John Milbauer,  Pianist and Conservatory Leader

 

992-164. John Milbauer

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, John Milbauer

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992. I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with John Milbauer, John, welcome to the show. So John, tell us about your journey since Harvard, since Harvard.

 

John Milbauer  00:24

So, as I mentioned earlier, I didn’t graduate with a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard, and so my journey was different from most the roster of people who leave Harvard without completing a degree there is, is not short actually, including when I was there, there are a lot of musicians who took a path outward for a while, some permanently, and mine was semi permanent, I would say. And we’ll, we’ll talk about that. But my, my life has been an alternation between the world of music and world of ideas, and they shouldn’t be separate, but in terms of how they’re approached in higher education or in academia, they’ve have been quite separate. And now I’m Dean of the School of Music at DePaul University in Chicago, and one thing we’re doing here is bringing those together more, which is essential. So when I was 17, I guess? Well, I I applied to Harvard summer school as a as a rising senior, and also at Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. I got into both, and that was one of my first tough decisions when I was 17. Am I going to go to this great music festival in the mountains which would open up a certain set of doors, or should I go to Harvard summer school, which is going to open a very different set of doors? Different set of doors? And I was told, I think it’s the right advice, if you can do something else, if you’re a young musician and you can do something else, you should probably consider doing something else and only go into it if you can’t do something else, whether that is can’t do it

 

John Milbauer  01:59

in terms of skills or intellect or just you absolutely have to do something. And I thought, well, I love music more than anything, but I’m going to try going to Harvard summer school and see what it’s like. And I had a blast. I had such a wonderful time. Took calculus, expository writing and and just loved it. And, but when I was looking at schools, I thought, Well, I would like to go to Harvard. I always wanted to go there, and I I wrote to the admissions counselors in seventh grade, I said, I’d like to go to Harvard. I grew up in northern Wisconsin in a small town, and it seemed to exemplify everything that I wanted as a kid, which was a world of ideas and sophistication and culture and globalism that I missed as a kid, and I found it in music. And then I thought, well, I’ll find it at Harvard. And I did, and I had such a wonderful time there for a year and a half. Wait, I got to ask more about this. When you were in seventh grade, seventh grade, and so when I applied, they said that they still had my note up on the on their on their board in the office. I said, you know, can you help me prepare? I just knew I wanted to get out of where I was. Will your note was I want? I’m seventh grade in northern Wisconsin. Can you help me prepare? Yeah, basically, I need to get out of here. Help me do it. And they kept your note pinned up on the board. Yeah, it was, it was very sweet. Did they? Did they give you any advice? Did they get back to you? They did get back to me. They did keep your grades up and develop extracurriculars. And I told them what I was doing in music, I believe, in seventh grade and, and they were enthusiastic and, but it’s, you know, Harvard has figured prominently in my life through what was your tell us a little bit about your music. You know, career up to graduating from high school sounds like that was an important, yeah, it was what I loved most, because the things that I was missing in rural Wisconsin, which is a wonderful place in many ways, but if you’re not into, let’s say, wrestling or football, and

 

John Milbauer  04:11

if you really want to apply yourself in school, at least in the 1970s 1980s that was not the place, because you were not going to find a cohort of people who were playing instruments and wanting to do chamber music, or even who were taking academics very seriously. It wasn’t something that was it wasn’t part of the culture, but it was something that I wanted and so muse,

 

Will Bachman  04:37

what was your instrument? What were you

 

John Milbauer  04:38

kind of I am a pianist. I identify as a pianist. I was introduced myself first as a pianist, and I forgot to do that today, and I still play professionally, and it was a window into a world that was much more captivating than the one that was my immediate and I think most people will say that if. They have a tight connection with music. It’s one of inspiration and being captivated. And it was, it was extraordinary. And so it was, it sounds very Little House on the Prairie, but, you know, I’d be calling the music shop in Minneapolis looking for the Brahms intermezzi, and did they have the score available? And you know, it was like, you know, phone with a cord and a rotary dial, and they’d say, Well, let’s see if we have it in the shelves. And then they go, someone goes away for seven minutes, and then they come back. They say, Oh, we don’t have it, but we’ll order it for you. It should be here in about three months. I mean, it’s just unfathomable now, because everything is online. And so after maybe two months, I’d start running home from school to see if there was a manila envelope in the in the mailbox with the Brahms intermezzi. And so it was. It was such a joy when, when that music would arrive, and I would just, I would just through it. I loved it, sorry. And I was strong, very strong pianist in a regional sense, I will say now,

