MUSIC CREDIT:

“NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive. 

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, This is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed. Today, we ‘re marking Disability Pride Month by revisiting one of my favorite interviews-- a 2020 conversation with author, advocate and teacher Rebekah Taussig, whose memoir Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body was subsequently named a NEA Big Read title. Have a listen—and you’ll hear why….

Rebekah Taussig: I think that we often think of our bodies in really distinct categories, disabled and not disabled and that there’s a big chasm between those groups of people and in some ways there are things that are distinct about our individual experiences, but a lot of what I am trying to play with and show in the book is that we all live in bodies with limitations and points of access. This is something that we all should be thinking about and not just in a dreadful way but in a way that allows us to imagine more for each other.

Jo Reed: That is writer, teacher and advocate Rebecca Taussig and this is Art Works the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed.   Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted in simplistic and simple-minded ways--none of which felt right. She wanted stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling. As an adult, armed with a Ph.D in disability studies and creative non-fiction, Rebekah got to work—first by creating the Instagram account @sitting_pretty and then by writing a memoir in essays called Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body.  In a conversational tone that makes it feel as though you’re talking with a very smart, funny and thoughtful friend, Rebekah reflects on a range of topics from the complications of kindness and charity to how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life for us all. Here’s Rebekah to tell us about Sitting Pretty.

Jo Reed: Why did you write “Sitting Pretty”?

Rebekah Taussig: Great question, and actually it starts a little before the book itself came into being. I started an Instagram account a few years ago now called Sitting Pretty and I created that space because I was in my late twenties, working through what my disability meant to me for the first time in my life in a critical new sort of way. I’ve been paralyzed since I was three but it wasn’t until my late twenties when I was in graduate school and immersed in critical theory on disability and disability studies and I was just saturated with-- just flooded with all of these new ideas to process and think through about myself and my body and my position in the world. And I needed a space to do that in and so I went to Instagram, a sort of-- an easily accessible spot for me to kind of hunker down and chew on a lot of thoughts in bite-size form I suppose and then attach it to an image that included my paralysis, my wheelchair, my disability that didn’t crop it out or try to obscure it or hide it but kind of brought it to the forefront. And so I’d been-- I had been doing these what I came to call mini-memoirs on Instagram for quite a few years before I started to feel the confines of that space and really want to stretch out a bit more and deepen my thoughts and expand my stories and met the right person at the right time and set to work creating a proposal for that very project which turned into the book “Sitting Pretty.”

Jo Reed: You have a Ph.D. in creative nonfiction and disability studies so a memoir and essays makes perfect sense and early on in the book you talk about growing up the youngest of six kids and partially because I’m an only child I was--

Rebekah Taussig: Oh, my, we’re so different.

Jo Reed: --just mesmerized reading about your family and your place in the family and the way they responded to you and I’d really like for you to talk about this.

Rebekah Taussig: Yeah. It’s interesting. When we grow up in our own families, and you I’m sure would have your own version of this, it- it’s kind of funny when outsiders start to look in and point out what’s interesting or noteworthy about your family because to me for most of my life my family was just the most ordinary group of people and their response to me was completely ordinary and then the more I wrote about it and the more people that read about it they were like “Well, that is very interesting” and I was like “Really? Oh, okay, guess it is.” So it’s just been kind of fun for me to see my family with outsiders’ eyes I guess because when I was first diagnosed with cancer and started going through these pretty intense treatments, chemotherapy, radiation, two surgeries my family-- so I was the youngest of six. I was fourteen months old when this all first started. My oldest sibling was-- would have been fourteen when all of this started and then every two years there was a new kid about, uhm.. and this would have been the ‘80s-- late ‘80s and my family really just continued on kind of as normal, as normal as could be. So they didn’t really make accommodations around the house as I started to lose my mobility-- or my-- as my mobility shifted. I mean I continued to sleep on the top bunk of the top floor of the house even as I wasn’t walking anymore, which again is one of the more notable details to outsiders but to me at the time and even for quite a bit as I got older it still felt really ordinary for me to continue to sort of make my way up to that spot on the top floor. I had a lot of pride in having the top bunk; I kind of had waited for that position in the bed lineup with all my siblings. So I just kind of found my own ways to move around whether that was up a flight of stairs or outside around the neighborhood and with neighborhood kids and kind of just folded into my family in a way that was-- felt very ordinary. We didn’t really make a big deal out of disability as a-- with a capital ‘D’ I guess, which is in large part I think why it was so striking to me decades later when I started to really think about what this meant to me because we didn’t talk about it that way at the time. My parents didn’t really-- and I think for good or bad; I think there are benefits and drawbacks to this but they didn’t really go out of their way to connect me with the disability community. There was no conversation about Rebekah has a disability and the rest of her siblings don’t. I don’t remember ever really sitting down and talking much about it at all or really talking about specific unique plans for how I was going to grow into adulthood or what it would be like for me to find a job or look at colleges versus my siblings. There was not any sort of spotlight in-- on me in that way so-- which kind of made for an interesting growing up as a disabled person because of course I am different from my siblings even as I am the same as them. And so not having any space or language to process that part of my identity and figure out for myself really what it did mean to me kind of hampered me in some ways even as it also made me-- I don’t know-- kind of scrappy and resilient so it kind of worked in both directions I think.

Jo Reed: Yeah, I’d think it would. I wouldn’t assume it was perfect but I think there was a confidence that you could maintain because that also meant you had the freedom to get on with it.

Rebekah Taussig: Yeah, absolutely. They definitely were not expecting me to whimper on the sidelines or get special favors and I-- and like I talk about in the opening of the book I think one of the strongest mantras in our family to this day is nobody’s whining about anything; <laughs> we’re not going to sit and wallow about anything even-- and I think this is the part that’s so remarkable to outsiders-- even childhood cancer and paralysis.

Jo Reed: And there we go, extraordinary. You talk about ableism a lot in the book and I’d like you to tell us how you’re using ableism and how you’re defining it and your thoughts about it--

Rebekah Taussig: Yeah. 

Jo Reed: --of which there are many.

