The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 098 Leila Josefowicz: Infinite Possibilities

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to The Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 98. Welcome to The Mind Over Finger Podcast, discussions on mindful music making, efficient practice, and building a purposeful career. And now, your host, violinist, teacher, and high-performance coach, Dr. Renée-Paul Gaultier. Hi, everyone. I hope this episode finds you doing amazingly well. Today, I'm so happy to have Leila Josifovic back on the show. Some of you might remember that she was my guest for episode 82. And if you have not had a chance to listen to this episode yet, you absolutely must as soon as you're done with the one you're listening to right now. She shared incredible insight on so

Starting point is 00:00:57 many topics including practicing, performing, learning music, memorization, etc. It's such an inspiring conversation and we had such a fun time that we immediately decided to have another conversation and boy it did not disappoint. For those of you who have not had a chance to listen to episode 82, here are a few words about Leila's musical journey. Throughout her career Leila has performed extensively on the world's greatest stages and with the best orchestras. Recent highlights include engagements with the Berlin Philharmonic, the L.A. Phil, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Washington's National Symphony Orchestra, and Boston, Chicago, and Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestras. Her passionate advocacy of contemporary music for the violin

Starting point is 00:01:49 is reflected in her diverse programs and enthusiasm for performing new works. A favorite of living composers, Leila has premiered many concertos, including those by Colin Matthews, Stephen Mackey, and Esa-Pica Salonen, all written specially for her. Leila has released several recordings, notably for Deutsch Gramophone, Philips Universal, and Warner Classics, and she's received nominations for several Grammy Awards. In recognition of her outstanding achievement and excellence in music, she won the 2018 Avery Fisher Prize and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

Starting point is 00:02:30 I love today's conversation so much. Leila shares amazing insight and wisdom yet again. She talks about her outlook for how things are going to be like in the coming months, how her recent incredible project at the Metropolitan Museum of Art unfolded, from where it originated to the vision coming to reality, the significance of her performing Bach and how she sees Bach as the music of infinite possibilities. She tells us about what she calls the performance headspace. She shares about performance preparation and performance anxiety, what having fun and performance means to her, and many other wonderful musings. It's a real window on the way artists like Leila approach a project. The power of intention and the thoughtfulness they put behind each decision, how each aspect is carefully evaluated, weighed, and curated in every angle crafted with care and love. And before I bring you Leila Josefovich, I want to remind you that the doors for the Music Mastery Experience, my highly personalized group coaching program, are open for enrollment.

Starting point is 00:03:48 if you're looking to reach a level of mindful practice that is going to shift your relationship with practicing performing and creating career opportunities this is the program for you if you want to walk in a practice room without ever experiencing hesitation and doubt you want to feel empowered as you work you want to start getting results and perform optimally time after time, you have to join the Music Mastery Experience. The program starts June 1st and it's going to give you all the tools you need to unleash all of your potential. I designed this program to be the solution to your problems and to be the catalyst for incredible things in your life. You're going to practice effectively and enjoy it. You're going to feel empowered and free

Starting point is 00:04:39 in a performance and you're going to have the tools to create the musical life you want. All of the details of the program are at mindoverfinger.com slash mme. So head there, take a look and book your free conversation today because the program is already filling up. Let's talk about your dreams, your goals, what's getting in the way and how we're going to remove all of the obstacles between you and where you want to be. You're going to start seeing massive changes from the start, and you won't believe what you're able to accomplish by the end of the program. So go to mindoverfinger.com slash MME, book your call, and let's get you started. I like to keep the group very small, so there are a limited number of spots. As I said, we start

Starting point is 00:05:30 June 1st, and I know that feels pretty far away, but spots are filling up, and it's not too early to save yours. I can't wait to talk to you. And now, let's go to the show. Okay, hello. Great to see you, Renee. It's so great to have you back, Leila. It really is such a pleasure to discuss with you. So I'm so happy we have another opportunity to do this. And me as well. As I said to you before we began,

Starting point is 00:06:10 bravo to you for making these podcasts available to players and enthusiasts, especially during a time when we don't have so many live concerts. This is a gift to people. So thanks to you. Thank you. I really appreciate that.

Starting point is 00:06:27 Leila, you and I talked a few months ago, and I really hope that the listeners who haven't had a chance to listen to this episode, go back and catch episode 82. And you shared fantastic wisdom on memorization, what the practice of violin playing means to you. You talked about motivation, about vivid, mindful practice, and so many other topics. and if you go back and listen to the episode we hear all about your wonderful musical journey and how it unfolded so if that works for you I'd like to dive right into our conversation and I invite the listeners to make sure they catch part one of the discussion so they hear

Starting point is 00:07:10 everything about your background and all of those wonderful bits of wisdoms you shared with us and um actually if they've listened to it already i dare to suggest a second round i listen to it to prepare for today and you share so many powerful ideas and episode 82 is definitely one to keep in the feed and listen to more than one i remember i had a great time talking to you and and you bring you bring out the best in me talking about these things so i'm happy to dive right in. Fantastic. Leila, we're entering year two of the pandemic. And as we're speaking today, there seems to be some stepping back and, you know, new variants of the virus. And we're seeing some numbers go up again. But there also seems to be some glimmers of hope. So let's cross our

