Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.
Maestro W. H. Curry: Growing up, I not only played classical music, I played jazz. I played the string bass, the bass guitar, and the baritone saxophone. And I grew up with this incredibly deep love of jazz. So, when I was offered a position as resident conductor of the New Orleans Symphony, I was certainly going to try to work in as much jazz talent in that city into the programs. And I did. To me, jazz is classical music. And the best of it is great music. Mozart, Louis Armstrong, the two greatest musical apostles of musical joy.
Jo Reed: That is Maestro Henry William Curry, composer, conductor and music director of the Durham Symphony Orchestra. And This is Art Works, the Weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed.
Maestro Henry William Curry is a man of incredible talent, tenacity, and, as you’ll hear, enthusiasm. His love of music is infectious and informs his rigorous approach to conducting. He grew up in Pittsburgh in an African-American working class family with a musical lineage—his maternal grandfather organized and sang in a Black opera company while his paternal grandmother was an organ major at New England Conservatory. Although neither of his parents were musicians, Curry’s brother has been a cellist with the Cleveland Symphony for over 35 years. It’s not easy for African-American classical musicians and it’s especially difficult for African-American conductors. And Maestro Curry has met numerous challenges even as he has found great success. Studying at Oberlin Conservatory, Maestro Curry has served as resident conductor and Summerfest Artistic director for the North Carolina Symphony for twenty years. He was also resident conductor for the New Orleans Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, St Paul’s Chamber Orchestra and has guest conducted with major opera houses, ballet companies, and symphony orchestras across the country and around the world. Currently, he is the music director and conductor of the Durham Symphony Orchestra where his innovative programming with its commitment to American music disrupts the idea of classical music as elitist. Maestro Curry is also the only African American to ever be music director of a symphony orchestra in the southern United States. For the Maestro, a fierce lifelong determination is matched, in fact, bolstered, by his utter and complete lifelong passion for music.
Maestro W. H. Curry: Now I grew up in an era where everyone owned a piano. I mean, poor people owned a piano. My mother and father were born five years before the beginning of radio, radio networks. So the entertainment centers was the piano. So everyone in the home played the piano a little bit, some by ear, some light classics, some popular songs. So we couldn't afford a piano but my parents' friends always had a piano and as soon as we entered their home I would make a beeline for the piano bench and you couldn't get me off it. But I'm sure it broke my parents' heart that there just wasn't any money for a piano and lessons.
Jo Reed: When did you begin formal music lessons?
Maestro W.H. Curry: I grew up in an all-Black neighborhood, went to an all-Black elementary school. And this is 1960s, early 1960s, and I guess I needn't add that of course financially speaking, the school was underserved. There were only the basics. All the teachers, except one, were white. There were no music programs, no singing, no art classes until they started to change things a bit when I was in sixth grade and there was a Jewish gentleman, Eugene Reichenfeld, who noticed there was this Black school over here, a suburb of Pittsburgh that had nothing. And so he offered his instruments and his lessons at this all-Black elementary school for free. It was a lucky break for me because he was also a conductor. And long story short, eventually he had me conduct his community orchestras when I was about 14, 15-years-old.
Jo Reed: Oh, my goodness. And conducing was something you had wanted to do?
Maestro W.H. Curry: Conducting was a secret fantasy of mine because I was a painfully shy introverted kid, but I did want to be a conductor. I didn't tell anyone that. But after one of my viola lessons, I was a violist more than any other instrument, he said, "Bill, I think you would make a good conductor and I'm going to let you conduct my community orchestra next week in a rehearsal." And I said, "That's thrilling but I don't know how to conduct." And he said that old adage, "Conductors are born and not made." Now it took me 20, 30 years to realize what he meant by that because I've known some genius violinists, just to mention that category, that once they try conducting and they will get paid to conduct because they're stars and can put butts in seats in these concert halls, they're terrible. They never get better. But me, after six months, was doing better than the local high school teachers. So there is a certain gift for it, the gift of connecting the mind to the body to the hands. But I did conduct this orchestra the next week and I'm sure I was terrible, but I remember I couldn't stop smiling at the end of the rehearsal. So he invited me to conduct half of a program about four months after that. So I made my conducting debut when I was 15-years-old.
