Hunter Noack: Grand Piano & Grander Landscapes
With his innovative "In a Landscape" series, pianist Hunter Noack hauls a concert-quality Steinway to remote locations, inviting audiences to wander through nature while intimate piano sounds fill their wireless headphones.
Today, the Spotlight shines On naturalist and classical pianist Hunter Noack.
Redefining what a concert hall can be, Hunter Noack hauls a nine-foot Steinway grand piano to mountaintops, forests, and beaches for his series "In a Landscape: Classical Music in the Wild."
Hunter grew up in Central Oregon, where his love for music and nature took root. His concert series gives audiences wireless headphones and encourages them to wander through stunning settings while the music plays. It's part performance, part exploration—turning national parks and historic sites into living concert venues.
Since founding the series in 2016, Hunter's brought classical music to over 75,000 people across the American West, many experiencing live classical music for the first time. He's performed in sun, snow, and everything in between—all to break down barriers between listener, music, and landscape.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Hunter Noack's album In a Landscape)
Dig Deeper
• Purchase Hunter Noack's In a Landscape from Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Follow Hunter Noack on Facebook and In a Landscape on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube
• Hunter Noack's 'In a Landscape' | Bringing Music — And Ourselves — Back to Nature
• Beloved scenic outdoor concert series announces 2025 tour dates for 10th anniversary
• Pink Martini
• Portland Institute for Contemporary Art - PICA
• Afghan Women's Writing Project
• Thomas Lauderdale Is as Well Connected to Old Portland as Any Cultural Figure in the State
• Yuval Sharon - The Industry
• Invisible Cities: The Choreography of Union Station
• In The 1930s, Works Program Spelled HOPE For Millions Of Jobless Americans
• Vista House in the Columbia River Gorge
• Frederic Rzewski - "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues"
• Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation
• The Alvord Desert - Travel Oregon
• 'There's no such thing as silence': What is the point of John Cage's 4'33"?
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I am super curious about your early years in central Oregon and really the genesis of the relationship for you between the outdoors and music.
Hunter Noack: I grew up in central Oregon in a small town of Sun River, and both of my parents are very active outdoors. My dad's a hunter and a fisherman and golfer, and so growing up, most of the time spent after school was either at the piano or outside.
I became really familiar with spending time outside. I spent a lot of time outside alone. Then in college, I started spending less time in the great outdoors, and my trips outside were limited. I had to be very focused about getting outside because I was in San Francisco and London and Los Angeles, so I'd go on the occasional hunting trip with my dad or a backpacking trip, but it wasn't as much a part of my daily routine or weekly routine or anything.
When I moved back to Oregon after school, I was spending more time back outside and I just thought, I really want to be outside more often. I want to be camping, I want to be by a fire, I want to hear the birds. There wasn't really any kind of aha moment when I was a child where I felt a connection with being outside. It was just more of a familiarity that when I grew older, I realized that I was missing.
Lawrence: Tell me about going to Interlochen. That seems like such a big thing, right? It's across the country, which I'm sure at that age could be across the world for how far away it is, also a very beautiful part of the country. Were you able to maintain your sort of love affair with being outside during that period or were the studies too intense? Tell me about that part of your life.
Hunter: I went when I was 14. I was desperately homesick. Both my parents and I decided together that I would go and I really went to focus on music and to be around other students that were my age that were better than me.
The Interlochen campus is in the forest set between two lakes, so even going between the dormitories and the classrooms, you're walking outside. I loved to go on runs, so I did spend a lot of time outside, even though the studying and the training was really intense.
Lawrence: After all of your studies and the various institutions that you attended and studied at, it doesn't seem obvious to me that after all that training you'd go back to Oregon. What drew you back?
Hunter: My plan was not to come back to Oregon. I had applied for a work visa to stay in London and I had started a production company and was really interested in the intersection of classical music and theater.
I love going to immersive theater plays, and when I was in my final year of school in London, I won an award to produce this show that was a dramatic presentation of a classical music piece by Arnold Sternberg that was based on a poem. I loved directing, I loved going down that more dramatic path.
