“Don’t let the challenges you face make you lose your passion for what you’re doing. Don’t lose your love. You’re doing it because you love it and that’s the most important thing. If you don’t lose that, you’ll always have a measure of fulfillment; everything else is just real estate.”

An interview by Esther Nahm, a New World fellow Sep 2015—May 2017

Edward Gazouleas is professor of viola at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
He previously held the Lois and Harlan Anderson Chair in the Boston Symphony viola section and was on the faculties of Boston University College of Fine Arts, the New England Conservatory of Music, and the Tanglewood Music Center.
An active recitalist and chamber music player, Gazouleas performs frequently as a viola and piano duo with Pei-Shan Lee. He was a prize winner at the International String Quartet Competition in Evian, France, and has performed with members of the Borromeo, Muir, Lydian, and Audubon string quartets.
He has held teaching positions at Boston Conservatory, Wellesley College, and Temple University and was a member of the Pittsburgh Symphony under Lorin Maazel.
Gazouleas attended Yale and received a Bachelor of Music degree from the Curtis Institute, where he studied with Michael Tree and Karen Tuttle.

I first studied with Mr. Gazouleas at Boston University, but have continually sought him out over for lessons over the years as he is a brilliant, perceptive, clear and nurturing teacher. He has the unique ability to patiently break down extremely difficult technical feats into manageable, bite-sized steps, bringing what feels impossible into the realm of the possible. As a result, he enables every aspiring violist that comes his way. He is filled with practical, wise advice for ailments ranging from fingerings for a tricky excerpt to a major life decision, and it is this scope that makes him incredible. He came to coach the violists of the New World Symphony for a few days in November 2015; below is a transcript of a truly enriching conversation he had over lunch with me and viola fellow Helen Hess in Miami Beach, Florida. Enjoy!

Let’s start all the way from the beginning. What was your journey to the viola?

I started playing the violin in a public school in suburban New York. I was 8 and I had played the recorder; that was the only music I had experienced up to that age. The string teacher at my school held a petting zoo where you could go around to all of the the instruments. He put a violin in my hands and took my right hand to make some bowing motions and from that moment I was totally hooked.

From the bowing motions?

Yes, he made me move the bow really fast over the strings and I made this sound! It was like someone flipped on a switch and I just lighted up. I thought, “I have to do this!” and was determined to do it. So I played the violin and also got interested in the viola; there was one sitting around the school. So I taught myself how to read alto clef when I was 13.

The first time I actually studied the viola was a summer with Heidi Castleman at the Quartet Program after my senior year of high school. She let me play on her primavera viola and I took some lessons with her, and that was how I really got hooked on the viola.

I went to Yale for my undergraduate and subsequently transferred to Curtis. I was lucky to get in as I had just made the age limit at the time, 21, and I studied with Karen Tuttle and Michael Tree. Karen Tuttle was the greatest teacher and probably the most influential in terms of how I play. Michael Tree was a great model-I probably studied with him at the height of his powers as a violist. He was 50 and the Guarneri Quartet had been going for 20 years. He sounded incredible all the time and he would always demonstrate. You never got to hear him play the viola repertoire as he never performed it; he had been a violinist who turned into a violist for the Quartet so you heard him only in the quartet repertoire, but he knew the viola repertoire and he could play it. It was astonishing that the only thing he ended up recording was the Brahms sonatas with Richard Goode. I remember he told me there was very little editing in making that recording.

He would play and he’d talk about fingerings but I felt like I could never sound like him as much as I wanted to, so I didn’t think it was helpful in that way. But over time I began to realize how he had been hugely influential, with the discipline and the detail of what he did. You’d study a Bach suite with him and he’d never play a note where he didn’t know where it was going. And that kind of thing does shape you as you grow.

And Karen Tuttle?

She was the greatest teacher of anything I ever knew. Do you know the expressions “social intelligence” or “emotional intelligence”? She was a genius at social intelligence/emotional intelligence. That was one of the things that made her such a great teacher. A lot of her students who have become teachers focus on her technical and physical ideas and approach which were revolutionary and original. Her teaching was nuanced and influential. The thing that made her such a good teacher was that she had this empathy. She could see a student and immediately size up their character and problems. Even at the end of her teaching career, when she was 80, she came to teach a masterclass at Boston University and she could immediately see the problem. She was suffering from some memory issues at that time that came with aging but she could still see the student in front of her and zero in.