 

Will Bachman  06:01

how did that happen, in terms of you sound, it sounds like you’re growing up in a little bit of a more remote kind of town. It sounds like you got to be at a fairly high level of proficiency as a pianist. But did you? Did you just luck into having some amazing teacher living in this small town? Or how what was your you know, how did you, how did you develop as a musician?

 

John Milbauer  06:23

There it was exactly that will that I had a wonderful teacher. Her name was Joan Moffitt, and I was very fortunate that she was my one teacher from age whatever 767, until 18. And very thoughtful, very experienced. And you know, in music, you have a lot of very, I say, charismatic and maybe, but not in a good way, teachers who get the students all wrapped up around them and and their egos get involved, and they learn all kinds of wacky techniques. And my teacher didn’t do that. It was very, very solid, very healthy kind of music making. And so when I was 18, I had solid technical chops, and I hadn’t developed any strange habits. And I know as having been a faculty member, as a piano faculty member, that a lot of your work when you’re working with people say 18 to 23 is undoing bad habits that maybe serve them okay when they were 16, that just doesn’t work when the body starts to age, and it does age in the mid 20s. So I was very fortunate. So that was, that was a wonderful part of my, of my youth, okay? Thought, you know, I go to Harvard. I’ll study economics, I’ll study government, I’ll play piano on the side. I’ll take lessons at New England Conservatory. It was certainly plenty of pianists do. We had, I believe one of the greatest pianists our age in the world was our classmate, Christopher Taylor, who’s now on the faculty University of Wisconsin. If you haven’t interviewed him yet, I recommend it. He’s, he’s, he is a genius, a word I use very rarely. He is a genius. But in my case, I needed more focused, narrow, purely technical training in music, and I realized quickly at Harvard that was not set up for that kind of training, and it shouldn’t be. It’s a liberal arts college. It’s the greatest liberal arts college in the world. Why should they be doing very applied technical training in music studies? So in the middle of my sophomore year, I decided I’m going to go to a conservatory, and I did, and that was a tough, tough decision for everyone involved, not least my parents. And you know, it’s not like I had a bad time there. I had a wonderful time there, but for what I needed, which was five, six hours a day playing the piano with someone who knew exactly what I should be doing that I needed to leave for. And this could be a very long story, but I’ll make it short. From Harvard, I went to Eastman, which is in Rochester, a wonderful music school, and then from there, I went to Juilliard and did a master’s. Now I never would have been able to go from Harvard to Juilliard with the training I was getting in Boston. It was, it’s conceivable I really needed that time at Eastman to to iron out the kinks and and become a musician. It’s a very different kind of being. And this is maybe a tangent, but I find that music making or the arts in Boston suffer a bit because the city lives so much in its head, which is wonderful. It’s such an exciting place to be, because the intellectual capacities of everybody on the street is is unbelievable, right? It’s the most educated state, the most educated city in the country, by a lot of metrics. But the ability to sometimes not turn it off, but allow other kinds of exploration and expression to enter into your daily life is hard for Bostonians. It’s not part of the culture, and whether that is what is your physical approach to an. Instrument like, what are you doing with your body? That was very hard to do in Boston, and that’s what Eastman does. That’s what Juilliard does. Musicians are like dancers and athletes in that respect. So I went to Harvard, then I went to Eastman and Juilliard, and then I I had a wonderful time as a pianist. For for some years, I went to Hungary list Academy on a Fulbright I studied there as Hungary was starting to open to the West. This was 1994 95 and that was fascinating. And if you’re a serious musician in the US, your 20s can be really spectacular, because you’ve got music festivals all over. You’re in Santa Barbara, or you’re Aspen, or you’re in Europe. Then the 30s hit. The reality is you need a job, you need benefits, you need health insurance, and I was very lucky that I had 23 years in higher education as a piano faculty member at three universities, and the last one was a great research university, University of Arizona. And if I look at my classmates from Juilliard, I graduated in 1994 of the pianists, the ones who I would say are the most successful by a normal metric, are the ones, as I did, who

