Bobbie Dressen  01:27

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Medical Alley Podcast. My name is Bobbie Dressen and I'm delighted to host today's episode. We're joined today by Benjamin Zander, a world renowned conductor, teacher and speaker. His book "The Art of Possibility" offers a transformative approach to personal and professional leadership, emphasizing the reimagination of challenges as opportunities, and fostering a mindset of abundance and creativity. We're thrilled to have Benjamin deliver the keynote at the 2024 Medical Alley Summit in February. Benjamin, it's wonderful to have you on the Medical Alley Podcast and to speak with you today. 

 Benjamin Zander  02:17

Thank you, good to be with you. I'm looking forward both to February when we're all together, and now speaking individually on the machines on the Zoom screen, you know is very nice also, because when you're in a room full of people, you are speaking to everybody simultaneously. And when you're on the screen like this, you're talking to each individual person on their own. And that also has a very special quality. So I've discovered the power of Zoom is very great. Even in the conveying of musical ideas and teaching, it's been incredibly valuable. I've done some of the best teaching I've ever done in COVID, which is very interesting, because you think that it will be a handicap but in fact, it's turned out to have many, many advantages, because you can see very closely into the other person and the other person feels as they're being attended to on an individual basis. So isn't that one of the beautiful things is come out of COVID? And there are many other things that come out of that horrible period in the world's experience. But I have a whole section on my web site dealing entirely with the wonderful things that happened in COVID. Isn't that strange? 

 Bobbie Dressen  03:44

No. I, I think it's right in line with with your, with your beliefs around possibility, and finding, you know, positive and abundance and creativity out of even things that others may see in an opposite fashion. So I'm not surprised by that. And I'm going to have to check that out. Let's start with you and your love for music. How did you find music? And what keeps you excited to continue this work each and every day?

 Benjamin Zander  04:19

Oh, it's amazing. I found music virtually after birth because my father was a wonderful amateur musician. And I put the emphasis on amateur because the word means lover, a lover of music. He was a true lover of music. He wasn't a professional. He was a lawyer by profession. But when he came home from the office, he would sit at the piano and play with such an ecstatic look on his face and his body would move from side to side like that. And I was about four or five and I remember saying something like,"Whatever he's having, I want." And that was, it came very early on. And then I started sitting at the piano myself and doing what he called climpering, which was just fooling around on the piano. And then gradually, I started to realize that there were sounds I could make and create that were new and mine and so I started writing them down. And sure enough, by the age of nine, I was a composer. Shortly after that I became a cellist. But music was part of my life, really, from the beginning. And we played in our family. All the children played something. My brother played the violin rather poorly, became a very great doctor. My sister played the piano and became a very great art historian. My elder brother, a great lawyer in the English legal system, and I became a musician. And so that's how it happened. But it was, it was part of the language of our life. And that comes from a very interesting tradition in Germany. My family came from Germany, my father lived in Berlin. And there was an idea amongst German Jewish people called bildung, which is culture, and it was very, very significant and important. Whatever you did during the day in order to earn money, when you came home, bildung, learning, art and music and literature. My father knew the whole second part of Goethe's Faust from memory. Imagine, that's 12,000 lines, which he knew from memory. And he knew — of course, I could never test him because how would I know? But he knew he knew Schubert songs from memory and Wolf and Goethe when he was an artlover, and he was a practical musician, a viola player, piano player, all of this. And so I grew up feeling that art was central, not peripheral to life. In other words, a natural way of human beings being in the world was through music. And that has gone on through my entire life. I'm now turning 85. And I feel just as excited at 85 as I was as a little kid, and as my father was playing. This love, this burning adoration and involvement and excitement about music never dims. And I've never found a period when I wasn't inspired and in love and engaged and excited and challenged by what I call classical music. That's the tradition of music, which we designate in that term. It doesn't mean that it leaves out jazz or popular music. On the contrary, it's all absorbed. But the great strain of classical music from the beginning from Monteverde, Palestrina, and these early composers, Vivaldi and so on, write the way through until modern times. And when I was nine, I wrote some compositions, as I said, and they were put into a competition and rejected by the adjudicator. And my mother, who was a very energetic and forceful woman, instead of being depressed and discouraged by this judge, she sent those compositions to Benjamin Britten. Now, Benjamin Britten, she didn't know Benjamin Britten, but he was the most famous composer of the day. And he called up a few days later and said to my mother, "Don't worry, your son is only nine years old. He's doing wonderfully that's fine, don't worry. And would you like to come and spend your summer holidays in the village where I live in Suffolk in Aldeburgh village where he lived. And so the whole Zander family spent three years the summer holiday in Aldeburgh. That that is a story of possibility because for my mother, the word no was an invitation for another conversation. You get a second opinion.

