Nicole Paiement: Artistic Director and Conductor

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Foreign.

I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. Today's remarkable guest is Nicole Peima. She is the remarkable conductor who focuses on contemporary music and opera. She is the founder and Executive Artistic Director of San Francisco's Opera Parallel. She receives her Doctor of Musical Arts from the Eastman School of Music. Nicole has served as the Artistic Director of the Blueprint Project at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and as the Director of Ensembles at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She also received the UCSC Eminent Professor Award in 2014. Nicole has conducted many premiere works around the globe. Some of her past work include Peter Maxwell Davies 1979 thriller The Lighthouse, the groundbreaking film Project Everest, and Jake Heggies Dead Man Walking. Nicole's chamber opera performance of the Lighthouse marked only the second time in the 54 year history of the Dallas Opera that a woman conductor took the podium. She was awarded the Champion of New Music Award in 2016 by the American Composers Forum for her outstanding contributions to contemporary music. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. And now here is the remarkable Nicole Peima. If you hear someone play for about 30 seconds, have you already made up your mind? Can you tell at that point that.

Quickly you were talking about playing an instrument? A musical instrument? Yes, it takes more than 30 seconds to really grasp an individual because some of the finest players pace themselves in terms of how they get really into who they really are. 30 seconds is not enough. You can get a very superficial picture of perhaps what that artist is. But I think it takes longer than that to really grasp their artistic soul, which is much deeper than just their skills.

Do you think that great musicians are gifted or they work harder? What separates a great musician from a mediocre one?

You definitely have to have talent. That has to be the basic of that talent is not enough to really make it in the career of being a musician. The talent is the foundation of who you are as an artist. But I think if you rely strictly on the talent, it will be very, very difficult for you unless you're one of those very fortunate person that meets the right person who will basically take you and guide you in that way. And even with that, it takes a lot of work to develop that talent. It's just like a garden. You can have really good earth in, but if you don't plant and work the soil and continue to enrich it, the earth will just at one point be there and not really go to fruition. So a talent is the seed. The work develops it in some way. So you need both. But hard work alone will not make you great, and neither will the strict talent.

Showing more of my ignorance of music. So, as a conductor, when you look at a score, do you hear it in your head? What happens when you see a sheet of music?

I think every conductor is very different. And my goal when I look at a score is to basically figure out a little bit, like if I was looking at a blueprint for an architect, seeing the structure and seeing how it's built and how I'm going to basically create that. That building of sound. For me, it's a sound building. It's not a structure. It's a musical structure. So I sit at my table and I start by hearing the basic sound forms of it. But yes, I sit down and then I start really slowly working through the pages. And it's like reading a book. I start to hear different things. There's different technique of dep. It depends a lot on the kind of score it is. If it's a very dense score. This morning I was working on a score that was extremely dense. So I. I had done this first initial reading of just looking at it and hearing a general kind of mixed sound. And now I started to go line by line and hearing how this line goes with this line. And yes, I get familiarized with the score and I hear it in my mind, especially when it's a new score, if it's an older score that I've heard before, it's very different. I'll read it. And I hear it already because I've heard it before outside my mind. And then it's a matter of rehearing it, hearing it the way I want to interpret it, which is a very different work than hearing a piece for the first time. Creating a piece for the first time, which is, you know, you've never heard it outside your own self. And you learn it, you learn to hear it that way. It just depends on what kind of score. But generally, yes, a conductor would sit and look at the score, and just like reading a book, you'd be reading that page and hearing them. You know, when you read a book, you understand the words in your mind, when you understand the notes. And it creates a different kind of language, but a language in your brain.

When you look at a score or when a conductor looks at a score that has been played thousands of times before, what is there to imagine? I mean, isn't it cut and dried? It's there, it's notated. What's. What's happening here?

