Melinda’s Writings on Music and the Arts
MOVERS IN THE ARTS: PETER DONNELLY
By Melinda Bargreen
They call him the “arts guru.”
Over the past 41 years, Peter F. Donnelly has risen from a young theater intern at the Seattle Repertory Theatre to the man who is perhaps the single most influential figure in the Seattle arts scene. He has transformed a modest united fund for corporate contributions, the former Corporate Council for the Arts, into ArtsFund, an agency whose clout is felt in Olympia’s political circles as well as arts groups’ cash registers. His long list of awards includes a 2005 Governor’s Arts and Heritage Award.
Partly through the exhaustive allocations process through which ArtsFund dispenses grants to arts groups, and partly through Donnelly’s own diligent perspicacity, he has become the ultimate arts insider. He knows who’s doing well and who isn’t; he knows the donor community equally intimately. And because the ArtsFund board of trustees reads like a who’s-who of Northwest businesses, he’s tapped into the business community at a surprising depth.
The news last year that Donnelly would retire at the end of 2005 shook the arts community to the core. Whom would theater companies, dancers and music groups call on for sage advice? Whom would the media tap for inside information?
There are two answers. First of all, attorney Jim Tune has been working alongside Donnelly for the past two months, and he is poised to take over as president of ArtsFund at the beginning of 2006.
Second, Donnelly promises he isn’t going to disappear. The law firm of Perkins Coie will host him, giving him office space (as they did with Anne Farrell when she left the Seattle Foundation) as a contribution to the community.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Donnelly promises, “but I’m going to reclaim about 50 percent of the time for myself, without a whole lot on the calendar.”
Emptying that calendar is likely to be a lot harder than Donnelly thinks. Aside from the frequent calls for help and counsel, he is already on the US Bank State of Washington regional board, and the boards of the Frye Art Museum, Kreielsheimer Remainder, KING-FM Radio (as an at-large member), and the ArtsFund Foundation. Besides that, Donnelly is national vice chair of Americans for the Arts, a national arts advocacy group, and he sits on the National Council of Boston University. He also plans to “do one or two more boards.”
He’s still deciding how much time to spend at his place in Palm Springs, where Donnelly has seldom darkened the door for more than a couple of days at a time.
“My goals are simple,” he says.
“I want to get through The Sunday New York Times by Wednesday. And I want to finish the New Yorker profiles within a week.”
He concedes that “it’s a little daunting to feel untethered. I have had a life in the arts for so long, working constantly ever since I stepped out of school. Now I have to look at all the prospects of redefining my life.”
When Donnelly stepped out of school (Boston University’s School of Fine Arts), he came to the fledgling Seattle Repertory Theatre as a Ford Foundation management intern. Theater was a natural choice for him, because that genre was an important part of turning his life around.
“In junior high school, I was one of those troubled kids,” he remembers.
“I was restless, directionless – not easy to be around as a kid. My mother used to say to my father, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be better next year.’”
All that changed when the school drama teacher tapped Donnelly to move scenery around for a play. Later, she put him on the stage crew for Thornton Wilder’s classic, “Our Town.”
“I fell in love,” Donnelly recollects.
“’Our Town’ is still my favorite play of all time. I still always weep at the line about a white starched dress and a chestnut tree.”
An apprenticeship at the Brattle Theater led to a scholarship to Boston University, where Olympia Dukakis was two years ahead of Donnelly and Faye Dunaway two years behind.
“I also did a stint in the Army: six months in the reserve, extended another six because of the Cuban missile crisis. I was briefly a page at NBC. But everything else has been arts, arts, arts.”
And here in Seattle, his trail led up, up, up. It didn’t take long until the former Rep intern became the general manager and then producing director in a fruitful term that lasted 21 years. The capstone to his Rep career was the building of the Bagley Wright Theatre, completed in 1983.
But after that, Donnelly started feeling a bit restless again.
“I had called in all my chips to get the new theater built. Everything was in wonderful shape. I didn’t know what my next challenge would be, and I was bored.”
Enter a team of determined headhunters from the Dallas Theatre Center, which badly needed a new managing director. Donnelly had gone to Texas a couple of times to give the company some advice on management problems, and they “cornered me.” Donnelly debated the issue for some time, and finally said no. The president and chairman of the Dallas board got on a plane and flew to Donnelly’s side for some Texas-sized persuasion. A few months later, he said yes.
Ultimately, Donnelly stayed there only three years before returning to Seattle. Was Dallas a mistake?
“Not at all! It was the best thing I did. I needed a change, and Dallas needed a new theater. It proved more complicated than we realized, because immediately a big depression hit the state in early 1986. When I left, not one bank in Dallas was still owned by a Texan. They’re just now doing the new theater, 20 years later.
“But I learned so much, and made such great friends. They’re the most optimistic people on earth; they’re more playful than Seattleites. Texans have seen so many booms and busts; they’re always optimistic that the next boom is coming right up.”
Donnelly had only been in Dallas a year when Seattle headhunters started hunting him right back.
“As soon as I left, I was a hero and a prophet,” he laughs.
Arts managers courted him, but Donnelly didn’t say yes until Immunex CEO Stephen Duzan pressed him to take over the Corporate Council for the Arts. At that time, in 1989, the CCA was an agency that collected arts contributions from corporations in King and Pierce Counties, but it was also widely considered a shield behind which corporations hid, giving modest grants while repelling more ambitious sales pitches from individual arts groups.
