03 / THE CREATION

The map on the wall.

Texas Cellos, Fredericksburg Festival, building institutions

Q: Texas Cellos was founded in 2020, but you have said that the idea actually began much earlier. Where did it start?

A: It was a cold winter night in Minnesota, about ten years before Texas Cellos actually began. I was staying at my parents’ home over winter break after my studies in Europe. The home is in the country, and there was quite a bit of snow on the ground. I remember looking out the window and seeing perhaps two feet of snow piled against it. Every so often I would go upstairs and put another log on the fire for my grandfather Hans, who enjoyed the warmth.

During my studies in Basel, I had begun to notice that certain musicians with a particular approach to music making seemed to find one another—on recordings, particularly on the ECM label founded by Manfred Eicher —through festivals, through teachers and other musicians. I loved the idealism of Manfred Eicher and his very defined fingerprint in sound.

That night in Minnesota I went over to a corkboard on the wall and began sketching connections around the idea of a musical ensemble. Before long, the corkboard was full.

I also make visual art, so I found a large drawing pad and began taping sheets of paper to the wall. The drawing kept expanding.

It started to look something like a family tree: branches, siblings and descendants. There was a rotating ensemble, a concert series, a festival and eventually a recording label that would document the music made.

I wasn't really drawing an organization. Looking back, I think I was drawing a network through which an artistic culture could grow.

Did anything immediately come from that map?

My sister Rachel and I started the Marinus Ensemble, and I am very happy that it has grown into a wonderful organization and concert series of its own.

But then life happened.

I moved to Texas and, somewhat unexpectedly, spent several years working in marketing. I had actually moved to Texas intending to start a marketing business rather than pursue a conventional musical career. In retrospect, that experience became enormously useful when I eventually began building Texas Cellos.

Through my friend Alex McDonald, who was a classmate at New England Conservatory, I became connected with the teaching ecosystem around North Dallas and Plano. Several teachers became unavailable around the same time, and suddenly I was essentially handed a class of more than 90 students.

Many were beginners or ordinary young students—not the highly selected conservatory-level musicians I had been accustomed to working with as an assistant to my own professor.

I dove into teaching and freelancing, and the big plans from Minnesota went onto the back burner.

So what changed in 2020?

Like many people, I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands.

In 2019 I had ended a studio recital by putting approximately 25 of my students together as a cello choir. So when COVID arrived and orchestras began trying to rehearse online, I was teaching a longtime student one day and realized that Zoom orchestra rehearsals were potentially a disaster waiting to happen.

I thought: why not start a cello choir?

At the same time, I was asking myself a larger question: If I really went for it—if I didn't hesitate or commit halfway—what is the greatest good I could aim for?

I had always been a very creative person and tended to see possibility everywhere, but reality doesn't always line up with imagination. There was fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of making a fool of myself, fear that nobody would attend or support what I wanted to do.

So this was initially very practical. I made a simple electronic flyer, threw together a website in a couple of days and posted it online. I probably hoped that half of my own students would sign up.

Instead, 33 students from around the Dallas–Fort Worth area joined us.

We began rehearsing on Sunday mornings in the fall of 2020, socially distanced.

It was very much a cello choir created to get people through COVID.

When did it become “Texas Cellos”?

Those 33 students generated about $11,000 in tuition, and I decided to start a nonprofit.

There aren't many models for cello choirs, so I played around with a number of names. I thought about the Yale Cellos and realized that “Texas Cellos” had a good ring to it.

Originally there were two ensembles beneath that umbrella, #CELLOCHOIR and #CELLOSOUND. The participants probably thought of Texas Cellos primarily as an ensemble, but because we incorporated as a nonprofit, it was simultaneously becoming an organization.

And something else had already happened.

During the summer of 2020, I had been exploring and stumbled across an extraordinary old cotton mill in McKinney, Texas. I made a solo recording there. While walking around the property, I met the owner, an older gentleman, and we began talking.

Before I left, I reserved April 23 and 24, 2021.

I was going to present a music festival.

That seems like an enormous jump—from a socially distanced student cello choir to a festival.

It was.

About six weeks before the festival, I had all the venues reserved and a contract with a string quartet to perform cello quintets with me. And I remember asking myself: Am I actually going to go through with this?

Could we afford it? Did I have the bandwidth?

Finally I decided simply to take the dive.

I performed in all four concerts. I also wrote the program notes, did the marketing, ticketing, paperwork, finances, interviews and practically everything else. There were many volunteers helping, for whom I remain eternally grateful, but it was an enormous amount of stress.

And I could see the ticket sales coming in. We needed those sales to pay for the venue and the musicians.

So when people actually came, there was incredible relief—but also incredible joy.

Several priests from my church attended concerts that weekend. I still remember walking into church on Sunday morning after our final Saturday-night concert and seeing the smile of one of them.

It was one of those tiny moments that stays with you.

The first festival used the phrase “music that gives you a heartbeat.” What did you mean by that?

The music industry isn't a particularly good business model. Margins are small, and idealistic music making is not always practical. Because of that, music itself can become compromised by limitations of time, money, energy and attention. Concerts can sometimes simply become boring.

I wanted to go in the opposite direction.

“Music that gives you a heartbeat” meant emotional connection. I believe very strongly in a culture of service to the music—learning to express something about the human condition in a way that speaks directly from the heart.

