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Brandon Labadie
Photo by Jeremy Rhizor |
I recently sat down with Brandon Labadie at my home and talked about his new role as Executive Director of Portland early music collective Musica Maestrale. We also talked about the fascinating challenges of trying earn one's way in the modern music world using a centuries-old model.
BL: I’m well thank you.
LW: So…new in town,
eh?
BL: Yeah I just moved here from New York, finished my
Masters Degree in historical music performance… I play baroque oboe…and moved
to the Portland area to do music and also build instruments with my boss who
just moved to Wilsonville. We make historical oboes, clarinets, shawms and
bagpipes. I met him in NYC and I’ve been working with him for a few years. He moved out here and that was kind of my big
push to come out here.
LW: I know that we were
talking a little bit earlier about how interesting it is that the model that
you seem to be following somewhat mirrors the way a baroque musician might have
made his way [in the world] a few centuries past.
BL: Yes, it’s very true I’ve been doing a little bit of
everything: composing, playing baroque oboe, modern oboe, and I’m going to be playing shawm with Hideki
[Ed Note:
Hideki Yamaya, Musica Maestrale’s Artistic Director ] in July…and I’m
building instruments. I think now for musicians it’s one of the only ways to
be a musician—you have to become this
person that does all these different things and you just have to make your way
in a lot of different facets of music before you can start to focus on one of
them…the one that pays, I guess.
LW: [laughing] The one that pays…that’s always the rub.
BL: Exactly.
LW: So what led you
to be a specialist in making and playing early wind instruments? That’s not
exactly a common occupation these days.
BL: Well I did my
undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado, and when I applied there I
had no idea that there was an early
music ensemble, and throughout my freshman and sophomore years I kind of
noticed that I really didn’t have the drive to become an orchestral musician.
Because honestly, you have to sit there and practice orchestral excerpts; that’s
your job during your undergraduate—to learn all the orchestral excerpts and be
able to play them like a robot. And that was really unfulfilling to me as a
musician. I even went through some phases where I was double-degree-ing in
different things and trying to…like “Ok, music is really my passion, but I
don’t think I’ll end up in an orchestra so maybe I should look for another way
to pay the bills.”
And that’s kind of
when I started getting into this early music thing, and was playing in an early
music ensemble, playing baroque style. So the next step after I had been
immersed in these ensembles was to get an historical instrument. I ended up going out to Seattle to get a
baroque oboe—there’s a maker just north of there—and I started teaching myself,
and then I started to look at schools on the east coast for early music schools.
There are two big ones –The Juilliard School and the Longy School of Music in
Boston, and so I went and met the teachers and had lessons, did the auditions
and was accepted into both. Juilliard was great because they have a new
scholarship program for the historical thing they’re doing, so that obviously
seemed like the best choice—to go do it for free. Because honestly it’s
also—this thing was so new—it’s ‘are we going to have jobs when we walk out?
Are there going to be gigs?’ And…just the exposure, and working with so many great
musicians. You learn so many instruments; at Juilliard you learn the recorder
if you’re playing oboe, and then you pick up shawm and things like that. So
it’s just kind of cascaded into this—you start to learn all the early wind
instruments almost, and its—like you were saying before, that a baroque
musician played a ton of instruments, so they kind of perpetuate that at the
Juilliard school. And so I walked out with a lot of knowledge and I felt good
that I had made that decision. I felt that I had a lot of freedom that way, so
now I can just do music and not have to worry about the orchestral auditions
any more.
LW: So in addition to crafting early wind instruments what
are some of your other gigs around town?
BL: I guess I barely touched on that. I’d been building instruments in New York,
and when my boss moved out to Portland that was also kind of a reason to move
out here. Outside of that I’ve also been playing modern oboe and I have a small
modern group. We’re called the
Silver Pocket, which was actually the name of Bach’s parent’s house, and I thought
that was my cool early music “steal.” So we’re called the Silver Pocket and we
play music for modern oboe, lever harp and interactive electronics. I do a lot
of composing, and we play various gigs that we form ourselves. We’re going to
Canada to play with some friends I know up there in their little venue. Other
than that I was just doing concerts, and was featured on the audio guide at the
Portland Art Museum for their Venice exhibit.