That's such a good question. Because a piece of stays alive, but it moves in time. So a work that was performed by Mozart or Beethoven, that we all know that was performed centuries ago, lived at that time in a very specific world, a world where pacing was in a specific way. How people moved, what kind of call we had, what how people were. And we forget to think that musical works are living things really. So as they moved through time, if I'm performing Mozart now, the tempos I will choose to do, the contrast of loud and soft. All these things are dependent on our society today. What, how we are. You know, there was a period where I actually wondered. I was going through a phase where I saw myself looking for transparency and science. Most scores that are dense, Romantic period music. And I was striving for a lot of transparency. And I started to wonder if I was not influenced by this big lean period that there was in the 90s of a lot of lean architecture, lean cuisine, lean, all kinds of things. And I thought, I'm being influenced on presenting these pieces with the colors of today. And it made me realize how these pieces say different things today to our world. And we have to find what they have to say to move the people of today. If we were to interpret them as they were interpreted in the 19th century, I don't think they would resonate, and they have to resonate to today. And you also, on Top of that, every conductor will look at a score. It's like reading a poem. If you read a poem, you interpret it. You will find the words that move you in that, and you'll emphasize that word. You'll pace that phrase differently. You'll find the meaning of it perhaps differently than someone else was reading that poem. Well, the same thing with the score. I'll read the score and I'll decide, oh, there's not going to be a breath in that whole page. It's going to go so long that people are going to feel breathless at the end of that long melody. Other times you could decide to make it shorter. All these choices that perhaps you're not aware when you're listening to music, but a conductor thinks about to give it to the audience.

And so when somebody says, oh, that's Mozart's fifth, it's not that cut and dried. So you're saying, when Mozart played it, and when you Hear it today, 2021, would you even recognize it? How different is it?

It's not that different. It's, you know, as I said, a poem is a really perfect example of that. You will recognize that it's a poem from Baudelaire. But first of all, the message, the emotion that comes out of it will be of reading it today. It'll be contemporary, but also, just because of how I'm going to read it will give it my stamp. My way of dealing with this language and my stamp is influenced by my life, my society, by where I live, by the way that I'm in the 21st century and not in the century. But of course, you would recognize that the way of playing instruments has changed a great deal. The way, the kind of bow, the kind of violins that were there, all these. The sound of these instruments were very different than they are today. So even just that, it's like different colors of paint. Green existed, but perhaps green will be different, a little different. Now. All these things influence the sound of the piece. And so it will have, yes, the same words like a poem, but it will just have a different feel for.

Someone like me with a tech background, that is just so the opposite. If you were to write a computer program, you want it to execute the same way every time for the next 200 years. You're not looking for some conductor to put their spin on how the code executes.

That's true. Except that you perhaps will hope that your code will influence something new. Right? That something will come out of it. And I think that in that way, the music of the path influenced new instruments. They say, oh, this was so hard to play. But if we change this instrument and gave it an extension, let's say, for the double bass, we could get those low notes so much easier or, you know, these kinds of things. So your programming will influence new development, probably in music, it will influence other composers. What I think is most important is that the music of the cast influences new composers to write. It's a lineage. We don't write in a vacuum. And you don't create code in a vacuum. You come from what was done before, and you're building on that. Composers, you know, build on what from the path and try to surpass what was done before and move it along.

Okay, backing up a little bit. What exactly does a conductor do?

