Episode 2.20 - Season 2 Recap Part 1
Episode 20 is the first of our two-part recap, where we say nice things about our guests and talk about what we learned this season!
These recaps will end our second season! Third season will drop every Wednesday beginning in February 2022, so catch up on all our episodes and keep your eyes out for new episodes in February!
In the meantime, if you'd like to support us, consider picking up some Diversify the Stand merch or getting yourself a copy of Winds of Change, and following us on Facebook and Instagram!
Full Transcript
Carrie Blosser 0:03
Welcome to Diversify the Stand. Together we build a community to listen and learn from the stories and experiences of passionate musicians. I'm Carrie Blosser.
Ashley Killam 0:11
And I'm Ashley Killam. In our second season, we talk with musicians, performers, educators, historians, and entrepreneurs to expand how we think of the music we perform and follow non-traditional career paths.
Carrie Blosser 0:24
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the recap of our second season of the podcast. I am Carrie Blosser, and I'm here with Ashley Killam. We are so excited to kind of talk through all of the wonderful people that have agreed to volunteer their time to come on our podcast. We are now, we've just celebrated our very first anniversary of being Diversify the Stand. Ashley and I started this last year when we were looking to make some change, specifically in the trumpet world, but also in how we are looking at the music that we play, the music that we teach, and kind of the career options and plans for the future. So thanks for listening. And let's jump in.
Ashley Killam 1:04
So our first guest, Christine Palmer, was really cool because she was kind of our first, like, super non-traditional career in music as, like, a trumpet manufacturer. So it was really cool to hear a different side of, like, the music world that we normally don't get to see with music being so, at least in, like, the collegiate format, being such, like, a two-pipeline-education-performing type of career paths, so she was awesome to talk to, and to start to meet some of Carrie’s friends.
Carrie Blosser 1:34
Yeah, Christine and I, I was working on my Doctor of Musical Arts in Colorado at Boulder. And Christine was doing her Master's there, which was really cool, because her background in undergrad was physics and trumpet. And it was really cool, she'd actually gotten the position with Harrelson Trumpets as she works now, while she was finishing up her Master's, so I remember she had, like, this is a little while ago, but she had, like, two bigger phones. So she had, like, her work phone and her normal phone. And I just thought that was really cool that she had something lined up before she had graduated. And also, I didn't know of anyone that was, like, actively building instruments and really interested in that side of not just performance, because she's a great player, but also in, like, creation of the instrument, which I thought was really fantastic. And I know few people who do that. Also, Christine was arranging and playing in a bunch of different styles when we were in school together, and which is really interesting, because now she talked in the podcast about all of the different groups that she plays in, which is just, yeah, like, she is playing in anywhere. Well, there are three things that she was looking for, right, she, like, wanted to play with people that she liked, music that was cool. And then things that, like, kind of, like, would pay. So she's looking for, like, two of those threes, which I think are a really nice guiding principle of how you, you know, find stuff and projects that you want to work on. Eventually, you run out of time in your day. And you can only do, like, so many projects. So I thought that was a really great, you know, kind of a way to streamline especially as, like, maybe you're getting into a new city and you're taking all of the gigs you can get and eventually, you're going to get too much, so. And Christine does so many, like, different projects, which I just think is really cool. And speaks to just the diversity of how she looks at how she's playing. The arranging that she's doing. And then her, like, full time position, too with Harrelson.
Ashley Killam 3:31
Yeah. Then we had Alonso, who, right now, I think he's finishing up his tour with the Christmas Story. He's conducting, like, this musical group, which is awesome. And they've toured kind of all on the West Coast, which is super neat. And he is one of the composers, if anyone hasn't read all of our website pages that list our composers, Alonso is another one of our composers that we commissioned for Winds of Change. And I know I found him and I love his music, especially because he has a background in film score writing and film composing. And so you can hear a lot of that in his concert works, which he got into writing after he did all of this film score writing, which is super neat, because it just kind of gives it a different perspective on music, and even all of his concert works, they sound like they could easily be applied to a movie or a show. And they're super fun to play. His trumpet solo is awesome. And he's just such such a great person and an awesome perspective to hear from.
