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Please welcome, Bruce Coppock.
Thank you, President Kardan, Provost Daly, ladies and gentlemen of the Board of Directors,
distinguished members of the faculty, but most importantly, you guys, the members of
the Colburn School's Class of 2016. It's an honor to be here today to
congratulate you on your accomplishments. It's no simple feat, and I'm sure that each
of you appreciates that without the tremendous support of your families and
the commitment and guidance of your teachers, you couldn't have found
yourselves here today. Not just the faculty who taught you at Coburn, but all
of those who from the very beginning of your studies at age four or five
invested in you and helped you find your way. Please never forget the debt of
gratitude you have to all those people. Please never forget that without the
superior early training you received, your teachers at Coburn wouldn't have
had the opportunity to mold you into the burgeoning artists you are today. It's my
fervent hope that you will forever thank the people behind the scenes who formed
the extraordinary network of support that's gotten here you here today. Let's
remember the leadership of Richard Colburn in making the visionary gift to
make this school possible and the noble men and women of the school's board of
directors and administration who brought that vision to life in 10 short years.
You are the beneficiaries of others' tremendous generosity and passion for
giving young musicians the best possible training. Humility before the efforts of
those who helped you
is a great place to start our conversation today. Of course, each of you
deserves all kinds of praise and credit for having to gift, the grit, and the
capacity for hard work that makes you the highly accomplished musicians you've
become.
You are among the elite few who had the wherewithal, the focus, and the determination
to gain acceptance into Colburn and to make it through its rigorous curriculum.
So while I hope you always show deep on-going humility before all those who
supported you, you must always take enormous pride in having reached this
moment of transition in your lives. Benjamin, your story of your vulnerability gives
me great hope for the future of classical music—some inspiring story. And
Jena, your generosity of spirit is equally deeply inspiring. It makes me
feel as if I almost have nothing more to say to you today.
It's been my great fortune to thrive in the classical music business for over 40
years. It's been a wonderful journey, but whether it feels like a wonderful
journey or unending misery is a choice each of us has to make daily weekly and
yearly. I've had the pleasure and honor of playing with and working with
musicians at every level in the classical music world: musicians who
struggled to literally to put one note after the next; musicians who live at the
very highest levels of classical music at the international level; and every
level in between. I've learned a lot from all those encounters from terrible
mistakes I've made and from continually trying to improve. I'm grateful for the
chance to share a bit of that with you today. I don't want to spend a lot of
your time today talking about the world of orchestras except to say how proud I
am of the work we did at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra to create a far more
egalitarian and musician-driven culture. In my work over the past 25 years
leading two orchestras, the Saint Louis Symphony and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra,
as Sel said the dominant theme of my work has been to empower musicians in
the orchestra to take leadership roles not just in orchestra politics or union
negotiations,
although that's very important, but in the artistic life of the
orchestras, and even more importantly, in their own artistic well-being. My
commitment to trying to make musicians lives more vibrant got me in a lot of
trouble over the years. But in St. Paul after 15 years of struggle, difficult and
pitched battles within the orchestra, I'm very proud to say that the artistic
affairs of the SPCO are now completely in the hands of its musicians. First we
eliminated the position of Music Director, which made a lot of people very upset
especially conductors. Over time the SPCO has become virtually conductor-less of
conductors only involved for big projects like the St. Matthew Passion.
