Everybody Likes The Piano Book 1 Pdf

[Carolina Bornman]

LLYRHELLER: All right. Thank you all for joining us today. We are very excited to be hosting three from the LA Philharmonic and Hollywood Bowl. Thank you so, so much for being here today. I know it's been a long time coming. I'm very excited. So the first question is just going to be ... and this is a relaxed conversation so we'll be pausing for questions from the audience so feel free.

LLYR HELLER:But the first question is, can you talk about the path that you've taken to get to where you are today. Different training, college internships, specialized training, et cetera, and what you studied. Thank you. Oh, and your name, sorry.

FABIAN FUERTES:Yeah. Hi. Can all of you hear me? Perhaps? Yes. Wonderful. Hi, first off, thank you all for having me here today. Thank you Amanda. Thank you Llyr for inviting us. I really appreciate this opportunity. My name is Fabian Fuertes. I grew up here in LA and it's been really great to come back. I just moved back in May of 2018 and I've been in many different states. So I moved to Florida and Texas and Ohio and Pennsylvania. Now I work with the LA Phil in the learning department.

So the question was a bit about how I got here to this position. First off, how many of you are interested in music? Yes? Okay. Okay, cool, cool, cool. That's a lot of hands. That's pretty good. How many of you care for music? You enjoy music? Yes? Yeah. Okay. Usually more hands go up when I ask that question. That makes sense. I think we all care for music.

My affection for music and the clarinet started way back when not that far back. I'm still young. Way back when, when I was in fourth grade. Some of you have heard me tell this story. So in fourth grade, we moved a lot. So I lived in LA, Pasadena, Monrovia, Chino Hills, and then Fontana. By the time we're in Fontana, I'm about eight years old. And I have the opportunity to go to a school where they have a band program and there's this young girl named Jennifer. Jennifer Balag is my first crush and she happens to play the clarinet. So since she played clarinet, I had to play clarinet.

So I went to my parents and I said, "Hey, I really want to play the clarinet." And it was a little, sort of caught them off guard. They said, "Why?" And, "How did this come about?" They knew I had played a little bit of piano at my cousin's house on the organ. In any case, I begged and pleaded and I was very fortunate. They scrounged up money for it so I could get a student model.

So now let's fast forward to the next semester or whatever you call it in grade school. And I'm in the room, right? And I have my friends here in band and I'm like opening up the case and I'm trying to put the parts together because there's several parts and I don't know what the heck I'm doing. And in the process, I look over to one of my friends and I said, "Hey, where's Jennifer?" They said, "She's not here today." And I said, "Well, is she sick? What happened?" They're like, "Oh no, she quit." So I was like, "Oh no." I begged and pleaded to my parents for this instrument and now there's no way I can say, "Oh, I don't want it anymore." Right? I'm sort of stuck with it.

So that's how I first sort of got onto the clarinet. But it came naturally. Anything that you enjoy, right? You like doing, everyone likes doing something they're good at. Right? So I sort of excelled into it. And then in high school, I kept moving around a lot. I moved to Florida and one thing that I didn't know that was consistent within the inconsistency of moving was having the support of my mother and having music and having the clarinet.

Because in that way I always had a community. I always had a band program or orchestra program. And that became my community. Even if I didn't have brothers or sisters, even if I didn't have friends because I was moving around, I'm trying to make them. I knew I had other clarinets, I knew I had other musicians around me. So that was really great to have that in my life. And that coupled with academics of course, which is extremely important, doing well in school. Between those two things, I was able to use my music to help get me a scholarship in college. Because I'm a first-gen Latinx, my mother has no idea about what it means to be a career in music. I had no idea what it meant to be a career in music. So that helped sort of guide me into there.

So I studied music performance in my undergrad and my masters at Florida State University. Then University of Texas, then I went to Philadelphia. Along the way, I started to sort of fall out of love with performing. And at that point, I was playing with a lot of orchestras. I was teaching, which I really, really enjoy and it's close to home and sort of leads to where I am today. And I started going into this arts administrative world and what does that mean? Right? Think about it sort of what happens behind the scenes to help build experiences that happen on stage and any venue you might be in. And so as I was falling out of love with one, I sort of fell in love with the other. And in that process, I got opened up to new experiences.

