TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon. I‟m Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and on behalf of all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for coming. I‟m pleased to acknowledge the underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums, including lead sponsor Bank of America, along with Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, The Boston Foundation, and our media sponsors, The Boston Globe, WBUR, and NECN.
Tonight's Forum is inspired by the convergence of two major anniversaries being celebrated in this city. The first, led by this institution, is the 50th anniversary of the 1960 campaign and the presidency of John F. Kennedy. And the second is the 125th Anniversary of the Boston Pops. The Pops is one of our crown jewels and the envy of its neighboring cultural institutions for many reasons, not the least of which is unlike us they serve wine and finger foods to their devoted audiences. [Laughter]
To kick off their 125th season, the Pops commissioned a new orchestral work, “The Dream Lives On,” to honor not only John F. Kennedy but also Robert and Edward Kennedy. The work includes narration and excerpts of speeches from all three men which were read at last week's premier by Cherry Jones, Robert De Niro, Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman. This magnificent work is itself the result of the collaboration of two, superbly talented musicians that are here with us tonight.
Keith Lockhart became the 20th conductor of the Boston Pops in 1995, adding his own artistic vision to the Pops tradition established by his predecessors, John Williams and Arthur Fiedler. During his 15 year career with the Pops he has led over 1,200 concerts and worked with a wide variety of artists from every corner of the entertainment world. It is hard to imagine that it's been 15 years since we all were introduced to Mr. Lockhart and his multicolored high tops, featured on the cover of his first Pops album, “Running Wild.” Loved by audiences for his incomparable style and consummate music making, Mr. Lockhart has a unique ability to speak directly to his audience in words, music, and creative programming.
A few years ago, he began thinking of a tribute to John F. Kennedy that would feature Ted Kennedy as a narrator, and last fall he approached Vicky Kennedy about the expanded idea of a work celebrating all three brothers. Embracing the project, she suggested the Kennedys should not be involved in its creation. “If you think the US Senate is bad,” she quipped, “you don't want everyone in this family deciding which quotes should be included in the piece.” Instead, Mr. Lockhart turned to Peter Boyer to compose the orchestral work.
Mr. Boyer's past Grammy Award nominated compositions, including his widely acclaimed “Ellis Island: The Dream of America,” have been described by Keith Lockhart as music that, “exalts and elevates with a distinctly American feel.” Peter Boyer is the Composer-in-Residence with the Ft. Worth Symphony Orchestra and a professor at Claremont University, where he used a well-timed sabbatical this semester to compose “The Dream Lives On.” His music has been performed in venues throughout the US and abroad, including Carnegie Hall, and by some of the world's finest musicians, including the London Symphony Orchestra. No stranger to writing honorific compositions, as a teenager he wrote his first: a large scale requiem mass in memory of his grandmother.
Mr. Boyer was born and raised in Rhode Island and often traveled to Boston and Tanglewood to hear the Pops and the BSO, so you can only imagine his excitement to compose this historic piece and hear it performed under Mr. Lockhart's direction in Symphony Hall last week.
Our moderator this week is Christopher Lydon, know to all in Boston for his 30-year career in print, television and radio journalism. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute at Brown University and the host of Open Source. I should note that we are indebted to Mr. Lydon not only for moderating this evening's forums, but also for sending our way one of his former producers Amy Macdonald, who now so capably oversees our Kennedy Library Forum Series.
The title of the new composition is from the closing lines of Senator Edward M. Kennedy's speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Let me conclude this introduction with those words: “There is a new wave of change all around us, and if we set our compass true we will reach our destination, not merely victory for our party but renewal for our nation. And this November the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans committed to our cause. The work begins anew. The hope rises again and the dream lives on.”
Please join me in welcoming to the stage of the Kennedy Library, Keith Lockhart, Peter Boyer and Christopher Lydon. [Applause]
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Thank you, Tom, and thank you everybody for being here. I‟m delighted to be involved with both Peter Boyle and Keith Lockhart. Just for a moment: how many people have heard the program in Symphony Hall. [Pause] Maybe a third. Think of this as the post-game analysis. I want to track the goose bumps. The piece has a history. It has its own, internal magic, too. Will you start, Keith, by talking about the gleam of the idea and how it all happened, how you put it together?
KEITH LOCKHART: I‟d be glad to, Chris. It is kind of a -- how shall I say? -- post partum depression that sets in at this point because this is something that I had had in my mind's eye for a long time. And then, seemingly, with great rapidity we actually got to the point of the creation of it. And now the premier is over and done and we look forward, of course, to a long and successful life for this piece.
Well, this dates back to my first few years in Boston in the late 1990s. It had struck me at some point, there is a piece well known to concert goers and to American music lovers by Aaron Copeland that is called “Lincoln Portrait.” And it was written on a commission from Andre Kostelanetz in 1943, the darkest days of World War II. It was written to provide inspiration to Americans by reacquainting them with some of the most profound words of one of their most profound statesmen, Abraham Lincoln. Copeland did a magical job of taking these inspiring words and setting them in a way which breathed new life into them and made them jump off the page, I think, for new generations of Americans.
As the new head at that point of an iconic Boston institution, the Boston Pops, I thought, well, besides Abraham Lincoln, when we think of great American statesmen who is the next person whose words are seared into the public consciousness? John F. Kennedy, “The torch has been passed;” “A new frontier;” “Ask not what your country can do for you.” All of those things are just part of our mantra as Americans at this point, so I thought we really needed to do this project. Fast forward -- as so often happens with projects, including cleaning my room [laughter] -- it goes on the back burner and I get busy doing other things. Fast forward to about four years ago when I was having dinner -- a getting-acquainted-dinner -- with the newly elected governor of the Commonwealth, Deval Patrick. And for some reason the topic turned to this. I said to Deval, “You know, I‟d really like to do this. It's time to do it now.” And the reason I said that actually is because I was going to use him as part of a two-pronged attack to get Ted Kennedy to narrate the premiere. This was before Ted became ill. Deval looked at me and said, “You know, it really shouldn't just be about the words of JFK.” And I said, “Well, what do you mean? Aren't they enough?” And he said, “Yes. But if you look at the words of all three of these brothers, you see there is a remarkably consistent world view. There is an agenda mapped out in all three of these brothers‟ thoughts that has influenced American politics for a solid half century now.” And I was left to chew on those words and, again, procrastinated. And a couple of years later with Ted ill and obviously the end being some time finitely in the distance and the Pops‟ 125th celebration in my gun sights as well, it became obvious that this was the time to do it. And that is what brought the two of us together.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: It doesn't explain what brought you to Peter Boyle.
KEITH LOCKHART: Well, that is the scary part. Maybe Peter can tell you about that part. Well, I'll just set it up to say, the scary part of this is: Oh, that's a great idea but I‟m a performing musician. I‟m a re-creative artist as opposed to a creative artist. I like to take the notes that other people put on a page and make them live and breathe for an audience. I wasn't about to try and write this piece myself. So I was working with my director of programming, Dennis Albs, who joins us today. And the two of us were going over, who could possibly write this.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: I want to hear a short list.
KEITH LOCKHART: No. Because then that would make those people feel bad. [Laughter]. But the thing is we had connections and reach to go into every genre. We have good friends who are Broadway composers, Hollywood composers, strictly kind of serious symphonic sort of composers. You name it. So we have an array of more choices than if we had been in a more traditional, symphonic institution. I had never met Peter. I had never talked to Peter. I knew this one piece of Peter's that made quite a splash, what is it, ten, 12 years ago?