Q What did you conduct?
Maestro W.H. Curry: Well, this gentleman, Eugene Reichenfeld, was really smart in that he allowed me to choose my selections. This is something that doesn't even happen in the professional world anymore. You have a thing called an artistic administrator that hands out pieces to conductors and if you don't accept them you're not a team player. Every conductor has their favorite pieces, their favorite genre of music and then there are pieces by certain composers that I don't get at all. I recognize they're masterpieces, like the Mendelsohn "Italian Symphony." I mean, if you want to hear a really badly conducted Mendelsohn "Italian Symphony," I will lend you my recording.
Jo Reed: <laughs>
Maestro W.H. Curry: I mean, it's not like I can't do a professional job, but I don't get it. It's like certain friends of yours. You say, "Wow. Despite their flaws, I love them." And this person, I didn't know what, some kind of psychic personality glitch, but he let me choose my own music. And this was important in that I had an out of body experience when I was in eighth grade playing in a youth symphony the "Overture to Wagner's Die Meistersinger." I had never had an out of body <laughs> experience before. I felt like I was floating around the room while we were playing this overture. So needless to say, I became a Wagnerian from that point on and one of the peak experiences of my life was when I was not feeling well on a school day and my mom, unusually so, let me stay home from school. Usually it was, "Get out of here. You'll be fine." But I guess I was looking kind of blue that day or purple. Any rate, I had taken home from the library the four records of the complete recording of Tchaikovsky's ballet, "Swan Lake." I had never heard anything from "Swan Lake." And so that afternoon playing all eight sides of these four records was one of the dozen highlights of my life. I just completely fell in love with this piece. So I conducted the Suite from "Swan Lake" and music by Wagner on this program. He knew that if I loved music that I'd be free to express my emotions rather than to be stiff and self-conscious about the affair.
Jo Reed: Yes, that's smart. And you went to Oberlin, which is one of the great music schools, and you continued studying the viola but then you also studied conducting. And I'm curious what that experience was like for you.
Maestro W.H. Curry: I couldn't study conducting until, what, my junior year. It was something about the Oberlin program. So I was a viola major and I told my viola teacher straight out on the first day, "Look, I don't want to play a viola. I want to be a conductor." There was a conducting teacher there, Robert Baustian, who was also one of the principal conductors of the Santa Fe Opera. And he knew from watching me conduct that I didn't need any lessons in conducting technique because I had been conducting since the age of 15 and the great thing about Eugene Reichenfeld is he had no less than three orchestras that he was Music Director of, so I was conducting them all the time. So I had much more experience as a freshman in college than a graduate from college. So he knew, yeah, I could control the orchestra, no problems. But what he saw was I was, you know, young conductors are very enthusiastic they're jumping up and down, you know, but they're not listening carefully.
Jo Reed: Right.
Maestro W.H. Curry: And part of your job is to be like a doctor with a stethoscope with a body and to find out what's wrong. So you have to be clear and objective. And so I remember I did a rehearsal of something, and I felt very, very full of myself, how great I was. And he handed me seven yellow legal pads of instructions. "You didn't notice the trumpet wasn't playing here. You didn't notice the basses were flat.“ et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's what he gave to me. It takes ten years of conducting before you actually hear clearly. It's a mish-mash of sound. You're lost in it. But in order to be a good conductor you have to be a technician, so you have to calm down and listen carefully and be the doctor that the orchestra needs.
Jo Reed: You went to the Richmond Symphony after Oberlin but somehow it was via the Cleveland Symphony. Can you tell me about that journey?