Carrie Blosser 4:31
Yeah, I really like his piece because I think he wrote it when he was, like, traveling, like the landscape of driving in, like, a car. And I feel like you could really hear that in the piece. There's a certain level of, like, programmatic-ness to what he wrote in the trumpet piece, which is really cool. I loved him talking through kind of the process of singing with an ensemble that got to go record, and eventually that recording won him a Grammy with his group that he was a part of. I know, with COVID, I feel like the world kind of stood still for, like, two years and still kind of is in some aspects. So it's interesting to, like, kind of hear, like, the project, make sure you listen to the episode. I think it's a really interesting story. But I think as performers and people who are recording, I think sometimes it takes us a while, composers especially, right? You write pieces, and then it can take two or three years before the recordings are released, or things start to really gain traction, like, immediacy in awareness sometimes takes a little bit of time. So I think that's a really good perspective as performers and, you know, people are recording and coming up into, like, the music world, like, sometimes things take a little bit of time. But sometimes the end result is, I don't know, you get a Grammy.
Ashley Killam 5:48
I hope he got himself his little mini, like, mini Grammy figurine.
Carrie Blosser 5:53
I feel like we need to send presents to people. Just a tiny little timeout from our official podcasting thing: If you don't already know, and you're listening to this podcast, we on our website, we have transcripts of all of our stuff. So if you really liked what someone was saying, or you want a different level of accessibility, check out our website, diversifythestand.org. And if you go to our podcast section, you can watch the transcripts or read the transcripts for each of the episodes. And Hollyn, our fantastic intern, has been working hard on those. We do all of our own stuff here in-house, we don't get paid for this. And Hollyn graciously donates her time to our project, which we really appreciate. So if you don't know this already, go to the website, check out the podcast. So in our third episode, we got to bring on one person that I know pretty well and another person who had never met, Dr. Lilly-Corbin Haley and her husband, Brian Corbin. So Lilly is a military musician, and she plays in the Navy Band in Hawaii. And we had met in person before she moved to Hawaii. So she's fantastic clarinet player, really fun person, really excited to perform music, especially music that's not by dead white guys, which here at Diversify the Stand we are all about performing the music of not dead white guys. It's fine, but, you know, diversify your stand, not the same stuff, right? We've talked about this for a while. But having Lilly and Brian here was really awesome. So Brian, we were kind of, Ashley and I were thinking about, you know, again, Christine came on podcast, which is fantastic. Brian actually owns his own business where he partners with Royal Global Clarinets and makes his own barrels and has been kind of tweaking and working on clarinets for a little while, so we wanted to bring on another person who's kind of more in the music industry side, someone who's building things. It was great to have both of them on the podcast to talk about their different perspectives. And as two clarinet-playing spouses, you know, kind of how their teamwork works together. It's always really cool to see those dynamic duo's that work together really well. You know, Lilly is a really talented photographer as well as a clarinetist. So she's been taking product photos and test driving all of the clarinets as Brian's been building and working and playing through those too, so just shout out to all the people that come on the podcast because they donate their time, but it was great to get to hang out with them for a little bit and talk about their projects, and hopefully clarinet players that are listening are buying things from B. Corbin Clarinets.