PETER BOYER: Eight years ago.
KEITH LOCKHART: Eight years ago, called “Ellis Island: The Dream of America.” And I had heard the piece because composers do things like send lots of conductors their CDs, hoping they will perform their music. And I did listen to it and I thought, “This is really compelling.” What he did in this piece -- it's a large scale work -- he took the words of actual immigrants, their own words, the letters they wrote home, from all walks of life, what their thought were, what their aspirations were in the new country, the hardships they endured to get to that point. And it was incredibly moving.
And he did what I think was the trickiest bit: setting narration to music. Especially when you have great narration -- and the words of the Kennedy brothers are exalted; they are the kind of words that should be carved in stone -- how do you write music that is worthy of these words, that stands up to them but doesn't just run them over, doesn't overwhelm them? Because if there's one thing that can overwhelm -- even the words of John F. Kennedy -- it's an orchestra welling up underneath it. So you need incredible sensitivity and I thought I sensed that in Ellis Island.
So Dennis and I talked. We said, “Let's give it a try.” And at that point Peter Boyer got a phone call in California.
PETER BOYER: Would you like to hear about it?
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Indeed. I would love to hear about it.
PETER BOYER: That is one of those phone calls that one can never anticipate, and one of those phone calls that is really a life changer and a very, very exciting phone call.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Did you think it was a prank, by the way? Sammy Cahn, the songwriter, said, “The only task: which comes first, the music or the words?” And he said, “Well, what comes first is the phone call.” [Laughter] “And Sinatra is in the studio today, the deadline thing.”
PETER BOYER: The deadline. The deadline is very, very important.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Right.
PETER BOYER: I have had a profound awareness of the Boston Pops for my whole life. And certainly since Keith Lockhart took over, which seems incredible to me when I realize it is now 15 years ago. But I certainly have been aware of Keith's work and all the wonderful projects that the Boston Pops do. So, yes, of course I had sent “Ellis Island” to the Boston Pops.
It was a very natural thing, along with sending it to lots of other orchestras who happily have performed this piece, never knowing the way that life works that this was a sort of a sideways
audition to be considered for the Kennedy piece that I didn't know about. But Keith -- actually Dennis Albs, who is here, called me at the end of October and we had a very pleasant and, yet, somewhat amorphous phone call in which it was very clear that he had done his homework and knew all about me and all about my commissions and all about my projects. And so something was up but I wasn't quite sure what it was. And at the end of that very pleasant phone call he said, “Well, can you take a call from Keith Lockhart tomorrow.” So I checked my schedule [Laughter] and I said, “Yes, as a matter of fact I can,” and spent the night wondering what this was going to be about.
And Keith called, and as I said I was very familiar with his work and was very surprised to hear him say he was very familiar with mine. And we had a talk about “Ellis Island.” Then, within the first couple of minutes of the phone call, Keith—I was taking notes, of course -- said, “Well, there is a very special project that I would like to talk to you about and it is about the Kennedy brothers.” And I wrote “Kennedy brothers,” and my jaw just dropped. And we began to talk about the fact that for several years I had very seriously been considering a work about JFK.
And, in fact, I had really given that a lot of thought. I can't remember exactly how far back but at least five years back I had been thinking about a piece about JFK, had bought JFK books and was quite interested in this topic. I felt that that would make a wonderful piece and wondered why there was no JFK piece in the repertoire as of yet, but the right circumstances had not presented themselves. So when he called I told him the story, and, obviously, we began to chat about this right away, and he mentioned wanting to do a piece about the three Kennedy brothers.
I was immediately just completely intrigued with this. Keith mentioned that he had personally known Senator Ted Kennedy and that Senator Kennedy had performed with the Boston Pops, which I guess I sort of knew in some back corner of my mind, and that he had had a personal connection. So there was a personal aspect to this project which made it even more exciting.
And so I thought, “Okay. For sure he is going to ask me to throw my hat in the ring with three or four other composers who are more established than I. And there is going to be some kind of competition and I‟m going to lose. But boy! Is it really nice to be considered for this.” And I asked him that question and he actually said, “No. We think that you are the right voice for the project. And if you can do it, we would like you to do it.” I thought about it for one nanosecond and said, “Yes. When do you need it?” [Laughter] And so that was how it began.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: He had the “Lincoln Portrait” in the back of his mind. How long did it take you to think of that model or others?
PETER BOYER: Well, Keith raised that topic in the early part of this conversation as a point of reference because what other point of reference is there? I mean one has to acknowledge “Lincoln Portrait” if one is going to do a piece about …
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: The “Eroica Symphony.” I‟m trying to think of others.
PETER BOYER: I‟m trying to think of others. One has to acknowledge that as the only work in the so-called standard repertoire, a piece that has a life and has a history and has a general knowledge of the general public and is continually performed that is in this vein, so one can't escape that but one would not want to simply do “JFK Portrait.”
KEITH LOCKHART: I have to say that's a scary thing in terms of … well, on both sides, actually, because you tell the composer, “Just write another one of those „Lincoln Portraits.‟ You are setting Aaron Copland up as, “Well, you can knock another one of those off.” But the other thing is you don't want to prejudice or set the person into trying to be imitative. But there needs to be a model there. You need to be able to say, “Like …
I remember once commissioning a piece from Dan Welcher, because we had grown tired of always starting concerts with Candide Overture, the delightful, frothy Bernstein. I said, “I need you to write a piece like “Candide Overture.”
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Who was this?
KEITH LOCKHART: An American composer named Dan Welcher. There was dead silence on the other end and he said, “You want me to write another “Candide Overture?” I said, “No. I want you to write a short, virtuosic, frothy piece that is lots of fun and that people will immediately fall in love with. But don't make it sound anything like „Candide Overture.‟” [Laughter]
PETER BOYER: So this was something that we discussed initially and then there was another very important person in this process, which is Lynn Ahrens who created the text for the piece. And maybe Keith can talk a little bit about his thought process of inviting Lynn. So there was an aspect there of collaboration from a text point of view that preceded the composition which is important. As far as I know, Copeland actually wrote the little connective tissue for “Lincoln Portrait” himself. And one might argue as grand as that piece is, that is perhaps the weak link of the piece. I mean, “And this is what he said; and this is what he said ….” Yet it still works. It is quite a wonderful piece. But that is, perhaps, not the most flowing of all possible connective texts. So Lynn was brought into this process and maybe Keith wants to say something about that.
KEITH LOCKHART: Lynn Ahrens is the Tony Award winning librettist, lyricist of the musical Ragtime as well as Seussical and other things. But, of course, when I think of Ragtime I think more an Americana vein that was appropriate for this. Lynn has a long relationship with the Boston Pops. She did, with her writing partner, Stephen Flaherty, a piece for us called, “With Voices Raised,” which was for our patriotic concerts about a decade ago.
We wanted the Kennedys to speak in their own words. We want the words of Jack, Bobbie, and Ted to be the centerpiece of people's attention. Well, it is not just about pulling out your 25 favorite quotes and stacking them and writing music underneath it. You need someone who does words for a living to figure out flow, that there was a theatrical nature. The piece has to have a journey from someplace to high points down into valleys and some exultant peak at the end. And to have a professional doing that, I think, made all of us feel more comfortable.