Maestro W.H. Curry: Well, I was at the Oberlin Conservatory, I think as a junior then. And the Cleveland Orchestra would come to Oberlin a couple times a year to play and on one truly memorable occasion, the Music Director at that time, Lorin Maazel, was conducting Mahler's Symphony No. 5. Wow. Unforgettable. So the performance ended and my roommate said, "Look. We should go backstage and meet Lorin Maazel." I said, "Are you crazy? I'm too shy to do that." He said, "Look, but we have an entrée. We know his parents." His parents ran the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony and me and my roommate had both been in the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony. So he said, "Look, we'll go backstage. We'll talk about his mom. He'll like us."
Jo Reed: <laughs>
Maestro W.H. Curry: So he dragged me backstage and we told him we knew his parents. And then he asked me what did I think of the Mahler. I don't remember what I said. I know I felt like it was a gigantic novel in five big volumes. But then the evening ended and the next day, Lorin Maazel called up my conducting teacher and said, "What's this Curry kid like?" And Robert Baustian must have said something very positive because the next day I was invited at age 19 to be part of the Cleveland Conductors Symposium that Lorin Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra had. Now it was incredibly complicated. You had to play an original composition on the piano. You had to play your principal instrument. He would play a crazy 12 tone chord at the piano then change one note, play it again and ask you to sing the note he had changed. I mean, it was unbelievable. And he had every conductor, I think there were eight of us, choose one movement from a symphony to conduct and the deal was you had to be able to write out from memory that entire movement.
Jo Reed: Oy.
Maestro W.H. Curry: Because this is Lorin Maazel with his photographic memory. So I went through this entire ordeal and I conducted the orchestra in the First Movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 2. and afterwards, some of the players found me in my dressing room and said pretty much, "You're green. You're green. You're green. But stick with it." Lorin Maazel was extremely complimentary. I mean, we all need validation from our elders to say the least. In the hall was the conductor of one of the Midwest orchestras. His name was Thomas Ricchetti. His sister was the Executive Director of the Richmond, Virginia Symphony and so a year later when they needed an Assistant Conductor, Tom Ricchetti called up his sister and said, "You should look at this kid, Curry." So I was then in my senior year trying to do a five-year program, bachelor's and master's, in four years and I did audition for the orchestra for Assistant Conductor and they offered me the job. I went back to Oberlin and I said to Mr. Baustian, "What do you think I should do?" He said, "Well, I can't tell you what to do but I've had," he said, "Ten conducting students in ten years and none of them are working as a conductor." That was enough for me. So I left Oberlin. I got there and the Executive Director told me within a day, "By the way, thank you for being here, but we're not going to give you a title." I said, "What do you mean? I left college to be Assistant Conductor." "Well," she said, "You are from Oberlin and your predecessor, a young man, was from Oberlin, too. And he didn't work out very well. So the board of directors had said we're going to deny you a title. You'll still get to conduct the chamber orchestra but not the symphony orchestra." Now this sound like nonsense, to use a nice word. I didn't find out until I had left Richmond that once the board of directors, who are generally a more conservative group, progressive, socially progressive, no, compared to the orchestra, when they found out they had hired their first African-American conductor in the capital of the old Confederacy, they said, "Hell, no. Let him conduct but you're not going to give him a title." I didn't know this. Now fast forward to the end of the season. The season is ending with Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. I had a great relationship with the Music Director. After all, he had hired me. And he didn't tell me about the board of directors' problems with me. At any rate, the dress rehearsal was on a Sunday night of Beethoven's Ninth comes. And this is a very youthful, energetic 40-something conductor and he's seated, which he had never done. And he looked pale. That night I went home and I said, "If he is sick for the performance tomorrow-- Nah, that won't happen. That won't happen." So I started anyway to look at the score. Fell asleep at midnight. The next morning 8:15, ring, ring, ring. "Good morning. How are you?" "I'm fine." I knew what had happened. "Have you ever conducted," the Executive Director asked, "Have you ever conducted Beethoven's Symphony No. 9?" I lied, of course. I said, "Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I had, yeah, certainly I had. Certainly. And da-da-da-da. And yes. Yes." "Well, you're going to have to conduct it tonight. The conductor is sick. There's no time for an extra rehearsal for you. So it's show time at 8:00." So here I am, 21-years-old, beginning my professional career with arguably the greatest symphony ever written. Now, why were they letting me conduct? This is what happened, and again, I found this out a year after that. Emergency call at midnight to the board of directors, "The conductor can't conduct." And the board said, "Well, you're not going to let that Black kid conduct." And they were stuck. So somehow someone called a manager in New York who had the number of Antal Doráti. Antal Doráti was the Music Director of the National Symphony which is located in Washington, D.C. which is a two-hour drive from Richmond. That's why they thought of Antal Doráti. So they woke him up at 2:00 AM. "Maestro Doráti, we have an emergency, Beethoven 9. No time for a rehearsal. You certainly have conducted it. Can you please help us out?" And he said, "Do you have an Assistant Conductor?" And they said, "Well, sort of." And he said, "Well, let him conduct," and hung up on them.
