CRB's Brian McCreath and Ed Gazouleas first talk about the ever-rising level of expertise among the Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center and the increased selectivity of the program. Then, they discuss the ways the program has evolved in the last several years, even while staying true to the vision of founder Serge Koussevitzky.
They also talk through issues common across the generation of current TMC Fellows, including training for a hyper-competitive profession and mitigating the risks of physical injury and mental health challenges. In addition, Gazouleas describes the qualities and values Andris Nelsons brings to the conducting program, new directions for the TMC composition program reflective of current directions in music, what a summer at TMC can mean for a young professional, and how it all adds up to continue the organization's mission.
To hear the conversation, use the player above, and read the transcript below.
TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited for clarity):
Brian McCreath I'm Brian McCreath at Tanglewood with Ed Gazouleas, who is the Director of the Tanglewood Music Center. And Ed, it's so great to talk with you. Thanks for a little bit of your time today. I appreciate it.
Ed Gazouleas Thank you, my pleasure.
Brian McCreath Your background is so extensive in both performing as a viola player in the Boston Symphony for many years and in education. Your teaching background, you're now at Curtis, but also having taught at Indiana and Boston University and New England Conservatory. So, I'm very curious to hear from you about the Tanglewood Music Center now, as it is, and maybe even with a little bit of reflection on past years. But to focus our conversation to begin with, how would you compare the overall level of players who are coming to TMC now with, say, 20 years ago? I mean, is there a way that that can be articulated?
Ed Gazouleas Well, I can start by saying that this year for the summer of 2025, we received a record number of applications for the TMC: 1,704 applications, more than ever in the history of the TMC. And we're seeing a level which is off the charts in all areas, not just the orchestra, strings, percussion, brass, woodwinds, but also in composition, conducting, and vocal department.
Brian McCreath When you say 1,700 applicants, what's the total number of Fellows that you have on campus this summer?
Ed Gazouleas 125 Fellows.
Brian McCreath Wow! Ok.
Ed Gazouleas So we've got an acceptance rate close to Harvard. [McCreath laughs] That's often the way it's been, but the numbers this year really shot up. The median age is also older than it used to be. It's 24 this summer, and I think a lot of that is still the results of the pandemic and the year that so many of these young musicians missed. And they came back. We had a summer where we didn't have TMC in 2020. We had a summer in '21 which was really truncated, short, and only 60 Fellows and only chamber music and chamber orchestra repertoire. So, we've been building back since then and there are many young musicians who felt they missed out on something. Many of them spent the pandemic in their home countries in Asia. And we're seeing them want to come back and come to Tanglewood, experience what we do here. And they're thinking about their professional futures and trying to be competitive in great orchestras as they approach their 30s. And that's an opportunity for everybody, but it's also a source of anxiety for young professionals.
Brian McCreath And an anxiety that historically has always been there, I mean—
Ed Gazouleas It has always been there.
Brian McCreath When you decide to pursue this kind of life, there's no guarantee at all.
Ed Gazouleas That's right. So, what Tanglewood tries to do in one eight-week session is take this really elite group of young musicians and show them the final step. They come to Tanglewood, they don't have private lessons, they are highly accomplished. How do they get from this high level to that very hard next step, which is engagement in a professional orchestra, or opera company, or other really fulfilling professional career?
Brian McCreath How has the Tanglewood Music Center's program evolved since you came on board as Director? Are there ways that things look different now for a Fellow from how they may have looked, I want to say, maybe 10 or 15 years ago?
Ed Gazouleas I'm not sure if it's different than 10 or 15 years ago. I started as Interim Director in the summer of 2023, really executing the programming of my predecessor. '24 and '25 have been the work of my team and the BSO, and we've had the great support of our new CEO, Chad Smith, who was a Tanglewood Fellow himself as a singer and really understands what the TMC is, what it can do. And that's been very gratifying. We also have appointed Andris Nelsons as the Head of Conducting at Tanglewood. That's something new in '24. He had conducted at TMC before, but he took on that added role, and he started really teaching the young conductors and made a great commitment to the TMC Orchestra. And that is a source of enormous joy for all of us, to have him around and be so engaged with TMC. And I think that's driven interest in the program. It's certainly driven applications and interest in the conducting program.
