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The Symphony of Design: Peter Boyer's Musical Journey · The iDesign Lab Podcast

• 0:00
  Voice Over: This is iDesign Lab, a podcast where creativity and curiosity meet style and design.
• 0:05
  Voice Over: Curator of interiors, furnishings and lifestyles.
• 0:09
  Voice Over: Hosted by Tiffany Woolley, an interior designer and a style enthusiast, along with her serial entrepreneur husband Scott, idesign Lab is your ultimate design podcast where we explore the rich and vibrant world of design and its constant evolution in style and trends.
• 0:25
  Voice Over: Idesign Lab provides industry insight, discussing the latest trends, styles and everything in between to better help you style your life, through advice from trendsetters, designers, influencers, innovators, fabricators and manufacturers, as well as personal stories that inspire, motivate and excite.
• 0:43
  Voice Over: And join us on this elevated, informative and lively journey into the world of all things design.
• 0:49
  Voice Over: Today, on the iDesign Lab podcast, we're joined by Peter Boyer, one of the most performed American orchestral composers of his generation, with over 800 performances worldwide.
• 1:00
  Voice Over: Peter is a master at designing musical experiences that blend cinematic storytelling with symphonic power.
• 1:06
  Voice Over: From Ellis Island to the coronation of King Charles III, his work continues to inspire audiences around the globe.
• 1:14
  Tiffany Woolley: Welcome to the iDesign Lab podcast.
• 1:17
  Tiffany Woolley: Today we are going to have a very exciting conversation with Peter Boyer, who has designed a life around music, more importantly, the orchestra.
• 1:29
  Scott Woolley: Yes, the symphony and classical music.
• 1:32
  Scott Woolley: And I have to say, before we start this podcast, I've had, you know, throughout my career, the fortune to work with a lot of great names, talented people, extremely talented artists, you know, from McCartney to Springsteen to Joel, to Bono to Pavarotti.
• 1:53
  Scott Woolley: I mean the names and lists go on and on.
• 1:55
  Scott Woolley: But what I want to say today is is the gentleman who's with us, peter Boyer.
• 2:00
  Scott Woolley: For me he ranks on right up at the top of the list with those names.
• 2:05
  Scott Woolley: I've always been so impressed with his work, love what he does, and it's just a fascinating aspect of music that I think is just wonderful, that I think more people should enjoy and get out and listen and hear.
• 2:20
  Scott Woolley: I mean, it's just what you do composing and conducting big symphonies.
• 2:25
  Scott Woolley: I always call it the big sound of music.
• 2:27
  Scott Woolley: I love it.
• 2:29
  Scott Woolley: The big sound of music and I've had the fortune to know you, for I don't know 25 years or so and have followed your career, and I always enjoy seeing your posts and the places that you're performing at.
• 2:42
  Scott Woolley: I mean, one of the things that's one of my goals this year is I want to take Tiffany and my kids to come see you in one of your performances that you do and there's so many of them that you have done, which we want to dive into and jump into.
• 2:58
  Peter Boyer: I will be happy to provide you a list of some good opportunities to do that.
• 3:01
  Peter Boyer: That would be lovely.
• 3:02
  Scott Woolley: Yeah, so first question we really want to ask is how did you get into being a composer?
• 3:09
  Scott Woolley: How did that start?
• 3:12
  Peter Boyer: Well, my personal story goes back essentially to high school time, so I'm not anything like a child prodigy.
• 3:20
  Peter Boyer: I didn't start music when I was extremely young.
• 3:23
  Peter Boyer: I didn't start composing when I was extremely young, but when I was in high school a couple of things happened that, looking back, set me on the path that led to where I presently am.
• 3:35
  Peter Boyer: So when I was 15 years old, I decided that I wanted to play the piano, and I was really a Billy Joel wannabe.
• 3:46
  Peter Boyer: That was 1985.
• 3:48
  Peter Boyer: I'm still a Billy Joel wannabe in some key ways.
• 3:51
  Peter Boyer: But so in 1985, when I was 15 years old, I asked my grandmother my father's mother, who really doted on me as the oldest grandchild boldly asked if I could have a piano and piano lessons.
• 4:05
  Peter Boyer: And my grandmother complied happily.
• 4:09
  Peter Boyer: And a few days later a moving van showed up with a new upright piano, which was my first piano.
• 4:16
  Peter Boyer: I was 15 years old and I took to that very quickly and at that point there was really no meaningful connection with classical music.
• 4:24
  Peter Boyer: It was pop music Billy Joel in particular, and Elton John and Dan Fogelberg and Journey, more on the rock end, etc.
• 4:32
  Peter Boyer: All of that and so I began.
• 4:34
  Peter Boyer: I took to it very quickly and started.
• 4:36
  Peter Boyer: I realized that I had ability to start writing what were then basically songs or very simple instrumental compositions early on, I mean right off the bat, and I really was immersed in that many hours a day.
• 4:48
  Peter Boyer: But a very important thing happened in this high school time.
• 4:52
  Peter Boyer: So I was in Smithfield, Rhode Island.
• 4:54
  Peter Boyer: That's where I grew up On the East Coast.
• 4:56
  Peter Boyer: East Coast and the Northeast.
• 4:59
  Peter Boyer: And so I was at Smithfield High School and was one of a very small group of students who had an opportunity to take up a music history course with a great teacher, Robert Cleasby, who was my high school choral.
• 5:13
  Peter Boyer: Up toward the present Halfway through that year, two things happened that coalesced and really set me off on a path.
• 5:31
  Peter Boyer: One was that my grandmother died.
• 5:34
  Peter Boyer: She had set me up with all of this when I was 15.
• 5:37
  Peter Boyer: So at this point I was just turning 17.
• 5:40
  Peter Boyer: So it had been about two years worth of lessons and pop songs and beginning to accompany the choir and all of that, and at the same time we came to Mozart.
• 5:49
  Peter Boyer: We came to Mozart in the course of this music history class, and this was shortly after the great movie Amadeus had released.
• 5:59
  Peter Boyer: And although now I understand how fictionalized that portrayal, of Mozart was when I was a teenager?
• 6:06
  Peter Boyer: of course I didn't.
• 6:07
  Peter Boyer: I just took it at face value that this was Mozart and this was his story.
• 6:10
  Peter Boyer: I didn't realize that this was a Hollywoodized version, but I was completely fascinated by this.
• 6:16
  Peter Boyer: And, of course, mozart's last unfinished work was a requiem, and this is dramatized in the movie Amadeus.
• 6:23
  Peter Boyer: He didn't finish it, he died himself while finish it.
• 6:25
  Peter Boyer: He died himself while writing it.
• 6:26
  Peter Boyer: That's a long story in and of itself, but my grandmother died.
• 6:30
  Peter Boyer: I saw the movie Amadeus, I learned about Mozart and I said I want to write a requiem mass in honor of my grandmother who just died, and I was just turning 17 years old and in fact I did this, and that's a long story.
• 6:44
  Peter Boyer: But the end of the story is that three years later, when I was just turning 20, and I was a junior at Rhode Island College, which is where I did my undergraduate work I had skipped my senior year of high school and went to college a year early.
• 6:58
  Peter Boyer: And three years later, just at the age of turning 20, I conducted about 300 performers in the premiere of my Requiem Mass.
• 7:07
  Peter Boyer: So that was four vocal soloists and a huge choir and a big orchestra.
• 7:11
  Peter Boyer: And I'd never done any of this before and I was very fortunate to receive a lot of mentorship and help, financially and morally and emotionally, from a group of people who believed in this very ambitious young fellow, and so there was so much attention given to this premiere.
