Dan Perttu: For this latest episode of The Muse in Music blog, I sat down with Conductor Devin Patrick Hughes. Highly regarded for his exhilarating score interpretations, advocacy for music accessibility, innate passion, and entrepreneurial vigor, Devin is an American orchestral and operatic conductor of Irish and Guatemalan descent. He is concurrently serving as music director and conductor of the Boulder Symphony and Arapahoe Philharmonic. He also hosts the podcast One Symphony with Devin Patrick Hughes, and has held artistic leadership positions with the Northwest Florida Symphony Orchestra, Santa Fe Youth Symphony Association, Denver Young Artists Orchestra, and Denver Philharmonic Orchestra.
Devin was recently invited to the Antal Doráti Conducting Competition and featured in Maestro, the Georg Solti International Conducting Competition as a semi-finalist in Budapest. He was also selected with eleven other conductors worldwide to compete in the Toscanini International Conducting Competition and was a conducting fellow at the American Academy of Conducting in Aspen. He has conducted orchestras across North America and Europe including the Winnipeg Symphony, Colorado Symphony, Des Moines Symphony, Fort Wayne Philharmonic, Rochester Philharmonic, San Antonio Symphony, Green Bay Symphony, Philharmonic Arturo Toscanini, and the Orchestra of the Hungarian State Opera.
I’m thrilled to be speaking with Conductor Devin Patrick Hughes. I’m so excited to hear about your listening playlist during the pandemic. Obviously we live in some times I never imagined we’d be going through, which I suppose maybe I was naïeve, but you sort of get used to normal life and then this happens. So we’re adapting to figure out how to keep the listening and live performance experience alive. What are your thoughts for listening recommendations for anyone who needs some inspiration these days?
Devin Patrick Hughes: It’s great to be here. I’m excited to speak with you today and I’ve enjoyed checking out some of your music as well, which is getting played all over the place, which is amazing!
I think I started listening to Bruckner symphonies when the pandemic started and then it was a lot of smaller works. I discovered a lot of composers, for example artists like Jenni Brandon, Barbara Harbach, and Hannah Kendalll. I started thinking outside the box in terms of how orchestras can program, whether it be living room concerts that we’ve been doing, or woodwind quartet concerts outside at a restaurant. This has really opened my eyes to a lot of great string repertoire like Tchaikovsky’s Serenade, the Elgar’s Serenade, the Holberg’s Suite, and Dvořák’s Serenade, as performance pieces, but there are some other works that I never imagined performing.
For example, I’m conducting the Philip Glass Third Symphony, which I’m really looking forward to presenting. Philip Glass I think is someone who is overlooked sometimes and often neglected who inspires strong feelings from performers and listeners alike. I was at a fundraiser at a local distillery recently and I was speaking with a music teacher who was going to the Metropolitan Opera to see four shows coming up and she was talking about seeing Einstein or Kepler with a friend and she said “my friend said she never has any thoughts about anything, and she just said she had to leave right away.”
I most certainly don’t feel that way about Philip Glass’s music. But, I think that kind of response is what music is designed to do. Take the most memorable example in the history of music, the Rite of Spring premiere in 1913 where it actually caused fights in the audience. The dancers could barely even hear the orchestra to sync with the music because of the shouting and ruckus in the audience as a response to what listeners were hearing.
I just wanted to jump in here because you outlined a lot of different things that I wanted to hear more about before we go further. First you said you started with Bruckner and I’m thinking “okay that’s interesting.” What made you want to start with Bruckner? And then I would like to hear about Jenni Brandon, Barabara Harbach, and others.
Bruckner is a composer that I’ve come back to at difficult moments in my life. Simply the spirituality that he brings, the ability to bring everything together in a way that unites our souls at the deepest level no matter what symphony you’re listening to. We know that he spent most of his life sitting at an organ in a cathedral. These great structures in Europe and around the world are built to bring one closer to our deity or creator. They are sacred places and Bruckner creates that on a musical level so fluently. In a time where we’re looking for answers, I feel that music, some music more than others, can provide those answers, because the most important questions go unanswered no matter what happens. Music energizes those questions and provides you with that kind of solace. I discovered this aspect of music at a very young age and made it my life to want everybody else to be able to experience that.