They’re putting on this big Venice early music/art exhibit. I’m on three of the pieces; I’m talking about
them. So I kind of approached them about
it initially; I asked ‘can we put on a concert for your exhibit’ and it turned
into: ‘can you come talk about the music you’re about to play for us, and can
you come talk about these paintings of street musicians,’ so this chain of
events happened there. Then my boss who builds the instruments and myself are
featured in their Object Stories exhibit, about building new baroque
instruments. Also my compositions which feature some baroque idioms but in a
modern sort of way—that’s being featured there.
So I’ve just been expanding in all these different parts of Portland as
much as possible. I’m always looking for new places.
BL: Yes; there’s not a core group of wind instrumentalists,
so I’ve been contracted to play with them twice, and hopefully again in the
future. We did the Messiah, during the snowstorm, and we did the classical
concerti, which is a very fun experience. So we performed on classical
instruments there, which is an entirely different oboe, and the pitch is different
and everything changes. That means more
reeds that I had to make.
LW: I’ve heard that making reeds is every reed-instrument
player’s favorite task.
BL: Yes, I think I make reeds for four or five different
types of oboes. I just have boxes. And when you’re not playing gigs you make
reeds for when the gigs come around.
LW: Making reeds in
your sleep?
BL: Exactly. Nightmares about making reeds.
LW: So you’re the new
Executive Director for Musica Maestrale?
BL: I met Hideki Yamaya, who is the Artistic Director, in
December, and we immediately became fast friends and got along really well. We
had the same vision for early music,so it was kind of an obvious pairing for us
to just work together and put on concerts and organize this whole thing. We have some really cool ideas in the works
for next season. Nothing’s official yet, but we’re looking to do Bach’s Coffee
Cantata, and we’re going to do it in one or two coffee shops in Portland. I
also have this very cool---I don’t want to divulge too much information, but
we’re going to premiere—definitely in this state—a set of American baroque
pieces that I found. And there’s going to be a pre-concert lecture about
colonial music. It’s from the year Bach died actually. So it’s what people in
America were doing in the baroque when baroque music was transitioning to
classical. Kind of when Bach ended his reign, if you will. We’re going to be
doing some music from America. American baroque, which is always fun.
LW: Do you think the
compositions that you’re looking at—and this is just my own hypothesis—are they
a bit anachronistic according to what was going on in Europe? Let’s say they [Europeans] were transitioning towards the
galante then. Was this American baroque a bit farther back in time
compositionally or stylistically—or was it kind of on par with what was going
on in Europe at the time?
BL: What I will say about this is that—if you look at around
1727 or so, you start looking at [Domenico] Scarlatti’s pieces—there are a lot
of them that are already in the galante style, what we would call it, already
moving away from the baroque. Bach beat the baroque idiom into the ground; he
composed in a very encyclopedic format.
“How many hymns can I write before it becomes too much, or fugues, etc.
etc.” So I will say, with that in mind, I think that the music I’m looking at
is very—how do I say this—it does have an older style to it. Because today I
can go in the internet to Youtube and hear what’s going on in the world super
fast...it’s just amazing. But back then—with America in turmoil and this trying
to break away—it wasn’t even 1776 yet. So there is a lot of stuff going on,
definitely older styles. What the Brits at the time were bringing over kind of
became what American baroque was, and became what colonial music was at the
time. So yeah it’s definitely older, a little folksier; there are major voice
leading problems in the music, probably some terrible chords but we’re totally
going to own it.
LW: These weren’t
composers that were coming out of the leading…
BL: They were a club.