On top of that she wrote some very lovely, book ending material, introductory and valedictory material at the end, that really connects the piece very beautifully, I think, and made it not just a listing of quotes but gave some explanation to the audience of the reason the piece exists.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: I‟m simply wondering, why had there been no JFK piece in the repertoire? But also, where is that piece, the Franklin Roosevelt piece in the repertoire? Or the Teddy Roosevelt or the George Washington piece for that matter?
PETER BOYER: I have other projects to do. [Laughter]
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Keep listing. Take this down. Why is this not a more natural kinship of words and music?
PETER BOYER: I‟m going to defer to Keith on that question.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: And I want a follow up question, too.
KEITH LOCKHART: It's a very good question. I'll get right on it. I think that, to tell you the truth, there is more than one JFK piece in existence. None of them have particularly caught on in any significant way. But there had been more than one Kennedy commissioned. I can think of at least two. Neither of them was particularly appropriate for our purpose at the Pops. We certainly wanted this to be a serious and significant piece. But we wanted it to be a piece that audiences are immediately taken by, that was accessible. Not to make it sound too middle of the road, but that is what we do. We want pieces that audiences take away a strong first impression from. We did not want a piece that was rigorously, seriously academic in nature. We wanted a piece that people would fall in love with. So there was nothing currently out there, and certainly nothing had taken the voice of all three brothers that I had heard of.
In terms of why there are not these other pieces, you will have to ask the composers who didn't write those pieces, I suppose. When you think about FDR, I mean, “There's nothing to fear but fear itself” and “A day that will live in infamy.” But I think certainly nobody has the body of work, especially when you think how short a time Jack Kennedy was in the national consciousness, and the number of things that he managed to say that really defined what America was about, both in terms of its strengths and its challenges at that point in time.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: I wish, Peter, that you could take us into the sort of compositional process of translating all that imagery, all those words into something entirely different.
PETER BOYER: Sure. It was a tremendous challenge, as you can imagine, and the timeline made it even more challenging. It was just the nature of this particular project. As a professional composer, whatever that is, that is the life that I embrace. And, in fact, going back to your Sammy Cahn joke, there really is something about a deadline that focuses a mind like nothing else. You have to get it done and, in this case, I was able to start the work in mid-January, basically, and I had to deliver the work complete and total by the end of April. So that is not a lot of time at all to do a 15-minute piece that has to hit a variety of marks and that has to work as a piece.
Also, we haven't even mentioned the fact that there is a chorus, although it is a wordless chorus, so it is kind of a texture. So one has in this case four narrators -- three for each of John and Robert and Ted Kennedy and a female narrator to read Lynn Ahren's words -- a wonderful full symphony orchestra and a chorus. That's a lot of notes to put on a page. That is a lot of voices.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Were you thinking beings? Were you thinking dramatic voices of the three men? Were you thinking of instrumentation? I mean what is the musical sound of JFK and how is it different from Ted.
PETER BOYER: It's a very, very good question and I will do my best to answer that. For me the process of any piece, of any composition, involves certain stages. And I'll just very briefly talk about that as maybe you don't interact with composers who write for orchestras every day. But essentially I have kind of a three step process. And maybe one could even argue there is a fourth step at the end.
The first step is to write themes. Obviously, you can hear from the kind of description that Keith has given us of the piece that was being spoken about in the abstract, there has to be something for an audience to grab onto, to connect with quickly. And really, there is only one opportunity to do that, particularly if one is competing, if you will, with these incredible words that are going to grab the audience in and of themselves. The music has to be something that will resonate and have a strong personality quickly. So I spent, in this case, close to two weeks just writing themes and sitting at the piano and with the words in front of me. By the time I started, the text had been pretty much solidified. It was clear certainly what most of the quotes were going to be. And I even had time to think about the quotes before Lynn Ahrens was brought onboard. So there were a lot of the words in my mind.
But how does one evoke this? Certainly one word that kept recurring again and again in my mind was nobility. There is a great deal of nobility in these words. And it is nobility of a particularly American political, rhetorical sort, and yet it has, I think, a wider connotation. It is not purely American but there is something American about it. So I attempted to compose themes that would work for this. And I actually composed quite a few themes and notated these down either by hand or played them on a keyboard, which lets the notes appear on a computer and one can manipulate them.
I wrote a number of themes and settled essentially upon three themes for the piece. We might then conclude there must be a JFK theme and a Robert Kennedy theme and a Ted Kennedy theme. And, actually, that is not true. I thought about it but that would have proven to be too simplistic in a way. “Here comes the Ted theme.” I don't think it would have worked so well. But these three themes that I did compose, almost everything in the piece is based on them.
There is one additional theme that is given to Ted in the last quote in his main section where he talks about sailing. It was the speech that he gave when he received his honorary doctorate from Harvard in the fall of 2008. It is a kind of valedictory speech. It has a wistful quality to it, and for that I wrote an additional theme that doesn't appear until the end. But all the rest is based on three quite simple themes, one of which is played initially by a solo trumpet in a register that is noble, especially the way that the principal trumpet of the Boston Pops played it, very noble.
But that is just the first step: to have these themes that are going to, hopefully, work. What I did was -- and I have to say I can thank the JFK Library for this -- is the archival recordings, as many of you may know, of the Kennedy brothers‟ voices is accessible through the wonderful website of the JFK website. I spent quite a bit of time on that website and I downloaded various speeches. And having the script in hand that Lynn and I had agreed upon, I then was able to edit out corresponding fragments of those speeches that match the script. So what I could actually do was have JFK on my desktop and play his 30-second bits that I was going to set the music to again and again and again and again and to get the cadence and to get that great voice, that wonderful voice, and the way that that flowed, and literally to sit at the keyboard and hear him say, “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” To hear him say, my personal favorite actually, “We choose to go to the moon.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard.” I had to have that quote in the piece. It was the one place where I really have adrenalin-filled music, because one can only have so much nobility. I think if you have 15 minutes of nobility, it could be …
KEITH LOCKHART: --A lot of nobility [laughter].
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: How do you do a Boston accent with an orchestra? [Laughter]
PETER BOYER: You just have the Boston Pops play it. [Laughter] That's all. That's how it comes out. Is this too long an answer?
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: No. I love it. Is it too long? No.
PETER BOYER: So once I have themes, I then compose what is called a short score.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Do you want to hum a few bars of one of those themes?
PETER BOYER: Sure. I have a piano. My wife always kids me about the way I do a face when I do themes. She is not here so she won't have to worry about it. So the main theme is [hums], and that repeats but the harmony under it changes [hums]. [Applause] It sounds a lot better when the principal trumpet of the Boston Pops plays it with all those strings. It sounds really much better.
So that to me had a certain nobility. It is a very simple theme and simple themes can be the hardest to write. It can be actually quite easy to write something that is fairly abstract, but to write something that they will even remember -- certainly I think you remember it during the piece -- is not the easiest thing, especially to write themes that nobody else wrote before because I wrote that often. I write something. “Oh, that is really good.” [Laughter] “Oh, I didn't write that.” [Laughter] “That's why it's good. That is somebody else's.” Those are the basic building blocks of the composition.
