Get to know guest conductor Susan Davenny Wyner
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Where were you born? Do you come from a musical family?
I was born in New Haven Connecticut to a musical family. My father was a concert pianist and educator (Director of Cleveland Institute of Music, member of Albeneri trio, head of Piano Department at Yale, etc.), and my mother was a richly cultured librarian who had been trained as a pianist. So the house was always full of musicians and music making.
Do you play multiple instruments? What was your first instrument? Which do you love most?
I studied piano as a child, had early training in Dalcroze eurythmics, harmony, analysis, theory, modern dance, working with Martha Graham and Jose Limon, became a violinist and took up the viola—had particular passion for the Bach solo sonatas and partitas, chamber music, string quartets, choral singing, and orchestral playing. I found my solo voice in college—the directness of going from imagination to sound with no external instrument transformed my own feelings about performing. The moment of discovery was a kind of Joycean “epiphany.” Put out on stage to perform Hugo Wolf songs to Goethe texts, I looked up into the spotlights, entered the spinning colors of the harmony and poetry, and lost all sense of myself. In that split second I felt what it was to be in that “moment in and out of time” when “music is heard so deeply
/That it is not heard at all, but you are the music/
While the music lasts,” as T.S. Eliot describes in his Four Quartets (The Dry Salvages).
I never thought to have a career in music. I just wanted to learn to spin the voice the way the great European singers did and find a sound that communicated the purity, passion, richness, anguish, of our humanity—that expressed the “Urtext”, the meaning beyond the words. The closer I got to it, the more a sense of mission I felt as the adventure took off. The irony is that as a child I had hated the singers I heard with their big vibratos and exaggerated gestures—my sister and I used to go into whoops of laughter, hold our ears, and even had to be removed from the audience a few times. In retrospect I realize how much my search for a pure expression of the “soul” in my singing voice was informed by all those magic instrumental colors heard in childhood. Now of course it is the orchestra, combination of sonorities, transformation of sounds, that are often most thrilling, bringing what I learned through the infinite variety of the singing voice—in a sense—full circle.
When did you start conducting? What was your inspiration?
I started conducting in response to a request from a singing group of women’s voices at Cornell University called “Nothing but Treble.” Normally they performed popular music but asked if I would lead them in a concert of “classical” music. Startled, I told them I would think about it overnight, but came back the next day so excited and with so many ideas about what we could do together that the project was on. My inspiration was the music. I wanted to share, to give back, to draw them inside its magic, variety and richness, and to help them experience the thrill of communicating all its layers in performance. We did pieces from the 1400’s up to music just written by a Cornell composer. The experience changed my life. At the time I was still privately desperate and in agony trying to retrain my singing voice from the hit and run accident. I adored teaching (had taken over the professorship of the teacher who first started me singing) and could lose my own pain in it. But the joy of making music in real time again, of becoming an instrument for others to engage in that incredibly rich play of mind that performing demands, touched on something so intense and deep that it caught me completely by surprise. Very quietly I opened the door to beginning all over again—to learning the art and craft of conducting so I could truly be of use to others and perhaps eventually become a voice for the music itself. The aspiration and inspiration were always towards building a musical culture of a particularly rich kind that can enable us as performers and listeners to feel and understand things outside our “normal” experience.
You are married to a composer and you are a conductor. Are there are special areas of creativity where you find the two of you intersect the most?
Living our lives together as musicians has been extraordinary on many levels. When I was a singer, Yehudi wrote much music for me, and we performed 30 or 40 different recital programs together for the CBC, Tully Hall, Carnegie, etc. (he is a marvelous pianist). Some of my first fleshed-out heroines lived in full opera productions he conducted—Boheme, Marriage of Figaro, Pelleas and Melisande—and we formed a contemporary music ensemble together. As performers, we often came from very different points of view about propulsion, process, structure—but working together, articulating and exploring, always took the music to richer and deeper places.
As a conductor I have “persuaded him” to write pieces for chorus and piano, full orchestra, string orchestra, have recorded and conducted all his big orchestra pieces, and have had him as a soloist— he played a smashing Gershwin Piano Concerto, and he and Andre Previn rattled off a pretty stunning Mozart E-flat Concerto on their 2 pianos. I treasure bringing his music to life, and any time he can be there when I conduct is resonant with meaning and value.