Karen Tuttle

Wow, what a gift. What then sparked your interest in playing in an orchestra?

What made me fall in love with playing the viola was playing string quartets. When I went to Curtis, that’s what I wanted to do. I loved the quartet repertoire and the experience of being an inner voice, of going in and out of the texture, of when you’re supporting and then all of sudden coming to the foreground. But like a lot of other people, as my schooling went on, I realized there were practical considerations. Honestly, it seemed like a more rational way of making a living at the time.

So I eventually grew to love playing in orchestra and grew to love the orchestral repertoire as much as the chamber music repertoire. I remember that the first time I played a Sibelius symphony I couldn’t stand it, but now I think that they’re among the greatest, most fascinating things in the repertoire-especially the ones we don’t play that often, such as the Fourth. It’s like a puzzle and I think it’s a great piece.

What was your preparation for auditions like?

My first audition has been coming into my mind lately. I was going to school in Philadelphia at the time and went to Washington D.C. to audition for the National Symphony. I didn’t want to pay for a hotel so I took a 5:00 A.M. train which then arrived at the Kennedy Center at 9:00 A.M. I played at 9:45 and by about 10:00 or 11:00 I knew I had advanced. The following round was to be later that day so I just hung around the hall all day-we didn’t have cellphones back in the day so we weren’t supposed to leave. I ended up playing much later that evening, and though I don’t remember how it went, I do remember that I didn’t pass that round.

So I went back home and realized that I had to take these auditions much more seriously. These auditions were not just a question of being able to play through the excerpts in a practice room; there was much more to it than that. It was like a major competition or a competitive sporting event. You have to train and there has to be a process to the training. And it is not just the practicing but you also have to take care of yourself, including how you’re going to travel that day. So over time of taking auditions and seeing what went well and what didn’t, I developed this idea that I had to be ready 2 weeks before the audition itself, meaning I had to pretend that the audition was 2 weeks before it actually was; not still be building things at that point but really performing them. If you play through something and you’re still stopping to correct something, you’re not ready to perform it. And that’s a hard bump to go over, of saying, “Oh, I have to stop and fix that note” because you can’t do that at the audition.

I had a couple of odd experiences taking auditions. I remember one audition in particular, there were around 50 people in the prelims and they were voting in groups. The personnel manager said that at the end of each group we’d be able to see the comment sheets. So we waited as a group and at the end of ours, he came out and seemed a bit embarrassed. He said, “You have to understand some of these people on the committee have forgotten what it’s like to take these auditions” before showing us the comments. One person on that committee, instead of writing comments, had on each sheet for each candidate drawn very well drawn cartoons. The drawing on mine was of a viola with a ten ton weight posed above it waiting to fall on the viola! So we started comparing our cartoons-another person had gotten one with a mack truck ready to crash into the viola.

I was mad so I went to Peabody where Karen Tuttle was teaching to tell her about this. She brightened up and said, “Maybe he thought you had a big sound!” laughs She could always see the silver lining.

Pittsburgh Symphony was your first job?

Yes, though I took the audition for it once before I actually got it.

How many auditions did you take before you won that position?

I took about 4 or 5, though I took many more auditions after I got Pittsburgh. I think it’s worth noting that it became much harder to take auditions after I had a job. The preparation was harder and I had less flexibility with my schedule. After winning Pittsburgh I took the Boston Symphony audition 3 times before I won it. Many people in that particular orchestra took it more than once.

Did you ever have periods of doubt during the audition process?

Of course.

How did you work through that?

The first time you take an audition, it’s a shock. And it’s probably a healthy shock for a lot of people. So I didn’t really allow myself to think that I couldn’t win something. I just tried to have a plan B, such as, "I’ll play for this contractor in NYC and start freelancing." But I was lucky because I didn’t ever have to go to my plan B.

That whole sense of self doubt became way more of an issue after I got a job. The way it is with these things is that you get one of these jobs and it’s then very hard to move up. I won a move up audition to 4th chair in Pittsburgh and eventually to 3rd chair in Boston, but it took 10 years in Boston before that position was open, and then you still have to win that audition.