• 7:30
  Peter Boyer: I got myself into USA Today newspaper, which is another interesting story, so I had national coverage of this.
• 7:37
  Peter Boyer: The local television stations and local radio station and local newspapers all wrote about it.
• 7:42
  Peter Boyer: So on the day that it happened, which was a Sunday afternoon in March of 1990, the place was literally sold out, with standing room.
• 7:50
  Peter Boyer: Only Over a thousand people came to see the premiere of my Requiem at age 20, with 300 people on the stage.
• 7:59
  Peter Boyer: So this was both a musical experience but also an experience in terms of being a kind of entrepreneur and learning leadership required leadership, to you know, to gather all of this together to get adults I was a young adult, to you know invest in this resources in kind and money to make all this happen.
• 8:19
  Peter Boyer: And so it was a huge success and a very important and very obviously heady young moment for a young composer at age 20 to do this, and so at that point I guess you could say I had become a young composer, although it's important to note that I hadn't had any formal composition lessons at that point.
• 8:38
  Peter Boyer: I did have mentorship, a man named Stephen Martorella, who was very important in my undergrad experience.
• 8:45
  Peter Boyer: He was and is a pianist and organist and harpsichord player and somebody who had great interest in me as a young man and gave me a lot of resources.
• 8:55
  Peter Boyer: But he wasn't a composer.
• 8:56
  Peter Boyer: So I didn't actually have any formal composition lessons, in fact for another year and a half until I went to graduate school at the Hart School of Music at the University of Hartford.
• 9:05
  Peter Boyer: So I did this enormous project, plus another couple big projects in the next year, my senior year all basically with a lot of self-motivation, and then many things came after that, but that was kind of a very unusual way to start a life as a classical composer.
• 9:20
  Scott Woolley: So that was a pivotal aspect of your life, that happening, and you basically, at that point I'm guessing On your way, really On your way, but at that point I'm guessing that piano was the instrument that you were playing, but from what I'm understanding, you also wrote for an entire symphony for many other instruments, is that?
• 9:39
  Peter Boyer: correct.
• 9:39
  Peter Boyer: That's correct, and you know.
• 9:41
  Peter Boyer: And that of course is a big part of what classical composers or orchestral composers do.
• 9:46
  Peter Boyer: And you know, essentially you could divide the work into the big category of composition and orchestration, and these things of course are very much related.
• 9:57
  Peter Boyer: But I learned initially the craft of orchestration simply by studying scores.
• 10:02
  Peter Boyer: I went to the Providence Public Library and took out scores of Requiem, so I took out the score of the Mozart Requiem and the score of the Verdi Requiem, et cetera, and listened to recordings.
• 10:13
  Tiffany Woolley: Explain the score really quickly though.
• 10:15
  Peter Boyer: So just the printed music, the sheet music of the entire piece.
• 10:19
  Peter Boyer: And so you know.
• 10:20
  Peter Boyer: If you think of piano music with simply two lines of music for left and right hand, when you're looking at a full orchestral score or orchestra and chorus, then maybe you've got 30 or 35 lines of music on the page indicating what every instrument is doing.
• 10:33
  Peter Boyer: So every instrument is listed on that page.
• 10:42
  Peter Boyer: That's correct.
• 10:43
  Peter Boyer: And for those who don't know, orchestral scores are organized by instrument families.
• 10:48
  Peter Boyer: So you have your woodwind instruments.
• 10:49
  Peter Boyer: You know flute oboe, clarinet, bassoon in a family on the top, and you have your brass instruments, horns and trumpets and trombones and tuba, in a family below that, and then you have your percussion instruments timpani and snare, drum and bass, drum, et cetera, and then you have harp and keyboard.
• 11:05
  Peter Boyer: If that's there, if there's a chorus, then the chorus is there sopranos, altos, tenor, basses, and then finally the strings, really the great body of the orchestra violins, violas, celli, bass.
• 11:14
  Peter Boyer: So indeed, you know, as one, as a teenager, as I began to look at this, it's like opening a world and hearing inside another composer's mind of the notes that they put down perhaps hundreds of years ago, that still speak to us today through this miraculous thing of music notation.
• 11:33
  Peter Boyer: And I was totally fascinated by this and I'm still fascinated by it, and this is what I spend much of my time doing is trying to create the same kind of thing in a contemporary guise.
• 11:41
  Peter Boyer: But you're starting all that with the piano, correct?
• 11:42
  Peter Boyer: That's correct.
• 11:43
  Peter Boyer: That's correct is trying to create the same kind of thing in a contemporary guise, but you're starting all that with the piano, correct?
• 11:48
  Peter Boyer: That's correct.
• 11:48
  Peter Boyer: That's correct and it's important to say.
• 11:49
  Peter Boyer: You know, I'm often asked this the only instrument that I play is piano, is keyboard.
• 11:55
  Peter Boyer: Now we're in a time in which we have sample libraries so that I have at my disposal all of those sounds that I just mentioned the woodwinds, the brass, the percussion, keyboard, harp, strings, choir all of this I can call it's really being able to understand.
• 12:14
  Peter Boyer: If I write these notes for a violin, what's that going to sound like when a violin section plays that?
• 12:32
  Peter Boyer: And that kind of thing is really what orchestral composition is about.
• 12:37
  Peter Boyer: It's wonderful to have the tools that we have now, but I didn't have them when I was a teenager or for my early pieces.
• 12:42
  Peter Boyer: I just wrote it at the piano and then began to understand, and I really couldn't hear it until I stood in front of an orchestra for the first time, and, of course, as a young person.
• 12:51
  Peter Boyer: When you're doing that, it's an unbelievable learning experience, because every single second that you're hearing what you wrote, you're getting this incredible human feedback and you're understanding.
• 13:01
  Peter Boyer: Ah, this is what happens when I write this down.
• 13:03
  Peter Boyer: Now, of course, I'm quite accustomed to this.
• 13:10
  Scott Woolley: I can hear it in my head, but when I was a teenager, it was a bigger leap of the imagination to do this, and I guess there's a lot of imagination and kind of, you're playing it on the piano, but then, kind of thinking, you know in your head what this sounds like and, like you just said, today you can take those notes, put them into a system or program and it's going to play out the violin or whatever it is.
• 13:29
  Tiffany Woolley: It really is designing music.
• 13:31
  Scott Woolley: So back in the 90s when you started this.
• 13:33
  Scott Woolley: That's right.
• 13:34
  Scott Woolley: That's a lot of visualization in the head, hoping that it's going to sound.
• 13:41
  Tiffany Woolley: It's funny because, even as you're explaining that to us, we have three daughters who are very into music right now.
• 13:47
  Scott Woolley: Well, they have a band.
• 13:48
  Tiffany Woolley: It's a big part of our life.
• 13:49
  Scott Woolley: Yeah.
• 13:50
  Tiffany Woolley: And they just started in high school and you know their focus was.
• 13:55
  Tiffany Woolley: One of them is the guitar.
• 13:56
  Tiffany Woolley: One plays piano, one plays drum, but the daughter who is doing guitar, they put her in guitar.
• 14:01
  Tiffany Woolley: She was all excited.
• 14:02
  Tiffany Woolley: She shows up for her first day of school and it's classical guitar and she's totally thrown for a loop.
• 14:09
  Tiffany Woolley: She like totally, you know, was like I don't know if that's for me, I don't know if I should pursue this, I don't know if I should stay with this.
• 14:15
  Tiffany Woolley: We called our music instructor, who we trust so much, and you know he was like no, stick with it.
