Season Four
Episode 107
Active Listening with Robert Franz
Robert Franz Website
Stella's Magical Musical Balloon Ride
Ted Talk: Active Listening and Our Perception of Time
Robert Franz Bio:
Acclaimed conductor, Robert Franz, recognized as "an outstanding musician with profound intelligence," has held to three principles throughout his career: a commitment to the highest artistic standards, to creating alliances and building bridges in each community he serves, and a dedication to being a strong force in music education. As Music Director of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra and Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival Orchestra, Associate Conductor of the Houston Symphony, and newly appointed Artistic Advisor of the Boise Baroque Orchestra, he has achieved success through his focus on each of these principles.
His appeal as a first-rate conductor and enthusiastic award-winning educator is acclaimed by critics, composers, and audiences of all ages. Composer Bright Sheng praised Franz for his "extremely musical and passionate approach towards music making." Franz is in increasing demand as a guest conductor, whose upcoming and recent engagements include appearances with orchestras in Austin, Buffalo, Fort Worth, Winston-Salem, Reno, and Opera Idaho. Additional recent guest conducting appearances include the Cleveland Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, North Carolina Symphony, Phoenix Symphony, and Italy's Orchestra da Camera Fiorentinas. Franz is equally comfortable and effective coaching more than 50 student orchestras each season. His versatility has led to collaborations with a wide array of artists, including James Galway, Joshua Bell, Rachel Barton Pine, Chris Botti, Idina Menzel, and Judy Collins. An eloquent speaker, Franz recently presented a TEDx Talk entitled Active Listening and Our Perception of Time.
In his eighth season as Music Director with the Windsor Symphony Orchestra, Franz was recognized by the Windsor Endowment for the Arts with its Arts Leadership Award. Highlights of the 2019/2020 season include a presentation of Madama Butterfly in concert and Canadian composer Tobin Stokes' Symphony No. 3 'The Piper.' Recent collaborations include the Windsor International Film Festival, Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor Public Library, Canadian Historical Aviation Association, and the University of Windsor.
Franz serves as Artistic Director of the Boise Baroque Orchestra, which will include collaborations with Opera Idaho in a semi-staged performance of Handel's Acis and Galatea featuring Grammy Award winning tenor, Karim Sulayman, the Boise the High School Chamber Orchestra and the Boise Philharmonic Master Chorale. Under his leadership, the orchestra will undertake its first ever commercial recording project of Classical Oboe Concerti for Centaur Records featuring rising star oboist Bhavani Kotha.
This season Franz celebrates his 13th year as Associate Conductor of the Houston Symphony where he was recently honored as the first member of the orchestra conducting staff with the Raphael Fliegel Award for Visionary Leadership. It was presented to him in recognition of his immense success in advancing the organization's education and community engagement activities.
As Founder and Music Director of the Idaho Orchestra Institute, now in its fourth year, Franz takes young musicians on an exploration of major orchestral repertoire that explores the complete musician.
In addition to his current posts, Franz served as Music Director of the Boise Philharmonic from 2008-2016, and the Mansfield Symphony (OH) from 2003-2010. When not on the podium he can be found on the slopes, skiing slowly and carefully, stretching in a yoga class, and non-competitively trying his hardest to win at a game of cards with his family.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW
Jessica: Robert, thanks so much for talking to us today.
Robert: My pleasure.
Jessica: I'm looking forward to hearing all about the things that you've created with your video and your story and also just kind of talking about active listening and classical music and just music in general. So thanks so much for sharing it. Can you tell us a little bit about how you discovered that music was your passion?
Robert: Sure! It actually started at a really young age and honestly, music chose me. I didn't choose music. So I was at the end of third grade and the music teacher came around and she said, "Hey do you want to play an instrument?" And I said, "Well, I don't know." I mean all my friends were so I said, "Yeah I guess I could." And she says, "Well what do you want to play?" I said, "I don't know." and she said, "Well let me see your hands." So she held up my hands to the window and she said, "These are the hands of a great cellist." And I was like, "Wow, that's pretty cool." And so I ended up playing the cello. Now of course what she meant was my hands were big enough to hold a cello so I didn't play the violin, but I started the next fall in 4th grade. And she showed us how to make a sound with the bow across the string and I remember I took it home and for four hours I just made sounds on the instrument. At the end of the four hours I went downstairs and I said to my parents, "I'm going to be a musician for the rest of my life." To which they replied, "That's cute."
You know how when you're nine you're like you want to be an astronaut. You want to be President. You want to be... anything, but you know, honestly, there was something about making the sound like it was almost like I found - well not almost - it was like I found my voice and I thought this is for me. This is how I began at nine. I couldn't describe it. Though I'm describing it now, but I felt like this was how I can represent myself and so I fell in love and I played every day for a number of years. Eventually we moved to a community that had no strings in the school so I switched instruments to oboe and then eventually I became an oboist. So I have a Bachelors Degree in oboe and that's how I became a professional musician was as an oboist. After that I eventually became a conductor. In the middle of undergrad I took a conducting class and I had another aha moment. I thought this is the coolest thing I'eve ever done and then I stayed to get my Masters Degree in conducting. I went to the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston Salem, NC, and I studied conducting and I loved it. And to this day I can't imagine not having the act of making music in my life on a regular basis. I love it.
Jessica: So when you're conducting you do a lot of programs for students and for children. Can you talk a little bit about how you engage them with the music that you're conducting?