When I got into the Pittsburgh Symphony, the dean of Curtis at the time heard I got in and said to me, “Well, now you’re set for life!” That was the most horrible thing I’d ever heard. I didn’t do that because I thought I’d just sit there for the rest of my life. So that started the process of finding what I really wanted to do. I got into this for more than just making a living, so how could I diversify? Where can I play chamber music? Play a recital? Teach?

This sort of thing eventually led me to committee work and governance in the Boston Symphony. That was challenging but also very rewarding, and I learned a lot. I was chair on the artistic committee and was eventually on the search committee that picked Andris Nelsons. That was a fascinating process.

What was that process like?

I can’t say! It’s a secret. It was a secret then and it’s a secret now! laughs

In the Boston Symphony, the process was that you elect four musicians, four board members, two senior managers, the concertmaster and the President of the Board. So it was a twelve person committee. We had to talk about everything from the job description to community involvement to how we would ascertain the orchestra’s true desire of what they wanted.

A search at that level has to be completely confidential and a lot of top conductors don’t want to be put in the position of being rejected. So we couldn’t really discuss candidates openly with the orchestra, but we did have a system in place as most orchestras do of evaluating each guest conductor. There were online forms developed by ICSOM so we customized the questions and used those forms to try to find out what the orchestra was really thinking. And of course, a lot of people shared their opinions with me!

Musicians are pretty good about sharing their opinions!

Yes, there were a lot of healthy opinions! laughs I was the subject of some lively monologues! There were some real problems along the way; major conductors who were supposed to come who we were going to check out who canceled and didn’t show up, or others that we couldn’t get to come to guest conduct in the context of a search going on. Even though no one said, "You’re coming to audition for this," it was widely known that the BSO was having a search, so in some sense every conductor who appears is scrutinized. The NY Philharmonic is going through that process now. The things that are said in the press are usually speculation but some people believe it. I learned to be very wary of talking to anyone in the press.

You played in Pittsburgh for 5 seasons and Boston for 24-what were your most memorable musical highlights during those years?

There were some great performances with the Pittsburgh Symphony and Lorin Maazel. He did an incredible Symphonie Fantastique and it got people on their feet everywhere. He loved to conduct encores, so he’d do a half dozen and people would clap along rhythmically. He didn’t need much of rehearsal time because he was so organized and clear as a conductor-he could really do it on the spur of the moment.

Something that stands out from from those years is a week that the Pittsburgh Symphony was devoting to Michael Tippett for his 85th birthday. We did an incredible piece he wrote that no one does anymore because it’s so difficult called The Mask of Time. I had a string quartet comprised of colleagues from the orchestra, and since he was in town, we prepared his Fourth String Quartet. We coached it with him and performed it at Carnegie Mellon that same week. That’s one thing that stands out as a great musical experience because when you’re in one of these orchestras, you have the opportunity to do things like that.

While I was in BSO, I was able to play chamber music with Gil Shaham and Christian Tetzlaff as part of the Prelude concerts at Tanglewood. That was cool. That’s a memorable experience.

There were great concerts in Boston with Bernard Haitink, and some great ones with Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos and Seiji Ozawa. The time when I was in the orchestra was a particularly dysfunctional one between Ozawa and the orchestra-that’s well known-but there were still some great concerts. There were some unexpected things such as when we did Ravel's one act opera L'enfant et les sortilèges and you could see what a great artist Seiji was. The opera is told from the perspective of a child and he got that. It wasn’t what he said or didn’t say in rehearsal, but it was that he caught the spirit of that in the performances; for a conductor to be able to do that makes him a great artist.

With Haitink, the Brahms symphonies stand in my memory as the greatest performances one could imagine. The best Rite of Spring was with Frühbeck de Burgos-you heard stuff you’ve never heard before. We had some great concerts early on with Levine, and there were some great concerts with Andris Nelsons. I just went back to sub for Strauss’s Elektra-a fabulous concert in Carnegie Hall. I think that orchestra is at the start of one of the best periods in its history.

What is it like to be on an audition committee? What are you listening for?