Everything else is either led by SPCO musicians or by one of its six artistic
partners, each of whom spends three or four weeks a year at the SPCO. Artistic
partners are chosen for the distinctiveness and imagination of their
own playing and their chemistry with musicians of the SPCO. People like the
Swedish clarinetist Martin Frost, the German pianist Christian Zacharias,
and the Moldovan phenomenon violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja among others. With those
people, concerts have become love fests for musicians and audiences alike. So the
musicians more or less control everything from who becomes a member, the
programming, the ratio of rehearsal time to number of concerts, who appears as a
guest, and most importantly, the preparation and interpretation of the
music. We could spend all day talking about the challenges of musician
self-governance, but that's for another time
the culmination of this work to put musicians in charge of their own
artistic affairs came concurrently with my retirement last December when we
formally transferred all of my artistic responsibilities and authorities out of
the Executive Office and into a newly created position of artistic director
now held,
and to be forever held, with the enthusiastic support of his colleagues by Kyu-Young Kim,
the SPCO's principal second violinist. Why Kyu earned the support of his
colleagues, the confidence of the Board, and the confidence of the international
and artistic business structure of the classical music world is what I want to
talk to you about today. Of course, he plays extremely well and is a highly
accomplished chamber musician. That's not why he got the job. He got the job
because of superior interpersonal skills, unending intellectual and musical
curiosity, and above all a ravenous interest in the wider music world of
music. And finally his humility—his willingness to submit himself to a huge
learning curve working with me over the past two and a half years getting
himself ready for the job. It was deeply impressive. Imagine a sitting member of a
major American orchestra who is its artistic director. It's truly a new day.
I started off with the story of Kyu, because I want to talk to you very
seriously about aspects of your upcoming careers that are crucially important and
which I don't believe get the attention that they deserve. What I'm about to say
may make you uncomfortable, but it's really, really important. I have to tell you that
there's nearly zero correlation between how well you play, how much adulation you
receive, and how you'll feel about your place in the world. And there's nearly no
correlation between how much money you earn, how famous you are, and how content
you are. We're a culture teeming with supremely accomplished musicians and yet
so many of those same musicians—brilliant musicians—
struggle mightily with the entirely human issues of self-respect, interpersonal
relationships, generosity of spirit, and fundamental emotional health and
happiness.
Those are the qualities that got Kyu the position of artistic director of the
SPCO. The truth is that playing extremely well is an absolute requirement, but on
it's own, it's an utterly insufficient set of skills to make a full career. So two
main aspects of this, one entirely personal and one completely
interpersonal. Your own well-being during your careers in music will be far more
determined by the healthiness of your relationship with music itself, your
humility before the challenge of being a musician, and anything else. People with
humility, unremitting intellectual and artistic curiosity, and thirst for
knowledge; people who understand that there is far more to know than they
themselves already know—those are the people who end up with satisfying
careers and you have something meaningful to say to audiences. That's
the self-care part. Then there's the interpersonal part, the diplomatic skills,
the ability to celebrate and learn from other successes, the leadership skills to
turn your own ideas into reality that makes the difference between musicians
who are in control of their destiny and those who simultaneously feel entitled
and powerless to change their own circumstances. There are many things you
won't have control over in the coming years and decades. Whether you win an
audition across the street or big competition across the pond; whether you play
as well as the person next to you or become as famous as they do; whether
someone runs a red light
and smashes your hand—just happened to be 27 years ago—whether you're diagnosed with
a life-threatening disease in middle age and all kinds of other life-altering
events. You can't control any of that.
I'm sorry to say, but there's lots you can control. In fact there's far more
that you can control than the stuff you can't. That's where your work begins
today, and it's the work you must do for the rest of your lives. It's about the choices
you make and the attitude you bring to your lives as musicians and as people
every day. You can control whether you remain curious about the world of music
and musicians. You can control whether you're in love with music and love with the
process of being a musician or in love with the rather elusive idea of being
famous. You can control whether you continue to grow as artists or whether
you rest on your various laurels. You can control whether you wait for the world
to come to you or whether you step out and embrace a world of possibilities.
You can control how you deal with the inevitable upsets and equally
importantly, you can control how measured you are in understanding the temporal
meaning of your many inevitable successes. You can control whether you
understand that the work before you is to sculpt your own life in music. This reminds
me of an old Chinese proverb that I've lived by and lived with for the last
forty years. The proverb goes: "A peasant must stand on a hillside for a long time
with his mouth open before a roast duck flies in."
In other words, it won't be served up to you on a platter. You'll need to go out
and cook it.