This music is from colonial Annapolis, and they had a club that would meet once
a week and they would write these compositions and play them, and they had
lists of the instruments they had in the club and who played what, and it’s
kind of open-ended as to which instruments should play the pieces. And that’s
kind of cool, because whoever showed up played the music. So we’re looking to
provide a concert that’s sort of in the same format. And I think it’s
definitely something that hasn’t been done over here; we’re excited about that.
LW: Excellent; that
sounds really fascinating. I’m looking forward to that now. I didn’t know that
was in the offing; you learn something new every day.
BL: Portland Baroque Orchestra
is great because it offers this huge orchestral experience of baroque
instruments. [For MM] it’s: ‘What can we
do that’s as good[as]…and entirely different [from PBO].’ And I think that’s what we’re becoming…the
answer to [someone asking]: “When PBO
isn’t playing, what are we doing?” It’s
hard for them [PBO] to do chamber music because they have this huge orchestra,
so why [shouldn’t they] do orchestral works?
LW: It seems to me
like a lot of the essence of baroque
music, for me anyway, is the small ensemble, it’s the two , five, six players,
because, as anyone who knows about baroque music knows, for the most part [back in those days] they
couldn’t field an orchestra as grandiose as the PBO…that might have been a
large court orchestra—yet still they were making music everywhere else. And that’s why there are so many incredible
pieces of music for these small ensembles. One of the wonders of baroque music
to me has always been the wide variety of instruments. It’s almost
bewildering…even people that study it for a long time…you know ‘I’ve never
heard a chalumeau…what the heck is that? Or a trumpet marine, or…’ there were
so many combinations. And part of that might have had to do with, as you said,
whoever showed up had to play.
BL: Exactly. What’s
interesting too is that a lot of new instruments or instrumentation was used
because there were music unions, so there were people who told you what you
could play and when. There were a lot of politics involved in music making back
then. But yeah, I agree PBO is an
amazing, awesome Portland institution that I’m glad we have. And we hope to
contribute to early music as they’re doing, by playing works that are a little
bit more obscure, and maybe draw…I mean there’s a huge draw to hear big Handel
works…
LW: They’re great
fun.
BL: Yeah they’re
amazing. But we want to provide the same experience with obscure works that no
one has ever heard of. Like this American Baroque thing, or playing tiny
Italian composers’ music, these people who wrote a handful of works and…Hideki
and I spend a lot of time digging up new things and looking for new works to
perform. And I think that’s an important thing that Portland can bring to the
early music scene as well, because a lot of big groups have a hard time doing
that music, and I think that MM…that’s what were headed for. Those horizons.
LW: I guess I have another question specifically for an
oboist looking at small ensembles. Can you tell us anything about the
repertoire for something that MM might be able to realize with an oboist?
BL: Fortunately for the oboist, most of our repertoire comes
from the baroque. There are over ten thousand pieces just from the baroque era
alone that are explicitly written for oboe, so it’s really easy to find works
with oboe featured. One thing I will say
though is we really take to heart the idea of house music, or making music with
whatever instruments are lying around. MM just played at the Portland Art
Museum for the Venice exhibit, and I played violin lines for pieces[on my oboe]
because we had an oboe, and one violin. It was [written] for two violins, but
we just said ‘well it’s two treble instruments, so we’ll make it work.’ Exactly
what they [early musicians] would’ve done.
Because sometimes you don’t have the luxury of being so picky. So it’s
kind of cool—it’s a historical touch.
LW: It’s interesting,
as we were discussing about having come full circle—making your living much the
same way that a baroque musician might have done. It’s fun to talk about that
and I personally am pretty excited about MM and what’s coming down the
turnpike. So thanks a lot for taking the time Brandon.
BL: Thank you. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Musica Maestrale is performing this Friday night, April 11 at Saints Peter and Paul Episcopal Church and Saturday evening at The Community Music Center. Tickets can be purchased at the door, or
here online.]