“I saw that there was real room for improvement,” Donnelly says now, “and they let me do what I wanted to do.”
What he wanted to do was to unite the community behind the CCA, later renamed ArtsFund to more accurately express a mission that grew from a focus on corporate contributions to individual workplace giving and foundation grants.
Almost the first thing he did was to establish the annual “Celebrate the Arts” luncheon, in which an astonishing cross-section of 1,000 business, arts and civic leaders gather annually to break bread and listen to speeches – but more importantly, to unite under the banner of the arts. The luncheon is a symbol of the connections Donnelly has built throughout the community and of the high-level advocacy of the arts here among CEOs, legislators, mayors and other leaders.
Under Donnelly’s hand, ArtsFund has more than doubled its annual distributions and raised more than 0 million in endowments (including a new one named in Donnelly’s own honor, as president emeritus). One of his greatest rewards was the decision of philanthropists Harriet Bullitt and Priscilla Bullitt Collins to donate one-third ownership of Classical KING-FM Radio to ArtsFund, which shares profits from the station with Seattle Opera and Seattle Symphony Orchestra. Among the successful ArtsFund-driven initiatives is the establishment of the Washington State Building for the Arts program, which helped make many of the region’s arts facilities a possibility.
More recognition of ArtsFund’s prominence came in the final year of the Kreielsheimer Foundation’s operations, when ownership of a .6 million building across from the Seattle Center KeyArena was donated to serve as the ArtsFund headquarters (and also to provide lease income from other inhabitants, whose ranks include KING-FM).
Other arts leaders value his ardent advocacy of the arts.
“Peter is a proselytizer, a vital characteristic for anyone in the arts but particularly for someone who wants to sell all the arts,” says Seattle Opera general director Speight Jenkins.
“He loves Seattle and believes that we have the greatest arts community in the nation. However good we are -- and I think we are remarkable -- he has been a major force in making us that way. We are all in his debt.”
So what comes next? The last time Donnelly left Seattle, in the mid-1980s, he told The Times’ Wayne Johnson in an exit interview that what the city really needed was the mayoral appointment of civic panels to study the troubled arts groups here. That’s exactly what happened, leading to the involvement of the National Arts Stabilization Fund and the influx of not only millions of dollars, but also lots of good ideas on running fiscally sound arts groups.
Now, Donnelly thinks the future for the region’s arts is tied to the Prosperity Partnership, a four-county regional coalition launched last fall by the Puget Sound Regional Council and headed by former Snohomish County Executive Bob Drewel. Donnelly sees Prosperity Partnership as a way to unite regional public and political support of arts and cultural organizations, such as the Woodland Park Zoo and the Seattle Center, as part of its job-building economic agenda for the Puget Sound region.
“Bake sales and marathons are not enough,” Donnelly says.
“We need a broader funding base for our cultural institutions. Look at what is being achieved in Denver, where a penny for every 0 of sales tax goes to support cultural institutions. Our own model might be different – but we need one.”
Arts watchers hear all the time about the necessity for vibrant cultural institutions in any city that wants to attract first-rate newcomers. That’s not empty verbiage, according to John Warner, who was senior vice president and chief administrative office of The Boeing Company when Boeing decided to move to Chicago.
“Just as it was, and is, important to Boeing that Seattle have a vibrant arts community,” Warner says, “when we decided we needed to put our headquarters in a low location, the arts were an important criterion. In Chicago, the heads of many arts organizations were on the team that met us: the Chicago Symphony, Chicago Lyric Opera, the Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company and many more. I don’t want to knock Dallas or any other city, but it was clear that Chicago’s arts community was a big plus.
“Boeing has always been a big support of Seattle’s arts, both before and after the move (to Chicago). The Boeing Company thinks the world of Peter Donnelly.”
Donnelly won’t look back over his shoulder with regrets when he steps down at the end of this month.
“I’m very happy that Jim Tune will succeed me at ArtsFund,” Donnelly says of the well-connected attorney who beat out 118 candidates for the job.
“You have to understand both sides of the equation, the donors and the recipients of our cultural community, and the quality of people I have gotten to interact with is extremely high. It’s a treat.
“This is a very highly developed arts community. It’s the real thing. It deserves the best.”
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MOVERS IN THE ARTS: JIM TUNE
By Melinda Bargreen
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed that “There are no second acts in American lives.”
Many have proved that aphorism wrong, though few have had more fun doing it than Jim Tune. A Seattle lawyer at the top of his game – managing partner for two distinguished law firms, and voted a “Super Lawyer” for the past seven years – Tune tossed his legal career aside to take a completely new direction. In January, he succeeded Peter Donnelly as president and CEO of ArtsFund, a Seattle-based united fund for the arts that required a whole new skill set.
Or so it would seem. Actually, Tune’s existing skills have served him and the agency extremely well in the eight months of his new “second act.” And to those who know him, Tune’s turnaround was not exactly unexpected: “I always figured I would do something else than law. This was my opportunity to convert my avocation into a vocation.”