• 14:21
  Tiffany Woolley: It's the, you know, it really is the basis of what music.
• 14:25
  Tiffany Woolley: It's the beginning.
• 14:27
  Scott Woolley: He came over the house and had a conversation with her Classical guitar.
• 14:32
  Scott Woolley: You need to learn, you need to almost master that.
• 14:37
  Peter Boyer: You're building a foundation for further understanding and for further technical development.
• 14:42
  Peter Boyer: For sure, absolutely, and also at that age.
• 14:45
  Peter Boyer: Our minds are so open and so fertile at that time and you know, it's just like a great time to learn language as well.
• 14:52
  Peter Boyer: So you know, I think during those teenage years, exposing oneself to all of these kinds of musical early experiences can really pay rewards down the road.
• 15:02
  Peter Boyer: They certainly did for me Absolutely.
• 15:04
  Tiffany Woolley: Without a doubt.
• 15:05
  Scott Woolley: And a lot of it seems to have been lost in the schools.
• 15:08
  Scott Woolley: The schools don't like.
• 15:10
  Scott Woolley: When I went to high school and to junior high, no, it was not involved at all in my generation.
• 15:14
  Scott Woolley: When I did music was a big thing.
• 15:16
  Scott Woolley: Today it's almost non-existent.
• 15:21
  Peter Boyer: Yeah, it's very, very unfortunate because you know I'm not a sort of you know professional advocate for music education, but I certainly know that study after study has shown that the study of music increases ability, intellectually and emotionally, all over, throughout the whole experience, from earliest up through high school and through college, etc.
• 15:50
  Peter Boyer: So you know, it's a very important part of our learning.
• 15:54
  Scott Woolley: So you're 21, 22 years old, you've composed and you've done these one or two amazing events.
• 16:01
  Scott Woolley: How?
• 16:07
  Tiffany Woolley: do you move forward?
• 16:07
  Scott Woolley: or how did you move forward into where it became a career.
• 16:10
  Scott Woolley: Well, let me ask you a question Before you did that, did you have visions of some other career?
• 16:17
  Peter Boyer: that you were thinking of.
• 16:18
  Peter Boyer: So I mean in my very youngest days I actually thought, I mean before music came into my life and really overtook my life.
• 16:21
  Peter Boyer: When I was very young, I actually thought, I mean before music came into my life and really overtook my life.
• 16:24
  Peter Boyer: When I was very young, I actually thought maybe I would be a comic book writer and illustrator.
• 16:30
  Peter Boyer: So I mean I have to say when I was creative.
• 16:34
  Peter Boyer: Yeah, your mind was creative right, I mean, I certainly I never imagined myself in, you know, housing, construction or something.
• 16:41
  Peter Boyer: So comic books, you know, and illustration, all of that.
• 16:46
  Peter Boyer: I thought maybe that would be the way to go, and I did that up until music took over, when I was 15, then, you know, I just immersed myself in it so strongly that I stopped drawing, alas, and you know, my work was putting notes down on a page.
• 17:01
  Peter Boyer: And of course, at that point I was, I was literally physically putting the notes on a page with a calligraphy pen at the very beginning, the Requiem Mass which I wrote by hand over many, many months when I was, you know, basically 18, 19 years old.
• 17:17
  Peter Boyer: I mean, I still, of course, have the original manuscript, such a tribute to your grandmother.
• 17:22
  Peter Boyer: Yeah, so you know that I mean those that was really done with with a calligraphy pen to do the note notation via a keyboard, a MIDI keyboard or an electronic keyboard, and then to type in text, etc.
• 17:50
  Peter Boyer: That of course it was in its early stages, in the early 90s, but I actually started in.
• 17:55
  Peter Boyer: 1990 was the first time I began to use that kind of software, and so now, you know, years later, I basically never actually write on paper anymore, even though there's something very tactile and wonderful about it, because it's so much easier to simply play the notes.
• 18:11
  Peter Boyer: In to music notation software I use a software called Sibelius, which is wonderful, and it allows me to then, as we mentioned earlier, to send the musical lines to whatever instruments I need to hear and to edit as necessary, to take a sketch and to expand.
• 18:27
  Peter Boyer: So the software has come a long, long way since the early 90s and of course so have computers themselves.
• 18:34
  Tiffany Woolley: So do you believe that, like formal training was what was the catalyst, or was it the passion that got you to this career?
• 18:46
  Peter Boyer: So it certainly was both of those things and, to answer Scott's earlier question, after having done the Requiem and also a couple other big projects that I won't get into during my because that was only my junior year, that I was.
• 18:59
  Peter Boyer: My junior year of college was the Requiem and I did more in my senior year, but I knew that I wanted to go on to graduate school.
• 19:05
  Peter Boyer: I knew that my learning process was still early and there was a lot to learn.
• 19:09
  Peter Boyer: So, uh, you know to to sort of very quickly go through the next steps.
• 19:13
  Peter Boyer: Uh, I went to graduate school at the Hart school of music at the university of Hartford for two more years after graduate school.
• 19:21
  Peter Boyer: So I did a master's degree and a doctoral degree, what's called a DMA, a doctor of musical arts.
• 19:25
  Peter Boyer: So, I actually had received my doctoral degree by the time I was 25.
• 19:30
  Peter Boyer: So I was kind of young fellow to have a.
• 19:32
  Peter Boyer: DMA and that was in Hartford.
• 19:35
  Peter Boyer: And then I also studied privately with a very, very renowned classical composer named John Corleano.
• 19:42
  Peter Boyer: He accepted me as a private student and I studied with him for one summer in New York and then moved to Los Angeles.
• 19:48
  Peter Boyer: So I've been there since I was 25 years old and did one more year, after having done my doctorate, of studying film and TV music in a program at USC now called the USC Thornton School of Music.
• 20:00
  Peter Boyer: So by the time I was 26, I had a doctorate.
• 20:03
  Peter Boyer: I had done this one more year of film and TV focused study, which was really much more commercial focused versus classical.
• 20:10
  Peter Boyer: And those things have informed you know the path that I've taken.
• 20:14
  Peter Boyer: I was approached about a teaching position and took that teaching position at the Claremont Graduate University, at the Claremont Colleges, but really started a lot of hustling to get my music out into the world and began to approach orchestras and conductors with my music.
• 20:31
  Peter Boyer: And also at that time when one is in one's 20s there are competitions that one can enter and I did enter some competitions and I did win those competitions.
• 20:39
  Peter Boyer: So there's something in particular called the BMI used to be called the BMI Student Composer Award.
• 20:44
  Peter Boyer: Now it's just called the BMI Composer Award, and it's a very competitive program that has many hundreds of entries per year and picks a handful of winners, and so I won that a couple of times when I was in my young 20s and that was the first sort of national exposure to the classical community.
• 21:04
  Peter Boyer: But of course you've got to hustle and get your music out there, and even to this day I'm still promoting my music on a regular basis.
• 21:12
  Peter Boyer: But I'm happy to say that now many more orchestras and conductors are simply coming to me, which is a great thing that I wish had happened in my mid-20s.
• 21:20
  Peter Boyer: But it was a long time of building this up, and in the early period if I could get even one or two or three orchestral performances, I mean it was a huge deal, it was a thrill.
• 21:30
  Peter Boyer: And now you know, happily I'm at a point where things have really exploded in the last couple of years, as Scott had alluded to earlier, and in last year last calendar year 2024, amazingly there were 134 performances of my music that's amazing calendar year.
• 21:48
  Peter Boyer: So you know, things have really grown.
• 21:49
  Peter Boyer: That means every, you know, basically every three days what do you attribute to that growth?