 

John Milbauer  11:23

ended up in a job at a research university. You have a built in presenter, you have a built in audience that you work with, and you have things that small towns, medium towns don’t have, because we’re not a country that supports the arts robustly. And that was wonderful. And I’m getting to the I’m skipping over several decades here will to get to 2017 because this goes back to Harvard, and I really hadn’t been in touch with our class, other than a few people like Geraldine Acuna and Gabrielle Burton and Geraldine and Gabrielle and my roommate Lawrence Dunn, wrote and said, It’s our 25th reunion. It’s a big deal. Please come. We’d love to see you. And I was so touched by that will, I thought, yeah, I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go see what people are up to. And Thomas Lauderdale said, hey, you know, we’ll have Harvard Knight at the Pops, and you should play Ravel Concerto with the Pops. I was like, great sounds fun. And I had the best time will. And I realized at the time I was 47 as I think most of us were, and I realized that I had done what I could do as a pianist in higher education in southern Arizona at my age of 47 it’s not like suddenly I was going to develop a great career overnight in my early 50s, and start playing more. And I wanted to, because I still love playing the piano more than anything. And I thought, What is a door that might be open to me that will lead to more opportunities, personally and the institutions I work for, and I’m bopping around Cambridge at our 25th reunion, and I hear bagpipes, and I walk toward the bagpipes, and I see a whole cohort of people from all over the world, speaking many languages, bouncing these inflatable globes. It’s my volume, okay, by the way. Yeah, it’s good. And, and I thought, that’s fantastic. You know, musician, you travel a lot, and I one of the things I missed growing up was a feeling of sort of a cosmopolitanism. And I thought, whatever school that is, I want to be there that looks That looks fun. And I found that it was the Kennedy School, and I thought they must have a one year program for bozos like me who are looking to pivot in the mid late 40s, and so I went to the Kennedy school that day, and yep, there’s a brochure for the mid career Master’s in Public Administration. I applied, I got a fellowship, and I had the best year of my life until then, and that was when I was 49 so a couple of years after that, well, I went back to Harvard, and I thought, You know what?

 