Many of us, who've had the good fortune to be successful, will volunteer that luck
had a lot to do with it, but it's hard to know in life what constitutes luck. How
was I to know that breaking my left hand in a car accident became a
transformational moment in my life
opening up a world of possibilities in music and my own personal development
and my professional career. Sure didn't feel like luck sitting in the emergency
room with a scalpel-happy surgeon trying to operate on my hand. So when I found
the right one, and he reconstructed my hand, he had a very interesting answer
for my most obvious question, which was will I ever be able to play the cello
again. He answered it with a fundamental challenge about personal choices. Said,
"Bruce, I can't guarantee you'll ever be able to play the cello again, but I can
absolutely guarantee that if you don't assiduously and faithfully do the
physical therapy I'm about to prescribe, you definitely won't ever play the cello."
It's your choice. He proceeded to outline a regimen of alternating hours of
exertion and soaking my hand, a two-hour sequence repeated six times daily. Those
12 hours daily not only healed my hand, but taught me more about life,
the value of grit, and the power of choices than anything I ever learned from formal
training. When after four months of the daily 12 hour ritual, I could finally
touch my fingertips to my palm. It was as great a joy as you can imagine. How
could I have known how lucky I was to be able to participate in such a completely
transformational experience. We just never know. My little 12 hour daily
routine provided ample time, believe me, for reflection about the cello, about music,
about my career.
What's really important, because the stakes felt little very high, I had to
very small children.
It turned out that a broken hand opened up a world of possibility,
a world of creativity, and the opportunity to function at a far higher
level of accomplishment in the world of orchestra leadership than I ever had as
a cellist—despite having maintained a perfectly decent career as a cellist
to Boston for twenty years. So why am I boring you with this personal story? Well,
it's because it's a lens on the critical importance of what attitude you choose
to bring to the path ahead. You're entering the profession at a very
interesting time. Whether you thrive will depend in large measure on a whole range
of skills you probably weren't taught in the studio, in theory class, or in your
chamber music coachings, nor should you have been if you're lucky enough to win
that job across the street, or you found a quartet, or you were
chosen for a teaching position, or if you develop a portfolio career. The
difference between whether you find yourself content, engaged, and musically
alive at age 50—let alone 70—will have far more to do with your relationship to music to itself
and how you navigate the tricky waters of the intense personalities around you
than it will depend on how you play. Your contentment will depend on your
leadership skills, your idealism, how vigorously you tend to your own garden
of love for music, and the self-care you show in maintaining your own artistic
identity. Only you can create a firewall between cynicism and idealism. If you
don't learn to protect your passion and your love for the journey of being a
musician, the music world could swallow you up. Please, please don't let that
happen. Over the years I've worked on a little list of ideas to work by, terribly
simplistic, but the result of years of observation,
terrible mistakes I've made, and the odd success. It keeps me headed in a
positive direction.
Here's my list, and I challenge you to develop one over your careers for
yourselves. Love of music, no matter where and in what form you're engaged with it.
Musical and intellectual curiosity. Being inspired by those who are better than
you and gracious to those less accomplished than you. Focus, grit,
determination, honesty even in the face of discomfort. Seeing opportunity and
possibility
where obstacles appear. No cynicism, no self-promotion, and no self pity. In a
commencement address
ten years ago, Stephen Colbert said the most insightful thing. He said:
Cynicism—you think this is gonna be funny, but it's actually quite serious—
cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it's the farthest thing from it, because cynics
don't learn anything; because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of
the world; because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. The great
German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, in his letters to a young poet also
provided profound advice, highly relevant to how you craft your futures. Rilke
wrote: "Don't search for the answers which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them. Live the questions now. Perhaps
then, someday far in the future, you will gradually
without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. So celebrate
your enormous good fortune to have had the opportunity to study in this
wonderful culture of learning. Use your gift to be evangelists for this music we
all believe in and love so passionately. Most of all, find a way to remember that
your leading your lives making music is a privilege, not an entitlement, and be
happy and grateful that doing it is something only you can work on. If you do
the work, you'll have a lot more fun that way. I guarantee it. I wish you all the
best, and thank you for the opportunity to be here today.
Bruce, thank you so much for being here with those inspirational remarks
and we know that you're going to continue to be a force in our field.
And your love of music is what comes through
everything you've done in your career, and I know that will continue to be your driving force
and so it's a great pleasure to present you with an award as our keynote speaker at the 2016
Commencement. Thank you, Bruce Coppock.