With these themes -- of which that is one -- then I write what's called a short score. And for me, this is the real creative process. The short score was actually, in this case, not very short. It was 13 lines of music. Thirteen lines of music represent what the final product will be later, 35 lines of music. So in the 35 lines of music -- the last step -- you have every little note for every instrument, every note, every articulation of a dynamic. But that has to come at the end because it's a whole different process. It is very, very time consuming.
What I am doing in the short score is I‟m typing in the words of the Kennedy brothers and I plop them on that page and there they are with blank staves. Very scary, just the words of JFK. And then I‟m trying to put these themes with the words, and as I say, playing the mp3, not just of JFK but of Robert Kennedy and of Ted Kennedy, listening to their voices and then actually playing and having the music crafted around these individual speeches.
There are about a dozen quotes in the piece, and each of the quotes is roughly 30 seconds long so there is a certain kind of structure there. But the real danger was to have 12 episodes that had nothing to do with each other. That is the real danger. Then you don't really have a piece, you have a series of commercials or something. You don't really have something that flows. So how could I vary this from one quote to another?
Just to give you one example, that main theme is played by the solo trumpet so we can hear it without any words, first. Then, the narrator simply says, “John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” and begins to read the first quote from the inaugural. At that point the strings take up that theme with a counterpoint line that I wrote, and the brass is doing harmony. As the line is being read, “Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike,” etcetera, the strings are playing this theme.
Then, when he finishes this paragraph, there is a musical structure. We modulate or go to another key. We bring in the chorus, who has been eagerly awaiting their chance to sing. Then we do the second part of the inaugural quote. It is a way to make a musical structure that matches the verbal structure. But you have to have some kind of through line that takes you through the piece. That was the hardest part -- to try to go from point A to point B 15 minutes later and have it be one piece.
When we got to Robert Kennedy's words, the particular speech that he delivered extemporaneously on the death of Martin Luther King -- maybe the most heartbreaking and poignant words in the whole piece -- and because they are such beautiful words, I really didn't want to get in the way. I almost wanted to stop the music but I couldn't do that. So I took that same theme and gave it to a French horn in its high register and had a very gentle accompaniment with muted strings and harp. So it is the same theme but it is stretched out and it is in a different key and it is a totally different instrumentation. It is thinner, and I think the audience won't even notice, “Oh, hey! That's the same theme,” but they maybe feel something that connects it.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Are you writing this on a synthesizer or on a computer program, or are you doing it all with pencil and pen or what?
PETER BOYER: In my studio I have two workstations, so to speak. I have the good old acoustic piano, which is great actually to create stuff. It feels better to sit at a real piano to create stuff. But it's been a long time since I actually wrote things out by hand, only because it is so much faster and more efficient to actually put it on the computer. So then I have what's called a midi-keyboard that lets me play the same stuff. It sounds remarkably like a piano and actually there is a software instrument that is playing the piano sound from the computer. So I‟m only hitting the keys but the sound is coming out of the computer.
Then I use a notation program, in this case called Finale, to actually notate. So when I go, [sounds out theme] it shows up. And then if I want to put it in another key I can do that. If I want to stretch it out, I can do that.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: When does Uncle Keith and the Commissioner get to hear the short score or fragments? At what point do you ask, “Am I in the ballpark?”
PETER BOYER: That's a very good question. Do you want to say something about that?
KEITH LOCKHART: Sure. The answer is the hardest part of having thrown this out there, having talked to Peter over the phone and went down and had breakfast with Lynn Ahrens and sprung the idea on her, got the two of them talking … They actually never met during the composition of the work. This was a long distance relationship from New York to LA for this entire time.
There are people who make commissions and are very interventionist, who say, “You got some themes? Send me some themes.” I think that the best thing that you can do is make decisions and trust them and let them play themselves out. The creative process is not about them writing what is in your mind's eye or your mind's ear. It's about giving them the freedom to succeed in the project in their own voice, so I tried very hard not to say anything.
I got involved a little bit because there were a couple of questions about the choice of quotes. There are so many great quotes. And one of the wonderful things for all of us, I think, was the process of discovery. Everybody knows the big five quotes pretty much. But when we started reading through, we had to leave so many on the cutting room floor, which were incredibly profound, but too specific to the argument that was being engaged in not to have a kind of universality to work in a piece like this, or just not enough space. We didn't want to write a 15- minute piece in which the people never stopped speaking. Then there is no point in writing a piece. You need to hear music answer, reflect, bookend, interlude, all of those things need to be in there.
But outside of that I think I was pretty good at not being a nudge and just waiting. It was like waiting for the love letter. I would keep running to the mailbox to see if the short score had been sent. When the short score was sent, I took it home and did what conductors usually do, which is sit at my desk and read it like I was reading through a new play somebody has sent. And I called Dennis up and I said, “I think this is going to be really good.” And that was a great feeling of relief at that point.
I will say -- rather than making Peter toot his own horn on this -- is that one of the things that is the biggest trap you can come into any time you write a piece that is based on extra musical resources -- whether it is a myth or a poem or a story, like one of the Strauss tone poems, for instance, or in this case the words of three extraordinary statesmen -- you run the risk of the piece becoming highly episodic, of setting it one quote at a time and realizing you have a totally disjointed piece from a compositional point of view. What I think the most successful thing about this besides the quality of nobility and exaltation, which I think he captured, is I think the piece does have internal coherence. It is an organic unit. And I thank you, and that is why I‟m not a composer because I don't have to deal with those things. [Laughter]
PETER BOYER: I will tell you what the hardest part was in composing this whole piece. And it goes right to what Keith was saying. The hardest part was the transitions. Because I knew that I had these structures that had to be dealt with. And in a way it is very helpful because it defines the box in which you have to write. These words are going to be said and they are going to take roughly 30 seconds. So the music has to start here and it has to end here. It is not really going to end; it is going to go on, but it has to put a period at the end of the paragraph in a way that is coherent with the single quote.
And as Keith said, the danger is being very episodic: that we do quote number one and we end. And then we turn the page and we do quote number two and we end, and we turn the page. I definitely didn't want to do that. The hardest part was to write the transitions. I wrote the piece completely out of order. I wrote the ending first because I knew we had agreed upon the words that you heard Tom Putnam read. Actually, some of those were edited out. It was even shorter than that but, “The work begins anew. The hope rises again and the dream lives on.”
And the chunk of that that we began with was -- I love this line -- “Yes, we are all Americans. This is what we do.” I just hear the French horns, you know? So that quote was going to be the end. And having written the theme, the main theme of the piece, and having these other themes that I thought would work, I then went to the end and I wrote the last minute and ten seconds, covering that whole quote. And to this very large climax -- which I guess we will hear when we play this excerpt -- just from the ending. I knew that that was the destination point. So then at that point I started working on individual quotes. I went back and I did JFK, but not the prologue. The prologue came later. So it was all completely out of order, and I had a little chart for myself because there was not a lot of time. And so here we are, January 22nd or whatever, and you have to deliver the short score basically by April 16th. And so between now and then you must write 15 minutes of music that you like and that is good, and if it is not good it has to go out.
So I just kept a little chart, and every day at the end of the day I would update the little chart.
The chart said, “Minute and a half done; thirteen and a half to go.” [Laughter] And as we get closer, the numbers were not moving as fast as I really wanted to, “Seven minutes done; eight to go; four weeks.” But, ultimately, it finally started to pick up toward the end, but it was writing these transitions from one quote to another.