John Milbauer  14:07

I remember Stephen Jay Gould’s class, right, history of Earth and of life in one semester, as if but one of the one of my takeaways from that was, you can’t play life’s tape backwards. And I think if you ask anyone, or anyone that you can say, if you went back to when you were 19, wouldn’t you like to make a different choice and see what happened? But leaving Harvard at 19 and going in a completely different direction, of course, I’ve thought at times, well, what would have happened if I had stayed at Harvard, I’d probably be a frustrated banker who’s doing okay, works. I don’t really love my job and but I was thinking of Stephen Jay Gould. You can’t go back and say, What if I had taken a different path because of all of the random things that happen and that make us who. Are. But what I could do is go back at 49 and and that’s what I did. I thought, after decades in the arts, that I knew something about the world, and I realized very quickly I knew nothing about Africa. I knew nothing about the subcontinent of India, and which was, you know, a third of, a third of the cohort at the Kennedy School is developing economies, emerging democracies. And it was such an eye opener. And both there and at the reunion, I was looking around thinking, I’m capable of doing more than I’m doing. I’m very proud of what I’ve done, playing, developing audiences, teaching, I love teaching, and I’m very proud of the students I had for decades. But I thought there’s hundreds of pianists out there who are dying to have my job. I could let one of them have it, and they’d be better off, and I can do something else. So I did the mid career. I graduated into a pandemic. So got a whole class of people pivoting into a pandemic, which was, let’s say, sub optimal, and I went back to Arizona, which was not the plan, but started going into administration at the University of Arizona, and then DePaul in 2023 approached me about being the dean here, and this is a fantastic job, because I was able to bring my musical chops. I can talk to the musicians. We have 16 faculty in the Chicago Symphony. It’s a really extraordinary faculty here at DePaul. I can talk to them as one of them, but I can also talk about marginal utility and gross margin in a way that resonates with senior administrators and board members and and it’s really fun combining the music piece and the economics government piece that I really attracted me as a freshman at Harvard, but I made a different choice, so I was able to incorporate that in my late 40s, and now I’m using all of it. If I think of what I learned at the Kennedy School, three things jump out, things I should have learned in conservatory. And I’m thinking the whole year, I thought, I’ll take these classics as they’re interesting. They might not be particularly useful to what I want to do. I don’t know. And the people in the class are very interesting, and at least I’m going to learn a lot from being around them. So one class was Ricardo Hausman, why are countries poor, volatile and unequal, and you’re looking at economic complexity, export baskets as a driver of of economies, especially emerging, emerging economies. And about halfway through the first semester, I thought, Oh, this isn’t just about countries. This is interesting, but it’s not just about it’s not just about countries. It’s about organizations. How you grow complexity and complexity, or you’re calculating how far is something from your current capacity? What’s the potential payoff? What’s the opportunity gain? What sort of industrial policy do you need? And I thought, this could be organizations also. This is very powerful for someone in higher education or the arts to start applying these to organizations. And by the end of the semester, I thought, it’s not just organizations. This is individuals. How do I grow? Will as a person. How do you grow? What are complexities that you can gain that are close. What are some that are far? I mean, pretty far to go from piano faculty to mid career Masters in Public Administration at the Kennedy School. That’s quite distant, but the

 

John Milbauer  18:53

the opportunity was far, but the gain was tremendous. And so now I come back into the arts and education world. Now I’m in a global cultural capital of Chicago, and I get to play with these tools that I learned from Ricardo Hausman and center international development about adjacencies and complexity and how you can grow. And we’re just knocking it out of the park, which no one in the arts is doing. So that’s that’s very exciting. That was one thing the Kennedy School. Another was Roberto Unger. This was a class in the law school Roberto Unger and Cornel West. This was open also to undergraduates, the conduct of life in East and West philosophy, not the meaning of life, but the conduct of life. And Unger is talking to a class full of people who are thinking of constraints in the normal sense. You know, you’re a country without a port, or you might not have women in the workforce, or there’s corruption. And he says the real constraint is the absence of an idea. The real constraint is. That of imagination. And I thought, I can use that. Why didn’t I learn that in music school, in conservatory and and I do use it, because what I do here at DePaul, what I do as a pianist, is make sure that we’re centering imagination and creativity and what we’re doing otherwise, there’s no point. I’ve often worried that there’s the presumption that anyone in music or in the arts is creative by nature, and I don’t always see that will. And here is Unger in law school saying imagination is the biggest constraint. You better make sure. You better make sure that you have that covered, and that’s wonderful, wonderfully reinforcing to what we do in the arts. And then the third thing I’ll mention was Ron Heifetz, the head of Center for Public Leadership, or the founder of the Center of public leadership at Harvard Kennedy School. And here he is talking to people from all over the world who measure impact in terms of the number of vaccines they were able to deliver to children in Rwanda, or the number of people they can lift out of extreme poverty in Guatemala in a year. And he says, resist the urge to quantify the good that you do in the world. And I thought, why am I learning this in policy school? I should have learned this in music school. Will and so there’s so many wonderful things that I learned, whether it was as an undergraduate, the brief three semesters that were so impactful, like Stephen Jay Gould saying you can’t replay life’s tape. You need to continue with the tape you’re on. And or these three wonderful takeaways from from the Kennedy School, the Law School and the business school. I’m taking a class in marketing at Harvard Business School. And then the pandemic hits, and the head marketing guru at HBS, Rohit deshpanda, says we’re going to turn the class on its ear now because of what’s happening. And we’re not talking about value creation. We’re talking about values creation already. My mind is blown here. I’m Harvard Business School talking about values. And he says it’s important to talk about the role of the arts during and after crisis. So that was a thrilling, thrilling year. Will and I use what I learned at Harvard all day, every day, in my work at DePaul one my my secret agenda for taking the job here was that I would be able to play chamber music with really wonderful musicians. And I thought they’ve got 16 faculty in the Chicago Symphony, many in Lyric Opera of Chicago, and that is a city full of great musicians. It’s a city that takes culture seriously. And I’m going to have a lot of fun and and I have it’s happened. So I love being dean. If I thought, if I could compare the DePaul school of music to a country, which is what I did when I interviewed and I interviewed and I said, Look, I’m coming with this international development I did it for a year. I’m not an expert, but here’s what I learned. If DePaul School of Music were a country, I would say Singapore in 1970

