Episode 3.4 - Elisa Koehler

PodcastTranscript
Written By Ben Bruflat

Our first month of season 3 ends with our talk with Elisa Koehler. Trumpet, conductor, and author, Elisa is also the current music chair at Winthrop University. We get the honor to talk with her about her books, opinions on historical performance, and experiences in academia.

 

Full Transcript

Carrie Blosser 0:00

Welcome to the third season of Diversify the Stand. Together, we speak with a wide range of musicians who talk about topics that are important to them. I'm Carrie Blosser.

Ashley Killam 0:08

And I'm Ashley Killam. We're so excited to dive into talks with a whole bunch of guests to see them. If you like following along and are a fan of our podcast, please leave us a five star rating and review. We hope you enjoy our talk with Dr. Elisa Koehler: historian, trumpet player, conductor, educator and author. Thank you so much for joining us today. We're so excited to chat with you.

Elisa Koehler 0:31

Thank you all, thrilled.

Ashley Killam 0:32

We'd love to start off just by hearing a little bit about your musical journey into kind of what you currently do.

Elisa Koehler 0:38

Okay, wow. Well, that's not a small question. It all started in the log cabin. No, I'm kidding. But, I actually grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland, and both of my... both of my parents are huge classical music fans. They love the opera, they loved symphonies. Anything that was on PBS was always, "Oh, we're going we're going to watch great performances." And I remember seeing the, you know, Bernstein series of Beethoven symphonies that he did with the the Vienna Phil, oh, that was like back in the late 70s, early, early 80s. And, they were amateur opera singers. So, every Saturday afternoon, it was the Texaco Metropolitan Opera Broadcast was always on the radio all over the house, and it was loud. And I just remember, you know, the singing was...was, you know, wonderful, but I was always galvanized by the orchestra. And I've always been fascinated by the orchestra to me is the world's greatest instrument. Now, I know it's a collection of instruments. But, of course, the brass always got my attention. I just love the the power and the energy. My maternal great grandfather played E-flat clarinet in John Philip Sousa's band. And so, my mother was always saying, "Oh, be like, great...Be like Great Grandpa, you should you should play the clarinet." And I was like, "Ehh..." We had something known as exploratory music in the fourth grade in the Maryland school system, and you know, all the fingers for the clarinet, I have double - I won't show you - jointed fingers. And I was just like, "The clarinet, ehh, you know, just...I want to play brass instrument or percussion. And when I originally wanted to play drums, and my parents were like, "No, you will not play drums." So I picked trumpet. And then they were really sorry. But, I just, you know, love the brass instruments, but especially trumpet because growing up watching television in the 70s, I always was like, the trumpet plays everywhere. I ended up playing trumpet. The music teacher wanted me to play the violin because I also sang in the...sang in the choir. I must have been able to match pitch easily, and so thought I had a decent ear, and so I should play the violin. But did I mention my double jointed fingers? When I would try to play the violin, it would go "conk." And I'm like, "No, I just..." And we didn't start with shoulder rests, so it was a little bit painful on the collarbone. So, I was always interested in all these other instruments, but it was the trumpet for me. Sits right here and have three fingers. I thought I would be great at that. Or it would be fun. But, I was the last person in my exploratory music class to be able to buzz. Isn't that...I'm so ashamed, you know? Everyone else: "Doot doo doo" you know, going on? I tried too hard, you know? I'm an overachiever. I was like, "I'm gonna do this." I was too tense, and I finally got it, and there was no stopping me after that. But so, that is how I really got into music. So, at a very young age was fascinated by history, fascinated by reading, fascinated by music, and I started to sort of put them all together. So, when I eventually decided to go into music as a classical trumpet player... So, to make a, you know, very long story short, I started out with interests in opera and orchestra music, the trumpet and history. And, as I went into Peabody Conservatory to study trumpet, I kept having all these questions, and I kept being curious and studying scores and reading more about history, just on my own, and then I decided to go into conducting. And then, I wanted to go into early brass, which didn't seem possible when I was at Peabody. They didn't have any studies for early brass, snd I've always wanted to find ways to - when I also started teaching - to help my own students connect with music on a real human level. And to me, that's what performance practice is all about. You're wanting to make the music sing. You're wanting to not go back in time and play old, play old music for the sake of old music but to find out what the message is behind the notes.

