“Can you say ‘syn-co-pa-tion?’ ” Michael Morgan asked.
“Syn-co-pa-tion!” chorused back a throng of primary school students packed into the Oakland Technical High School auditorium for one of the Oakland East Bay Symphony’s popular Young People’s Concerts. Students from more than 50 East Bay schools attended this one, the second of the morning at Oakland Tech.
Symphony music director Morgan’s lesson on off beats, illustrated first by a performance of Leroy Anderson’s The Syncopated Clock and later by a clap-along account of Dave Brubeck’s tricky seven-beat Unsquare Dance, was tucked into a recent program titled “We’ve Got Rhythm.”
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An interview with Michael Morgan.
The Art of Conducting - Michael Morgan, Conductor, Oakland East Bay Symphony Orchestra from City Centre Digital on Vimeo.
Morgan and his band of 18 players offered a few obvious school-age crowd pleasers: A sing-along “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” served as the example of triple meter. Oakland Tech’s African Dance Class stormed on with drums pounding and hips gyrating at one point. But this was no easy-listening, lowest-common-denominator concert.
“Everything has rhythm,” Morgan told the students. “Your heart has rhythm.” A tender extract from Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings earned close attention. So did a passage from the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.
The school concerts, Morgan said in a post-concert interview at his Oakland apartment, “are the most important thing we’re going to do all year. Becoming familiar and comfortable with symphonic music, with classical music, at an early age can go on to be a rich part of people’s lives.”
Anyone who has followed his tenure at the helm of the Oakland East Bay Symphony would know Morgan wasn’t mouthing a platitude. He said what he said, as he does about everything from his own evolution as a conductor to his preference for the single life (“I don’t play well with others”), because he means it. And the organization backs him up on the importance of playing to the young. One third of the budget goes to education.
Thinking About the Audience
As Morgan prepares for his orchestra’s 25th anniversary season, which opens with a November 8 concert at the Paramount Theatre, he exudes a blend of serenity, self-assurance, and self-awareness that can only come with experience and maturity. His own silver anniversary with OEBS arrives next year. “So I get to celebrate twice,” he said, flashing one of the wide, ingratiating smiles he often displays during his remarks to the audience from the podium.
“We program in ways that are both interesting to us as artists and to our audiences, while always looking to bring in new people and get them to sit together.” - Music Director Michael Morgan
Morgan’s genuine desire to connect to the public drives his musical choices. “We program in ways that are both interesting to us as artists and, hopefully, to our audiences, while always looking to bring in new people and get them to sit together,” he said The new season, which both celebrates the orchestra’s legacy and turns outward in various ways, affirms Morgan’s core principles. “Michael has molded this organization,” said new Executive Director Steve Payne, “with the unique perspective of the role it plays in the community. This orchestra is built on his vision of what music can do.”
In addition to bicentennial tributes to Verdi and Wagner, the season opener features Mason Bates’ electronically powered Mothership and Aaron Copland’s rustic Appalachian Spring, the first piece Morgan conducted as OEBS music director in 1990. Other season highlights include a holiday program with four new commissioned gospel works, performed by a variety of East Bay choirs; a Mary Fineman song cycle premiere; staples like Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7; a boundary-stretching “Notes from India” evening with works by Ravi Shankar along with a Juhi Bansai world premiere; and a season finale of the Berlioz Requiem.
“We’re always looking for ways to show people from different communities that this orchestra is theirs, too,” Morgan said. Previous “Notes From” concerts have spotlighted music from the Middle East, Armenia, and the Philippines, among others.
Morgan, 56, has grown more and more comfortable thinking and planning outside the symphonic box over the years. He’s mounted impressive semi-staged concerts of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and Stephen Sondheim’s daunting Follies. High on his wish list for future collaborators are Broadway and opera composer Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Pippin) and local boy-wonder-made-good Darren Criss, from TV’s Glee. Carlos Santana, added Morgan, always has a home away from home with the OEBS.
Unusual things often happen, Morgan knows, in unusual ways. “You can’t go through the agent,” he said. “You have to find a way to the artist directly. The challenge is making the connection.”
The Morgan Style
Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Morgan was a fast starter. He began conducting at age 12, studied with Gunther Schuller and Seiji Ozawa as an Oberlin Conservatory student at Tanglewood, won an international competition at 23, and made his operatic debut with the Vienna State Opera in 1982. Georg Solti tapped him as assistant conductor for the Chicago Symphony in 1986, a post he held for five years before coming to Oakland.
“To the extent that I have a conducting style,” Morgan said with a twinkle, “you could say I’ve been doing the longest Solti impression you’ve ever seen. There’s probably lots of Bernstein in there, too.” Mentors can cast long shadows. Morgan avoided Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, which he first studied with Bernstein, until 10 years after his teacher was dead.
With the source material out of the way, Morgan offered some more probing self-analysis. “In my mid-50s, I fairly consistently have something to say about the works I conduct. That’s very different from knowing how things go.”
Morgan recalled, with a slight shudder, a Mendelssohn “Scottish” Symphony he conducted at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “A decade later I wanted to send an apology.” Morgan now believes that musical ripening “does not happen until the 50s. That’s when you start to see where everything from balance to phrasing to even the style of playing fits together.”
Morgan believes he’s gotten away from “being so literal about what’s on the page.” He favors more rounded attacks and less vibrato than he did in the past. Noting the higher profile of brass and woodwinds in some orchestras, Morgan described his approach: “I can’t imagine an orchestral sound that is not based almost entirely on what the strings sound like.”
“We’re not in a golden age of conducting. People don’t stay with an orchestra long enough to develop a rapport.” - Michael Morgan
Glancing at the baby grand piano across the room, he credited his own chamber music playing as a freeing influence. “I’ve started to approach the orchestra as something you play, like a piano. Technical perfection has made everyone sound like everyone else.” The freelance players in the OEBS, he added, are eager to take on works they’ve played repeatedly in freshly conceived ways.
“We’re not in a golden age of conducting,” said Morgan. “People don’t stay with an orchestra long enough to develop a rapport.”
Morgan has no plans of moving on as his own 25th year in Oakland approaches. But he’s anything but hermetically sealed here. He conducts others ensembles — the Alabama and Atlanta symphony orchestras are particular favorites — and has other interests. He follows politics “at every level” and is a devoted watcher of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. His Twitter account goes unused. “I just don’t think I’m that interesting.”
Emerging from administrative changes, the orchestra is facing its first shortfall after 19 years of balanced budgets. “It’s something we need to pay attention to,” said Steve Payne. “We’ve just gone through a major transition. Plus we’re still feeling the lag effect from the economic downturn.” The structural merging of the OEBS with the Oakland Symphony Chorus and Oakland Youth Orchestra poses additional challenges.
Morgan cheerfully concedes that orchestras are “a terrible business model. There’s no government backing to speak of. The aristocracy has always had to support it.” An overly optimistic labor contract, signed just before the recession, has complicated matters in Oakland.
But none of that seems to dampen his spirits. “When you do something unusual and authentic, the audience will come along with you.”