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The Scene Room
The Scene Room Podcast spotlights the movers and makers redefining the performing arts—focusing on innovative marketing, leadership, and the importance of collaboration. Hosted by Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman, with a keen eye on audience trends and cultural shifts, the goal is to explore how artists and organizations are connecting with communities, shaping the future, and redefining what it means to engage and inspire.
The Scene Room
Barry Shiffman — Chamber Music and the Pulse of Community
Barry Shiffman challenges the doom-and-gloom narrative surrounding classical music by spotlighting the remarkable growth of chamber music across North America. Drawing from his roles as Executive Director of the Banff International String Quartet Competition, and Associate Dean and Director of Chamber Music at the Glenn Gould School and Dean of the Taylor Performance Academy for Young Artists at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, and Artistic Director of Classical Music & Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Shiffman shares stories of thriving festivals, purpose-built venues, and passionate audiences redefining the art form’s future.
From Rockport Music’s evolution—from volunteer-run gallery concerts to a year-round presenter with its own performance center—to similar transformations in La Jolla and Parry Sound, this episode reveals how grassroots enthusiasm has sparked major investment in chamber music.
Shiffman ties this growth to the art form’s unique intimacy: the direct connection between performers and audience, the communal experience, and the personal resonance audiences are craving today. At Banff, this intimacy creates an immersive, high-stakes environment where audiences become advocates and every quartet leaves with meaningful career momentum.
For aspiring musicians, Shiffman emphasizes that exceptional listening—both musical and interpersonal—is key to unlocking the “flow state” that defines great ensemble work and, ultimately, quartet success.
Whether you’re a chamber music devotee or simply curious about where classical music is thriving, this episode reveals a flourishing art form that brings people together through shared experiences, deep artistry, and a powerful sense of belonging.
All episodes are also available in video form on our YouTube Channel. All episodes are hosted by Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman.
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Don't hesitate to reach out to us with guest ideas, information you'd like covered, or any ideas you might have—the hope is for this to be a continuous resource and dialogue with our listeners.
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Hi, I'm Elizabeth Bowman and welcome to the Scene Room. Today I have Barry Shiffman in the room. It's tough to describe Barry's professional history. He's had so many roles across so many different avenues. He is a violinist, a violist. He has had a career performing, recording, teaching, administrating. Right now he is the executive director of the Banff International String Quartet competition, the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, as both Associate Dean and Director of Chamber Music at the Glenn Gould School and Dean of the Philip and Ellie Taylor Performance Academy for Young Artists. He is also Artistic Director of the Classical Music in Rockport Chamber Music Festival. He's also a sought-after juror. He has served on the jury of the Tchaikovsky and Montreal Violin competitions, as well as London's Wigmore Hall, geneva, banff and Lyon String Quartet competitions. In addition to his work at Banff Centre, rockport and the Royal Conservatory, he has served as executive artistic director of Vancouver's Music in the Morning concert since 2009. So Barry has his hands in a lot of this classical chamber music business. So what a delight to have him here today.
Elizabeth Bowman:If you're enjoying the podcast, please do like, share, review, do any of those things. It really helps keep these conversations going. Let's get to it, barry. Welcome to the scene room. Thanks so much for coming.
Barry Shiffman:Great to be with you, Lizzie.
Elizabeth Bowman:So great to have someone's perspective from the chamber music and string world, because I've had a lot of singers and also administrators for opera and that kind of thing. So it's really, really great to get your perspective on this podcast.
Barry Shiffman:Happy to be here.
Elizabeth Bowman:So you've spent your life steeped in the industry, as a performer, as an educator, as a curator of programs, artistic director and all the things. How would you describe the current state of the industry?
Barry Shiffman:Oh yeah, well, that's a great question and something a lot of people are curious about. So the industry is that's a big word. So I don't feel I can speak to the entertainment industry or the recording industry or the music industry. The classical music industry is something I feel I know pretty well and I think we've done a pretty horrific job of realistically describing things that are happening. We're very good at describing everything that's wrong, so you'll hear all sorts of wonderful stories of declining audiences, struggles even at the Metropolitan Opera, financial struggles, orchestras that can't get audiences all sorts of challenges. What we're not very good at is describing incredible growth in the industry and opportunity and in the chamber music world. That's what I'm seeing, and yet that story isn't getting told. It isn't even getting told at places like Chamber Music America, which is, you know, an organization that, by the nature of their task, they do a lot of focusing on what are problems. Let's focus on for a second what's really good. I have a lot of focusing on what are problems. Let's focus on for a second what's really good.
