#bill mcglaughlin

Yehudi Menuhin Leads The ORTF Orchestra In Music Of Bartok, Mozart, Bach And Beethoven – 1964 – Past Daily Mid-Week Concert

Yehudi Menuhin – 100 on April 22nd.

http://pastdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ORTF-Orchestra-Menuhin-Sept.-30-1964.mp3

Yehudi Menuhin conducts l’Orchestre national de l’ORTF – September 30, 1964 – Radio France –

The legendary violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin was born in New Yorkon April 22, 1916. This year marks his centenary and several radio organizations throughout the world are…

Jason:  Tell me a little about yourself?

Bill:  I'm Bill McGlaughlin and I started life as an honest musician; I was actually a harmonica player, not sure if that's an honest musician, then a piano player, then a trombone player in a couple big orchestras.  Got into the conducting business for about 30 years and that led to my fall into the broadcasting world.  So I've been doing Exploring Music for over 10 years now for WFMT Chicago.

Jason:  What was the inspiration for Exploring Music?

Bill:  We've got a great boss in Chicago, Steve Robinson, whose a friend of yours I understand.  He called me on the phone one day and said "I wanna do a show, 5 days a week.  I wanna do a theme."  And I asked my old friend Garrison Keeler, I was working at St. Paul at that time.  I said "Steve Robinson called me."  He said "wow that's a great place, too much work, not enough money. No matter what he gives you."  And he was right, Garrison's almost always right.  What Steve said "a lot of people feel like classical music is like a foreign language.  And their able to do it with brand new film, with novels, with new dance, with all kinds of new experiences, but something about classical music is off-putting.  So we want to do this show that brings people in and sort of try to tell people how it feels to do it, and also how it makes them feel in a way that gives them tools to help understand what it is they're hearing."  So it's one thing to hear a phrase in Beethoven.  (Sings opening phrase of Fifth Symphony).  Why does he do that?  It's only 4 notes.  (Sings second phrase of fifth symphony).  And he does it again.  And he builds up this thing.   And before you realize it he's built a steam engine.  And that steam engine is just rollin down the tracks.  That's one of the reasons composers repeat the notes so many times.  Bringing it into the station  They'd go right through the station if they didn't do all those extra notes.  So you want to get people thinking that way.  Not talking music talk, not talking about motifs, not talking about intervals too much.  Of if you do, you just play them.  If I say minor third, what's that mean?  But if I play (plays minor third on piano).  That could be… (plays lullaby).  That could be a lullaby, it could be something very different.  But the important things; it doesn't matter that I caught a minor third, it's that you hear these intervals and it makes me feel a certain way.  That's our whole point.

Jason:  How does Exploring Music connect to such a wide range of subjects and curriculums?

Bill:  I think when I was a kid, I was one of those guys who was interested in everything.  Sometimes to my detriment, I couldn't stay on topic long enough.  But the whole world is so interesting.  And the great thing is that music is a way of viewing the world, like a lens.  Music will take you inside a lot of other realms.  It will take you inside history, it'll take you inside economics if you want to try to go there.  It will take you inside physics.  It will take you into painting and dance.  And all of that comes from..music is such a beautiful way to express emotions that we can't put into words. That's the whole reason it "is."  I mean, songs are great, but you sometimes wind up whistling or singing a tune without the words, because the music itself means something.  And the great thing is, it means something slightly different to every person on earth.  So when you hear music, you get to make up your own movie, in a way.

Jason:  Why are you excited about making Exploring Music available to schools?

Bill:  You know, from the very beginning, when Steve Robinson and I started thinking up Exploring Music, that was a big part of our project right away.  He said, "I want to put it in the schools."  He understood that right away.  I come from a family of teachers.  My mom was a teacher, I got a couple brothers teaching in North Philly in the school system.  I got another sister as a guidance counselor, and whether I like it or not, I may say that I'm a trombone player, but in  a way I'm trying to function as a teacher.  I want to bring people in.  I love the word "education."  It means "to lead."  "Educo," like "The Duke."  Yeah, the Duke leads you into things.  He's not trying to trick you.  That would be "Seduce."  That would be leading you away from the truth; we want to bring you in.  So, I love the idea that the music is the way to get it.  Because the music gets in kinda like under the radar.  You have all these defenses, and all this noise in the world, and you can hear a conversation going on, and all of a sudden you realize you are kinda focusing on this musical theme.  It may be softer than all the background noise, it may be softer than traffic, it may be softer than people talking, but it starting to get a hold of you.  And part of it has this time thing going on.  (Starts to tap a beat).  The rhythms amazing.  That's where it comes from.  It's from your heart.  And all of a sudden it becomes large.

