Tell me a bit about your musical journey, how you got started with music?
I think the beginning of my musical journey honestly starts with my parents. For years, growing up in western Kentucky, we would travel each summer to visit my grandmother and grandfather in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, which is just like 45 minutes outside Pittsburgh.
And on the drive, my mom would be listening to all of the oldies. And when I say oldies, like music from the 50s, the 60s and the 70s, the time that she was a little girl, all the way to 1960s when she was in college and after, and that was predominantly Motown music.
And then, with my father it was a lot of Delta Blues music, folk music. And then one day I discovered a Tchaikovsky recording, and I was completely taken by it. And it, of course, had the “1812 Overture,” and it had “Marche Slave” on it, and it was really kind of incredible.
That, coupled with growing up in Kentucky, the Louisville Orchestra would do statewide tours, and there would be youth concerts. Getting to see these youth concerts when I was in elementary school was a really cool thing, because it was something new and unique. And so, from there, I just developed this love for music, and I enrolled in band. I remember for sixth-grade band, everyone was trying instruments, and I thought, “Okay, I want to play the saxophone.” And I heard this sound from across the room, and I look over, and there's these three girls trying clarinet, and I thought, “Wow, that's a really beautiful sound.” And I went to my band director, and I was like, “I kind of want to play that.” And then I spent a few weeks on clarinet learning the basics. Then there was this eighth grader.
I remember hearing him play bass clarinet, I thought, “Okay, that's really cool. I've got to play that.” So then I switched to bass clarinet. And long story short, I was in middle school and high school doing honor bands, All-State, and marching band, but never really got to play in an orchestra until I got to college.
And once I played in an orchestra in college, I was hooked. I mean, I knew, ever since I started playing an instrument that I wanted to be a full-time musician, there was no looking back. And at that time, when I was 12 or 13-years-old, it was like, “Oh, I want to play clarinet, but I also want to play bass guitar in a punk band.” And ultimately, I went with classical music because I felt it was, ironically, an easier way to make money than touring in a punk band. But I still listen to a lot of punk rock. But from there, I just went to college and studied music performance and had some amazing teachers along the way who just really reinforced my love of music. I would hear them perform in the orchestra, and it was incredible to me.
So that's my early musical history. And then as of late, I've been privileged to play in the Sarasota Orchestra. Been playing with the group since 2010, officially as a member of it since 2013, and before that, played in the Orlando Philharmonic, and had a couple other one-years, like with Miami City Ballet. And lots of freelancing in between, and trips around the country playing my instrument.
What drew you to Florida in particular?
Before I moved to Florida, I had taken one audition down here, and that was for the Naples Philharmonic, for the bass clarinet job, and I was in the finals and runner-up for that. And that was really my only experience coming down to Florida, and I really didn't care where I was moving. I just needed a job. And there was a one-year position that was open in the Orlando Philharmonic, and they hadn't been able to fill it. Moving to Orlando from the northeast was a bit of a shock for me, mostly because I was used to much bigger cities and being crammed in with people and public transit and stuff like that. But I have to say that year in Orlando was an incredible education in how to navigate life as a professional musician and in a professional orchestra, and I learned a lot of great lessons. And I think the best thing that came out of Orlando is that I met my wife there, and so that's always a special thing.
Then making it to Sarasota, and then here at USF, I wouldn't say I've ever thought, “Oh, I have to live here.” I've just been wherever the music takes me and wherever there's an open position. I mean, there’s cool stuff everywhere, there's beauty everywhere. And the longer that I've been—especially on the west coast of Florida—the more I really appreciate how many cultural offerings that we have here, whether that's museums, universities, ballet companies, opera companies, symphony orchestras. I mean, it's kind of incredible that one hour away from each other, there are two full time orchestras, the Sarasota Orchestra and the Florida Orchestra. I think we live in a special community where there's a lot of support for the arts.
Tell me about your work here at the University of South Florida.
I've been teaching at USF since 2010, and my work here has definitely evolved over time. I came in here, teaching clarinet originally, and then did a number of years with the Honors College, which I'm still involved with. I remember the very first semester I was here; I think there were 9 or 10 clarinet majors. And right now, we hover between 22 and 24 clarinet majors. I was always taken with the excellent faculty, the rich history of the arts here at the University of South Florida, and I’m still in awe. For example, every time I go to an MFA exhibition at the (USF) Contemporary Art Museum, I'm like, “Wow, some really incredible things (are) going on here.” My wife and I go to the dance concerts and the theater productions. There's a lot of excellent work going on here within the arts community and at USF.
I teach applied clarinet, bachelor's through graduate. And I also teach some courses in the Honors College. This semester, I am teaching a self-discovery course. It's called “10,000 Hours: Grit and Determination.” And I tell the students the first day of class, “This is all about the feels.” I also equate it to like, “We're on our vision quest right now, trying to figure out what we want to do in life and how our story and our experiences are going to move that forward.” And then I also teach another fun course, “The History of Electronic Music.” It's a broad history of electronic music in general, everything from classical to very avant-garde to modern electronic dance music.