Tune and his wife Kathy are surrounded by art – paintings, glass, all kinds of media – as they sit down to chat in an airy room off the kitchen of their Madison Park home. They bought the first house they looked at in 1974, when they moved to Seattle, and over time they’ve filled it with carefully chosen pieces that they love. For them, art isn’t an investment; it’s something they can’t live without. Tune likes to quip that “Kathy would sell me before she’d sell that Sam Francis” (the American abstract expressionist painter, 1923-1994).
At ArtsFund, Peter Donnelly left some pretty big shoes to fill. He completely revamped the fund, then called the Corporate Council for the Arts, when he took over in 1989, adjusting its focus, changing its name, building a remarkably probing allocations system for grants, and working to create endowment funds that would provide income year after year. Donnelly also built ArtsFund into a community-wide resource and a clearing-house of arts know-how. With an old theater director’s savvy, he rounded up more than 1,000 arts workers, politicians, donors and artists into an annual luncheon, which proved such a landmark on the arts calendar that everyone has kept coming every year.
Donnelly thinks his successor is doing just fine.
“He has a real passion for the theater, and he was star material from the moment he got on the Seattle Rep’s board,” he says.
“I was delighted when he declared himself a candidate (for the ArtsFund presidency), but the real question I had was ‘Why?’ He had a very successful law career; he was highly respected. Why leave?”
Donnelly says it was the right time for Tune and his family, when he could “afford to take this kind of leap.” But leaping isn’t normally part of the Tune strategy: “He’s much more organized and methodical than I am. I’m better at free-falling and landing on my feet; he uses a road map. But with that road map, he really knows the community. People know him and trust him already. With his great track record, everyone just fell in behind him. He knows where all the bodies are buried – and who buried them.”
Tune, now 64, hails from a small town in Virginia – Chatham – and there is still that tinge of the Suth’n gentleman in his speech. His childhood was well grounded in visual art, partly because his mother painted; he also played the trumpet in the band, and participated in high-school theater productions. As a University of Virginia undergraduate, he also was involved in the arts.
A NROTC student, Tune also spent two years on a destroyer, and participated in the invasion of the Dominican Republic. He was the officer in charge of a Swift Boat in Viet Nam, though he didn’t know his fellow Swift Boater John Kerry, because the two were on different segments of the coast.
Tune’s tour of duty concluded in Washington, D.C., where he met his wife. He had intended to work on a Ph.D. in political science, with Woodrow Wilson and Danforth Fellowships held in abeyance during his military service. Kathy, however, wanted to study in a linguistics program at Stanford.
“Why, that’s west of the Alleghenies!” her startled husband replied.
They ended up at Stanford.
“This is the secret to our 37-year marriage: obedience!” Tune teases.
Tune switched to the law school at Stanford, and afterward the couple moved to Seattle. Kathy Tune had been working as a teacher in several grade levels (preschool through sixth grade). Friends suggested they move to the Northwest, and the Tunes arrived during one of the nicest Seattle summers on record, in 1973.
“We explored the state, climbed The Brothers, walked in the rain forest, checked out Spokane. Seattle had a more settled feeling, more like an East Coast city than California, and the people were not so transient. I liked the change of seasons.”
He joined the now-defunct firm of Bogle & Gates, where he stayed for 25 years (and was managing partner from 1986 to 1993). After that, he went to Dorsey & Whitney for a couple of years, then to Stoel Rives the last five years (three of those as managing partner).
Over those years, Tune saw great change in the legal profession, including increased specialization that reflects the greater complexity of today’s world. His focus was wide: litigation, banking, commercial and tax law (“I’m still dangerous in the tax area”). The pressure was intense, with a focus on more billable hours, personal productivity and bringing in new clients.
Still, Tune says he found “an enormous amount of personal satisfaction in doing my job well as a lawyer. Putting together a good contract is like a craftsperson looking at what he created and thinking, ‘Hot damn, that worked.’ There were times when what I did in six or seven hours was worth several million dollars to the client.”
But the Super Lawyer always had a hankering for the arts. Even in their starving-student days, when the Tunes relied on a corner grocery that sold ten pounds of hamburger for , they eked out enough money to buy a painting here and there (starting with their honeymoon).
Those 32 years as a Seattle Rep season ticketholder weren’t enough; the Tunes didn’t get to the opera, symphony, ballet or other theater nearly as often as they would like. Meanwhile, Donnelly arm-wrestled Tune onto the Rep board, where he did the legal work to set up the Rep Foundation and helped put together the Leo K. Theatre.
“That was the first time I discovered I could ask people for money,” Tune observes.
That ability has come in handy. Now Tune is a very persuasive advocate of not only corporate support, but also individual workplace giving for the arts – often right alongside workplace giving campaigns for United Way.
“People should support both,” says Tune, who also is a former chair of the United Way board. He quotes philanthropist Millard H. Pryor, Jr., who says: “Giving to social-purpose organizations supports a community’s needs. Giving to arts and heritage organizations supports its assets. Great communities do both.”
In Seattle, ArtsFund’s workplace giving programs netted 00,000 this year, but Tune notes that a similar program in Cincinnati brought in million, with million in Milwaukee and Charlotte. Such programs, he feels, are “good for the ecology of the arts.”