Jason:  talking to teachers, what would you say about using Exploring Music in their curriculums?  How might they use it?

Bill:  You know it's funny.  Like I mentioned, I got two brothers teaching at a vocational high school in North Philadelphia.  This is a dreadfully dangerous place to teach where they are working, and they've got kids doing great work.  One of them is teaching English and he's also got the kids doing film.  The other one's teaching mathematics.  And they use everything they can to draw the kids in and cross-reference with events that kids already know about.  The more you can connect with what kids already know, the less they feel like they are outsiders.  They go like "Oh Yeah," and that's exactly that kind of response, you notice it teachers when you look at them.  You say "Oh," and that's the most exciting thing.  I think the most exciting thing in the world is learning.  Ok, maybe in certain situations, pizza, but aside from pizza, aside from exactly the right joint, the most exciting thing is learning and then telling somebody that you just learned.  Telling your mom, or your pop, or your baby brother.  Sharing that kind of stuff is so interesting 'cause it's the part of our brain that gets the hippest kind of vibe.  Faster than driving a fast car; that's cool for a little while.  If I could shoot a forty foot jump shot, I'd be really thrilled with that for at least the first week.  You know, but after a while I'd want to learn more.  I'd maybe like want to learn how to dribble; how to pass the ball; all the rest of the stuff, and learning is the whole key to human life.

Jason:  What is Exploring Music?

Bill:   For the basis, Exploring Music is 5 hours a week, 5 hours of radio  Each hour has about, I think, 57 and a half minutes of content in it, we've got a little bit to thank the people that make it possible for us.  And out of that hour, probably about 45-48 minutes is just music.  It's not me sitting at the piano and talking, it's just your listening to music.  But sometimes when we hear something go by in the orchestra, in listening to music, and then you want to play it again at the piano.  You said "did you hear that spot?  That's my favorite spot right here."  And then play it at the piano.  And you know that's a little bit like looking at a black and white photograph instead of looking  at a color film.  When you hear the piano just play (sings three notes), and then you hear the orchestra play (sings three notes bigger), that kind of sound is so coming alive.  So part of what I want to do is use the power of this medium because radio is so creative in that…I mean, Look at it, we talk about TV therapy, right.  You get really tired, you go home, you lie on the couch, you turn on the TV, and you don't move for an hour.  And you just let images wash across you.  Radio is not like that, cause it's not all there.  You have to complete it, the listener has to be part of the experience.  This is what makes radio so interesting and so fascinating.  And when I'm talking to this microphone,  was just looking at this glass wall , and I guess we can look out and if it weren't dark we could see Brooklyn out there.  So I'm not just talking to SoHo and Brooklyn and then Maine and England, I'm talking to everybody.  But the thing is I'm talking just as casually as you and I are talking right now in this studio.

Jason:  Where do these ideas come from?  Where do you start with an Exploring Music segment?  What inspires a specific segment?