Most of my friends are actors, and even in undergrad in Los Angeles, it was the actors that seemed to be pushing boundaries. They were performing in abandoned warehouses. I love my classical music colleagues, but there was more of a focus on competition, and in classical music there wasn't as much creativity in terms of the expression of the art and the performance of the art.
Lawrence: I get that.
Hunter: London was incredibly inspiring because the quality of art and performance art was so high, and so I really wanted to stay there. I had got this artist visa to stay and live and work there. But while I was waiting for the paperwork, I came back to the US and essentially started being in a relationship and thinking, so I stayed. That's what brought me to support.
Lawrence: It's a time-worn tale. (laughter) That's beautiful though.
Hunter: When I look back on it, starting this kind of project in Portland actually, I think it's the best case scenario because in London there's so much happening, so many people are creating new things constantly.
And in Portland it's just much smaller and it's a very enthusiastic and very supportive place to experiment. I remember going to the time-based art festival run by PICA the first few weeks I was in Portland. The quality was all over the place, but people were showing up and they were applauding and they were giving feedback and it was like a workshop conference kind of energy. There was just a lot of support. And so for me to try not only as a landscape in which to try something new, but also in a community that's small enough where doing something different gets people's attention. And I was also able to retain attention year over year because the pool of people experimenting in this kind of world is much smaller.
Lawrence: Hearing you talk about it, it reminds me a lot of some of the other great fertile scenes where maybe the classical tradition meets the jazz tradition and there's an avant-garde dance component and there's somebody else playing in video and visuals or multimedia, and you get these opportunities to experiment with presentation that aren't necessarily available to kind of what you were saying before, like classical music in a lot of regards doesn't necessarily innovate with presentation. There's sort of a path if you're going to be an elite musician. So with all that context, how did you arrive at the "In a Landscape" concept? Did this one have a light bulb moment?
Hunter: There were a few light bulb moments. My mother, Lori, has been—both of my parents and also my stepfather have been really involved and supportive my whole life. And especially my mom, she's a nonprofit professional, ran different music festivals and Afghan Women's Writers Project. And she was really very helpful, not just in developing the early idea, but in helping write grants, which in hand, further refined and sculpted these ideas.
"In a Landscape" wasn't the first iteration, but we were actually working, she was helping me with a grant proposal in London. It was like four in the morning. The deadline was the next day for this project, and she had, it was actually her idea. She said, "You know what? If you could just put a piano on a trailer and then you could go anywhere." That idea had nothing really to do with a project that we were working on. But that night I couldn't sleep and that idea stuck with me. And so it wasn't until about 10 months later that I was back in Oregon. My partner Thomas Lauderdale, is on several different arts organization boards, and it's through him that I learned about this grant opportunity for individual artists.
Another inspiration point at that time was Yuval Sharon down in Los Angeles. He is the director of an opera company that does these kind of immersive theater productions called The Industry. And they had done a show called "Invisible Cities" at Union Station, where they had musicians and singers and dancers in Union Station while it was open. But they were in different areas, so the musicians were over kind of in one area, and the singers would traverse through the station. And the audience was given wireless headphones so they could follow whatever character in the theater that they wanted to follow. But all the while they had this concert hall quality sound, and that was the first time I had heard of a classical kind of format production really having the sound that was not just acceptable in an alternative setting, but really great, because there's so much time and money spent on the acoustics of a great hall, and that really makes that, it's so much a part of the performance of classical, or unamplified music.
And when you translate that to amplification, oftentimes there's the number of people that have that optimal sound is many fewer. And so with the headphones, you were really able to control the quality of sound for everyone in the audience and I loved that potential. Also, just being in Oregon, I was spending time in the Columbia River Gorge in these landscapes that just by being in them, I felt so inspired.
So the first kind of inspiration for this project was to take the music that most inspires me into the landscapes that most inspire me. And here because of the industry, they had demonstrated a technology that could help bring those things together in a way that wasn't possible before. And so that was really a very important thing to be aware of.