Barry Shiffman:I have a career that you mentioned has a number of touch points, so you know, educating. I present a festival in Rockport, massachusetts, for Rockport music and I direct the International String Quartet competition in Banff. The exponential growth of chamber music festivals in North America is an enormous story that isn't getting told. If you look, just as an example, at Rockport Music in Massachusetts, I used to go to Rockport Music when the St Lawrence Quartet was young, we had just won Banff and we went to this small little town, sleepy town in beautiful New England and on Cape Ann We'd play concerts for this little series that had, I think at that time, three or four weekends of concerts, almost entirely volunteer run. The board members would move the chairs into the Art Association building, they would make little cookies and you'd have them for dessert and it was very hands-on and endearing. That wasn't that long ago and that organization then themselves raised money, pulled no debt and built the Shilinlu Performance Center on the incredible water of Rockport.
Barry Shiffman:And that little chamber music festival that was a few weekends in the summer is a 12-month-a-year multi-genre presenting organization with an enormous chamber music festival that I'm involved in classical music during the year, a jazz festival, a Celtic festival, an education department, a jazz camp. Recordings, podcasts, videos, and it's sensational. But it's not the only example like that. Look at La Jolla in California. Look in Canada at Festival of the Sound in Parry Sound, ontario. Have you been to Parry Sound, ontario, lizzie?
Elizabeth Bowman:I have. Yeah, I've never been to the festival, but I've heard it it's lovely.
Barry Shiffman:Parry Sound's lovely, you know, you can go fishing and you can go swimming and you can eat like lots of fried food and it's, it's a great place. It's not where you'd expect a hotbed of classical chamber music, but there you have it. There was an incredible desire for this. In the summers, concerts used to happen in the school gymnasium and such was the excitement that they got together and they built the stocky center for music and they have an incredible summer festival and go through prince edward county you could just. When I was in the quartet, by the time I left, we were busy from Memorial Day weekend we played almost every single day until Labor Day, different festivals popping up, new, one, new, one, new one, new, one, new one. So that, to me, is amazing and that's a story we don't talk about. And for me, because I'm involved in identifying the next quartets that have a potential for a career through their work at the band competition, I feel morally okay that we're doing this, that we're actually identifying groups, because I know that there is opportunity for them.
Elizabeth Bowman:I feel like chamber music in general has all of the ingredients of what future and current audiences want, of what future and current audiences want. So the idea of connecting on an intimate level with the performers and the performances. Chamber music has all of that because, just inherently, you have a small ensemble and oftentimes you'll have performers talking to the audience about what they're doing and the programming is often well curated and there's a thematic thread to it, so people know what to expect. The conversation afterwards is accessible and relatable because they make it so. So I understand this growth and why it's happening and think that you know, if people listening to this podcast have not been to a chamber festival, that they should definitely go and experience it.
Barry Shiffman:Yeah, I think you've touched on a number of things that are some of the secret ingredients, and one of those is exactly that that you're close to the action and so already you have a leg up over events in large halls, where even a great performance of opera or a great symphonic experience you're still removed physically. So there's something very exciting about being very close. That's wonderful, and I think you're right as well that there is a growing, there's a desire from artists to reach out to the audience and connect beyond the music on the stage. So you're seeing lots of artists, like you mentioned, speak from the stage, share anecdotes, take questions and answers, and I wondered why there's so much interest in this. And I've come to understand that in life today, for many people we've lost community as a core value and when you go to the concert hall you have this community experience and that's as important as the music that's coming off the stage.
