Not Just Noise

Reflections on Victoria’s Classical Music Scene with Victoria Symphony’s CEO Matthew White

“Just because people said, ‘Hey, you sing well, you should keep doing this,’ isn’t enough of a reason to do it. You have to want to do it.”

Matthew White

Could you share the CliffsNotes version of your journey as a musician—and the ‘Aha!’ moment that led you down the path to becoming the CEO of Victoria Symphony?

Sure. I started as a singer when I was eight years old. At the time, I was singing in a men’s and boy’s choir, five days a week. It was a huge part of my life. And then I ended up going to university to study performance for a year.

Even at the beginning of my singing career, I always knew that I had other interests, one of which was the business side of music. I was interested in the ‘how’ of producing large-scale concerts, or concert seasons. I started producing my first concert seasons with my own little group at university, when I was about 21 years old.

At that time, too, I kind of realized that I had a deep enthusiasm for other people’s talent, and for supporting it. And I recognize now, that was strangely rare—there’s not a lot of people that really enjoy pushing other people’s talents. 

I have a true enthusiasm for beautiful things and a true enthusiasm for supporting people that have that same capacity.

And then my singing started to get more and more difficult. I mean, literally physically more difficult, as I started to have some vocal problems. As I moved into my 40’s and had two young children, I thought, ‘Why don’t I just do this whole admin thing full-time?’ So I moved into it very abruptly. I quit singing over a Christmas season one year, when I was still very popular—right in the middle of a [Handel’s] Messiah run. I had 14 Messiahs lined up, Toronto Symphony—large-scale gigs—and I just walked away. I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do this anymore.’

What happens when you push eject like that? I imagine there’s a feeling that the whole thing rests on you, and if you back out the whole production falls apart…

I think it depends a lot on the particular circumstance. But in my case, I remember not feeling guilty about that part because, you know, my sense of my own value as a singer at the time had gotten pretty low. So the idea that somehow somebody else was gonna have to sing. I thought, ‘Well, I’m doing everybody a favor.’ And it was Messiah, too. There are lots of people who know that piece, so I didn’t put anybody in any really compromising position. 

Christina Zabo, I remember, went in to fill in for me and she’s absolutely terrific. And I think the next gig it was Allison McCarty. These are all people who are really super. We’re all replaceable, let’s be honest. I never felt that sense of ‘Oh, I’m really going to be denying the world of a talent that needs to be heard.’ I mean that was part of the problem. 

Do you see yourself essentially as a curator now? Discerning the parts of an experience to bring to the public?

Well, a curator, but also a producer. I’ve always had that producer gene, which is not the same as an agent. You know, where an agent might go out and tell people about how great somebody else is, and then take their cut—a producer, in many cases, is more like an impresario, who goes out and takes a risk on that person. I never wanted to be an agent, for whatever reason I always felt that was kind of more parasitic, somehow.

In my case production was just something that always felt fun to me, you know, trying to create a successful event and ultimately, to just to help make something really beautiful happen. 

When I go to a concert that I’ve been a part of, when it really comes off in a way that is profoundly beautiful, I just feel grateful and full of joy, you know? I just feel like, I don’t produce hot dogs—not that there’s anything wrong with hot dogs—but I’m not producing ‘stuff’ that makes people unhealthy or makes the world a shittier place. I think I’m helping share love, a little bit.

And now in this ‘second life’ as a purveyor, a producer, a curator of beautiful experiences and cultivating talent—I’m curious, is there one thing that you wish you had learned years ago?

Oh, you know, youth is wasted on the young, right? So there’s a gazillion things I wish I I’d known back then. 

One of them is the really basic principle: Know thyself. I wish I had listened to my instincts earlier, and wasted less time feeling bad about myself. I think I already knew where I could have been the most helpful from day one. And it wouldn’t have meant that I had to not sing. Not at all. I totally could have sung at a really high level, for fun and on my own terms. But instead, I let myself roll into the next gig without being intentional about it. Then I felt terrible about it, like I was wasting my time and everybody else’s. And yet I kept doing it. 

Then I finally made a real decision: I thought, you know, I’m gonna listen to myself. My inner confidence was transformed. Now, I don’t need to apologize because I’m just being myself.

What’s one thing about the Victoria Symphony that most people don’t know—but they probably should?

I would say there’s two things. One of them is the versatility of the orchestra, because in comparison with a lot of orchestras I’ve heard, I feel like they’ve got the capacity to play in different styles, equally well. I find that larger symphony orchestras are less able to pivot. A good example of that is hearing them play Baroque music.

The other thing is that—I don’t know if it’s specific to what a beautiful place Victoria is—but I feel like we’ve been able to attract a disproportionately excellent group of musicians, for the budget and size of the city. The quality of this orchestra, for a place of this size, is really extraordinary. 

