not. And so that's unfortunately a massive part of the entertainment industry, is you've got to have the talent to make it. But more important than that, you've got to have the talent and the luck. And that, as we know, is pretty much uncontrollable.

Dan: So let's hang on that for a second. Going along with luck. How important is it to know people in your industry? Doing what you do, does that help with the luck? Does that help propel you forward knowing the right people?

Robert Emery: Yeah, it does, but usually you know the right people through luck. So I can give you a brilliant example. There is a musical theater composer. He's probably the most famous composer in the world for musical theater called Andrew Lloyd Webber. He wrote Phantom of the Opera, he wrote Cats, and he wrote Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Starlight Express, and he wrote a show called Joseph, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Now that show is aimed at kids. I went to see Joseph when I was a 10-year-old boy in London. It was the first time I ever went to see a show. And I loved it. And I sat there and I pointed to the guy he was conducting. And in the program, I found his name, and his name was Mike Reed, and there was another guy called Mike Dixon. And I circled it and they said, musical supervisor, musical director. I didn't know what the difference was, but I circled their names. And I wrote in this program as a 10-year-old boy, this is what I wanna be when I grow older. Cut to seven years later, I moved to London. I need money. So I get a job in a local church, playing the church organ. The first Sunday I'm there, the vicar comes up to me and says, I'd like to introduce you to somebody. And down walks Mike Dixon, the guy who I circled. And I'm like, well, that's freaky. I circled your face seven years ago. And I said, well, this is what I wanna do as a job. The next Sunday, the vicar said, there's somebody else I'd like you to meet. And his name is Mike Reed. And he walked down the aisle and I met him. And so these two people I circled, there was a 10-year-old boy saying, that's what I wanna do as a job. I ran, I lived 120 miles away. I moved to London. I moved, London's a massive place. Many millions of people live here. And I happened to land in the church as a jobbing organist. And the vicar introduces me to these two guys. Now, those two guys, all of my professional work has come from the starting point of knowing them. They gave me a link to somebody who gave me a link to somebody else. And everything basically stems back to meeting those two guys. Now that was luck. And that's just, that's like serendipity. It was like as a 10-year-old boy, I looked up to the stars and said, please introduce me to those two people one day. And it happened, this crazy story.

Dan: That is one heck of a story. That is really, really cool. Wow, wow, wow, wow. Okay. You mentioned Andrew Lloyd Webber and the different musicals that he composed. And this made me think of my next question. Specifically, Jesus Christ Superstar was in the 70s, electric guitars. So in today's landscape, as a conductor, as a member of an orchestral group, how often are you seeing untraditional instruments in your setting? How common is that right now?

Robert Emery: Pretty much all of the music I work with is either just the standard symphony orchestra and there's lots of instruments in that, or it's a standard rock band. There's nothing kind of really weird and wacky that I have to deal with. We did something with an octobass once. And an octobass, you just have to Google it, it's massive. It's probably twice the height of me. It's a double bass, but just massive. And I think there's only like seven in the world or something. It's insanely big. It wouldn't fit in my room here. I mean, it's so tall. So I once wrote some music for that octobass, but apart from that, no, everybody just plays the standard instruments.

Dan: All right, cool. So earlier you talked about the different things that you do aside from conducting. Conducting was only about, I think you said maybe about 15% of what you're actually doing.

Robert Emery: Yeah, something like that.

Dan: Can someone make a living just conducting? Is that possible or like realistically now? And maybe a person wouldn't even want to. Once you're in the music scene, you really enjoy you're coming up as a pianist or another instrumentalist.

Robert Emery: Got it. So look, think of a musician as a sportsman. It's kind of as simple as that. You say, I don't know, can you make a good living out of playing tennis, being a tennis player? Well, sure, if you're Roger Federer, then yeah, you can make millions, literally, for years or Novak Djokovic or any of the big players. Yeah, absolutely, you can do that. But you have to be at the very top of your game and it's being at the top of your game worldwide. So you might have, I don't know, maybe there's a hundred people in the world who make a living from playing tennis, literally playing tennis. Everybody else who was a wannabe tennis player and is probably very good at tennis playing, everybody else probably coaches tennis alongside playing. And they have tennis academies or they teach in schools or they became some sort of physical therapy teacher or something. So it's the same in music. Sure, you can be a world-class conductor, Dudamel, who's the current conductor at LA Phil. I think he's probably the highest paid conductor in the world at the moment. He's literally earning millions doing what he does and he deserves it, he's phenomenal. But there's only one Dudamel. And so for every one conductor of the LA Phil or every one conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, there's gonna be 50,000 wannabe conductors. They're not gonna make a living out of that. They're gonna be music teachers. They're gonna teach piano privately. They're gonna, I don't know, coach the local choir as well or the local youth band or whatever it might be. So it's the same as sports people. There's a top rung who are really, really, really high and then everybody below that can make a living of some sort through music.