Starting point is 00:08:03 fingers that things will continue to go in the right direction. Absolutely. And I would love to hear where you stand now looking back at the last 12 months what it brought to you uh what you've been doing and also what your outlook is for you know where things are going what they're going to look like in the coming months both for you and for the musical community goodness gracious well i'm definitely not um endowed with prophetic talent but i think that um people are healed by music uh this is something that no matter what happens in the world i am sure about um and just based on that alone um i think that musicians have a great responsibility in culture in life in people's outlook and people's mentality and i think one of the reasons why people have had

Starting point is 00:09:01 such a hard time is that we don't we can't in the same ways turn to art um and turn to culture and turn to live performance the way we have in the past um to sort of heal us so hopefully these things can just keep moving forward even with some twists and turns um that we have vaccines is huge, meaning that we can more comfortably travel, get on planes again, get to places where we need to be. It's going more slowly than we'd like, of course, but we have to focus on the positive once again, even though at times it can be hard to do, that we are in fact moving forward through this um and hopefully we can get things really back running once everyone is vaccinated um so that's sort of what what I'm hoping for um in terms of just my own personal

Starting point is 00:10:08 study and playing um certainly endless time for self-reflection and um that seems almost like a cliche at this point um and those of us who are able to in some ways self-reflect but then utilize these kind of internal mechanisms into actual action um this is so important for us to do what we can um and some people are just more blessed than others right now um just from a human perspective, humanity perspective. And it's a very humbling time. I think it should be a humbling time for all. And that's sort of where I'm coming from with music. In some ways, I read a quote that said musicians are like first responders, emotional first responders. And I thought, amazing just so absolutely astute so incredibly well said um and so true um that we are first

Starting point is 00:11:19 responders and we can use this time period to be first responders in whatever way we can even if we're not helping people medically uh in other ways we sort of still are because emotionally uh our emotions are just at the core of our our sense of self our sense of identity or our sense of being um on a day-to-day basis it's uh emotions are what makes us uh human our emotions are what makes us uh feel and what makes us alive in a way um and so with these things in mind um i did probably the the thing that people will will most easily be able to access is um a streaming i did at the met museum um that was recorded in two days at the end of january and was broadcast and is still up um will be in perpetuity um on youtube from met live arts

Starting point is 00:12:28 from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Museum of Art in New York, so we can definitely get into this and discuss everything around this event and this streaming. It was sort of, in many ways, I think I will be able to say pretty much the high point of a sort of quote-unquote performing performing life during this pandemic so it was recorded 26th and 27th of january um and so so thrilling to be in the metropolitan museum um just simply said it was so thrilling to be there i used to live in new york city and never went as much as i could have gone And of course, when life is in full swing, it's hard to stop and do things that you wouldn't normally do.

Starting point is 00:13:30 But upon reflection in the museum during this time, I thought, this is just astounding, the emotions, the skill, the display of expression and humanity from the Roman ages and pre-Roman ages and the Egyptian tombs to all the way up until you get to the contemporary wing what a celebration of the expressive achievements of mankind and that was a very very inspiring way for me to launch into the plane this was not attempting to be a live stream from a concert hall this was an an environment um in some ways much more creative environment maybe not acoustically always geared to what i was trying to do but we can get i can explain what we did with that but but this is um to be playing within feet a great masterwork of bach to be playing

Starting point is 00:14:37 within feet of this painting called autumn rhythm um by jackson pollock um those of you who have seen this in person know how huge huge it is covering immense wall space yeah so it was just a very very inspiring event to be part of and it's still something I'm living with every day and feeling so so privileged to have been able to do so my partner George Kondo is a world-renowned painter and was able to coordinate this streaming with the Met Museum and it started with me and Limor Tomer walking through the museum on a free day at the beginning of January we walked we walked through probably a good half of the museum just looking at the size of the rooms what was in the rooms, which art was in the rooms, what kind of ideas we had in terms of

Starting point is 00:15:41 displaying and showing and expressing this incredible music alongside visual art. And one thing we both agreed upon was that we didn't want it to match in the sense of time kids in other words i wasn't going to play um there are plenty of rooms in the in the museum that have sort of more um baroque artwork or church like artwork um and uh paintings and sculpture and oftentimes the acoustics and those areas are perfect for bach but it seemed too matchy matchy to and too expected as well it was too um fitting the mold of expectation to play Bach against religious icons I mean in front of religious icon in a room that has art from the same time period what we wanted to do was have people listen to Bach in a different way with a

Starting point is 00:16:38 new perspective have people listen to Matthias Pinscher alongside unexpected visual art so it was a question of first me being so caught up in Bach and so obsessed with thoughts around Bach which we can discuss but finding the right acoustic for what I thought was right for Bach and this actually you'd think the Met Museum has you know thousands of rooms you'd think um you think it would have been an easier process but in fact it was not so easy to match the acoustics of the room with what we thought was also the right visuals for for the music um and we started off in the the contemporary wing um this was for the bach now start off in contemporary wing and it just didn't have the right artwork it didn't have the right feeling

