What are your goals for the future Walla Walla Chamber Music Festival?

For one thing, I’d love to help foster a broader and deeper understanding of the Festival among the people of our community. Our flagship events—public, ticketed concerts—speak for themselves, and I believe anyone who has experienced one would attest to how impressive they are. But for those who may not be familiar with what a chamber music event looks or feels like, it can take a little courage to show up for the first time. More importantly, however, I’d love for everyone to know how much work the Festival does in our community that goes largely unseen: engagements in schools, the Library, the Veterans Home, and with many other partners. I’d love for everyone in Walla Walla to be so proud of the Festival’s important work that they just can’t help but crow about it to visitors, friends, and family from out of town. 

I also dream of the Festival being more visible and engaged in Walla Walla outside of June and January. That has to be brought about in an incremental, very calibrated way, and it will involve making innovative partnerships in our community. I have a lot of ideas about how to foster that kind of growth, but it will take time and, more importantly, it will involve forming new relationships. Stay tuned for more about that in the next year or two!

Can you tell me how you got started in classical music recording and production?

As a kid, I was always very focused on music. I begged for piano lessons and practiced hard; I saved my lawn-mowing earnings for a Korg Poly 61 so I could play keyboard in a band with my friends; and I played in my school’s concert and marching bands (sadly, there was no orchestra program in my hometown). When I was fifteen, I took a piano audition for the North Carolina School for the Performing Arts. About ten seconds into mangling the Prelude from Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque, I stood up, leaned over, and gave that enormous Bösendorfer concert grand an emotional hug. When one of the imperious judges asked why I had stopped, I told them I had never played such a magnificently beautiful instrument, and that it had just moved me. Surprisingly, they let me in. It was really there at NCSA that it dawned on me that a life in music was achievable. By my senior year, though, I had also come to realize that the traditional career path for pianists—compete for scholarships and prizes, hope to win management, strive to book enough concert appearances to support a family—was both unappealing and also implausible for me. I was also interested in such a broad variety of music (particularly musique concrète, but also punk, pop, industrial, and EDM) that a college program focused only on piano didn’t seem to make sense. Miraculously, my piano teacher, Eric Larsen, encouraged this mildly anti-conformist impulse. That’s why I chose a conservatory for my undergraduate degree that could provide rigorous training not only in music (technique, ear training, sight singing, analysis, etc.) but also in audio recording. That was the Cleveland Institute of Music. My thought at the time was to learn both the foundational principles behind audio, particularly acoustics, and the then-new world of digital recording and editing, and then to apply those principles to the creation of new kinds of art. What I didn’t expect was that along the way, I’d fall so hard for the core aesthetic values of Western art music that I could spend the next 30+ years very thoroughly satisfied exploring them; that is, to be engaged primarily with the conventional institutions of classical music, and not only the avant-garde. I later went back to school for a Master's degree in Musicology—a challenge I imposed on myself, really just out of a hunger to know more about how societies think about the music they choose to create, propagate, and confer status upon. Today, my work producing recordings is most personally fulfilling when it is connected to social work or community development, or when I’m working directly with a composer to bring a new work of art to life.

What do you hope audiences take away from this year's festival?

Every June Festival is dazzling, but each is unique. This season, the Festival's founder and artistic director, Timothy Christie, has created a distinct overarching design that anyone attending even just a few concerts should be able to sense. Some concerts will feel like an abundant celebration. In contrast, our most ambitious concert will be tantamount to a kind of collective catharsis (I don’t want to give anything away, but I know everyone will be deeply moved). Here’s the thing. Going to any concert, I believe, accomplishes two beautiful things. First, it's an act of meaningful self-care—physically, therapeutically, spiritually, and emotionally. It's also a way to connect with people around you. In the case of the Walla Walla Chamber Music Festival, though, there’s an equally crucial third effect of coming to our concerts: it fosters and fuels our pride in and love for this magnificent place we call home. It reminds us how grateful we can be. So I hope everyone who comes to any of our events leaves feeling better about themselves, and maybe even a little more hopeful.

Learn more about the 2025 season here!