Dan: I just thought about this. So what about, you have theater and you have your star of the show or stars of the show and you have your understudies. So in the world of conducting, is there like an equivalent of like an understudy if something happens in underperformance and the conductor is ill or something like that?

Robert Emery: So in theater, we have assistants. So as a musical director in theater, I used to conduct six shows a week and my assistant did two, eight shows played. And so I had one assistant and then when we got into the West End, West End and Broadway are the two big theater capitals of the world. You tend to have more than one assistant. So you might have two assistants or an emergency conductor. And so you'd have two, three, four people who can conduct the show at any one time because you don't do a show, you lose a million dollars. So it's really important to make sure the show keeps going. With orchestral conducting, it's a bit different in that you don't have deputies and you kind of still have to go on regardless of how bad you feel. Unless, of course, it's an emergency situation and you physically can't, in which case they'll either try and find a conductor who can just randomly step in the last minute or it gets canceled.

Dan: Robert, one of the questions I like to ask when I'm interviewing different people about their jobs, one thing I'd like to say, identify something about your particular job that people could perceive as a negative. And one example I'd like to give is, in a past life, I was a web developer and as part of web development, you're expected to be sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day. If you don't like doing that, that is not for you. So think about what you do as a conductor. Is there some aspect of that that if someone doesn't like X, probably being a conductor is not for them?

Robert Emery: Yeah, sure, stability. So as a web developer, you've got a pretty good guess that there are millions of people around the world who need a website being built. And if you go to what you do and you know how to market yourself, you should be okay for work. It's not uncommon for me to start a year with only enough work in my diary to pay maybe one month's worth of the mortgage. And so that stability, that idea of, I don't know, if I have enough work this year to be able to keep a roof over my head, that's scary. That's horrible, it's not nice, it's stressful. It keeps me awake at night. I'm lucky that I've never had a problem finding work and people are asking me to do work all the time. And I'm really, really lucky that I've managed to, so far, keep the wolf from the door. And I thank my lucky stars for that. But I know plenty of people who have gone bankrupt and not because they're rubbish at their job, just because life hasn't worked out for them as they expected. So that sense of stability, if you are not prepared to take that risk, then, well, being a musician, a professional performer as a musician is not for you. It doesn't matter whether you play the flute, whether you conduct, whether you play the piano, whether you play guitar, it's not for you.

Dan: That is really, really good information. Thanks for sharing that. So earlier you talked about writing music and you talked about, you're gonna be having, I think it's getting played in Switzerland, I think you said. So how does someone create those opportunities where they orchestrate something, they write something? What kind of opportunities are there for someone to get that kind of music out there? Again, it's just, you know, luck who you know. How does that work for you?

Robert Emery: Yeah, that's tricky. So I'm commissioned to do work as a conductor and the music isn't written, and I'm lucky enough that I can also then write it or arrange it. If I didn't, and it's not normal, I should say, for a conductor to do arrangements and orchestrations and things, that's not particularly normal. So if I was a conductor who needed something arranging or orchestrating, and I couldn't do it myself, I would have to find another Robert Emery to do it. For me, becoming a professional musician is not about niching down. It's about opening your opportunities as much as you can and grabbing every element. So if you want to be in a rock band, don't just focus on your rock band. You know, maybe teach guitar as well. Maybe do some online tutorials. I don't know, maybe try and build up a fan base online. Try and do different things. If you're a violinist and you want to play in an orchestra, well, it's really difficult to get seats in orchestras. So you're going to end up teaching music, for sure. You're going to end up teaching the violin to private students. But you might also want to compose your own music and try and get that played. So it's all about trying to create as many opportunities as you can for yourself. In the genre of music, full stop, and hope that they all support your main end goal, whether that's violin playing or electric guitar playing or conducting. And that's the same with me. As a conductor, I get asked to write music as well.

Dan: Okay, so what about someone who wants to start small writing music? And I'm thinking like more of the classical sense, you know, maybe they're writing for like a brass trio or a violin duo or something like that. What are some ways they could then get that music out there for people to play and do a live performance? What kind of good avenues are there for them to explore?

Robert Emery: Yeah, so if I spin the question on its head a bit and say, you know, I don't know, you're a pop artist and you just recorded a 10 track album in your bedroom with you playing acoustic guitar, how do you get that out there? How do you get the world to hear that? And the answer is, it's very, very, very difficult. Getting it out there in terms of getting it on the platform is really easy nowadays, but the place is so crowded. How do you make yourself stand out from the rest of them? And that's kind of where the luck comes in. And it's the exact same if you are writing music for a violin duo or brass quintet or something. It's the same thing. You can write to your heart's content. It could be the world's best piece of music. How do you get everybody to play it? Well, that's really, really difficult. And there is no shortcut. There is no solution. You just have to have luck on your side. You have to keep pushing, pushing, pushing. You have to write to people and try and get them to perform it. And it'll either happen or it won't.