Robert: Sure. So when I got out of school with my second degree I didn't have a job, which is part and parcel for what happens when you get out of a Conservatory because to get a job you have to have experience and you have to get experience to get a job. So I took on seven different part-time jobs and one of those part-time jobs was to help run a research project that put a woodwind quintet in residency in an elementary school in Winston Salem, NC. The question was if you integrate classical music into the curriculum - kids listening to it live without playing instruments - could you affect test scores? So my job was to help create the programming for that and create the bridge between the teachers and musicians. So we did that for three years and our school had amazing results when we first started 44% of them were passing the state standardized test and when we finished after the three years 88% of them were passing the state standardized test. And it was really awesome, right!? Like we're like ok that's great! What was really incredible was at the end of the third year we did a one hour Wood Quintet Concert for three hundred 6/7/8 year olds. You could have heard a pin drop in the middle of that hour. It was three major quintet pieces so it wasn't like short pieces for kids kind of concert.
And what we discovered afterwards... we sent in... there was a neurologist from the Bowman Gray School of Medicine who went in and what he discovered is that we had developed high level active listening skills in these kids. And it turns out, Jessica, that active listening is one of the keys to being a good reader and so our kids had developed those skills and were reading one-two-and three grade levels above where they were. So that was the basis really from my understanding of what my mission was going to be in life, which was to develop active listening skills in young audiences. Actually try to do it in audiences of all ages, but young audiences in particular. And so when I won my first job as an assistant conductor at the Louisville Orchestra in Kentucky the biggest part of my job was to do education concerts where kids were bused in or family concerts where families would share the orchestra with their young people in their lives on a Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon or whatever. And so it became a real lynchpin. Real centerpiece of my career that I learned and developed and really enjoyed to the max. The idea of being able to share classical music with audiences - with younger audiences - in a way that help them engage with classical music. Not just have it wash over them, but engage with it and have a real meaningful experience.
Jessica: How would you describe active listening? Like what does it look like? Or what are students doing when they're actively listening?
Robert: So the idea of active listening is when you listen to a piece of music what your mind is doing is it's sort of examining what's in front of you. Like any great art form, right? Like if you went to an Art Museum you would look at a painting and you would examine what was going on. When we examine sounds, we examine an orchestra in an active listening way we do things like we ask ourselves questions like, well, what is the composer doing? Is there rhythms? Are there rhythms that are copacetic that go along with our heartbeat? Are their rhythms that are chaotic? Are there is it legato mostly? Is it staccato? Is it high? Is it low? What instruments are playing? All of those clues lead us to understanding the composer's intention and then we add onto that a level of understanding the history of the composer - what the composer was thinking at the time or what was going on in their lives. That sort of composite understanding of the sound world that the composer is inhabiting is really the art of active listening and one of the best ways to show it is the opposite, which is passive listening.
So if you imagine you go through a day and you have millions of sounds going past your ear every single day and you don't really pay attention to them. What I try to do is help kids adjust that because when you enter a concert hall you know you can't just passively listen to a big symphony by say, Tchaikovsky or Beethoven. There's so many layers and so many things going on. So I try to help kids grab onto components of the music. Listen for this... listen to what the composer was doing here. Listen to what this instrument does there. And so it takes away the judgment of oooh I like this piece... I don't like this piece or this is how the music makes me feel. And it turns it into:
What do I notice in this soundscape?
What is going on here?
And for me that gets to a deeper understanding of the composer's intention and deeper understanding of the music and in the end I find for myself and for students that they have a much more emotionally profound experience because they have a better understanding of what actually was going on around them.
Jessica: Yeah. Something you and I had talked about before was the idea of comparatives and giving students literally just two things to listen for.
Is it fast or slow?
Is the pitch high or low?
I know that something as educators that we do all the time with our students is wanting them to really listen in the music to what's happening, but I think giving them just those simple comparatives allows them to listen for one or the other without making it so much being thrown at them that they are unsure what to listen for.
Robert: I think that's exactly right. So I've always had the sense that when I create an education program I integrate into the curriculum because I want to compare what kids are learning in school in other areas with music. So that sort of brings them full circle. Makes the world seem a little smaller. A little more understandable. I remember once years ago I was putting together a program for kindergarten through second graders in the state of Ohio. So I was looking through state standards and I couldn't find the exact right curriculum item that I wanted to pair up this concert with and all of a sudden it dawned on me that every section started with compare and contrast this; compare and contrast that. And I realized that art of comparing/contrasting that you're talking about could easily be used if you imagine the orchestra as a giant, manipulative something that the kids could engage with and use to compare and contrast. So I created a concert in which we play a piece with high pitches and a piece with low pitches. And I would stop afterwards and ask the kids to give me words to describe the differences in what they heard and by the way, the similarities.
And we go through that through multiple pairs. I called the program Opposites Attract. And then in the end we would do a piece of music by a composer that used all of those elements, but changed back and forth so all of a sudden the kids were listening to music in terms of comparing and contrasting sections with each other as opposed to just hearing a piece and saying, "Oh that was kind of cool."
Jessica: I like it when they can actually engage with it and describe for themselves what they're hearing and know what to listen for. I love that you did that.
Robert: Well, I'm very much involved. Like I love the idea of Socratic teaching and so even when I'm working with the Houston Symphony and I have 3,000 kids in front of me, I will ask them questions non-stop. And it's funny like sometimes I'll pick kids that are close up so that I can see, but sometimes I'll say, "You in the red shirt in the balcony!" And I've had teachers write in like, "How did you - how could you see that far?" And of course the secret is I can't. I just assume there's some kid up there with a red shirt on and it always kind of works out, but I have had kids and teachers write back to me, "I was in the back of the Hall and you called on me to answer a question," and it, you know, it's a really that kind of engagement with what's going on on the stage I think is really vital.
Jessica: Definitely. I watched your Ted Talk about Active Listening and Our Perception of Time and I loved the part where you got to talking about your dad and you created - well not created for him - but you talked about how he was on his way with you to go listen to a 30 minute premiere of a piece. And he trend to you and said, "What should I listen for?" And so you kind of created this tool chest with four tools - kind of Bob's tools - to share with him about the four areas of rhythm, melody, texture, and visual. That those are kind of these four ways for all of us to listen actively. And I think you talked a little bit about the rhythm already - just kind of comparing it to our heartbeat and is it in line or now, but I wondered if you could touch on those four
Robert: Sure so the way these four screens worked, or tools, is that you listen through one of them and if it's not working for you, put it down and pick up another one. And you just kind of keep alternating through.