Starting point is 00:17:38 for the music either it was the artwork was kind of too distracting or the ambience of the room the acoustics were kind of on the cold side um what of course I was trying to achieve and what we were looking for was as much of a church-like sound as in terms of the right amount of reverberation which it is I think is incredibly important for Bach um but had that of course work in in context with what art is on the wall so eventually we ended up in the Pollock Rothko room and this was the right mixture of beautiful stunning hypnotic artistic vibrant visual art with this kind of incredibly emotional, sacred, whatever words you want to use for Bach, this ended up being the perfect room. And then we were also wandering the museum, various rooms

Starting point is 00:18:45 to find the right ambience for the Matthias Pinscher and the Veras Blanca room, which is a room, a Spanish patio, which was put into the Metropolitan Museum. I'm not sure exactly when when it became part of the museum but it's very gothic has sort of a medieval flair very atmospheric quite spooky in fact and you almost feel like you're outside but you're not and it's it's much more even reverberant in this room and this was sort of the sound I was looking for as well for the pincher which is this sort of um ancient prophetic just um mystical um mysterious ambience that the music um calls for to have it be sort of a a timeless echo chamber um and that's what that's what we found at the at the veras blanco so that already for us felt

Starting point is 00:19:46 like a huge achievement just to find the two perfect rooms for these two magnificent pieces so we um we were happy with that and then we set the recording days one day for each piece in each room so it was really a journey a process to to pick the room and then finally do these incredible days of recording in these rooms what was for me one of the unexpected things and what i was sort of learning a lot about in this time period is just what it means to do a streaming i'm not a tech person and i'm not someone that can edit my own music i mean there's so many players out there now who are so they actually enjoy doing this and and they're good at this but you know not me so I was glad not to have any part of that but just as a performer

Starting point is 00:20:45 who has been so used to doing live performances for my entire career all of a sudden here I was in a situation where and fellow players will understand I think this feeling very well of okay I'm geared for live performance more truly than I am geared for recording I've always found that my best performances come ultimately from live performances. Um, and if I can have one or two patch sessions to compliment the live performances, then we get the best of both worlds. And that for me, the spontaneity, the, the energy of the public, the energy of it being a ritual, the energy of it being a live event. This is something that gives me energy and I wanted so badly in this case to even though there was no real audience there was a few very select

Starting point is 00:21:44 people but very few because it was in a recording like situation to capture a feeling of performance of live performance during this live during this this stream and a feeling of if people were to put it on and listen at any time to give them over the tech waves as much as I could possibly achieve in this instance, a feeling of that same urgency, of that same spontaneity, of that same just emotional energy. So this took incredible reserves in my being to get this feeling out in in in that way and it was uh ultimately uh successful but what we did was so so the bach was the first day and um we went in there and i was immediately sort of floored by this incredible camera setup and microphone setup in this room where i had practiced just

Starting point is 00:22:50 for acoustics and they had let me practice in there um just to feel the room and not really look so much at the art at that time but just hear hear myself in the room and and with the Bach how important it is to hear oneself back and to use the counterpoint of the music to have this carry over in the right ways and have certain notes and certain harmony reverberate for longer than other notes or other other harmonies or to think of this in many ways as a very horizontal interpretation but also vertical too to have horizontal and vertical together at the same time and combining horizontal and vertical so i walk into the room and you know there's i'm overwhelmed with this incredible jig like camera mechanism where you know it's like in the movies i felt like i was

Starting point is 00:23:44 in the movies it was just amazing having this 25 foot beam with a camera on the end of it kind of swiveling around these great big beautiful lights that were sort of set on a on a vertical plane and that made me instantly extremely glad that I had done all of these practices without all that in there and that this room was feeling kind of familiar to me before this great camera setup and then really it was about an extremely um sort of vigorous warm-up and we can we can talk more about that if you want but just yeah that'd be great really warming up in the headspace of a live performance on stage in the way i'm going to be playing getting any kind of kinks out nicks out loosening up the body and getting your mind

Starting point is 00:24:43 especially with Bach into a space of of kind of ecstatic and and contemplative and meditative euphoria this was really the the big big challenge and it took time for me to do that it took over a couple of hours of really, really just internal playing without getting kind of distracted and sidetracked by all the tech around me. And it kind of gave me a new respect for what actors and actresses do on the set. We're used to having our same setup, which is the stage, the orchestra, the hall, and showing our emotions and our feelings and our gestures in that way. but this is this is a whole new thing so so that was very different and I think ultimately very successful but basically the the recording lasted three or so hours once the tapes were

Starting point is 00:25:44 rolling and I did basically two big run-throughs of a Bach and then did some pieces of various movements again and then in some movements were completely untouched in terms of any any work being done at all so I think overall the takes were very very very long and there were really not very many of them so I was thrilled and relieved to have um really given the performance that I wanted to give for a piece as uh as incredibly loved and known as as the Bach and getting into the study and the interpretation was something that began at the very beginning of the pandemic I can confess to you and it's not really any sort of a guilty confession but just a reality confession a truth confession that I never until this pandemic felt that Bach

Starting point is 00:26:45 playing Bach and my own playing were in sync and for that reason I never performed Bach in public not even one time until this thing. I could tell you that I had a very small run-through for about eight people in the fall, very much around the time that we did our first interview, but it was kind of hard to say whether that was really a true public performance of Bach. Intentionally, I avoided Bach, and some of the people who I love, you know, in 20th, 21st century music actually don't resonate composers that I know don't always resonate with Bach some do and some don't and I had not found a voice or an interpretation with the Bach that I felt was enough to convince me to actually really take it on until this whole thing began with the pandemic