The very hardest part, which was the last part, was to get out of Robert Kennedy's section and into Ted Kennedy's section. I had these four, ugly, blank bars staring at me and I could not figure out how to get from there to there, different keys and different instrumentation. I finally figured it out. It was very simple and I filled it in and I played it and I said, “This is going to work.” And that little bit was the last bit. The other stuff had all been done. Does that make sense?
KEITH LOCKHART: Giant Lego project.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: I would love, and I hope you would, to see and hear an edited fragment of the piece. And then we will come back and open it up to everybody's questions. There are two microphones here. But we will all have a little more vivid sense of exactly what it is we are talking about.
KEITH LOCKHART: Three minutes of it.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Cue the tape, please. [VIDEOTAPE]
KEITH LOCKHART: The Reader’s Digest version.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: The Reader’s Digest version. But it captures a great deal of the power, and also this sort of mystery to me of the combination of the music and the words. I mean Aaron Copeland didn't have video behind the orchestra either. How were you plotting that, Peter?
PETER BOYER: One other thing that Aaron Copeland didn't have, he didn't have Abraham Lincoln's relatives in the audience. [Laughter] The pressure was a bit higher.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Not close relatives, anyway.
PETER BOYER: So should I answer that?
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Sure.
PETER BOYER: There are a couple of issues here and that is really a big one. And I will also say that that is a very well edited excerpt. It has much more power, of course, if one hears the whole thing from start to finish, to hear how things flow, because there we have some awkward musical moments as we cut from one thing to another and the keys don't quite mesh. But that is dealt with in live performance.
But there are a couple of issues: one is speed and tempo, the tempo at which words need to be read, the tempo at which an actor reads them and then the tempo at which the conductor leads the orchestra. Those things cannot be precisely notated on the page, unless one is actually writing musical notation for the words, which clearly we are not going to do, write [haltingly spoken] “Ask not what your country can do for you.” I mean that would be terrible.
How long does it take an actor to say these words? And then, how long does it take the orchestra to play these notes? And so a great deal of it is finding just the right pacing and tempo and basically laying out the words on a score over them, so that if Keith needs to make a small adjustment, if he needs to go a little faster or slow down a little bit, he knows what the points of coincidence are. But there has to be a flow between those. And then the other thing is, just more broadly speaking, that when we hear words, when we converse with each other or we listen to these great words, we are processing them intellectually. We hear them and we know it's language, spoken language, and we process them that way.
But when we hear music we don‟t. We process it in a different way. I think we process it emotionally. We process it sort of viscerally. And if one can combine those two, intellectual and emotional, and have them be simultaneous, I think you can have something is greater than the sum of its parts—at least that is the hope.
KEITH LOCKHART: We should talk a little bit about the inclusion of video. We asked Peter to design the piece in a way that would be performable in numerous different situations. It is great that we have this piece. We want to give this piece to the world. We want this piece to be performed all over the country in a few years. We want first dibs at it, of course. So the piece is either designed to be performed by one narrator taking all of those roles, or four narrators as we did at the premiere. The chorus is optional. I think it is a very important timbre element and I would be loathe to do it without it, but we actually already have. We will see how it goes that way, because we have an upcoming performance without a chorus.
The video was something that we thought about and added after the fact. The other thing that Aaron Copeland did not have was good video of Abraham Lincoln. So we have this wonderful body, much of which is contained here and much of which were grateful and owe the Kennedy Library for access to. The idea was -- and I always feel a little bit mixed about these things because the video imagery is so powerful because all of us have the pictures of those three brothers.
A lot of us have seen, I mean, the touch football seen on the compound. Those images are so strong that I don't want people to stop listening to either the music or the text in favor of looking at the pretty pictures. And I‟m still not sure at the end of the day how I feel about that. This is the first time I have seen it. I performed it five times but, believe me, the last thing you do is sit around and pay attention to … you are paying attention to making the thing happen, not listening the same way an audience member would or viewing the videos the same way. So it is interesting. I‟m looking forward to seeing the rest of it.
I think it is a gorgeous video, actually. It was put together really wonderfully, really sensitively by Susie Dangel, who does a lot of work for us and we have known for years. Whether the video is a hindrance to absorbing the piece or an aid to absorbing the piece …
PETER BOYER: I will say one thing and then be happy to do these questions. In a way it is a double-edged sword as Keith said. A video has a specificity that you can't get away from. And music has the ability to be interpreted in different ways. So, clearly, I think listeners could hear the music and hear the words and fill their own minds with imagery, both of what they know and of what they are thinking at the moment. And we are a very visually oriented society and video can dominate.
On the other hand, it added wonderfully. I only got to see the video just a few days before the performance itself. And in the video we had a great luxury because Susan Dangel was cutting the video to my score rather then me having to hit marks of an edited video. It was actually like making a film score in reverse, where the score comes first. So that is a wonderful luxury and a few of these things actually surprised me, and then you very quickly get used to them.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: If it can work without a chorus, it can surely work without a video. The problem—having worked in television and decided that most of the pictures you see on television are distraction from what you are saying -- I‟d love to see it without the video, Kennedy imagery being so incredibly powerful onto itself.
KEITH LOCKHART: You will have that opportunity. I should tell you if some of you did not have the pleasure of being in Symphony Hall last week, there will certainly be more performances of this in the immediate near future. July 18th we are doing the piece at Tanglewood with Alec Baldwin doing the entire narration. And on August 1st we are doing the piece in Hyannis in our annual concert on the green there, a concert that, incidentally, the Kennedy family tends to attend every year, and that concert is in the middle of the day outside so we will not have video, and it has a very small stage so we will not have chorus. So you will have an opportunity to see, if you want to check that out, Chris.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Shall we address these questions?
KEITH LOCKHART: Please. Indeed.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: It is the people's turn. And there is another microphone over here. Don't be shy. Step up here. Stump the band leader, as they say. [Laughter]
QUESTION: I‟m Jack Simmons. My wife and I had the memorable pleasure of hearing you on Tuesday night, the first performance in Symphony Hall. Thank you.
KEITH LOCKHART: Thank you for being there.
QUESTION: I was curious about why we haven't heard anything about Ted Sorenson, who was an organic part of most of those wonderful speeches that Jack made.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Good question. Wonderful question. Over to you, Peter. [Laughter]
PETER BOYER: Well, certainly in the research that I did -- and I make no claims whatsoever to being a Kennedy scholar; I‟m a composer who did research for a project. But, obviously, the role that he played was a very significant one. And, actually, I have to say that I did read the book, Ask Not, as part of a number of books that I read for this project and learned much more about all of the details surrounding the creation than I had ever known. It's a very fascinating book by Thurston Clarke. I also read Thurston Clarke's book, The Last Campaign, about Robert Kennedy's campaign, and I learned a great deal more about that than I ever knew. So that's a very hard question. Obviously, his role is one that is known, and it is part of the fabric of the history that goes with these words. But my job as I saw it was to set the words that we had agreed upon and the question of authorship was not really directly relevant to how the piece proceeded.
KEITH LOCKHART: Ted Sorensen's contribution was huge, but it was huge, if memory serves me correctly, for one of the three brothers, whose speeches inhabit this. And, of course, every great politician has a great speechwriter behind them.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Has Ted Sorensen seen the piece?