Barry Shiffman:You know, I teach at the Glenn Gould School, as you know, and Glenn Gould was an amazing musician, an amazing genius and such a celebrated Canadian, and I think he got it wrong like completely. He played great, but you know he was convinced that the better experience was making music in the recording studio. I don't understand how he missed all the good that happens in the concert hall. I wish I could meet him now and invite him to one of the festivals and show him how great that is. You know, it's funny because when he made many of his television shows for CBC they were often almost like a living room setting. So he desired that sort of informality and community but yet couldn't find that in the concert stage. And I think today we have lots of opportunity for that in the festivals.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, I grew up in Ottawa and Ottawa is known for its chamber music. Obviously they have the Ottawa Chamber Festival and also now Music and Beyond. And I remember as a teenager when Chamber Fest would start, people would line up with their lawn chairs. Like that's how the lineups to get into the hall. They would bring lawn chairs because you know they wanted great seats. It was general seating and so they would go hours before they even opened the doors and that kind of vibe. It was an impressionable experience for me because I was luckily aware of all these great chamber works at a very young age and, yeah, I think I would say it was life changing for someone.
Barry Shiffman:Yeah, and for you and I would say for me as well, and for so many musicians that were invited to Ottawa. I had heard about the festival but we hadn't been invited. And finally we were invited to go to this festival in Ottawa. And we head out to Ottawa and we walked from our hotel to I think it was Dominion Chalmers Church or wherever it was that we were playing, and we saw that scene you just described. There were hundreds of people lined up and it was such an ego boost. We thought, wow, this is awesome. They must have heard that we're really good. And it was just. I'd never seen people line up for a concert. So we're just, we're so excited.
Barry Shiffman:And then jeff in the quartet, he's like, hey, look down the street, there's another church and there's a concert there and there's another lineup, like what is going on here. There was such an appetite for music and for community and I think the lining up, the bringing the lawn chair, the suffering through the heat of the church, all of that experience was as important as then taking in the amazing music that was being curated and people came and studied Ottawa as an example of success, because it was such an anomaly just in terms of the numbers. At one point I read that they attracted more people to the Chamber Music Festival than to the National Arts Center's summer programs.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, I can see that. But part of that is the genius of the curation and we can all learn from that. All the institutions certainly can still learn from that audience connection and experience. And, like you say, it's all part of that experience the community connection, the sitting down on those lawn chairs and there would be hot dog stands nearby and things like that, like you're incorporating the whole community, and that's what we need to do as an industry in the classical arts and in any of the art.
Barry Shiffman:Yeah, yeah, so agree.
Elizabeth Bowman:So tell me what's going on. It's a competition year at Banff.
Barry Shiffman:Yeah, it's a competition year. This is a really particularly fun time in my year. So we've just finished the Glenn Gould School season and the Taylor Academy, which is the pre-college prep program that I run, and now I focus my attention on two things. One, the Rockport Chamber Music Festival starts in the middle of June. We open with Angela Hewitt and we have an incredible number of concerts and they're selling great and we're excited about that. We have Josh Bell and Stephen Isserlis and Jeremy Denk coming for a weekend, so very exciting stuff. And we have previous winners of the Banff competition the Dover Quartet, isidore Quartet, both on our series and, as you mentioned, it is a Banff International String Quartet competition year.
Barry Shiffman:Every three years we run the competition. You know I mentioned before the importance of community. Our audience is legendary. We have a pretty much 100% return rate. Those that have come want to come again and the audience comes and spends. Most of them come for the entire week. Some come for just the final four days and they have a hotel room on campus and they have all their meals together and they go to the concerts and the masterclasses and they drink in the bar at night and listen to people reading chamber music informally. We sold out those residential packages in one day. There are 120 people on the wait list. Now I'm not patting myself on the shoulder. You know, if you can't sell that incredible experience of the competition in the most beautiful place in the world, on this magical campus, then you know you're in the wrong business. So I'm very lucky to have the opportunity to create in Banff.
Barry Shiffman:We have 10 remarkable quartets that are coming. We have a fantastic jury. We have a prize package that is unmatched in the industry in terms of chamber music. So if you win this competition, you get three years of professional management, working with John Zion and his team at Mel i Kaplan in the States and with our office in Banff and with Andrea Hompel in Europe. So you've got multiple concert tours recording a residency, a visiting resident at Southern Methodist University. It's so joyous to be able to share that with whoever wins. The first prize pack is valued at close to half a million dollars now in terms of the cash and the benefits of the concerts and all the rest.