But I think my favorite thing here is honestly watching all the clarinet students develop and seeing how someone comes in as a freshman and looking at what they become whenever they graduate. I tell students that I'm not here to teach you clarinet, I'm here to help you become a better musician. I'm super proud of all the students that graduate in music education, because they go off to wonderful teaching careers, and students that are combining music with an outside major, and some of them go off to med school, some of them become engineers, but they carry with them this love for music, and they're still involved in music. They play in community ensembles, they still teach lessons. And then I'm also proud of all the performance majors who have gone on to graduate degrees, and they've won jobs, and they're teaching at universities, playing in orchestras or playing in military bands. I can say now that I've been here for a while it’s really cool seeing what your students are doing and how they grow.
And if I can say one last thing about that, as a professor, we have to do research and creative and scholarly work. And the default for a performer is releasing recordings, playing in our orchestra and doing chamber music. But I have to say, the longer I'm here and the longer I'm in the profession, I think the real creativity comes in your pedagogy and seeing those results with your students.
Do you think that the process of helping students evolve has changed your own performance practice in how you work and improve your own clarinet playing?
Absolutely, yeah. It's one of those things where, when I'm practicing and I find myself getting really frustrated at something, or there's this difficult lick that I'm working on, I will literally stop and say to myself out loud, “Okay, this is what you say to your students. Don't get frustrated.” And I have to sometimes take a step back and think about, “What is the plan? Did you go into this practice session without a plan, and if you did, why did you do that, Calvin?” So honestly, I think teaching has helped me stay honest with myself and my preparation. When I'm talking with all of the students saying, “You need to do ‘X, Y, Z,’ to prepare this,” I have to do the exact same thing. And, yeah, it definitely reinforces that quite a bit, keeps me honest.
Well, you mentioned the scholarly work you're supposed to be working on as a professor. Tell me about the project that you've had going on for the past year or so.
Yeah, so it's finally coming to an end. Right now, I am almost done with the editing and the mastering of my next project, which is going to be lovingly titled “Finding Equilibrium,” based off of one of the pieces on the record by Roger Zare, which is a piece that I commissioned along with about 15 other bass clarinetists. It's for bass clarinet and string quartet, and it is written about his search for equilibrium, if you will, when it comes to running his first 5K. It's kind of an interesting piece, it really resonates with me. Because as someone who cycles a lot, runs a lot, goes hiking, I'm all about the process, and that's a fun thing to experience.
And then the other piece is David Maslanka’s “Concerto for Clarinet,” which I got to perform last year with the USF Wind Ensemble, which you were in, and we did a patch session for that, and the recording sounds great. And I have to say, when I played it recently for my wife, she was really turning up the volume, and she's like, “Man, the clarinets sound great in this!” And so I'm very, very proud of how the clarinet section sounded on that recording.
Can you clarify what a patch session is for those who might not know?
The way all of my recordings have been, whether it's on my first CD or a compilation CD I did of Max Lifchitz’s music for North/South Recordings, we will record the concert. And if you're lucky enough to have more than one performance, you can usually get away with recording two or three concerts, and then you go through them systematically and make note of where people are coughing, where people are dropping programs and bags and stuff like that, and then you just edit those out with spots from the other nights.
But with the wind ensemble, there was only one performance. Then the next day after that, we had a recording session where I and the engineer went back, listened through everything, and we were like, “Okay, we need to do from here to here because flutes and oboes were slightly out of tune.” Or, “We need to go from here to here because someone was having a coughing fit.” Or, believe it or not, at a beautiful section in the first movement where it's really quiet, someone was zipping up their backpack.
So things like that, you can get rid of through the patch session. But there are occasionally certain things where you're not able to. We did the same thing with the Zare. We recorded the dress rehearsal, and then we recorded the concert. And with both of these, I'm really proud to say that we used, I'd say, probably 90-95% of the live recording, and what we had to edit out was simply for those reasons.
Someone was coughing, or in the Maslanka, one little quiet spot in an otherwise bombastic section, you can hear someone dropping a mute, so you have to splice that in with a little bit of silence. And most symphony orchestras do that. Professional orchestras will generally record Friday, Saturday, and Sunday performances and edit those together for a major label release. And if there's something that they're not quite able to get, then they will do a patch session. It's fairly typical recording practice.
Then, for editing, do you have an engineer that you’re working with? Or are you the primary person involved with that?
On my first record, I actually edited the Joseph Hallman concerto, because that was again, a live performance with a patch session. I did all of the editing in Pro Tools myself on that one. And then the other two were recorded by John Stephan from the Springs Theater. And on this current disc, John Stephan recorded the Maslanka concerto. And then Dan Byers, our recording engineer from the Sarasota Orchestra, recorded the second one, Zare, which was with ensembleNewSRQ.
And then can you tell me a little bit about publishing? I know you still haven't decided which label you're going with, but what does the process look like for picking someone, the promotion, and the physical creation of the product?