PETER BOYER: No. But I would like, with some trepidation, for him to hear the piece. I think he would be the toughest critic of all, I suppose.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: I was thinking also of Dick Goodwin, who is alive and well in our neighbor. Was he there Tuesday night? I don't think?
KEITH LOCKHART: I don't know.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: But have you heard from Dick Goodwin on the subject do we know?
PETER BOYER: I don't know.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Next question, please.
QUESTION: My name is Ray Mack and I live in West Bridgewater. The question that I was going to ask has largely been answered, but I didn't want to just go sit down without saying a few things. One thing is I‟m absolutely thrilled to hear Christopher Lydon's voice. And I‟m sure that everybody else has the same feelings. [Applause]
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Oh, thank you.
QUESTION: I really intended to go to that performance in Symphony Hall, and I could not make it. Is that video available now? And the last question is is Cherry Jones doing to be doing any more performances about this piece during the summer and in the fall?
KEITH LOCKHART: Those questions I can't answer. For most of last week we were both filming and audio recording in the Hall for several future uses of these that we haven't quite sorted out yet. What I can tell you definitely is that the piece will be seen in its entirety on Channel 5, WCVB on Memorial Day, May 31st at 7:30 p.m. in the space normally occupied by the news magazine Chronicle, with which I‟m sure a number of you is familiar. We are hoping that there will be further opportunities for people to see the video product of this. We are also hoping to release in the near future an audio CD that has the complete work on it.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Can't you see a bit of it on the BSO website right now?
KEITH LOCKHART: No more than you just saw, the three-minute excerpt.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Please.
QUESTION: Peter, I was wondering if you could touch a little bit on the process of how you got from the theme that is just in the piano. How do you develop that on your own before you are able to sit in front of an orchestra? Do you use software?
PETER BOYER: Sure. That is a very good question. Actually, it's a good question because it let's me finish my long, unfinished answer from before. So there is one final step in the process, which is to go from the so-called short score to the full score. Let me just say a few words about that. It is an interesting process.
In this short score what one has is a very complete depiction of what is going to happen in the piece. Actually, for this piece I did the most detailed short score I had ever done. And one of the reasons for that was that the timeline was so short I thought I might need to bring in some help to flush out the final orchestration. And just in case that happened, I wanted to make it super detailed so that all the decisions were mine.
As it turned out, I was just too proud and I did it all myself and just stayed up for about two weeks straight. So in the short score I had two lines of music that say „woodwinds.‟ And on those two lines, everything that is in the woodwinds is there. Maybe it doesn't exactly dictate what the voicing is between flutes and oboes and clarinets and bassoons, but it is clear enough. That's woodwinds. And I have two lines for „brass.‟ And I have just two lines for „percussion,‟ which is not enough but that is what fit in the short score. And then I have two lines for „chorus‟ and then I have a line for „narrator‟ and on the narrator line is all the text and then three lines for „strings.‟
Let's say the composition process really got underway at the end of January, and I I had set the goal for myself of April 1st and I finished it around April 9th or April 10th. My contract said I would have the parts for the whole orchestra, which is a stack of parts this high, in Boston by May 1st. And with great pride I say that I got them to Boston on April 29th, which is actually …
KEITH LOCKHART: I don't remember the terms of the contract. Did you get a bonus for that? [Laughter]
PETER BOYER: I was still negotiating.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Did you do all the orchestration yourself?
PETER BOYER: I did. And so I had two weeks. In those two weeks I orchestrated the piece and did the demo for the piece. And I think this goes to somewhat of your question. Let me just say something about the full score. So the full score to the piece is about this big, and the print is really small and Keith Lockhart can see with only some difficulty. But you have to actually make the paper like this for it to be any bigger, because there are so many lines of music, 35 lines of music.
For example, flute one and two are together and flute three, etcetera, as we go all the way through the instruments of the orchestra. And every note that every single member of the orchestra plays and every single note that the chorus sings has to be written out. There are composers who rely upon what are called orchestrators to flush out this process because it is extremely time consuming to do this. And, in fact, I very frequently am an orchestrator for other composers on Hollywood movies, having not yet gotten the opportunity to score those movies myself, which we hope is coming.
KEITH LOCKHART: He recently did the movie Up, if some of you saw that. [Applause]
PETER BOYER: I didn't write it but I did orchestrate some chunks of that score, a lot of the action themes towards the end. So I‟m very familiar with the process of orchestrating for other composers and taking a short score and having to flush it out. But as a so-called classical composer, whatever that is, part of the job description is that one actually does all of the orchestration oneself. I really enjoy that process and it is really just fine work. It is very, very fine work.
But in making those decisions, you have to have total control over what the final sound product sounds like. For this piece, we needed a demo, that is short for demonstration recording, that would serve two very important purposes. One was to let the narrators hear the piece with the text and the music before they came to Boston, which was right before the premiere. And the other was to have the demo for Susie Dangel to actually cut the video to. That is a whole other process.
I have a very elaborate system which are orchestral sample libraries, which are little recordings of orchestras really playing. So here is a first violin section playing a C at this dynamic, and here is playing a C at this dynamic, and here it is playing a C at this dynamic. So when you actually play on the keyboard, the software calls this up in a remarkably easy way. So I actually demo the entire piece and actually make it sound reasonably like — it still doesn't sound as great as the Boston Pops in Symphony Hall. Nothing does. But it sounds pretty good.
And you've got chorus samples. So you've got real singers singing “Ah” and “Ou” and “Um.” All of those can be called up. And then I had to take narrations so they could hear it. So I took those same little recordings of JFK and Robert Kennedy and Ted Kennedy and I put them on my music. So I have JFK himself on my demo. And then the pieces that we didn't have recordings -- although it was Lynn's words -- then I actually read the words myself. And I mixed all this in my studio and lived with that as a demo product eight days before the premiere.
The middle of April is a sort of total blur. I know I had some food and I slept once in a while but it was just a total blur. But that is what it takes to sort of get it done. I‟m sorry. It was a long answer. [Applause]
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Totally fascinating. Totally fascinating. [Applause]
QUESTION: You kind of took steps to my question just then. I was just going to ask if you had considered using the actual voices, the recorded voices of the Kennedys. And you talked about putting the demo. Any chance of it getting to a live performance or a studio performance? And what was your thinking behind that?
PETER BOYER: Well, I'll let Keith answer that. It's an interesting question, actually.
KEITH LOCKHART: It is an interesting question. And it is one that came up in the process and the discussion. I have to say, listening to the demo it is kind of neat to hear these voices that are instantly familiar. You know, the way that JFK delivers, “Ask not what your country can do for you,” it couldn't be anybody else doing it, even that guy who made his living imitating the Kennedys.
One of the things that is different about this piece from “Lincoln Portrait” is that Lincoln had been dead for almost 80 years when “Lincoln Portrait” was composed. The people whose lives his words directly touched were by and large long gone. In the case of the Kennedys, this is still a little bit fresh. Both the greatness and the wounds are still fresh. I think that one of the opportunities for a piece like this is that it takes these words and makes them universal. It takes them out of hearing them associated with the person who said them and more that they become words for all time, even for those people 50 years from now who will have no idea what JFK sounded like except by playing back archival material. I think it is better to take these words, hand them to another voice.
