The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 185 Paul Lueders: Backstage Pass

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

Backstage conversation with Paul Lueders, Principal Oboist of the Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra. We chat about: The challenges of performing multiple shows a day The audition process Overcoming performance anxiety Paul's specific warm-ups and mindset to prepare for long opera performances His approach to phrasing and musicality Some of his practicing tips And much more!   Book your free consultation with Renée HERE Download the transcript from this episode HERE     MORE ABOUT PAUL Website: https://www.lyricopera.org/about/company/artists-musicians/lyric-opera-orchestra/paul-lueders/   YouTube links: HERE   Mind Over Finger Click www.mindoverfinger.com/coaching to book your free consultation with me. Visit MindOverFinger.com for my online courses as well as free resources on peak performance. Connect: https://www.youtube.com/@MindOverFinger https://www.facebook.com/mindoverfinger/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/mindoverfinger https://www.instagram.com/mindoverfinger/     THANK YOU: Most sincere thank you to composer Jim Stephenson who graciously provided the show's musical theme:  Concerto #1 for Trumpet and Chamber Orchestra – Movement 2: Allegro con Brio, performed by Jeffrey Work, trumpet, and the Lake Forest Symphony, conducted by Jim Stephenson.

You're listening to The Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 185. Welcome to The Mind Over Finger Podcast, where we dive into the world of mindful music making, peak performance, and crafting a purpose-driven life and career. I'm your host, violinist, certified performance and life coach for musicians, and your guide to unlocking your full potential, Dr. René-Paul Gaultier. Hi everyone. Welcome to another Backstage Pass episode. In this series, I give you access to the artists you love at work in their element and I ask the questions you're curious about.

I bring you backstage with me where I sit with amazing world-class musicians and we have a relaxed conversation about music making and life as a musician. And today, I'm backstage with Paul Lueders, Principal Oboist of the Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra. Paul joined the Lyric Opera in 2022, and before that, he served as Principal Oboe in the San Antonio Symphony for eight years. While in San Antonio, Paul was also a core member of San Antonio's Olmos Ensemble, a chamber ensemble consisting of San Antonio's principal winds and concertmaster. Beyond Texas, he's also performed as principal in the orchestras of Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Detroit. Paul grew up in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, and he's a graduate of the New England Conservatory.

In our conversation, we covered several of the topics I know you love to hear about. We chat about the challenges of performing multiple shows a day, the audition process, overcoming performance anxiety, Paul's specific warm-ups and mindset to prepare for long opera performances, his approach to phrasing and musicality, some practicing tips, of course, and much more. I know you're going to love Paul's mindful approach and find tons of practical insight you can implement today in your musical path. As always, no need to take notes. Click the link in the show notes to grab the summary and transcript of this episode. So without further ado, for you, oboist Paul Luders, enjoy your backstage pass. Paul Luders, it's so great to have you on the show. Thank you for having me.

Paul, we're backstage. It's a super long run of the Nutcracker Ballet. Many, many performances. Tell us a little bit about how that is for you to sit in the pit night after night, or many times a day, actually, to perform Nutcracker. The Nutcracker is a piece that's very near and dear to all of us, I think. Like, if you've played it under 100 times, you're still relatively fresh. And I'm not sure that I've hit 100 quite yet, so I'm still kind of enjoying.

I'm doing something new every single show. I'm playing with the music a little bit. It's still kind of exciting. Yeah, I don't know. For me, it's more of a challenge of two shows in a day and making sure that I can consistently bring my best to the table between my mental agility and also making sure that I have enough reads to get through the day. That's one problem I don't have to deal with. Paul, you and I were

talking a little bit before I hit record about auditions. And nowadays there are so many auditions we're coming out of the pandemic. It seems to be everywhere all at once. And I know that you have a lot to say on the topic. So I'm just going to give you carte blanche to say anything you want about auditioning wow wow okay huge subject um auditions i mean it's such a journey for any musician trying to find professional work stable professional work especially um you know the holy grail is to get some kind of job with benefits that gives you a certain amount of income that allows you a certain lifestyle to play the music that you want to be playing and it's just such a journey from the beginning of it from your first audition to whether it's starting to make finals

or starting when you finally win your first job or moving on to your second job I feel like my relationship with auditions has evolved so much from the beginning to the end I had a slow start and then I started really kind of having some success and then I had a huge run-in with some performance anxiety which set me back it almost felt like to zero and then I won my first job and I continued auditioning because I knew I wanted to keep moving but while I was doing that I lost my first job it went belly up financially and suddenly I had the pressure again of really needing work and having to go back and revisit the performance anxiety that comes from that pressure and really start to make friends with the process I think was the biggest thing that I've learned

towards the end of it um and focusing more on how much it really adds to my playing and brings to me as a musician as opposed to this life and death situation of just needing it if i don't have it then it's the end of the world i think that's the biggest thing that i've learned over my say how long has it been now maybe 10 12 years of auditioning is really focusing on the positives and how much it's brought to me as a player i feel that's an excellent point because up to a certain degree the outcome is often i mean probably always out of our hands completely the only control we have is how we play so what you just said about focusing on the process that's key what do you think was the catalyst for you to start at least getting some leverage over that