Guy? There are so many people who do not know, and they think we're just up there moving our arms and that everything could be done without. And it depends again, if you're conducting a symphonic work or if you're conducting a choral work or if you're conducting an opera, that will vary. But in a general role, what we're doing is that first we study a score and we have a precise idea of how this piece holds together. Just like a blueprint, like someone that is a contractor and goes on the territory and sees, okay, this is how we're going to build this building. So we enter the space on the podium, understanding the whole structure. Musicians in the orchestra have their one line. They read one line out of your score, and you have 40, 50 lines in your score that you're reading vertically at the same time as horizontally. So you have all the information. They have very small part of the information. So you're putting all of this information together so that the walls are put at the right place and that we all have the same door. We breathe at the time, same, same place. Same thing as building a building. So that's the basic thing that you do. You cue people and say, ah, this, this. You enter here in that moment here, you. You need to play a lot softer so we can hear this instrument. Who has the melody? Oh, here we have to move faster. So this is the pacing. I'm giving you the pulse. So everyone's moving at the same tempo, same fast. So there's speed, there's color, there's texture. All these things you give through your body. There's basic kind of body language that you do to give that information to 75 musicians that are sitting there in front of you and that need someone to guide that. But for me, also which is very important. And not all conductors would necessarily say that, but I like to think that I help them listen to each other more by my gesture, by saying, okay, here, right now, there's something crucial that's happening in the violas. And my gesture to everyone will be to focus on, let's listen to this right now and react to this and help people react so that it becomes very spontaneous rather than planned. And that's where it's different than a blueprint. Because if you're building a building, you're not spontaneously saying, oh, let's add a window here. I think it would be nice. You just follow the plan, as I like to have a plan so that I can get out of the plan. And then depending on how we're all working together, what would be the best for someone to understand what a conductor does is to sit into a rehearsal and to watch a conductor work. Because at the concert, that kind of work is done. You're still going to try to deepen those ideas and push those. But these ideas have been established in rehearsals. We have gotten to know the tempo, how fast we want to move, how soft we want to play. All these things have been put into play. We fixed the wrong notes. If there were any problems in the. You know, if you're doing a new work, often you'll hear there's a mistake here. This should be a G sharp. So we fixed everything. So by the time you get to the concert, it's a very different thing. The audience sees the final results, which I'm just basically now reminding everyone of that, hopefully, unless there's a train wreck and then you try to fix it.

And what took you down the path of becoming a conductor as opposed to a musician?

You have wonderful questions. You have to be a musician, of course, to be a conductor. But not every great musician can be a conductor. But you cannot be a conductor if you're not a good musician. So it's in a one direction. It's very rare that you will decide when you're six years old that you're going to be a conductor. And I know people say, oh, that person knew when he was 6 years old that he was going to be or was going to be a conductor. Maybe. But it takes this process of deepening your knowledge to understand that you want to go beyond just being the sole interpreter of that instrument. That line. You want to make your instrument a much more complex instrument. Because for me, my instrument now is the orchestra or is orchestra and singers when I do opera. So it's Developing that and saying, you know, I'm feeling limited with just the instrument that I have. I'd love to get these colors. So that first element attracted me a great deal. Obviously, I'm very attracted to architecture and building that. And I really thought when I was starting to be advanced enough to really study scores, I thought, it's really like looking at a blueprint. I can really decide where the pillars are going to be, what this room is going to be like. And I started to think I could maybe blend both of my love for architecture and music by becoming a conductor. And then there's also the idea that there's a great feeling of collaboration when you're on that podium, if you're willing to go there. And I know you love the water and you love the waves. You like to surf. Well, conducting has that element. It's dangerous. And I was attracted to pushing my. Pushing my. My capacity as a musician to a more dangerous place where you're needing to take even more risk because your instrument is bigger. So I kind of liked that also. And also I think the biggest thing is that I was so attracted to working with living composers and putting my stamp on new repertoire of the centuries with I am a pianist, you know, it's much more limiting in terms of the impact that you can give to the repertoire of the 21st century if you're just with one instrument. So there was a lot of reason for it. Sometimes I wish that I had. Not because it's very challenging, but it's also very exhilarating.

In business terms, you have made the transition from being an individual contributor to being management.

Good management requires leadership. Not only leadership, but also passionate leadership so that you inspire. But, yeah, in a way, you could think of it that way, that it becomes a way to basically expand your company, expand how you work within your field.

Do any sports team analogies work? Are you the coach, the general manager?