Rebekah Taussig: Yeah, exactly. I was going to say in the book there are several pages of kind of elaborating and wandering around that term because it is a loaded word. I mean it’s an “ism.” A lot of people I think come to that word and think that they know what it means and think they have a pretty sturdy understanding of it and I think that the Oxford English Dictionary version of it is “discrimination against people with disabilities,” which is pretty straightforward, but in my work and my understanding-- I mean both from an academic sense but also from a lived experience I think it’s much more complicated than discrimination against disabled people. I think it’s a hearty world view and set of structures that fill the world with a largely imagined ideal body at the center of it so the ways that we come to see ourselves in the world are kind of morphed by this large vision in the middle of it. So we shape our ideas about love and romance, we shape our stories on screens, we shape our schools and work spaces with this idea of an idealized typical body at the center of it and then any body that deviates-- the greater the deviation from that the greater the punishment to the person who embodies the literal body but also the mind or the capabilities that deviate from that idealized body in the center. And I think if you kind of start to unpack it a lot of times we talk about that as if that’s the typical body in the middle, that we shape the world around a typical body, but I don’t think that that’s really the case. I think that very few bodies actually match that idealized young, never aging, never in pain, never needing anything, never lactating, never having a period, never needing to go to the bathroom, never having a need of any sort, and that’s sort of the body that we hold up and build our world around when—

Jo Reed: Exactly.

Rebekah Taussig: --very few-- and even if you do happen to match that body for a time in your life it’s going to be a flash of a moment of time because you will age, we all age, and I know we like to pretend otherwise but we do; we all age and wrinkle and start to forget things and have different needs as time goes on. So yes, that is my-- that’s my attempt at a succinct version of that definition for that big, heavy, complicated word.

Jo Reed: As we talk about ableism, you talk about for example being able to find an apartment, a house for you to rent that you actually could have access to and said that was a job unto itself.

Rebekah Taussig: Yeah, absolutely, and interesting that you bring that example up because I-- before having to do that I don’t even know that I would have understood just the extent-- the barriers that I would find in my attempts to find accessible affordable housing and as a disabled person you’d think I’d be the expert on that but there’s a lot of ways in which I think we don’t understand or know how much we’ve overlooked a specific population until we’re in it, until we get to that point ourselves and realize, oh, my goodness; wow; this is almost impossible; how is a person supposed to go about doing this? I live in Kansas City and the house I live in now-- well, I haven’t moved in quite some time because I’m not about to go through that ordeal again but about five years ago now I was in a position of needing to find a place to live pretty quickly and that turned into nine months of looking for anything that I could both afford and get into and it seems like a pretty low bar but it was a surprisingly exhausting experience. <laughs>

Jo Reed: You talk also about if you go out to eat in a restaurant the kind of reconnaissance you have to do.

Rebekah Taussig: Yeah, really any sort of outing outside of my house. It’s like any place that I haven’t been before there’s quite a lot of research and planning and often honestly anxiety that goes into that experience so I talk about the experience of someone casually offering to go out to dinner somewhere or a birthday party that’s being held at a restaurant, and that turns into hours of Google imaging and trying to find pictures of the inside of the restaurant and seeing what the spacing is like and does it look like there’s a place that I could park to get into that building and what about bathrooms; are there going to be accessible bathrooms there. And some days I feel like I have the energy to take that on and a lot of days I really don’t.

Jo Reed: Yeah, I hear that.

Rebekah Taussig: Yeah, and I think my upbringing in some ways made me into a person that feels kind of up for a lot and is willing to be flexible and roll with the punches but I think anyone at a certain point gets kind of exhausted from that as a way of life, and so of course there are plenty of times when I just send the “I’m not feeling very well” text and just end up passing on a lot of the experiences that I think otherwise I would enjoy, I would in-- appreciate, but yeah, it’s kind of finding the places that work, finding the spots that I can access pretty easily and those are the places I go to all the time.

Jo Reed: And I think it also brings up that ADA was wonderful, the Americans with Disability Act, but it’s 30 years after ADA and the ableism that you’re talking about it still structures basically the way we move through the world and I wonder what you wish policymakers understood about city planning.

Rebekah Taussig: Yeah. That’s such a great question and I love the opportunity to answer it. It’s interesting that you bring up the ADA because I think a lot of people-- if they know what the ADA is, which a surprisingly large number of people don’t-- I think people assume that that is kind of a one-and-done deal like we’ve done it, we finished, big, giant checkmark,  we’ve accomplished accessibility—

Jo Reed: Problem solved.

Rebekah Taussig: Yeah, problem solved, and in some ways-- it’s both/and. In some ways it’s true, that was a huge accomplishment and remains a huge victory for the activists that fought so hard for that, and also at the very same time there is such an uphill battle to have that legislation implemented in meaningful and comprehensive ways. So in terms of what I wish policymakers knew or would have in mind I think a lot of people think of accessibility as this extra thing to kind of tack on the side of what already exists like the ramp that goes into the back of the building or like the extra sort of lift that we harness to the side of a restaurant, but I wish that what people-- I wish that people thought about accessibility as more than this extra side thing for this very few set of people and more as an opportunity to just design more sustainably and more-- widespread inclusivity. I wish that we were thinking about access with a lot more energy and excitement and creativity and thinking not just how can we get that one wheelchair that might show up into our building but how can we just create more points of access for all of us because that’s what I think we find time and time again when we actually look at design and accessibility is that when we have access in mind and we’re forced to kind of think about things more flexibly like what additional needs might show up to this space and how can we create an object or an entrance that has more points of access I think that when we’re thinking about design that way we usually get the most exciting, most open spaces and tools that everybody can use that are not just these extra add-ons for this tiny subset of people. I was just talking to someone today who was visiting their disabled son who had actually had a house that was designed specifically for their disabled body, which is a huge privilege, most disabled people are not able to actually do that, but she was saying that when she went into this house it was like “Oh, my goodness. I want this to be my house. This house it just feels good to be in it” and I think that that’s true. You don’t have to use a wheelchair in order to benefit from designs that include wheelchairs, you don’t have to be deaf in order to benefit from tools that are created with deaf people in mind, and I guess that’s what I wish that we were thinking about. I guess that’s the tone that I wish we had in conversations where we talking about and thinking about access. 

Jo Reed: I know this is so early on but I’m wondering how the pandemic in fact might impact the ideas that you put forth in the book because suddenly all of us have to be aware of our bodies and their vulnerabilities and it also seems to me that in the middle of all this awfulness there’s space for imaginative thinking, for adaptability, for flexibility. There’s an opening created here I think.

Rebekah Taussig: A hundred percent I feel that and I think a lot of disabled people feel that. I think there-- depending on who you talk to and when I think that there is on the one hand a little bit of frustration that we’ve been saying there were changes that we should make and things we’ve been asking for for so long and for so long people were like “That’s impossible. We can’t do that” and then when nondisabled people have those needs then suddenly magically they appear and there’s a little bit of frustration with that, but also I think there’s a lot of excitement and hopefulness maybe even more than anything, hopefulness that these would be changes that we would be able to hold onto even when the pandemic is over and that that attitude of creativity and thinking about ways to be more flexible would be held onto. I feel really hopeful about that. I hope that that’s something we can continue to be thinking about and an approach that we can continue to implement.

Jo Reed: I would bet that out of all the essays in your book the essay on kindness is the one you talk about the most--because people want to talk about it.