What I realized was over time through working at the Philadelphia Orchestra in personnel, through working out Oberlin College and Conservatory in operations personnel. Then coming to the LA Phil, how can I make a bigger difference? I was affecting change in a small circle of human beings who I interacted with, but how can I make a broader change? And now through this opportunity with the LA Phil, I work in the learning department and I get to support a program called YOLA, Youth Orchestra Los Angeles. And this program helps provide a positive social change to the vehicle of music in providing free instruments, free programming, free education, academic help, leadership help at four sites across LA to over 1200 students. In this way I get to help support and build experiences for those around me through music. Something that was very close to home to me and something that I'm very passionate about. So now I get to share that with more people here in LA and it's a very beautiful thing.

So I sort of took some twists and turns moving around to Florida and Pennsylvania and Ohio and sort of being that performer on stage to going back behind the stage. And it's really cool to sort of learn what it takes to audition into music, what it takes to be on the other side at the table, sort of adjudicating for it and knowing what it takes. And it's tough, it's really tough. But I think the more important part is the relationships I was able to make and the experiences I was able to have to make me who I am today. And now I'm here at the LA Phil. So I'm going to go ahead and stop talking now and pass it over to my colleagues.

AMANDA LESTER: Thanks Fabian. My name is Amanda Lester and I work in the marketing department at the LA Phil so that now includes Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Hollywood Bowl and now the Ford Theater. And like Fabian, I grew up playing an instrument, probably not the one you would guess. When I was in middle school I decided to play trombone and I remember the band directors and my parents saying, "Don't you want to play flute?" Something you can actually carry. Because I was pretty small then like I am now. But I decided no. Trombone was it. And like Fabian, I loved playing so much and I loved being part of that community.

So for college, I was growing up in Austin, Texas. I went to the University of Texas at Austin. I did study music performance, but I also had so many other interests that I wanted to explore. So I double majored and I also majored in liberal arts. And that was really valuable to be sort of diverse in the skills and experiences I was gaining. And that helped me later on when in the last year of my music degree I got injured and basically my playing career ended. And so it was at that point, sort of like Fabian was saying, sometimes you take sort of a wibbly wobbly path to something that makes you really happy. I knew that music made me happy, but I could no longer play. So I started looking for other ways to be involved. Arts administration is an amazing way to do that.

So I told one of my former music teachers, I wanted to go into arts administration and she told me, "You're never going to be able to make a career in that." And that's obviously not what I wanted to hear. I didn't believe her. Sometimes you get advice from people and you have to sort of weigh it and see is this really advice that I think is true and valuable. And I decided that I would not take that piece of advice and I'm really glad that I did because I found out later that there's tons of opportunities to be involved behind the scenes in the arts.

I ended up going to USC, which is how I ended up in LA for a master's degree, totally outside of music in communications and public diplomacy. Which is essentially building common ground and mutual understanding between groups of people, building community. And I sort of layered in my interest in music on top of that. Eventually, after some internships in communications and the arts, I ended up at the LA Phil where I'm essentially building community around music. Yes, I'm in the marketing department but I'm not in sort of the, "Here. Let me sell you a bunch of tickets," kind of area. I'm in the, how do we build an audience that will be interested in the kind of music that we present in the longterm and how do we make memorable experiences around that.

So I think when I got to the LA Phil, it really struck me that there are so, so many ways to be involved in the arts. None of us perform with the LA Phil, but Fabian works with education. I work in marketing, he'll, as you'll hear, he works in development. But we also have lawyers on staff. We have people who fix our computers, we have people who do all sorts of scheduling, we have production managers. Almost any job you can think of, we probably have someone doing that at the LA Phil, which it's something that I wish more people knew. So I think that's sort of the message that I want to bring to it with my story is that there's so many ways to be involved in something that you love. Maybe not the most obvious one. But there are other opportunities out there that if you look hard enough and if you sort of ignore the naysayers, you can end up doing something that makes you really happy.

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