performance anxiety that you mentioned? Well, I started, I think as a lot of people do, honing in on learning what the fight or flight response is and methods of whether it's meditating or otherwise of ameliorating that, both the physical aspects of it and the mental aspects of it. And then also a more long-term project is figuring out why the pressure exists in the first place you know what is it about uh how i view auditions that that causes me to not perform my best on stage and i think as i continue maturing into the process as opposed to looking at it as another chance for rejection which most of them are you know i'm in my 30s for amount of auditions that i've taken and i've won two of them that's a lot of rejection and instead i think going to

audition and remembering that I put in a lot of preparation that whatever happens with with this audition I'm a better player I will go into the next one even better and I'll have a lot to bring back to my job or whatever gigs that I'm doing at the moment and I feel like those two things together both the physiological components the mental components and just my outlook on them continues to make them feel more like something manageable more like my friend than this insurmountable thing that i have in my life yeah i love that and i agree with this perspective i can say shameless plug i do have a program on performance anxiety called the performance anxiety solution so anyone who's interested can check it out at mindoverfinger.com

another thing that we were talking about was the difference in preparation from opera versus symphonic repertoire. I'd love to hear what that looks like for you. I would say that's the number one thing I'm enjoying about working with the Lyric Opera. I loved, I played in the San Antonio Symphony for seven years. I loved that job. It was only a three-person oboe section, which means I was basically playing principal for entire programs. And so when we'd have a month or five weeks of straight classics, I'd be learning, you know, a new symphony every week, a concerto. It It was really, really fast repertoire, one after the other. And that was exhilarating in its own right,

but I would come to the end of the week and I would feel like I didn't really get to know this composer or live in that world for a while. And what I'm really enjoying about opera is we'll have cycles that go for a month long or even longer, and you really get to sit with this music and learn the story, learn the composer's style, and you hear it so many times. And I feel like by the end of a cycle, I'm really able to make the music mine and communicate what I really want to. Especially because over the course of the performance, amazingly with opera as well, is the vocalists are always doing new things on stage.

They're acting out there. They're responding to each other. Things are happening slightly differently. And opera orchestras similarly, too, I feel like are some of the most sensitive groups in the world. It really feels like playing chamber music. So the amount that the music is involving and my interpretation of the music is evolving every single performance, I think, is huge. And even by the end, I feel like there's still a few things that I feel like I could do more of, which is great when the music inevitably comes back. But I really feel like at the end, I've lived with this music.

I've lived in it, and I've been able to process it properly. the question that the listeners always love also is pre-performance routine because especially in the case of operas when we play for three hours sometimes even longer that that requires a certain amount of uh you know intentionality in the preparation what does that look like for you well for us for oboe it's a little bit of a marathon of both endurance and equipment a lot of these operas involve a lot of blowing and you know our mouths our embouchures weren't really meant to hold on to a reed for that long a period of time so it's a little bit about conservation conserving the reeds conserving my energy so I will warm up for no more than a half an hour before

before an opera kind of in anticipation of that and I'll be very mindful of exactly what I'm hitting i'll do a few scales and then i'll have very specific i usually mark my part with with tabs to make sure that there are certain things i need to hit every single day before a show just to make sure that they're in my fingers um and also sometimes only having that half an hour is kind of good because you have to also remember to trust yourself it's a lot of music to get through in a night and you're not gonna be able to hit all of it before you go out onto the stage and getting into that mindset of trusting yourself and just playing music with very little warm-up.

I love that, trust yourself. That's not something we hear often, and I think it's such an important mindset. For someone who's feeling like maybe they're not quite there yet, trusting themselves, what are your tips for them? How does one get to trust him, herself, themselves before a performance? It's a two-fold thing. i i always you know people always say fake it till you make it which is true in a lot of ways

and i think you have to you're never going to feel a hundred percent but you have to give 150 percent and so there is a little bit of that fake it till you make it um i like to tell people a story again oboe is so equipment and read dependent and we get very in our heads about what we're playing on and the things that we're playing on and um i remember hearing from richard woodham's the old principal of the philadelphia orchestra that he felt like he would get the most compliments from random audience members on days where he felt like his reads were the worst and i think we really get in our heads about things have to be in a certain way things have to sound a certain way and we forget that there is also art in not being 100% or what we believe

is even 50% and getting through that and conveying what we want to despite that and I think that that's also helped me on days where I feel like I'm not able to present what I want to that I still can bring something to the table and to have that confidence and do that so that's the fake it until you make it aspect the other aspect of that obviously is the thousands and thousands of hours that we've put into it before going in there you know you can't just walk in and climb mount everest um i would say it's somewhere the combination of the two yeah it's like trusting your preparation and also having this this faith in what's to come yeah it's a great mindset But one of my favorite things about the oboe in general, but also with you specifically, is the phrasing.