Ashley Killam 8:29
Then we had another one of our composers—if you couldn't tell, something that was important to us this season was getting all of the composers that we commissioned for Winds of Change on the podcast to talk about their stories and upbringing and things that are important to them. So next we had Dr. Gina Gillie, who teaches, she's professor of horn and teaches aural skills and music history and theory and a little bit of everything up at Pacific Lutheran up in Washington. And she was wonderful because she didn't go to school for composition. And so she gave a really big perspective on, you know, you don't have to have a composition degree to be a composer. And everyone brings a unique voice to what they write. And her music especially is brass-related. And so her music’s gotten really popular the past couple of years in the horns and the brass trios she's written, and a couple of the brass quintet she's written, and it started off with just you know, a piece or two that she wrote, and things have really amped up into a lot of commissions, so any composers, highly recommend listening to her episode, just hear thoughts she has on kind of building a composition career for yourself, and that you can label yourself as a composer, even if you may not be, like, the most, you know, “traditional” composer people necessarily think of.
Carrie Blosser 9:49
I also just love hearing people's kind of backstories and how they kind of get into music, too. I think we all have sometimes similar stories and very different stories, you grow up with a family that's musical, or maybe you're the first person to pick up something. So I think it's, again, my background was kind of teaching middle school and high school bands. So, like, knowing that that's, like, kind of the gateway into a lot of different opportunities for careers, it’s always really, really cool. So, yeah, Gina’s music, I'm really loving her solo that she wrote for our project. And we're so excited to perform it live in the future. And we've been starting to hear some solos pop up on Instagram of people recording their practice. So it's really fantastic to kind of get to know our composers that have worked on this project, get to know other composers, other people in music, get to know them and their stories a little bit more. And, like, then when we go to perform pieces, or we're working with them to kind of have this great background knowledge, so it's like stepping into a friendship five years in rather than meeting awkwardly for the first time, although I do still like the super awkward, like, zoom silences, and Google silences and whatever. But yeah.
Ashley Killam 10:55
And just heads up for performers, if there's any performers listening to this, that everything Carrie just said, it's why it's so important to create relationships with composers, and Carrie and I are putting on some presentations in the next couple of years to different clinics and conferences, that say this exact same thing, that to keep music moving forward, to keep diversifying our stands, it's so important to establish these relationships. So then you can have these connections, and when you go to commission new works, or play new pieces, it's more than just playing the notes on the page. You have all this backstory, you know where the music comes from, you know who you're playing the music of. And that really, really makes an impact on not only how you think of the music, but how your audience is going to hear it too.
Carrie Blosser 11:42
And I know a lot of the composers that have come on, and we talk about this a lot. And it's in the bottom of the of the book that we have created, but ways that you can continue to support composers even if you can't, you know, start a new commission—starting a new commission is a great way, purchasing music directly from composers or from publishing houses that they are working with, rather than taking, like, a scan that's been passed down for years and years, like, buy that original music to support composers. And then as you’re live performing pieces, make programs and make sure that the composers get them, because there's another way of royalties that composers can get a little bit more money for the pieces that they've written. It's just another way that maybe sometimes we might not think about as a performer or as an educator, like, that's just one more task in your concert prep, but it's an important one to kind of continue to support composers in the future. On our fifth episode, we got to bring in one of my dear friends that I've known for a really long time. Dr. Ciara Glasheen-Artem, who teaches at the MTU Cork School of Music in Ireland in Cork. Kira and I met a long time ago playing in an international wind band, it was in Ireland, I got to go, I was the very last trumpet accepted into the program. And it was fantastic. And I got to meet her, oh my gosh, in 2006 or 2007 or 2008, somewhere, like, a little while ago. So it's always great to have friends, musical friends that you kind of, like, develop your careers with. But, so Ciara graciously came on the podcast, we talked about all sorts of fancy things, because she's cool and awesome and I just love her to death. But since joining the podcast she had interviewed and is now the head of the school. So as I brought up the MTU Cork School of Music website, the message from the head of school has a picture of Dr. Ciara Glasheen-Artem on the front, like, welcoming students and talking about what's going to happen in the 2021-2022 school year. So since she's joined us on the podcast, she's gotten, is now the Head of School at MTU Cork School of Music, which is really fun.