• 21:54
  Tiffany Woolley: I?
• 21:55
  Tiffany Woolley: Mean is that just the internet social media, you know?
• 21:58
  Scott Woolley: well, I think it's also a lot of what he's composed is just your catalog is so bad all of those things are factors.
• 22:05
  Peter Boyer: I mean, I think, more than anything else, it's been a continuous and relentless work ethic over these years, doing broadly two things, one of which is to compose what is now a relatively large body of music.
• 22:19
  Peter Boyer: I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not like Mozart, it's not like Bach or Telemann, you know, with hundreds and hundreds of compositions.
• 22:24
  Peter Boyer: It's not like Mozart, it's not like Bach or Telemann, you know, with hundreds and hundreds of compositions.
• 22:27
  Peter Boyer: But I mean, I have a catalog of about 30 works, and some of those works, in particular Ellis Island, the Dream of America have become very well known and have been, you know, on national television, on PBS, performed many, many times by many orchestras.
• 22:41
  Peter Boyer: But also other works of mine, you know, have had many performances and I'm constantly writing new music because there are commissions and I'm in a very fortunate place to have had a series of commissions over the years that has been pretty continuous.
• 22:55
  Peter Boyer: So the catalog continues to grow and I continue to promote it.
• 22:58
  Peter Boyer: But also there's a kind of blossoming effect.
• 23:00
  Peter Boyer: You know, for example, when I first started and was promoting my music to orchestras, of course I would send my music to the most famous conductors and almost never get any reply.
• 23:11
  Peter Boyer: But I got replies from younger conductors who were earlier on.
• 23:16
  Peter Boyer: They were climbing the ladder, so to speak, and they took an interest in my music.
• 23:20
  Peter Boyer: Well now, years have gone by, those younger conductors have risen within the field and so they now have music directorships, et cetera, and you know, so there's a kind of ripple in the pond effect that has grown out over the years.
• 23:36
  Peter Boyer: And it's been a long, long process.
• 23:37
  Peter Boyer: But yeah, I mean, to have 134 performances in a single year is such a wonderful thing and to just be able to.
• 23:44
  Peter Boyer: I think I'm not the type to ever just sit back and say, okay, I'm done.
• 23:47
  Peter Boyer: I don't think I could do that.
• 23:49
  Peter Boyer: But to know that this body of music is growing and that the interest in the music is growing on a regular basis is very gratifying, of course.
• 23:58
  Scott Woolley: But besides writing, you're also conducting correct, yes.
• 24:01
  Scott Woolley: So you're actually going to live performances around the planet.
• 24:08
  Peter Boyer: So it's interesting that I mean, and my training was both as a composer and a conductor, although more as a composer for sure, and so I do a relatively modest amount of conducting compared to composing.
• 24:23
  Peter Boyer: But what has what tends to happen is if I'm invited to do something as a conductor it's usually because my music is involved.
• 24:29
  Peter Boyer: So there have been occasions where I'm asked to conduct, for example, ellis Island, the Dream of America, because the orchestra doesn't have a music director.
• 24:38
  Peter Boyer: They're doing a search and they want to do the piece and so I brought on to do that, etc.
• 24:43
  Peter Boyer: And my music is kind of falls in a mainstream, if you will, american symphonic composition.
• 24:50
  Peter Boyer: So my music is often programmed alongside the music of Aaron Copland, of Leonard Bernstein, of John Williams, and so sometimes I've been asked to conduct all American programs where I get to conduct these great older American composers whose music I so admire, and also to do mine.
• 25:08
  Peter Boyer: And the other part of that answer, scott, is that the recordings that I've done in London with the London Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, philharmonia Orchestra, those have been very, very important to my career and also fall in that kind of entrepreneurial category of making those recordings happen Extremely prestigious.
• 25:30
  Peter Boyer: And so I have conducted, you know, all of those recordings.
• 25:33
  Peter Boyer: I've made five recordings in London over the years and am now planning a sixth, another, and so that's also, of course, an incredible experience, you know, to go into Studio One at Abbey Road, or Air.
• 25:47
  Peter Boyer: Studios, lynghurst Hall, and to conduct these amazing London-based orchestras who are astonishing in their sight reading ability and the musicianship.
• 25:57
  Peter Boyer: So those recordings have become a very important part of my career because they've been embraced by classical radio, especially in America, but really all over the world.
• 26:05
  Peter Boyer: And now, tiffany, you mentioned the Internet and social media.
• 26:09
  Peter Boyer: It's really remarkable how social media has allowed us, in my case as a composer, to make connections so easily across the globe and to hear from conductors in Europe and in Asia who are interested, who've heard the music somewhere.
• 26:25
  Peter Boyer: Then, of course, that again allows this idea of the ripple in the pond to spread not just around the United States but internationally.
• 26:38
  Scott Woolley: So all of those things, I think, have contributed to a growth in recent years.
• 26:41
  Scott Woolley: So what is the process when you decide you want to compose something new?
• 26:44
  Scott Woolley: A new orchestra.
• 26:46
  Scott Woolley: Are you just sitting down at the piano?
• 26:48
  Scott Woolley: Creating that Does?
• 26:49
  Tiffany Woolley: it start with a story.
• 26:50
  Tiffany Woolley: Yeah, vision.
• 26:54
  Scott Woolley: Like Ellis Island is something we want to talk about.
• 26:56
  Scott Woolley: That's an amazing project.
• 26:59
  Scott Woolley: When you explain that, you can understand how that came about, but when you're doing something new, is it?
• 27:07
  Scott Woolley: Just you're sitting down and going.
• 27:10
  Peter Boyer: Okay, let's start here or we go at the beginning.
• 27:13
  Peter Boyer: So I mean broadly speaking.
• 27:15
  Peter Boyer: So as a professional composer, I'm always thinking very carefully about my task at hand, what the commission is.
• 27:23
  Peter Boyer: And so when we use the word, you know, commission in this sense a commission is simply one is being hired to write a piece of music.
• 27:31
  Peter Boyer: So I'm commissioned by, generally, orchestras, but sometimes they might be choruses or orchestras with chorus, but broadly speaking, let's say it's orchestra.
• 27:40
  Peter Boyer: So there's going to be a specific occasion for which I'm being commissioned.
• 27:45
  Peter Boyer: We're going to write this piece for this occasion.
• 27:47
  Peter Boyer: There's going to be a specific length.
• 27:49
  Peter Boyer: This piece for this occasion, uh, there's going to be a specific length.
• 27:52
  Peter Boyer: This is going to be, let's say, a short piece of five or six minutes, or a longer piece, uh, you know, concerto of 18 minutes.
• 27:56
  Peter Boyer: Or, in the case of ellis island, the dream of america, that's a very big piece, that's 45 minutes, with actors and orchestra.
• 28:03
  Peter Boyer: So I'm always first of all looking at the specific context.
• 28:07
  Peter Boyer: What is it that I have to do if I have to write a 20-minute piece?
• 28:10
  Peter Boyer: Is that piece going to be in multiple movements or sections?
• 28:13
  Peter Boyer: What is the theme that's going to drive all of this?
• 28:16
  Peter Boyer: And then we should also say, is there text or not?
• 28:20
  Peter Boyer: Because purely instrumental music, just the orchestra, where there's no singers, there's no spoken word, it's just purely music then that's going to be a different kind of process than something that has either sung music by a solo singer or by a choir, or spoken word in the case of Ellis Island spoken by actors.
• 28:38
  Peter Boyer: Those are going to be different things from each other.
• 28:41
  Peter Boyer: But you know, I think, scott, what you're asking is you know, how does, how does one actually start?