Barry Shiffman:And what I think maybe is really touching is we don't eliminate anybody from the competition until the night before the final round. So every quartet that comes performs multiple times before the sold-out audience. And then three groups are invited Saturday night to come back on Sunday and play the finals. That means seven groups don't make the finals and those seven groups all receive a career development grant from the Anderson Family Foundation and it's a cash award of $5,000 to each group. So that idea of everybody's a winner we back that with these awards and we cover the travel and the hotel of all the quartets.
Barry Shiffman:So I feel that every quartet that comes to Banff, regardless of whether you've made the finals or win a prize, gets something really significant out of it. And what's really fun is sometimes the audience says you know, barry, you got it wrong. You know Lizzie's quartet was the one that was the best. How did they not make the final? I'm like that's fantastic, don't tell me. Go tell Lizzie, go tell her how much you loved her quartet and then go back home and tell your chamber music presenting organization and wherever you're from to hire that quartet. And that happens. So the audience takes ownership over their own choices, which is really fun to see.
Elizabeth Bowman:Well, it's all live streamed as well, and I watch it every year on stream and engage like this.
Elizabeth Bowman:I get really into it. You know there's also well, it used to be on Twitter, but you know now Twitter's not a place to be. But yeah, I used to say like when the jury was, you know, debating, I'd be like, oh, it's definitely. This is first, this is second, this is third. You know, and as a publicist, I would say, use all of that information, everyone that's tagging you and saying like, you know, we're rooting for you in this way or that way and connect with those people. Experience for them because it's a major global stage using digital assets. And then it's like they should have someone because they got to focus on the competition, but they should have someone hired. You know, it's not that much money to have the quartet.
Barry Shiffman:you mean the individual quartet. Yeah, it's really interesting. We definitely see a huge range of experience in handling social media. Some of them have no experience at all and occasionally a group is really savvy. But you're right, they're so focused on the preparation for the competition that they're not able to really take advantage of telling the story. And that's an interesting idea that they could come to the competition with their own publicist helping promote them. I think we'll see that. You know, sometimes we see that if a quartet comes from a school is associated with, you know, the Royal Academy or Colburn or Curtis or the Glenn Gould, then you have the benefits sometimes of those assets. But it's different storytelling than if the publicist is focused on the actual quartet.
Elizabeth Bowman:Well, the clients I work for you know it's. You know they need to focus on their performance. Very distracting otherwise, their performance it's very distracting otherwise. And if you have this big opportunity where you're getting live streamed continuously, you should take advantage of that with all. Put everything towards it, I would say, Because, it's like you say, it's not necessarily about the winner and the winner is going to get this amazing package Great, but it's about engaging with audiences. You've got to invest and if that's what you want to do for your career, this is a gold medal moment for you.
Barry Shiffman:So, yeah, no, I think you're right. It's really good advice. You know one of the things you speak about digital assets. So we do live stream the whole competition and we share that on our channel Of course, we on the violin channel as well, because they have so many eyeballs, and then we also, you know, the capture of those concerts is live, so you can only get cameras so close. I think we do a really good job. But we also work with Brittle Films from Toronto. We bring them out and they shoot what we call the Rolston Sessions, and so they basically make an incredibly beautiful video performance five or six minutes of a movement, of a particular work, where the cameras can get really up close, and each quartet, each of the 10 quartets leaves with this video asset, which costs incredible money to produce, and most of the quartets that I've seen, the professional quartets don't have such beautiful assets of their own.
Elizabeth Bowman:Impossible to afford, yeah.
Barry Shiffman:So again, we're trying to make sure that everybody that comes to Banff leaves with something tangible.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, they can't leave with the mountains.
Barry Shiffman:Exactly. I know I so wish we could. For me it's really beautiful to go back because I, you know, I went to Banff as a really young kid the first time I think I was 11, going to Gifted Youth, and I went back again and again and studied there and the St Lawrence Quartet formed there and then I had the amazing opportunity to live there and run the programs and my second daughter was born there. And so when I go to Banff, second daughter was born there. And so when I go to Banff, it's, it's, you know, it's pretty emotional to like drive from Calgary and you see those mountains, and it's a flood of incredible, really positive memories.
Elizabeth Bowman:It's the best place on the planet.