Tune has more plans for ArtsFund, including “stepping up the game” in Pierce County (ArtsFund serves both King and Pierce Counties, but the former gets the lion’s share), and investigating possible expansion to Snohomish County. He’d also like to expand ArtsFund’s grants to the smaller arts groups, who “sail close to the wind” and need more support. Tune also has his eye on Olympia, where an ArtsFund-originated “Building for the Arts” program has channeled more than 2 million into the region’s capital arts facilities since 1991.
Taking a hands-on approach, Tune is working his way through all 70 of the arts groups his agency funds, giving them feedback about how they’re doing and how they can improve. According to attorney and ArtsFund executive committee member Mark Paben, Tune also is an excellent communicator with his board and staff: “His weekly email reports to the board, called ‘Board Talks,’ work wonderfully to keep us informed, engaged and entertained. He energizes the board, business and arts communities alike with his focus, intellect, arts savoir-faire, wit and business acumen. He's made an exceptional entrance into the arts administration arena, leading with distinctive style and flair.”
All the serious stuff aside, the Tunes are having the time of their lives, now that their two children are educated and launched, and the legal career has been set aside. They’re out to arts events three nights a week, sampling everything from niche theater to chamber music and even the complete Wagnerian “Ring” (last summer), which was “a revelation.”
Is Tune happy with his own “second act”? You bet.
“I’ve finally found a job,” he says, “that “gets me up in the morning with my tail wagging.”
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THE DIVINE AMADEUS
A recently-surfaced Mozart portrait
By Melinda Bargreen
Music lovers will never agree on the greatest composer in history, but Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is generally on everyone’s shortlist. The most remarkable prodigy in history, he excelled in every dimension of music: performance, improvisation, sight-reading, instruction and, of course, composition.
In nearly every compositional form, Mozart’s mastery was unsurpassed: songs and arias, operas, sonatas, quartets, symphonies, choral works and concertos. His emotional range was equally broad. He wrote works of the most serious, sublime beauty, and he also wrote bawdy songs with titles and lyrics far too impolite to print here.
How remarkable was Mozart’s talent? Consider this account of one of his childhood performances in London, by scholar Daines Barrington: “Suppose then a capital speech in Shakespeare never seen before, and yet read by a child of eight years old, with all the pathetic energy of a Garrick. Let it be conceived likewise, that the same child is reading, with a glance of his eye, three different comments on this speech tending to its illustration; and that one comment is written in Greek, the second in Hebrew, and the third in Etruscan characters . . . When all this is conceived, it will convey some idea of what this boy was capable of.”
As the late writer Edward Said noted, “Mozart’s gifts bordered on the supernatural, and have remained unequalled.”
Add to this the tragedy of his early death, as Mozart tried vainly to complete a final Requiem that turned out to be his own musical memorial. No wonder Mozart’s life has inspired so many stories, films and plays.
Ten facts you might not have known about Mozart:
-- Mozart was three, and his sister Marianne (nicknamed Nannerl) seven, when they began keyboard lessons with their father. At four, Wolfgang composed a concerto, which his father read “with tears of joy and wonder,” according to a family friend.
-- When Mozart was seven, his family set out on a three-year tour of Europe to show off the two prodigious youngsters in concert. They hit 88 towns, were received by kings and queens, and nearly died en route of smallpox, streptococcal throat infections, rheumatic fever, scarlet fever and other serious illnesses. (Five of their siblings had already died in infancy.)
-- While on tour, the young Wolfgang submitted to many tests of his musical powers. In one, he played the keyboard with a cloth placed over the keys so they couldn’t be seen. In another, he had to identify the pitches of various instruments, bells, even clocks. One Naples audience member demanded that he remove a ring from his finger, claiming that it must have been an enchanted ring.
-- In Rome, the young Wolfgang heard a performance of Allegri’s “Miserere” at the Sistine Chapel, and wrote the entire work down from memory the following day. (Later he went back with his copy to make sure there were no mistakes. There weren’t.)
-- During their travels, Mozart and his sister devised an imaginary kingdom, “Das Königreich Rücken” (“The Kingdom of Back”) and they made drawings of many details of their make-believe realm. Wolfgang was the king; Nannerl the queen. Being confined to that coach must have been stupefyingly boring: of the 13,097 days Mozart lived, he spent 3,720 of them traveling to more than 200 European cities.
-- Throughout his life, Mozart loved fancy clothes. During an Italian tour, he acquired a suit of rose-colored moiré, trimmed with silver lace and lined with sky-blue silk. Of this outfit, he wrote, “We put on our new clothes and we were as beautiful as angels.”
-- Wolfgang and his wife Constanze had six children, of which only two boys – Karl and Franz Xavier – survived. Neither of them, as far as we know, produced any offspring, so there are no Mozart descendants. The last surviving descendant of Mozart’s sister Nannerl (who named her son Leopold after their father) died in Graz, Austria, in 1919.
-- Until he was nine, Mozart had an irrational fear of trumpets. (Perhaps they made too great an impression on sensitive ears.)
-- Near the end of his life, Mozart believed he was being poisoned, according to Constanze. (This belief, along with a reported confession by Salieri when he was in an asylum near the end of his own life, was a basis for Peter Schaffer’s play, “Amadeus,” later an Oscar-winning movie.)