Starting point is 00:27:41 in which I was reassessing what music I could play alone and really thinking actually about Bach listening to other instruments play from that period, sort of shedding myself of violinistic traditions, which I think in Bach are so heavily laden and have so heavily burdened this music. I have very strong feelings around that, which many people may or may not agree with. But in any case, I had many of these notions, which prevented me from really going forward with it until it took a lot of releasing of certain traditions of ideas of how things to be done as just thinking only of my own imagination and the score and thinking about how many different ways just even a single phrase could be done and then you realize that this music is the music of

Starting point is 00:28:44 infinite possibilities and that if you take away any editorial marks by other musicians and other violinists which there are so many I just didn't want to see any of that anymore I didn't want to be told by another musician how I should be playing it I didn't want to be told what bowing I have to use what fingering I have to use I didn't want to be told what dynamic to use unless it's only from Bach himself and then guess what as we all know Bach put almost no dynamics in his music very very rarely did he put any dynamics in his music at all any inflections were always up to the player and that is something that for some reason I think you know in the 20th century especially early 20th century to mid-20th century violinists felt somehow that that they

Starting point is 00:29:40 needed to put more in there so that other players knew more what uh supposedly the composer wanted but in so doing it it tells young players this is how it needs to be this is how it should be that the end should be pesante and it's like there is no no there's no marking whatsoever of a pesante did bach want pesante not necessarily at all um so questioning the rhetoric of of these editorial markings and really thinking about actually the the precariousness the wildness the unpredictability of life and in bach's time is maybe a little bit slightly more similar to the time that we're living in now where there wasn't the right medicine all the time um there wasn't the care available people lived much shorter lifespan people being born people

Starting point is 00:30:42 dying all the time i mean this was life back in the 17th 16th centuries when you sneeze bless you i mean this is what this all comes from this that life in the moment and um so i really started thinking about emotionally what does that mean for this music this music often was written for the church but I mean the human being behind this music that the humanity behind this music the the human quality behind this music is so intense and and so vibrant so ultimately I mean without getting into tiny nitty-gritty details about it this was sort of the life force idea behind what i was trying to do and it's very tricky of course because you know people have different interpretive ideas um different you know ways of of having a sort of being well behaved in this

Starting point is 00:31:40 music um being sort of studious about it having different um you know interpretive ideas what should should not be done the only way um i can go about this is just as i've said to get rid of all of those so everything came from this idea and then to have to to play to have this opportunity to play it in front of a vibrant energy popping energy boosting piece of you know incredible art from you know the 20th century 1958 by an artist who completely found his own voice in painting Jackson Pollock who found this incredible signature um way of of dripping paint onto the canvas in different ways and having it create this universe it's like a universe of it's a galaxy of stars and and um life forces energies um and it's amazing you get close to the painting you see

Starting point is 00:32:48 prints from his shoe, shoe prints from his sneakers or his shoes on the paint that hasn't totally dried yet. You can feel the energy of an artist at work. And this was so inspiring to perform next to. And I actually faced in such a way that at times I could play to the painting, um that it was within my line of vision and there are a few shots in this in this video where i'm actually in the just sometimes you get the whole camera room angle you see the whole room but then you see like literally me a silhouette against the painting the pollock the autumn rhythm which um it's just what can i say it felt like such a privilege um so this was uh this was the day of bach um and then the following day i came back in to the spanish patio and um created an echo

Starting point is 00:33:52 chamber sound with these incredible um sort of just absolutely um mysterious and um the word i'm looking for right now is um escaping me but um these this timeless mystery um enigmatic quality of of this human and yet very inhuman alien force um that's that's the energy of the pincher um and having a whole different setup and and universe for this for this other recording day you know and it's really interesting the Veras Blanco room is is right next to the entrance to the museum so sometimes we had to just stop and and let the cherry pickers do their work in the main hall the main entrance that place I have a new profound respect for it's it's a work in progress so many different things going on in this museum at all times and these recording days which

Starting point is 00:34:54 we're on a Tuesday and Wednesday when the museum is actually closed to the public but that doesn't mean nothing's happening in there they have incredible amounts of art being moved around at all times things changing exhibitions changing in different areas and that was another thing that we had to take into consideration just keeping in mind that this is a workspace a creative workspace for exhibiting new art all the time which was also kind of inspiring so yeah it was a memorable experience to say the least and there is even in the in the vers blanco room there's a there's a violinist sculpture that at times I actually played I played to him and you can see this in there that this in some ways became in my mind a duet between me and and the violinist in there

Starting point is 00:35:48 so um it was uh it was epic it was epic that was uh sort of the high point of the last few months it's so incredible and i find that 2020 yielded many gifts for many people i i think that i can see the gifts in my own life i hear it when you talk about jackson pollock finding his voice and it sounds like you found your Bach through the pandemic. And it's so interesting to hear about the process and see the amount of care that went into all of the details, finding the perfect marriage between the visual elements, the sounds, and also this energy that you talk about. And you mentioned it, and I would love to hear more about warming up in that headspace that you talked about and if you don't mind speaking more about it and maybe unwrapping it for us how you got the