Barry Shiffman:It is the best place.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, I love Banff so much, and I've said it multiple times on this podcast too. I've been there a couple summers.
Barry Shiffman:You were there with the opera right With Joel's thing, yeah with his program.
Elizabeth Bowman:And it's just there was no wasting time with anything. I was up you know five o'clock in the morning running and just getting right into it, going on crazy hikes all the time and then obviously teaching so obviously I love it.
Barry Shiffman:I love it when people get to banff and do that and take, you know, truly full advantage of the place because, yeah, and it's, it's magical every every hour, right, you wake up early.
Elizabeth Bowman:It's magical at night although I did go to bed like a grandma there because it you know I would be up so early and I'd just teach all during the day I was I was definitely not one of the people drinking at the bar right.
Barry Shiffman:Well, it's funny, you know I I don't too much about this, but you know the mountain that used to be referred to as Tunnel Mountain but is now referred to as Sleeping Buffalo yes, which is the name that the Indigenous gave the mountain. And I understand that the Indigenous would come to Sleeping Buffalo Mountain to sleep, because dreams and sleep were an elevated experience in Banff, at Sleeping Buffalo Mountain, and a number of artists that have come talking about the wild dreams they've had. Now, you know, I don't know why that is, but for many, many, many years people have been coming to Banff specifically to sleep. So good on you.
Elizabeth Bowman:Taking advantage of sleeping. And I was also last summer, when I was there, I was in a career transition. You know, I had stopped working at Opera Canada, I had just finished working there and I wasn't really sure about my next step. So I would say, you know, the answer is in the mountains, and I would just try to figure out what I was going to do next.
Barry Shiffman:And here I am, there you go, good work.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, so let's circle back to the beginning of your musical life. I just am curious about how you know you performed with the St Lawrence Quartet, like you said, for many years, and then what made you transition away from that?
Barry Shiffman:So I was really lucky. I had a beautiful experience with the St Lawrence Quartet and I was in it for 17 and a half years and it was a great ride. You know, within the quartet everybody finds their own area of specialization. I guess you'd say right, somebody's organizing touring and somebody's doing the concert program choices. And Jeff was brilliant at engaging from the stage and my role off of the music making was really around project creation and dealing with management. And so I started to put some of these projects together with the quartet or for the quartet, things like a touring project with Palabolas Dance Company or commissioning different music, or working with the museum, the Cantor Museum at Stanford, curating a program that looked at music composed during the Holocaust and curating that with photos of Roman Vishniac, who documented Jewish ghetto life. Before the whole, and in the putting these projects together, I realized how much fun I was having doing that. And the thing about being in the quartet is you put a project together, you might do it once and then you're touring and you're off doing it and I said, well wait, if I wasn't in the quartet I could do lots of these projects or help people do these projects, and I wasn't so enamored with 240 days a year on the road anymore.
Barry Shiffman:My wife, robin and I were expecting our first child and we naively decided to leave Stanford. Yeah, that was. You know, robin had an incredible job at the time. She was acting executive director of performing arts at Stanford and in retrospect, as a you know, as a more mature person, I'm like what in the heck are we doing? Who walks out of that?
Barry Shiffman:But we moved to Banff and overnight our lives changed. We had a house, we had a living in the mountains, we had a baby, I had a job, I was working crazy amount of hours because, unlike the quartet, which is contained, banff Center is not contained and it took me a couple of years to realize you can't ever get all the work done because that's just not possible with that much going on. But it was an amazing time and we did, I think, really great work in Banff. It was a great team and I really loved it.
Barry Shiffman:Yeah, I think in the end I made the right decision, leaving the quartet and the quartet flourished and we got to work together One of the first projects I did in Stanford University with the St Lawrence Quartet and listens to them play Beethoven and goes home and writes a string quartet for them, I'm like, oh, that's killing me. But we invited the quartet to come to Banff and they recorded on the non-such label John's String Quartet. We brought John Adams out to Banff and brought young composers that worked with him, and so that was very gratifying. I was able to spin my relationship with the St Lawrence Quartet and my work in Banff and bring those things all together and build out so that young composers also had access to John, which was really, really special.
Elizabeth Bowman:What do you think are two or three key components to having a successful string quartet?