-- The real cause of Mozart’s death at 35 is still under debate; many scholars concluded that it was kidney failure due to rheumatic fever, but a newer hypothesis is that he contracted trichinosis from eating his favorite pork cutlets. (He disclosed that menu item in a letter to his wife, several weeks before he fell ill.)
Interesting books about Mozart:
“Mozart’s Women,” by Jane Glover (HarperCollins, 2006): The eminent British conductor and Mozart expert examines how the composer’s relationships with the women in his life shaped his creation of the memorable women’s roles in his operas.
“Mozart: His Life and Works,” by Julian Rushton (Oxford University Press, 2005): Comprehensive overview of the composer’s life and its aftermath, including an era-by-era examination of Mozart’s posthumous reputation.
“Mozart: A Life,” by Maynard Solomon (HarperCollins, 1995): A real insider’s look at Mozart, with great details and much psychological analysis of the complicated relationships between the composer, his father, his sister and his wife.
“The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia,” ed. Cliff Eisen and Simon P. Keefe (Cambridge University Press, 2006): For the hard-core Mozartean, this 600-page, 75 hardback has not only historical data (towns, cities, friends, enemies) but also up-to-date information on Mozart-related movies, videos and websites.
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Nancy Zylstra (L), with Margriet Tindemans
REINVENTING A SINGER’S LIFE
By Melinda Bargreen
Nancy Zylstra was on the top of the world.
The Seattle soprano was at the start of what is usually a singer’s best decade, the 40s. Phones were ringing on three continents: there were engagements with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, the Toronto ensemble Tafelmusik, a “Messiah” production in Japan. Everyone wanted Zylstra’s uniquely clear, radiant soprano and her deep understanding of early-music vocal technique.
Then her voice suddenly began to change, to diminish – to vanish.
Zylstra was puzzled, then frustrated, and finally terrified. What was wrong? Would she ever sing again?
She began a 10-year journey that Zylstra now describes as “like a long death,” where every hopeful avenue reached a dead end. The journey took her to many doctors, medical centers, teachers and therapists – and to a startling diagnosis. She endured agonizing medical procedures and battled insurance claims adjustors who whined, “Well, you can still talk, can’t you?” During this time, she lost her jobs, her teaching studio, both parents, her marriage, and, very nearly, her mind.
Now, for the first time, Zylstra is stepping forward to tell her story. “Musicians are like athletes,” she says, “and when Randy Johnson had back trouble, you heard about it – and how many games he was expected to miss. It doesn’t mean you are bad at what you do; it means that something has happened to you and you have to face the consequences.”
Her career is not evolving as fortunately as Johnson’s; there may not be a vocal no-hitter in Zylstra’s future. But she has made a satisfying life for herself. She deals with her demons every day, but she has decided to give as much of her talent as she can to a new generation of students – and to help other singers who find themselves in her unenviable circumstances.
The fateful Requiem:
It was 10 years ago, in October of 1994, when Zylstra was signed to sing the soaring solos in a Mozart Requiem. The arias took more effort than before, and Zylstra found herself working harder to get the right notes out. She was perplexed.
Preparing for another Mozart classic, the C Minor Mass, Zylstra sang for conductor James Savage, who was puzzled by the change in her sound.
The winter “Messiah” performances, music Zylstra knew intimately, went pretty well, and she thought the problems had passed. But they hadn’t; they got worse.
The worried singer went to her doctor, who gave her a physical and checked out the vocal folds (or cords); they looked symmetrical and node-free. A speech pathologist’s exam of the vocal apparatus found some inflammation but nothing serious.
A rest period of six weeks was prescribed: no singing, very little talking.
“Can I tell you how hard that was?” quips Zylstra, a chatty, high-energy, can-do little dynamo and the mother of two girls.
“I had to constantly muzzle myself. Afterward, the voice still felt very logy and unresponsive; it felt thick.”
She went back to her longtime teacher, the highly regarded Marianne Weltmann. She went to Charles Peterson, a teacher experienced in rehabbing the voice.
Nothing seemed to help. Zylstra had all her old range, including her stratospheric high notes, but her pitch – always one of her most reliable attributes – would unaccountably sag. Why wouldn’t her voice do what she asked it to do? Zylstra says the experience was like the old Lily Tomlin comedy skits as Ernestine, the hilariously malevolent telephone operator who loved to plug callers into the wrong slot in the switchboard, just for fun.
“I’d want this,” Zylstra says, “but I’d get that. And nobody could help me, not the specialist in Chicago or the people who knew my voice best. I was exhausted and frustrated.”
Voiceless in Philadelphia:
Finally, about five years ago, Zylstra went to Philadelphia, to the office of Dr. Robert Sataloff, a famous voice specialist. He found that something was alarmingly wrong with the vocal folds: one would stop vibrating, then the other, as Zylstra sang for him.
Sataloff ordered a laryngeal EMG (electromyogram), a terrifying procedure in which long needles are inserted through the cartilage in the neck (with an audible clunk each time the cartilage is pierced) and into the larynx. The result: a slight weakening in the superior laryngeal nerve on one side of the neck was discovered. This wouldn’t be a big deal for most patients, but for a singer, it could be critical.
There were more tests, and finally a shocking diagnosis: Myasthenia gravis, the serum-negative variety that didn’t show up on blood tests. An autoimmune disorder of neuromuscular transmission, myasthenia gravis afflicts an estimated 36,000 Americans, and its usual cause is an acquired immunological abnormality.