1) Rhythm
So rhythm, as we talked about, is: does it go with your heartbeat or against it?
2) Melody
Melody is: Is it a tune that you could sing? Sometimes melodies by composers, especially modern composers, aren't singable. Or they're not in the instrument you would expect. They're not in the high instrument. You have to listen to the low instrument or the middle instrument.
3) Texture
Texture is my way of describing harmony, which is to say the sort of color that is woven out of the sounds. So when you imagine different instruments have different sounds - the timbres - and you weave those together, it forms sort of a tapestry and as the colors change - as the timbres of the instruments change - so too does the timbre or the color of the tapestry. And so sometimes the composers are not focus on rhythm or on melody. They just are focused on creating this texture. This sort of soundscape
4) Visual
And then the fourth tool is the visual tool and the idea there is that the component of watching a live performance. Seeing the choreography of the bows. Seeing the movement of the percussionist moving around. Seeing people breathing together and moving together. The conductor moving all of that leads to a deeper understanding of the sound world that you're in.
So the idea is with these four tools you pick one up. You put it down. And so my dad did that. With this it was really kind of cool. He came back afterwards backstage and I said, "So what do you think, Dad?" And he said, "It was good. It was great. It was just too short." And I was like, "It was a half an hour. How could dit be too short?" And he said, "Well I just worked my way through the four tools and the piece was over. And I thought... right!?... so I thought this is interesting. My dad was actively engaging with the music, trying to figure it out and kind of exploring and more importantly, was curious to hear the music again so that he could see if what he detected was correct or if he wanted to change it or if he noticed something else. And I think that's the key to success. And that really that's my mantra. That's my key to active listening.
Jessica: Yeah I love breaking it down to simplistic things like 4 tools to look at or 2 comparatives because I think for students as well when they are first interacting with a piece it's helpful to have a starting place and to have something to think of rather than just, "hey we're hearing a 30 minute piece. You'll hear lots of instruments." You know, that it's just too broad.
Robert: It's correct and honestly so when I pick pieces of music for family concerts or education concerts, I pick pieces of music that from the surface, that's to say, from the audience's perspective (not from the inside from the composer's perspective), but from the audience perspective I pick pieces that on the surface have really clear topographies. Really clear shapes and really clear sounds so that the audience can grab onto those things in the easiest way possible. You know you wouldn't start an instrument by playing a major concerto. You start playing a short piece. And so it's the same thing with developing active listening skills.
Jessica: Definitely. Something that you've created recently is this story and you tell this story through music and through visuals and through conducting. And you've called it "Stella's Magical Musical Balloon Ride." And I'd love for you to tell us about how you created the idea of the story and how you put it together.
Robert: So this has been a labor of love and it's been in my mind and on paper actually for over a decade now. So I have done these kinds of education concerts we've been talking about for years and years and one of the concerts I did was A Musical Tour of America. The idea was that there were musical pieces that depicted the topography of certain things like a river or mountains or ocean or Grand Canyon. And it dawned on me that it would be kind of cool if I could tie this together in sort of a story format. Not necessarily for the education concerts, but you know, in a way that kids and their parents could engage with it on their own. And simultaneously twelve years ago my niece Stella was born. And she was the first niece in the family and so she, of course, was doted on to now end and you know she's just adorable. And now she's just a firecrackers and she - even from the beginning - had a sort of a streak in her of like 'I'm going to try that. I'm going to do this.' And so I love that about her. She's kind of brave and she goes for it kind of thing so I thought I'm going to write this book about Stella.
And so in this book... in this story Stella takes a balloon ride and the reason it's magical and musical is because first of all, in one day she goes over the entire United States. But secondly, what happens to Stella is that when she does something special she hears a full symphony in her head. She hears music in her head, which is not unlike me. I have the same experience like, you know, at home I don't listen to a lot of music in the stereo, but I always have music going on in my head, especially when I'm activated by something really unique or interesting. It'll just spark that in my mind. So I thought, well if it happens to me, it must happen to other people too. I can't be the only person that that happens to. So I created this story: Stella's Magical Musical Balloon Ride.
What happens is she gets in a balloon. She goes on a hot air balloon ride. She goes over a river. when she gets over the river, She hears the Moldau by Smetana. She goes over the mountains. She hears Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky. She goes over the ocean. She goes over the Grand Canyon and eventually she comes back home. But what we learn about her is that the night before she had in her dreams imagined this incredible piece and we hear it at the very end. And it is Dvoraks' Ninth Symphony - a bit of the New World Symphony. And so I actually sort of sent it around to some publishers, you know, a decade ago. It just didn't fit anybody's model because you had to have good sound to hear it. You had to have - there are just a lot of components to it and so this is really a product of COVID-19. I was in quarantine. Everything stopped in terms of orchestra performances and I was kind of looking through my things and I was kind of thinking about what I wanted to - what I wanted to come out of this period having done. I stumbled upon Stella again and I thought these would make really good videos for YouTube and so I made five videos so that it's in five parts and each part is a different feature - different piece of music. So for instance, in Part I you meet Stella. She gets to the field where the balloon takes off. She gets up in the balloon. They go up and over the river and she hears the Moldau. So that's Part I.
What I added to it in the YouTube video, which I never thought it could happen before, but was a really cool thing to add, was that after she's done - after the story and after you hear the music she heard in her head (which by the way has visuals; has little video vignettes over top of it as thought you were viewing a river from a balloon). The third part is that I teach my listener, which by the way I was going to say kids who listen, but I've actually gotten back feedback already from adults who have conducted with me. I teach people how to conduct the Moldau - the little excerpt that we play and so there's a conducting lesson at the end of each of these five episodes. And so it takes us through this magical musical day of hers: this magical musical balloon ride. And it's super fun and I never thought of them this way, but it all came together and I think my YouTube videos are the perfect platform to get this story across.