Hunter: I had heard about the WPA, the Works Progress Administration, Great Depression of the 1930s. It was a government stimulus plan that put millions of Americans back to work. And what I knew about the WPA was projects like Timberline Lodge up on Mount Hood in Oregon, where you had skilled and unskilled workers coming together to create lasting beautiful structures. There were countless post offices and recreational, beautiful lodges, also trails. But what I didn't know about the WPA was the extent that it reached into the arts. There was a federal music and theater and writers project that really kept a lot of arts organizations afloat throughout the Depression, and it employed directly individual artists.
The two things that kind of resonated with me about the WPA was that with a government stimulus program, the arts were a big part of that, and I think that signaled to the American people the arts are as important to the overall health of our society and our economy as things like roads and post offices. And the other thing is that they presented a lot of plays and concerts outdoors in parks, in what I believe are our most democratic spaces, which are our public lands. And so that was kind of the spirit with which I wanted to, I wanted the vibe to be about the good of the people, about championing, celebrating these incredible spaces that belong to all of us, that we all have access to.
Taking the music that so many people feel like classical music for a lot of people doesn't necessarily feel like there's a way in, I don't know that I knew how well they would work together at the beginning, but I wanted to be outside more.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Hunter: That's kind of the landscape in my mind that I had going into writing those first grants.
Lawrence: That's all super helpful. Thank you. You foreshadowed a lot of the other questions and paths I'd like to go down, but one of the things I'm gonna actually grab onto out of sequence, because I didn't quite realize the important role that the wireless headphones played in terms of just realizing this, the vision could become a reality.
I was thinking of it more about the freedom of movement it gives the patrons or the attendees, and that alone is fascinating, right? There's such a unique way to be able to experience music having, as a lover of live performance of different types of entertainment or art, become so used to the mindset of grabbing a spot or having a seat, or being assigned. Seldom do you think about the ability to roam around without sacrificing the experience. It's one thing, it's like, "Oh, I have to get something to eat or drink or use the bathroom. Oh, I'm gonna miss something." This is really a beautiful, it's a beautiful—I was gonna say small thing, but profound aspect of the experience. I love it.
Hunter: I think it's surprising how different it makes the experience. I think a lot of people, myself included, were skeptical at the beginning. People say often, "I would love to be here, but I don't wanna have the headphones." And we usually say, "Well, just hang on to them in case."
And part of the thing that happens during the show is I talk between each piece and you can really hear the piano acoustically wherever you are, but it's really difficult to hear me talk if you don't have your headphones on. In my talking, what I try to do is set up the music a little bit. There will be certain pieces that I think are especially good for wandering through the landscape. And so I'll encourage people to get up for certain pieces or if there's a body of water nearby that they can stick their toes into. I might play a piece by Debussy called "Reflections in the Water" and ask them to get in the water and watch the light dance through the water.
Hunter: There are other pieces where I want people to kind of feel the resonance, like the physical resonance of the piano. And so I'll invite them up onto the stage to lie underneath the piano. Whether it's giving physical direction or giving some sort of historical context about the piece or my own interpretive story or relationship with the sounds. All of that that I'm saying gives people some sort of context and a way into the music. And then with the headphones, you would think that it might be isolating. What I feel like happens is because the microphones are right inside the piano and when I'm talking, basically, it's like everybody's ears are right next to me.
Lawrence: It's like a close-miked recording.
Hunter: Yeah. And everybody's sharing this experience, and so even when I see someone way off in the distance that's wandering around, I feel actually very close to them. And one thing that I have heard happens often out when people are exploring the landscape is they can connect and make eyes with each other. There's a feeling of connection without having—almost because of the shared experience of the headphones.
And then on top of that, these magical things happen that nobody could possibly create in a theater. I'll play some sort of swooping gesture and then a flock of geese will fly by or a beam of light will come out, or it'll be a storm and then the rainbow, the sun shines, and then there's a giant rainbow. And there are these things that we all then get to experience in the landscape together, witnessing this magic all of us simultaneously, which also has this incredible power to feel like it's bonding. It's bonding. I feel like I'm a part of it with everybody else. That can happen in a concert hall and in a playhouse, but this is just a different, it's a different and surprising thing that the headphones facilitate that connection.