For Bruckner symphonies in particular, I’m a particular fan of course of the Ninth, the Seventh, and the Fifth, but I think all of them are out of this world. The Sixth is amazing. The Eighth is another favorite of mine. If your listeners are looking for a way into Bruckner, I would start with Symphony 4, then 8, 7, 9, and go from there.
It’s good that you put it in some kind of order because frankly Bruckner can be a hard nut to crack for some people, just because the symphonies are very long for one thing. I was wondering if you’re going to say the Fourth. I find the Fourth Symphony also to be one of the most accessible in terms of the way in. The Eighth is just so monumental. It’s great and I see your point very much with respect to people who are looking for answers. People are looking for something with solace or comfort or some way to channel all the difficult emotions of the time. Where people are looking, and using music almost as a form of therapy right now during these very difficult times. So, thank you for sharing your Bruckner ideas.
I would add the caveat that all of these symphonies are amazing so if I ended up conducting the Third Symphony, I would probably put that to the top of my list. I’ve experienced that with Mahler too. I’ve conducted the First Symphony, which is my favorite symphony. Then I conducted the Fourth Symphony and that became my favorite as I’m conducting it. Then the Fifth Symphony, which now feels like the greatest symphony I’ve ever had the honor of conducting.
Then I did (Mahler’s) Seventh Symphony. I saw Mahler Seventh with the LA Phil in a rehearsal a decade ago with a Webern piece to open the program and I didn’t think much of it, it was just a rehearsal, and then I conducted (the Seventh) maybe five years ago and that’s now my favorite symphony. That’s the greatest thing about the symphonic world we live in, I feel that you could live a hundred lifetimes and many works would still be undiscovered. It is wonderful that there’s this abundance of music out there and music for all sorts of purposes and emotions.
That’s great. I wanted to ask you then a little bit more about Jenni Brandon. Could you tell us a little more about her music?
Jenni Brandon is a fantastic composer who lives in southern California. She teaches, performs online workshops, and composes a lot of small ensemble and solo music for all instruments, and has found a niche in that regard. Even before the pandemic, one of her works, called Five Frogs which is based on Hioraki Sato’s book A Hundred Frogs is an amazing characterization in miniatures for woodwinds, flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, and horn, and paints different aspects of the frog’s life. Her way of writing for the instruments is quite virtuosic, but also incredibly tuned in and idiomatic to the specific instruments. I think of her as a musician’s composer. The colors she writes are phenomenal, and some of her rhythmic shifts give us a fun challenge. Of course the basson ends up being the bullfrog for example and there’s a horn that plays these beautiful melodies that aligns musically with floating on the lily pad. I encourage anybody, especially woodwind players who are soloists who want to get small ensembles together to check out Jenni’s music.
Was this piece written for a general audience or was it also written with kids in mind?
It could be either. In our performance we broke it down a bit to demonstrate the various effects described above to the listener. We live-streamed the concert and had a small live audience due to restrictions, but you make a great point. It could be on a program with Carnival of the Animals for instance because it’s very engaging and programmatic as far as the frog’s story is concerned.
That’s one of the hidden advantages of the pandemic. For example, I have a daughter and I might not have been able to get her to sit still through an entire concert because she’s a very crazy four-year-old, but I could have her sit through a shorter piece that is programmatic like this.
A lot of people with families out there, there are ways of bridging into people’s living rooms and exposing people to stuff they might not have heard or really enjoyed because of the live streaming and then they’re able to have that kind of experience at home. I think that’s really neat. I think it’s really wonderful you have taken advantage of some of these things and made lemonade out of lemons.