Jessica: I love that it took you, you know, over a decade just mulling about it, putting it aside, and then we get to COVID and it always seems like during challenging times that amazing musical things come out of that.
Robert: I think that's true, but I also think for me, and this may just be how I am, I constantly have ideas running through my head and I write them down and make note of them, but most of them I forget about quite frankly. I mean most of them either are not good or not ready or whatever so it's not unusual for me to have ideas swimming around and then they'll pop out decades later. I think that for me that's kind of a normal part of the process. What I really kind of like about these five parts of Stella are the three ways that learners can relate to them. So if you're an auditory learner, if your child is an auditory learner, they can just listen to the story and listen to the music and everything is great. If you're a visual learner, you can listen to the story, but then you can hear the music, but see the visual of what Stella saw. And if you're a body kinesthetic learner, you can do both of those things, but then you can actually learn how to conduct the piece and move your arms around with the piece and so each one of these five episodes has those three contact points for kids of different learnings styles.
Jessica: Yeah even in the fourth video, I think it was when you're conducing in the video at the end and all of a sudden you're like, "Well what is my left hand going to do?" And so you're really showing students, or even like you said, adults as they're watching how to show the smooth - how to show just the contour and the phrasing with your left hand. It's not just simply beating out a 2-pattern with your right hand, but I loved that you went a little further with that to make it like 'this is what I do.'
Robert: Well I think I've always had the philosophy and I feel strongly that kids will learn whatever you put in front of them. I mean they're not... kids will meet whatever expectation you set for them so I set it sky high so that there's plenty of room and somethings they don't set expectations at all. I just, you know, let me see where we can go. And I think that's important, especially when you're somebody lime me who is a conductor of an orchestra is the music that we play is sophisticated. It's big. There's a lot of layers to it and so I have to find a way to build those bridges with my audience because there isn't such a thing as a sort of child's version of a Beethoven Symphony. It just doesn't exist. However, there are components of Beethoven symphonies that are completely accessible and doable and engageable by audiences of all ages.
Jessica: Is there something you look for within - specifically classical music - that would let you know this would be a piece that would really capture the attention of a student or that has a certain element that you can pick out and really help guide students towards? You know, taking what they're used to hearing and then applying it so they have a better understanding of classical music.
Robert: I think that's... I think yes is the answer. There are two elements for pieces that I put in front of students that I think are important. One is if they're programmatic. If they tell a story without words that may help the child get into the music for the first time. The other thing is as if the music has a sense of ABA form because kids are learning that in every way possible. They're learning in their writing. They're learning it. They see it everywhere around them. Then using that sort of ABA form in music is kind of a natural step for them. What I try to avoid is pieces that are sort of super ethereal or super meditative or super like something that somebody with more experience in life would be able to relate to so I try to keep in mind the experiences that my average aged audience would have. And then I try to find pieces that sort of match in that way and that's, by the way to go back to Stella for just a second, how these five pieces were chosen. I've done these things - these pieces hundreds of times over the course of the last 25 years. Doing the same education program in different orchestras in different places and I tried a number of different pieces, but these five pieces I really feel have resonated with that sort of 8-10 year old crowd.
And actually I focus grouped this story. When I first wrote it was really fun. I went around too schools and I said, "Ok I'm going to read you a story that I wrote. So first of all I'm going to be super vulnerable with you. This is my first story that I ever wrote, but secondly I want you to tell me what you think about Stella. Be honest with me and ask me questions." And so I did that and they said things like, "Okay." One girl said, "I have a little bit of a problem with her getting into the hot air balloon with the pilot with our her dad. I'm just not sure that would be safe." And I thought that's a really good point and so I made the pilot super friendly and you know, like just so that she would feel comfortable. But the second thing was I have a thing for polka dots. I don't know why. I think it's what I grew up. My mom used to wear polkadot clothes, right?! So I put Stella in a polka dot dress and I said to some of the people in the class - I said, "Hey so what about this polka dot dress? Is this super like 1990s? Is this old fashioned?" And one of them sat up. She goes, "No that polka dot dress is perfect. That's really cool. We really like the polka dot dress." And everybody was like shaking their head yes and I was like okay. Polka dot dress stays in.
Jessica: Perfect. Now has your niece seen or heard the story?
Robert: So yes. So I read this story to her when I first wrote it. She was like five years old. She doesn't remember anything about it so now she's 12 years old and I sent her the first YouTube video. She called me up 'cause she has her own smartphone and she could just FaceTime me. And she's like, "Uncle Bobby (which is what she calls me - Uncle Bobby) this is cool! and my favorite part is that it says Stella, that's me and dad. It doesn't have his real name so nobody knows that it's my dad."
Jessica: That's great. And where can we find, you know, if we want to see Stella's Magical Musical Balloon Ride or even just learn more about the things that you're doing?
Robert: So there are two ways to do it. First of all, my YouTube page is Robert Franz conductor. It's actually all one word, but if you type in RobertFranz.com on the education page there is a section called Read Along Read Aloud and the reason I called them that - so I definitely read Stella - but I read books that are published for kids and I always put the subtitles in all of them so that kids can read along with me. So it's sort of part of that reading process and I've got about a dozen or so videos on that page. So RobertFranz.com and it's the education page and it's called Read Along Read Along.
Jessica: Well I have really appreciated talking with you and hearing, you know, just how we can better help our students with active listening. Also I hope that teachers will definitely go check out your story and the videos and be encouraged as they use this in their classrooms.
Robert: I hope so too! I would love to hear from them as well so you know just subscribe and send me comments and I will respond. I promise!
