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At the Reader it’s great to hear new music and learn about what bands are doing in the area. We’ve had the privilege to cover everything from experimental electronic music to folk, but with all of the new music that keeps popping up in the area it’s easy to overlook something that has been in the area for decades. This week we finally got around to covering a mainstay in Duluth music and were happy to have the opportunity to talk with Dirk Meyer, the new Conductor of the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra.

Orchestras have been performing in Duluth since the late 1800s. It was not until 1932 that the Duluth Symphony Orchestra came about and was renamed the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra in 1974. For over 80 years the DSSO has been delighting audiences with top notch performances that have brought in centuries old classics from some of the greatest composers to ever live, to collaborating and working with more contemporary material. The DSSO fills a very particular niche in Twin Ports music and adds to the fullness of it’s arts community.

This season will mark the first year for Dirk Meyer as Conductor and Music Director for the DSSO. Although relatively young, he has made his skills known with his work with orchestras all over the world, from the Orlando Philharmonic to conducting productions in the Czech Republic, it’s fair to say that he is ready to masterfully lead any orchestra that he works with. Meyer moved to Duluth in early April, but had worked for a few weeks with the DSSO in the fall of 2012. He will now be the conductor of the DSSO for at least the next three seasons.

Reader: When did you start and decide to take music as your path? I ask a lot of people this, but you in particular have a very unique path.

Meyer: I decided this when I was maybe 13 or 14 years old. I grew up in Germany and my best friend’s parents were opera singers, they were sort of my second family so I was in the opera house all day, every day, with him and his family. That’s when I decided I really liked this, that’s what I want to do. I thought the best job in the house seems to be the guy who is waving his arms and keeping it all together. From there I took the steps you need to take in order to make it happen.

Reader: I saw that you went to school in the States?

Meyer: Yeah, I did my undergrad in Germany at Folkwang, but then I did both my graduate studies at Michigan State.

Reader: When was the first real conducting experience for you?

Meyer: My first conducting experience was in one of those summer courses. Outside of school, the first thing I did one my own was my first year of undergrad and I asked a few friend musicians that I had come to know to come play for me and I picked a piece I knew they wanted to play and that I wanted to conduct. It was the “Soldier’s Tale” by Stravinsky, which is of course funny because you have all these young kids starting out with music playing one of the hardest pieces ever written in classical music, that was the first time that I put anything together on my own.

Reader: It’s interesting you brought up Stravinsky, I was going to use “The Rite of Spring” as an example of a very complex piece. As a conductor, your role is to lead, can you explain to me about bringing out your interpretations of the complexity and feelings in a piece of music and why it’s important to have a conductor.

Meyer: I just did that a few weeks ago. Let’s start with that last question. It’s important to have a conductor for several reasons. Take this Saturday, we have our first concert. We’ll have probably 90 people on stage and 90 musicians each with their own view of that particular piece. If you were to discuss which version you would be playing, you still wouldn’t be performing the piece in two years, you’d still be talking about it. Somebody has to make the decisions. That’s the first reason of course why you need one. The bigger the orchestra is, the more modern, the more complex the repertoire is, the more you need a conductor to purely keep it all together. You mentioned “The Rite of Spring,” that’s a piece of music that’d be pretty much impossible to play without a conductor because there are so many tempo changes, meter changes, every measure is a different time signature and so on, you just need somebody to signal what is going on visually.
In terms of the interpretation, that’s always of course a very personal thing. As you know you can listen to the same piece of music performed by a conductor “A” or conductor “B” and the same conductor with the same piece with two different orchestras, and they might be very different. You just have to make your decision about what you want. The first and most obvious one is about the tempo, what kind of tempo do you want? Where are you going to take time, where are you going to speed up? Take Mahler’s “Symphony Number One” that we’re doing this Saturday, in the first movement alone, I’m making this up, but let’s say there are 20 time indications in the score, well you’re probably going to do 50 different things with your tempo. That’s just because the music speaks to me personally that way. I feel that here it wants to go forward or here it wants to settle down. And even though it’s not written, you do it because that’s your own personal interpretation.

Reader: I’m guessing it takes a lot of training to do this.