Rebekah Taussig: <laughs> It’s certainly the one that people have a lot of questions about and and/or pushback. It definitely makes people uncomfortable more than anything in the whole book. Yes, yes, you’re right. <laughs>

Jo Reed: Describe the points that you were making in that essay.

Rebekah Taussig: I think a lot of times when people think about disability one of the first things they think about is kindness, that we know that we’re supposed to be kind to disabled people and we have charities around that kind of kindness and we know that as one of my students so aptly says that I quote in the book-- if we see someone who’s disabled and we don’t help them we kind of look like a jerk. And so I think we think that we understand the relationship between disability and kindness, which is that you should always be kind it’s as simple of that, and what I do in the chapter is kind of blow that wide open and look specifically at what is genuinely actually kind in a lasting sort of way when we think about disability and disabled people and the needs that that very diverse population might need at a given day. So I start by looking at some of these articles that you see crop up in the news-- quote, unquote, news where there’ll be the story about the football player who asked the disabled girl to prom and there’s a whole story about that kind of celebrating and implying that nondisabled kids are asking a girl to prom or when somebody helps a disabled person get their food at a fast-food restaurant. I think we’ve all seen those stories in the news and so I kind of begin by looking at those stories as a way of unpacking why some of those ways of thinking about kindness are actually the opposite of kind, that they so often center the nondisabled person as the star of that story and we’re actually not even looking at that experience through the lens of that disabled person and the whole story is about applauding kindness of this one time that this nondisabled person reached out to a disabled person. And then there’s so much that’s left unaddressed like why are we not looking at how to create fast-food spaces that make it easier for a disabled person to get food on their own. So that’s kind of the beginning of the conversation. I look at charities and the history of charities a little bit and then--and I think this is the part of the chapter that you may be thinking of Jo, the part that people push back against a lot-- I look at specific encounters that I have with people who are attempting to be kind to me that usually end with me feeling frustrated or humiliated or probably more specifically left really unseen or invisible. And specifically, for me this shows up with people kind of rushing to help me put my wheelchair together like in a parking lot or people asking to pray over me to heal me of my paralysis, kind of these one-on-one moments where people are attempting to do something kind but ultimately it leaves me feeling very small. And I think that that’s the part of the chapter that I think most people get really riled up about because what I hear a lot of people say are things like “Why-- I just open the door for everyone.”  I think ultimately in that chapter I have to think a lot and I have spent some time thinking about my own impulse to be kind in different contexts, not specifically with disability necessarily but just when you encounter a person who belongs to a group that is disenfranchised or marginalized in one way in another there’s this impulse to get rid of that feeling that you have access to something that somebody else doesn’t and oftentimes that we respond in sort of a gut reaction as opposed to stopping and listening and looking and seeing the person who’s actually in front of us. I am read as being helpless in a lot of areas that I am not helpless but there are ways that I need help or assistance that might not be as obvious, and so I guess in that chapter ultimately what I want to do is I’m imploring people to look at each other in the eyes and really see each other before jumping to conclusions, before rushing to do something or treat that person in one way or another because more often than not I think in that-- in the space-- that beat we could take where we pause and we actually look at the person in front of us we might see something that we didn’t expect; they might be showing us something that wasn’t obvious to us in that immediate reaction. I don’t know. Is that the gist do you think, Jo, in what you saw of the chapter?

Jo Reed: Yes. Even as you’re talking I’m thinking people’s ability, and I will own part of this as well, to be unconscious as they move through the world is really extraordinary; that is something that never ceases to amaze me and as I said about myself as well. I think you’re asking people to be more conscious and I think there’s also a way in which-- and I’m completely compressing this-- you’re saying, “You see a wheelchair. You don’t see the person in the wheelchair.”

Rebekah Taussig: Yeah. Yes, absolutely. I mean yes, time and time again-- it’s interesting-- the parking lot is always an interesting example to me because I put my chair together and pull it apart; pre pandemic days when I was actually leaving my house more often I would do that like five times a day and that’s something I’ve been doing since I was 17. So the process of getting my chair in and out of my car is like brushing my teeth, is like doing laundry, is the easiest thing in the world to me and I think I’m showing that I’m competent, right. I’m doing this with ease, I’m doing it quickly, I’m not struggling, but I think that as soon people see a wheelchair they-- there’s not that space between what you see and then taking a beat and waiting to see what the story actually is unfolding in front of you. They don’t have time to see competence, they just see the wheelchair, and I think so often wheelchairs are shorthand for weakness or helpless or needing help and that’s not the case in that moment for me and it- it’s pretty amazing how often-- how consistent that pattern is when I go out in public. And to me it just signals exactly what you said, that we-- and myself included we are often on autopilot when we go out in the world and so what happens is that we reveal a lot of assumptions that we have just by default because we are not taking that beat to pause before we impulsively go to grab someone’s wheelchair wheel for example. 

Jo Reed: When did you start writing, Rebekah? Were you a writer all your life?

Rebekah Taussig: Oh, in some ways yes. It’s evolved so much that I hardly recognize what I was doing before as writing. I mean I started writing really excruciating poetry as a child and I wrote-- I was an aggressive diary-- journal writer so I have just a whole shelf-- a bookshelf full of journals that I wrote as a child and then I was a big reader so I was a English major and my undergrad was in creative writing. I had no idea what I wanted to do with that but I knew that I loved reading and writing so I kind of hunkered down there and I wrote a lot of strange kind of like YA slipstream fiction stories in that time of my life and then I got more into the academic side of things so I wrote my MA thesis on “Moby Dick” so I was really interested in Victorian nineteenth-century British and American literature and it was actually in graduate school that I kind of went back to the creative side of things, that I had really moved into the academic writing and had been writing more papers and things that I would try to publish as articles but it was the merging of disability studies, which was on the one hand an academic way of thinking but on the other hand incredibly personal. And so when those two kind of fields merged for me is ultimately the writing that you would be reading from me now, not so much the YA slipstream fiction or the angsty poetry of my childhood but I’m sure that that is part of what has changed me as a writer. 

Jo Reed: There are two things that are true with Instagram and I’m curious about how they changed with the book and I’ll start with the obvious one being first. The photographs are so important and they’re fabulous also. Did you miss that in the book?

Rebekah Taussig: Yeah. I do miss that. I think that the photos are an important part of what I tend to relish about the Instagram space. I think I did try to make a lot of the experiences in the book as visual as possible—

Jo Reed: That was my next question actually, if it changed the writing.

Rebekah Taussig: Yeah. I think that I did and there are even phrases that I use in the book where I am being pretty transparent about how much I want people to be able to see and feel and picture in their heads these moments and so I do spend a lot of time describing in pretty specific detail I think-- I try to at least describe exactly what that moment looked like and felt like in a way that people could picture. I hope that I accomplished that because I think it’s important.