Barry Shiffman:Oh yeah, wow, you know, probably the first thing is just as it is in the actual music making. The most important element of making music in a string quartet is the skill of listening. Everything comes from that. If you're really brilliant at listening, you can react, you can mold your sound to accompany, to converse. It's all about listening. But I would say that outside of the music making, the listening is the big skill that needs to be developed. It's a very difficult thing to be in a group of four people that are striving for something that's greater than any of the individuals, and things get heated. You're looking for the best, you're not always expressing that in the best way possibly and emotions get frayed, and so developing that listening skill outside of music making is key.
Elizabeth Bowman:In terms of, I guess, the entrepreneurship side of it, I would imagine that it would be key to have someone with organizational skills. And also, when you talked about commissioning and that kind of thing, I guess it's important to have your artistic stamp made clear as well. So, in that respect, what would you say?
Barry Shiffman:So again goes back to the thing, doesn't it? In a certain way? I remember I won't say who the quartet was, but there was a quartet that was meeting with me and they were talking about different things they were doing and they put out doing a program on Mozart and Beethoven issue and they were talking about. It was interesting. They were kind of engaged as they were telling me about it, and then they started to talk about all these things that they were doing with living composers and they became a different group. They were animated, they were excited, they were passionate.
Barry Shiffman:My advice would be just listen to yourselves, follow that road, because that's the road that is speaking to you and you need to listen to yourself. Look what Kronos did. You know Kronos listened to themselves. They were a passionate bunch of scrappy kids that wanted to play Black Angels of Crumb and weren't going to take no for an answer and wanted to work with composers and had no money and ended up playing in bars, but where they were true to themselves, they just kept listening to that inner voice and didn't sell out and the result is they created a brand around that. So I think you're absolutely right, lizzie. It's about what's your artistic stamp and you can't manufacture something that is not true, but you can listen to that truth and then develop that.
Elizabeth Bowman:I guess they have a unique challenge in that you have in a strong quartet, obviously you have four very dynamic players, because you have to have four dynamic players in order to have the energy needed to have a great quartet. But with dynamic players come dynamic egos, which is fine. I mean that's part of performance, it's not necessarily a bad word. But yeah, this unified identity. That's the challenge, I think, of the string quartet is to have that resonant unified identity that everyone believes in equally, and that's where I actually think that really successful performances happen, how you generate that X factor. It's like everyone is on that same mental plane and it's like you've all just gotten right into the the pathway and it goes right out like full saturated color to that audience so it's not always that that happens, but when it does happen it's a magic zone, isn't it?
Barry Shiffman:some people refer to it as flow state I've heard it called but where technique is no longer an issue. It's not, you're not, it's just, things are just happening. Athletes have described that as well. I wish the Toronto Maple Leafs had a bit of that last night, but whatever I digress.
Elizabeth Bowman:Not to go totally off topic, but I'm listening to another podcast right now called the Telepathy Tapes. Have you heard of it?
Barry Shiffman:No.
Elizabeth Bowman:Oh, it's fantastic. It talks about well, the whole it. No, oh it's fantastic, it talks about, well, the whole. Purpose of the podcast is to talk about nonverbal autistic people who are actually capable of communicating far beyond what we imagine. They describe people who have been taught, you know, for 21 years, these are their primary colors and these kinds of things, and then they gave them a different way to communicate through spelling, they call it where they're able to point at letters and that kind of thing, and they learn that these people are educated with world issues and they're like, actually like fully developed humans that we haven't understood. So it's pretty amazing, the podcast. But one thing that obviously is in this conversation is the telepathy element to it, the fact that they are able to communicate on a different plane.
Barry Shiffman:We just haven't figured out how to measure that, but it's happening.
Elizabeth Bowman:It's happening. Yeah, you know an octet or generally chamber music and this idea of getting into that flow state. I immediately started Googling musicians and telepathy.
Barry Shiffman:Oh, interesting Okay.
Elizabeth Bowman:Because I thought that maybe these musicians, when they're developing this flow, state and now my podcast is going to go into the hippie zone. But yeah, maybe it is an actual state of connection?
Barry Shiffman:No, it is Absolutely.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah.
Barry Shiffman:Once you've felt it, you know we're just very early stages at being able to understand that or capture what's really going on.
