The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - The Conservatory's New Maestro

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

Many Ontarians likely took lessons from the Royal Conservatory of Music as children. Alexander Brose is the new president and CEO of the Royal Conservatory, which has headquarters in Toronto. He joins us in studio to share his vision for Canada's most prominent music education institution. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's this season on Queries in Good Faith, a TVO original podcast. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. How many people watching or listening to this program right now took lessons at the Royal Conservatory of Music when they were kids? I'm betting a lot. I know I did. Well, the Conservatory headquartered in the provincial capital has a new boss. Alexander Broz has worked all over the world.

And now we're going to find out what he's got up his sleeve for Canada's foremost music education institution. It's great to meet you, great to have you here. Great to be here, Steve, thank you so much. Well, we're gonna start talking a bit about your background so we can find out a little more about you. You were the executive director of something called the Tianjin Juilliard School in China, I guess an overseas campus affiliated

with the Juilliard School in New York. What did that job involve? Oh my gosh. The Juilliard School in around 2009 decided that it wanted to start researching how it could expand its place. Obviously, very famous campus in New York City. Many of its students were coming from all over the world, but it wanted to look into going outside of New York campus

and choose a place that it felt it had the most potential to really develop the lives of young musicians going forward. China was an obvious choice. Tianjin was not. It is a very fantastic city. It's always been Beijing's protectorate, Beijing's mote, but doesn't have the kind of cultural recognition that a Beijing or a Shanghai would be or have.

And so negotiations with the city government resulted in the creation of the Tingen Juilliard School starting in 2017. I moved there with my wife and two kids as one of the first of four people on the ground and began to create an entire team, build a beautiful building, hire an entire faculty, and try to launch it in the middle of COVID, which was an adventure, to say the least.

Well, that was my next question. You spent five years there? Yes, give or take, with a lot of travel back and forth during COVID. But your family was not there the whole time. Well, the story is that we went on vacation during the Lunar New Year of 2020 to Cambodia to go see Angkor Wat.

And while we were there, Wuhan shut down. We just squeaked into Singapore by the skin of our teeth. Didn't know what to do. My kid's school in China was shut down for the entire rest of the year by February 1, going remote. So we decided to come back to North America, to the United States at the time. And my wife and kids have not been back to Asia since.

So it was quite the experience going back and forth during COVID getting the project up and running. And it's actually, by all accounts, doing quite well to this day. Can I ask you a little geopolitical question emerging from that? Sure. Which is, how much do you think, given your experience

in China, we have to fear China as a looming adversary? Oh, wow. That's a hard question to answer. But I do know that projects like the Tianjin Juilliard School, cultural bridges, people to people exchange, is going to be of the utmost importance as we move forward geopolitically between the US and China, between Canada and China.

It's a marvelous example of bringing people together. So I hope it continues to succeed in that way. Let's keep going back. The Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado. That was another point on your destination. What did you do for them? There I was fundraising. I was working with the board, working

with a terrific faculty, working with hundreds of students a year, visiting artists, really developing the next generation of classical artists, working with some of the world's most generous philanthropists who wanted to support a very important American summer music festival that has just one of the best reputations of being the place where everyone goes, either as a student, as a faculty member, as a performer.

It was living in paradise, for sure, and it was a great five years for me and my family. The San Francisco Conservatory of Music. What did you do there? There I was director of admissions, which is something that was offered to me at the young age of 24 years old. And there it was really phenomenal

to be able to learn the canon. I'm a singer, and so I spent my childhood singing not only abroad but also in the United States and knew the vocal repertoire but upon arrival to the San Francisco Conservatory was asked to go across the US and abroad to audition students playing pieces that I wasn't too familiar with. So there are some stories of me cutting really young, incredible violinists off right before the cadenza in an audition and things like that.

So it was a really, it was an incredible opportunity for me to learn the pieces that make the canon tick. Marvelous to work with faculty there, many of whom were members of the San Francisco Symphony, and just understanding really what the power of music education has in this society. Where are you actually born? I was born in Manhattan and grew up outside of New York

until I was seven, at which point we moved to South Korea in 1983, which was a really interesting time to be living in South Korea. What took you there? My dad. My dad wanted something different for the family. That's different. It was different.

Yeah, 1983 for sure. He was a banker working for a major US bank. And many of his friends were going abroad to Europe. They were going to Frankfurt, Paris, London. He wanted something else. And so off we went. Two weeks after Korean Air Flight 007 was shot out of the sky by a Russian MiG, we moved to Seoul.