Jo Reed: It’s a book of essays. Do you have one that you feel closest to?

Rebekah Taussig: I love that question; no one has asked me that. Yeah. I feel like the chapter on love and “ An Ordinary Unimaginable Love Story”; Yeah. I feel close to that chapter in a lot of way-- in a number of ways. So the whole chapter is about being disabled and the longing to find love and be loved and to find a partner and I think in-- on the one hand that was just such a big part of my life story so far. Not to give away any major spoilers, but I got married really young in sort of this-- in the ways that a lot of young people do get married, which is for a lot of the wrong reasons, <laughs> not to say everyone young is doing it for the wrong reasons, I definitely was, and then coming out of that and how much of my identity I think is forged in one way or another around some of those decisions, either toward or away from those relationships and then finding my partner, Micah. I write about Micah in that chapter and he is just one of the best and most important parts of me and my life and so having a chapter I get to tell that story and bring him to life on the page it’s just a -- oh, the word that’s coming to my mind, I don’t love it but the word is “precious,” like there’s something precious to me and that’s treasured to me about my relationship with him that I get to share with readers and I-- and that’s special to me.

Jo Reed: And you have a P.S. because after you were done with the book you discovered you were pregnant.

Rebekah Taussig: Yes, Jo, less than 24 hours later. I mean I hit “send” on the manuscript on a Monday night and it was the Tuesday late afternoon when I was very surprised to see two pink lines on a pregnancy test and called Micah; with no ceremony or no cute “I’m pregnant” story it was like “Micah, we’re pregnant.” And then it was just unbelievable and it continues to be kind of unbelievable to me even though Otto is almost six months old this week and then Micah-- the following Tuesday we were even more shocked to find out that Micah had cancer so that was a lot for a postscript and then of course we all learned that there was a global pandemic a few months after that. So pretty much everything changed both personally and globally after this book was written and then it came out in a world that was very different than the one it was written in.

Jo Reed: Has it ever. And how’s Micah?

Rebekah Taussig: Thank you for asking because I feel like it’s very unfair of me to tell that without the follow-up, which is that Micah is doing really well. So he had a second surgery in June and his recovery from that surgery has been longer and more complicated than we hoped for but his cancer has not come back and to both of us that’s kind of the-- everything. We can handle recovering--  we are very tuned in to any test results and so far everything has come back as looking good and we’re really relieved about that.

Jo Reed: Good. I’m very glad to hear that. Finally, Rebekah, if you could have somebody get one point from this book what would it be; if somebody walked away with this point you would say, “Okay, that’s good”?

Rebekah Taussig: Yeah. Oh, and you want me to choose one I suppose. Do you, Jo? Just one--

Jo Reed: Maybe one and a half.

Rebekah Taussig: <laughs> Yeah. Okay. I think one of them would be an important one; if someone left the book with this idea I would be glad. I think that we often think of our bodies in really distinct categories, disabled and not disabled and that there’s a big chasm between those groups of people and in some ways there are things that are distinct about our individual experiences, but a lot of what I am trying to play with and show in the book is that we all live in bodies with limitations and points of access. This is something that we all should be thinking about and not just in a dreadful way but in a way that allows us to imagine more for each other, imagine a world that can bring more ease and creativity and flexibility to all of us. So I guess one of the big things I would be pleased if someone took from this book was thinking about this idea of accessibility as a project for all of us in the way that we’re all attached to bodies and to take that idea-- this is my stretching this into one and a half ideas move-- is to take that and use that as something as a point of play and imagination and creativity, that it’s an exercise that doesn’t have to be sterile and medical and dreadful but open and expansive and maybe a little bit enjoyable as well.

Jo Reed: That is a great place to leave it. Rebekah, it’s a wonderful book and congratulations.

Rebekah Taussig: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me here and I loved your questions.

Jo Reed: Thank you.

That was writer teacher and advocate Rebekah Taussig we were talking about her memoir called Sitting Pretty The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body. You can keep up with Rebekah on Instagram @sitting_pretty  You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Subscribe to Art Works and leave us a rating on Apple—it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Stay safe and thanks for listening

That was author, teacher and advocate Rebekah Taussig we were talking about her memoir called Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body which was subsequently named an NEA Big Read title. You can keep up with Rebekah on Instagram @sitting_pretty and find out more about the Big Read atarts.gov—you’ll find it under the initiatives tab.

Rebekah Taussig: I wish that people thought about accessibility as more than this extra side thing for this very few set of people and more as an opportunity to just design more sustainably and more-- widespread inclusivity. I wish that we were thinking about access with a lot more energy and excitement and creativity and thinking not just how can we get that one wheelchair that might show up into our building but how can we just create more points of access for all of us because that’s what I think we find time and time again when we actually look at design and accessibility is that when we have access in mind and we’re forced to kind of think about things more flexibly like what additional needs might show up to this space and how can we create an object or an entrance that has more points of access. I think that when we’re thinking about design that way we usually get the most exciting, most open spaces and tools that everybody can use.

Music Credits: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the CD Soul Sand. U sed courtesy of Free Music Archive.

Excerpt from Play, composed by Andrew Norman, performed by Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose, recorded by BMOP/Sound.

“Malcolm’s Aria,” from X: The Life and Times of Malcom X, composed by Anthony Davis, libretto by Thulani Davis. Performed by Davóne Tines as Malcom X, The Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and Odyssey Opera, conducted by Gil Rose, recorded by BMOP/Sound.

Jo Reed:  From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed.

I want to introduce you to Gil Rose—the conductor, founder, and artistic director of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project or BMOP—founded 25 years ago, BMOP’s mission is commissioning, performing, and recording music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a focus on American music. Described by The New York Times as “one of the most artistically valuable” orchestras in the country, BMOP is a unique institution in today’s musical world, winning, among other awards, 17 ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming. Understanding that recording new music is as vital as performing it, Rose began the orchestra’s Grammy Award winning in-house label, BMOP/Sound which is releasing 100th recording this year. And as if that wasn’t enough, Rose also founded Odyssey Opera in 2013 which is dedicated both to the performance of new and underperformed operas. Both companies are frequent recipients of grants from the Arts Endowment and with good reason, they expand greatly the repertoire of music, by commissioning, performing, and recording these works. I spoke to Gil Case recently on the occasion of BMOP’s 25th anniversary—here’s our conversation

Jo Reed:   Well, Gil, first of all, thank you for joining me today. I appreciate it. You began the Boston Modern Orchestra Project twenty-five years ago. So, first, congratulations, <laughs>

Gil Rose: Seems like yesterday <laughs>. Thank you.

Jo Reed: What was your thinking was behind it?