• 28:45
  Peter Boyer: And there comes a point where, ok, all of the planning and thinking has begun, but I have to actually sit down and get started.
• 28:51
  Peter Boyer: And you know, just thinking of that, that blank canvas, so to speak, when you're using music notation software, it's the same idea, it's a blank screen.
• 28:59
  Peter Boyer: And so you know, I have a, I have a template, and that template you can think of as like empty sheet music, if you will.
• 29:08
  Peter Boyer: That is across my screen from top to bottom, and you know, stretching out as far as I need it to be.
• 29:12
  Peter Boyer: And so I've got a template that has empty musical staves for all those instruments we talked about earlier, the woodwinds, the brass, the percussion, harp, strings, choir, if we need it.
• 29:22
  Peter Boyer: And so you know, I've got at some point, I've got to open up a new project and I've got to say, okay, now it's time to start.
• 29:28
  Peter Boyer: And this is where it's very difficult to describe, because this is something about being a composer and having a certain ability.
• 29:34
  Peter Boyer: So if I am thinking I need a theme that represents nobility, or I need a musical theme that's going to suggest energy and optimism, then I have to sit down and my hands are going to go to the keyboard and I'm going to start creating musical material.
• 29:52
  Peter Boyer: And it's very difficult to explain exactly how that begins.
• 29:56
  Peter Boyer: But those things that I just suggested, they're going to bring out in me something that's going to be a kind of musical response.
• 30:03
  Peter Boyer: So I'll just give you one example, just so it's kind of concrete.
• 30:06
  Scott Woolley: So it's a feeling inside that's kind of concrete.
• 30:09
  Peter Boyer: So it's a feeling inside, yes, and it has to manifest itself by playing the keyboard and coming up with material that I have a response to that I say, ah, this is good, or this is not so good.
• 30:19
  Peter Boyer: Or, of course, this sounds like something that I've heard before, because we don't want it to sound like Billy Joel or John Williams, john Williams or Aaron Copland.
• 30:32
  Peter Boyer: So you know, a big part of it is okay.
• 30:33
  Peter Boyer: How do I create something new that lives within a tradition that comes from a place that I admire, but that is not merely an imitation of this other thing?
• 30:40
  Peter Boyer: And it's very difficult to explain how that happens.
• 30:43
  Peter Boyer: But there is a kind of trial and error process.
• 30:45
  Peter Boyer: And going back to that idea of the blank canvas or the blank staves that are in front of me, at some point I've just got to put some stuff down.
• 30:50
  Peter Boyer: And going back to that idea of the blank canvas or the blank staves that are in front of me, at some point I've just got to put some stuff down and so play something, get something down and either keep replaying it myself with my hands on the keyboard or enter the notes and then have the software play it back to me and I begin to make decisions about this.
• 31:07
  Peter Boyer: Okay, this is good.
• 31:08
  Peter Boyer: Now let's see what we can do to expand this.
• 31:11
  Peter Boyer: And music is organized basically in bars, right?
• 31:14
  Peter Boyer: So a bar could be, let's say, just four seconds long.
• 31:16
  Peter Boyer: So I could write four bars of music and that could be, let's say, 16 seconds of musical material.
• 31:24
  Peter Boyer: Well, I might even spend a whole day to get the ideal 16 seconds of musical material.
• 31:30
  Peter Boyer: But now I've created.
• 31:31
  Peter Boyer: I've created something that can be developed, that something that can be grown, something that has potential to develop in a direction, and this is what composers do.
• 31:42
  Peter Boyer: And, of course, you know all of that schooling that we talked about and going to school for many years and saying, okay, let's learn counterpoint, let's learn how musical lines behave against each other, let's learn about harmony and how chords are developed.
• 31:55
  Peter Boyer: Let's learn about voice leading and how to make a line move forward.
• 31:58
  Peter Boyer: Let's learn about balance.
• 32:00
  Peter Boyer: You know, going to your whole concept of design and how we balance in an orchestration, the woodwinds against the brass, against the percussion, against the strings, so that we have something where a melody can be heard over a bed of harmony below it.
• 32:13
  Peter Boyer: All of these things are the kinds of things that composers go to school for, and spend many, many years trying to hone that craft.
• 32:21
  Peter Boyer: But the hardest thing really and it's almost impossible to describe is what some people would call a voice, a composer's voice.
• 32:28
  Tiffany Woolley: I was just going to ask you your inspiration which is probably that voice.
• 32:35
  Peter Boyer: Yes, all of those things I mean.
• 32:36
  Peter Boyer: If you think, for example, about Beethoven, if we go back to Beethoven, one of the most famous composers, I mean Beethoven had a distinct voice and personality and sound, but it evolved very much over the course of his career.
• 32:47
  Peter Boyer: So early Beethoven and middle Beethoven and late Beethoven sound quite different.
• 32:50
  Peter Boyer: But he didn't start in a vacuum.
• 32:52
  Peter Boyer: He existed in a time period in which he had great composers who were alive.
• 32:58
  Peter Boyer: When he was young, he had, you know, he had Mozart, he had Haydn and he had others.
• 33:02
  Peter Boyer: So he built on those foundations and then, ultimately, his own personality became manifest and he became Beethoven.
• 33:12
  Peter Boyer: So, all of us who are composers, you know we all do this.
• 33:15
  Peter Boyer: So when I sit down as I described and I'm trying to do this from nothing it's never really from nothing, because I have all in my head All of the music that I have loved in my whole life is all part of that process and then I have my own kind of whatever you want to call it personality or voice or style, and that ultimately dictates the notes that I say ah, I like these notes better than I like these notes.
• 33:39
  Peter Boyer: And, bar by bar, eventually we build this up and when you can think about okay, what does it take when at the end of the process, I have to have a 45 minute piece and it has to have notes for an entire orchestra or orchestra plus actors or choir, I've got to have something that's going to have literally thousands of bars of music at the end, that is idiomatic, that all of these people can play and do in such a way that it is gratifying to them as players or as singers, and that we create this final result.
• 34:08
  Peter Boyer: So it sounds almost insane, right.
• 34:10
  Tiffany Woolley: It does.
• 34:11
  Tiffany Woolley: There's so many layers to it.
• 34:14
  Peter Boyer: But you must begin somewhere and that somewhere, you know, is just putting down that initial material.
• 34:21
  Peter Boyer: And you know, as you can probably tell just by hearing me talk about this, I'm very passionate about it and also I'm very willing to work at it and work at it, and work at it, and so you know any of these pieces that we're talking about I mean, ellis Island took a year.
• 34:33
  Peter Boyer: It took a year to create, and you know.
• 34:37
  Peter Boyer: But here's a piece that that premiered in 2002.
• 34:40
  Peter Boyer: We're in 2025 and it's more performed than ever.
• 34:44
  Peter Boyer: So that year that I spent between 2001 and 2002 writing it was a wonderful investment of a year, because now we've got something that really has a life, that has gone on and I never get bored with it.
• 34:57
  Peter Boyer: I never get tired.
• 34:58
  Peter Boyer: I never say okay, I'm done with writing music, so I always want to keep going.
• 35:01
  Peter Boyer: And also there's also a learning process.
• 35:03
  Peter Boyer: I'm continually, hopefully I'm a better orchestrator now than I was 20 years ago.
• 35:08
  Scott Woolley: So when you're writing a new piece and, like you just spoke about, going like Abbey road, you know studio and now you're going to record it, you've got a full orchestra in that.
• 35:17
  Scott Woolley: In that recording studio, is everything written, is everything set for every instrument before you walk in, or are you, as you're listening to it, adding or changing or?