Carrie Blosser 5:46

I think it's so interesting how your family connection to your history really connected you to the trumpet, and then kind of guided a large chunk of your career, which I find really, really fascinating. I actually knew about you before I ever met you because I had seen a book that you had written, and you actually have two books. I would love to hear your process in creating both of those books, why you did it and kind of what inspired you to create them.

Elisa Koehler 6:12

Once again, curiosity, history, wanting to share, and wanting and wanting to learn things. It all started when I was able to start getting into the early brass world because at one I used to teach over Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, there was a science Cali bare physics professor named David Bohm, who was very much interested in playing early natural trumpet, and he was involved in the Historic Brass Society, which I had heard about, but I wasn't a member of because I was already in the Trumpet Guild. I was...I had been...I'd just gotten a doctorate in orchestral conducting from Peabody, so, and I was still freelancing as a trumpet player. I sent a draft to the then publications editor of The International Trumpet Guild, "We are going to publish this. So you know, just tidy up a few things here." And that was it. That's how I got started: the Beginner's Guide to the Baroque Natural Trumpet. And it's still used by a whole lot of people to get started just that one article that I just...very homemade project. I knew what I wanted to do, but I just covered things like "How do you get started with the instrument, and what sort of equipment you need, sources where you might find an instrument," and stuff like that, that you might not know where to get into some performance practice resources. That you know, one article, people really liked. I actually got fan mail. I was like, Sally Field at the, what was it? The 1986 Oscars. "They liked me! They really liked me!" You know, "They like what I'm doing!" So I should do more of this, and I was fascinated by it. I also love to...I like to explain things. I love to teach. We all do, right? Then I got invited to play the Hummel Trumpet Concerto by a friend of mine, Jason Love, who's music director of the Columbia Orchestra in Columbia, Maryland. When I had played the Hummel, it was like I was Rip Van Winkle and I'd been asleep for however many years, and I woke up with fresh eyes saying, "Hey, everything I know about this piece is wrong."