 Bobbie Dressen  09:19

I like it.

 Benjamin Zander  09:21

If you don't like what you hear you ask for a second opinion, so that's possibility thinking in its style, in its manner. You could say it's pushy, but she didn't feel she was pushing anything. She just wanted to inquire what is the value? 

 Bobbie Dressen  09:40

Yes. What a gift you had from both of your parents when you think about it. I mean, planting the seed and the nurturing around music, your mom being such a role model in terms of art of possibility in and of herself. I mean, that's a gift. 

 Benjamin Zander  09:54

You see, the thing about them that one should remember is that they were refugees from Nazi Germany. They came to England and they were so grateful to England and to the English people, the they couldn't see anything wrong. When my father paid his taxes, he told me "I pay every last penny of my taxes because that's the only way I can say thank you for Britain having taken us in and giving us a home and giving us safety and refuge from the Nazi scourge." So we grew up in an atmosphere of gratitude, and of recognition of the privilege that we had. Most people if they're born into a country, they take all that for granted. And they try and cheat on their taxes. But what a silly idea That's the one way you can say, now I can help you, rather than, you see, it's completely different atmosphere if you grow up in that way. I'm very grateful for them. Can I tell one little story? When I became an American citizen, I was alone with the judge and some friends. And the judge as they do when you come in to become an American, they asked, "You have to give up your previous allegiance." And I said, "Well, judge, this is a little difficult for me." And then I told the story of my father and the taxes. I said, "I cannot give up my allegiance to England." And he said, "Well, I think we'll have a special case. We'll add it on." There was a lot of humor, also. My father love to make humorous remarks. And the last remark he made, the last thing he said, he was 96, blind, and completely invalid. And my brother was his doctor My brother, Luke, he knocked on the door. He was blind, so he couldn't tell. My brother said, "Dad, it's Luke." And my father said, "Is there anything I can do to help?" That was the last thing he said. He died immediately. 

 Bobbie Dressen  12:19

Oh, my goodness. Always caring for others. 

 Benjamin Zander  12:24

Beautiful relationship to the world. He knew he wasn't doing well. He didn't think he had long. He didn't, I suppose real. But he my brother said he was his shoulders were kind of shaking with laughter as he said that, because he knew it was funny. He somehow had a wonderful way of always making — and another thing he used to say, which was so beautiful and I've used it more and more as I got older, which is it's too early to judge, he would say. And whatever the circumstances, it's too early to judge. And he apparently got that quotation from I think it was Chiang Kai Shek was asked about the implications of the French Revolution. And he thought for a moment, he said, "It's much too early to judge." So when my father was about 94, I said, "Dad, you're 94." He said, "Still too early to judge. Much too early." If you grow up in that atmosphere, it's charming. It's amusing. It's light. And at the same time, it is serious. It was very, very serious. It was a wonderful atmosphere to grow up in. 

 Bobbie Dressen  13:45

Well and you have you have great responsibility in your role with the Boston Philharmonic. What is this role or that you're doing taught you? What what's been your greatest takeaway from it? 