 

John Milbauer  23:31

in terms of location, fresh water, cultural capital, affordability, education, the facilities are amazing at DePaul School of Music, the built in advantages, like we just eclipsed the other institutions in Chicago in terms of our relation with a major orchestra. So I thought this doesn’t require a lot of innovation. It requires really good management and some entrepreneurship, and it’s been great. So I’ve been yapping away here for a while. Well, what would you like me to expand on? Or what reaction do you have so far?

 

Will Bachman  24:10

Well, a few areas I want to explore, but one is, I’d love to hear from you about one or maybe two very specific instances of performances that in your life that really have stood out for you, ones that just of the many, many performances you’ve given over the years, what are one or two that were personally meaningful, or were you just, you know you learn something or just that you’d like to tell us about

 

John Milbauer  24:46

sure one was shortly after I came here and I took the job, as I mentioned, hoping. That I get to play chamber music with the faculty. And my pianist friend said, no one’s going to want to play with the dean. No one is going to ask you to play. It’s not fun, like you’re the boss. They’re not going to and I said, they will. They will. It’s going to happen. And at the end of my first year, Steve Balderston, who was a many decade faculty member at DePaul, and he was, I think, 20 years, 10 years, associate principal cello in Chicago Symphony, playing under the best conductors in the world, a real stalwart in the School of Music. He said, John, I’m going to retire next year, but I’d like you to play my final recital with me. And I was so honored that he asked me to do that. And so I said, absolutely happy to do it. And for many reasons, not just the music making will that was very special, because it was him also demonstrating to the community. I believe in this weirdo, John milbaur, and we’re going to put him on stage, and everything’s going to be fine, even though I, Steve ballerston, am going away. And it did a lot for, I think, for building trust. And then after that, I got asked to play a lot of concerts, and some of the musicians from the Chicago Symphony came, and, you know, this year, I’m playing several concerts with them. And you know, people don’t expect the dean to be able to put two hands together and play chopsticks. So that was very special. But if I think of one like purely musically, I do play a lot of 20th century music, for reasons we could go into maybe in another podcast, mid century or 20th century music is much less well received than the same movements in visual arts or in architecture or literature. It’s just for a bunch of reasons, but I love playing it. And I was playing music of John Cage in the cage centennial. So I think he was born in 1913 so it must have been 2013 I was at the University of Arizona, and we were getting to the end of 2013 and I think John Cage is the greatest American composer, more than Copeland, more than Bernstein. That’s a contentious thing to say, but I’ll stand by it. And I proposed that I would play the cage Sonatas and interludes for prepared piano, which is where you take basically half a hardware store full of nuts and bolts, and you stick them inside the piano to alter the timbre. He was very inspired by Javanese gamelon, and he wanted it to sound basically he lost his budget at the school where he was working in 1948 I believe. And so I’ll just make my own percussion orchestra. I’m gonna do with the piano. I’m gonna play it myself. And it is one of the seminal works of the 20th century in, let’s say western music or classical music. And I pitched it, and I was told no one’s going to come. Nobody likes that music. And I said, My people are here. My people are here in southern Arizona. They will come because this is an unmet need, using economic speaking, this is an unmet need that I’m going to meet. It’s the cage centennial. We haven’t done anything. It’s October, just let me do it. And everyone was opposed to it. And the morning of the concert, I think five tickets had been sold. And I thought, okay, I you know, I’m gonna go out and I’m gonna have a good time. I good time for the five people who show up, three of them friends and family. And 10 minutes before, before the concert, everybody shows up, and people were turned away, which I don’t feel great about, but it is nice to play for a full house well. And I thought, of course, you know the cage. Cage was a Buddhist. He, you know, who wants to reserve a ticket in the morning. I’m just going to show up and see if I can get in. And they were there. And it’s, it’s an unusual work in that it’s 6570 minutes and you’re on stage the whole time. You don’t get to leave. So you make sure that you don’t have too much water before you go on stage. There is no bathroom break. Once you start, you are on stage until you finish. And I felt for 70 minutes in what can be a high pressure situation, not just a concert, but a concert where you don’t leave stage for 70 minutes is tough. Tough for pianists. We’re not used to that.