You know, I had gotten into some performance practice and trying to study scores. As a conductor, I would do a lot of homework. I'd want to know more about the cultural context of a piece, the musical structure, harmonic analysis, thematic organization, etc. Right? All this kind of stuff. And when I would do that, for the Hummel concerto I was like, "Wait, how come there are some additions that put a cadenza at the end of the first movement. There is no cadenza." Once again, that same old theme where I'd want to read books, I'd want to learn what to think differently about how it really was, and what was the key trumpet and things of that nature. So, guess what I did? I wrote another article, and that one was "In Search of Hummel: Perspectives on the Trumpet Concerto of 1803." I wrote this article where I compared...I think it was 10 or 15, maybe 20 - it took a long time - different recordings, and I like looked at their different tempi. I looked at what they did with trills. I think I ended it saying "And so, when it's New Years, you know, raise a glass of your favorite beverage to toast the New Year and think of Hummel." Right. So, but once again, I got fan mail! I got a lot more. And people were really fascinated because what I do is connect the dots. I wanted to offer different, like the subtitle of the article was, perspectives on the Hummel. I kind of got the writing bug, the research bug. And, after all these articles, I was like, "I want to write a book. I want to put the book out there that I always wanted." I read books on how to write books and how to publish books. For nonfiction, you can have a whole...you can send a table of contents and a plan and what you want to do, and maybe some sample chapters, and then they might ask for more. So, I sent that off to two different publishers, and I heard crickets from Indiana. They didn't even tell me that they got it. So, another month went by. February: crickets, nothing, March: nothing, I didn't hear anything. And then, in the beginning of April, I got an email out of the blue from the acquisitions editor at Scarecrow Press, which is no longer in business. Now it's part of Rowman and Littlefield. They had a series of dictionaries for the modern musician. And they said, "We want a brass volume, a trumpet volume, and we wrote to the international trumpet Guild, and they said we need to talk to you." So, they wanted me to write a Dictionary for the Modern Trumpet Player. And I said, "But here's this other book I want to write," and I sent that to them. And they were like, "Yes, yes, that's all very nice. We don't want this, we want you to write a dictionary. Just, you know, give us some definitions for some sample terms. And we'll see what we can do." They were like really eager to, you know, promote this series, so, I sent that to them, and they said, "Great, okay, we'll send you a contract." They really wanted to get me to do this. And then the week that that was all happening, guess who I heard from? Indiana. And they said that "Well, we've had some staffing changes, things have been backlogged. But we were really interested." And I'm like, "Yay!" So, I was able to work it out with both of the publishers that Indiana, I was going to write the book that I really wanted. And then, I was able to negotiate a little bit later deadline for the dictionary for the modern trumpet player. And, at Goucher College, I was able to get most importantly, a half-year sabbatical so that I could actually write all of this stuff, so. And I learned a lot about permissions for photographs and all sorts of things. So, it was basically the fall of 2012 when I was a hermit. I was locked into my apartment just "write, write, write, write, write" all day long, and work on the bibliography, work on the images. And, that summer, before the Historic Brass, Society had its second International Brass Symposium in New York City where I was able to meet a lot of my heroes from the early brass world, and they let me photograph them. And I was able to get, you know, all of their permission to use those photos that, I can't emphasize enough: what a huge boon that was for having images for the book. And so, for the Dictionary for the Modern Trumpet Player, different publisher, different format. I had to translate the narrative because Fanfares and Finesse was a narrative book. I had to pick this sort of Mary Poppins lofty, "Yes, so now we will discuss this." kind of phrasing. And that was kind of fun in a geeky nerdy way. How can I be Jekyll and Hyde talking about instruments in a scholarly way, versus a narrative way? And the narrative is also scholarly, but I tried to make it more readable, you know, like I'm talking to you and sharing this information. But, I couldn't use the same images, those great photos that I told you about. So, I had to hire a pen and ink illustrator who also worked for the for the publisher. So, I would, like, send him some of the photos that I had used or other sources and I'm like, "Okay, Todd, draw this. Now, can you flip it horizontally? So it doesn't look exactly like this picture that I taken it from?" You know, so things like that. And that was...that was a lot of work. But, it was a fascinating time, and I was extremely grateful to have the opportunity to write both of those books, but I wouldn't want to do it in one year again.

It took me a little bit longer than a year for the dictionary because that like bled into work after the sabbatical, but... And then, I wrote some other articles. But yeah, writing the book, there's a lot to it. There's a lot to it, and I'm extremely grateful for that opportunity. I want to do a second edition of Fanfares and Finesse because I'd love to add a chapter on mutes, and there's been a lot of research on trumpets of the ancient world. And I would love to, you know, expand more content. But wow, yeah.

Ashley Killam 16:10

It's super exciting and wonderful that you had these resources and that you had all of the support to make this happen. I want to know your thoughts on the importance of -and you talked a little bit about it earlier with knowing like the culture and knowing the the cultural context of historical performance - what advice do you have for performers to best balance working on historical pieces that are incredibly important for their instruments, but also playing newer music and helping out current composers and finding a good balance between that when like, you know, in university, we don't have a ton of time to play a ton of pieces?