Yeah, that's a whole other thing. So with university professors, and a lot of people who are wanting to publish their work and point to it and say, “See, this is my published work and research,” you have to go with a company that is going to have the best distribution and the best marketing to make sure that it's reviewed. Also, when it comes to distribution, are they getting it on all the streaming platforms? Are they sending it out to radio stations to get radio play? So you send a pitch proposal out to different record companies. Sometimes they say, “We're not interested.” Sometimes they say, “We're interested, this is how much our portion is going to cost and how much you have to invest.” And it really comes down to what is the best fit for you.
And I've talked with a number of record labels and am currently between two different record labels. So right now, it's just kind of seeing what is in the contract, how are they going to market it, who are they going to send it to and where am I going to get the broadest reach, if you will. And also, when it comes to album design, and the whole layout, who's going to have the best graphic designer, that whole landscape is changing as well.
Most of these companies are doing digital only releases because physical media, while I love it—I'm a big nerd and have a CD and record collection—not everybody wants to do that. So the companies that I've been speaking with have agreed that we're going to do a digital release, and then we're going to do a very limited pressing of vinyl, mostly to give out as gifts and to people who are on the project. I love listening to records on vinyl. I mean, it's an incredible experience, because when you put the needle down on the record, you are sitting there listening to it all the way through, as the artist intended, and not jumping around from track to track.
So it's a project that has been a lot of fun and intense at times to put together. But the other thing that adds to the stress of a project like this is, are you able to get enough grant money? I'm very thankful for the University of South Florida and Research One, because if it weren't for USF investment in the faculty, helping us publish creative and scholarly works, then it would be an incredibly expensive endeavor, especially when you think about outside resources. For example, playing that concerto with the wind ensemble. Where else are you going to be able to have that experience? You know, being able to work with colleagues, get all the rehearsal time that you want and perform in a really good hall, like our concert hall. So there's a lot of things that go into the project that USF has been very good about supporting and I’m very thankful for that.
Well, I think a lot of WSMR listeners can probably relate to that one point you mentioned about being present and having to fully listen to something in the moment when you play a vinyl recording or you're listening to the radio.
Oh yeah. Lately, a couple weeks ago, I was doing the Brahms Quintet up in Wilkes-Barre in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with the Chamber Music Society of Northeast Pennsylvania. To prepare for it, I was listening to my favorite recording, which is Richard Stoltzman with the Cleveland String Quartet. I have it on CD and I have it on vinyl and it was on repeat. I mean, listening to that record, there are certain things that I feel like you have to listen in a particular sitting. Another piece, I've got a great recording that you don't want to leave the couch when you're listening to. It's a Szell recording with the Cleveland Orchestra of Brahms 4, absolutely incredible. I've got one of my favorite recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with Heifetz and the Chicago Symphony.
There are so many of these recordings that just have a sound. They have a certain life to them. And part of that is they were recorded in an analog fashion, you know? So it's a very real, very natural sound. So you're getting a unique experience. But then this also extends to rock music. When I listen to Prince's album, “Purple Rain,” I listen all the way through as it was intended. Same thing with Rick James' “Street Songs,” Pink Floyd's “Dark Side of the Moon.”
I feel like there's that certain experience that you get out of listening to the record, but also it mimics that of a live performance, and I think especially in a time whenever we are just listening to snippets of things, on Instagram and TikTok, you only get a minute or two of any given song. I think that it's really incredible to be able to slow down and really listen.
On cross-country drives, a lot of times when I go out of the WUSF and WSMR broadcast area, I have the app on my phone. I'm listening to it, and I can be on my way. When I'm playing Des Moines Metro Opera in the summer, I can be in the middle of Kentucky or Missouri, driving out there, and I'm listening to classical music. Having that experience is, I think, really important, especially now, when things are about small sound bites, being able to really slow things down and just really listen to stuff.
Are there any upcoming performances with Sarasota, or any other groups in the area that we should look forward to?
We have a great collaboration with the Sarasota Ballet coming up at the end of April, which we're looking forward to. There’s a couple of really cool works by Glazunov on that particular program. And then we've got some great chamber music coming up with the Chamber Soirée series.
Beyond that, other things that I'm involved with is ensembleNewSRQ, in a couple of weeks, doing Steve Reich's “Music for 18 Musicians,” which is going to be a very cool thing. That's going to be at the Sarasota Opera House, and then we’re premiering a new opera with ensembleNewSRQ, directed by Peter Sellars, and that will also be at the Sarasota Opera House in the middle of May. So those are some fun performances coming up.
And it's kind of an exciting time in the orchestra with Giancarlo (Guerrero, Sarasota Orchestra Music Director) next season, it looks absolutely incredible. I'll put it to you this way: We had a concert, and it was completely sold out. The key piece was the Schoenberg Chamber Symphony, which I think is a masterpiece. But some people are not that into contemporary music or serialist music with 12-tone, and I have to say, in that performance, the audience was captivated and jumped to their feet as soon as we were done.
He just has a way of explaining things to the audience and really making the audience feel like they are a part of this shared experience, which I think is important, because why do we go to live performances? We want to be part of this shared experience. So yeah, we've had some great performances, and like I said, some really excellent performances that we're looking forward to.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