Lawrence: I totally get it. It makes total sense to me, like even the process of going from initial resistance or skepticism to being completely spellbound by it. I, that seems to make sense. Something I'm curious about, which you allude to in what you were just saying, is the sort of interaction, if you will, with the environment. I was also curious about the—I don't wanna say the negative side of that, but there's an unpredictable nature that could break really nicely, but I can imagine there's also some opportunity for weather. I don't know, I can only imagine the different conditions you find yourself in. What's that like for you? I mean, it's one thing to say, "Oh, I'm returning to such and such concert hall. I come through here every three years. I know what it's gonna be like," versus, "Wow, what's gonna happen here?" How do you deal with that as an artist as well as somebody who wants to sort of—for lack of a better way to say, and please forgive me—provide entertainment and control what you're presenting. How do you wrangle that?
Hunter: It's a good question and it is really hard sometimes. One thing I noticed a lot before I started this project is that in a concert hall, everything is very controlled and it's very predictable. You know roughly what the temperature's gonna be, you know what the piano's gonna be like. You know the audience is for the most part going to be quiet and attentive.
Hunter: What that did for me is it created a lot of anxiety. So I often had memory troubles. I would just get like my hands, it felt often like they were somebody else's hands. I would just get so debilitatingly nervous in a concert hall. And then when I started performing outside, sometimes—like the very first concert was at Vista House in the Columbia River Gorge. It was like 101 degrees at the third piece. This group of Harley Davidson riders, there were probably 60 motorbikers that came and they did this circle around Vista House and I was playing and there were maybe a hundred people crowded around, looking out over the gorge. And it was this first, I was like, "What do I do?" There's all of this rumbling noise and I'm here playing my little forest scenes.
And so I stop playing. I had learned this piece by the American composer, Frederick Rzewski, which imitates the sound of a cotton mill. It starts at the bass and I rumble and I play blocks of notes with my arms and elbows, and it's like this thunderous symphony of sound. And so I started playing that and it was like competing and in conversation in a way with the noise of the landscape. And they did a circle and then they went on, but it was the first time I'd ever changed what I was playing because of the environment. And since then, that happens all the time where it's like—well, there are concerts where I've played in the moonlight in Big Sky Montana in the winter in negative two degrees. There are concerts where a storm comes and there's lightning and thunder, so we put up a tent and everybody gathers, huddles in the rain around the piano and it's chaotic.
But sometimes when the environment is less perfect, my focus is actually sharper because I have to try harder to communicate what the music is trying to say. There's less space for me to get in my own way. That kind of exercise of sometimes pushing against—sometimes being outside is not the piano's natural habitat, but then when it's a perfect day and it's 76 degrees and there's a little bit of a breeze and there are birds and it's still, then when there's no resistance, the music has this—I no longer have the kind of nervous, self-critical voice in my head obstructing the expression of the music.
Lawrence: I get that.
Hunter: And so now kind of, I feel like either way, whether it's difficult or whether it's easy in the environment, I feel it's much more spacious. There's a lot more room for me to just let the music be expressed.
Lawrence: A trite question given what you just articulated, but do you travel with your own piano and tuner, or is there an advanced team that arranges a piano and a tuner, and by the way, 101 degrees or two degrees below—how the hell do you keep the piano in tune? (laughter)
Hunter: When we first started this, a lot of people suggested that I use a keyboard or I use a smaller piano because it would be easier to bring all over the place. I really felt it was important to have the best piano in the world, to have the same piano that's in Carnegie Hall, be out in these inspiring landscapes that absolutely deserve the best. They deserve better.
Hunter: The first year we rented Steinways and we did just nine locations around Portland. But then the next year I wanted to bring it all over Oregon, to the Alvord Desert, which is basically kind of like a Burning Man style dry lake bed. To the top of Mt. Bachelor, the local Steinway dealer, which was incredibly supportive of the project, they were like, "Hunter, that's, we love that for you, but we just can't. It's too expensive and we can't take on that liability."