Starting point is 00:36:48 body and the mind ready because I find that when people start working with me in the coaching context they're often surprised about the amount of time we speak in terms of preparing mentally for performance and practicing with a performance persona in mind or you know putting yourself in that headspace as you said um it's very complex yes and people think that they will practice in the practice room and then cross their fingers walk on stage and they hope that somehow the things will you know come together perfectly for this performance and there there is such a big amount of i would call it conditioning to get into that performance absolutely and that is a key word uh absolutely key and in some ways i feel yeah i paid the price for it in other ways but very lucky

Starting point is 00:37:51 in that i had started performing from such a young age that this conditioning is not something that you can just learn in theory it's something that can only be truly um experienced in those moments in in practice is the wrong way to say it because practice is not practice performing is different than actual performing and for that reason you know if i was coaching or helping someone prepare for a performance of any kind i would say there's nothing that replaces performing nothing no amount of practice no amount of thinking about it no you must do it so whether that means you know you stand in front of your roommate your your sibling your parents your friends you gather your friends you put on your face masks you do what you need to do basically what I'm saying is you do what

Starting point is 00:38:53 you need to do you do what you need to do and to have that experience before you get into the thing that you really are preparing for. There are things that happen when you have adrenaline in your system. And that's a very kind of scientific way to kind of say it, but there are things that happen spiritually, mentally, physically to your entire being that happen when you are under a certain kind of performance pressure, as well as performance euphoria. there's a kind of concentration a kind of focus that can be achieved that cannot be replicated or duplicated in other kinds of situations so the idea being that you replicate as much as you possibly can this experience before you get into the real thing you try to actually trick yourself

Starting point is 00:39:48 into thinking it's the real thing even when it's not the real thing you do whatever it takes and I'm quite militant with this in the sense that in this way I think I was trained exceptionally well that run-throughs practice performances are absolutely an essential part of preparation practice goes without saying is is also essential but then to go from start to finish of a work without stopping in the performance clothes in the clothes that you're going to be playing in in um that's why i was going in and out of those rooms in the museum so often i had maybe four or five days in each room to prepare before i was in there to be in the environment as much as you can i fight with stagehands for stage time not necessarily fight but um i bought let's just

Starting point is 00:40:47 say i bargain i coerce i i i make it a point that before anyone you know pre-pandemic before anyone was in that hall i was on stage and look at the seats look at the lights look at the balcony look at this environment look so that when you get on stage and everyone's in the seats you say okay, you know, people are in the seats now, but I've seen this before. So the shock element of the actual performance time, you know, of course, you can still feel a certain kind of shock element, but it's less, you can be sure it's less so having done that. So this mentally is a huge step towards feeling in my head towards feeling prepared even practicing feeling nervous which is kind of hard to do when you're not feeling nervous things are much easier of course

Starting point is 00:41:48 run up and down the street get your heart like really pumping get so that you are actually uncomfortable get uncomfortable i heard about someone and i thought it was great um who you know had to wear a tuxedo and get used to playing um getting all sweaty in the tuxedo getting in your tuxedo standing in front of a fireplace with a roaring fire in it and actually sweating and playing sweaty you know break break a bow here play with it hanging down you know getting in getting in the way play with that get used to playing with your violin attitude there actually was um you know times in the box recording where my strings are not in tune and you know i wasn't going to sacrifice um good takes because my strings weren't totally in tune this is not a cd i was

Starting point is 00:42:41 making this was sort of an experience as i was making so you know times where things are far from perfect and maybe you feel kind of crappy that day good that's a good day to have a run through practice. Don't reserve the run through practice for when you're feeling great because people have to perform under all situations, under all circumstances. Maybe you have to play feeling ill. Maybe you have to play something upsetting going on in your life. This is what performing is all about, that people don't know what's going on with you or me or anyone. And you give the best performance you can in the situation that you're in and I think people often in the audiences glamorize the performer's role in the sense that oh how how incredible how

Starting point is 00:43:37 amazing what they can do on the stage isn't it fantastic and oh it's so dramatic and so glamorous and it is those things but the other side of it is actually very it's a very macho profession here here's your instrument go do it and be good at it don't show anyone you got anything that you're battling against besides the music or you know if it's that kind of music you know show us what you got and do it right now so there you have to have a pretty thick skin in terms of of developing this ability to do something really very difficult under almost any circumstances and this is something that can be only achieved with learning to feel uncomfortable that was one of my favorite things from your episode you where you were talking about how people are attached to

Starting point is 00:44:35 feeling comfortable while they perform when in fact exactly what you just said we are able to perform under any circumstances and feeling any way I mean there was a point say with the the Bach recording where I knew intuitively that I was well warmed up I mean I was well warmed up in the environment that I was in in the sense that if I played too much more that I was going to tire myself out for the real thing so I had it's a very tricky thing to know actually when to stop before the performance when you kind of pass that threshold where that energy that you need for the performance will get eaten into by the you know the the arduousness of the warm-up so to find that balance and to be checking in with yourself how am i feeling actually how am i doing how how are my