Gil Rose: Well, at that time I’d just relocated to Boston, and I was trying to find a way to add to the musical culture here in the city. I thought it was a problem that large orchestras were playing the same msuic over and over again. And I hit upon the idea of reinventing the orchestra as a more flexible and less institution-like body or organization, and tried to recreate what I thought would be a healthier dynamic between composers, and performers, and the audience. So, I started on this mission to recreate a model that was similar to how Beethoven's time worked, what I then called the triangle between composers, performers and audience.So that we could play a wide variety of repertoire.

Jo Reed: Well, you're known, with great justification, for championing American music written in the 20th and 21st century. But I'm also mindful that the name isn't modern music, but Modern Orchestra, and it's also Modern Orchestra Project. So, tell me how that reflects the mission, the idea of a project?

Gil Rose: Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up, because it was funny, at the beginning of our time, and getting up and running, and doing concerts and recordings, you have to build a name that has some recognition. I put those four words together very purposefully. One was, of course, Boston, because that's where we were, but Modern Orchestra was important to me, because I wanted to create a different orchestral model. I didn't want to recreate the existing-- what then was a subscription model--, and the relationship between earned revenue and unearned revenue, i.e. ticket sales, or donations, or support in other ways, to me seemed to be creating an unhealthy relationship to repertoire. The fourth word, Project, which many people tried to get me to drop, and I justified keeping it because of the acronym, how fancy the acronym BMOP was, as opposed to BMO. But the real reason for the word Project was I felt to achieve our goal that we needed to have ultimate flexibility, so we could expand, contract, modify, collaborate with other kinds of arts organizations, and keep it completely fluid and flexible. At that time when we started, in 1996, I can't identify any other organizations that had the word “Project”. I wish I had a royalty for every organization <laughs> that's founded, now, <laughs> that has the word “Project” in it. We maybe started that trend, and it was very purposeful. It was about flexibility and a lean, mean model for bringing music to the public.

Jo Reed: Who are the orchestra members?

Gil Rose: Well, our orchestra members come from all over, but most of them are here in Boston. One of the things that makes Boston a great place to do this work is the vast resources in freelance musicians. So, we have a lot of conservatories here, and the freelancers here are as good as any freelancers in the world. We have a whole roster of regulars, and they come together to do sometimes big 90-player orchestra pieces, and sometimes 15-player orchestra pieces, and they deliver every time. I always tell them that they make my job easy.

Jo Reed: Well, yes, they're so well regarded. Other musicians can't praise them enough. It was named Musical America’s 2016 Ensemble of the Year, the first symphony orchestra to be named such. So, congratulations on that.

Gil Rose: Thank you.

Jo Reed: Can you explain just a little bit more for those of us who don't know all the ins and outs of orchestras, what it means to have an orchestra of freelance musicians?

Gil Rose: Well, the big orchestras, the major symphony orchestras in the country, their players are salaried, they’re employees. My players are freelancers, or independent contractors. So, some years, we've produced as many as seven or eight events, and ten or eleven recordings. In some years, it's been less, depending on what the projects were, and how it all played out. These players are available to come in and play often on fairly short notice, and it's just a flexible model that keeps our employee count down. We run a fairly large organization, by new music standards, on five or six employees.

Jo Reed: You are not just the conductor, you’re also the curator, <laughs> among many other things, but--

Gil Rose: I think actually, one of my titles is also beast of burden.

Jo Reed: <laughs> I’m sure that’s true.

Gil Rise: I think anybody who's listening who's founded an organization can-- I was going to say attest, but maybe sympathize is the right word, when you're the founder, and the artistic planner, and you bring the artistic vision and the executive vision as far as administration, and you just wear all the hats. It's a double-edged sword in that it's a lot of work, but it also gives me the ability to not just pick artistic things to do, and deliver them, but to also plan the structure of how the group works, and grows, or even, in some cases, shrinks. During the pandemic, we were, of course, like everybody else, doing less, and that was a natural thing for us to do, because we didn't have a lot of fixed costs in how we operate the organization. So, running it both from an artistic standpoint and an administrative standpoint is just what I do.

Jo Reed: I'm curious, it's twenty-five years in, you have a name, people know what BMOP is. But when you first began, how did you find composers? How did you reach out to them? What was that process like?

Gil Rose: Well, the good news on that front is that when it becomes known that you're an orchestra, not a small or new music group, but an actual symphony orchestra, performing living composers, and recording their works as part of the mission, you don't have to find them, they find you. So, there's been a long-term relationship with, at this point, hundreds of composers, both established, iconic American masters, and also up and comers. We've had the pleasure of both dealing with some of the most important musical voices in America, and some that will someday be the most musically important voices in America, and everything in between. So, yeah, finding composers has never been the problem.

Jo Reed: The orchestra's rare in that it records a lot of what it performs through its own label, BMOP Sound, which you also founded, of course. So, why was this important to you?

Gil Rose: Well, I think one of the realities about new music orchestra compositions, new compositions for orchestra, is that they often get played once and then never again. Big orchestras will commission new music, and they're doing it more and more actually, than they did when I first started BMOP. But often that means one performance or three performances on a subscription weekend, and then many, many, many pieces, and many by famous composers, never see a second performance run. So, one of the reasons I think that is is that they've not entered the canon in a way, and I always felt that if we were going to take the time, and energy, and finances to produce a piece of orchestral music that hadn't been played in thirty-five years, that would be irresponsible to not record it as a professional studio recording for preservation, and for dissemination. Only so many people can come to one of our concerts, but by recording this music at the same time, or recording after the performances in the studio sessions, we have preserved pieces that would otherwise be lost, and some of them lost forever. That's a unique thing we do, and it gives us both pride, and pleasure, and distinguishes us, too. A lot of orchestras in the world now have started their own labels, but  maybe other than the London Symphony, BMOP Sound has more titles released than any major orchestra in the country on its own label. We're approaching our 100th release. They're all world premiere recordings, or composer-centric CDs. If there's anything that distinguishes us, that's because we're doing something that nobody's doing, and it just resonates with our mission.

Jo Reed: Well, as though you aren't doing enough, you decided you needed to do more, and you founded Odyssey Opera. Can you tell me what Odyssey Opera--

Gil Rise: Are you sensing a pattern here?

Jo Reed: I am.

Gil Rose: Yes <laughs>.

Jo Reed: I am. I'm not even touching your freelance <laughs> career. So, what is Odyssey's mission, and what did you want it to add to the music you were already creating in Boston?