 

John Milbauer  29:45

I felt totally at ease. It was a total chick sent me high flow state for 70 minutes, and I felt like you could hear a pin drop the whole time. It was the most attentive on. Aliens I’ve ever experienced, and I love that. You know, I could talk about the people I’ve performed with as well, and the violinists and the singers and another pianist, and they’ve all been wonderful in different ways, but those are two that jump out at me.

 

Will Bachman  30:21

I’ve, I’ve been trying to learn more about classical music and get a little bit more educated about it myself. Haven’t made a ton of progress, but like last year, I did this thing where I called, I did the heightened challenge. I said, Okay, I’m going to listen to listen to every Haydn composition in 2025 a lot. I didn’t get the whole thing, but I did listen all the symphonies and all the quartets. That was a bit so I’ve been working at it, but I’m still very, very like, I wouldn’t even say beginner stage. One question I have for you is that I read about but I’m not yet sophisticated enough to hear, is how different musicians might be different musicians approaching the same piece would be really interpreting it differently, or trying to, Like, say something different about the music or and I’d love to to maybe pick a piece that you’ve play, that other people play, and talk about that, a little bit about how, like what you’re trying to say when you play a piece, versus maybe what some other people perform it say. And you hear them, you say, Okay, I understand your argument, but this is my argument about it. I’d love to maybe just pick one piece as an example and talk about that.

 

John Milbauer  31:47

Sure, I picked something simple is not the right word well, but let’s say streamlined or easier to digest a box. Sweet Bach, G major French suite, which has, I don’t know, six, seven different dances in. It starts with an allemande and then a courant. And I don’t impose myself intentionally on music, so I’m not looking to reveal myself. And I would say, if you ask 100 professional musicians or strong amateurs, even maybe 3040, of them would say, I don’t impose myself on the music. And maybe 60% say, No, I need to have my stamp on this. Mozart is the genius. I am not the genius. Mozart is captivating and fascinating I am not. And so the best what I want to do as a musician is to understand what the dream of the composer was, to not necessarily convey that to an audience, but to respond to it in a way that demonstrates to an audience whoever is listening. This is what I find beautiful in this music, and maybe you’ll find some of that beautiful as well. So what I try to do is more reveal what is there. And by doing that, you’re obviously making choices. But it’s not intentional. It’s this is how I this is how I ideally. This is inevitably how this music should sound when it comes out of my hands, where there’s there’s no question. One of my favorite teachers, Hungarian George shabach, said everyone talks about seeking and seeking this and seeking that it’s not important to seek. It’s important to find. And that was kind of a smack in the face when I was in my mid 20s, like, no, no, no, we’re all we’re all on a journey. We’re all seeking. And he was very much a philosopher, and said, No, find, and that requires a lot of understanding. And I believe that an interpretation or a performance that is grounded in an understanding of style of history will be the most compelling one. And that means, to some extent, if you’re playing a Bach suite that was written in 1723 what was Bach’s intention at the time in 1723 How would it have sounded in 1723 so if I get technical and say, you have,

 

John Milbauer  34:36

you have a jig in the G major French suite, the meter is 1216, which is very strange. What does that mean in terms of how fast it goes? There are all these signals that composers give you with a tempo indication or a meter, whether it’s three, four or three, six or 3334, or three, eight or 1216, they give you all kinds of clues and musicians. To increasingly ignore those, those clues. And so what I do when something like a G major French suite is think, what is this meter in this dance? Tell me about how fast it should go. And so you end up with very different I guess interpretations is the word, but I don’t feel like I’m interpreting. I am revealing.

