JAMES STRECKER: Please tell us about one or more projects that you have been working on or have recently completed. Why exactly do they matter to you and why should they matter to us?
PATRICK JORDAN: There are several on the go at the moment, some related to my work with Tafelmusik, some with the Eybler Quartet, and some rather free-floating. The Eybler Quartet is just about to release the second and final volume of Beethoven’s Opus 18 quartets. The quartet’s approach has been to take seriously Beethoven’s metronome indications. While controversy swirls around that topic, we committed ourselves to relearn those works, and what it has revealed to us about Beethoven and his relationship to his own musical world his been fascinating. We love how they sound too!
When we first proposed to release these albums, our publicist, who had delivered great results for a release of a lesser known composer, went to great lengths to manage our expectations about the kind of coverage we might receive. “Another recording of Beethoven in an already saturated field is a tough sell,” she warned, but I think what we have brought to the discussion has proven to be substantial.
Our next recording will feature some of the quartets of the considerably less well-known Franz Asplmayr. Asplmayr was a long-time friend of Haydn’s and an early contributor to the newly emerging repertoire for the string quartet. His distinctive voice is one that provides a real sense of the connection between some of the fading practices of the earlier decades of the 18th century while harnessing the galanterie of mid-century, putting in place the pieces that we have come to know as the Classic style. Along those same lines, I have been working with Elisa Citterio, Tafelmusik’s new music director, to put together an upcoming program of early symphonies making precisely the same kind of connections. I suppose it matters to me because I think the music is fantastic and I hope you do too!
JS: How did doing these projects change you as a person and as a creator?
PJ: That’s an interesting question. I think I’ll answer those in reverse order. I frankly don’t think of myself as a creator, but rather as a crafts person. As I type that I realize I don’t really know where the line is between those two descriptors! I can, however, say that pursuing these various interests has sharpened, deepened and made considerably more nuanced my understanding of the working and personal relationships of the composers and performers of the various eras in which I focus my efforts: if it’s not too hackneyed a description, I feel like I can see both the forest AND a bunch of individual trees.
As a person, I would say that the value of the personal working relationships I am lucky to enjoy has become increasingly more obvious and more important over time, and here I’m speaking primarily of the members of the Eybler Quartet (including the recording team we’ve assembled) and Tafelmusik. The depth of understanding and shared vision one can develop over the years becomes essential to the work itself. I am also aware these days of the years passing, with the concomitant realization that not everything I can imagine doing is going to come to fruition. I suppose that both focuses the mind on what can be done, but also provides a sense of mild urgency to get on with it!
JS: What might others not understand or appreciate about the work you produce or do?
PJ: I’d be inclined to let them answer that question, and I would be very interested in their answers. I do worry that people will still mistake the works of Vanhal for Haydn…. Ha! More work to do….
JS: What are the most important parts of yourself that you put into your work?
PJ: The work itself is so varied that I find it hard to narrow it down. For example, here are some of the ways I’ve spent my days lately: reviewing and negotiating a recording contract for the Eybler Quartet; type-setting newly discovered music; practicing the viola; memorizing a program for Tafelmusik; editing audio files; wrangling the Eybler Quartet’s schedule into some sort of shape; playing a concert on tour and answering James Strecker’s interesting questions on the bus ride back to the hotel; reviewing Tafelmusik’s collective bargaining agreement in preparation to be part of negotiating same; doing my taxes. Some of those are downright mundane, but they all need to be done. To sum it up, I’d say discipline, list-making and an unquenchable curiosity have been assets.
JS: What are your biggest challenges as a creative person?
PJ: Well, having the time to do everything I want is the first thing that comes to mind. I also have a recurrent and long-term conversation with myself about the value to society and humanity of what I do, if that’s not too grand a conceit. My mother has for nearly fifty years been a public-school teacher of children with learning disabilities and other challenges. She says she never wonders for a second whether what she does matters. I envy that sense of certainty. As fortune would have it, while I was answering these questions, the chaplain at the Calgary airport happened by and struck up a conversation. Upon learning that I was a musician, he extolled the value of those of us who are able to touch the hearts of others!