Gil Rose: Right. Well, Odyssey is similar to BMOP, in that it's dedicated to performing and recording things that aren't normally played. If the orchestra world is playing the same twenty-five or thirty pieces over and over again, with some random exceptions here and there, the opera world's an even worse example of that phenomenon. This time of year, when all the American opera companies announce their next season, I see the same 12 operas over, and over, and over again. For me, I could never understand it, and I think that opera companies are sort of creating their own corner that they can't get out of, because they're training their audiences to expect “Carmen”, “La Bohème”, “Don Giovanni”, and 10 other operas. When they present something that doesn't fit that mold, it doesn't sell well for them, they don't get good attendance, and so they double down the next year, and don't make that mistake again. What Odyssey’s attempted to do is to do none of those operas, to do operas that were part of the canon, and slipped from the canon, and revive them, and show that the operatic kaleidoscope of sounds and stories is much, much more colorful than we think it is. So, that's what Odyssey's mission is. BMOP's mission is to do things within the last 100 years. Odyssey doesn't have that time restriction, so we can do baroque opera, which we've done quite a bit of, or contemporary opera. It's not a time specific restraint, it's rather a repertoire. I won't say restrictive, but there's an opportunity to do all sorts of repertoire that needs to be brought before the public again.

Jo Reed: Well, you weren't kidding around. Its debut was the six-hour long production of Wagner's “Rienzi”. I mean, that was bold <laughter>.

Gil Rose: Bold would be one word you could use, yeah. You only get to launch a company once. So, we decided to do a concert performance of Wagner's third opera, “Rienzi”, which is an opera, in the French grand opera tradition, with marches, and giant choruses, and a 30-minute ballet, and we did it in concert. But if you do all of it that's known to still exist, it's about a six-hour event. So, we did it. We did act one and two, and then took a dinner break and came back for the rest, acts three, four, and five. It was a thrilling thing to do, and I think, we're not 100% sure, but it may have been the only complete performance of “Rienzi” ever done in the Western Hemisphere, and we're not sure if it might’ve been the only complete performance of “Rienzi” since its premiere.

<pause in thought>

Gil Rose: So, yes, we don't have a lot of small ideas.

Jo Reed: Yeah <laughter>. So, can we talk about the process of programming BMOP and Odyssey? They do productions together, so how do you integrate these seasons? Because not everything is together.

Gil Rose: Yeah, right. If Odyssey's doing Verdi, we don't do it with BMOP. But if we're doing a 20th century American work, we pull forces and often participate. In recent years, especially coming out of the pandemic, we've managed to cooperate quite a bit. How do we program? BMOP has this agenda of 95% American music written within the last 100 years, could be something from 1924, or 2023. It's in a rather large window, but it's generally all American and composer kind of focused. So, the concerts come around composer ideas or styles of composers. Whereas Odyssey has been getting some notoriety for building thematic seasons. So, we'll pick a season and do-- I'm thinking of the-- some of the past seasons, we did a whole opera season based on the stories about the Tudors, as in Henry the 8th, the Tudors, and we filled it out with five operas. That was the one that got interrupted by the pandemic, but we've also done seasons about historical characters, like Joan of Arc, or even musical ideas, like when the Gounod bicentenary came, I didn't notice very many American companies even acknowledge it in any way. We did a little mini season of Gounod operas called Gounodyssey. So, we're into the themes, and we get a lot of good feedback, and it does, I think, like BMOP’s recording activities for Odyssey, the thematic seasons sort of distinguish us and give us an  identity.

Jo Reed: All right, here's the question I have. You have this idea, “I want to start an orchestra.” That's great. What did you actually do to begin this? How do you start?

Gil Rose: Yeah--

Jo Reed: How did you start?

Gil Rose: Well, it was a long time ago, and it was way before the internet had kicked in. So, I was newly arrived in Boston and didn't really know many people. I was trying to reach out and connect with people, and I thought “I'm going to start something,” because I, quite frankly, didn't have anything to do. So, I came up with this idea about an orchestra with an alternative model, and then I started telling people about it. One of the things I did at the very beginning was I <laughs> actually put an ad in the want ads, and I <laughs> described the orchestra and asked if anybody was interested in being part of it. A couple people replied, and to this day, one of them is still one of my best friends, and also still plays in the orchestra. So, I just put feelers out and started talking to composers, which there were no shortage of here in Boston, and got a concert together and went from there.

Jo Reed: Okay, so, now, second question is how do you sustain BMOP and now Odyssey? I mean, we all know the larger musical institutions have a repertoire of recognized European classical pieces for a reason, because they know that that's going to pay the bills. So, where do you find first, the money, and then also the audience for contemporary work?

Gil Rose: Right. Well, the money is a reality and a critical reality. When I started this, I had never formed a non-profit, or an orchestra, or an opera company, and I'd never asked anybody for money, and I'd never written a grant proposal. I'd never done any of those things. Necessity is the mother of invention. So we wanted to do this orchestra and I started figuring it out. I had a lot of help from a lot of people, and piece by piece, we put it together. To this day, twenty-five years later, a Grammy Award, the Musical America-- everything, fundraising is no easier than it was when I started. The organization's bigger, and it's a hungry beast which needs feeding, and we work at feeding it every day. The difference between, I think, what we do, or what a lot of organizations like BMOP do, is our fundraising efforts have a certain sense of missionary work. We are out about an idea, and most people who work in the arts will tell you that raising money is no fun, but I will say that if you're raising money for something you believe in, it's not as egregious a task, and it also is something that people respond to. Because if you're talking about something that needs to happen for artistic development and growth, people understand that, and they sense your passion and your commitment to it, and that's how things move and flow. So, a large part of my day is about money.

Jo Reed: You've received quite a few grants from the arts endowment, and I'm curious what they have allowed you to do as an organization?

Gil Rose: Well, I'm not sure what year exactly was our first NEA application and grant, but I would imagine it was around 1999 or 2000, and we've received support not every year since then, but almost every year, for a variety of projects, from commissioning, to recording, to performing--- a couple dozen successful applications. The support has been integral and critical for our development and bringing these things from conception to the finish line. It's an endorsement and a seal of approval. Yes, we often lead with that <laughs> fact. Yeah, because especially with the track record we have, of consistent support for a variety of projects, it's a great endorsement. The NEA’s been a great partner over all these years.

Jo Reed: All right, there's the money raising part of running two organizations, or three, actually, and the grants, and writing the grants. But then there's all the music permissions and dealing with contracts, and all of that, which just from what little I do with music permissions, is just the biggest pain.

Gil Rose: I'm not going to argue with you <laughs>.

Jo Reed: Yeah. I mean, in the beginning, you didn't have a staff for that. I'm assuming it was just you. So, getting your arms around that really is almost a job in and of itself.