“The nerve sends the right chemical to the receptors on the muscle,” explains Zylstra, “but the receptors’ little ports are plugged up with your own antibodies.”
Myasthenia gravis does not cause muscle wasting. Its most common effects are on upper-body muscles – eyes, larynx, cranial nerves, shoulder-girdle area. Once a strong swimmer, Zylstra can’t lift her arms overhead for extended periods (she notes cheerfully that she is now unable to wash windows).
The disease can be controlled, to a degree, with medication that Zylstra takes up to five times a day. Too much of the drug, however, puts patients in myasthenic crisis (in other words, you stop breathing).
As frightening as the diagnosis was, at least Zylstra knew what was wrong. She concentrated on making the best of things – going to Philadelphia three or four times a year to work with Sataloff on rehabilitation and therapy. Fascinated by his research, she also got permission to follow him around (along with doctors from several other countries), even into the operating room.
Because Zylstra had trouble getting her vocal cords to close completely, Sataloff suggested autologous fat transplantation (injecting her own body fat into the vocal cords). The results were tantalizing but short-lived, because the fat reabsorbs.
The “model compliant patient,” as Zylstra puts it, she practiced singing twice a day for short periods and worked with a singing specialist. The voice seemed to be coming back – but in a horrible, teasing way, where one phrase would sound perfectly beautiful, and the next phrase would be “from Mars.” As she built more stamina, Zylstra discovered that the voice would be “great for four or five days, and then, ka-WHAM. Nothing.”
From all these trials, Zylstra harvested a single piece of good news: her voice now has enough stability to allow her to teach. She teaches up to five students a day, and she goes each summer to the highly regarded Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute and teaches there.
She is so highly regarded as “the Ornamaster,” a nickname her students gave her because of her great skills in ornamenting baroque repertoire, that singers from other cities call her to sing a phrase over the phone and ask what she would do with its ornamentation.
“I’m an eternal optimist,” Zylstra says, “and I take joy in giving my students what I have learned along the way.”
The human cost:
What is it like for a singer to lose her voice?
Zylstra now knows that “except for a miracle,” she will not sing again, and the agony is clear in her face and her misty eyes as she talks about “feeling certain pitches right in my body, and they’re so close, so close. I lived with hope for so long, postponing panic as I tried so hard.
“What is it like? It’s like having a stroke. You lose functions that were once so easy, and you loved them so much, and now it is excruciating to try to get them back.
“I feel robbed. I have so many mature ideas about music and singing. At first I was more of an ‘instrumental singer,’ just creating a musical and beautiful sound, but now I am totally into the text and its meaning. If I could just have someone else’s larynx!
“And I miss my singing colleagues – the excitement of rehearsal and collaboration. I loved making music so much that I never had stage fright.”
The human cost of Zylstra’s disappearing voice was exacerbated by intense stress at home. Her mother had a mastectomy, followed by chemotherapy, and couldn’t drive; Zylstra was the caregiver. Zylstra’s father lived with the family, and his health began to deteriorate. With the singer’s own doctor appointments, there would be “weeks and weeks when I had to drive all of us to different doctors all the time.”
“Every singer knows she will retire,” reflects Zylstra.
“But to be taken out when you have so much to offer is just so painful. I try to be graceful about it, but there are times – especially when I hear pieces I sang often – when I’m just overtaken by it all.
“My urge to be helpful, though, is stronger than my urge to despair. I want to give the right lead to my daughters: You don’t give up, even when you have to make your life all over again.”
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THE NEXT SUPERSTAR SOLOIST?
By Melinda Bargreen
Inside the toasty Town Hall, bottles of water and baskets of paper fans awaited the overheated crowds who showed up to hear Joshua Roman play three cello concertos with the Northwest Sinfonietta.
Never mind the ambient temperature: the music-making was hot enough to require the use of a fan. Roman, the 23-year-old principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony, already proved his solo mettle with an unaccompanied recital last March that sold out Town Hall. This past weekend, he was back in what amounted to two marathon concerto performances, a brilliant programming idea that demonstrated conclusively that Roman is a man for all musical seasons.
With conductor Christophe Chagnard and the Tacoma-based Northwest Sinfonietta, Roman sailed through concertos from three different centuries: Haydn’s D Major (18th century), Schumann’s A Minor (19th) and the Shostakovich No. 1 (20th). He played an instrument that always seems to bring out his best: the “Gudgeon” Montagnana cello from David Fulton’s collection of rare strings.
Chagnard and the orchestra gave Roman fine, well-balanced support in the Haydn, which showcased both his poetic approach and his big sound in the phenomenal first-movement cadenza. The finale was all exuberance and good humor. Almost as praiseworthy was the more romantic Schumann, with powerful high notes that never sounded thin, and a cadenza that raised eyebrows throughout the crowd.
Roman saved the best for last, however, in a positively incendiary performance of the great Shostakovich First with the orchestra in commendable form. The middle movement, always an interpretive challenge, emerged as Roman’s deeply personal statement, meltingly beautiful. No technical demand was beyond this extraordinary young cellist; how lucky that a great set of fingers is also accompanied by a level of musical artistry achieved by few.
Seattle music lovers, practice saying “I knew him when.” Joshua Roman has a starry future ahead.