It’s great that you brought that up because one of the things we did recently is children’s programming that we call Curiosity and Discovery concerts. So, we adapted a show to be arranged for strings, percussion, guitar, and keyboard so everybody could wear a mask and be socially distant. We performed it outside and it was really designed for kids.
There are a couple of characters, including a 300 year old composer named Mozart who’s here to show us how much fun his music can be, and then there’s professor Snooty Von Classicus who’s frankly a very pretentious snob and thinks that symphonic music should be reserved for the elite and needs to be intellectually understood to be enjoyed. They battle it out while we get to play some great string pieces by Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, and Mozart, but we also perform Old Town Road by Lil Nas X and we do a Mozart and Metallica mashup.
That sounds wonderful the way you’re able to capitalize upon some of these situations where you know there are opportunities. It’s not ideal certainly, the way the quarantine has been, but there are opportunities for different levels of audience engagement anyway. Do you think you could share some music you like to listen to at home?
When I’m listening to orchestral music it’s hard for me to disengage from it so sometimes you need the cosmic background radiation, just to take your blood pressure down a little bit. There’s a great composer, I think he’s been through Colorado a couple times, he’s in Germany, named Nils Frahm. He grew up in a household of musicians. He’s a trained classical pianist and he combines his classical upbringing with electronics. He incorporates these amazing electronic sounds into piano performance and acoustic performance. I would encourage anyone who wants music to play in the background for studying, for meditating, for doing chores around the house, just to calm everybody down if you ever need that, and who wouldn’t need that these days right?
You know, I need to look that up because sometimes I might get out of a contentious meeting or something and I know that feeling, and it’s like I just need to take a walk somewhere and get out of my office or whatever. I’m definitely going to look that up because I’m not familiar with that and totally hear what you’re saying there.
I would just add a couple other pieces as long as we’re talking about stuff that is not affiliated with my work. Happy by Pharrell is always gonna get your spirits up. I don’t know if you’re familiar, you have a four-year-old, you might be familiar with it. It’s from Despicable Me. Then there’s another song that actually we did a woodwind arrangement for called Tico Tico No Fuba. It’s a Brazilian song. I actually found a couple of different arrangements. My favorite version is with the full orchestra. There’s a short clip of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra playing it, but it’s a Brazilian song roughly translated to “sparrow in the cornmeal”.
It’s just a really cool salsa song. At first the farmer discovers the sparrow in his grains and he’s really upset about it, but then the sparrow ends up giving him some romantic relationship advice, and the farmer becomes thankful. Such a cheesy little thing but it's a fun and uplifting piece. I’ve been playing it and looking for an orchestral arrangement, I may just have to make one!
That’s fun. So again, using music as a way to just escape some of the stress you happen to be maybe doom scrolling on CNN or watch and it’s like oh my God why did I do that?
Yeah. Just have some Nils Frahm ready to go in the background.
Well that’s wonderful. Thank you, this is great. What else would you like to share from your listening list?
One of the things that we’re playing are some Björk songs. We’re hosting this globe trotting mezzo soprano, Michelle DeYoung, who will sing a few of the songs including Hunter, Joga, and Army of Me. Bjork is somebody who I’ve listened to on and off over the decades and am just rekindling the music a bit now. It’s really incredible how she brings together these elements of electronic dance music with classical strings and sounds. It’s something that I hadn’t really noticed until recently, and we’ll have those arranged by a fantastic electronic music creator and composer named John Clay Allen who actually just released two amazing albums called Asnières and Turn, if you’re still adding music to the playlist.
It’s great to be able of course to do an orchestral premiere, a world premiere, with string orchestra but when you get to merge different genres like this and create something out of some classic pop or rock tunes, I think that’s really exciting, not only for the orchestra and performers but for the audience. It brings new audiences with different interests into the concert venues.
I really wanted to ask you about that. So you’re in Boulder. Boulder of course is on my short list of places I would love to live because it’s just a super cool place. I wanted to ask you about your audience there. I know obviously in the quarantine it’s tougher right now in terms of programming so you’re sharing some of these really interesting things to listen to, for people to open their minds to, and get to know, and then you have a fusion of genres and different types of music that you might not always see together.