Gil Rose: Yeah, I should say that over the years we've had great staff. I learned along the way, and in many cases, they've learned along the way too. Sometimes having less people doing things is better than having more. I know that seems anti-intuitive or counterintuitive. We do work with some other labels, and they're bigger entities, and they have a lot of staff, and I think sometimes my staff is like <laughs> “Why do they have so many people to do my job?” But there's an efficiency that comes from a small staff that gets lost in the big staff. I've just had excellent help and dedicated people who really put their shoulders into it, and think creatively. I think it goes back to the word “Project”, it's a work in process.

Jo Reed: I want to know a little bit more about you. Tell me where you were born and raised?

Gil Rose: I was born in South Side Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I grew up about 40 miles to the southeast of Pittsburgh in a little town called Latrobe, Pennsylvania, which has a famous resident, well known probably to the NEA and audiences everywhere. My neighbor was Mr. Rogers--

Jo Reed: Oh wow.

Gil Rose: -and I grew up in Mr. Roger’s neighborhood. Yeah, so I was there, and the other famous resident of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, was Arnold Palmer. So, I had a golf club in my hand, and Mr. Rogers on the television in all my upbringing. But then I left there after high school and lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, for a while, and in Europe for a while, and back to Pittsburgh for graduate school, and then ended up in Boston. I've been here since 1994.

Jo Reed: How did music figure in your life when you were a kid growing up?

Gil Rose: I benefited from a strong public school music program, and I played in the band, and sang in the chorus, and was part of all the musical activity of a fairly large school district. I come from an avocational musical family who enjoyed music, my father's side especially, and it was just sort of in the air. When I got to participate in ensembles, and choirs, and orchestras, and bands, realized that there was something in that that resonated with me. It's funny, it all comes full circle. I can remember, I was telling this story to somebody yesterday, because we're about to launch into a recording project with a very recognized and distinguished American composer, Joe Schwantner, and I was talking to him the other day and it made me remember that sometime in the 8th or 9th grade, I had gone <laughs> to a summer music camp, and I didn't know anything, or anybody, or I didn't know certainly who Joseph Schwantner was. I was at the three-week camp at the University of West Virginia in Morgantown, West Virginia, and the RA in our floor in the dorm, I had some reason to knock on his door, and this music was coming out of it, and he showed me the score for a piece called “Aftertones of Infinity”, which blew my mind open. I never had heard anything like that, or seen anything like that. This fall, we'll make a commercial recording of that piece with the composer there. So, it's been quite a journey that's been driven by a love of ideas, and repertoire, and sound worlds, and it's given me an amazing life.

Jo Reed: You mentioned the organization being composer-centric, and I'd like you to tease that out a little bit more. Let's talk about how the composers, and I'm assuming especially visiting composers, work with the orchestra, how you collaborate with them?

Gil Rose: So, I just finished a recording project a few days ago, a big opera project with a very famous American composer, John Corigliano, and Mark Adamo, who was the librettist for the opera, “The Lord of Cries”. We did a concert performance and recording, but John was up here on two occasions to do mixing for the recording, and at one point we were in the car, headed somewhere, and he said “What's it like with all the composers you work with? Do they work like me?” I said “No, none of them are the same.” They're all different, and they all interact with me as conductor, or producer of a recording, or a concert, in a different way. Some are very hands off, some are very hands on. Like any person, they have their own idiosyncrasies, and that adventure, interacting with all these interesting and great musical minds, has been an education about people, and what they desire, and what motivates them, and how they think. There's no end to the fascinations that come out of that. They still keep coming and I learn something new every time I work with a different composer, and it's been almost 100% positive <laughs>. Not quite 100%, but it's been a great honor, and really, when times get tough, and there's challenges, and you have to fight through stuff, I think about those moments, that I got the opportunity to not only just meet, but to engage in the process of bringing the vision of gifted thinkers to the public, and to preserve it, in many ways, for posterity. So, yeah, I probably have dealt with, well, at this point, hundreds of composers, and no one of them is like the other.

Jo Reed: Well, one I would like to talk about is Andrew Norman, whose work “Play” you commissioned, and also recorded. You raised the money for that recording through a Kickstarter campaign?

Gil Rose: Kickstarter was part of it. It's far enough back that they all sort of get a little murky in my mind, <laughs> actually, how they came into being. But there was a Kickstarter that was part of that. There was a lot of individual donors too, I think, and some foundational support. That was a piece that got a lot of recognition. Andrew was starting to be known in a composer’s circle, and we kind of found out about him before that, and he was in a residency with us for two years, three years. One of the things that went with the residency was to commission a piece, and the objective of the commission was we were very dedicated to commissioning, and still are, substantial orchestra pieces, meaning not short and not small. Many of the opportunities composers get with big orchestras are to write what I call the snappy new music opener. So, they get a 12-minute piece at max, half of a rehearsal, and it gets played, and that’s sort of it. We wanted to go back and get commissions of pieces that took the whole second half of the concert, where they were the main course of a concert. So, Andrew's piece, “Play”, was one of those, and I think it's forty-six minutes. It's a big piece, and, yeah, it was a wild ride to get to the performance, and the recording, and then the recognition, I think it was in The New Yorker. I think the piece was described as the most important orchestra piece written in the 21st century.

It was all different after that. But I will tell a funny story about that, which is this very loud and famous piece which we just repeated at Carnegie Hall a couple months ago. It's been the apple of the composer's world's eye since it was written. It was a very small audience that night when we premiered it, and I'm just very thankful that we were able to make a commercial recording, because that's where the piece started to get its legs. It’s been played all over the world by big orchestras and famous conductors, and if we hadn't managed the recording it would’ve had that one performance for a small audience in Boston on a rainy, rainy night, and that would’ve been it.

Jo Reed: Who is your audience, Gil?

Gil Rose: Boy, that's a good question that I'm not sure I have an answer for. Our audience is rather eclectic. Since we do so many thematic programs, often we’ll draw people who have an interest in that theme. For example,some years ago, we did a concert, as a memorial concert, for Toru Takemitsu’s death, and they were all pieces either by Takemitsu, or written in honor of Takemitsu, or somehow connected to Takemitsu. We worked very deeply with the Japanese community here, with the Japanese consulate in Boston, and we had a big crowd, and a lot of the people in the audience were Japanese, who would not have come to a BMOP concert otherwise. Now, the next concert we did, which had a different theme, most of them, didn't come back. But some of them did, and what we've been able to-- basically by doing this, is attracting an audience for an idea and then holding onto some percentage of them, sometimes small, but you build up enough of those events and you've got your own core constituency. So, we have this kind of strange eclectic brew of an audience of our own making. We don't have a big marketing presence. I don't really want to spend money on that, when I can spend it on composers and recordings, but we have a loyal fan base. It's funny because partially our audiences, some of the people in our audience have never even been to a BMOP concert. Because of the active and involved recording agenda, many people know us and are very dedicated to us, and some of them are donors and financial supporters, some of them have never been to a BMOP concert. But they know us through the recording work we do, which it can be delivered to their computer in a split second.