Two weeks later after that, the then military president Chun Doo-wan's cabinet was blown up by a North Korean operative in Rangoon. I wore dog tags to school most days. There was tear gas coming in through the windows from demonstrations at Yonsei University. And I wouldn't change it for the world. It was an incredible experience to grow up in that environment. To do the travel that I did growing up, I feel very lucky to have been able to have that. Did your parents not have any second thoughts about the wisdom of moving into a war zone just at that moment? I think it's safe to say that my mother was apoplectic. But no, it was really, it was a very interesting time for Korea for sure. It was a very interesting time to formative for me at the age of

seven. And in fact it was there that I really started to sing for an organization much like TVO called KEDDI, the Korean Educational Development Institute. And I was on TV. I was singing more or less like a Sesame Street to teach Korean kids how to speak English, going on set every week and singing educational songs about jumping and skipping and hopping. It was a great introduction to the arts, for sure. I'm so tempted to ask you to do a few bars on this right now. No, no, no.

OK. Well, here's the key question. What nationality is your wife and two children? Oh, man. The best thing I've ever done was marry a Canadian. And yeah, my wife grew up in BC, born to Chilean immigrants in the mid-70s. My kids have dual citizenship, US and Canadian, and we're just, feel very lucky to be in Canada

and very lucky to have the opportunity to raise our boys in Toronto. Suffice to say, that's why you wanted the job at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto? Absolutely, yeah, 100%. You have that built-in advantage, I guess. You're, now, do you take out citizenship at some point? Is that something? Oh, yeah, oh, sure. Oh, absolutely. You will? Oh, yeah. You will, okay in advantage, I guess. Do you take out citizenship at some point? Is that something?

Oh, yeah, oh, sure. Oh, absolutely. You will? Oh, yeah. You will. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay.

You, I don't have to tell you, have taken on a rather mammoth task. This is a big organization. This is an organization that's been led by the same guy for the last 33 years, and Peter Simon. How do you do that smoothly? Well, I think unique to transitions, Peter and I overlapped for an entire year leading up to this September. And it was something that was the very second the search firm called me to ask if I was

interested in this position. It was the the first thing that they mentioned, by the way if this all works out for you, you will be overlapping with the outgoing president, Peter Simon, for an entire year. Are you OK with that? And I said, well, sure. I mean, I'll have to do what I have to do. It was, I think by all accounts, certainly mine, a huge success.

Peter is, I mean, just an inspiring, inspirational, entrepreneurial monster. I mean, the guy created everything that the Royal Conservatory means to this day. The building, the board, the faculty, his fingerprints are on everything. And so to be able to have that year, to see what he's created, but also to listen.

It's a unique and, I think, kind of a luxurious position to be there but not really be in the driver's seat for a year. And I told you at 185 individual conversations with employees there. I did, yeah. And it was something that I used similarly in China. It was different. I was building something from the ground up.

So whenever someone came in for their first day or first week, regardless of their position, I asked them to come into my office for 15, 20 minutes just so that I could hear from them about why they decided to work at the Tange and Juilliard School, but also for me to be able to tell them about the mission of the organization, why it's important for geopolitical relationships, music, and society, et cetera. And it was so incredibly rewarding for me

to have that moment. I wanted to try and recreate that when I could. And so having those conversations were so important because what it did for me is it allowed me to hear what people's connection to the Royal Conservatory of Music truly is. As a Canadian growing up in this country as you did, everyone has almost a Royal Conservatory of Music memory or experience. And it was so inspiring to hear that from everyone. I mean they may be working or have been working for the school for 10 years, 53 years,

but their relationship with the school goes back even further than that. So themes began to emerge. Stories began to emerge. It all resulted in a wonderful town hall this past fall, where we honored those who had been serving at the Royal Conservatory of Music working there for 10 years or over. It was over 125 people, including five piano teachers who'd been there for 50 years, and

Vera Tchaikovsky, who's been there for 53. And to see her walk across the stage and the recognition that she received from that was just, it was palpable, the energy in the room. It was wonderful. So that legacy that the Royal Conservatory of Music has is something that I think is very unique to the organization and very unique to Canada, for sure. You've got that legacy, but of course,

every new person wants to do their own thing. So what is that going to be for you? Well, yeah, I mean, that's a great question. So much of what has been put in motion over the past 33 years needs to be capitalized upon. I think that there are so many incredible things happening at the organization.

It is, in essence, a five-headed dragon, very unique to any music school on Earth, with the three schools, the three campuses on our campus, the Glenn Gould School, the Taylor Academy, the Oscar Peterson School of Music, Koerner Hall, which is arguably the best concert hall in North America, if not the world, acoustically, and then our learning systems. So our certificate program, our publishing, our exams,

our early childhood program, which is, I think, about to be a major player in the early childhood space. All of this looks at a brand. All of this refers and reflects on the brand of the Royal Conservatory of Music. And it's my hope, it's my goal, that over the next three to five, ten years, when someone hears any of those things that I've just mentioned, they automatically know that that is the Royal Conservatory of Music.