Dan: What kind of red tape is there? So for instance, if I approach you and I say, "Hey, Robert, listen, I wrote this brass trio piece. I'd really like to have it performed. Would you consider adding it to your concert listing or something like that?"

Robert Emery: I get emails every day from people who write music. Really, hundreds, hundreds. And saying, "I've written this piece of music. Can you perform it in your next concert?" And I'm afraid the answer is always just no. Because all the concerts I do are themed. They're all based around something. So I'm doing a concert in Switzerland just that happens on New Year's Eve. And we are having a theme of American music and it's American jazz music. So things like George Gershwin, Duke Ellington. Now, when somebody says, "I've just written a, I dunno, a violin sonata, can you play that at your next concert?" Well, the answer is no, I'm afraid. Because there's so much music already in existence for me to choose from and it's always themed. There's always a reason why I'm programming a piece of music. So for me, my blank answer is always no. Maybe I'm just grumpy and British, but I'm pretty sure most people would say the same thing as me.

Dan: Okay, all right. So one final question I think I have for you. So how do you go about discovering the new music that you wanna conduct, you want your group to play?

Robert Emery: All of my work is booked on a topic. So if I'm asked to do a concert, there's always that theme. And so I will just Google and discover music within that theme. But in terms of music written by people who are alive today, it's pretty rare we perform anything. Sometimes in choral music you do actually. Choral music is about the one exception where it's a bit easier maybe to try and persuade people to, particularly if it's accessible. And I don't wanna sound pessimistic. I know I sound really, really pessimistic here. And making music, being in the entertainment industry is a nightmare. It's not for the faint-hearted. Everybody thinks it's glamorous. And yeah, sure, I get to meet amazing people and I get to fly all around the world and I get to do amazing things. But it's really hard work. And it's really, really uncomfortable doing this job. Or being any musician is a very uncomfortable job. So I would say if you've got that passion and that burning passion inside you to make music, use it, but be realistic and know that you are a business. Just like the people who build tables for a living and then sell them. They're a business. I'm no different. I'm a business is what I do. I sell myself in terms of the music I can make. So you would just have to be realistic about that.

Dan: So much awesome stuff you're sharing with us. I was speaking with Brian Wolbert. He was a pianist here. He plays the East Coast. I spoke to him a while ago. I spoke to Glenda Glenda Benevides. She was a Grammy-nominated musician. And here on her side of things was just really, really cool. And then I also spoke with twin sisters and sharing their side of it from the business side of really, really fascinating stuff. And this just kind of rounding it all out. Robert, I am running a little short on time, but one thing I'd like to do whenever I'm speaking with someone, I'd like to give them the opportunity to share with us a project they're working on, a cause they believe in, their business, their music. So whatever it is you'd like to discuss, the floor is yours.

Robert Emery: That's very generous. Thank you. I would say I am a young-ish champion of classical music. I think classical music has a really bad rep. People think it's old, boring, complicated. They are nervous to listen to it. The interesting thing though, is that we have classical music all around us. Almost every film we watch has classical music in it, whether we realize it or not. People like John Williams, who writes these amazing themes from Star Wars and E.T. and all of these things, Indiana Jones and Superman, all of these pieces of music that you will probably know and love, it's all made by an orchestra. It's all orchestrated just like Beethoven orchestrated his music a couple of hundred years ago. There is no fundamental difference between a John Williams of this world and the big van Beethoven. And in fact, I believe that John Williams in 200 years time will be put on the same level and in the same breath as a Beethoven or a Mozart. So use it. It's amazing music. It's down at your local concert hall. There is something really amazing about seeing 90 players on stage who are all brilliant at what they do, making passionate music. And sitting in that audience, I don't know anybody who can go and listen to something like that and not be uber impressed. So if you think classical music is boring, what I would say is give it a go. Go down to your local concert hall, listen to an orchestra, play something easy, something accessible like some John Williams music to start with and you will love it, I guarantee. And then when you do love it, shout it out to the rest of the world because that's really important.

Dan: I absolutely love that. And I'll add to that. One of the awesomest moments I saw was the original Pirates of the Caribbean movie. And one of the opening fight scenes, the music that is going along with it is matched to that scene so perfectly. And I would encourage people that they even want to get more of an introduction to classical music, watch that scene and listen to the music and watch what's happening during that. It is really, really cool.

Robert Emery: Yeah, that's Hans Zimmer at his best.

Dan: Yes. Robert, it's been absolutely awesome having you on Time We Discuss and we learned what it's like to be a conductor.

Robert Emery: Pleasure, thank you very much.