 

Will Bachman  35:23

Tell us a bit more about the point you were making earlier about using the actual body and what you learned through your training at Eastman at Juilliard about just the physicality of the musicianship

 

John Milbauer  35:46

that was, in many ways, the best part of my training at Eastman. I’m you can’t tell from this, but I’m tall. I’m six four. At the time, I put on some weight, but at the time, I was very thin, 150 pounds or something. And the piano was not designed for someone who’s six, four and 150 pounds. And the I had no idea what to do with the instrument, because when I was probably at my best, before that, I was maybe 510 when I was 15 years old, 16 years old, and as the body’s changing, especially as you get taller, you need to adapt to an instrument that what that really hasn’t changed height since 1750 or 1760 when average height was probably five feet tall For men and but it was many things. One was, how do you breathe? And I think because I had been very I was athletic, but I was very studious, I think my breathing was quite shallow and quite high in my chest. And this is something that singers do or win players, you have to learn how to breathe in different ways, where your chest expands, your rib cage expands. You’re using your diaphragm, diaphragm intentionally. And that’s also true of pianists, that a lot of what you do is initiated by breath. So I think I was holding my breath when I played some extent. So that was one another was my teacher at the time, who was physically, technically, the best teacher I had said, You’re like the Tin Man. Everything is stuck. I need to take an oiling can to every one of your joints. And she did. My shoulders were a disaster. I think I had gotten taller. I hadn’t adapt, adapted my technique, and so I had muscles that were really tight around my scapula, both of them on both sides. I had ribs that were not fluid and flexible, and I didn’t know how to support. In short, I was doing too much work with small muscles, those in the fingers, and really not enough with the muscles that should be doing most of the work for most musicians, which is your legs, your torso, your your your back. And that was really important. And I don’t think I could have intellectualized my way to that. It was something that I had to feel. It’s also in part, that I’m a kinesthetic learner in many ways, and to have a teacher say, No, your arm needs to move this way, or no, you need to do this with your sternum, that was something I could not do by thinking. I had to feel it, and I had to have someone manipulating me as I was playing. And it was, it was wonderful. It was one aha moment after another. Will in my early 20s, and that’s why I was like, I’m okay that I left Harvard, like I I was having such a blast learning how to play the piano. It’s okay

 

Will Bachman  39:01

Harvard, that’s not something I’d actually really thought about much before. Tell us about, like, physical conditioning for musicians. Is, is it important that musicians kind of hit the gym? And are, you know, physically fit as well as practicing for all those hours a day, but it’s also you got to be aerobically, and there’s certain amount of strength that you need to have.

 

John Milbauer  39:22

I would say it’s a combination of strength and flexibility and understanding, understanding how how your body works. When I would when I was teaching, I would ask a group of students, these were very accomplished pianists, say, How many bones are there in your forearm? And half of them thought that it was one bone. They didn’t understand. You know, that there were two, and one was sort of fixed, and one rotated around the other and but there’s such a lack of understanding of just basic physiology among some musicians that that was important. So the in terms of, like cardio, I don’t think. It’s as important. I do have friends our age, mid 50s, who have stopped playing because the hormonal stress, the cardiac stress of performing on stage, just that adrenaline. They feel like it’s not healthy, and their life Max they’re taking on the life maxing mantle, and they’re like, Nope, it’s not worth it. And these are very solid physicians who, as far as I can tell, didn’t suffer from stage fright. What is important is the fluidity and the flexibility. And I tell people, five years ago, I would say it takes me 90 minutes a day not to get worse. Now we’re up around two hours as I get older, like, what’s happening with my hips, make sure that I maintain muscle tone. What’s happening in my torso, what’s happening in my back? I started windsurfing again last summer up at Northwestern and kind of messed everything up all over again, threw everything out of balance. And I thought, This is great. I’m exercising. I’m in my mid 50s, and you know, then I end up with sciatica. So it’s not just cardio, it’s not just strength, it’s everything in balance, but I say most of all, an understanding of how your body works relative to an instrument, and understanding that your body’s going to change from year to year, and you better be able to navigate that change. That’s the main one.