Can you talk maybe a little about your audience in Boulder? I’m just curious if people are more into experimental music there because it’s just such a cool city.
Yeah, I would say Boulder, like any city, there’s gonna be people who like new stuff. In Boulder, it’s really unique here because we have so many arts organizations, not just music groups but dance companies, theater troupes, and many non-traditional performing arts groups. Ever since I’ve been with the Boulder Symphony, which is probably a little over 10 years now, we’ve tried to position ourselves as an orchestra that’s introducing new music to new audiences. Whether we’re successful or not, I would say it’s not always successful, but I think the most important thing is that, like we talked about earlier, is that we elicit some kind of strong response and our listeners really feel something, which is what music is designed to do.
All the greatest pieces that people are in love with now were premieres at one time. Even Beethoven symphonies were not able to be understood at first or even subsequent hearings. In his string quartets and the Ninth Symphony, you imagine these premieres not always being a success. You read about the premiere with the chorus and the orchestra getting together the day before the concert, rehearsing all day. You can imagine this must have been a disaster in some cases, but they got together for enough time to convey the meaning of the music, which people could deeply feel, and at some profound level probably understand what Beethoven’s intention was.
I would imagine it would be great for Beethoven to hear some of his music two hundred years later to see the pristineness that orchestras today can actually play with. I’m sure he’s looking down from somewhere, and I think that Beethoven as an innovator created the modern orchestra as we know it. He forced it to expand. He forced it to improve. He forced the idea of even a professional ensemble to come together as opposed to composers just having to invite their friends to assemble an orchestra to get their music played. His ideas permeate the orchestral world to this day, and when you play a Beethoven symphony, it’s not just a repeat of what’s been done before, it feels like a new thing. It feels raw, disruptive, and inspirational.
I would agree with you that given the sort of tech prominence and the creative endeavors that are concentrated in Boulder but also in Denver, and our entire area, I think there’s a very rich and vibrant orchestral scene. Orchestras are really compelled to innovate. I also think one of the most important things orchestras can do around concerts is to bring the composer to meet the orchestra and audience, especially when the composer is a local resident or connected to the geography. Because for me, just the actually around the concert, whether it be going to some of our partner schools and talking to the students or introducing composition lessons, or doing pre-concert talks, having them engage in events, having them there for the orchestra rehearsal, I feel it is one of the the most special contributions an orchestra can make for our community.
That’s really exciting that you do that and just in general bring the composer in to enhance the community engagement and the audience’s experience of the piece, because so often in classical music people don’t realize the role of composers as actual human beings. We tend to create figures and statues and deify composers, so I’m always encouraged to see when people nowadays are humanizing composers and taking them down from that pedestal. Granted there are many wonderfully talented people from the past who wrote masterpieces, and I think it’s nice to have the deification sort of fizzle out where possible.
Yeah. I agree. I think it’s important to not separate ourselves from this idea of genius. I think that the pathway is accessible to a lot more people than we think and it’s more determined by how Beethoven for instance was raised in a hotbed of Enlightenment ideas in Bonn. Growing up, his father forced upon him the need to practice in a way that made it so he could improvise anything the rest of his life. And his deafness created an eternal well of expressive ideas and potential.
Or take Mozart. His father paraded him around all of Europe and basically lived vicariously through him, which resulted in this polyglot genius who could hear and play anything. It’s a mixture of things. Not just like this Messiah has risen kind of thing. It’s really a sociological, geographic, and cultural alignment of the stars. When people see composers today, their music is a response to our world. They’re characterizing our shared experiences, hopefully in some unique way that will allow the audience to change their perspective just a little bit.
Well that’s really wonderful and considering this context, now I’m even more excited to listen to your playlists and get to know all of the different things that you’ve shared. Did you have anything else you wanted to add?