Yes, you could think of it that way. First of all, often I feel it's not necessarily a team sport, but swimming, which actually I'm an avid. I love swimming myself. I think of swimming in that when you're swimming, you have to have that movement, that constant movement and that breath. And when I'm conducting, there's. For me, there's an element of being in water and swimming with the sound and the density of the water. And I really relate to my arms moving into the density of water to create warm tone and all of that. So there is that in terms of my own physique when I'm conducting But a good coach, though I'm not an expert, I love sports, but I mostly do individual sport, not a lot of team sport. But I could see that the idea of a good coach understand their strong players, understands when to use the strong players in the forefront, understands the balance between when the people are getting tired and when they need a rest. All this dynamic that you have in rehearsal, in a practice, when you're in sports, you have to have that rehearsal technique, being on the podium. Going back to your question of not every musician can be a conductor. This idea of having the capacity to have empathy, but also understanding a group and saying, okay, right now they're getting tired. We need to do this, that will bring back the energy or this is a very good player. I need to take advantage of that strength in that play to bring all the woodwinds into that same dynamic. Just like any sports, I think the orchestra is as strong as its weakest player. So you need to make sure that you build strength in all of the participants. So there is a lot of analogy between sports and orchestra. You need to be in shape to play these instruments.

Do you make hiring and firing decisions on the members of the orchestra?

Yes, I do.

And what do you look for?

I look for professionalism, of course, talent. They're not going to be hired if they cannot perform. But once, assuming that they have the capacity to do the job and if you're hiring them for a specific position. For me, it's a lot about professionalism, respect of others, because you're working in a team and you need to have that. If to work, we have to have respect and also capacity to grow again. It's very similar to being in any company, you know, going into a rehearsal, open minded, that instead of saying, I have played this piece five times. This is how it's supposed to go. And I like it this way. If I decide we're going to actually slow this moment down a great deal. And actually, rather than giving the line of the violin, the major line that you'll hear in the texture, I'd like to bring out the bassoon counter melody because I think it'll make it interesting having someone say, oh, okay, I'll play softer here. Because, you know, having that kind of willingness to grow with a piece that they've played before is an indication that someone is open minded and wants to make art. Not just recreate something, but create something new. Creating rather than recreating as an artist is very important. So I look for that a lot.

And at the level that you live In. Are all the members of the orchestra superstars, or are there still people who just stand out? There's this one cello player that's clearly just better than everybody else. Or is that everybody's at that level already?

It depends a lot. I conduct in various places, so I wear many hats in the group that I hire for, let's say, for opera parallel. They're all very strong players. I love to also help young musicians that really need that final opportunity to make their career bloom. And they might not yet be at that level of the first chair of the orchestra because it's, you know, it's a hierarchy. The first chairs have a leadership and have a way of playing that helps the other people in their. If we're talking about string players, there will be, let's say, 12 first violin, the concert master, or the principal second or something. They're not necessarily better on their instrument than the person sitting right beside them, but they have a different kind of leadership in their playing that will help the others play at their best. I will be very excited often to bring in players that are slightly almost there yet. But that will benefit, will grow from that experience and will bring a different kind of energy, will remind everyone that at one point they were there. So, yes, they're all people that have great talent, great capacity of their instruments. But there will be at times, in orchestras, like super superstars on one instrument. And you go as a guest conductor, you arrive, everyone plays beautifully, but all of a sudden there's a solo for the first horn, let's say. And that first horn plays, and you think, oh, my God, that is an amazing sound. And you see that person so different, and it could. And it can be just that in that piece, that person rises to it, too. But generally speaking, everyone has attained a very high level.

Now, there have been many places where you were a guest conductor. So explain that to me, because you show up in Dallas and you inherit the crew, and off you go. How does that work? You're not building your own team. You're given a team, and you just have to make do with it.

Exactly. It's like you. You're a great coach of this baseball team, and all of a sudden you arrive and you have to go work with this other team and play a set or a series, because that's what it is. It's a very different skill because you don't have that relationship. You have to first build that relationship when you get there very quickly. Like right now, I'm going to Italy to do an orchestra concert. I will have three rehearsals and then the concert. I will not get to create a relationship with this Italian orchestra. And so it depends on how long you go as a guest conductor. When you're going to do a production of an opera, you have the luxury because of the staging and because of the complexity of an opera, you're there for five to two months. Or actually next fall I'll be two and a half months in London. So it depends on how long the production is. But for orchestra, the very short time. So depending on the length, you have to just put on your acceleration. But you have different goals. You have the goals perhaps a little more precise. Just like if you have a baseball team, you want to have them win that game, you want them to play at their best for that set. Because your impact will not be as long term. You can't build and start feeling as if you were if it was your own team. So I go there, I analyze very quickly in the first rehearsal what the strength of the orchestra is, how I'm going to make them better for the project we have in hand. I find the strong links. I identify that right away. And then I focus really on just creating that piece rather than in the long term relationship of building a product together in the long term. Which you would do if you're managing a company or if it's my own opera company. Very different.