• 35:33
  Peter Boyer: in general, in general, everything, everything down to the smallest detail, has been written.
• 35:37
  Peter Boyer: So, um, there is there's, uh, in that kind of a context, there is not any kind of improvisation that's taking place.
• 35:44
  Peter Boyer: Um, now, if you had a certain kind of a piece, uh, which is not really the kind of piece that I'm talking about, but if you had a certain kind of a piece and you had a soloist who had an ability to improvise, then there might be an improvisational aspect where the orchestra was written out totally, but maybe you had some empty bars for the soloist, that they had to improvise in a certain style.
• 36:04
  Peter Boyer: But no, that's not what I do, and so you know, as an interesting example, we had talked a little bit before today about this piece called Rhapsody in Red, white and Blue, which I wrote for the pianist, jeffrey Beagle.
• 36:20
  Peter Boyer: A long story, but a commission to honor and celebrate the centennial of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which had its centennial just over a year ago.
• 36:28
  Peter Boyer: In February of 2024 was the centennial, and this was an incredibly difficult commission, because Jeffrey wanted a piece that would be able to stand on its own, alongside, and even be performed on the same concerts, alongside, george Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which, of course, is one of the most famous, most beloved and unique pieces of American music.
• 36:48
  Peter Boyer: It's a very, very challenging commission.
• 36:50
  Peter Boyer: I actually said no at first and he kept pursuing me.
• 36:53
  Peter Boyer: He said no, you're the right composer to do this.
• 36:56
  Peter Boyer: So, going to your question, scott, there are sections in that piece where the solo pianist, jeffrey who's a miraculous pianist, really wonderful pianist there are sections where it sounds as if he is improvising some really cool stuff in a bluesy style.
• 37:13
  Peter Boyer: It sounds that way, but it's not.
• 37:15
  Peter Boyer: It has been notated absolutely precisely.
• 37:18
  Peter Boyer: So I have very carefully figured out exactly what to put down for Jeffrey so that he in fact sounds like he's improvising, but he's playing precisely what I notated.
• 37:28
  Peter Boyer: And then, of course, when the orchestra comes in behind him, then that's been notated as well.
• 37:32
  Scott Woolley: Where was that piece first played?
• 37:35
  Peter Boyer: It was interestingly, it was first played in Utah, in Park City, utah.
• 37:40
  Peter Boyer: As it happened was the Utah Symphony June 30th of 2023.
• 37:45
  Peter Boyer: , so less than two years ago.
• 37:47
  Peter Boyer: It just the stars aligned in such a way that the Utah Symphony had the premiere.
• 37:51
  Peter Boyer: It was opening night of the Utah Symphony's Summer Music Festival and it was really a gorgeous setting up in the mountains, outdoors big screen so the audience could see.
• 38:02
  Tiffany Woolley: You know from far about 3000 people like that outside.
• 38:06
  Peter Boyer: Yes, very, very, very beautiful, very memorable, very scenic and literally we're just like among the mountains.
• 38:12
  Peter Boyer: And for a piece that has a middle section which really kind of evokes the big, wide, open spaces of America and the beauty of America in its middle section at least that's what I tried to do it was really kind of wonderfully poetic that that's where we were for the premiere and I mentioned that to the audience and you really could feel it.
• 38:33
  Peter Boyer: It was a stunning experience, and especially that you're not in a concert hall, but you're actually outside and people are on blankets.
• 38:40
  Peter Boyer: And then when it was over there was an immediate standing ovation for these 3,000 people.
• 38:47
  Peter Boyer: I'm standing on the stage sort of looking out at the crowd and seeing all these people rise and stand because they were so moved by the experience and Jeffrey and I were just.
• 38:55
  Peter Boyer: It had been like three years up to that moment and so we soaked that moment in so dramatically and emotionally and, I have to say, largely because of Jeffrey's tenacity.
• 39:07
  Peter Boyer: His idea with that project was that he would play it in all 50 states with orchestras in all 50 states.
• 39:15
  Peter Boyer: And I thought that was an almost impossible task, but he is in fact in the process of doing that and so far he's already played the piece as of this week in 33 out of the 50 states.
• 39:30
  Tiffany Woolley: That's amazing, amazing.
• 39:31
  Scott Woolley: Has it been played in Washington DC at the Gershwin Theater in the what's it?
• 39:36
  Scott Woolley: Library of Congress?
• 39:37
  Scott Woolley: Library of Congress yeah.
• 39:38
  Peter Boyer: It would be too big.
• 39:39
  Peter Boyer: It would be too big to fit in the Library of Congress because it would need a large orchestra.
• 39:43
  Peter Boyer: But no, not yet Washington DC.
• 39:45
  Peter Boyer: But, as I say, 33 states thus far and actually 47 performances, because some of them are played at two or three times.
• 39:54
  Peter Boyer: And we do in fact have commitments from orchestras in all the remaining states and in fact there are a few states where, including Florida, where there's more than one orchestra that has either has already played it or will play it.
• 40:06
  Peter Boyer: So we have 56 orchestras involved and you know that's as far as Jeffrey and I both know.
• 40:15
  Peter Boyer: That's unprecedented in terms of a piece for a soloist and orchestra.
• 40:20
  Tiffany Woolley: I know what a great goal.
• 40:22
  Scott Woolley: It's a great goal.
• 40:22
  Scott Woolley: Have you done anything pertaining to like the Aspen Music Festival?
• 40:26
  Scott Woolley: Tiffany and I have enjoyed that.
• 40:29
  Scott Woolley: We actually, when you talk about the blankets and so forth, we prefer to be outside the building listening.
• 40:38
  Peter Boyer: Sure, it's a wonderful experience.
• 40:39
  Peter Boyer: So actually it's been pitched there and I don't yet know if that will happen in Aspen.
• 40:44
  Peter Boyer: There is a small orchestra in Colorado that has agreed to perform it that hasn't performed it yet, and so some outdoors mostly they've been in concert halls and there are still about a dozen of those orchestras that have agreed to perform it that haven't scheduled it yet.
• 40:58
  Peter Boyer: So, as I said, the premiere was June 30th of 2023, less than two years ago.
• 41:04
  Peter Boyer: There are performances scheduled for the next year and probably it's going to be, I would say, early 2027, by the time Jeffrey gets to that last handful of states.
• 41:14
  Peter Boyer: So I think that by the time he's done, it will have been almost a four year process to play it in every one of the 50 states, but he actually is going to pull off that goal and I have to tip my hat to him.
• 41:26
  Tiffany Woolley: That's amazing, and does it feel different at each state, like when each orchestra is playing the works, do they?
• 41:34
  Tiffany Woolley: I mean, is there something different you take away each time you hear it, or?
• 41:39
  Peter Boyer: There are certain similarities and then differences, just in the you know the personality and the performance level of each orchestra and I have to say the acoustic of the place right.
• 41:49
  Peter Boyer: Yes, yes, for sure, and obviously indoors versus outdoors.
• 41:52
  Tiffany Woolley: Outdoors yeah.
• 41:54
  Peter Boyer: One thing that was very sweet and very nice was so just about five, six weeks ago.
• 42:00
  Peter Boyer: Of course, I'm from Rhode Island, as we said, and so the Rhode Island Philharmonic, which you might say is my hometown orchestra, the Rhode Island Philharmonic played it with Jeffrey as the soloist, a conductor named Aram Demerjian conducting it, and that was the first professional orchestra I ever heard when I was a teenager.
• 42:19
  Peter Boyer: So it was a really very kind of sweet moment to go back to Rhode Island, to be invited to go back and to talk to the audience right before the piece was played and to say, hey, I'm from here, I was born two miles from here.