Starting point is 00:45:32 hands feeling how is my kind of emotional temperature and how how do i my feeling what time is it? What time is it? How much time do I have to now get into my dress clothes and, you know, do the final few minutes or 15 minutes before it's time to go? Time to go, meaning time, time to start. So, I mean, this is also very important. I think the presentation to oneself, we're always thinking about dressing for the occasion uh dressing for the concert but to me the ritual begins before the concert begins so meaning that it's sort of like a tribal face paint makeup becomes for me a tribal face paint um the the dress the the thing that you wear becomes part of that ritual and especially i think everyone would kind of resonate with this

Starting point is 00:46:33 in the age of the pandemic when you can do these incredibly important zoom meetings in pajamas this felt actually extra meaningful to me as well that part of this ritual is how we present ourselves how we present ourselves to ourselves and what that says to our own selves what are we telling ourselves about what we do what are the things that we do what are the rituals that we do to give ourselves our own self signals that this is special and this can be applied to anything we do what signs do we give our own selves what what rituals what habits do we give our own selves and this became something also that in the last year i realized something I very much took for granted preparing for a concert in this way when it was all taken

Starting point is 00:47:33 away and I had my my skill set then it's time to start doing this not in the live concert hall but you know for cameras or this was something that I thought about a lot as well and how much actually fun it can be to dress up something easily taken for granted when you have to do it all the time that all of a sudden it's just like damn look at this dress it's pretty this is a work of art too and having said that the director of the Met Museum Max Hollein his wife is an incredible clothes designer name is Nina Hollein and it seemed ever appropriate to have her design for me the things that I wore for these two pieces in these different rooms um and how we chose um almost um things that maybe um illustrated a little bit or highlighted some of the work in the

Starting point is 00:48:36 room um and I think when you watch it you'll see what I mean um as one of my friends put it when I entered the veras blanco room i became a goya painting i was just a totally totally different animal and being and person than i was um in the pollock room with the bach um i became and i transformed it from one animal species or being to another and that was also fun to do it was um almost like an actress changing completely changing roles this was quite fun say yes It's so true how we have such a power to generate emotions within us from a place of controlling elements outside of us, such as rituals, putting on the dress. And I love that term that you used, self-signal. I'm going to be using that because I really believe that this is something I use as well for myself in preparation for performance.

Starting point is 00:49:36 And I've never had that term before, self-signal, but definitely something I use. I mean, even I have a process of visualization I do before performance, and a while ago I started, and when I say a while, I mean years ago, I started adding a sentence in there in French, so I'll try to do a loose translation, but something unexpected happens, you know, and I welcome it with grace, something, you know, along those words. something unexpected happens and I accept it with grace or I will come it with grace and you'll agree with me that something unexpected always happens and now I always feel that when it happens of course I knew this was going to happen and I always end up not feeling frazzled by the unexpected that shows up because I had ahead of time told myself that when it will happen I will welcome it with grace so I had my plan that's a that's a fantastic attitude um with grace always with grace or or if it's not going to be with grace let it not be with grace I mean

Starting point is 00:50:43 it's it's kind of a there's an acceptance which is so important um a self-acceptance in in that moment and I'm always suspicious when I'm feeling so great the day of a performance or not nervous and because I know you know basically in a one in a matter of literally a few seconds before a performance it can flip and then the shock of the flip is um can be quite significant um and I'm feeling oh like I got this you know I got this today I got this I'm I feel calm like and then boom there comes that wave of adrenaline you're like all right here we go and I've gotten into this place now where i'm like good i'm glad i'm feeling this way this is what needs to happen before a performance this is part of the ritual right this is what needs to happen this is healthy

Starting point is 00:51:42 to happen and that kind of feeling is is is something that should be welcomed not kind of shunned in any way um so this this is very um an essential part of enjoying the performance that people say oh have fun out there oh like have a good time and then you think like what does that actually mean have fun out there um because you know sometimes it's not like what you would always call fun it's just part of what we do so how actually do we if it's going to be fun what people mean by that i think what they mean by that if you were to ask me i mean everyone's different everyone might think something different about it have fun out there means live in the moment live in that live in that space where the unexpected can happen um that's the beauty of life

Starting point is 00:52:41 spontaneity that we don't always know what's going to happen and one thing that i've also very much enjoyed is playing in my favorite string quartet um which is called uh and fred is a little shy but it's called the fred sherry quartet the cellist fred sherry um we have a great quartet um and we just recently live streamed um the schoenberg first quartet this past sunday and this has been absolutely a wonderful wonderful experience in so many ways but we had a live stream which i think will be released as well on youtube very soon but it was streamed live at 3 p.m one of the most difficult things for a string quartet ever to to play and perform and here we were in bard college in a small hall there and it was showtime

Starting point is 00:53:39 all of a sudden we had practiced a lot we had discussed but then there comes that time where four incredibly experienced and mature and you know big feeling artists have to get together and make a performance and then you realize that basically I would say 90 percent of maybe not 90 okay 80 75 percent of what happens in the performance is nothing we could ever really rehearse um that we did of course map out what we were going to do and you know fit things together and um and did detailed rehearsing but then what actually happens when four different brains personalities anatomies get together then you have something that creates its own special chemistry in a performance and this was something really wonderful and inspiring and sort of fascinating