Jo Reed: <laughs>
Maestro W.H. Curry: So when I got this call at 8:15 AM, the call ended with, "Oh, by the way, we're going to give you a title because, 'We have to tell the public and the media who the heck you are.'" So now I'm Assistant Conductor finally. And of course when you're 21, you don't have any fear at all. You're like a young Siegfried fighting the dragon. I had no fear at all. <laughs> And so the performance was electrifying. Standing ovation. The review the next morning was like my mother had written it from heaven. And long story short, I was able to parlay that into an audition for a full-time professional orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony. And that's how my career began.
Jo Reed: You know, it's not easy to be a conductor, period. But it had to have been particularly difficult to be an African-American conductor, certainly now, but really, even more so then. And this can't be the only time something like this happened to you in your career.
Maestro W.H. Curry: Well, any African-American classical artist will tell you, we don't talk about this in interviews because we're afraid of being misquoted. Andre Watts schooled me on this, great African-American pianist. "Don't talk about the issue because for one thing, something will be taken out of context; and number two, you will seem like you're Head of the Grievance Committee." "Oh, woe is me," the self-pity thing. But let me tell you one story. Lorin Maazel mentored me. At this time, I was, like, 24. He was at this time the conductor not only of the Cleveland Orchestra but the Music of the Vienna Opera, arguably the greatest opera company in Europe. So he saw me conduct a second time and was wonderfully flattering. And he said, "What you need now is management. I'm going to get you in the office of the Harold Shaw in New York." Harold Shaw was amongst other things, the manager of arguably the greatest pianist of the 20th century, Vladimir Horowitz, who was still alive at the time. So this was 1980. I get into the lobby and he has me cool my heels for 45 minutes. Finally, I'm escorted into the office and within about two minutes he said, "You know, I can't do anything with a Black conductor." Now there's a thing called the glass ceiling. There's also a thing Black people call the "N" word wake-up call where you suddenly realize as a young person you have a problem or other people have a problem with you and you were too young to look at this clearly but now you had your head broken on the glass ceiling and you know reality. Even though Lorin Maazel, one of the five great conductors of the world, has gotten you into this man's office, because you're Black you've got to, like, get out of his office. So, yes, that's just one story.
Jo Reed: It’s very telling. And what did you find in Baltimore? It’s a great orchestra. I live outside of Baltimore, so I think of it as my orchestra now. What was your experience like there?
Maestro W.H. Curry: It started off badly and great in the same time. Remember, I'm very green. I'm 22. So they again, because I'm so green, gave me a weird title of being Guest Conductor. A guest conductor is someone that stays for one week and they're gone, but I'm there the whole season, and again, it was a one-year contract. So I knew in order to get rehired I had better have a great concert before Christmas. They offered me a choice of a couple programs, one which included Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10. When you're a young conductor, there are certain pieces you can do as well as an old conductor if you feel it. It's like an actor that says, "I know that character. I know Hamlet. I know King Lear. I know Archie Bunker." Whatever. You know that. I felt Shostakovich's Tenth. I felt this was almost like my autobiography. So you can only imagine how carefully I prepared that score and how passionately I conducted it. The performance was just hard to describe. I can only say that my best friend, Dan Euband, was at a party some years ago in Baltimore, Baltimore Symphony members, and the principal horn player was retiring. And I guess his name was Dave Packard. And he had been with the Orchestra something like 30 years and they asked him, "What was the most exciting performance you ever did with the Baltimore Symphony?" And he said, "When Bill Curry did Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10.