And I read in a post on social media when she announced it, she is the youngest head of the Cork School of Music, which is great. I loved hearing in her episode, we talked a lot about the Fulbright Scholarship, which is this, if you are not aware of it, it's this really big, like, fellowship that's offered to all types of careers and paths. And it's really hard to get and it's really complicated. And she received it for music and was able to come study out in Colorado. Hearing her perspective from someone who was part of that exchange, and who tries to center all of the work that she does around, you know, being part of something bigger and being part of this musical community that learns from different cultures. It was a really, really cool perspective to hear in how she experienced all of that. And if we have any listeners looking for DMA programs, look into the Cork School of Music to go study under Dr. Ciara and/or all the many amazing faculty they have out there.
I think one of the things that I keep forgetting just because Ciara is such a fantastic performer and educator, so she actually played flute all the way, like, through I think it was into college into her first years of undergrad, and then switched to the oboe. And now is Dr. Head of School. Oboe queen of the world. So I think we sometimes we think that you, if you haven't started as, like, a prodigy child, prodigy at age whatever, that you might not be successful in your programs. So just another reminder that you can switch and still, you know, you find the instrument or the career path that really works for you, and really helpful for you. It's a good thing.
Ashley Killam 15:51
Another one of Carrie’s friends we got on the podcast is Dr. Jose Leon, who is a trombone player, this amazing educator, and has a incredible backstory on how he got started in music where he came through the El Sistema program in Venezuela. And so he talked a lot about the impact that El Sistema had on him, and how that, you know, launched him into really wanting to pursue a career in music and go to school in the United States, and his whole journey through that, which was awesome. I'd heard about El Sistema. I know a couple of people who had gone through it. But being able to talk with someone who went through that program his entire upbringing, it was really great. And now he is teaching in Florida and has built an amazing low brass studio down there, doing awesome things. And, yeah, he's teaching and playing everywhere. And he talks with us a lot about just the gigging life and how to keep it up and how to kind of create a sustainable career for yourself in music.
Carrie Blosser 16:54
And as I've seen Jose post on social media, he very often has, like, whatever music he's working on, and then he puts his Diversify the Stand sticker that we gave to him on his music stand next to his music, which I just get a kick out of it of every time. So it's great to see the support from all the people that have come on the podcast and other people who have stickers and tag us and are, like, making, like, kind of integrating what they're performing with orchestras and how that fits in with what we want to do here at Diversify the Stand, so that's really awesome. Jose and I have known each other for a little while, we both were working on our doctorates at the University of Colorado Boulder together. And Jose is a really great guy and fabulous trombone player, and he's so good at social media, like, about, like, collaborative effort, and, like, tagging people and being really thoughtful about, like, kind of making this, like, musical community. And I know over the pandemic, he’s working on a lot of kind of, like, virtual projects with different trombone players. Jose is just such a great person to, like, do a collaboration with, and is always very thoughtful and kind of trying to bring awareness to things that he is passionate about. So it's great to see the support from people of Diversify the Stand, and great to have them come on the podcast to talk about their life, how they got into music, and kind of worked forward. So, thanks Jose.
Ashley Killam 18:20
Our next episode, Carrie and I were both super fan girls for the entire time. We are so thankful. I’d been following this composer for a while. So had she. And he said yes to speaking with us. Anthony R. Green came on our podcast. And he is a composer, educator, social justice activist, and really brings social justice into all of the music he writes. He's one of the founders of Castle of our Skins, and just an incredible composer who's done so many amazing things. When we spoke with him he was, like, a couple weeks away, or a month away from going to Ghana for, like, a residency out there to work with students. And I know a couple months after he was flying somewhere else. And he's been back and forth from the Netherlands to Boston to do some work for Castle of our Skins out here. So, incredible composer that's done a lot of things, and he was just wonderful to talk to about the composer perspective and how much of a struggle it is for grant writing, with getting your name out in the world to get funding, and just kind of a lot of the problems that people don't talk about in the music world.