Brian McCreath When you watch Andris work with the Conducting Fellows, what do you see him doing with them? What is it that makes him an effective teacher and coach for that kind of work?
Ed Gazouleas Well, he has the benefit of his enormous experience, so there is a practical side to it. For instance, yesterday, we had the first day rehearsals with Andris with the Conducting Fellows, and he was quietly listening to the Fellows rehearse. He said, "I'm not going to interfere. I just want to let them do their thing and see how they do." And one of the Fellows was saying something to the orchestra, and he turned to me, and he said, "Can you hear her?" And I said, "Not really. I can't hear everything she's saying." And after the rehearsal was over, he very good-naturedly said, "If you're going to say something, speak a little slower, choose what you're going to say." He called it the "dramaturgy" of the rehearsal, how the conductor really focuses, speaks to the orchestra or not, and times the whole rehearsal, and how the conductor prepares for the rehearsal, which is really interesting. And he articulated it very well. Young conductors tend to get up there and go, "I gotta get through so much, and I have so much to say, and so much to conduct," and they try and do so much in such a short time. So, he has very valuable practical advice like that, and he's actually a very good diagnostician of what the problem is, if there is one, in their conducting. Ultimately, his interest and his musicianship is a kind of intuitive understanding of interpretation of the character of the music. And he's always after that. He's after that with the conductors, he's after that with the orchestra itself. And it's really wonderful to see him work with the young musicians of the TMC because he's pretty unedited. I think he tries to use his time a little more efficiently with the Boston Symphony and professional musicians. With the TMC, he knows that he can go on a tangent, [McCreath laughs] which is very, very entertaining and really enlightening for everybody.
Brian McCreath And it's interesting because I think many of our listeners would think of conducting, you know, someone coaching that kind of thing, being really just about the music. But you're saying that when you see Andris, and maybe other conducting coaches as well, what is often imparted has much more to do with the way that that person is relating to their colleagues and how they're communicating as much as anything having to do with music.
Ed Gazouleas Yes, absolutely. You know, I was on the search committee at the BSO when we went and picked him and talked to him about taking the position back 12, 13 years ago. And I remember the first thing he said was, "I want to have a human relationship with the orchestra." He's not interested in being a tyrant or a dictator in the old-fashioned sense of conductor. He really wants to be a partner, and he wants to be an inspiration. And how you communicate that to a young conductor who is trying to establish his or her authority is a really interesting and difficult problem. Andris was a really great young conductor because he wasn't hung up on, "I have a certain amount of authority." He just did his thing, and he related to the music. And he got the orchestra to relate to the music right away. And he likes to say that it's easier now that he's a middle-aged conductor... I didn't say that. [McCreath laughs] I can't wait to see what Andris is like as an old conductor. That would be really interesting, too.
Brian McCreath Right. You have this really deep background as a teacher, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you taught even while you were in the BSO. Were you on TMC faculty at that point?
Ed Gazouleas Yes, I was on TMC. I had a viola studio at Boston University. I taught orchestra excerpts for violists at New England Conservatory. And in 2010, they asked me to co-design curriculum and teach a course at New England Conservatory on entrepreneurship for musicians, which was really interesting. We focused on three areas, communications, business, and health—areas that we felt that young musicians didn't get in their traditional training. And I had in the class not just musicians who were studying their orchestral instruments or classical music, but we had the jazz students and the contemporary improvisation students as well. We felt strongly that they should all be in the class together. And we should talk about topics that were important to all of us.
Brian McCreath Do you feel like those same topics still need to be imparted to the musicians you're seeing at TMC and other young students that you work with?
Ed Gazouleas Absolutely. And so, the topic of health, for instance, how do we prevent injury in young musicians? How do we train them to be super aware of their own wellness? That's something that's even more of a problem now than it was...