I wanted to present the highest-level musicians we possibly could, performing beautiful programs in spaces and formats where people actually wanted to be.

And those four concerts received remarkable publicity because live music was only just beginning to return at the end of the pandemic. There was this extraordinary hunger—from students, colleagues and audiences.

People wanted music again.

And shortly afterward you received an unexpected telephone call.

Yes. That is one of the moments I will never forget.

In May 2021, I was in North Carolina on the beach with my large family when my phone rang. It was incredibly windy, so I had to walk away from the beach just to hear the woman speaking.

She was calling from Bank of America.

She explained that a trustee of a foundation had read our story in The Dallas Morning News and wanted to support Texas Cellos. I believe the gift was $5,000.

I was elated. Joyful. Hopeful.

The whole thing felt almost like a fairy tale or a Cinderella story.

Someone completely outside of our immediate circle had seen what we were doing and decided that it mattered enough to support.

Coming immediately after that first festival, and right at the end of the pandemic, it gave me this tremendous sense of the joy of possibility.

I think that was when the possibilities began to become tangible in my mind.

When did education become central to the organization?

That evolved through my own experience.

My career wasn't particularly conventional. I studied in Boston, then Germany, then Switzerland. Those sound like exotic places, but when you move around that much you don't necessarily develop many lasting professional connections.

Then I spent years teaching one-on-one.

That gave me a firsthand understanding of what actually happens when a young person learns to play an instrument: the frustration of not being taught well, lack of technique, lack of enthusiasm or inspiration, poor repertoire choices—but also the extraordinary transformation that can happen when something begins to work.

So much of our programming grows out of the actual work of learning to play the cello.

You take the seed of an idea. You teach a student how to make a beautiful sound. Then how to shift. How to play in tune. The principles of phrasing.

And eventually, at the other end of that enormous process, that person walks onto a stage and is capable of expressing some deep beauty or perspective on the human condition.

In some ways, I think I personally needed to pass through all of these roles. Student. Performer. Marketer. Recruiter. Private teacher. Organizer.

I needed to know them from the inside.

Was there something you felt music education was getting wrong?

One thought became increasingly important to me.

We don't need to “save” classical music because it is somehow dying.

We just need to show people the real thing, and they will love it.

If young musicians encounter extraordinary playing, extraordinary teaching and extraordinary music—not as something distant, but close enough that they can participate in it—I think they respond naturally.

That became one of the defining aspects of our programs.

The amount of interaction between senior artists and students is unusual. The artists don't simply arrive, teach a class and disappear. There are conversations. There is proximity. And in our side-by-side cello choir, students literally sit beside professional musicians and make music with them.

For many students, that has become an incredibly memorable, sometimes once-in-a-lifetime experience.

That thinking led us to launch our first weeklong Cello Festival and Institute in August 2021. Again, the response from students, faculty and audiences was remarkable.

You mentioned Manfred Eicher and ECM. What did you recognize in that world?

I originally discovered ECM because of my teacher Thomas Demenga.

At first I simply loved the recordings. But as I discovered more and more of them, I began to sense an unexplained fingerprint behind everything.

It was taste. Beauty. Style.

And because it was deeply personal, it became deeply memorable.

I sometimes imagine great artists as being connected to the center of a wheel. They share something at the center, but the spokes travel outward in completely different directions—almost to infinity. Two artists can appear to be doing nothing alike and yet be profoundly connected at the center.

That fascinated me.

And looking back at that map I drew in Minnesota, I think that was what I was trying to understand.

How do you create a place where those connections can happen?

You have used the phrase “service to the music.” What does that mean?

It means focusing as completely as possible on something outside ourselves.

It might be the cello. It might be the piece we're learning. It might simply be the second-cello part we have been assigned in a quartet or cello choir.

When we serve that thing as completely and totally as we are able—when we accept our place and give ourselves to it—something strange happens.

We forget ourselves.

And in forgetting ourselves, we seem to become the best part of ourselves.

Athletes might call it a state of flow. I think of it almost as a suspension of ego and self-consciousness—something that comes very close to being in heaven.

There is an enormous tension between that and the highly competitive culture that can exist in classical music.

I want to create spaces where small-minded competition can be set aside; where people approach one another and the music with curiosity, humility and genuine love for what they are doing, rather than an ambitious coldness.

Excellence matters enormously. But excellence should be in service of something.

If you could find that original drawing from your parents' basement today, what do you think would surprise you?

I think I would be fascinated—and in some ways amazed—by how similar the organization today is to what was on that wall.

The ensemble was there. The concerts were there. The festival was there. The idea of recording and documenting the work was there.

What wasn't on the map were the hundreds of thousands of little colorful details that make something real.

The people.

Every memory I have of our festivals, concerts and rehearsals is attached to a person: who was there, the relationship we had, how that relationship developed.

The map couldn't anticipate the endless possibility of people, the complexities of relationships, or the wonderful—and sometimes horrible—friction that arises whenever human beings try to create something together.

And I think that has changed the way I understand my own role.

The organization isn't ultimately the point. The ideas aren't ultimately the point.

The people are the most important part of everything we're doing. The organization and the ideas exist to allow those relationships to develop.

My job, if I do it well, is to open a space.

There needs to be enough order. Enough opportunity. Enough talent. Enough teachers, audiences, venues, funding and programming.

But those things are the structure, not the life itself.

You create enough structure for the ecosystem to exist.

And then, if you're fortunate, it becomes alive.