Bill:  When I first started this dries, I wanted to have one week per month be about the particular composers, the people who actually make the music up, and make a sort of five part bio about that composer.  And it's been a big part of it altogether.  We are just finishing a series right now on a French composer called Camille Saint-Saens and a few months ago we did a big series on Verdi because it was the 200th birthday of Guisseppi Verdi.  But it's not just about the composers, sometimes it's about Shakespeare and music, because all of these composers are nuts about Shakespeare and they wanted to make Shakespeare operas, or Shakespeare overtures or Shakespeare sonatas, all of this sort of stuff.  That;s one idea that we tried that was really fun.  Another one, this may have come from Bill Sigmund, my engineer here.  "What else you got"  You know, like, here's your big hit tune.  Everybody knows Beethoven wrote the Fifth Symphony.  What else you got Louis?  What you got in the can there?  (mimicking Beethoven) Oh, I got this other symphony called "Eroica.”  Ok, that's one thing with Beethoven where we know a lot of his big hits.  But what if it gets into these lesser composers?  That's fun!  Or, a series I really love, I borrowed  a title from this wonderful critic named Pauline Kael.  She wrote this book called "I Lost It At The Movies," so we made a whole series called "I Lost It At The Movies."  But in fact we found it at the movies.  We found all these wonderful film scores, some of them classical music, some of the things like Ennio Morriconi writing for the spaghetti westerns that Clint Eastwood used to do.  And then towards the end of his life when he's writing these beautiful pieces like "General Paradiso," and hearing the way rock and roll finds its way into film scores, the way jazz does.  Can you imagine a classic film with Paul Newman and Robert Redford called "The Sting?"  Can you imagine that without ragtime?  That thing is all about Scott Joplin's music.  That's where the color and the smell of that film comes from, it comes from the music.

Jason:  Do you have a favorite bit of music?

Bill:  (laughing) I have so many favorite bits of music.  In a good way.  I was for a long time a performer, both as a trombonist and pianist, and then as a conductor, so whatever you're working on right now, that's sort of de facto your most important and most favorite piece.  But how bout the middle of the night, you wake up, you're trying to sing yourself to sleep.  Yeah I've got tunes I think of then.  And if I had to make a list, probably 20-30 people. Let's put Mahler in it, let's put Bach on it, let's put Beethoven.  Let's put maybe Hoagy Carmichael and John Coltrane.  Let's put Duke Ellington for certain.  Let's have a range of stuff.  Funny, we did a show this past February called "Portraits in Black Brown and Beige."  It took me about 10 years to get up the courage to make it.  We spent two weeks examine the music of African American performers and composers, so many of whom I did not know.  See, I worked with a lot of the composers, I knew Jeffrey Mumford, and I knew a lot of these guys, you know, all the people who had conducted.  Did you know the guy who wrote "Carry Me Back to … Virginia" was a black man?  (continues singing)  It sounds like it was written by a white guy thinking about these white plantation columns in the South…that was a black man living in New York City.  That was a big revelation.  And I kept finding things about that.  I found Maryanne Anderson singers  singers from stuff that would break your heart.  I found way down in the sea islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina down there, people talk in this language called "Gullah," which is a mixture of African language, and some stuff from the Caribbean, a little bit of English mixed together.  And you hear them singing these spirituals in this song and it's so moving.  So I mean, I wouldn't have bumped into that on my own.   I live at 100th street, I could walk and be at a really fine church in Harlem on any Sunday afternoon, but I usually don't bother to go there.  You know?  But here you have to do it, because you want to learn about this music and inside the soul.  I went into the Schaumburg Center, it's a center for black culture in New York City,it's on Weddox Avenue, which is Malcom X Avenue nowadays, up on 135th Street.  There's a whole fantastic building studied with all of these artifacts.  Schaumburg was a guy who came, I think, from Puerto Rico, at least from the islands somewhere, not speaking English, spoke Spanish, settled in Harlem in the 20s.  He knew Langston Hughes, he knew all of the stuff that was going on during the Harlem Rennaissance and he just collected everything he could.  Matchbook covers from the great clubs.  I mean, he couldn't go in the front door of the Cotton Club, but he's got a cover from the matchbook.  I don't know whether Duke Ellington gave it to him, somebody did.  So I love that kind of stuff that builds the kind of story from the inside out.

Jason:   

Bill:  This is Billl McGlaughlin for Exploring Music and we are so happy to be hooked up with MashPlant Studio.  If you're a teacher, call me, write me.  You know our email ExploringMusic.org.  Send us a note.  If you're a kid and you're listening, first of all, go to the website and listen to some more of this music.  We'll fix it up so you can do it dirt cheap, cause you kids need it and I need you to get it.