Carrie Blosser 19:35
Yeah, it was really great to have Anthony to come join us. And in part of the things again, make sure you go back and listen to his podcast if you didn't get a time, but, you know, kind of talking about, you know, coming up in, like, the classical world, Anthony really talked and was very vulnerable and talked about his experiences kind of coming up in classical music and kind of trying to find people, you know, that looked like him to, like, work with, and as a big founding, or, like, drive, I think, that he and Ashley had started Castle of our Skins, and we'll talk about her in just a little bit as well. But I think that creating Castle of our Skins and, like, being dedicated to celebrating Black artistry through music, I think it's just such a powerful group. And I had been, we had been following, both Ashley and I have been following them for a little while. So having, I was definitely like, sometimes we get nervous for podcasts, and sometimes we don't. This one for me, I was definitely very nervous because I was really excited. And just was really happy that Anthony had the time to come talk with us. And I think that—I'm trying to remember how many timezones different that podcast was.
Ashley Killam 20:13
I think six hours?
Carrie Blosser 20:46
It's always really cool when we get to interview people from across the world. We get to flex our timezone transposition a little bit too. But yeah, I have been listening more and more of Anthony's music. And I'm just, I'm very impressed with just, like, the depth of, like, emotions through his composition and kind of some of the more kind of mixed media or, like, kind of the collaboration he seems to have even with himself in the pieces that he's writing I think are, it’s just really, I don't know, it's really awesome. I don't know of many other composers that I'm kind of, I feel that with so, I really enjoy his music, so make sure you check it out. So another composer that worked with us in the Winds of Change commissioning project is Dr. HyeKyung Lee, and HyeKyung has her piece that she wrote for us was one of our more beginner pieces. And it's such a fun tune. It's so fun to play, there's such flowing musical lines, I think. HyeKyung is a composer and teacher at Denison University in Ohio, and I absolutely loved getting to know her through the podcast, and kind of talking a little bit about—I am also a person who really loves pop music, and I listen to it in the car, don't judge me too hard. I listen to a wide variety of things. So I loved when HyeKyung was talking about she likes to keep an open mind and that she really likes K-pop and pop music. I'm in the same vibe as her, which I think is really fun. But she's done so many different musical styles and has such a, like, kind of a really wide range of compositions through her career. And she's such a sweet person, and so nice to work with and to get to know her, too. But I had a great time. And learning more about her background and, you know, growing up in Korea, and how, you know, kind of what—she took a year off between part of school and continuing with school, which I know she talked a lot about that being challenging, and really trying to, like, find the passion for what she wanted to do. So it was really great to hear her story and her perspective.
Ashley Killam 23:01
And it's something we don't talk about. I mean, in music school you hear ,like, you know, musicians have to be “on” constantly. And we always have to have the passion. And we always have to have the creative energy. And it's kind of reassuring when you hear from people their experience on how maybe that isn't always the case. Always. Especially during a pandemic, it's very nice to hear that you're not the only one that maybe hasn't had the most creative energy this past year. And that is totally okay and acceptable. So I know I'm personally slightly reassured when I hear that from other people. And yeah, it was great to hear how she started. And we're so thankful to have her on board, writing some awesome music for trumpet. And then our last guest that we are going to say nice things about today in Part One of our recap is Lara Poe, another one of our composers that wrote an intermediate solo for Winds of Change. Hers is very angular, and it's a really cool concept. Her solo is, it kind of portrays, like, if you're on a mountain and playing on a mountain, and you get closer every time. You have, like, a very, like, there's a lot of visual imagery you can capture there in working how you sound as a trumpet player. And then when the pianist comes into play with you, so her solo is super cool. And we've seen a couple trumpet players post some clips online of them playing this solo. It's awesome to hear. If you have not, if you're a trumpet player listening to this, buy Winds of Change. It's wonderful and great. I ended up getting to hear most of this episode when I was editing it afterwards because my internet decided to, like, all of southwest Virginia internet disappeared when we were, like, a third of the way through this podcast. So Carrie had to continue without me. But when I listened back to it, it was really cool. We talked with Lara, or she talked with Lara, rather, a bunch about— Lara's Finnish-American, so she has spent a lot of time both in Finland and in the United States. So be we got to hear her perspective on just kind of the similarities and differences between music in Finland and the United States, the different opportunities that she's gotten, why she decided to stay in London. She's in the UK now to do her doctorate. And we talked with her about her decision on staying there versus in Boston where she got her undergrad done. And so it's really cool. A lot of these, especially this particular month of podcasts, when we talked with Jose and Anthony and HyeKyung and Lara, it was, like, the the month of global episodes, because we had a lot of people from all these different countries bringing in their perspectives. And it's really cool to see what does compare and what differences there are country to country and area to area.