 

Will Bachman  41:29

You said that in your job interview at DePaul. You compared it to Singapore in 1970 what? What would success look like for you? You know, five years from now, at DePaul, like, what, what’s your vision of the institution where you’re hoping to bring it to? That’s a great question.

 

John Milbauer  41:52

Should conservatories be doing a lot of applied training in the US, where you are preparing people to enter, say, orchestral, the orchestral world where they’re playing for symphony orchestras, I would say most should not, because that’s a very precarious life. Very limited number of schools should do that at the highest level. And DePaul is one of them, and should be a preeminent one. So if I think of you know, three to five years there are five to seven big orchestras in the country, and not all of them have a close relationship with a neighboring conservatory. We have a very nice relationship with Chicago Symphony that I am intentionally leaning into and growing. So the Training Orchestra affiliated with Chicago Symphony, which is civic orchestra of Chicago. We have, this year, we have 16 or 17 alumni and current students in civic orchestra of Chicago, and that is great. And we just had, I think, I don’t know, I can’t announce it yet, but the numbers are increasing in other instruments for next season, and that’s wonderful. There should be, there is still hunger for orchestral music. There is, there is still audience for it. And in some places, it’s growing. And so there needs to be training areas for that. And I want DePaul to be a top three in orchestral training. Another one is in we call it musical studies, crudely put, we’ll call it not performance studies, non performance Recording Arts Management is a great program at DePaul, and last year, we hired Ryan Freeland to be our director of sound recording technology. He came with six Grammys and Bonnie rate and Natalie merchant were references, and he’s fantastic. And I’m like, so ai, ai is not going to replace recording technology. Sure, this is like, there’s always going to be need for engineers in the room. Ai cannot do what needs to be done. And so that’s fantastic. So we’re already a leader in sound recording tech. I’m very competitive will and so I just want us to be the acknowledged STAR program in recording technology, and similarly, with performing arts management, and that’s not neither of these Recording Arts or performing arts management is even largely classical music, it’s all recording, it’s popular, it’s commercial, it’s country and rock and indie. Performing Arts Management, same thing. We have a great program there, and I want those to grow so that we are increasing the excellence of our classical and jazz ensembles while expanding performing arts management and sound recording technology on top of existing strengths and other programs like music education and so that we diversify our curriculum in a way conservatories are worrisome. You don’t want to be a. ZM piece fossilized, and Berkeley and Boston is a great example of a way out, you know, a path forward. But they don’t do what we do at DePaul. And there’s a real opportunity to be a diversified complex, in a Ricardo Hausman sense, diversified and complex institution of higher education in the arts that that is a leader. That’s the goal.

 

Will Bachman  45:31

John, we already chatted some about professors that had an impact on you and continue to resonate where, where can listeners find you online if they want to keep track of what you’re doing, either your performances, or about your work? Leading the DePaul school, sure.

 

John Milbauer  45:52

LinkedIn is good. John Milbauer, M, I, L, B, A, U, E, R, and I’m not. I still have a small social media presence. My job sort of demands it in some ways, but I’m stepping away from that pretty strongly. But LinkedIn, I don’t really check Facebook anymore. DePaul, School of Music, music.depaul.edu, you can see what’s happening here in terms of concerts and or just send me a message. My My email is on the DePaul website,

 

Will Bachman  46:24

amazing John. Thank you so much for joining today. Thanks for this discussion. I appreciate

 

John Milbauer  46:29

the invitation will thanks so much. You.