Welcome to our new series, What the Fact?!
Throughout 2018, we’re teaming up with talent at the Australian National Academy of Music to bring you informed answers to real questions and topics about your music career.
Ever wondered why you feel performance anxiety? What the deal is with tuning to 440Hz – or not? Why you should bother undertaking a music residency? We’re here to tell you all about it.
In this WTF?! interview, we chat with José Luiz Gomez (this guy):
There’s a lot of talk about becoming a master of your skills – but is it even possible? What does a master make? We ask this Venezuelan-born Spanish conductor, who started out achieving great success as a violinist, graduating in the instrument from the Manhattan School of Music before building his orchestral career across Europe. But while he was on the way to mastering the instrument, José decided to put down the violin and pick up the baton instead.
After leading many an orchestra – from the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Ottawa to Hamburg Symphony, Houston Symphony Orchestra, and RTVE National Symphony Orchestra of Madrid – José will now come to Melbourne to lead the ANAM Orchestra. And he wants to tell young musicians what it means to be a master of your musical domain – and if it’s even possible.
Jose, you started out with violin but made the move into conducting. Why did you decide to move on from your hard work toward one specific musical goal, and aim for another?
Well, I must say that I never felt that I was giving out or dropping playing the violin towards conducting, I felt it was more of a natural transition into expanding my musical skills and horizons. That is why I personally never felt pressure getting myself into the conducting. It was all about the joy of making music, either as a violinist or as a conductor now.
Confidence for sure came from the many years of experience as an orchestra violinist, in which I had the fortune to play a vast repertoire with different conductors, and see and feel the orchestra from inside.
You won the Solti competition almost immediately after you moved into conducting. How did you pick up your new skills so naturally and quickly?
I think the honest guidance that I got from my early mentors and colleagues plus the orchestral experience as a violinist gave me that extra ‘natural’ approach to my conducting, and so I told myself that I need to prove myself into the highest level of stress and concentration as a competition requires, and so it happened.
I must say that, on the other hand, one of the great things of being a musician is that you never stop learning, and every experience makes you grow more and more.
What did learning violin teaching you about conducting?
Being able to tackle the technicalities of string playing makes you connect immediately with an orchestra. As you know, a vast number of musicians in a symphony orchestra are string players, so that is something that helps create a first positive approach for a conductor. Also in my experience as an orchestral violinist, the word ‘awareness’ was my personal credo, as I always tried to pay attention to how a conductor dealt with the different sections of instruments that an orchestra has – woodwinds, brass, percussion – and being able to understand and learn how to blend all those different instruments in a whole one musical texture.
Your experiences in conducting are extremely wide-ranging. Do you feel like you have mastered your artform – whether to your own expectations, or those that others place on you?
Not at all! Again, for me, the beauty of this profession is that you will never stop improving, developing, or learning. Working with different orchestras, soloists, repertoire; it is a real process of enrichment as a musician. Even doing the same piece that maybe you conducted months before, going back to it is already revealing how much you can still learn from it – how many other different details appear. That is certainly the beauty of being a musician! Music is alive.
How would you define a ‘master’ of an instrument or musical career, anyway? And how much time or activity do you feel is necessary to reach this level?
There is never enough time to sit down and go through a score and learn more from it, for a conductor, for a player, for an ensemble. It takes dedication, honesty, respect of what you do. And, of course, discipline, which is translated to the audience and can be moved and touched with this universal language called music.
How can a young artist know when they have ‘made it’?
[Laughs] Good question! A young artist can be 85 years old with lots of success and still feel that they ‘haven’t made it’. I think goals are important, but for any artist the best goal to achieve is to feel that you are improving and developing every time.Despite your success, what do you hope to learn in the future throughout your career?
I consider myself fortunate to have had always great people around me that have nurtured and taught me great important things, so having had that privilege makes me always hope to continue growing as an artist and as a human being; and also try to always use our art for a greater good, to touch people’s hearts, inspire, and nurture the future.
Music for me is something that goes deep into your soul and stays with you forever.
José Luiz Gomez will conduct the ANAM Orchestra in A Bernstein Celebration, 7.30pm April 27 in the Melbourne Recital Centre. You’ll also be treated to works by Copland, Barber, and Ginastera.
Check back in soon for our next What the Fact?! with professionals in the music industry.
Images supplied – credit Mattieu Gaughet. Emoji via APACHE – License 2.0.
