Remember my New Year's Resolution to interview a conductor at least once a month? Well, I'm pleased to report that I haven't broken that resolution yet, as I did interview a conductor last month...it just took me a little bit of time to get around to transcribing and posting it.
Walter Chapin is the founder and director of the Oriana Consort, based in Cambridge, MA. They perform primarily music of the Renaissance and the 20th century, but their repertoire is fairly eclectic. I sat down with Walter on Friday, January 30 at the Cafe Algiers to talk about his life history and experiences as a conductor. Unfortunately, my recording device gave up the ghost about 15 minutes before the end of the interview, but luckily Walter had prepared some notes. So you will get the transcript of the interview, followed by his notes on what he had said during the lost fifteen minutes. If you'd like to listen to the audio, click here. I've decided to follow some good advice, and break the interview up into parts, and post the parts over several days. So the transcript and Walter's notes will follow in subsequent posts! (Thank you, Rachel, for that brilliant suggestion!)
I have a meta-question, which is: when you do these interviews in future, why not break them into several posts? You could get a week's worth of material out of this: post the beginning of the interview, then a "part 2," maybe even a "part 3," and the stuff that's at the end of this post (his notes on what you talked about; the answers to the Pivot questionnaire) could also each be their own posts.
ReplyDeleteI'm making this suggestion because posts like this one are hard for me to process; there's so much material here that I inevitably just skim. I can understand how editing the interviews down into briefer, tighter pieces would be more work than you want to do, but I think your readers might read these more closely if they were broken into installments.
Or, maybe it's just me! :-)
Dear Rachel:
ReplyDeleteThat's an awesome idea! And I hadn't even thought of it myself. Thanks - I will try to do that in the future.