Somebody actually asked the question, “Would you like the narrators to imitate the brothers?”, and we said, “No. No. This is not a Saturday Night Live impression. The idea of this is that these words are creating a great composition. These words will outlast the people who actually spoke them. These words will become something that is greater than the vessels who carried them. So I think it is important to have that point at which you say, “It is somebody else's turn to speak these words.” That having been said, it was really wonderful to see a bunch of A-list actors trembling, essentially, at the prospect of reading these words. These words have such magic and such power to them and such meaning to Americans who have been alive over the last half century or so that when you scare Morgan Freeman, a man who has played God more than once, you know they are powerful words. [Laughter]
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Do we know what it was that drove Robert De Niro to the brink of big, salty tears when he talked about it?
KEITH LOCKHART: Do you remember the line? I'll bet you do somehow.
PETER BOYER: At this press conference, some of which was televised, I described the process of visiting Arlington National Cemetery, and I became very emotional at that moment. And if I talk about it now, I will again, so I won‟t. I got very misty and teary eyed, and I think that set the tone. And then the next question that was asked from a journalist to Robert De Niro was about his personal connection to the Kennedy family. And he began to speak about it and he really couldn't speak. He got very emotional and sort of gestured to me, and I think now for the rest of my life I have the dubious distinction of having cried with Robert De Niro at a press conference. [Laughter]
KEITH LOCKHART: Or of having made Robert De Niro cry.
PETER BOYER: That's what made the headlines, right?
KEITH LOCKHART: The original tough guy. And I have to say, at the Pops we work with famous people in all walks of life and especially in the entertainment field, but this was a pretty incredible cast list. Outside of the fact that we had people like the American Singer, Patty Austin, the Broadway star, Brian Stokes Mitchell, the songwriting team of Alan and Marilyn Bergman and the list just goes on and on.
One thing that happened was there was one word in one of Robert De Niro's JFK speeches that he was consistently getting wrong. He, obviously, just wasn't paying attention to it or he was doing it by memory. And we wanted to get it right because we were doing it for TV. So everybody turns to me and says, “Oh. I guess we got to tell him.” [Laughter] And then somebody says, “Keith, I think you should tell him. You're the conductor of the Boston Pops.” And, actually, all the actors were incredibly generous, kind and happy to be there. There was nothing that we possibly could have given or paid Robert De Niro to want to come into this. They obviously, at the end, just really had to want to be part of it.
But I walked up, sat next to him up in the room that he was dressing in and I said, “You know, I‟m going to do something I never thought I would do. Would you mind if I gave Robert De Niro a line note?” And he said, “Oh, sure. Did I screw something up?” “Yeah, just a little bit.” It was so funny. He was castigating himself. And he said, “Oh, yeah. I always do that wrong. And thanks for telling me.” But giving line notes to Robert De Niro is one of the fun parts of my job.
PETER BOYER: And the word was?
KEITH LOCKHART: The word was citizens. Oh, no, it was “my fellow.” “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America can do for you but what we together can do …
PETER BOYER: … “for the freedom of man.”
KEITH LOCKHART: He lived with the quotes a lot longer than I did, and he was saying “My fellow Americans of the world,” as opposed to “My fellow citizens of the world.”
PETER BOYER: It was a good thought.
KEITH LOCKHART: It was a good thought. And he said, “Do you know why I do that?” And I said, “No, Mr. De Niro. Why?” And he said, “It's Lyndon Johnson. All I can remember is „My fellow Americans.‟” [Laughter]
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: You made him an offer you couldn't resist.
KEITH LOCKHART: Exactly.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Please.
QUESTION: I was lucky enough to be there Tuesday night. It was wonderful, and knowing the family was there really made it moving. But I was wondering, I think you gave a date of April 16th when you had to submit it. How long did the orchestra actually get to practice it and what did the actual musicians think? What was their feedback.
KEITH LOCKHART: During the Boston Pops season we perform 35, 40 concerts on about ten rehearsals. It is rather an intense pressure cooker. We rely on having one of the world's great orchestras to be able to assimilate things very quickly. With this piece -- because it was a world premiere and an exceptional thing -- we actually scheduled a second rehearsal. [Laughter]
PETER BOYER: I should say one thing about this. In the context of writing pieces for orchestra, which I have been privileged to do for some years, people are astonished when they learn that you have maybe three or four rehearsals total. They are astonished by that. But I knew with the Boston Pops schedule that one rehearsal was absolutely the norm. Then, when I heard that there was going to be a second rehearsal and it was going to be a full ten days before the performance, this was a tremendous luxury, two rehearsals.
KEITH LOCKHART: The Pops season opened in the first week of May. We opened on May 4th I think. That Saturday we had a reading of this with Peter in attendance. It was actually good that it was that far in advance of the premiere of last week because that gave him time to assimilate. If we do two rehearsals one day apart, there is no time to change anything if there is something he didn't really like. No matter how good your demo is, when you really hear it with the orchestra … and it also gave me a chance to assimilate it a little deeper. I didn't study this piece with the demo. I studied the piece with just the score, trying to get the sound in my head off the page, which is the most thorough way one finds to assimilate a piece as a conductor. But, still, I got to hear it for the first time. He got to hear it for the first time. He had a week to do anything that he thought needed to be done. We also had the chance to put some stuff together so other people who needed to hear the piece before it could hear it.
I ran out of the country for a foreign guest conductor engagement. Two days later I went to Abu Dhabi, of all places and came back totally jet lagged from Abu Dhabi on Sunday. On Tuesday, here is the world premiere.
PETER BOYER: I have to say the really good news is there were no changes necessary. I mean, the parts were just right.
KEITH LOCKHART: We adjusted a couple of things. We do things a little differently. We discuss tempos and pacings and that sort of thing. But basically it is rare that you play a piece straight through and go, “Okay.”
PETER BOYER: The orchestration work in the Hollywood world really helps with that because the pressure is intense. Because it is not unusual to be given a cue, as it is called, a two and a half minute action cue, which is a lot of notes, way more notes than in a piece like this except for the very end because there is so much going on. To be given a 135-bar action cue basically on a Sunday night and they are going to record it at ten AM on Tuesday.
KEITH LOCKHART: And if there are any mistakes in it that caused them to be paying 75 people to sit in the studio, you don't get called again.
PETER BOYER: So if one can actually function in that environment, which always involves staying up all night, which I feel I really am getting too old to do, but it is just part of the gig. It is just part of what you have to do. So if you can do that that helps a lot, because, as I say, it focuses the mind and it let's one understand what will and will not work. And happily it did. It just played down so that we could adjust the tempo of narration or of Keith's tempo just slightly. But these are fine things. This is splitting hairs. It was basically there, which was great.
QUESTION: Just a quick question. I was wondering what the Kennedy family reaction was.
KEITH LOCKHART: I can tell you a little bit of it. One of my favorite parts was at intermission Ethel Kennedy ran into my room and grabbed me in a bear hug, which was very sweet. There were a lot of people surrounding them and spending time with them, and I had to do the rest of the concert after the first half was over, so I didn't get a chance to go out and see people immediately afterwards. We got a report from Lynn Ahrens who ran backstage and said, “Vicki is beside herself. She loved it. She doesn't know whether to shout in joy,” and I got an e- mail from Vicki the next morning saying, “I can't say anything except I was elevated and swept off my feet. And thank you, thank you. And I will never forget the day when you sprung this project on me.”
