Category: Talking about Music

Catching up with Edwin Outwater can be a schedule buster! He has so many assignments and projects in the works that he rarely stops for long in one place. I recently sat down over Zoom with this peripatetic musician to preview his upcoming online conversation with AMN Curator David Landis (October 23 at 2 p.m.). Edwin made time for me while in Miami to conduct a “Welcome Back” concert with the New World Symphony Fellows. He had just completed producing the Kennedy Center 50^th Anniversary Celebration, where he was responsible for wrangling more than 70 artists from all genres and styles into “one concert with a coherent narrative and message of what the performing arts are in America in 2021.” If you’ve seen the PBS broadcast, you know it was a great success.

We talked about what he hopes to focus on during our upcoming online conversation, and what makes him inspired about the future.

Imagine … where does music live if not in our imagination? No static thing, unchanging and immutable, music has to be played, and heard. The music is the sounds, not the marks on the paper, not the grooves on the record, not the zeros and ones in the digital media. It only makes sense as something we hear — and it makes its own separate sense to each of us in its own separate way.

That’s where we’re going with our six-week workshop Imagine. We’re exploring the heard experience of music, not what it should be or what’s correct. Sure, along the way we’re going to explore some of the nuts & bolts of symphonies, concertos, and symphonic poems — but always as experiences in our own minds, triggers that elicit reactions, emotions, feelings, physical sensations, memories. For Proust it was a madeleine; for us it can be a moment in a work by Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, or maybe the song of a skylark in the evening sky.