I would ask you every once in a while. Maybe it's because you're a conductor and you're so used to waving your hands with a baton.

I use my hand a lot.

Yeah, you hit your microphone. So there's a click. Just FYI. I'll explain that in the podcast because that's actually a funny story. I want you to explain to me the concept of what does quote opera for our time mean?

So you're taking that from our website what it means? It means that it's opera that that will represent what right now people would enjoy seeing when they go into the theater. Just like this restaurant would say, food for our time. You know, it used to be that Jell O was popular. Now we don't expect that in a restaurant. Right. We expect something else. So it's not food for our time, it's opera for our time. It will be something that we'll be able to relate to it when we sit in there. We will enjoy it because it makes us feel comfortable that it's from our time.

If I may be somewhat of a devil's advocate, again showing my ignorance, but to me, the experience of opera is Something like, I want you to go to a performance that's going to be several hours long in a language you do not speak, so you have no idea what's happening. This would be like saying to me, guy, would you like to attend a TED Talk in Russian for four hours? And I would say, no, I have no idea what you're talking about. So on the other hand, I saw a pretty woman and I saw Richard Gere saying, you know, opera just. It moves your soul no matter what language. But how do you expect people.

If.

You expect people to appreciate opera when it's in a language that many people don't understand what's going on at all?

Well, first of all, this is why opera parallel exists and why we say opera for our time, because you have to be initiated first. And so the operas we do are generally a maximum of 90 minutes, so an hour and a half, sometimes even no intermission. So you go in, you can bring a glass of wine if you want, you sit down and you watch the opera. Generally, it's in English. If it's. The very few operas that we do in other languages would have supertitles. But generally speaking, we try to find operas that are in the language of the people that live in that community, then the story that we tell is a story, not necessarily of something that happened in the 16th century, but something that has a quality anyway, that will relate to stories of today. And if it's not exactly of today, it'll be staged in a way, visually in the spectacle will look like the aesthetic of today. It'll be modern, it'll use technology. So you'll feel very at home in that environment, and you'll feel that you're watching a spectacle. I'm not going to say it's like Cirque du Soleil, but why is Cirque du Soleil so popular is that they took the circus and they brought elements of today to it. Circus was always popular, but there's something very vibrant about something like that. We are bringing that kind of aesthetic and modern aesthetic to opera. It's just like if you go to the restaurant and you don't think you like fish, you don't start with necessarily raw octopus. You might start with something that is a little less. And then later on you'll say, well, maybe I'll try this, maybe I'll try something else. And the same. In that same way, people might like pretty women, decide to go and hear operas of the past and be more than comfortable with hearing perhaps a language they don't understand. Because it's just pretty music. But they will love still the spectacle. But they will have been initiated to that. But in order for that initiation to happen, it's our responsibility to keep it modern and to keep the door open so that people like you will come and say, oh, is that opera? I love opera. I didn't think this was opera. The problem is starting at the wrong place. When I started to do mountain biking, I did the mistake the first time I had my bike of going into the Santa Cruz mountain and having one of the steepest mountain to climb without really understanding how to do the gears and all of that. And I think thought when I got to the top, I hate mountain biking and I'm a cyclist. I cycle all over in countries do cycling trips and that. And that's because I had decided on the wrong hill to climb for that first time. It's the same with opera. You have to start with the right kind of hills to climb to love it. And that's why we created Opera Parallel. It's really to demystify it for people to go and say, oh, maybe I should try this more. So that's what we do.