One of the things at the beginning of the pandemic that I also started to rediscover are the late Beethoven String Quartets. String quartets are music that composers don’t really have to write. This is like a passion project for them. Just learning about and getting into this music and tracking how that cross-references with events in their life is fascinating. In particular, the Beethoven Grosse Fugue. It’s almost like the Rite of Spring in its modernity, dissonance, and sound. You play it in 2021 and it sounds like it’s still unable to be deciphered. You don’t know where the phrases are. You don’t know exactly what the composer’s trying to say. I don’t know if Beethoven knows what he’s trying to say in that piece.
Due to the abstractness of the Grosse Fugue, we decided to add the music to our kids concert. What shocked me was to see the reactions, and the audience was marvelously engaged in the music. Actually, we asked people who liked it, who hated it, who doesn’t know how to feel about it, and maybe surprisingly, almost every participant liked it.
Philip Glass said “beauty and dissonance are closer than we might think.” This idea in our world that consonance, melody, and harmony are beautiful and any sort of dissonance is the opposite of that can be limited in its scope. I believe music like Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge for instance really breaks down that barrier, which is the purpose of music in all forms.
That's a really interesting pick, I need to go back to the Grosse Fuge. I haven’t listened to it in quite a while. Of course, thinking about and talking about dissonance and consonance makes me think about all the traditional music theory that I teach. I think Philip Glass is right in that we really can’t experience the sweetness of consonance without dissonance, so this is taking that a step further or putting another spin on it because if you don’t have tension then you can’t have release. I’m definitely excited to go back to listen and maybe I’ll play it for my kids.
Now that’s great and actually I should correct something I said earlier: I do think that Beethoven knew what he was saying because at the premiere of the Grosse Fugue Beethoven left the rehearsal to go the pub because he didn’t want to see the musicians trying to put it together. One of the string quartet players came to fetch him afterwards and the only question Beethoven asked was about the fugue: What did you think of the fugue? How did it play? That’s all he cared about and ultimately the publisher, worried about sales, made him replace the fugue with a different movement. So that’s why the Grosse Fuge was published separately, because it was originally part of one of the later string quartets. Beethoven didn’t get his way but posterity still got an amazing fugue out of the deal.
What an interesting story. That’s wonderful. Thank you for that. You know I really appreciate your taking the time to talk with me. Today has been a fascinating discussion covering Beethoven to Björk. I love sharing playlists because there’s such a wonderful abundance of music out there. This allows us to cross reference styles and recognize that people have such divergent tastes and yet there are ways to build effective bridges and for orchestras to reach various communities. That’s absolutely wonderful and very inspiring. Thank you so much.
Thank you Dan for having me. This is a great thing you’ve got going and I’m looking forward to hearing about things you’re doing in the future.
This interview can be found in video form on The Muse in Music blog with Composer Dan Perttu. Dan’s music has been performed on four continents and in 40 of the United States. His international credits include performances by the Niš Symphony Orchestra (Serbia), the Falcón Symphony Orchestra (Venezuela), and a recording by the Moravian Philharmonic (Czech Republic). In the states, his orchestral credits include the Firelands Symphony Orchestra (Ohio), Fox Valley Symphony (Wisconsin), Acadiana Symphony (Louisiana), Oklahoma Composers' Orchestra, Greenville Symphony (Pennsylvania), Orchestra Omaha, and Lakeland Civic Orchestra (Ohio).
Upcoming premieres include Dan’s myth-inspired viola concerto Merlin, written for Brett Deubner and commissioned by the Perrysburg Symphony (Ohio), and his Planets Odyssey for piano and orchestra, written for Jeffrey Biegel and commissioned by the Canton Symphony (Ohio). Other orchestral performances set for 2020-2021 and beyond include Butler Symphony (Pennsylvania), Symphonicity (Virginia), Sonoma County Philharmonic (California), and Sierra Vista Symphony (Arizona). Upon graduating with his doctorate in composition, Dan took a position as a music professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and now teaches at Westminster College, where he also serves as Chair of the School of Music. He lives with his wife and two amazing daughters in bucolic New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.