Starting point is 00:54:47 to feel again like we never could have rehearsed that oh wow listen to that we never could have rehearsed that but it happened then this little inflection that someone reacted to in the group oh like that happened because it was a performance that happened because uh it was a live stream and we were all there and excited to be there like this is not something we ever could have planned and um when you have that interactive quality between players this is something um so beautiful and something um strangely when i was doing the solo work i had to generate within myself i had to sort of spontaneously react to my own self which was something so um so different for me i've been always playing with big orchestras and working with the conductors and different

Starting point is 00:55:40 members of the orchestra etc um and the solo thing was almost like okay i'm reacting to my own self now you're like oh okay i did that i can do this oh cool and it's sort of like this this sort of internal rubik's cube of um playing playing around with things um but this quartet was really just it was such a joy um one can see our next uh fred sherry string quartet performance next month if you uh log on to bard college condo concerts c-o-n-d-o concerts condo concerts Bard College you can see our next streaming and you can get the information there we're doing two we we just did the Schoenberg first which is monumental and because we love monumental our next piece that we're going to be performing is the last Schubert quartet the

Starting point is 00:56:44 G major quartet Schubert number 15 this incredible piece of music and what Fred and I call the the Schubert G major minor major minor major minor major minor in the sense that it's towards the very end of his life and it's almost schizophrenic at times harmonically and that I don't think we remain in a major key or we keep switching between the major and the minor so frequently and so immediately that it creates, to me, a very, very powerful mix of emotions that only Schubert can do to one. But especially in the age of this pandemic, I was listening, I believe, sometime in the fall or over Christmas to this amazing piece by a quartet that I really love. That's not an official quartet. It's with Get On Kramer. There's a recording with Get On Kramer and Yo-Yo Ma. What I love about this is that it's not necessarily always well blended in the ways that song quartets get so perfectly. These are four totally different personalities, Kim Kashkashian, Daniel Phillips. These are four brilliant players who are four brilliant players in their own right, who have come together to play a great, great piece of music, who have their own voices and own things to say about the music, and four different personalities.

Starting point is 00:58:23 and not necessarily trying to achieve the perfection of a voicing in the the way that you know a professional string quartet playing together year-round would that the the the goals of performing a great piece with four great individuals singular individuals are it's sort of a different set of goals that start to come about and I'm very attracted to this of course because I don't regularly play year-round in a string quartet, and often people, I think, are very sort of intimidated to play string quartet repertoire if they're not a professional string quartet, and this, I think, is a great pity. I think that the great repertoire of the string quartet is something to be celebrated by all, and not just professional string quartets,

Starting point is 00:59:17 um and having four great musicians different individual thinking musicians can be such a gift to this repertoire um give great new insight to um to not blending perfectly to actually purposefully not blending perfectly um i've prided myself in my career as having a very unique sound that will stand out and not necessarily always mesh with someone next to me that's sort of the beauty of of one of the things I've been trying to go for so I still apply this to the string quartet maybe to some people's chagrin but I mean it's it's uh it's something that I find fascinating and yeah certainly Fred Sherry is one of the most uniquely thinking musicians that I'll ever know and an inspiring figure musically um we have a great of course

Starting point is 01:00:10 long friendship as well but someone who's taught me so much about music and ways to think about music so it's a real privilege to play in his Fred Sherry string quartet so that'll be that'll be next month and very much looking forward to playing this unbelievable cataclysmic piece of Schubert that sounds amazing I'm going to put the links to all of this in the show note as well as the Met performance which I'm going to go watch right now when we're done with this interview and um Layla how how about a round of rapid fire questions before I let you go sure fire away what's a habit that you have and that you think contributed to your success I would say that I am very stubborn some ways I get an idea in my mind it's very hard for me to

Starting point is 01:01:05 let go um and that can be that can be a pain in some aspects of my life but in terms of setting myself a goal or the determination aspect is extremely strong with me if I really come to a place where i want to make a decision or i give myself a goal um and it is really really self-motivated by me i'm not saying all of my decisions are and i'm not saying i'm always this way but when it does um grab hold of me and it's almost like slightly obsessive them I will do almost anything to make that happen um I made the quartet really laugh because I alluded to myself as a pit bull um gripping a two by four I mean in the sense that once that thing latches on it doesn't let go and I'm a little bit like that in that way everyone was

Starting point is 01:02:13 laughing at me and stuff and it was funny but it is sort of true um you have to have this incredible grit that it's a personality thing um that you just have a relentless pursuit of your goal that's very inspiring and i would say that i'm not saying in any way that this is you know i have this all the time not at all it's just when it does when it does happen i know how much i really want it. I know how much it means to me. It doesn't happen all the time. And sometimes without it, I feel sort of lost. And I long to have that feeling. It doesn't always happen. But when it does happen, it is part of my personality. When it does happen, it really does happen. Do you have a favorite book that you would like to recommend to our listeners?