Up next on Remarkable People. What is Opera for Dummies? If it's not going to be one of our operas, then the one you should go listen to or see is what. I'm part of the HubSpot Podcast Network and I want to explain some of the benefits of being a HubSpot customer. First of all, to truly understand HubSpot you have to be customer centric. So what does that mean? It means building and growing sustainable customer relationships, fulfilling unique customer needs, and personalizing the customer experience. So how does the HubSpot CRM platform help you build a customer centric business? Well, the HubSpot CRM platform provides game changing tools, for example, native payment links, recurring payments directly embedded in HubSpot, quoting tools and emails for easy delivery and collection. This helps you build a seamless payment experience with your customers. A CRM powered cms, lots of acronyms there, means both you and your marketeers can personalize the customer experience and ensure all engagements are timely and relevant. Learn more about how a HubSpot CRM platform can help you build, maintain and grow your customer relationships@HubSpot.com welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. Is the rest of the Opera business just appalled that you would do such a thing?

No, actually we have been a model and a leader, so we're ahead of the curve. So a lot of companies have caught on and said oh, this is how we're going to build our audience of tomorrow. This is how we're going to get younger people. This is how we're going to get donors, because they want new things and also the older generation will pass on, and we need to make sure there's an audience of tomorrow. We have actually been a great model for many companies. We go to conference and talk about how we do things. And thing is, it doesn't belittle opera at all. I think it enhances it. We don't take so much simple scores, and we don't think that people need to be, you know, we need to simplify things so people like it. On the opposite, the scores we do are quite complex, but the way they're presented appeals because people are generally intelligent people. They want to be stimulated, but they need to be stimulated with the right ingredients. So that's what we do. And a lot of companies are trying to do at least one production a year where that will happen, and then they resort back to the older style. But they are realizing actually that perhaps the modern opera that they do in the year is very popular, more popular than perhaps some of the older works. So it's catching on. It takes time, takes time to change, but we are ahead of the curve.

So you're reinventing opera.

I think that we are. We are redefining it for our time. Nothing is static. Even your code that you say that will live on for 200 years, eventually it will trigger something else, and it's still going to be called code, but it's something else. And that's what keeps everything vibrant and alive. So we are just continuing to make that happen rather than making it a dying art form. Which I remember when I started to do opera, looking at articles, so many articles, you know, the dying art form and all of this. And I thought that is too bad, because honestly, opera is one of the most complete and beautiful art form. There's no reason for people not to love it if it's right.

So if someone is listening to this and they are not, somewhere that they can see one of your operas? If you ask me, how should I start surfing? I could tell you where to go, what conditions, what kind of board, and what to do.

Right.

Surfing for dummies. So what is opera for dummies? If it's not going to be one of our operas, then the one you should go listen to or see is what?

Okay, first of all, it's interesting because you said if for surfing, you would say you would go. So I would Say, go to San Francisco and hear a production of opera. Parallel. But if they could not do that, I do think that except experience live rather than listening to an opera is really, really important as a first experience. Because being in the hall, feeling the other people there, the excitement of that, seeing the lighting, seeing the spectacle, basically of it is very unique. So it's just like being in the water. If you're surfing, don't just read about it, get yourself wet. So go live. So the first thing I would do is look in your area where you live for an opera that will be performed perhaps in your language, depending what you speak. If you speak Italian, you might want to do and try to find something that's not long, that's not a three hour opera. I think it's better to start with a shorter piece, you know. The other thing I would say is that it's okay not to like something at first. It doesn't mean you shouldn't go back. We think we have to love everything. I'm sure when you started surfing it was a little dreadful at first and you were scared of the waves and put it mildly, you still pursued. So you can't just go once and say, I don't like it. You've got to give yourself at least three chances. At least, like say, I'm going to commit to this three times. I'm going to find an opera that I like and the language I want that I like, and I'm going to find it short and I'm going to try to see that it's a story that will touch me, that I'm attracted to. So for some people it might be a comic opera, for some people it might be a story about Malcolm X. And there are jazz operas. You can also look at what kind of music there are. Nowadays you have a mixture of genres. It's not strictly classical music that does opera. So find a genre of music that you like and look for that. But it has to have the word opera in it and go and sit down and do it three times. Then write to me and tell me what you did and then I'll have a conversation with you.