Jo Reed: I want to talk about one of your current projects. You've begun a five-year initiative called “As Told By”, and that's commissioning, and premiering, and recording opera works by black composers, about black figures. The first one—which received a grant from the Arts Endowment-- premiered last year, “X”, by Anthony Davis. Tell us a little bit about the impetus behind this initiative and how you chose the operas you did?

Gil Rose: Well, the impetuses kind of came from two angles, I think. So, this is a program to do five operas by black American composers about black historical subjects, and they all happen to have some kind of connection to Boston. That wasn't a motivator, but it turned out to work out that way. But it really started because 20 years ago, I was advocating with a prior opera company that I had worked with and helped to run, called Opera Boston, to do a performance of Anthony Davis's “Life and Times of Malcolm X”. It didn't happen for whatever-- I can't remember exactly why it didn't happen, but it didn't come onto the stage, and I'd been trying to find a way to do this opera for quite a while, because I thought it was one of the great American operas. That had just been on my desk, trying to find a moment to be done, and at the same time, I got very interested in an opera by another black American composer named Ulysses Kay, who had written an opera about Frederick Douglass, which had also had an initial performance in 1992, or something, and disappeared. Got a less than positive review from the New York Times, and nobody touched it after that. But I knew about it, I knew Ulysses Kay’s music, and so these operas were kind of in my consciousness about something I'd like to do. There's dozens and hundreds, maybe hundreds of them, that are there now in my brain about what could be done in the future, but they were just kind of banging around in my head. I realized that “Oh, wait, they have something in common.” It was just the authors, the subjects, and that they also both had had initial moments and disappeared. Then I sensed a theme, <laughs> as I often do, and I started filling out the idea, and I started to pitch it to foundations, and we received money, and we started going. So, we've produced the first one and made the recording, as we always do, or try to almost always do, and was a Grammy nominee, and we're now onto the second one, which will be done next summer, June of ‘24, which is Nkeiru Okoye’s opera, “Harriet Tubman”.

Jo Reed: “As Told By” also brings educational programs to Boston public schools, and you do this in partnership with Castle of Our Skins. I had interviewed Ashleigh Gordon, who's the artistic director of Castle of Our Skins, back in 2021. How did you guys join forces, and what's the hope behind the educational component?

Gil Rose: Well, Ashleigh actually plays in BMOP. She's one of our viola players, and so I knew Ash, and once this idea of what operas would be done, it was obvious that this whole project should be done with a big effort towards community outreach, and audience development, and educational programs. So, I knew what Ash did, and I knew how excellent she was at all the work that Castle of Our Skins does, and we talked, and we were partnering on this going forward. So, it's nice because we don't have to reinvent any wheels. They're expert at community engagement, and education programs. So, as in the word “Project”, we found a way to draw outside the lines, and just partner in a way that advances both organizations and benefits the community.

Jo Reed: I know this year, your twenty-fifth anniversary, you had your debut at Carnegie Hall to glowing reviews by the New York Times. I wonder what that experience was like for you, and for the musicians?

Gil Rose: Well, it was a long day, <laughter>  I went down the day before, but the orchestra came down on buses the morning of the concert. We went into a dress rehearsal in the afternoon, and had a dinner break, and played the concert. It was quick experience, but very, very gratifying, and I think I'm not out of turn in saying that it really gave the players in the orchestra a sense of pride and accomplishment, and it didn't hurt to get a rave review from the New York Times about the concert, and we're hoping to go back. There is no group like BMOP in the country, and we're happy to take it to the country <laughs> too, not just Boston.

Jo Reed: Looking back over this quarter century of the musical work you did, what's brought you the most joy?

Gil Rose: Wow, oh my. Now, what an interesting-- what's really brought me the most joy? I don't know that there's been all that many epiphanies of that kind of joy. But sometimes the joy comes at unexpected moments. I think that getting up in the morning and doing this thing, what drives me is what gives me the most joy in the knowledge, and in some cases it's specific, and some cases it's cumulative. But having the knowledge that we did something, that if we hadn't done it and put all of the blood, sweat, and tears into making it happen, it would’ve never happened, and our public understanding and discourse about music would’ve been diminished without its existence. An example of that would be-- well, there's many examples of it, just one that pops in my mind because it was a big, big, huge concert, was on our 20th  anniversary, we topped it all off with a big concert performance and recording of David Del Tredici's work, “Child Alice”, which is a two hour orchestral musical extravaganza par excellence. That piece is at the core of what American music is. Only part of that piece had ever been recorded, and the whole thing needed to be known and heard in full. It wasn't easy, but we made it happen, and knowing that that and two dozen other projects like that came into being because of what we did gives me the most joy.

Jo Reed: Finally, Gil, what can we look forward to from BMOP and from Odyssey?

Gil Rose: Surprises <laughter>.

Jo Reed: Good answer.

Gil Rose: Well, yeah, there's so many things in the pipeline. Coming out of the pandemic, I've been using the analogy that the pandemic was like an earthquake, and though the earthquake’s over, the aftershocks are still rumbling, and will continue to rumble. They'll get weaker and more far apart, but a lot of things that we were planning to do around the twenty-fifth anniversary were pandemic interrupted. So, there's a lot of rescheduling to do, a lot of commissions coming, a lot of recording projects that are all done but haven't been released yet, and there's more and more coming. I hope we can continue to do this work.

Jo Reed: Well, congratulations on twenty-five years, and here's to the next twenty-five, yes?

Gil Rose: Well, I don't know if I have twenty-five in me, but at least let's say maybe the next ten. Thank you, it was a pleasure to be here.

Jo Reed: Thank you, it was a pleasure to have you. Thanks.

 That was Gil Case the conductor, founder, and artistic director of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project or BMOP, its recording platform BMOP/sound and Odyssey Opera. We’ll have links to it all in our show notes. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. We’d love to know your thoughts—email us at artworkspod@arts.gov. And follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on Apple, it helps other people who love the arts to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed—and thanks for listening.

Gil Rose: I think one of the realities of new compositions for orchestra is that they often get played once and then never again. Many, many, many pieces, and many by famous composers, never see a second performance run. So, one of the reasons I think that is is that they've not entered the canon in a way, and I always felt that if we were going to take the time, and energy, and finances to produce a piece of orchestral music that hadn't been played in thirty-five years, that would be irresponsible to not record it as a professional studio recording for preservation, and for dissemination. Only so many people can come to one of our concerts, but by recording this music at the same time, or in recording after the performances in the studio sessions, we have preserved pieces that would otherwise be lost, and some of them lost forever. That's a unique thing we do, and it gives us both pride, and pleasure, and distinguishes us,