For Yehudi composing is an incredibly private experience—the process shakes the very core of his existence, and he does not like to be overheard or talk about what he is writing. So each time he is ready to show me a work, it is always a surprise and a gift; because of the music itself, of course, but also as an insight into the deepest imaginative process and creative beauty of the person you love and a glimpse through a window into where he has “been.” I have to laugh now, remembering how in the beginning, young as I was, I found it terribly disconcerting to feel him suddenly disappear in the middle of a conversation — his words continuing but the person behind them “gone.” Now we both do so much work in our heads that we know to ask before talking about a piece of music (“no, no I’m hearing something else”) or turning on the car radio.
Seeing through his eyes as a composer has made me much more aware of how approximate musical notation actually is and how delicate the “re-creative” performing process is. Very few composers I’ve worked with, even the most meticulous annotators like Elliott Carter, feel that the notation completely communicates their vision. As performers the way we voice harmonies, breathe phrases, evoke subtle stylistic nuances, can profoundly change a piece. A split second stretch can make all the difference in whether a phrase speaks with wit or a thud. Hearing how Yehudi inflects his own music when he performs—doing things that his notation can’t show but that are absolutely essential to its eloquence— is always both revelatory and living proof!
Do you consider music to be healing?
Yes. I have no doubt that music and music involvement can aid in healing, forging delicate new pathways in brains and bodies, in ways that LSO members understand far better than I. The challenge seems to be in quantifying the evidence that anecdotally and experientially seems so irrefutable to many of us who are musicians, who have been educators, and who have used music in therapeutic situations. Even in childhood I took part in outreach music therapy sessions; programs for stutterers, people with movement problems and stroke victims, that engaged them through singing, Dalcroze, music lessons, dancing, and of course listening to performances. There was no question that music helped enable a kind of coordinated concentration that links and integrates physical, emotional, expressive, mental processes; that connects parts to a whole.
I have also found that many musicians, who spend so much time training their bodies, have a kinesthetic sensitivity, an extraordinary awareness of tiniest impulses, flows of energy, breath, and states of mind. They often have developed such a sense of how the mind and its imagery can “play” the body, that they can direct processes of healing in their own bodies and help “read” others. I think of Hung-Kuan Chen, the piano virtuoso who suffered a “permanent” hand injury, singers who actually healed nodes on their own vocal chords by re-coordinating their vocal production, and numerous colleagues who have come back to performance readiness after being told by doctors that an injury made it hopeless. I also know well from my own accident, which, in addition to the physical damage it caused, changed my brain all around, what an amazing, fascinating, complicated, miraculously nuanced, instrument we are. Music and music making were certainly inextricably interwoven with my process of healing and retraining –guiding the impulses of imagination and thought in new ways.
As educators we all have witnessed music’s benefits in helping “heal” young people’s resistance to academic learning and concentration. Research is showing that music lights up an incredible number of areas in the brain. Early on I was part of a Ford Foundation Project run by Yale that brought me into the New Haven inner city schools 3 days a week—the regular classroom teachers were amazed by the complicated musical analyses, pieces created, rhythmic skills, memory games, songs the students were capable of from the very beginning. (An 80-voice choir I formed of 5th and 6th graders memorized the 4th act of Carmen children’s chorus in French and performed it with orchestra in 4 weeks.) The class teachers corroborated that on music days the class concentration improved so radically that reading and mathematical skills jumped geometrically, and they even incorporated some of the musical “games” into their teaching methods.
Is there anything special to you about LSO in particular?
Yes—I have long admired the accomplishments of the Longwood Symphony Orchestra and believe in its goals and purpose. Its committed music making, mission to serve, intriguing programming and dynamic leadership have made it not only a fountainhead for supporting medical projects, but I think the orchestra also serves as a cultural ambassador for the importance of the arts and humanities in our lives.
Now that I have worked with LSO’s members, I am moved by the sense of community, desire to serve and make a difference in people’s lives, the willingness to explore below the surface, and above all, the sense of love, respect, concentration, curiosity, humor, and intellectual brilliance!
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