The most helpful thing for perspective people taking auditions to know is that from the point of view of the panel, you have to find a balance between listening for detail, such as, "Is this note in tune?" and listening more generally- "What kind of a musician/what kind of player is this?" And most people try to listen generally in the later rounds. This may not be right but that’s the general trend. In the earlier round people listen more “objectively”-is it in tune with good rhythm and tone? For myself, I tried to listen for "What is going on?" more than "Is this out of tune?" because then you can tell- they’re a good player but really nervous, so maybe I should pass them. Or, they’re a really good player but not prepared- OK, not going to pass them. Beautiful sound, but can’t shift-is it that, or is it an accident? If you listen that way, people appear in the finals that make more sense.

The problem, which is an unfortunate trend, is when people listen too objectively or in too detailed a way, such as, “They didn’t count that quarter rest” or “They played a half note instead of dotted quarter” and eliminate solely on that basis. Sometimes those things indicate something, such as carelessness or lack of preparation, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it’s an exceptional player. When I first joined an audition committee, I thought would be simple. I thought sure, I know how to do this; I’ll pass this, I’ll be able to tell. But it’s actually much more difficult than you might think. You have to have practice at it and have stamina at it and still be listening intelligently after many hours of hearing the same thing; that is challenging.

In that light, from the auditionee’s point of view, do you think it’s better to play an audition earlier in the day?

That’s hard to say.

Being an auditionee, one of the hardest part of auditioning is the lack of comments, especially if you get cut from the preliminary round. Sometimes it feels obvious why you were cut but there are other times when you feel good about how it went and it’s frustrating when you can’t turn the audition into a learning experience because you don’t know what exactly got you cut. Why do you think so many orchestras decline to share audition comments?

Some people on the panel are worried and uncomfortable revealing what they think. I had one colleague who said, “I don’t want to have to quantify in words my vote. I can’t do it.” Someone who doesn’t teach on a regular basis isn’t used to doing that. So this person said to me, “I can say this note was out of tune, etc., but it doesn’t amount to why I would reject this person. It was an impression in a negative or positive and I went with that.”

When you do get comments after an audition, it’s good to think about the fact that sometimes they have been written quickly. Sometimes they’ve been written in phrases and words that only they understand, and if you try to read tea leaves into these comments it’s not always helpful. I actually find that sometimes you have to do the opposite of what they’re saying. I’ve had people show me comments and say, "I’ve been working on this" and I say, "No, that’s not actually what they are telling you." Because people writing the comments aren’t thinking about how they’re expressing themselves; they’re just writing down notes to try to remember for themselves. So they don’t want it to be for public consumption.

The other thing is that sometimes it takes effort and time for a staff person to collate things and send it out and they don’t consider that a part of their job. They’re not in the business of being an educational institution; they’re in the business of hiring someone, and it already takes time and money to hold the audition. At least that’s the attitude. Now to me, that’s a short-sighted, ungenerous attitude, but that’s the attitude you see.

I asked Joseph DePasquale about comments once, and he said, “If someone asks me for comments after an audition I just say, ‘It wasn’t good enough! What do you want comments for?’” laughs So that was the old school way about it. You didn’t ask any questions. For me, having essentially grown up in that world and seeing what it’s like now, the atmosphere in these orchestras are much better than they used to be. Everything we’re trying to do in musical education is make more positively contributing musicians so that these orchestras become better places to work-nurturing, supporting, humane, artistic places to work. These are traditionally hidebound, conservative places but it is changing.

It is a period of change in American orchestral culture. They’re recognizing that their roles in communities are changing and they must change to survive. It’s fascinating to look at places like Minnesota, Detroit, St. Louis-orchestras that appeared to be in danger a few years ago that are now doing really well. Musicians aren’t necessarily getting rich but they are in good, sustainable jobs. That’s a huge thing.

If you look at Bruce Ridge’s 2015 ICSOM address, it counters the message that orchestras are falling apart. It’s true that there’s a change happening.

 When you decided to leave the Boston Symphony to teach at Indiana University, what went into making that decision?