You talked earlier, you said soaring, you know, soaring phrases. And I'm always fascinated how people go about shaping phrases, all of these artistic decisions, and how they have this vision that they have in their head, how they make that come to life. What does that look like for you? one of the things I really appreciate about my teaching and about the woodwind schooling that I come from is that it was really broken down into essentially a very very simple concept from you know back in the 1800s early 1900s when a lot of French musicians were being imported to play in American orchestras we had Marcel Tabuteau brought over from Paris studied at the Paris conservatory and um really taught a very simple idea of just what he called playing on the line

of the wind you know as wind players all we have really is our air at the end of the day and what that looks like is you have one stream of air that grows or diminishes and you just put the notes on top of that if you were to think of it he actually had a number system where it went from 1 to 9, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, which, you know, is the basis for any phrase. And I think we get really caught up in this note has to go to the next, and this one has to go to the next one, and this one has to go to the next one, especially with the oboe, that feels so complicated and confusing. And really all the phrase is about making as as beautifully simplistic a message as you possibly can.

So I remember my first lesson with my teacher. He just took the very first phrase of the Barrett book, which is the oboe etude book. It's our Bible, basically. And we worked on the first four measures for basically 45 minutes, made the entire lesson. And I'd been playing oboe for a while at that point. That's the first time someone had communicated to me

playing on the line of the wind. and I think even though it is so simple I've spent my career since then just making sure that I stay in that moment now that said there's a lot that you can do within that if you want to express within a certain note if you want to really power um through and support one interval like you can absolutely do that but within this concept of a phrase is just up and then down you have the wind there and you put the notes on top of it and it really should just play itself I'm gonna try that I don't know how that translates to a string instrument but I'm sure you guys have similar ways of of simplifying things for one another and ultimately it comes from

a strong sense of concept first absolutely yeah and then exploration in the workspace until we We can really figure out how that can come to life from that vision that we have. So, Paul, I ask that question a lot, but I think the listeners would be upset if I don't ask you. What tools do you like to use in the practice room? My favorite thing in the practice room, I mean, a metronome, everyone, but I almost always have some kind of drone going. Especially as oboists, we really need to have a really strong sense of pitch. I think people look to us especially for for a really good scale and I think without a drone or without some kind of leveling guidance it's really really hard to do and easy to get off of

so I would say number one it's that and then I feel like I can go into work and and really present a scale that I feel like is at 440 now if somebody needs a little bit of help I'll obviously adjust I think we're all helping each other out at all times but I think that that's the biggest thing that I can provide to my colleagues is that real sense of of pitch and pitch floor and a drum allows that what about getting yourself to practice when you don't feel like it I think that's more you know we don't feel like it probably 90 percent of the time um I think for me it's more a matter of just getting into a routine of something and and sticking with it every day and also not trying to do too much. I think if I'm really not feeling like I want to do it, um, like a full set of

scales might take me 25 minutes. I'm going to sit down and be like, you know what? I'm just going to do half of them today. And maybe that's all that I can do. I think we have to be nicer to ourselves and that'll actually lead to more consistency. Yeah. Yeah. How about a piece of advice for young musicians embarking or about to embark a career in music? hmm i would say if you've already made that decision i think you have conviction and you've probably made the right choice um and just just take it one day at a time you're not no one rome isn't built in a day all the cliches you have the conviction you have the intent go with it see where that takes you i love that

And finally, because we both agreed that we need an extra cup of coffee before the second show, what's an actionable tip that the listeners could implement in their musical life today? An actionable tip? I think going even further than what I just said for that advice is one day at a time. You have to do one. It's, again, I'll go back to this oboist thing. it's really easy to get into this mindset of where i have to be in months and it's good to have that planning it's good to have long-term goals but all we have in front of us is this current day and what you can do today and if you treat every day like that it it adds up more than

anything else in my opinion it keeps you from getting too overwhelmed about the future and also just keeps you in the present and and focusing on the things that you're able to do to improve your skills and honestly just enjoy things more. Yeah. One day at a time. Embracing that process you were talking about. I love that. This is such great advice. Paul, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Thank you. and there you have it i hope you enjoyed this conversation with paul luders i love that he emphasized the power of living one day at a time this resonates deeply for me and i think it's such a powerful reminder for all of us musicians to balance our long-term ambitions with the present

moment, to focus on the daily steps, the incremental progress, and the joy of the process itself. That is so crucial. It's a reminder to embrace each day's opportunities for growth and improvement. And that's what allows us to stay grounded, motivated, and truly savor our musical journey. And if you feel like you want to reclaim that joy in the process, but you find yourself struggling and you need guidance to refine your approach and find your footing in this performance world, book a free consult with me. Head over to mindoverfinger.com slash coaching or click the link in the show notes. When you book your free consultation, you and I are going to talk. We're going to go over what's going on for you right now and what kind of blueprint will give you the

results you want. And then we're going to see how I can help you with your process. I work with my clients one-on-one for six months to transform their career and their life. The initial call is completely free. And either way, you're going to walk away from that call with clarity about your next step. All right, that's what I have for you this week. Much love going your way, and à bientôt!