Jo Reed: Wow. High praise, indeed.
Maestro W.H. Curry: Now here's the bad part.
Jo Reed: Oh.
Maestro W.H. Curry: I didn't know the Music Director was in the hall. Oddly enough, he never told me that he had been at the performance where the orchestra was cheering me when I would come onstage. Two days after the performance, one of the trumpet players, Rob Roy McGregor, comes to me and says, boy, you're in a lot of trouble. I said, what are you talking about? I thought the Shostakovich went well. He said, it went too well, because now the orchestra thinks you're better than the music director, and that's going to get back to him. Which it did. And that man, for all of his talent, let's say it was a bad son bad father relationship from that point on. Though they did offer me a title of resident conductor. I replaced the legendary Leon Fleisher in that role, and I had a great run with the orchestra, because the orchestra saw me as this still-green talent, but they saw me as their favorite son or nephew, and they figuratively put their arms around me. And they gave me the greatest constructive criticism. One, the oboe player, Joe Turner, principal oboe, then. I was seated next to him on the orchestra bus, going to a concert. He said, look. Remember. The orchestra will play for you as long as it appears to be that you love the music at least as much as yourself. Too many conductors, it's like a vanity thing. It's an ego thing. It's a bully pulpit, as it were. But if you love the music as much as yourself, then you'll be fine. So, they put their arm around me, and it was a blissful experience that was the perfect entree for me to go into the professional world.
Jo Reed: Well, you've worked with so many symphony orchestras… Indianapolis, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. And so on and so on and so on. And you were also resident conductor of the New Orleans Symphony. And I'm so curious about that, because New Orleans has such a rich musical tradition, and I was wondering if you were able to bring that to symphony programming, if people were open to that. If that was something you wanted to do.
Maestro W. H. Curry: Well, yes. Great question. And growing up, I not only played classical music, I played jazz. I played the string bass, the bass guitar, and the baritone saxophone. And I grew up with this incredibly deep love of jazz. When I was very young, I got to conduct Benny Goodman and Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. I mean, can you imagine?
Jo Reed: No. No.
Maestro W. H. Curry: George Shearing. I mean, unbelievable. They were elderly, and I was very, very young, and I got a chance to work with them. So, I revere jazz. So, when I was offered a position as resident conductor of the New Orleans Symphony, I was certainly going to try to work in as much jazz talent in that city into the programs. And I did. I discovered a brilliant young saxophonist, Nicholas Payton. I worked with the Neville Brothers. I've worked with the Marsalis family-- Wynton Marsalis, Brandon, the patriarch Ellis Marsalis was one of my friends. I lived about a block from him. So, yeah, I used all of these people that I could find. Al Hirt. Pete Fountain. I mean, they had never been asked to collaborate with a symphony orchestra. But, to me, jazz is classical music. And the best of it is great music. Mozart, Louis Armstrong, the two greatest musical apostles of musical joy. So, it was a one-year run, then the orchestra went bankrupt, but I believe I changed the idea about jazz not being classical music, at least for that decade in New Orleans.
Jo Reed: Then, you went to the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra, and you were there for 20 years. And there's just so much I want to ask you about this, and we do have time considerations, but tell me about what you and that orchestra gave one another, to sustain a relationship for 20 years.
Maestro W. H. Curry: You know, you're the first person to ask that question. And it's a perfect question, because, as you know, the industry standard these days is you better start looking for another job after six years as conductor. Because the orchestra hates you, or some elements of the orchestra hates you after six years, no matter how good you are. The management says, well, we need a new image, a new billboard, Now, how did we manage to have, instead of the six to eight years-- I mean, Alan Gilbert was in New York, what, seven years?