Brian McCreath More than it was 15 years ago?
Ed Gazouleas I think so.
Brian McCreath Wow.
Ed Gazouleas I think that's getting harder as it becomes more competitive. Your search to play perfectly becomes more and more important. And certainly, for string players, but for everybody really, if you neglect what your body is telling you and you just keep training, essentially you injure yourself. And we've seen great, great musicians end their careers because of injuries like focal dystonia or even carpal tunnel. If you read the newspapers in the last couple of years, you know that rates of mental health illness among young adults is skyrocketing. That's something that I encountered teaching college students over the last 10 or 15 years and running programs at Curtis and Indiana. And we all need to be more attentive to that as if we're going to be teachers and mentors to these young musicians.
Brian McCreath How much can TMC do in that area?
Ed Gazouleas Well, we have an incipient wellness program that I'm trying to expand. We've brought onto the campus a local outfit called Optimal Wellness in West Stockbridge, Jake Corley and his team, and they're doing classes in movement and stretching, and we also have them booked for some sort of physical therapy massage sessions for those who need it. But we really need to do more, particularly in the area of mental health.
Brian McCreath I'm so interested that you're drawing from your experience to paint a picture of this getting more acute, even as awareness of it has heightened. I would have thought, maybe optimistically, the problems weren't as huge because of the increase in awareness, as you say, of mental health of college-age students or the physical ramifications of hyper-competitiveness. People know about these things more and even talk about them more, but you're saying that also somehow translates into the problem being even greater than it was.
Ed Gazouleas Well, I think there may be more awareness, but there's really not a lot of treatment, and the traditional ways of teaching the instruments haven't changed a whole lot. I mean, I was lucky to have a teacher who really understood the ergonomic problems of playing the viola.
Brian McCreath Which are considerable.
Ed Gazouleas Which are considerable. [McCreath and Gazouleas laugh] We're not gonna get into that now, are we?
Brian McCreath No no no, no need.
Ed Gazouleas But if you reach a certain stage on the instrument and the teacher's telling you, you just have to do X, you have to play more intensely or you have to vibrate more, or if you're in an orchestra and a conductor is trying to wring out more intensity, and if you are not careful, that's when overuse happens. It's in search of this added kind of intensity or excitement, or when you really have to go home practice and figure out actually how to get the result you're being asked for without excessive tension, which is what ends up giving us these injuries. Excessive tension combined with the postural things that we have to do to play the instrument.
Brian McCreath Your teaching background is so extensive that clearly you find it really rewarding. It has become the major focus of your life after having left the BSO, it sounds like. And so, I'm curious about what you learn from students, especially... Let's make it more specific. As you look into the summer of 2025 and you think about the TMC Fellows that are on campus right now as we speak, what do you see from them that's teaching you something?
... one thing which inspires me about this group, besides their obvious accomplishment, is their determination to avoid cynicism, which is something I haven't seen before.
Ed Gazouleas Well, we're always learning from them, and I've been teaching long enough now to see differences in the approach of different cohorts, let's say. And one thing which inspires me about this group, besides their obvious accomplishment, is their determination to avoid cynicism, which is something I haven't seen before. And I don't know what that is or why that's coming, but this group really seems to be determined to play well, absorb everything they can out of the experience of being at Tanglewood. I think some of that may have something to do with a sense of fatalism about the business where they just want to experience it now because they don't know what they'll be doing in 10 years. I sometimes want to tell them, "Well, you're going to play with Andris Nelsons and all these great conductors," and many of them will have a richer musical experience this summer than maybe they will in their professional lives. That was certainly the case for me. My last year at Curtis, which was 1984, we played with Leonard Bernstein and Sergiu Celibidache, who was a legendary conductor and never conducted in the United States except for this concert with the Curtis Orchestra in 1984 in Carnegie Hall. It was amazing. And I remember somebody in the Philadelphia Orchestra telling me, "Oh, you're never gonna have a year like that ever in your professional life." Which was kind of true, but still it was wonderful. And, you know, when you're 24, you don't know what life is going to bring you when you are 34 or 44. But this is a generation that has seen their world come to the point of extermination in the environment, in the economy, in public health. And they're still loving music and wanting to play music. So that gives us an enormous obligation to give them everything we can so that they can do.