 Benjamin Zander  13:56

Well, actually, that's, of course, what I'm going to talk about when I come to speak in February. Because what I learned was the most profound lessons of leadership, which you can find anywhere in the world. And I will reveal that, but I'll give you a little glimpse, which is that the conductor, everybody makes a lot of fuss about the conductor, the maestro, right? He's very important, very grand fellow standing on his stand. But actually, the conductor doesn't make a sound. Not a sound comes out of the conductor. He gets his power from his ability to make other people powerful. I've said that phrase so many times. When it hit me, I think at the age of 45, it suddenly turned everything around because now I realized that my job was to awaken possibility in other people. So that changes what leadership is about instead of domination and forcing them to obey your will and to have control, you're putting all your attention on eliciting, on bringing out the power that is in the players. And when you realize as a conductor that the instrument you have, these 100 musicians, all of whom have been highly trained and have worked their lives to bring their art to the culmination, until you release that power, it's nothing. There's no capacity for that orchestra to function until the conductor opens the door of that energy and that power and that imagination and the spontaneity of the training and all of that. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing to be doing. It's a very invigorating thing to do. And it's very empowering for the people who are being led, because they are asked to give everything they have to give. And as a model for any kind of relationship, even a relationship between a husband and a wife, or a father and son, or between a coach and a football player, whatever it is, that relationship flourishes if the coach or the leader understands that it's not his or her power, but rather the power of the people being led. And that is essentially the idea which I'm going to bring in February. And I'll do it in a very elaborate way so that not only people understand it intellectually as an idea, which you I can tell, even through your glasses, your eyes are shining bright. But that you can go away and do that in your own life, because otherwise it's meaningless. Otherwise, you're sitting in a speech, and you go home and it's exactly the same. I want everybody to go home with a completely different attitude to every aspect of their life. If I don't do that, I'm wasting their time and mine. 

 Bobbie Dressen  17:03

I am expecting you will accomplish that just based on our conversation today.

 Benjamin Zander  17:09

I have the most wonderful time doing this type, done it a great deal all over the world, in hundreds of different places. And I never fail to have the best time. I just love to do it. And my reward is the shining eyes of the people in the audience. 

 Bobbie Dressen  17:29

So if I were to ask you, what's your favorite part of that it's watching for shining eyes, or is there another piece within that that's your favorite? 

 Benjamin Zander  17:36

Well, the shining eyes, the shining eyes is the window into the soul. You can't lie with your eyes. So my reward, when I say my reward, most people think of rewards being in terms of wealth, or fame or power, all the things that people strive for. When I say my only reward or the only one that I care about is the shining eyes, what I'm saying is I know that those eyes are the window into a transformation, which is occurred in that person that will translate into a different relationship to the world, to work, to failure, to every aspect of life. And that gives me an immense satisfaction. And you could imagine what that does for me, knowing a little bit like a priest or a vicar, I see what effect that has on people. And I know that it does. And the satisfaction of seeing their eyes shining and the warm response and applause and love and singing and all that we do in this wonderful hour and 45 minutes or whatever we're together. It's immensely satisfying. And it never fails, never fails. Possibility never fails. 

 Bobbie Dressen  19:09

That's good to know. Has there been a point in your life when you've had failure? And could you share a moment how you learned from that experience? 

 Benjamin Zander  19:19

Oh, daily, daily, absolutely daily, if not hourly.

 Bobbie Dressen  19:25

I run close to you there.

 Benjamin Zander  19:30

Yes, it's very simple. Failure is the most natural and inevitable part of life. The thing is what you do with it now, not the fact that you have it. And what I teach my students when they make a mistake, I say when you make a mistake, instead of the usual response of pulling down is how fascinating. And I'm giving away some of the best things about the talk. That is one of the great discoveries that, first of all, when we make a mistake, we usually pull everything down, tension, anxiety, pressure, and that makes him more likely that you'll make another mistake. So by raising the hands like that, I mean, it's a silly gesture, and you can't do it in the middle of a concert. Although once I taught that to a youth orchestra, and one of the trumpet players made a huge, because the trouble with the trumpet, if you make a mistake, everybody can hear. 2000 people in the audience, and this trumpeter went like this.

