At 15, Daniel Black convinced his band director to let him conduct the high school band.
Leading his classmates, he never felt more comfortable.
“I knew that’s what I wanted to do, and here I am,” he said.
The sixth and final candidate for music director/conductor will take the stage to conduct the May 9 concert in the Great Falls Symphony’s 67th season.
Each of this season’s six concerts features a finalist for the position in a two-year search process that began last season, drawing 238 applications from across the globe, according to Hillary Shepherd, the symphony’s executive director.
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The symphony established a 12-person search committee composed of conductors, musicians and those with administrative experience.
They broke into teams of three, with each reviewing about a quarter of the applications, whittling the list down to 13 candidates who were asked to answer a set of questions on video, Shepherd told The Electric last spring.
The full search committee reviewed those responses and further narrowed the list down to six candidates with two alternates.
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The top six were scheduled for the season’s concerts and started programming, which “gets a perspective of how they think,” Shepherd said. “Programming is a vessel by which to achieve an artistic vision.”
“Really amazing programs” are planned for the search season and “our community will be involved” through surveys and events, Shepherd said. “It’s going to be a pretty amazing time getting to know everybody. It will be fulfilling and exciting for everybody involved and the community gets a say in making sure the next maestro or maestra is the perfect fit for Great Falls.”
Black is an American conductor and composer currently based in Montreal.
Few orchestras are looking for a music director at any given time and when the Great Falls Symphony started its search process, he was looking for a more permanent position.
He said he was impressed with the organization and the city looked interesting.
Growing up in California, he’s worked and studied as far away as Russia.
The music director’s role is broader than conducting the symphony’s concerts, he said, and serves as an ambassador for the organization, working with the board and staff to make strategic decisions, with long-term impact. The job also requires being a part of the community and developing connections.
In a community the size of Great Falls, the symphony doesn’t exist in a silo and if offered the position, he’d want to see a thriving local cultural scene for all the arts organizations.
Black attended the University of Wisconsin, the Eastman School of Music in New York and studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in Russia. He studied at Northwestern University for his doctorate.
He was the associate conductor for the Fort Worth Symphony, then emigrated to Canada.
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A year later, he was offered a job with the Florida Orchestra, splitting his time between there and Canada.
It’s been a winding road to music, Black said, who didn’t grow up with parents who worked in the arts, though his mom was an opera lover.
He had some Beethoven and Tchaikovsky records, and liked John Williams scores from Star Wars and Indiana Jones, all of which gave him a sense that music was amazing, and in particular, the big sounds of the orchestra.
At 10 years old, he decided he wanted to play drums or pipes.
In his middle school band, only three people got to play drums, “so pipes it was.”
Starting with the flute, he realized he didn’t have the singular interest in his instrument that many musicians have, but a broader interest in the full orchestra, which was his first inkling toward a musical career, and he started composing.
For Black, live performances from the symphony to bingo offer human interaction.
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“In our time, when online communication, recorded content of various kinds is so accessible and everybody is walking around like this all the time,” Black said, looking at his phone, it’s amazing in so many ways, but we’re in danger of losing our perspective of how important that is “and being in the room when something happened. A human connection that is far better and far deeper than anything you can get from a recording.”
Black said he saw survey data from the symphony’s strategic plan work that indicated about a third of people had seen an orchestra other than Great Falls perform.
“This will be, for a lot of people, their only opportunity to see it live,” he said and this weekend, he said the program includes pieces the local audience has likely never heard before.
He titled the concert Renewal and wanted to create an emotional progression from beginning to end.
The first piece is Manfred Overture by Robert Schumann, a 19th-century German composer, which is based on a written piece by Lord Byron about a man tormented by guilt and regret, searching for meaning in life, but having difficulty finding it.
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Next is a modern piece by female Canadian composer Jocelyn Morlock, My Name Is Amanda Todd. The piece is based on a Canadian teenager who committed suicide in 2012 after being cyberbullied.
Black said the piece “shows why modern music is so important to continue to play…depicting the cumulative effect of those small barbs,” of cyberbullying, trolling and mean-spirited comments that are familiar “if you’ve spent any time on the internet whatsoever.”
The piece transitions to imagining an ideal world of what would happen if all those negative comments were positive, Black said, tearing up as he described it.
“That is a masterpiece that can touch a modern audience in a way that” classics cannot, Black said.
The third piece, Les Belle Heures by Guillaume Connesson, a piece commissioned by Dwight Parry, an oboe player, who will join the symphony for Saturday’s concert.
It’s only the fourth or fifth time the piece has ever been played, Black said.
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The piece is in three parts, noted as hours, beginning with the Blue Hour, with birds chirping as the sun rises with the sounds of nature, followed by the Exquisite Hour, which is sort of a love tune, Black said. It’s “exactly sad, but not exactly happy.”
The third movement is the Fleeting Hour, which is “wild” and far removed from where the concert started emotionally.
The fourth and final piece of the concert, Symphony No. 8 by Antonin Dvořák, is “unrelenting joy,” Black said. “Delight, joy, so beautiful and so uplifting. An explosion of joy.”
He said he hopes people will come along on the emotional journey with the symphony and thinks the audience will love it.
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A composer himself, Black was recently awarded a grant with a colleague to compose an opera.
Composing is a “creative activity” that “takes a completely different mindset than conducting,” he said.
If offered the position, Black said the big goal would be cultivating an “absolutely thriving cultural scene in Great Falls,” since with that, professional performance artists will make their home here, increasing music opportunities for students and the community.
Ways to do that include a strong youth orchestra and music education, he said.
When he was a member of a youth orchestra, his parents got involved and started attending the professional orchestra concerts. By the time he went to college, they were season ticket holders.
Fast forward to when Black was conducting a youth orchestra and parents of the students got involved, eventually serving on the board.
Kids participating in youth orchestra and arts programs may not grow up to be professional musicians, Black said, but their families are involved and exposed to the arts along the way.
It’s surprising, Black said, that even in cities the size of Great Falls, how many people don’t know a symphony exists.
To reach them, Black said the organization has to take the music to them and find ways to make classical music seem less intimidating by being inviting and building personal relationships.
Ideally, he hopes to see community members treat members of the orchestra like they do local sports teams.
In choosing music programming, Black said he looks for a balance of familiar and unfamiliar music that audiences feel some emotional connection to.
That’s why, Black said, he does music, for what it brings out in him emotionally.
“That’s what I would also like to do for the audience,” he said.
Want to go?
When: May 9
Time:
- 6:30 p.m.: preshow talk with Black and Parry in the theater
- 7:30 p.m.: concert
- post show reception in the Gibson Room, upstairs at the Civic Center
Tickets: Purchase here
Details:
- show is about 1 hour and 41 minutes with a 20-minute intermission
- wine available for purchase in the lobby and Gibson Room