I noticed it the first time when I was a singer.  I came to work with the orchestra, and I thought, ‘I don’t know if it’s the climate, but how else did they attract so many great people?’ It really is a pretty crack orchestra, that would be appreciated as an excellent orchestra anywhere in the world. And yet we’re on this little island off the west coast of Canada. 

Does any aspect of this place, or this city’s geography influence, or somehow infiltrate, the choices that you make from a programming perspective? 

It’s always nice to be able to support local composers and local artists, and I think we do a lot of that. We use a lot of a lot of local artists who are all world-class, but also just happen to make their home here.

Let’s talk about the symphony—and classical music in general—in terms of younger generations. What role does the Victoria Symphony serve in the local community, in the present and also the future?

Well, it’s interesting that you say that because I have two young daughters, and I see how much they have to filter out—how much noise there is. And even though it’s getting harder and harder for people to hear what a symphony has to offer, it’s more and more important that they have access to it. 

I’m beginning to realize the act of just sitting in a room and listening—not just to the music, but to where the music takes you—is becoming so difficult. But it’s so…essential. A symphony is not just noise. A symphony is a way of organizing sounds to take somebody into themselves.

That’s something that I love about live classical music, or just live music in general—when you sit down and you allow yourself to go on a journey. It requires a kind of a focused attention, and mindfulness. And being in the moment is more important than ever these days. 

I mean, I find these f****** cell phones so distracting. Soul destroying, actually. I had an experience a couple weeks ago. I was listening to Allison McCarty singing Mahler, and it’s all in German and the music is dense, and it’s in a foreign language, and it requires a lot from an audience. I was sitting there with tears running down my face. And I thought, ‘Why am I finding this so moving?’ It wasn’t just because of the text, or that the singing was so beautiful. It was because I thought, ‘Is the time for this gone now? Are people even capable of hearing this anymore? Do they have the tools to listen to this music anymore?’ 

And that’s the one thing that worries me—that the act of sitting and listening is becoming too much to ask of people, mostly because we’re being trained by our devices.

Do you see opportunity for innovation in the business model of the symphony?

Obviously, I’m thinking about this all the time: our strategic plan, artistic development, and programming. We’ve said we want to enhance the audience’s experience through innovative programming and concert formats. We want to nurture professional artistic partnerships, exchanges, and cross-disciplinary collaborations that add value to the music. You know, these are all very exciting things.

Ideally we’re going to be able to do them. But it’s going to have to be done in a way that that doesn’t alienate people. The thing that worries me, is that if those people we’re trying to reach don’t have the tools, then it’s an almost-impossible task. It’s one of the reasons why I think education is so important.

I don’t know if you’ve been following what’s going on with the School District 61, but there’s a lot of movement towards pulling all the music funding. Which is super scary. I worry that we have these very progressive, high-minded goals, but is it even going to be possible to do stuff that’s truly interesting and innovative and still maintain an audience base? 

I think it is. I do. And I think the cross-disciplinary thing becomes more important as people know less and less about classical music. If you can find some other way to get people into the concert hall, like through an interest in let’s say, contemporary dance, you have to figure out a way of mixing contemporary dance with, let’s say, Baroque music. Now all of a sudden you’ve given them access to this amazing music through a path that they may not have ever considered.

How can we reach younger folks? Well, as you know, older people die and younger people grow up. So the way I think of it is: ‘How can I out-educate everybody?

What if our artists gave lessons? ‘Hey, I’m so and so, let me teach you how to play this scale, and why it matters.’ People always love to hear other people’s enthusiasm and love for something. 

I just posted something on Facebook the other day which got a lot of a lot of responses from people. I was looking at the Netherlands Bach Society’s most recent posting, and the music-making is just absolutely amazing. The quality of the instrument-playing and the singing is all super high, but–this was a beautifully produced video—and why I noticed it was, you could see how much joy there was on the face of each musician as they watched their colleagues being excellent. 

It’s the type of thing that that you can’t fake in somebody’s expression. It’s a little bit like when somebody is watching their child do something beautiful. It touches something deep inside you. It makes that person profoundly happy. I watched that video and thought, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of happy people up there,’ I don’t mean that in an insipid way. I mean, people are really hearing something that’s touching them at their core. 

If we can somehow communicate the joy that music brings—or how much stimulation music of this complexity brings—I think that could be potentially mind-blowing to people. It could be a bomb. A source of profound consolation to them.

This, as opposed to saying, ‘We have to change everything about it, make it sexier.’ That approach bothers me. We can do better than that. We can discover new ways to build keys that open those doors. So much of this music is wonderful, and if you can help people access it, that’s what we should be doing, you know? We are coming up with lots of ways to do that, but we’re doing it in a way that doesn’t diminish the core value of the music.