I'd become friends with this incredible businessman and philanthropist, Jordan Schnitzer. He had helped buying the headphones the very first year. We were talking about kind of the importance of piano, not just like the sound of the piano, but the theater of it. Like seeing this nine-foot concert grand Steinway in these majestic settings—that in and of itself is enough to get people curious enough to take a chance on a classical piano recital.
Lawrence: So you're bringing a Steinway with you?
Hunter: He bought the piano that we still use, it's a 1912 nine-foot Steinway Model D concert grand. It's been totally restored and it's an incredible instrument and we, the very first year that we used this, which was 2017, we had to figure out how to move this thousand-pound instrument that usually takes three very strong people to tip it on its side, remove the legs, put into a box truck and in and out, and that process costs between six and $1,200 for every time you move it.
So we developed a way to transport the piano, which is on its belly. We take off the legs, we can lift up the—I can set up the piano myself because it's all, now I have sort of a hydraulic lift, but the very first time we, I bought, I just went on Uline and bought some hydraulic lifts and put them under the piano and tried it out and it worked. And so we put it on a trailer and it's, we're still essentially using the same system that we developed back in 2017.
A couple years ago, we played a show in New York at Baryshnikov Arts Center, and Steinway brought out a brand new, one of their very shiny, fancy, brand new Steinway Spirios. And we were talking to the lead technician about how we move it, and he actually said, "This is better for the piano because you're not tipping it up on its side." And there's also now the carbon fiber and synthetic parts that we can install inside the action of the piano, which make it a little bit more resilient to dramatic changes in temperature and humidity.
And then there's the trim of the body which is three and a half inches thick. Pianists in the early part of the last century, they would travel with their own instruments much more frequently.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Hunter: So they're really built like tanks and they're incredibly resilient. We have a piano technician work on the piano for usually 90 minutes before every concert, so it's all tuned up and dialed in and concert hall ready. By the end of the concert, it's usually out of tune a little bit, but it's totally worth it.
Lawrence: I mean, everything you've just said a hundred percent, like having the majesty of the piano seems to be a key component. And I'm very familiar with some of the places you're playing on the upcoming tour, I live just outside of Seattle. And so some of the places on the itinerary, I don't know if you've been to them all already, but you're playing in some incredible—like within 30 miles of me, you're playing four or five shows and they're all in beautiful settings and diverse settings. You're gonna be up in the mountains, you're gonna be on the coast. It's really incredible when I think about the places you're gonna be. How do you scout? 'Cause you are playing in places that, at least from my perspective, I don't see a lot of gigs get posted there. Do you have an advanced team? Are you doing this all site unseen? How can you talk about the logistics a little?
Hunter: From the beginning the way that we choose where to play is not formulaic. I do all the scouting. I physically go to all of the places. But to get to that point, a lot of it is word of mouth. "Oh, you should check out this ranch. You should check out this park." I do a lot of preliminary scouting on Google Earth.
When I started, I really wanted to be focused on public lands, but then my interest expanded into natural resource management and working landscapes. This project has been a fascinating way to learn about forest management practices in the Pacific Northwest. So we work with a lot of organizations on both ends of the spectrum. We work with a lot of conservation groups and land trusts. We also work with industry leaders like Stimson Lumber.
We played at one of their logging mills in the lumber yard. We worked with Greenwood Resources performing in a managed Timberland about eight miles up a logging road. At that concert, people were able to drive through the kind of patchwork of forest, seeing the 48-year clear cuts, then going up to the top of this mountainous region, looking down over the ocean, and during the concert, being able to walk through a 15 or 20-year-old stand and see what that forest looks like.
Having a concert in that setting puts people in a state of mind that's a little bit more open and curious instead of what can often be met with—it's just a different state of mind, and my hope is that by choosing landscapes that are not predictable, that we all can learn something more about how everything works together.