Jo Reed: And I love Alan Gilbert.
Maestro W. H. Curry: Well, he was a great conductor. I mean, but as far as me, I can say that the week I was offered the resident conductor position with this orchestra, the very same week, I was offered a position as associate conductor of the Atlanta Symphony. Now, of course, being in this city with this huge upper-middle-class Black population--and I would have been the first African American staff conductor, was hugely tempting. And I loved the orchestra. I was there for a whole year as the interim associate conductor, until they offered me a two-year contract. But, truth to tell, there's-- I had a love affair with the North Carolina Symphony. It was chemistry. And conductors that guest-conduct a lot, as I have, you can feel the chemistry or the lack thereof within about one minute. And you have to be yourself, and it is what it is. And so, the first time I conducted the North Carolina Symphony, I think it took me about four bars before I said, this would be a great home for me. And they felt the same thing. So, as somebody said at year 18, when I was there, how could it be? This was someone in the orchestra said, how could it be that the orchestra still loves you after 18 years? The orchestra met me more than halfway. I've conducted some orchestras where I felt like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill, you know? But this orchestra met me halfway and more. And they knew. Well, one time I was in my dressing room, and it was right next to the men's locker room, orchestral players. And I could hear them talking about me through the door. And one gentleman said, you know, sometimes Curry is a pain in the whatever. But, tonight, at this concert, there's the strong likelihood that he's going to remind me, as he often does, of why I became a musician in the first place. So, there was some kind of magical marriage, chemistry, love, respect, between me and the orchestra. And it truly was an honor to conduct a great orchestra where my perfectionist instincts could run riot. With a great orchestra, you can be a perfectionist. And so, because our programs are often recorded, I still enjoy hearing some of my archival recordings of these performances, because it's very obvious the orchestra and I are like one, like hand in glove.
Jo Reed: Well, you retired, which could not have been easy after 20 years. But even though you're retired, you're still the music director and the conductor of the Durham Symphony, and there was an overlap between there and the North Carolina Symphony. And the Durham Symphony prides itself on being an orchestra for the people, and you play this breadth of music. So, tell me about the way you program a season at Durham Symphony.
Maestro W. H. Curry: As an assistant, associate, and resident conductor, I never had the-- or rarely had the programming input I wanted to, as far as the selection of the pieces. This was not true of when I was the music director of the North Carolina Symphony summer season, where they pretty much let me have my head. Otherwise, you've got to work with people, people, people, and sometimes it's a compromise, sometimes you wind up doing pieces you have no feeling for, like, dare I say, the Mendelssohn Italian symphony. But with the Durham Symphony, I decided, now I can finally do the things that I think would make a symphonic experience much more interesting and less elitist. The ritual, nowadays, is overture, or some kind of dreary modern piece, and then the concerto, with the, of course, foreign-born soloist, and then the Maestro comes on and does the "New World Symphony." That's the formula. Very predictable. And how about the lack of American music being on the programs of American symphony orchestras? This is a national disgrace. So it was a couple years ago, I looked at the top ten American orchestras to see how much American music they were doing. Chicago Symphony on tour of Europe. Nothing. One orchestra, "Rhapsody in Blue." Another orchestra, Ives' "Variations on America," that he wrote when he was 17. Now, maybe this is changing a little bit in this woke era, but there are many composers that are lost to history. It used to be, there were things called newspaper music critics in cities that held the conductor's feet to the fire to make sure they did American music. Even Toscanini had to conduct American music in his 80s, when it's very hard to learn a new piece. So, the Durham Symphony, for 12 years, on every last program has had at least one piece by an American composer. Are we not an American orchestra? Do American audiences love American music? Yes. So I can do what I can do. Every program has had at least one piece. We are only the second orchestra in the history of America to do this for more than one season.
Jo Reed: Which is shocking. And you are a champion of African-American composers.