 Bobbie Dressen  20:44

So he dropped his trumpet then?

 Benjamin Zander  20:45

That was as far as he could do. But all my students, all my players know how fascinating. And the result is an atmosphere of ease of confidence, and above all, of risk taking, because you know you're not going to get into trouble if you make a mistake. But that the person who has given you permission, not only to make a mistake but to take the risk, and if you make a mistake, not to blame you, punish you or otherwise seek retribution, then people first of all, they relax, so they're less likely to make mistakes. But also, they recover quickly and are less likely, because they don't waste time blaming themselves or blaming the conductor or blaming their colleagues or blaming anybody. They say, "Oh, I made a mistake. What did I learn? On we go. 

 Bobbie Dressen  21:46

That's good. When you think about your classical music fans listening, I'm going to totally switch gears because I'm thinking about music now. Do you have a favorite piece in terms of your own music? 

 Benjamin Zander  22:00

Well, that's a wonderful question. And in a way, if I may say, so a silly question. It's wonderful because it draws attention to the pieces that one has grown to love and admire and return to constantly. And there are many, many such pieces. To choose one is like asking a parent to choose their favorite child, which very few parents are willing to admit to. However, if you ask the question in a slightly different way and said, which piece would you conduct if you only had one concert left? Then I can give you an answer. And that would be the Symphony #9 by Gustav Mahler. And if anybody's interested in knowing why, go on my website, and I recommend that for everybody, because it's a playground for music. It's benjaminzander.org. And there you will find yes, a playground of music and possibility and explanations. I say everybody loves classical music, they just haven't found out about it yet. So my website is designed to having people find out about classical music. And there's one whole section on Gustaf Mahler, because that's the composer that I've devoted, with Beethoven, as the two most important composers for me and my life and career. And there, spending a little time there and getting to know for instance, there's a recording of the Ninth Symphony of Gustav Mahler made by my youth orchestra also, professional recording by the Philharmonia which was nominated for Grammy. I mean, it's wonderful, world class. But there's also one by my youth orchestra. And this is an orchestra of 12 to 21 year olds, and you might as how on earth could such young people play a performance which got spectacular reviews for music critics everywhere, reveal the truth and depth of a piece like Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 9, which is one of the greatest expressions of humanity and experience known in the entire repertoire of art. How is that possible? Well, I've spent a little time on my website, and you will discover that there the answer to that. So without being forced to say my favorite piece, because I would have to include something by Schubert, because Schubert is such a deep and fantastic, I mean, of impromptus of the piano of Schubert or the Schubert two cello quintet. I mean, these are works of such stupendous majesty and greatness, that how could they not be your favorite? But then there's also the Mass in B Minor by Bach, and there's the ninth symphony by Beethoven. And it just goes on and on and on about 100 favorite pieces. And I never get tired of them because you always, always discover more things. It's amazing. This is the difference between classical music and popular music, which is popular music makes an instantaneous, wonderful impact, physically dancing, generates energy and gets young people out of puberty alive. The classical music world is an endless search for truth and beauty. And you never get there. There is no way of getting to the bottom or to the essence of a Beethoven led string quartet or a Mozart piano concerto. I mean, these are works of such stupendous complexity and richness, or let alone an opera like Don Giovanni or Marriage of Figaro. Incidentally, on my website, there's a coaching I do of a young soprano from Marriage of Figaro of Mozart, you can look it up. There's a search for Marriage of Figaro. Susanna's aria, "Deh vieni, non tardar." That's the name of the aria. And I take a young soprano who is singing that and I work with in great depth in order to bring out all the richness and irony and sarcasm and brilliance and humor and tenderness and love in that music. And by the end, half an hour later, she's singing on a completely different level. You can hardly believe how the change. But what what the miracle is, the music that Mozart wrote in order to bring that. I mean, if you do that we just get completely awed by genius of that kind. I mean, it's just, there's nothing to compare with it. And so that's our privilege as lovers of classical music to spend our lives in, I mean, it's like living in the celestial firmament, surrounded by stars, imagine. 