Episode 107
Active Listening with Robert Franz
Robert Franz Website
Stella's Magical Musical Balloon Ride
Ted Talk: Active Listening and Our Perception of Time
Robert Franz Bio:
Acclaimed conductor, Robert Franz, recognized as "an outstanding musician with profound intelligence," has held to three principles throughout his career: a commitment to the highest artistic standards, to creating alliances and building bridges in each community he serves, and a dedication to being a strong force in music education. As Music Director of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra and Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival Orchestra, Associate Conductor of the Houston Symphony, and newly appointed Artistic Advisor of the Boise Baroque Orchestra, he has achieved success through his focus on each of these principles.
His appeal as a first-rate conductor and enthusiastic award-winning educator is acclaimed by critics, composers, and audiences of all ages. Composer Bright Sheng praised Franz for his "extremely musical and passionate approach towards music making." Franz is in increasing demand as a guest conductor, whose upcoming and recent engagements include appearances with orchestras in Austin, Buffalo, Fort Worth, Winston-Salem, Reno, and Opera Idaho. Additional recent guest conducting appearances include the Cleveland Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, North Carolina Symphony, Phoenix Symphony, and Italy's Orchestra da Camera Fiorentinas. Franz is equally comfortable and effective coaching more than 50 student orchestras each season. His versatility has led to collaborations with a wide array of artists, including James Galway, Joshua Bell, Rachel Barton Pine, Chris Botti, Idina Menzel, and Judy Collins. An eloquent speaker, Franz recently presented a TEDx Talk entitled Active Listening and Our Perception of Time.
In his eighth season as Music Director with the Windsor Symphony Orchestra, Franz was recognized by the Windsor Endowment for the Arts with its Arts Leadership Award. Highlights of the 2019/2020 season include a presentation of Madama Butterfly in concert and Canadian composer Tobin Stokes' Symphony No. 3 'The Piper.' Recent collaborations include the Windsor International Film Festival, Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor Public Library, Canadian Historical Aviation Association, and the University of Windsor.
Franz serves as Artistic Director of the Boise Baroque Orchestra, which will include collaborations with Opera Idaho in a semi-staged performance of Handel's Acis and Galatea featuring Grammy Award winning tenor, Karim Sulayman, the Boise the High School Chamber Orchestra and the Boise Philharmonic Master Chorale. Under his leadership, the orchestra will undertake its first ever commercial recording project of Classical Oboe Concerti for Centaur Records featuring rising star oboist Bhavani Kotha.
This season Franz celebrates his 13th year as Associate Conductor of the Houston Symphony where he was recently honored as the first member of the orchestra conducting staff with the Raphael Fliegel Award for Visionary Leadership. It was presented to him in recognition of his immense success in advancing the organization's education and community engagement activities.
As Founder and Music Director of the Idaho Orchestra Institute, now in its fourth year, Franz takes young musicians on an exploration of major orchestral repertoire that explores the complete musician.
In addition to his current posts, Franz served as Music Director of the Boise Philharmonic from 2008-2016, and the Mansfield Symphony (OH) from 2003-2010. When not on the podium he can be found on the slopes, skiing slowly and carefully, stretching in a yoga class, and non-competitively trying his hardest to win at a game of cards with his family.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW
Jessica: Robert, thanks so much for talking to us today.
Robert: My pleasure.
Jessica: I'm looking forward to hearing all about the things that you've created with your video and your story and also just kind of talking about active listening and classical music and just music in general. So thanks so much for sharing it. Can you tell us a little bit about how you discovered that music was your passion?
Robert: Sure! It actually started at a really young age and honestly, music chose me. I didn't choose music. So I was at the end of third grade and the music teacher came around and she said, "Hey do you want to play an instrument?" And I said, "Well, I don't know." I mean all my friends were so I said, "Yeah I guess I could." And she says, "Well what do you want to play?" I said, "I don't know." and she said, "Well let me see your hands." So she held up my hands to the window and she said, "These are the hands of a great cellist." And I was like, "Wow, that's pretty cool." And so I ended up playing the cello. Now of course what she meant was my hands were big enough to hold a cello so I didn't play the violin, but I started the next fall in 4th grade. And she showed us how to make a sound with the bow across the string and I remember I took it home and for four hours I just made sounds on the instrument. At the end of the four hours I went downstairs and I said to my parents, "I'm going to be a musician for the rest of my life." To which they replied, "That's cute."
You know how when you're nine you're like you want to be an astronaut. You want to be President. You want to be... anything, but you know, honestly, there was something about making the sound like it was almost like I found - well not almost - it was like I found my voice and I thought this is for me. This is how I began at nine. I couldn't describe it. Though I'm describing it now, but I felt like this was how I can represent myself and so I fell in love and I played every day for a number of years. Eventually we moved to a community that had no strings in the school so I switched instruments to oboe and then eventually I became an oboist. So I have a Bachelors Degree in oboe and that's how I became a professional musician was as an oboist. After that I eventually became a conductor. In the middle of undergrad I took a conducting class and I had another aha moment. I thought this is the coolest thing I'eve ever done and then I stayed to get my Masters Degree in conducting. I went to the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston Salem, NC, and I studied conducting and I loved it. And to this day I can't imagine not having the act of making music in my life on a regular basis. I love it. Jessica: So when you're conducting you do a lot of programs for students and for children. Can you talk a little bit about how you engage them with the music that you're conducting?