Brian McCreath You talked about the beginning stages of health and wellness incorporating into TMC and the curriculum. What other visions and hopes do you have? Nobody's going to hold you to the story, [McCreath chuckles] no commitments necessary. But when you just have those moments at the end of a summer at TMC when you're sitting on some porch wherever you are in the Berkshires, and you are sipping on an iced tea and you're thinking, "That was a great summer, but what could we do?" Where does your vision take you?
Ed Gazouleas Well, one of the things we've tried to do is, every performance, every assignment given out to a young musician, is something that they take with them for the rest of their career. So Tanglewood has had a historic commitment to contemporary music and to new music. So, we have composers, and I felt that we really needed to, in the composition program, acknowledge some of the areas that young composers were interested in, for instance. And one of those areas is how they use electronics and other media. And just new this year, we have some new composition faculty: Nina Young from Juilliard, who's a real pioneer in sound installation and as a sound artist that's not traditional composition training, you know, of the Aaron Copland variety. [Gazouleas chuckles]. Marcos Balter from Columbia is another of our faculty, and he's in some very different areas as well. And we've had George Lewis here teaching, lecturing. We had his lecture last summer on decolonizing classical music, and I think that is also a vital thing that we need to be aware of. And we have this giant of American music who was very, very helpful to me in his advice. So that program is going to go in some very different directions, and I'm really interested in unleashing that talent and those aspirations. In the instrumental side, our focus has really been to raise the level of the playing from a sort of student level to a really young professional level, and that was particularly the case with the string playing at TMC traditionally. And in the last three years, for whatever reasons, we've really gotten to another level in that area. And we have Fellows of the TMC going into professional jobs much more quickly after their summer. In fact, we have some who have gotten jobs the year before they come here, but they choose to come to Tanglewood anyway to have that experience before they start their professional lives.
Brian McCreath And I think some in the past, if I'm not mistaken, are even in those kinds of orchestras that don't play 52 weeks, and so they actually come here already having a job.
Ed Gazouleas A few of those we have, but I mean I'm talking about the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony. We have people who are in the Toronto Symphony, who win these auditions in the spring and come to Tanglewood for the summer and then go off to their jobs. Well, was Tanglewood a factor in their getting that job? Not exactly, no, but their experience at Tanglewood informs how they approach their professional lives. And that's also part of what Tanglewood means, because it's not just about bringing everybody to a professional level and saying, "Okay, here you are, go off and get a job," but it's about an aspiration for what we want our musical world to be and the kind of community we want to build through music.
Brian McCreath And you're talking about, just to focus in on those composers that you've brought in this summer who are new, teaching in a very different way, in a very different aesthetic from those days of Aaron Copland. But what I hear you saying aligns perfectly with the vision of Copland and Koussevitzky as forming musicians for a life in music, whatever the life in music is.
Ed Gazouleas Empowering them to go their own road. I mean, that's what the teaching of technique really is. It's not an end in itself. It's giving the student the tools to go wherever the art form takes them. I mean, we had a rehearsal this morning of The Rite of Spring, and here was a surprise: I thought we needed a little preparation for that, and they sat down and played it pretty close to perfect the first time. A piece that, a hundred years ago, was barely playable for professional musicians, and now most of the students know it before we sit down to rehearse.
Brian McCreath [McCreath chuckles] That's amazing. That's fantastic. Ed, it is such a pleasure to talk with you. I feel like we could talk all day, but we'll draw a line under it for now right here.
Ed Gazouleas We have other things to do.
Brian McCreath Yeah, we have other things that do, and maybe we'll talk again in the future. But thank you so much for this time, I appreciate it.
Gazouleas Thank you.