Starting point is 01:03:04 I was actually thinking about this question and it was a harder question than any other that's put to me lately partly because i confess i don't read as much as i'd like to read um it's just something that i have a six and an eight year old and with the kind of things that have been demanded of me these days um it sounds incredibly um non-intellectual but you know i'm watching the crown of uh i've been uh searching out different shows and sometimes really all i can do at the end of the day right now is actually try not to focus on anything as non-intellectual as that sounds i spend so much time thinking about how the next months might go and i'm sure i'm not the only one it's exhausting um and the last thing

Starting point is 01:04:06 i can do honestly at the end of the day is open a book and read um however one thing i really do love is reading poetry uh i have a dear friend who's a wonderful poet her name is natanya Rosenfeld and she writes me poems uh and she actually wrote a poem about the Bach which I thought was incredibly um kind of inspiring and and wonderful and maybe I can even send a copy to you um to post in some way that would be amazing this is a poem that was written inspired by the box in front of the Jackson Pollock and sometimes less is more less words mean more to me than ever before and so this is something I love to do read roomy different poetry different things that maybe I can I can look at and analyze and read but then think about and have different inflections

Starting point is 01:05:17 from these words so poetry has been something I think very beautiful for me but in terms of getting sucked into a book it's very difficult I think many people can relate to this me first actually these days in normal times how do you maintain peak form while juggling a family life busy travel schedule and a large list of repertoire in normal life so that's sort of not applying to now I guess correct you're right I mean and if we ever go back to what was what's normal is changing I think too I mean normal we thought we all knew what normal was and now I think one of the points of whether you call it um just questioning what what is going on right now which i believe i'm also not alone in doing which can be quite exhausting is actually finding a new

Starting point is 01:06:17 state of existence so you know going back to what was it was very hard to do it was very very difficult to juggle all of those things um but one of the things that's changed right now is that my my kids will be back in school five days a week my six and eight year old um apparently by the end of next month which is sort of mind-blowing but in the last months um they were home doing um computer work like so like all kids basically these days and that's going to shift back and give me more time to not feel like i'm multitasking so much but i had to carve out and my beloved mother has been here saving my my entire life but um you know time where she say you can go practice I'll look after the kids and then I close the door and forget about everything outside of that room

Starting point is 01:07:11 and really try to focus which is was much easier said than done um but it was something that again I sort of took for granted in the past that kids are in school okay I'm going to practice and I got to juggle my my business calls and my administrative calls and my practicing while the kids are in school um and that was hard enough but you know because of everything that's happened that all changed um it will go back somehow to the way some of the way it was before and the way it was before is comparatively easy to how it's been in the last months so we all have to again prioritize our time prioritize our goals make lists if we need to and stay while being if i would say emotional first responders there's a time there's also time in which it's like okay

Starting point is 01:08:09 you know what i'm gonna forget about how i feel right now now i want to forget about how i feel I want to think outside my body. I want to look around me and think what else is going on out there. Cause I'm sick of feeling what I'm feeling right now. I want to get out of my own body and mind. I want to get out, think about what's outside of my own little universe here. And you know, that was a source of frustration for me often. It's like, I'm tired of my own thoughts and my own feelings. I want to get the hell outside my body. And then, you know, that's where exercise comes in that's where watching movies comes in and find ways to self-distract again easier said than done but right yeah so important so important to do and in conclusion

Starting point is 01:08:56 is there a piece of advice that you would like to pass on to the listeners I would say that I'm grateful I have humble and immense gratitude for being able to have the ability and doesn't mean I always do but to have that chance that ability to reach people to heal to emotionally to heal means so much more now than it did before and that is something that people have said these days and it may not be the first time that you've heard it but as my identity as a player that changes my identity as a player it changes my my own idea of self-worth in a certain way I feel in some ways more important than I did before and it has nothing to do with people giving me in any way any sort of praise it's more knowing my own ability

Starting point is 01:09:56 in what I do in what I'm able to do for people I played for people individually in this past year who were crying in front of me when i finished playing and um in ways that i never had the opportunity to experience before um and i thought this is profound and i felt very um grateful and and a certain kind of humble humble feeling of um having this sort of healing effect if maybe people have certain locked emotions and feelings that have been stuck that haven't been able to come out and then something like this is sort of like opens the floodgates in a very very good and healthy way for people that ah like i've missed having people human humankind understand my existential feelings and existences that cannot be put into words this can only be felt

Starting point is 01:11:03 through music so having um being part of that is very very special i love that leila thank you so much for this incredible gift of your time and your wisdom you're someone that I think in the last episode, the word I used was, you have so much depth. And I hear this, again, we see it in everything that you've shared with how much you care, all of the details surrounding the Met exhibit, choosing the painting, choosing the room, the pieces, even in your choice of clothing. And we can see how profound you are when you approach everything that you do and it translates in your playing and in who you are and i'm so grateful that you spent this time with us today oh i'm so thrilled to um to be able to um just share and discuss

Starting point is 01:12:01 with you so it's a wonderful thing you have going and thank you for that and um maybe we'll even do another one you never know it sounds good thank you guys so much for listening I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Leila Josipovic and Leila was kind enough to send us the poem she mentions in the episode Partita by Natalia Rosenfeld

Starting point is 01:12:36 you can find that in the show notes wherever you listen to podcasts or at mindoverfinger.com slash podcast. I would love to know what your favorite takeaways from today's conversation were. So get in touch with me. I'm mindoverfinger.com on both Instagram and Facebook and share your thoughts on those topics.

Starting point is 01:12:56 You can find more information about Leila and her incredible career projects and concert dates at leilayosefovich.com. I'll have that link, the link to her project at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other fun performances in the show notes as well So that's it for today Again, thank you and à bientôt

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 098 Leila Josefowicz: Infinite Possibilities

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