Elisa Koehler 16:46

That's a fabulous question, and it's so vital because music is alive. And when...we want to focus the people who are composing today, and...but, to me, interpretation, putting my conductor hat on, that's what conductors do. You have all this evidence, you have to interpret it. And especially for a new piece, right? You are going to create the first performance, and it's so valuable to have the oppor the opportunity to work with living composer and ask her or him. "What do you want? What were you thinking of when when you wrote this piece?" When we work on classical repertoire, the composers are no longer here. We can't ask them that. We can...we have to look at all the evidence. That's where all the performance practice comes in. But, I find that working on historical repertoire gives you the skills that you will then use to interpret new music because nothing happens in a vacuum. Everyone is aware of what came before, and that will shape your performance of that new piece and perhaps what the musician who wrote it once. So, that is what I would say. It's just good music making.

Carrie Blosser 18:18

So, I've been really excited to ask this question, and I hope that it doesn't seem too overly personal. I would love to hear your experiences as being a woman in academia in you know, trumpet performing and playing and conducting and maybe how that's changed over the years and experiences that you've had.

Elisa Koehler 18:32

I have been extremely fortunate to have a lot of mentors and role models. Growing up in middle school, high school, I didn't have a lot of female mentors, but, in the Baltimore Symphony, there was a...one of the trumpeters was a woman. Gail. She was the fourth trumpeter for the Baltimore Symphony. So I was like, "Hey, I can do that! She's doing it." You know? And also, one of the associate conductors for the Baltimore Symphony when I was in high school or college was Catherine Comet. So, I was able to, like, see women doing what I wanted to do, and I had the great good fortune in my master's to have a teaching assistantship with Cathy Leach at the University of Tennessee. And she's fantastic. And I learned so much from her. She was also principal trumpet of the Knoxville Symphony at the time. So I was like, "You go girl! She's doing it." And so, I was just always seeing role models and people who were out there doing it which made me realize I could do that. And, when I was an undergrad, as a woman conductor, you know? Not quite the same? To answer that question broadly, I would say I am extremely fortunate to have had a lot of female role models, and I'm extremely grateful for that opportunity.

Ashley Killam 20:15

And we completely agree at how just having the representation shows that there are doors open. And just sometimes you don't know what you don't know. And you don't realize that a career path could happen if you don't see someone like yourself doing it. So, that's awesome that you've not only had that mentorship and had those role models, but now that you are a mentor and a role model to so many people.

Elisa Koehler 20:40

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Ashley Killam 20:42

Our last question that we ask all of our podcast guests is what's on your music stand this week, whether that's a physical or metaphorical stand, and how are you diversifying your stand?

Elisa Koehler 20:53

Okay, well, I'm not doing any trumpet performances upcoming. I've be doing a lot more conducting. I also conduct the Winthrop Symphony Orchestra at Winthrop University, which is my day job, and I'm trying to diversify that stand. We are going to be doing a Sinfonia in D by Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. We'll be doing that on our concert in April. And I had wanted to do Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel's Overture in C-major, but I changed it from the program because I have a transfer student who plays the harp, so I had to find a piece that would fit into the program. So we're going to do one of my all time favorite pieces: Vaughn Williams' Five Variants of "Dives and Lazarus," which is just a little piece of heaven for strings and harp. It's fantastic. And...but...and there's...I would love to do some music of Jennifer Higdon, but the orchestra is, you know, small over at my university. We're looking to build it up. I've been invited to guest conduct with some local orchestras. We have the Rock Hill Symphony, and there's the Charlotte Civic Orchestra. I had guest-conducted with them. I didn't get to create the program. But, if I did, I would love to do some music by women composers and also other ethnicities that are under-represented.

Carrie Blosser 22:30

Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Elisa Koehler 22:32

It's my pleasure! Thank you.

Carrie Blosser 22:35

Thank you for listening to Diversify the Stand. To support us and our projects, visit our website at diversifythestand.org.

Ashley Killam 22:42

And a huge shout out to Eris DeJarnett, who wrote the intro and outro music. The piece that we've been playing is Board Games for Two Trumpets and Fixed Media. Links to their website are in the podcast description.

Carrie Blosser 22:52

And as always, we ask our guests. What's on your stand?

Ben Bruflat
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