 Bobbie Dressen  27:35

Well, you know, so as we close, that's one of the things and I think I hear you somewhat describing it. When we think about, you know, what keeps you motivated and excited about the work you're doing, I'm hearing some of it in you in terms of the creation, pulling things out of people. But are there other elements of that, that you reflect upon? 

 Benjamin Zander  27:55

You know, there's so many ways of answering your wonderful questions. To me at the heart of all of this is enthusiasm because the word enthusiasm is very beautiful word because "theo" in the middle of "enthusiasm", the word theo means God. Now you don't have to be a believer to know about God, right? And so the essence of enthusiasm is to be alive to possibility, alive to energy, to life, to what some people refer to as God. And I have another word for it, which is possibility. It serves just as well. And I won't be satisfied till when you go to a hotel, and you open the drawer, 

 Bobbie Dressen  28:51

That you find your book.

 Benjamin Zander  28:53

Two books.

 Bobbie Dressen  28:55

Okay. That would be a new success. Benjamin, thank you. Thank you so much for your time and insight, and we can hardly wait to have you join us in February here in Minneapolis at the Summit. Is there any closing remarks you have for us? 

 Benjamin Zander  29:20

You know, about Minneapolis, very interesting because Boston, where I live, is one of the great musical centers in America. And Minneapolis is another, and I'm proud to be part of the young training of young musicians in Boston in the many I've conduct one of the youth orchestras that there are several and Minneapolis is the other city which has a vibrant, incredibly rich musical life, with St. Paul, together with the Chamber Orchestra. It's one of the richest places in America for classical music. So when I come there, I feel as though I'm coming home. 

 Bobbie Dressen  30:00

Oh, well, that's nice to know. Yeah. I mean, I, we do have a lot of even our universities, right, so dedicated to it. Just down, you know, Northfield with St. Olaf College. And and so both our private schools as well as our universities are enriched with and believe in music.

 Benjamin Zander  30:20

A rich territory. So I'm not looking forward to the cold weather in February. But I think we'll stay underground when we're walking from building to building.

 Bobbie Dressen  30:33

You know, here's the deal, we can get you straight from the airport to the Four Seasons, the event's in the Four Seasons. So unless you choose to venture out from there, we may have to, you know, if you want to go down to Orchestra Hall or the like, we will have to drive you there.

 Benjamin Zander  30:50

Thank you. It's been a pleasure. And I look forward to — thank you for your wonderful questions and your own enthusiasm and your own openness to possibility. That is a huge secret of leadership, to be open to other people's possibility. That's a great gift you give to the people who you interview because it's a pleasure to talk with you. 

 Bobbie Dressen  31:17

Oh, thank you. You're very kind. Thank you very much. 

 Benjamin Zander  31:21

Dostoevsky, the great Russian novelist, apparently said, with an intelligent person, even conversation is a pleasure.

 Bobbie Dressen  31:33

I'm going to have to reflect on that one.

 Benjamin Zander  31:37

We began with laughter and we're ending with laughter. 

 Bobbie Dressen  31:40

Yes, we are in credit to your father. Thank you so much. Bye. Good to see you and have a wonderful start to your new year. And enjoy the rest of the season of light and we will see you in February. 

 Benjamin Zander  31:57

Bye bye. 

 Bobbie Dressen  31:59

If you or your company is a 2024 Medical Alley partner, registration for our summit is still open. Only a few seats remain. To register, head over to medicalalley.org/events. Thank you to everyone for listening. This has been another episode of the Medical Alley Podcast. If you're not already a subscriber, you can find every episode at medicalalley.org. You can also find us on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get your podcasts. I'm Bobbie Dressen. Have a wonderful day.