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NOTES ON THE FUTURE OF CLASSICAL MUSIC
By Melinda Bargreen
During the past decade, reports about the impending death of classical music have arrived with such regularity that doom-saying is practically a full-time activity for several arts journalists. Today’s pop culture, they say, with the idol-of-the-moment TV spectaculars and the cult of celebrity – combined with the serious decline of music education in many school districts – has built a society in which classical music is terra incognita to most people. Concert activity, buoyed up by a handful of aging donors, is confined mainly to blue-haired dowagers who make their increasingly decrepit way to the halls in order to hear the same stale pieces performed by the same bored musicians.
Or so they say.
Attendees at a national classical-music summit held at Seattle University on Feb. 10, however, had a whole span of quite different views. Presented jointly by Seattle U. and Bellevue Philharmonic CEO Jennifer McCausland, the summit brought in representatives from coast to coast – Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, The Washington Post, and several others – described a classical-music industry that is doing considerably more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Most of them, in fact, took a line pretty close to that of moderator and Seattle Symphony music director Gerard Schwarz, whose introductory remarks included the observation, “This is the most positive time in my career for classical music. When I came to Seattle 25 years ago, the Symphony had 4,000 subscribers; now we have more than 35,000 subscribers, and we reach 315,000 annually with our concerts [including 90,000 at education and community programs].”
Schwarz, who is 60, has a long history in this art form, from his schooldays as an aspiring trumpeter to music directorships in locations from Tokyo to Los Angeles, New York and Liverpool. Even given the challenges of his last few years, including the well publicized strife with members of the Seattle Symphony, his optimism about the classical field was evident, and it was shared by the majority of those who came to discuss the future of this art form.
And that future lies in education. The message was impossible to miss, as speaker after speaker came to present information about what their orchestra, their opera company, their educational institution was doing to reach into the community and (especially) its schools. If the school district can’t muster the funding and manpower to teach youngsters about great music and how to play it, these groups aren’t going to sit idly by while their art form fails to renew itself.
Among the more interesting presentations: Leni Boorstin of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, whose orchestra will soon be led by the visionary 27-year-old Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, talked about Venezuela’s much-admired “El Sistema” – which arose in a garage in the 1970s and now involves more youth-orchestra players (about 250,000 of them) than the country’s youth soccer teams. With money from Venezuela’s health department, El Sistema has brought about tremendous social change by giving kids free instruments and free instruction –starting at age 2 – in more than 50 community music schools that take over when school gets out. As Boorstin notes, “It keeps them off the streets,” and through eight different political regimes, El Sistema has spawned 200 children’s and youth orchestras (and 30 professional orchestras).
The top youth orchestra, named for Venezuelan national hero Simón Bolivar, recently toured major cities in the U.S. to rapturous acclaim, led by Dudamel, himself an El Sistema graduate. (If you want to see and hear what all the shouting’s about, check out the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlAaiBNCYU4).
Not surprisingly, the L.A. Phil is taking a leaf out of El Sistema’s book, establishing youth orchestras in underserved areas of L.A. and giving kids free instruments and lessons in conjunction with community partners.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Symphony is hopping right into the schools with “Adventures in Music,” a free program that reaches every child in every one of San Francisco’s public elementary schools (plus several parochial and independent schools, for a total of 91 schools). The music curriculum is tied to the schools’ other subjects, from math to history, and the San Franciscans also go into communities as far afield as Fresno to work with teachers and create an infrastructure of support for music education among local institutions and companies.
The orchestra’s telegenic maestro, Michael Tilson Thomas, is also getting the word out with a sophisticated series of PBS broadcasts, “Keeping Score,” in which great works are explored in their cultural context – for example, filmed segments from Stravinsky’s dacha in Russia and clips of energetic folk singers as context for “The Rite of Spring.”
Here at home, Seattle Opera, which works with 30 different area high schools (some of them in Eastern Washington), did a demonstration of the opera segment they’re taking to the kids: a scaled-down, colloquial-English version of the first act of Wagner’s mighty “Ring,” in which talented, frisky members of the Seattle Opera Young Artist sing and act with piano accompaniment. The presentation had everyone riveted, as the three young “Rhinemaidens” teased and taunted the ugly dwarf who was later to take a revenge that corrupted and ultimately ended the world. The parallels to contemporary playground bullying, to the hostile treatment of youthful outsiders who later explode into vengeful violence, were scarily clear.
Not all the participants in the classical summit were equally sanguine. Journalist/composer Greg Sandow, a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, was the program’s provocateur, playing a Lucinda Williams song that repeated the same four chords (G, D, E-minor and A) throughout both the verse and chorus, but which he deemed “a real feat of composition” and “genre-bending.” Sandow cited a survey that showed a gradual rise in the median age of classical concertgoers over several decades, as well as a national survey (by the League of American Orchestras) showing a decline in total sales since the mid-90s (except for “an uptick in the past two years”).
Calling on classical music to “blend with pop culture and rejoin the world,” Sandow urged presenters to make performances more informal, more amenable to the audience chatting, interrupting, applauding; more, in short, like pop music.