Robert: Sure. So when I got out of school with my second degree I didn't have a job, which is part and parcel for what happens when you get out of a Conservatory because to get a job you have to have experience and you have to get experience to get a job. So I took on seven different part-time jobs and one of those part-time jobs was to help run a research project that put a woodwind quintet in residency in an elementary school in Winston Salem, NC. The question was if you integrate classical music into the curriculum - kids listening to it live without playing instruments - could you affect test scores? So my job was to help create the programming for that and create the bridge between the teachers and musicians. So we did that for three years and our school had amazing results when we first started 44% of them were passing the state standardized test and when we finished after the three years 88% of them were passing the state standardized test. And it was really awesome, right!? Like we're like ok that's great! What was really incredible was at the end of the third year we did a one hour Wood Quintet Concert for three hundred 6/7/8 year olds. You could have heard a pin drop in the middle of that hour. It was three major quintet pieces so it wasn't like short pieces for kids kind of concert.
And what we discovered afterwards... we sent in... there was a neurologist from the Bowman Gray School of Medicine who went in and what he discovered is that we had developed high level active listening skills in these kids. And it turns out, Jessica, that active listening is one of the keys to being a good reader and so our kids had developed those skills and were reading one-two-and three grade levels above where they were. So that was the basis really from my understanding of what my mission was going to be in life, which was to develop active listening skills in young audiences. Actually try to do it in audiences of all ages, but young audiences in particular. And so when I won my first job as an assistant conductor at the Louisville Orchestra in Kentucky the biggest part of my job was to do education concerts where kids were bused in or family concerts where families would share the orchestra with their young people in their lives on a Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon or whatever. And so it became a real lynchpin. Real centerpiece of my career that I learned and developed and really enjoyed to the max. The idea of being able to share classical music with audiences - with younger audiences - in a way that help them engage with classical music. Not just have it wash over them, but engage with it and have a real meaningful experience.
Jessica: How would you describe active listening? Like what does it look like? Or what are students doing when they're actively listening?
Robert: So the idea of active listening is when you listen to a piece of music what your mind is doing is it's sort of examining what's in front of you. Like any great art form, right? Like if you went to an Art Museum you would look at a painting and you would examine what was going on. When we examine sounds, we examine an orchestra in an active listening way we do things like we ask ourselves questions like, well, what is the composer doing? Is there rhythms? Are there rhythms that are copacetic that go along with our heartbeat? Are their rhythms that are chaotic? Are there is it legato mostly? Is it staccato? Is it high? Is it low? What instruments are playing? All of those clues lead us to understanding the composer's intention and then we add onto that a level of understanding the history of the composer - what the composer was thinking at the time or what was going on in their lives. That sort of composite understanding of the sound world that the composer is inhabiting is really the art of active listening and one of the best ways to show it is the opposite, which is passive listening.
So if you imagine you go through a day and you have millions of sounds going past your ear every single day and you don't really pay attention to them. What I try to do is help kids adjust that because when you enter a concert hall you know you can't just passively listen to a big symphony by say, Tchaikovsky or Beethoven. There's so many layers and so many things going on. So I try to help kids grab onto components of the music. Listen for this... listen to what the composer was doing here. Listen to what this instrument does there. And so it takes away the judgment of oooh I like this piece... I don't like this piece or this is how the music makes me feel. And it turns it into:
What do I notice in this soundscape?
What is going on here?
And for me that gets to a deeper understanding of the composer's intention and deeper understanding of the music and in the end I find for myself and for students that they have a much more emotionally profound experience because they have a better understanding of what actually was going on around them.
Jessica: Yeah. Something you and I had talked about before was the idea of comparatives and giving students literally just two things to listen for.
Is it fast or slow?
Is the pitch high or low?
I know that something as educators that we do all the time with our students is wanting them to really listen in the music to what's happening, but I think giving them just those simple comparatives allows them to listen for one or the other without making it so much being thrown at them that they are unsure what to listen for.
Robert: I think that's exactly right. So I've always had the sense that when I create an education program I integrate into the curriculum because I want to compare what kids are learning in school in other areas with music. So that sort of brings them full circle. Makes the world seem a little smaller. A little more understandable. I remember once years ago I was putting together a program for kindergarten through second graders in the state of Ohio. So I was looking through state standards and I couldn't find the exact right curriculum item that I wanted to pair up this concert with and all of a sudden it dawned on me that every section started with compare and contrast this; compare and contrast that. And I realized that art of comparing/contrasting that you're talking about could easily be used if you imagine the orchestra as a giant, manipulative something that the kids could engage with and use to compare and contrast. So I created a concert in which we play a piece with high pitches and a piece with low pitches. And I would stop afterwards and ask the kids to give me words to describe the differences in what they heard and by the way, the similarities.
And we go through that through multiple pairs. I called the program Opposites Attract. And then in the end we would do a piece of music by a composer that used all of those elements, but changed back and forth so all of a sudden the kids were listening to music in terms of comparing and contrasting sections with each other as opposed to just hearing a piece and saying, "Oh that was kind of cool."
Jessica: I like it when they can actually engage with it and describe for themselves what they're hearing and know what to listen for. I love that you did that.
Robert: Well, I'm very much involved. Like I love the idea of Socratic teaching and so even when I'm working with the Houston Symphony and I have 3,000 kids in front of me, I will ask them questions non-stop. And it's funny like sometimes I'll pick kids that are close up so that I can see, but sometimes I'll say, "You in the red shirt in the balcony!" And I've had teachers write in like, "How did you - how could you see that far?" And of course the secret is I can't. I just assume there's some kid up there with a red shirt on and it always kind of works out, but I have had kids and teachers write back to me, "I was in the back of the Hall and you called on me to answer a question," and it, you know, it's a really that kind of engagement with what's going on on the stage I think is really vital.
Jessica: Definitely. I watched your Ted Talk about Active Listening and Our Perception of Time and I loved the part where you got to talking about your dad and you created - well not created for him - but you talked about how he was on his way with you to go listen to a 30 minute premiere of a piece. And he trend to you and said, "What should I listen for?" And so you kind of created this tool chest with four tools - kind of Bob's tools - to share with him about the four areas of rhythm, melody, texture, and visual. That those are kind of these four ways for all of us to listen actively. And I think you talked a little bit about the rhythm already - just kind of comparing it to our heartbeat and is it in line or now, but I wondered if you could touch on those four
Robert: Sure so the way these four screens worked, or tools, is that you listen through one of them and if it's not working for you, put it down and pick up another one. And you just kind of keep alternating through.