Maestro W. H. Curry: Oh, this has been one of my missions. Of course, American composers have been neglected. But African American composers have been especially neglected. So, if you were to look at the videos of our repertoire from our concerts, you'll see Scott Jopin, William Grant Still, Florence Price, salutes to Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis. So, we are unique. We call ourselves the People's Orchestra. Just two days ago, I was at the Durham celebration of Juneteenth. We were the only classical performing arts organization there. And we had a booth. I got to talk to hundreds of people, and we handed out our brochures. And they were stunned-- mainly these were Black people. They were stunned to hear that I am the only African American music director of a symphony orchestra in the history of the American South. We did the research. I know it's hard to believe.
Jo Reed: Moment of silence for that. Oh my lord.
Maestro W. H. Curry: But I am the only one. And so, my decisions about music making, about programming, of course are going to be a little bit different. You hear my passion and my ire about this. American audiences love American music. It should be heard.
Jo Reed: I completely agree. And you, yourself, are a composer. And I really want to touch on that, before we run out of time completely.
Maestro W. H. Curry: You know, composing is the most difficult thing in music. My mother, the principal influence in my life as a parent, said, if it's easy, don't bother with it. If it's difficult, go straight for it. I was the understudy for Aaron Copland when he conducted a concert with the Baltimore Symphony in 1980. I was 26, he was 80 years old. And I had a precious half an hour with him in his dressing room. And great, great gentleman, and I wish I had written down everything he had said to me, obviously. But I remember one thing. I said to him, Mr. Copland, you know I'm a conductor because I'm here as your understudy. But my secret dream is to be a composer. I had written a little bit in my mid-teens, but at the Oberlin Conservatory, I decided to drop composing because I didn't want to be a jack-of-all-trades, master of just one. And Copland thought for a second and he said, you know, as a conductor, you're in competition with every living conductor. I said, well, I guess I can kind of understand that. He said, but, as a composer, you're in competition with the living and the dead. Shall we put on this program Mozart or Curry? Tchaikovsky or Curry? Bruckner or Curry? That is the standard. And unless you're serious about this-- and, as Mahler said, if you're not writing masterpieces, why-- you know, why bother? So, that didn't make me want to compose, what Copland said, but I began to practice writing melodies. Because I wanted to write music that was melodic and warm and romantic. This was the era when melody was out. I mean, if you dared write a melody at the Oberlin Conservatory in 1975, you'd be ridiculed. And I'm very serious about that. This is before Philip Glass and the return to tonality. So, I began to compose in the 1990s, and just stuck with it, and had great success with a piece called "Eulogy for a Dream," using the speeches of Martin Luther King, much like the Copland "Lincoln Portrait" using the words of Lincoln. And this piece has always received a standing ovation.
Jo Reed: And you had a recent debut of a piece in April, "Dark Testament." Tell me about that piece.
Maestro W. H. Curry: This was a commission for a string orchestra piece from UNC Chapel Hill, and I love African American spirituals. And I'm of a certain age where I see a lot of the things that I loved in my youth disappearing, like African American spirituals. So, I decided to write this piece, based on either existing spirituals, or write my own. And it's a three-movement piece. Each movement is a tribute to an African American female icon. The first movement is a tribute to Mahalia Jackson, who was called the Queen of Gospel. She was a household word-- name, as the Queen of Gospel, as I was growing up. Incredible. So, the first movement is based on "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around." "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around." Great spiritual. Which means just what it says. I'm going to do this. It's like when Harold Shaw told me he couldn't do anything with a Black conductor, I could have crawled back home and gave up. Ain't nobody gonna turn me around has been the story of my life. The second movement is a tribute to Pauli Murray, Durham's hero. She was an incredible Renaissance woman. A lawyer-- first African American female priest, an author, a poet, a civil rights activist. And I read her autobiography, and one chapter was about never knowing her parents. Never knowing her parents, because her mother died young, and her father died in an asylum. So, for this movement, in honor of her, I used "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child," which she surely was.
Jo Reed: Yes, that’s perfect.