Jason:  Take me back to that moment when you were a kid when you decided this is what you wanted to do.  How old were you?   what were you doing?

Bill:  I grew up around music because my Grandmom, with whom me lived in North Philadelphia played the piano really well.  I mean she played all the stuff that nicely educated young women of her era would have learned which included some Mozart, some Chopin, some Beethoven.  She also played all this Victor Herbert and, sort of, gay 90s music that she and my Grandpop had known when they were courting.  So I grew up around that.  Actually my first lesson, I used to say it didn't come till I was 14, cause that's the first professional piano lesson I took, but my first lesson came when I was 6 years old.  My pop loved music; didn't read a note.  He gave me a little harmonica one day and he showed me how to play a scale.  He said "Look.  Blow, draw, blow, draw, blow, draw, draw, blow."  (sings major scale).  So I went away and about a minute later, I came back, I said "I think I got it, what's the next lesson?"  He said "Oh, that's it.  You know a lot of songs, let's just play them together."  So we did.  We played all the tunes we knew.  We knew Stephen Foster tunes, which you could still play without that quite of racial implications that have come up later.  We played a lot of opera, which was something that we both loved, and it was his favorite.  He was always listening to broadcasts on Saturdays and we started buying records.  And we had these little harmonicas that had little push button, so you couldn't play (plays chromatic scale).  You could only play (plays major scale), diatonic stuff.  So as soon as the opera got chromatic (plays chromatic scale), we had to switch to another opera.  We played "Traviata," then we'd go to "Trovatore," then we'd go to "Rigoletto," a we played little bit of "Aida."  We played all kinds of songs.  Some cowboy songs.  I think what I was learning form about the time I was 6 years old until my first real lesson when I was 14 on the piano, was that music was something that you did by ear, it was so much fun, and you did it with somebody you love.  I think they were the best lessons.  I do remember, I was studying with a nun in our neighborhood, she taught at a school a couple miles away.  I remember waiting for the us after my second piano lesson thinking "Ah, that's it, I'm going to be a musician."  I had no idea what that meant.  I didn't know what there was to be, but I thought "That's it."  And I was about 15 or 14 years old, I think.  I was so lucky cause I knew absolutely certainly, I never changed my mind since.  And so, since then, I was kind of a piano player for a while, and then kind of a brass player for a while.  I guess after a while, yes a brass player, cause I was playing with these big bands in Philly and Pittsburgh.  And then for about 30 years I mostly conducted orchestras, but then I wound up doing radio on the side and then composing music.  There's so much chance, all these different things to be a musician.  I wanna be a musician, I didn't know you could do all of that.  I especially didn't know I would ever be talking through a microphone to people about music.  

Bill:   I suppose I could tell you a lot of stuff about how good music is for you just like your mom does when she says "eat your vegetables."  In fact, ok, I'll tell you, fifteen second commercial.  You start studying music and it re-wires your brain in a very good way.  It gives you more connections, more positive connections.  It's fantastic!  Talk to people who know about neurology and they'll tell you I'm not making this up.  So that's going on without you knowing it.  Cause meanwhile you're just trying to play a couple notes on the clarinet or trying to sing a song you heard on a radio show, but meanwhile it's working on you in a really positive way.  Now if you actually get into a little group at school, whether it's a chorus or marching band or anything, you're learning all this stuff.  First of all, you have to learn to spend a bit of time by yourself practicing  your instrument until you're good at it.  You can't do it just punching a button, you have to practice, and the only way to do it is practice alone.  Then the second cool part, you get together all your buddies and  you start playing with them and you're learning teamwork, you're learning generosity.  And here's another thing, people are always talking about testing in the schools.  In music it's so simple.  Everybody knows, as soon as you do it, whether you got it right or not.  Starting with you, starting with your teacher, starting with all of your classmates.  They all know, did you play it right?  If you played it right, cool.  If you didn't, no problem, go back and work on it a little more until you get it.  But we'll all know, you can't fake this one.

Jason:  Can you show me a script for one of your shows?

Bill:  (Holds up mostly blank page with scribbles)

Jason:  Wow.  It's extemporaneous.