So rhythm, as we talked about, is: does it go with your heartbeat or against it?
2) Melody
Melody is: Is it a tune that you could sing? Sometimes melodies by composers, especially modern composers, aren't singable. Or they're not in the instrument you would expect. They're not in the high instrument. You have to listen to the low instrument or the middle instrument.
3) Texture
Texture is my way of describing harmony, which is to say the sort of color that is woven out of the sounds. So when you imagine different instruments have different sounds - the timbres - and you weave those together, it forms sort of a tapestry and as the colors change - as the timbres of the instruments change - so too does the timbre or the color of the tapestry. And so sometimes the composers are not focus on rhythm or on melody. They just are focused on creating this texture. This sort of soundscape
4) Visual
And then the fourth tool is the visual tool and the idea there is that the component of watching a live performance. Seeing the choreography of the bows. Seeing the movement of the percussionist moving around. Seeing people breathing together and moving together. The conductor moving all of that leads to a deeper understanding of the sound world that you're in.
So the idea is with these four tools you pick one up. You put it down. And so my dad did that. With this it was really kind of cool. He came back afterwards backstage and I said, "So what do you think, Dad?" And he said, "It was good. It was great. It was just too short." And I was like, "It was a half an hour. How could dit be too short?" And he said, "Well I just worked my way through the four tools and the piece was over. And I thought... right!?... so I thought this is interesting. My dad was actively engaging with the music, trying to figure it out and kind of exploring and more importantly, was curious to hear the music again so that he could see if what he detected was correct or if he wanted to change it or if he noticed something else. And I think that's the key to success. And that really that's my mantra. That's my key to active listening.
Jessica: Yeah I love breaking it down to simplistic things like 4 tools to look at or 2 comparatives because I think for students as well when they are first interacting with a piece it's helpful to have a starting place and to have something to think of rather than just, "hey we're hearing a 30 minute piece. You'll hear lots of instruments." You know, that it's just too broad.
Robert: It's correct and honestly so when I pick pieces of music for family concerts or education concerts, I pick pieces of music that from the surface, that's to say, from the audience's perspective (not from the inside from the composer's perspective), but from the audience perspective I pick pieces that on the surface have really clear topographies. Really clear shapes and really clear sounds so that the audience can grab onto those things in the easiest way possible. You know you wouldn't start an instrument by playing a major concerto. You start playing a short piece. And so it's the same thing with developing active listening skills.
Jessica: Definitely. Something that you've created recently is this story and you tell this story through music and through visuals and through conducting. And you've called it "Stella's Magical Musical Balloon Ride." And I'd love for you to tell us about how you created the idea of the story and how you put it together.
Robert: So this has been a labor of love and it's been in my mind and on paper actually for over a decade now. So I have done these kinds of education concerts we've been talking about for years and years and one of the concerts I did was A Musical Tour of America. The idea was that there were musical pieces that depicted the topography of certain things like a river or mountains or ocean or Grand Canyon. And it dawned on me that it would be kind of cool if I could tie this together in sort of a story format. Not necessarily for the education concerts, but you know, in a way that kids and their parents could engage with it on their own. And simultaneously twelve years ago my niece Stella was born. And she was the first niece in the family and so she, of course, was doted on to now end and you know she's just adorable. And now she's just a firecrackers and she - even from the beginning - had a sort of a streak in her of like 'I'm going to try that. I'm going to do this.' And so I love that about her. She's kind of brave and she goes for it kind of thing so I thought I'm going to write this book about Stella.
And so in this book... in this story Stella takes a balloon ride and the reason it's magical and musical is because first of all, in one day she goes over the entire United States. But secondly, what happens to Stella is that when she does something special she hears a full symphony in her head. She hears music in her head, which is not unlike me. I have the same experience like, you know, at home I don't listen to a lot of music in the stereo, but I always have music going on in my head, especially when I'm activated by something really unique or interesting. It'll just spark that in my mind. So I thought, well if it happens to me, it must happen to other people too. I can't be the only person that that happens to. So I created this story: Stella's Magical Musical Balloon Ride.
What happens is she gets in a balloon. She goes on a hot air balloon ride. She goes over a river. when she gets over the river, She hears the Moldau by Smetana. She goes over the mountains. She hears Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky. She goes over the ocean. She goes over the Grand Canyon and eventually she comes back home. But what we learn about her is that the night before she had in her dreams imagined this incredible piece and we hear it at the very end. And it is Dvoraks' Ninth Symphony - a bit of the New World Symphony. And so I actually sort of sent it around to some publishers, you know, a decade ago. It just didn't fit anybody's model because you had to have good sound to hear it. You had to have - there are just a lot of components to it and so this is really a product of COVID-19. I was in quarantine. Everything stopped in terms of orchestra performances and I was kind of looking through my things and I was kind of thinking about what I wanted to - what I wanted to come out of this period having done. I stumbled upon Stella again and I thought these would make really good videos for YouTube and so I made five videos so that it's in five parts and each part is a different feature - different piece of music. So for instance, in Part I you meet Stella. She gets to the field where the balloon takes off. She gets up in the balloon. They go up and over the river and she hears the Moldau. So that's Part I.What I added to it in the YouTube video, which I never thought it could happen before, but was a really cool thing to add, was that after she's done - after the story and after you hear the music she heard in her head (which by the way has visuals; has little video vignettes over top of it as thought you were viewing a river from a balloon). The third part is that I teach my listener, which by the way I was going to say kids who listen, but I've actually gotten back feedback already from adults who have conducted with me. I teach people how to conduct the Moldau - the little excerpt that we play and so there's a conducting lesson at the end of each of these five episodes. And so it takes us through this magical musical day of hers: this magical musical balloon ride. And it's super fun and I never thought of them this way, but it all came together and I think my YouTube videos are the perfect platform to get this story across.