But I want to push you harder. I want you to name names. I want you to say, okay, go. I Recommend the following 3. Name a name, don't say it has to be short and in English and a story you like and blah, blah. Just name names.

Okay, I will say, for example, recently I went to hear Terence Blanchard's opera Fire up in My Bones at the Met. It was an opera I know Terence Blanchard well and opera parallel actually did his first opera Champion, which was an amazing opera. So I would say if you have a chance to see the opera champion, go see it because one of the thing is that it has a beautiful length. The story you will complete completely relate to the story. Terence Banshers is a brilliant jazz musician. So the orchestra, it's a full orchestra, it's a classical orchestra, but it has inside the classical orchestra a drummer, a bass, kind of a jazz trio in there. And the harmonic language, the language he uses has some jazz element rhythms in there. You'll feel very comfortable. So that's an opera you could see either Champion or Fire Up My Bones. Great pieces to see. It's a little bit of a longer opera, but one composer that we have in San Francisco actually that very well known, Jake Higgy, who wrote Moby Dick and Dead Man Walking. Dead Man Walking is about the death penalty. It's a great story and it's very dramatic, but it's a good story. It doesn't take a stance on what you should think of death penalty, but it makes you think. The music is great. It's in English, has a big chorus, there's all these funny elements, there's tragic elements, very good. But it's a little long. That one's a little long. Moby Dick is also a great one by Jake Higgy. And Gene Shear is the librettist. I would say, though I. Oh. One other opera that I love to conduct and that is great is called Silent Night by Kevin Putz. And Mark Campbell is the librettist. Librettis is the person who writes the story, the text to be signed. And that one is about the truce during the war when the French, the Scots and the Germans had a truce on Christmas Eve. A true story. But what's great about it is that it has four languages because the Scots sing in English, the French sing in French, there's Latin in there. So you have all these different languages and the story is beautiful and it's a big spectacle. It's like going to see Hamilton. It's great music, it's great story. You'll love it. My list is long. These are things that I think are the first, good first waves. But there are many other. I know so much repertoire and that I love also that it's hard for me to even mention just those few names. They just come up right now. But I could name many, many, many, many, many operas. And I should mention operas from women composers. Missy Mazzoli has some breaking the Waves by Missy Mazzoli. 90 minutes long. Great story. Fantastic music. Young, vibrant composer that speaks before you go to the show. She can meet the composer. It makes you realize all these people are alive. They're not all dead somewhere. This is something that people do still.

You touched on this very briefly. But why are there so few women conductors?

There are more and more women conductors, especially in the symphonic world, in the operatic world a little less because it's even more demanding in terms of the amount of knowledge. You have to know a lot of technical knowledge on top of the musical knowledge when you do opera. And a lot of that had often been reserved to being in the male leadership. I think that that's changing.

What do you mean reserved? Reserved by whom?

Who used to build the computers? Like who did the tech of all of that? Was it all these women that would do that or mostly men? Women could think about creating that, but who actually built it? That kind of thing. These kind of hands on were reserved in the past. They thought that more for men. And so in opera you have to understand how productions work, that this is going to slide down and you're going to have to wait before you cue this singer because the set has to change. And the lighting now in the backstage there are 2 tons of women and lighting designers, all of that are female. But in the past, in the history of opera, that used to be all male. It took a little longer for having women conductors in that seat because you're really driving the whole thing when you get to the performance. Classical music used to be very old fashioned in that we have traditions, we hold to our traditions. We wear our tuxedos and the conductor walks in, the orchestra rises. Actually before that, the concert master walks in, tunes the orchestra, the oboe gives the A. They have all these traditions that are being kept. And part of that tradition was the maestro and that was the male leader. Only men in orchestra were playing. It took a long time to have women in orchestras. It's just slow. But we have caught on. And now I see that when I go and guests conduct somewhere, people are not as surprised to see me on the podium. I often am surprised when I go somewhere and they'll say, oh, this is the first time we have a female conductor on the podium. But they are not uncomfortable with it. So that's a first step. And there are so many great institutions now that are promoting women conductors. So giving a voice to female conductors and realizing that there can be more difference at times, but between two female conductors than my conducting and a male conductor it's very individual, not about female or male. For me, anyway. I know some other female conductors feel differently, but for me, female or male doesn't really matter. It's who I am as a musician on that podium.