JS: Imagine that you are meeting two or three people, living or dead, whom you admire because of their work in your form of artistic expression. What would you say to them and what would they say to you?
PJ: Wow, that’s an interesting one. I would love to be in the room for a performance of a Haydn symphony in London under his direction, and I would want to say to him, “You’re admired for all the wrong reasons, no one really appreciates your genius!” And he would probably call security. I would want to ask Beethoven (in late 1826) “What are you thinking about metronomes right now? Care to share some thoughts about that and hook me up with the metronome marks for the quartets you’ve recently composed?” In my fantasy of that exchange he would both spill the beans and also show me his process for determining the marks. Bliss. I would also love to talk to Maddalena Lombardini, the solo violinist who made quite a splash in Paris in the early 1770s. I would ask her what it was like to grow up in one of the orphanages in Venice, the San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti and what music meant to her. I have no clue how she might respond.
JS: Please describe at least one major turning point in your life that helped to make you who you are as a creative artist.
PJ: The first would be my initial meeting with Susan Schoenfeld, my viola, music and life teacher in Lubbock, TX. I started learning music late, at age 11 and had spent a couple of years with attentive and adequate training, a ton of enthusiasm, and possibly something to show for it. She listened to me play, heard something interesting, I suppose, and basically said: “You can really do this if you want to, but you have an enormous amount of work to do? Are in all the way?” I felt Iike I was being swept off my feet, and to recall that moment, I still feel like I was being invited to the best party ever. The second came a little over a year after I had left New England Conservatory. I had indeed taken Susan up on her invitation and worked very hard during high school to get into the Conservatory. Once there, I must say I didn’t necessarily make the most of the musical networking opportunities presented to me. The reasons for that are probably the topic for another kind of interview, although my generally iconoclastic frame of mind (not a great match with the “conservative” part of “conservatory”) would take a leading role.
In any event, after being out of school for a while, I was thinking pretty seriously about going to law school or possibly studying the history of science. One night, my girlfriend at the time discovered a weird, hard lump on my right upper arm, and within a few weeks I was scheduled for surgery to remove a tumour. My surgeon happened to be the son of a violist, so he took a particular interest in my case. He also explained in terrifyingly sobering detail the possibility that there could be damage to my radial nerve in the procedure, which could make playing an impossibility rather than something I might choose to pursue. That got my attention in a way that few things have in my life.
JS: What are the hardest things for an outsider to understand about your life as a person in the arts?
PJ: The level of devotion to the craft of playing is a tough one for most outsiders to grasp. The weird hours of an entertainer don’t really compute with a lot of people either. There are people in the world for whom trading your weekends for a lifetime of practicing or playing concerts is incomprehensible. As I write this, I can kind of see their point….
JS: Please tell us what you haven’t attempted as yet that you would like to do in the arts? Why the delay so far?
PJ: Most days I find myself wishing to engage in some other form of art. I look at Monet and think “Man, I wish I could manage colour in two dimensions like that!” I read one of Anne Michaels’ sublime paragraphs or poems and think, “Geez, I wish I could actually write!” Or on a memorable and rare occasion, I tasted several dishes from Joël Robuchon and thought “I wish I could balance flavours like that!” Anyway, you get the picture.
In terms of things closer to the field in which I already work, I have come over the last while to realize that I deal with a built-in conundrum common to the curious and ambitious person. Part of what makes me tick is the energizing novelty that a new project represents. Another part of what makes me tick is actually accomplishing the projects I’ve created for myself. Seeking the thrill of novelty is very attractive, but the time demands of what you’ve already committed to don’t generally get much shorter or go away. In short, I have more than a lifetime’s worth of projects bubbling away in my mind! Who knows which ones will find their way out?
JS: If you could re-live your life in the arts, how would you change it and why?
PJ: I know Drake has distanced himself from the phrase “You Only Live Once” (YOLO), but it’s true!! I generally believe that the things I’ve missed or opportunities that I haven’t seized have kept me plenty busy doing the things I actually have done. I don’t have a lot of energy for regret.
JS: Let’s talk about the state of the arts in today’s society, including the forms in which you work. What specifically gives you hope and what specifically do you find depressing?