As was referred to earlier, this was not a piece that we needed to seek permission from the Kennedy family for. But, again, it is a different thing than the “Lincoln Portrait.” There are many of these people who are very connected with these people who are still among us, and my personal connection with the death of the Senator was with Vicki.
And the last piece before she said, “Go ahead and do this for him,” was I drove down to Hyannis with my wife. Vicki and my wife are very fond of each other, and we had lunch the Tuesday before Thanksgiving this last year. It was the first time I had seen her since before Ted's death, because as usual with conductors, I was in Abu Dhabi and then I was in New Zealand when the Senator died. I was unable to come back for all of that and she had no idea what we wanted to talk about. I said, “I just have something I really need to talk to you about.” And we had lunch and we sat down in this room where the last time I had been the Senator was tossing tennis balls out the door to his Portuguese water dachshund. It was wonderful memories associated with that. It was one of her first times back in that house, too. So it was a poignant time. We told her about this and she said, “This was the most wonderful gift you could have given me.” She said, “I trust you.” She said, “Do you have any idea who is going to write it?” And I said, “I have a pretty good idea.” I mentioned Peter. The good thing was that Ed Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy's husband, was very familiar with his work because of his association with Ellis Island. So they talked about it amongst themselves at Thanksgiving and she came back and she said,
“Everybody says it's a great idea. Well, everybody, including the few people I talked to. Go ahead. Consider our blessing given. Just don't talk to us until it is done because you do not want us debating whose quotes get to be there.”
PETER BOYER: I have to say that for me, as you can imagine, this has been a dream project and very gratifying on many levels. But maybe the most memorable thing is I was sitting directly behind Vicki Kennedy, again, that sort of pressure being there, and Joe Kennedy III was right behind me and Ted Kennedy, Jr. and Kiki Kennedy, who I just met at the reception minutes beforehand. As soon as it was done I put my hand on Mrs. Kennedy's shoulder and gave her a hug, and she was so excited. That was unforgettable. That was great.
KEITH LOCKHART: It's a good thing De Niro isn't here. [Laughter] [Applause]
QUESTION: This is the first time my wife and I have been able to hear the piece, and it has such an emotional depth to it. I was wondering if that was something that you ended up intentionally wanting to do, because some music does not have that same level of emotional depth and, of course, the whole connection with the Kennedys.
And the second part of the question is, is there a thought of doing the music in a symbolic place, whether that be here at the Library, or at the Esplanade, or someplace where a larger portion of people could hear that were not able to be at Symphony Hall. Unfortunately, the TV networks when they were showing these clips seemed to be fixated on the one scene with Robert De Niro talking in regard to the narration. It just seems like it would be wonderful to see the piece really be celebrated from people that may not necessarily be drawn to classical music.
KEITH LOCKHART: Would you like to answer the emotive depth question first and then I will …
PETER BOYER: Sure. The short answer is yes. It is, obviously, a very emotional piece and one that is unembarrassed about being emotional. There is a great deal of contemporary music that is written in which emotion is anathema. It is not okay to be emotional. And for better or worse I am willing to do that, and it's not fabricated. It is just me. It is simply honest. And it makes certain types of people who favor certain types of music view me as anachronistic or irrelevant and write some wonderfully snide things in their views, which is okay. That is part of what one has to deal with.
It was a very emotional process and certainly I know Lynn Ahrens spoke of being moved to tears many time in the reading of these speeches, and I certainly was as well. In a sense, the composer is the first audience member all the way through because the composer has to listen to his or her own work and respond. In this case it is a very, very specific thing. One is setting the words of JFK or of Robert Kennedy or of Ted Kennedy, and if those words speak to me, personally, and then if the music can add something even more, it can be a kind of cathartic experience. And so that very much guided me in the process.
KEITH LOCKHART: I do believe that one of the important things we can do with this piece is to broaden its exposure as much as possible. And the Pops, of course, it's what we do. We are the orchestra that plays for people who don't think of themselves as classical music fans, necessarily. We are the orchestra for everyone. We are a great populist tradition in this city and in this country.
We have several things in mind that address what you have said, both in this region and we would also like to take this piece down to Washington because, of course, that would be the obvious other logical place that this piece would have a constituency who would really want to experience it. And those will be announced, as we say, shortly when I can officially announce them before they end up in The Globe without … [Laughter]
By the way, I will say one of the other things about this was getting to experience the material I was least familiar with, the Robert Kennedy material. Simply because the JFK material is so iconic and so universal and everybody knows at least the big speeches. I lived much more through Ted's time. I was four when JFK was assassinated and I was eight when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. I don't have a strong intellectual memory of that period of time. But I think all of us -- me, Dennis, Peter -- everybody fell in love with certain quotes and you had your new favorite quote. And mine, personally, is in the Martin Luther King assassination speech where he talks about dedicating ourselves to what the ancient Greeks wrote, “To tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” I thought for this to have been essentially an extemporaneous speech, the turn of phrase and the power of that thought is amazing.
PETER BOYER: Yeah, the Robert Kennedy speeches were a great discovery for all of us, for Lynn Ahrens and for me. Again, I was pleased to see so many of these on the website of this Library. There was really an embarrassment of riches that was not known, and one could only really accommodate just a small amount, a small amount of text. I should say what Keith just said about his memories of this personally, one thing that made this especially daunting for me is that I was born in 1970.
KEITH LOCKHART: Kid. [Laughter]
PETER BOYER: Don't let the gray hair fool you. I was too young. I have been aware of them as long as I can remember so there is an iconic quality that has been with me my whole life. I wrote a note about the piece for the program and mentioned that Ted Kennedy became a Senator eight years before I was born. And so my whole life, I just was a fixture of Senator Ted Kennedy.
This project gave me an opportunity to learn a bit more about the other two brothers that I had not really researched. And I make no claims to expert-hood, but just the several weeks that I read Kennedy books night and day and looked at websites was a great time of personal learning for me.
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: I keep coming back to the Copeland, “Lincoln Portrait,” and I want to come back to it just once more to say, I didn't realize, I didn't remember until we got here that I've done it with Keith Lockhart and the Pops, which is a tremendous thrill. I also remember standing backstage in the wings when Arthur Fiedler conducted it with Ted Kennedy around 1970, and performed it once here with the Tufts University Orchestra. And that's the one I
remember. It was with an Indian conductor from India I didn't know. He called me out of the room and said, “Would you do it with us?” And I said I would be thrilled. We rehearsed it once, I think, performed it here. The place went completely bananas. It has so much American music in it, which is thrilling, and it has the words or Lincoln, ending of course with, “The government of the people, for the people, by the people,” etcetera, “shall not perish from the earth.” George Matthew, the conductor's name, and I walked off stage and I didn't realize at the time but he didn't have any papers. He had no visa. He was a kind of man without a country at that point.
But we stood there in a kind of ecstasy. And he said, “Chris, it makes you so proud to be an illegal alien.” [Laughter] And I‟m thinking we should all be so lucky that the whole world will hear it, Peter, and on that note, ladies and gentlemen, Keith is due on stage with the Pops in two minutes so wish him luck. [Applause]
CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Thank you, Keith. Thank you. It was really a pleasure.
THE END