Carrie Blosser 25:51
Yeah, I remember Ashley just was frozen on our—we use Google meets when we do our recordings with podcasts—and Ashley’s face was just kind of frozen and then ran away. Because, I don't know, yeah, I think there was some kind of, like, very horrible storms or something. But yeah, I was like, ah, okay, we're just gonna continue. The show, the podcast must go on. But Lara was a super great guest. And it was great to chat and talk with her a little bit more. I think that it speaks to the small world of music, I remember Lara was posting that she was headed to Santa Fe to the Chamber Music Festival, for a piece of hers to be performed. And at the same time, I think Mary Elizabeth Bowden, who was one of our guests on Season One was also in Santa Fe and got stuck in, like, a really terrible, like, storm while hiking. And I feel like they were, like, Lara posted a picture of from, like, the plane of this crazy storm. And I think Mary Elizabeth Bowden was, like, hiking in that storm. So I just remember thinking, what a very small world that we are in. Even in our podcast, we've got people layering over each other. So yeah, Lara’s music, I'm really digging the solo that she wrote for our piece. And I loved her perspectives on kind of, like, she's one of the composers that she's always kind of, she's writing music for a lot of different sizes of groups. But I feel like the pieces recently that I've listened to hers are kind of for kind of larger orchestra pieces, which holds his own challenge, right, because it's, like, the most amount of different kinds of instruments. It's a large score, you have to know a lot of different, you know, orchestrations and whatnot. So it's really cool to have the piece that she wrote for our trumpet book of that intermediate solo. And I remember she talked about it was a good challenge for her, thinking about kind of that small scale of, again, like, the trumpet, we kind of asked for, like, a range, you know, what would someone who isn't a professional be able to play and really enjoy. So I loved the piece that she had wrote for us and I loved hearing about her musical journey so far, and a little bit about how she, you know, kind of recommends to future composers to, you know, find scores and listen to orchestras and, you know, keep learning the kind of, like, the craft and the trade and then take it into your own spin for your compositions, too.
Ashley Killam 28:14
So, that's the first half of Season Two. Tune in next week to hear us say nice things about the rest of our guests. And like Carrie said, all of our transcripts are online, you can pick up merch, there's a sale going on for the rest of the year through December 31st with the code MERCH25, you can get 25% off all of our stickers and tote bags. So pick up merch to carry your music in for next year. Any trumpet players pick up a copy of Winds of Change. Can't wait to share the rest and say nice things about the second half of our guests next week. Thank you for listening to Diversify the Stand. I'm Ashley.
Carrie Blosser 28:54
And I’m Carrie. If you'd like to support us and our projects, find us on social media and visit our website. We now have a store where you can pick up some Diversify the Stand gear.
Ashley Killam 29:04
And as always, a huge thank you to Trevor Weston and Whitney George for allowing us to use their compositions in our podcast. The musical introduction is Trevor's trumpet duet Fanfare for Changes, and the ending music is Whitney's Incantations for trumpet and piano. Both composers’ websites are listed in the podcast description.
Carrie Blosser 29:22
Until next week, what's on your stand?