Maestro W. H. Curry: And then, the next movement is called "The Underground Railroad." It is a tribute, of course, to Harriet Tubman. And, in this piece, I use some of my own music, based on spirituals. The piece is dedicated to the first Juneteenth that was a federal holiday, which, of course, was just a few days ago. So, the piece has received a rapturous reception. I'm stunned by it. I've never had so much fan mail in my life. And I'm very, very proud to have written it, and I'm very flattered to have been commissioned to write it.
Jo Reed: Gosh. We are so pressed for time, So, perhaps, briefly, I want to know what it's like to rehearse and then conduct your own work.
Maestro W. H. Curry: Well, first of all, number one, it's terrifying beyond words. What did Copland say? Shall we do Tchaikovsky or Curry? Hm. So, these are high standards. So, before a first reading of a piece, I am almost hallucinating, I'm so scared. And this is not unusual for composers. You read about Brahms being upset before a first reading. But, when the orchestra starts to play the piece and it comes into the world for the first time, after it's been trapped in your head, It really-- there's nothing like this experience, to hear your piece being birthed into the world. It is-- it's so warm. And because of course it's your own music, so you become extremely emotional. How can you not? You're conducting music you've wept over when you were writing it on the paper. So, you have to control yourself, not to jump up and down for joy, and not to cry at certain passages that, when you played them on the piano, you knew they were good. So players tell me my face looks different when I'm conducting my own music. Like I am lost to the world. And do I love conducting my own music? Oh, yeah.
Jo Reed: Do you think about legacy? I'm assuming you do, and if you do, what would you like your legacy to be?
Maestro W. H. Curry: How could it be that I've never been asked that question? Of course, I don't want to be lost to history. Stephen Sondheim said you either have to have children or create art. I would like to think some of my compositions will survive me. One of the great moments in my life, and I don't know how to tell this story briefly. Let me try. I had been hired to be the resident conductor of the New Orleans Symphony by Maxim Shostakovich, the son of Dmitri Shostakovich, and I got to know him pretty well. And he told me that his father, when he was growing up with him, always had a packed suitcase by the door. That's because Dmitri knew the KGB would come to get him eventually, as they did his friends in the theater and in the intellectual world. So he knew his days were numbered. So, he said, if I had a packed suitcase by the door, at least I'll have some pencils and music paper when they send me to Siberia. When he was writing his famous symphony, "No. 5," he was thinking at any moment, they're going to come and get me. So, I was conducting a youth symphony in Shostakovich "5th Symphony," a piece that more defeated them than challenged them, as far as the technical issues. And finally, I got upset, and I said, put down your instruments. Let me tell you what this piece is about. This is about a man whose life was on the line, and this was the symphony that was meant to save his life. How do you tell the truth and yet be true to yourself in this symphony? And I told them about the packed suitcase by the door that was there when this symphony was written. And so, I said, now, let's play this again. You wouldn't believe, they played it 80 percent better, because they were freed from the technical challenge, and they were suddenly in tune with the message of the music. They knew what it was all about. Fast forward to about eight years later, I'm conducting a concert for young people with the North Carolina Symphony, and I always talk to the kids in the auditorium beforehand, just to have fun with them. And one young lady came up to me and said, Mr. Curry, you don't remember me. I said, I don't. She said, well, I'm Rebecca, and I was in the orchestra when you conducted Shostoakovich "5th." And because of what you said, and because of what you did that day, with that piece, I decided, that day, to become a music teacher. I have to say, that may be the highlight of my life, the fact that my love for music touched someone so deeply that they will pass on that spirit. That is a legacy, passing on your love for music.
Jo Reed: And I think that is a great place to leave it, Maestro. Thank you so much, and thank you for giving me your time. I so appreciate it.
Maestro W. H. Curry: Thank you so much for these great, probing questions, and giving me a chance to talk about that. I appreciate that, thank you.
Jo Reed: Thank you. That is Maestro William Henry Curry, composer, conductor and music director of the Durham Symphony Orchestra. You might want to check out his blogs at durhamsymphony.org—just look for the Conductor’s Corner. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed—stay safe and thanks for listening.