Meyer: In order to do this well, you really need to know the piece you’re conducting. You need to know how you can technically achieve certain things with a group in front of you. If you don’t know how to slow down or speed up a group of 80 musicians then it’s not going to work. But once you have that, it’s really a matter of knowing the piece. You can’t be surprised yourself, “oh, it’s that page,” that doesn’t work.

Reader: Have you ever dealt with any new or contemporary music that you end up not being familiar with it?

Meyer: Oh yeah, lots of it. I’ve done several world premieres where really nobody has heard this music before, it didn’t exist until a week ago. That is a completely different way of learning something, when you’ve never heard it and have no chance of listening to it. You really just sit down, my undergrad was in piano, so that helps me a lot. When I have a score and I have no idea what it sounds like, I take it and I sit down at the piano and I try to get the basic idea from the piece and how it sounds by just playing it on the piano. I do that with everything I study, but of course with new music.

Reader: So you actually go to the piano on your own and start working it out?

Meyer: Right. Usually when you have a commission lets say, you have a brand new piece. The composer will send you the first version, “what do you think?” That’s when you go to the piano and you play it as well as you can and figure out what the composer is doing. Usually when you have a new piece there are four, five or six different versions before you end up with a final one.

Reader: I suppose back in the day that’s how they ended up doing it too.

Meyer: When you look at the time of Mozart and Beethoven, the big time of Vienna, they weren’t listening to anything. All the music that they played back then was brand new. When you think about Johan Sebastian Bach, now we think he’s one of the greatest composers of all time but back in the real classical era, he was forgotten. Nobody would play music that was 50 years old. They only played music that was written that week.

Reader: The most interesting thing to me about classical music is that you look at music today, like pop music or rock music, generally it’s really simple. The thing that’s always impressed me about classical music is that it’s intense, it’s complex, there’s so much going on. What are your thoughts on this?

Meyer: I think that’s precisely the reason we’re still listening to it and why many people still write for the orchestra. Because classical music really is not just classical; it’s also romantic, it’s also modern, it’s also baroque, it’s everything basically. We just say classical for everything that involves classical instruments. What I find fascinating about it and I do listen to quite a bit of pop music, jazz music, rock music and I like it, I have yet to find a single band that writes as all inclusive as you will find in, for example, Mahler’s symphony. Of course, here’s a five minute song and a 50 minute symphony, that’s a huge difference, but I think that’s what makes it so cool. That’s what makes classical music great. You sit down for 40 minutes and go through every emotion from unbelievable sad to “I cannot sit still” and it’s triumphant and exuberant and every emotion in between in one of these works.

Reader: This is kind of going back, but I meant to ask this. As in a percentage, what happens overall with rehearsal and the energy that happens live?

Meyer: You don’t really mean time wise. This comes back to why there is a conductor. Ideally, you would use your rehearsal time to put it all together, so you have a big pile of pieces in front of you and during the rehearsal, you actually build the house. At that same time, you give it your interpretation, you paint the house blue, or whatever you want to do with it. But then in the performance, you want to give something extra, whether that is something you’ve held back and you consciously did not convey in the rehearsal, that might be. But it also could just be that because this is a different situation, you have a connection with a thousand or so people behind you. They are there experiencing that thing at the same time. It is a completely different feeling from the dress rehearsal where nobody is in the hall, to playing through the piece with a few hundred or thousand people behind you. You’re looking for that special moment to just forget about that “the door to the house goes here,” but reacting in the moment and just going with the music. When you do that, certain things can happen that might be great that you didn’t even think of. Certain things can happen that you don’t like and you try to correct them. But if you let yourself go and not think about the analytics and thinking about it like you do in the rehearsal, just letting the music flow through you, you can achieve usually something much more emotional and touching in a way.

Meyer will be leading the DSSO Saturday, September 28, with “Titans,” Mahler’s Symphony Number One, which will be held at the DECC. He was especially excited about the upcoming “Discovery” series shows. “Discovery I” will feature Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” and will be brought to life through the live painting of Lee Zimmerman on giant panels of silk. The concert will also have “Cinderella” by Prokofiev and will have a narrator and actors participating in the Grimm fairytale. “The Firebird” by Stravinsky will also be featured with multimedia influences. “Discovery II” will likewise be a multimedia experience over Beethoven’s famous Fifth Symphony as well as other works. Visit dsso.com for a full schedule.