That was a long evolution for me. I first started teaching when I was at Curtis. At my first lesson with Karen, she said I should keep a notebook with notes from all of my lessons which I had never done before. She said it’d help me remember things, and that in the future when I taught I’d find it useful. I thought that wasn’t necessary. I didn’t think I’d ever teach anyone; I was still too involved in figuring things out for myself. But she said that like it was a certainty-not if, but when you teach.

Well, I still have that notebook. I have it in my studio in Bloomington and this was a part of how perceptive she was. She knew that teaching was something I’d eventually do and that I'd be good at it. She sent some teaching my way during my last year at Curtis, so I taught a couple of students at Temple University.

When I got to Boston, I started teaching at a number of schools including Boston Conservatory and Wellesley college. These were students who weren’t necessarily going to make a career of performing, but I did that for years before I started at BU. The longer I taught, the better my students became. As that became more and more of an interest, it began to take over more "psychic real estate" as I like to say. I got involved in teaching the orchestra repertoire class at the New England Conservatory, and through a strange set of coincidences I also got to design and teach NEC’s Entrepreneurship for Musicians course. I taught it for 4 semesters; it was very interesting and I learned a lot. I still run into students who took it. I thought I was out of my element, but they still have positive things to say about it.

So that got me thinking, and the job at IU came. These positions don’t come very often, so I was lucky.

You’ve taught for so long. At this point, do you feel like Karen Tuttle in the sense that when you hear a student, you can tell whether or not they will be successful?

To be able to look at a student and say you’ll be able to accomplish such and such takes more perspective than I have right now, Even the judgement of how talented they are is a very subjective thing to me. I can look at a student and say they need x amount of work before they can achieve this, but that’s just a matter of time. More realistically, some of them from the ages of 18 to 22 will need to work 4, 10 or 12 years, but are they actually going to do the work? So that becomes more a question of their character or circumstance. It’s very rare that I hear someone play where I can’t do anything to help at all.

The whole point of teaching at a place like IU is that you teach different levels. I have freshmen who are 18 years old to artist diploma and doctoral students in their late 20’s and early 30’s, with everything in between. I want to see them achieve some step, some realization or epiphany, no matter however small, at each lesson. "However small" are the key words there. Even if it’s something very little, then you can say they’ve taken one small step, and then they can take another small step, and then they can build.

It’s somewhat based on my own experience, but I also recognize that everyone is different so what has worked for me may not work for someone else. And that’s where experience comes in, because over time you see what works for most people, but also that this works for this or that kind of person-what works for the person with small hands or the tall gangly guy-and it’s all different. The fact that it’s so much beyond me, my own problems and my own experiences is what I love about it; it’s what keeps it so endlessly fascinating.

I never had the chance to talk to Karen about this, but I’m pretty sure she felt the same way because she had a great measure of joy in her teaching. That’s not to say she was always happy; she’d sometimes get impatient or say, “Babe, you’re just out of tune! It’s just out of tune, babe.” laughs But she was never discouraging.

What does your warmup routine look like?

I’ve gotten into the Dounis Daily Dozen. I think some of that is really great for viola. The silent independence of the finger exercises are very good even for someone who is accomplished who wants to stay in shape. I’ve been doing it more with students. Do something involving shifting and something involving double stops and do them with vibrato. I find that these kinds of exercises can be more time efficient than playing scales. Reading through the Dounis things can be really helpful and has helped me when teaching the left hand. Karen studied with him and called him a great "digital teacher."

Karen would say that if you have really good finger action, you don’t need to warm up. It took me a really long time to get that. So now I think of it not as getting warm enough to play but as exercises to keep myself in condition and in shape. It’s about your brain turning on along with keeping your hand flexible and keeping a physical sense of precision of what you’re doing. Our whole thing with technique is a non-visual perception of distance-a feel of distance of intervals and a feel of the bow in distance from the bridge and the kinesthetic feel of how fast or slow the bow should move over the string-so the exercises are to keep all of that in shape.

What’s your advice for us aspiring violists, particularly for those of us on this path of auditioning for orchestral careers?

I’m not Yoda, but I’d say: don’t let the challenges you face make you lose your passion for what you’re doing. Don’t lose your love. You’re doing it because you love it and that’s the most important thing. If you don’t lose that, you’ll always have a measure of fulfillment; everything else is just real estate.