What's your advice to young people who are interested in this field, either as musicians or conductors or singers?

I love working with young people, and I definitely would say if you feel that you have a passion for it, try it. My personality is one that loves to dare and push forward. And I think that if you have that inside you, it's a gift to have it. And we need to encourage people that have that desire to have the courage and the opportunity to do it. So I would say it's not an easy ride, but it's a great ride, and that you just have to stay. Again, I'll refer to cycling. If you see a big hill, you don't look at the top, you look in front and you just cycle and stay steady and just work on getting up there. And I think it's the same for any career. And so I would say if you feel that passion, just get on the ride and look just ahead of you, thinking that you want to get. You know, you want to be successful, but just find the opportunities and work hard. Be honest to yourself, Be in the present just like any other field. If you feel that passion, it's no different. You just have to believe and do it and work on it. It's no different than if you want to become chef patissier in a restaurant. You just work your way in doing it.

A complementary question to that question is, what's your advice to parents of potential professional musicians? Do you push them hard? Do you not push them? Do you make them do other activities? If you were a mother or father, what would your advice be to them for kids who have shown an interest or an aptitude or a passion for music?

Well, I don't have children. But first, I would say don't be scared. I think that parents tend to be scared and fear for their children. Because if you do agree in engineering, engineering, your chances of getting a position is pretty clear. You'll become an engineer. As if you go into music. There are many roads of making a career as a musician. It's not just being a conductor. There are so many opportunities to do that if your child is interested in music. It's a privilege to be a parent of a child that loves music like that. It's so hard right now with everything else that's going the way that our society is Pushing other things in our world that if you have a child that really has a passion for music, it's a privilege, and that you should honor it and you should find a way to make it enjoyable. I don't think you should push. Let's say you wanted to be a musician and you didn't have the opportunity to do it and push it on someone. It has to come from that child. But if it's there, it has to be nourished and it has to be honored without fear. We forget that there are so many ways that you can make a living as a musician.

One last point of clarification. So several times you've said go to a short one. What exactly does that mean? Is a short opera five hours instead of eight? Or is it 90 minutes? What's a short opera? When you say a short opera?

I premiered an opera called Everest by the composer Jo B. Talbot and the librettist Gene Shearer, and that opera is 62 minutes long. It is a total journey. It's based on the true story of the Kakov book, Into Thin Air, but it's not exactly that story. They actually researched it and the librettis gave a very personal rendering of that story. But it's that story. It's an adventure story. It's beautiful music. It's extremely accessible, while brilliant, brilliant music. The story is touching. It's in English, 62 minutes. And then actually opera parallel. Right now, during COVID we created a graphic novel opera version of this. So you can actually watch a graphic novel opera of that and listen to the music. So you could actually go see the opera then you could see a graphic novel opera of it. You could see all kinds of things in it. That's a great way to start loving opera. So that's what I mean by short. There are operas that are 60 minutes.

Long that I can handle.

You know what? I will send you the link to our graphic novel.

Well, thank you very much. You've brought me out of the darkness of opera.

I'll make sure that I invite you to our next production.

I will come. All I can say after this episode is I've got to try opera. And Nicole provided some examples of what to see. There you go. And if Nicole says go, I think you go. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. I just want to thank the remarkable Peg Fitzpatrick, Jeff C, Shannon Hernandez, Luis Magana, Alexis Nishimura and Madison Nismer for the remarkable work that they've done. And this episode would not have happened were it not for my friend and mentor, lighthouse inspiration, Marlene Del Borg. Del Feast. Merci beaucoup, Marilyn. Until next time. As we say in France, mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable, people.