PJ: That is a huge topic, and I’m no expert. At the moment, we’re at about 7.7 billion people on the planet, and the forms of society people experience range from harsh dictatorships to relative political democracy (without, perhaps, the concomitant economic freedoms). Art has an absolutely dizzying role to fulfill in that spectrum, from total support of a regime to relative freedom to criticize power. The “go-to” for hope is of course the notion that we’re all so interconnected that the truth will out. Another attractive feature of that interconnectedness is the relative ease with which we can access almost any document, image or idea.
I find it depressing that we are not the authors of our own interconnectedness. The fantasy that our exchanges aren’t for the most part being mediated is just that, a fantasy. Another irksome thing is that the material wealth of our work, distributed in this system, tends to flow to those who control the platforms rather than those who populate those platforms with meaningful content.
On a more manageable scale, the world of classical music frets about levels of audience attendance. The number one indicator for whether someone actually buys a ticket or makes the time to attend a concert or other live performance is having actually participated in some artistic endeavour: they have played in a band or orchestra, sung in a choir or were in a play. The opportunity to participate in the arts in public schools has certainly declined since my childhood, and that makes me very nervous for the future health of all sort of art forms. That said, the number of incredibly gifted and dedicated young performers I’ve gotten to know and work with in the last few years is very inspiring and hopeful indeed.
Finally, a part of our Zeitgeist seems to be a willingness to question the value of liberal democracy with an enthusiasm that disturbs me. My worries about who’s singing in a choir in Grade 3 or who’s getting the larger share of digital royalties would look awfully quaint if we give up on that incredible experiment.
JS: What exactly do you like about the work you create and/or do?
PJ: Most days I like how it feels to play the instrument. I really enjoy the detective work in finding new pieces and making meaningful (to me) connections between historical figures and their work. I Iike being on stage and getting doses of both humility and the adrenaline in live performance. I like producing lasting documents through recording. I enjoy passing along to other artists some of what I’ve accumulated over the years.
JS: In your creative life thus far, what have been the most helpful comments you have heard about your work?
PJ: There are a raft of comments that begin, “That was great, but….” The trick is to remember to hear the support in the “That was great” part before obsessing about the “…but…” There are three other very specific remarks that stick with me. One came from the legendary Louis Krasner who was a chamber music coach of mine at New England Conservatory. We were playing the excruciatingly beautiful slow movement of Schumann’s Piano Quartet and in the course of the coaching, he asked me to play the viola solo a second time. And a third time and then perhaps a fourth time, without any remarks from him about my performance. I asked him, “Mr. Krasner, is there something you`d like to say about this passage?” He answered, “No, it is quite expressive, but there’s just something profoundly dissatisfying about your playing. I cannot say what it is. Let’s move on.” In the moment it was in equal parts crushing and infuriating to me: what kind of teacher are you that can’t help me make it better? Upon reflection it was a fantastic way to learn the lesson that even if you’re playing expressively, you can’t please everyone.
The second came from Philip Naegli, a violinist and violist with whom I studied very occasionally in my twenties. At our first meeting he asked what I was busy with professionally. I gave him the rundown on all the gigs and groups I was part of and at the end of that he said, “Your twenties are a great time to figure out what you don’t want to do.” Which I have understood as receiving a kind of permission to stay busy but keep assessing the value of what you’re involved with. (I’m glad I remembered that line because I certainly didn’t really understand it when he first uttered it.)
The other came from my teacher Susan Schoenfeld. When I began to go down the path of period performance, she was at first concerned. Toward the end of her life, and after hearing me play a few times, she finally said, “You’ve found a way to marry your intellect to your passion.” That was a pretty nice send-off!
JS: Finally, what do you yourself find to be the most intriguing and/or surprising things about you?
PJ: I appreciate the “and/or” nature of your question. I’m going to take a pass on “intriguing” because I can’t for the life of me come up with anything there. “Surprising”… hmmmm. I think what’s most surprising to me about myself is that the few lessons I can learn, I have learned. The ones I can’t learn are the ones that just keep coming back around, over and over again, rubbing my nose in it!!