And so a lot of the selection just comes from my own personal interest. And then it's a whittling down process. This year we started with about 360 potential venues, and we knew we had to whittle that down to about 40-50 venues. And so it comes down to scheduling money, ticket sales. But we try to have a combination of places that are like out there, adventures, places like the Alvord Desert, which is—no matter where you're coming from, it's this magical, very rural, remote part of Oregon. And it's a certain kind of adventure. But then we also do concerts in urban green spaces, so having the mix of the adventures—we do some resorts, that means that there's kind of something for everybody and it also for the six of us that are traveling on the road, it also provides some interesting variety, some places that are quite comfortable and others that are much more of a challenge.
Lawrence: Yeah, and I would imagine the economics must change as well. Like there have to be some dates that are, just practically speaking, you need a reasonably good payday or you need a place to get from point A to point B because the distances are too wide or what have you. I get that from that perspective. I was going to—it was funny because as you were speaking, I was thinking about places I would love to see this and I would, and so rather than do that to you, because I would imagine everybody does, what I was going to ask you then is do people do that to you all the time? I would imagine you get bombarded with people saying, "Oh, did you ever think of such and such place?" Or, "Why don't you play here or there?"
Hunter: Yes. But I love that. I would love to hear, that's how I learned about places that we should go. That's 80% of what determines what happens in the next season—getting great recommendations of places to go. So yes, fire away.
Lawrence: I was thinking Devil's Tower. Maybe you've already played there. I'm sorry for my ignorance, but I was thinking Devil's Tower, we have a really good campground at the base of the tower. So there's a place. But anyway, that's my first one's free.
Hunter: Amazing. I'll take it.
Lawrence: So hearing you articulate the types of places you play, though, it strikes me as—okay, so now you have a list of potential places, you've done your preliminary Google Earth looking. You must be dealing with people. You have to make phone calls, everything from like the local parks department on up to corporate, I don't know, events and communications people and everything in between. I would imagine that when you first reach out, some folks are like, "You wanna do what? Where? What?" Some of these places, you must have to be committed to pulling it off or teaching the people how to do it. Because I would imagine a lot, just looking at the itinerary, I see places and I'm like, how do they even know how to have a public event or a ticketed event?
Hunter: Sometimes it does take some convincing. One of the reasons that we are able—I'll say a couple things. One is that we don't need any infrastructure to present a concert. We bring absolutely everything that we need. All of our equipment is off-grid, solar power, our footprint is the size of a trailer.
Lawrence: Ah,
Hunter: It's very different. It's the reason that we're allowed—we're the only musical event that's been allowed in Yosemite Valley, in Joshua Tree. It's such a light touch production, and there's no amplified sound, so it works in very environmentally sensitive landscapes. Sometimes, just logistically like that concert up the logging road, we had to arrange for shuttles to bring people up. But for the company that managed those Timberlands, that shuttle is an opportunity to talk with the audience. And so they have those eight miles. They arrange the shuttle and they then have a captive audience to talk about their own practices. That's like a learning opportunity and something that they have a reason to help facilitate.
Lawrence: Wow.
Hunter: Zooming out, I think that one of the most beautiful things about this project that I didn't know going in was, like you said, there's so many different kinds of people that we interact with. There's the private ranches that host us and getting to know them over years then builds a relationship and trust, not just with me and our crew, but also with the community of people that comes to the concert year over year.
At every concert, about half of the audience is local and half of the audience travels more than 50 miles to attend. And especially these days when there is a disconnect between often the people that are living in more urban areas versus more rural areas, these concerts are places where there is a lot of mingling and mixing with people that otherwise wouldn't be spending time together.
And because the premise is so inclusive and the focus of the project is on an appreciation of the music, but mostly on the land and the stewards of the land, whether that's a public park or a private ranch. And so you're putting all of these people kind of into a space of gratitude when they're showing up. And so the conversations and the way that people interact with each other is kind of inherently more open. So that's one of the most beautiful things is just seeing people at a concert talk to each other.
And we've been denied. People have said, no, we don't—I mean, before CBS wrote a story about us and there really wasn't a lot to show for the project online, people would say, "There was one organization that said classical music has no place here." I was like, I had got a grant basically to go to this community and they were like, "No, please don't come." So I went to a board meeting and I gave a pitch and I was trying really hard to kind of even bend the program to change what I was going to play in the concert, to be a part of the story of what their historical society was about.