Jessica: I love that it took you, you know, over a decade just mulling about it, putting it aside, and then we get to COVID and it always seems like during challenging times that amazing musical things come out of that.
Robert: I think that's true, but I also think for me, and this may just be how I am, I constantly have ideas running through my head and I write them down and make note of them, but most of them I forget about quite frankly. I mean most of them either are not good or not ready or whatever so it's not unusual for me to have ideas swimming around and then they'll pop out decades later. I think that for me that's kind of a normal part of the process. What I really kind of like about these five parts of Stella are the three ways that learners can relate to them. So if you're an auditory learner, if your child is an auditory learner, they can just listen to the story and listen to the music and everything is great. If you're a visual learner, you can listen to the story, but then you can hear the music, but see the visual of what Stella saw. And if you're a body kinesthetic learner, you can do both of those things, but then you can actually learn how to conduct the piece and move your arms around with the piece and so each one of these five episodes has those three contact points for kids of different learnings styles.
Jessica: Yeah even in the fourth video, I think it was when you're conducing in the video at the end and all of a sudden you're like, "Well what is my left hand going to do?" And so you're really showing students, or even like you said, adults as they're watching how to show the smooth - how to show just the contour and the phrasing with your left hand. It's not just simply beating out a 2-pattern with your right hand, but I loved that you went a little further with that to make it like 'this is what I do.'
Robert: Well I think I've always had the philosophy and I feel strongly that kids will learn whatever you put in front of them. I mean they're not... kids will meet whatever expectation you set for them so I set it sky high so that there's plenty of room and somethings they don't set expectations at all. I just, you know, let me see where we can go. And I think that's important, especially when you're somebody lime me who is a conductor of an orchestra is the music that we play is sophisticated. It's big. There's a lot of layers to it and so I have to find a way to build those bridges with my audience because there isn't such a thing as a sort of child's version of a Beethoven Symphony. It just doesn't exist. However, there are components of Beethoven symphonies that are completely accessible and doable and engageable by audiences of all ages.
Jessica: Is there something you look for within - specifically classical music - that would let you know this would be a piece that would really capture the attention of a student or that has a certain element that you can pick out and really help guide students towards? You know, taking what they're used to hearing and then applying it so they have a better understanding of classical music.
Robert: I think that's... I think yes is the answer. There are two elements for pieces that I put in front of students that I think are important. One is if they're programmatic. If they tell a story without words that may help the child get into the music for the first time. The other thing is as if the music has a sense of ABA form because kids are learning that in every way possible. They're learning in their writing. They're learning it. They see it everywhere around them. Then using that sort of ABA form in music is kind of a natural step for them. What I try to avoid is pieces that are sort of super ethereal or super meditative or super like something that somebody with more experience in life would be able to relate to so I try to keep in mind the experiences that my average aged audience would have. And then I try to find pieces that sort of match in that way and that's, by the way to go back to Stella for just a second, how these five pieces were chosen. I've done these things - these pieces hundreds of times over the course of the last 25 years. Doing the same education program in different orchestras in different places and I tried a number of different pieces, but these five pieces I really feel have resonated with that sort of 8-10 year old crowd.
And actually I focus grouped this story. When I first wrote it was really fun. I went around too schools and I said, "Ok I'm going to read you a story that I wrote. So first of all I'm going to be super vulnerable with you. This is my first story that I ever wrote, but secondly I want you to tell me what you think about Stella. Be honest with me and ask me questions." And so I did that and they said things like, "Okay." One girl said, "I have a little bit of a problem with her getting into the hot air balloon with the pilot with our her dad. I'm just not sure that would be safe." And I thought that's a really good point and so I made the pilot super friendly and you know, like just so that she would feel comfortable. But the second thing was I have a thing for polka dots. I don't know why. I think it's what I grew up. My mom used to wear polkadot clothes, right?! So I put Stella in a polka dot dress and I said to some of the people in the class - I said, "Hey so what about this polka dot dress? Is this super like 1990s? Is this old fashioned?" And one of them sat up. She goes, "No that polka dot dress is perfect. That's really cool. We really like the polka dot dress." And everybody was like shaking their head yes and I was like okay. Polka dot dress stays in.
Jessica: Perfect. Now has your niece seen or heard the story?
Robert: So yes. So I read this story to her when I first wrote it. She was like five years old. She doesn't remember anything about it so now she's 12 years old and I sent her the first YouTube video. She called me up 'cause she has her own smartphone and she could just FaceTime me. And she's like, "Uncle Bobby (which is what she calls me - Uncle Bobby) this is cool! and my favorite part is that it says Stella, that's me and dad. It doesn't have his real name so nobody knows that it's my dad."
Jessica: That's great. And where can we find, you know, if we want to see Stella's Magical Musical Balloon Ride or even just learn more about the things that you're doing?
Robert: So there are two ways to do it. First of all, my YouTube page is Robert Franz conductor. It's actually all one word, but if you type in RobertFranz.com on the education page there is a section called Read Along Read Aloud and the reason I called them that - so I definitely read Stella - but I read books that are published for kids and I always put the subtitles in all of them so that kids can read along with me. So it's sort of part of that reading process and I've got about a dozen or so videos on that page. So RobertFranz.com and it's the education page and it's called Read Along Read Along.
Jessica: Well I have really appreciated talking with you and hearing, you know, just how we can better help our students with active listening. Also I hope that teachers will definitely go check out your story and the videos and be encouraged as they use this in their classrooms.
Robert: I hope so too! I would love to hear from them as well so you know just subscribe and send me comments and I will respond. I promise!
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