• 42:32
  Scott Woolley: And I went to.
• 42:33
  Peter Boyer: Smithfield High School and I went to Rhode Island College and you know, to kind of get the shout outs from the Smithfield people and the Rhode Island College people and then to have this magnificent pianist and this excellent orchestra play it in my hometown, the city of my birth, that felt very special in a way.
• 42:49
  Peter Boyer: I think that's only possible because of that, that local connection.
• 42:55
  Tiffany Woolley: So let's go back one minute to the Ellis, ellis Island, the Dream of America has had over 300 performances.
• 43:04
  Tiffany Woolley: Where was that commission?
• 43:07
  Tiffany Woolley: Or where did the inspiration?
• 43:10
  Scott Woolley: originate from yes.
• 43:11
  Scott Woolley: Yes.
• 43:11
  Scott Woolley: So, and before you say anything, I just want to say anyone who's listening and watching to this podcast when you're done, you should go to I mean iTunes, it's there, and you know and download it and listen to it, because it's an incredible piece.
• 43:30
  Peter Boyer: Thank you.
• 43:30
  Peter Boyer: Thank you so much.
• 43:31
  Peter Boyer: And yes, you're right, tiffany.
• 43:32
  Peter Boyer: I mean it just had its 300th performance in Pittsburgh in January, which is really remarkable for a relatively recent American can say that.
• 43:46
  Peter Boyer: And of that handful, ellis Island is unique in that it's much longer, it's a 45-minute piece and it's for actors and orchestra and projected images.
• 44:00
  Peter Boyer: So the idea for Ellis Island, one of the best ideas I guess I've ever had as a composer, actually hit me, I think, as far back as 1999.
• 44:10
  Peter Boyer: I was contemplating the poem the New Colossus, which is the poem that is on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.
• 44:21
  Peter Boyer: And from which the lines?
• 44:23
  Peter Boyer: I think all of us who have grown up in the United States and have been students at some point we're familiar at least with the closing lines of this Emma Lazarus poem.
• 44:34
  Peter Boyer: You know, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
• 44:40
  Peter Boyer: Send these the homeless tempest tossed to me.
• 44:42
  Peter Boyer: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
• 44:45
  Peter Boyer: And so those lines.
• 44:48
  Peter Boyer: I don't know how old I was when I first heard them, and so you know, let's say I was 10 years old or something like that.
• 44:52
  Peter Boyer: But so in my late 20s I was contemplating this and contemplating early 20th century immigration and I thought what a, what a fascinating idea this would be for a piece to have stories from Ellis Island and to put them with orchestra.
• 45:06
  Peter Boyer: And I thought this is such a good idea.
• 45:09
  Peter Boyer: Surely somebody must have done this.
• 45:11
  Peter Boyer: And I did some research and, as far as I could determine, no one had done that.
• 45:15
  Peter Boyer: And I thought, wow, I'm kind of surprised no one's done this.
• 45:17
  Peter Boyer: There had been some composers who had set to music sung some of those stories as songs to be sung.
• 45:25
  Peter Boyer: But no one had done the idea that I had, which was to take these stories, create a script and then put that with orchestra.
• 45:32
  Peter Boyer: So I began pursuing a commission so that I could essentially be paid to write this piece and not just do it entirely on my own.
• 45:41
  Peter Boyer: And ultimately the commission came from the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts, which is a major performing arts institution in Hartford, connecticut, where I had gone to graduate school.
• 45:54
  Peter Boyer: I was already living in California, so this was a few years before, but the Bushnell decided to commission the work in celebration of a new theater that they opened called the Belding Theater.
• 46:04
  Peter Boyer: And so it was a good time for the Bushnell to commission a piece, and I had this connection as having gone to grad school in Hartford.
• 46:12
  Peter Boyer: So they commissioned it and set a premiere with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra for April of 2002.
• 46:19
  Peter Boyer: And I was invited to conduct the premiere, which, looking back, was, you know, absolutely wonderful thing that I had the opportunity to conduct it, because so many conductors have done it.
• 46:28
  Peter Boyer: But I did have the opportunity to do the premiere and and so I set about that process.
• 46:37
  Peter Boyer: I went to Ellis Island a couple of times to do research in what's called the Ellis Island Oral History Project, which is a wonderful collection of about a thousand interviews done between the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, maybe even the early 2000s.
• 46:51
  Peter Boyer: But the Ellis Island Immigration Museum was opened in the 1990s, so as part of that process there was an effort made to identify many Ellis Island immigrants who, of course, at that point were generally older, in their 70s or 80s or even 90s, but who had experiences to discuss that had happened decades before when they were very young, but who had experiences to discuss that had happened decades before when they were very young.
• 47:15
  Peter Boyer: And so I examined personally over 100 of these stories from the Oral History Project and ultimately I decided on seven stories four women, three men who came to America from seven different countries in Europe and Russia between the years of 1910 and 1940.
• 47:34
  Peter Boyer: And Russia between the years of 1910 and 1940.
• 47:39
  Peter Boyer: So there's a 30 year span that's represented in the piece and a large range of stories.
• 47:42
  Peter Boyer: And I set about creating the script basically just using every word that you hear in the piece that is spoken by an actor or an actress is not invented by me.
• 47:49
  Peter Boyer: It was actually said by a real person in the course of an interview talking about their life.
• 47:54
  Peter Boyer: And I tried to find balance between the story so that they would make a narrative and a flow, and I spent about five months creating the script.
• 48:01
  Peter Boyer: It's less than 10 pages.
• 48:03
  Peter Boyer: The script is less than 10 pages long, but that, of course, was the basis then for the whole piece, and then I spent about five months composing the entire score very carefully around those stories.
• 48:15
  Peter Boyer: So I wrote a six-minute orchestral prologue that introduces the main themes of the piece, that sets the tone, that tells the audience what kind of a piece this is going to be, gives the musical material a theme for the immigrants themselves, a theme for the idea of traveling, et cetera.
• 48:33
  Peter Boyer: And then I very carefully essentially underscored those seven stories so that the music is giving a kind of emotional counterpoint to what we're actually hearing.
• 48:42
  Peter Boyer: We're hearing words of real people, but then the music is bringing another level of engagement emotionally to this, and then wrote interludes that connect all of the stories and ultimately and this is very important I knew that I wanted to set that whole poem by Emma Lazarus, the New Colossus, in its entirety.
• 49:00
  Peter Boyer: It's a sonnet.
• 49:01
  Peter Boyer: And so at the end of the piece, all seven actors who are now familiar to us as listeners because we've heard their stories, one at a time they take a line from the sonnet until they all join as a kind of immigrant chorus.
• 49:16
  Peter Boyer: On the last line I lift my lamp beside the golden door and and I knew that that was going to be the kind of emotional payoff of the whole, of the whole piece.
• 49:24
  Peter Boyer: And so you know it was a very, I would say inspired time.
• 49:28
  Peter Boyer: I was very inspired by the material.
• 49:30
  Peter Boyer: A very hard working time and at the end of the day, you know, arrived at this piece that was premiered in April 2002 and has just never stopped being played since that day.
• 49:43
  Scott Woolley: Well, I think it's more relevant today for people to hear, because of just what's going on with immigration and the fact that this country is coming upon its 250th anniversary.
• 49:53
  Scott Woolley: Yes, I mean, I think that you know, as that celebration comes about somehow, your piece needs to be part of that.
• 50:02
  Peter Boyer: Well, thank you.
• 50:03
  Scott Woolley: Back on Ellis Island.