Or when they buy a piano book in Vancouver or Yellowknife, that they know that there is a campus with an incredible hall that they can come and visit in Toronto. It's a mammoth task because it is a very large organization, 250,000 students throughout Canada, 10,000 teachers teaching the Royal Conservatory of Music curriculum. How do we unify all of that? How do we make it known that that is really a part of one large community and keep them connected with the mothership here in Toronto?

It's a huge task, but I'm ready for it. I know you didn't want to sing in Korean for us here. But through our little mischievous ways, we've seen you sing. We're going to see you sing. Sheldon, if you will, roll the clip. That certain night, the night we met, there was magic abroad in the air.

There were angels dining at the Ritz, And a nightingale sang in Barclay Square. Where did you learn how to sing that well? Most administrators or executives I know can't sing like that. Oh boy. You'd be surprised. Yes I would. You know, it's very difficult for me to watch myself perform. I think, you know, it's all about teacher, right?

I mean, I think in the community that the Royal Conservatory finds itself in, it's all about supporting the teacher. I was so lucky over the course of my training to have just remarkable teachers. You started, I assume, as a kid in New York? As a kid, yeah, in New York, yeah, really, in New Jersey, singing with a terrific teacher named Margaret Leary, who's since passed. My public high school in New Jersey did about nine productions a year,

including three musicals. Unbelievable, very unique. And again, it's that relationship that you have with your teacher and their ability to pull out talent from you that I think is so instrumental, no pun intended, to artist expression, creativity, connection, et cetera. And to be at a school like the Royal Conservatory of Music

that associates itself with so many talented teachers, it's wonderful to see that happening on a daily basis. Again, I just feel so lucky that I had that experience with the teachers that I had. I'm told you love that song in particular. It's a great song. What is it about that song you love? Oh, man.

You know, I sang it in college with an acapella group at Cornell. And I just was always, I was in love with the melody. I mean, I just think the melody in and of itself is so terrific. It's a beautiful image of, I don't know, of love, of loss, of connection. And it sits well in my voice. I just, I don't know, I love that song so much.

What was the name of the acapella group? The Hangovers. And it was called that because? Because it was actually started in 1963, 1964 by a number of Cornell engineers who were hanging over for a fifth year to get their masters from their undergraduates. So that's the story.

And I'll stick to it. I'm sure, I'm sure. I don't mean to get too serious with you here, but the reality is music education in the public school system across this province and country, I think is probably nothing like what it was when you and I were going to school and I was going to school well

before you were going to school. Absolutely. So I presume that puts more pressure on you to really get out there and spread the word about what the conservatory can do because kids are not going to accidentally bump into music in school today the way they did when we were younger.

Absolutely right. So what do you do about that? Oh my gosh. Well, so I mean, it is a huge topic. We talk about it, I think, almost daily at the institution, certainly at the board level, staff level, teacher level. How do we make music education relevant, certainly?

How do we make it more appreciated? We have to be true believers in the power of music to create future leaders and to create a real civil society, in my opinion. So for me and for the institution, we have developed a program that is steeped in neuroscience and steeped in music. It's been in our building for 10 years, and it's something that we see as being an absolutely

rewarding, rewarding opportunity for young children and their parents and care providers to really introduce music at a very early age to open up those neural pathways so that students who study music at that age have better performance in literacy, numeracy, problem solving, language learning, you name it. And how do you make sure they can afford it? Well, that's huge, and we are a not-for-profit, right? So we are developing these programs

with the hope that we can bring them into communities, music schools, but also early childhood centers throughout Canada at an affordable cost so that music is a part of people's lives from the very first steps. And when that happens we build future audience goers, we build future instrumentalists and singers, and we build hopefully an even more stronger society that is focused on music as a way to communicate and to connect. I have to just give you a bit of a story as it relates to the Royal Conservatory. I was working in San

Francisco as an admissions director and we were at the time recruiting a number of students from Canada who were coming in to study either as bachelor students or master's students. And at one point, they were taking their placement exams, and I got a knock on my door from the music theory professor and the music history professor who wanted to know what was going on in Canada, that all of the Canadian students who were coming into this very, very revered conservatory of music in San Francisco, all the Canadian students were passing out of every single placement exam in theory and in history. And it was the Royal Conservatory of Music's programs that they were taking in high school that got them there. And this society, this Canadian society,

has been so, I think, benefited from what the Royal Conservatory of Music offers. It is a very musical country thanks to this very national institution. So I just think it's a remarkable opportunity for us to bring more music to more people at an earlier age. Alex, we wish you well with your new mission. Thank you, Steve. Good luck. That's Alexander Broz, the new president and CEO,

Royal Conservatory of Music. Thanks. Thank you.