And so sometimes it does take a little bit of time or money to get people on board. But then I think when people come and they see that it's actually, it's not a rock concert, the audience is generally just so respectful and grateful. It doesn't have a lot of—I think there's a lot of fear with the unknown. And when you say concert, there's a lot of red flags about trash and noise, but then when you come to a concert you realize it's pretty mellow. It really brings people kind of on board.
Lawrence: I know our time together is starting to wind down, but I wanted to ask you a little bit about the actual program that you present and I love what you were saying earlier about adjusting to the conditions and to that sort of serendipity or almost improvisational element of what you have to pull from your own knowledge and repertoire.
I'm gonna make some assumptions inherent in this question, so please disabuse me if need be. But I would imagine, in some of these communities, some of these locations, you're not necessarily playing to the same crowd that shows up at the local symphony to hear the canon that the subscribers are used to paying for. You're getting either a new audience or maybe an adventurous audience, however we could describe them. But I would think that they contrast to the typical classical music goer. How do you think about crafting the program for them? That's question one. And then I also had a related question. I'm curious about what role, if any, American composers play in your repertoire? Just because some of the—I think of like Copland or, just is there a role for that music in what you do?
Hunter: Yes. There's definitely a role for that. I'll try to address the first question, which is about our audience and how I choose music based on our audience.
You assume correctly it is not your typical symphony crowd. For about one-third of our audience, this experience is their very first time with live classical music. So there are a lot of first-time listeners, and that does factor into how I choose what to play. Choosing the repertoire for a season is a challenge every year because I want to play music that I love. I want to play music that feels like it would be lovely to experience outside, and I want it to be approachable in the best way.
That word "approachable" can assume that you're dumbing down music or dumbing down the program for an audience. But that's not actually how I think about it. What I tend to do is—a typical solo piano concert might be organized chronologically. There would probably be a Sonata, for example, three movements they would play. They wouldn't ever really consider not playing the full work. I almost never do that.
I have no problem taking a movement from this and a movement from that and playing an excerpt from this. I try to build a program that has an arc, that has a story that is dynamic. There are certain things that I know I want to do, like I know I want a piece that's really spacious that's gonna be my "go get up and go wander around" piece. This past year I played a piece by John Cage called "Four Minutes and 33 Seconds." And so I had everybody take off their headphones and we just listened to the landscape. John Cage also said you could do that for any amount of time and four minutes and 33 seconds ended up being a little bit too long. So we would just do that for like 60 seconds.
I am much more flexible and fluid, and a lot of classical institutions and musicians would not approve my programming method.
Lawrence: It's almost like the Pops approach.
Hunter: It's what kind of show would I want to go to? I like music that I can get into where there's a story or there's something that grabs me and that holds me in the world of the music. And so sometimes there's a piece that I love, but it's not a clear, definite win that the audience would like this. Then there's sort of a challenge of, "How can I make this piece of music come to life for somebody that has no context for this piece?" And that is a really fun exercise and challenge for me, and that also makes me love the music more.
Hunter: After school, I wasn't really sure if I loved classical music enough to keep going with it. There was so much emphasis on perfection and competition. It has a weight, but by thinking in some ways from the audience's perspective, it makes me—and almost projecting an audience that knows less about classical music, it makes the music come alive to me more and I discover more about it and I fall in love. I'm so much more in love with this music than I was 10 years ago.
I try to program music that makes me feel something, and it's not always romantic classical piano pieces. It spans from the 17th century up to music that's written for me or for a particular place. And I like how that variety is really important, and it's important to remember that all of this music was once new and that what I'm doing is not—Leonard Bernstein didn't like the term "classical music." There's this specific moment in history that is classical music. Music before and after that is, it's really hard to categorize the kind of music that I play. I mean, I still use the term "classical." It's really piano music, music for this instrument that I'm exploring and the more variety, the more beauty, the better.