Elizabeth Bowman:Anyway, go listen to the telepathy, yeah.
Barry Shiffman:I'm going to write that down. So what's it called Telepathy?
Elizabeth Bowman:The telepathy tapes. So back on topic and back to the Banff competition, because that's coming up. Do you have workshops outside of the asset building that we just talked about? Do you talk about entrepreneurship and career?
Barry Shiffman:So we're just looking at that. But yes, for the quartets that we'll work with, that are the laureates, we will be working on a whole range of things grant writing, program building, liaising with management, how to work with the public, how to do an interview that can basically break down what an interview is about and to give the artists a sense of agency or control in the best way that they can feel. They walked in and, through developing their skills, they achieved what they wanted to in getting a certain message forward. And also that makes the life of the interviewer so much easier, because I think sometimes, especially with the young quartets, they'll go to an interview and I'll look afterwards at the. I'm like what are you? You just spoke for an hour, you didn't touch on anything of real relevance and you went off in these crazy tangents that you gave nothing for the writer to actually work with. Yeah, those are skills that you need to develop, for sure.
Elizabeth Bowman:The biggest challenge, I think, in early interview. Well, young artists doing interviews, I would say first they talk too fast and two, they don't write down a primary point that they want to get across before they start the interview and then two secondary points if they have time. A lot of times you only have 30 seconds, so it's one point and even if they ask you a question that even isn't related to that point, they have to figure out how to pivot from what the question that was asked to the point that they're trying to make. So to practice pivoting, that's a good thing.
Barry Shiffman:And to practice I mean it's so interesting that you said that because the musicians practice, they practice their own part. They spent years practicing the quartet and then there's no practice, there's no real consideration of any of the ancillary activities. They just kind of do it and some are skillful at it and some are really not.
Elizabeth Bowman:I think it's also important for these emerging artists to know that the interviewer is trying to ask a broad enough question to open the door for them to talk. So it's not about waiting for the next question to be asked. It's like just run with it, take what they give you. They're giving you the baton and that's your opportunity to speak. And if you have those three points and you have time to say them, great, you got through it one thing that happens this year in the competition that I think is really fun.
Barry Shiffman:We we haven't even announced it or the details of it yet, but the anderson family, who provide the the generous career development grants for the seven groups that don't advance to the finals. They spend a lot of their time in the Grenadines and St Vincent in the Caribbean, and so we've created an opportunity now for one of the 10 quartets to go to that beautiful part of the world for 10 days, give three concerts and give a whole bunch of performances in the community for children and for audiences who haven't had interaction with string quartet before. And so we'll be looking to choose a group from the 10 that apply, based not just on how they perform in the competition that's no one element, but any of the 10 quartets are good enough to play concerts but on how they write to us about their interest in the project, why they're interested in it, why outreach is important to our community connections. So I'm excited to see where that goes and excited to spend 10 days with them in the Grenadines.
Elizabeth Bowman:Take me with you.
Barry Shiffman:Right, I know this competition just gets better and better.
Elizabeth Bowman:That's amazing. I know what an opportunity for them. I also love that you have the Canadian composition element to the competition and you get to listen to that piece over and over again.
Barry Shiffman:You know. So, lizzie, you know you think about the audience in Banff. They're not a new music audience. They're not a new music audience. They're not like new music aficionados that go check out all that. And so I always am a little worried about this round where you have a new piece of music, and this this year by the wonderful Canadian composer, katia Ghosh, who's a professor at New England Conservatory, and you would think it'd be a tough sell, because you know what are you doing today.
Elizabeth Bowman:Well, I'm going to quartets play the same piece one after another and it's the most popular round we have.
Barry Shiffman:It is so cool because it really does demonstrate the artistic interpretation and how, how it can just like vastly change you're like what mind blown again, and I think any, any person, whether you're an expert quartet player or composer or just a music lover or whatever you hear those differences, you see those differences. I always think it's a little bit like a kaleidoscope you turn it and suddenly you see different shapes. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that and I think Kati's written a wonderful piece.
Elizabeth Bowman:Well, thank you so much for being here today, and I'm so glad to connect with you again.
Barry Shiffman:Same Lizzie, Great to see you.
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