Not everyone would agree. New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini took a different view in a piece last December, when he wrote: “. . . to claim a listener’s attention, a substantial classical piece must entice the dimension of human perception that responds to large structures and long metaphorical narratives. This, more than anything lofty about the music, accounts for the greater complexity, typically, of classical works in comparison with more popular styles of music.”
In other words, “Instilling audiences of all ages with the ability — and patience — to listen to something long [is] crucial to an appreciation of classical music.”
As British writer Stephen Moss put it in The Guardian: “. . . there is a decent-sized audience that remains loyal, and if programmers are confident and opinion formers stop pandering to trash culture, the potential is limitless.”
What about the aging of classical audiences? Henry Fogel, former 18-year president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association who became president of the League of American Orchestras (formerly the American Symphony Orchestra League) in 2003, says in his blog “On the Record”: “We've been hearing about the death of classical music and the aging of the audience for many decades. Not true! In fact, the first time I saw imminent death predicted for classical music was in a 1962 editorial in Stereo Review, which observed (without evidence) that the audience was aging significantly, and that if something wasn't done soon we would see some major orchestras folding. Guess what? We're still here, and doing better than ever.”
While debates go on about the future of classical music, there are encouraging signs of life in this art form all over the globe. Some of the optimism is generated by classical-music downloads, which have taken off like a rocket as symphony orchestras launch their own private music labels and offer both downloads and live streaming on the Internet. Never has so much classical music been so widely accessible: a trip to YouTube.com will let you see and hear great performers of the past and present singing arias, playing piano preludes and conducting orchestras.
Newsweek recently reported that although total sales in all music categories (on- and offline) fell 5 percent last year, “classical sales grew by a whopping 22 percent.” On-line sales are ideal for classical music, where obscure works and performers appeal to specialist buyers in this hugely diverse genre. As Newsweek observes, selling classical music downloads over the Internet “can be twice as profitable as it is offline due to the extremely low costs of digitally producing, storing and distributing music.” Just ask Gerard Schwarz, whose “Musically Speaking” recordings have racked up 100,000 downloads.
In the sphere of live performance, every year sees an expansion of symphony, opera and chamber programming, and people are buying more tickets all the time. Just ask the Seattle Chamber Music Society, whose summer festival at the Lakeside School was so consistently sold out that they added a new Eastside festival, which also has been selling out. Imaginative and experimental chamber music also is doing well; Seattle-based Quinton Morris and his ensemble The Young Eight play Mendelssohn’s Octet right alongside 50 Cent and Beyonce hits, and attract turn-away crowds.
Even the most expensive form of classical music, grand opera, still manifests a tremendous appeal: the Metropolitan Opera sold million of tickets in one day last summer, and whenever Seattle Opera stages Wagner’s “Ring,” all 12 available performances (more than 36,000 seats) sell out in a single day.
Meanwhile, classical music is gaining popularity in other countries. In China, private music teachers are in such demand that they earn more than five times the average per capita monthly income. About 20,000 amateurs annually take the Shanghai Musicians' Association's piano proficiency exam, and new concert halls are rapidly being built in Chinese cities; meanwhile, China has become the world’s largest instrument-making country, churning out 370,000 pianos and about 2.5 million violins annually.
“Once people have enough to eat and to wear, they need to improve their minds and souls,” said Zhao Zengmao, director of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music's social education division, in an interview with The Financial Times. “Advanced countries all recognize that the arts are important.”
In England, Classic FM reported last December a significant growth in the number of children under 15 listening to their music. According to official audience figures, nearly half a million under 15s now regularly listen to the station, an increase of 52 percent over the previous quarter. More than 6.5 million people listen to Classic FM each week.
In Canada, music critic John Terauds reports sellouts by both the Canadian Opera Company and “the entire season of concerts by the Women's Musical Club of Toronto – which has the most uncool name of any music presenter in the city.”
And in Korea, the pop composers are sampling Bach and Beethoven to create hits for such divas as BoA and Baek Ji-young: The Korea Herald reported last fall that “one of widespread beliefs among pop stars and album producers is that sampling well-known classical tunes is the surest guarantee of a song's commercial success.”
The Toronto-based musician Owen Pallett recently said in a forum hosted by The LA Weekly, “. . . I love new classical music, but the world prefers Amy Winehouse, and so do I. New classical composers are fighting an uphill battle for any sort of relevance: trying to make any headway against the huge volume of amazing pop music out there, and also, trying to reinvent forms and ensemble choices that have existed for centuries.”
But does classical music really need to fight this uphill battle? As Seattle Opera’s education director Perry Lorenzo says, classical music “has never been for everybody.” It isn’t pop music, no matter how hard people may try to bridge that gap or to dumb it down. But as long as music education – that is, education about all music, playing all instruments – can be brought back to thrive in our schools, kids will have the right to choose what they love to hear and play, and the means to do both with intelligence and good training.
Gerard Schwarz, who recently judged a KZOK Radio competition in which 46 marching bands played their own arrangements – including a band from tiny Decatur Island – says, “We [classical musicians] don’t have to answer the question ‘are we relevant’ anymore. We are everywhere.”
What’s the best reason for hope? The brilliant young Seattle Opera singers and players – including violinists Marié Rossano and Simone Porter, and cellist Joshua Roman – who represent the potential of tomorrow. Listening to them perform at the summit was enough to remind everyone there why they care about classical music in the first place, and to work for its secure future.
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