• 50:05
  Peter Boyer: Yes, I mean absolutely, and of course.
• 50:08
  Tiffany Woolley: With the golden light you know over it, I could see the whole town.
• 50:15
  Peter Boyer: And you know you're right, scott that things have changed so much in this country just since the piece was written I mean since 2002, many orchestras that have presented the piece have made note of the fact that the whole situation has changed a great deal.
• 50:28
  Peter Boyer: And obviously immigration has been, and continues to be, a very controversial topic, and it's interesting that you know.
• 50:34
  Peter Boyer: Occasionally I've been asked were you trying to make a political statement with this piece?
• 50:39
  Peter Boyer: And the answer is absolutely not.
• 50:41
  Peter Boyer: This is not.
• 50:41
  Peter Boyer: It's not a political piece, it's an historical piece it is, I feel, full of pride too.
• 50:48
  Tiffany Woolley: It's just so much pride and understanding what it meant to come here.
• 50:53
  Peter Boyer: And and, and the difficulties and hardships that many people had to endure in order to actually come here and to settle.
• 51:01
  Peter Boyer: And you know, as I was doing the research on the piece, I mean these years ago, I was amazed to realize that there were over 12 million immigrants who came through Ellis Island to America over the years in which it was open, between 1892 and 1954, over 12 million.
• 51:15
  Peter Boyer: And of course, as generations have gone by, that 12 million and their descendants has grown so dramatically.
• 51:21
  Peter Boyer: So, you know, a significant portion of all living Americans can trace some ancestry through Ellis Island.
• 51:28
  Peter Boyer: So it has a very profound connection to our past and I think those stories I mean obviously a big part of the reason why the piece has resonated so strongly with so many people is that they have found something of themselves in their own family stories, in those stories that I chose.
• 51:44
  Peter Boyer: There's a kind of universality to it and in our very contentious times in which we live, I think that the message of that piece is a message that is well worth hearing, absolutely.
• 51:55
  Scott Woolley: Yes, I agree, people should hear it.
• 51:57
  Scott Woolley: So what's next creatively for you?
• 52:09
  Peter Boyer: Well, it's a great segue from the point you just made about the 250th anniversary, or 250th birthday, of the United States.
• 52:13
  Peter Boyer: So I actually have two major commissions for next year, for 2026.
• 52:17
  Peter Boyer: And one of them has just recently been announced, so I can actually talk about it, which is nice, that's exciting.
• 52:23
  Peter Boyer: And so, and then the other has not yet been announced, so we'll just say there'll be another as well, but so I'm working on a pretty large piece.
• 52:28
  Peter Boyer: That's a musical visual piece.
• 52:29
  Peter Boyer: Working on a pretty large piece.
• 52:31
  Peter Boyer: That's a musical visual piece.
• 52:33
  Peter Boyer: Its title is American Mosaic and it will be about a 32-minute work for one single narrator and orchestra with rather incredible video.
• 52:46
  Peter Boyer: And my collaborator on this project is a man named Joe Sohm, s-o-h-m, who is quite renowned as one of the great Americana photographers, and I had met him years ago when we both were connected through the Boston Pops.
• 53:03
  Peter Boyer: And the Boston Pops did my piece that they commissioned way back in 2010 about the Kennedy brothers and the legacy of the Kennedy brothers.
• 53:11
  Peter Boyer: That was done at Symphony Hall in Boston, with Robert De Niro and Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris all narrating the words of the Kennedy Brothers, which was amazing.
• 53:20
  Peter Boyer: And Joe Soam had a piece called Visions of America, for which he had provided the photographs and the concept, and he was collaborating with the composer, roger Kelleway, and the great lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman did so much stuff for Barbara Streisand and others, so they worked on this piece, visions of America, and we found ourselves together briefly in Boston in 2010.
• 53:42
  Peter Boyer: And then, about two years ago, joe contacted me out of the blue with this marvelous idea for this project, and he said that after decades of going around the United States to again all 50 states a kind of connection to the other project and taking thousands and thousands of photographs that have been published you know so many places, so many times that he had been on a quest for the last seven years to once again go around all 50 states in America but to capture, now, high-def video, and that he was embracing the drone technology and the high def video technology and that he has been gathering this incredible collection of video that really has a sort of national geographic feel to it.
• 54:25
  Peter Boyer: It's very, very impressive, very beautiful and over the course of more than seven years, he's got something like 140 hours worth of video footage staggering.
• 54:35
  Peter Boyer: He's gotten every major city in America, the major national monuments, historical points of interest and, of course, many images of people, and so his idea was to create a piece together that would celebrate USA 250, using my music and his imagery.
• 54:52
  Peter Boyer: And, even more specifically, he wanted to do what he called and this is his term Peter Boyer's greatest hits, which I thought was quite funny and that he said we should.
• 55:03
  Peter Boyer: We should go back to your whole catalog and give me all your recordings, joe, and let me start building these video sequences to all sort of these great segments from your pieces, and let's create our own mosaic and put this together.
• 55:15
  Peter Boyer: Um, and so that is exactly what's happening, and I'm very happy to say that I love that collaboration.
• 55:22
  Tiffany Woolley: It's very exciting.
• 55:23
  Peter Boyer: It's a great great idea on his part and you know he said to me that he believed that the combination of his catalog visually and my catalog musically would, would create something greater than the sum of its parts.
• 55:35
  Peter Boyer: And I think he's really right.
• 55:37
  Peter Boyer: There's a complementarity that goes together with these pieces.
• 55:41
  Scott Woolley: That's very strong, so has that been commissioned.
• 55:43
  Peter Boyer: So it has been commissioned, and so I'm happy to say that we can announce the four orchestras that have jointly co-commissioned it thus far, and there may be more.
• 55:51
  Peter Boyer: So the lead commissioner is the Kennedy Center and the National Symphony Orchestra, and it will be premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Wilkins, at the Kennedy Center, february 19th through 22nd of 2026.
• 56:06
  Tiffany Woolley: So those will be the first performances in Washington Very excited about that and will you be there?
• 56:10
  Scott Woolley: Absolutely yes, I was going to say Did you just recently put something out on social media about this?
• 56:16
  Scott Woolley: I did.
• 56:17
  Scott Woolley: I think I read it, yes, yes.
• 56:19
  Peter Boyer: So this has been in the works for a long time, but it was finally just announced as part of the 2025-26 season of the National Symphony Orchestra, and I'm very proud that there are five American composers who've been commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra to celebrate USA 250 next season, and I'm one of those five, and this piece American Mosaic will be the first of those to be heard in February 2026.
• 56:45
  Tiffany Woolley: What a project.
• 56:47
  Peter Boyer: It's very exciting and maybe you can come to Washington and see it.
• 56:50
  Peter Boyer: And so it's also been co-commissioned by, so far, three other orchestras.
• 56:55
  Peter Boyer: So the Cincinnati Pops that I've worked with quite extensively.
• 56:59
  Peter Boyer: They will perform the work at Cincinnati's Music Hall with John Morris Russell conducting.
• 57:04
  Peter Boyer: That's in March of 2026.
• 57:06
  Peter Boyer: And I'm very excited that they have actually secured Martin Sheen to narrate the piece.
• 57:10
  Tiffany Woolley: Oh my gosh.
• 57:11
  Tiffany Woolley: So that's very exciting and obviously I've admired Martin Sheen to narrate the piece.
• 57:13
  Peter Boyer: Oh my gosh, so that's very exciting and obviously I've admired Martin Sheen for my whole life.
• 57:18
  Peter Boyer: So pretty remarkable that he's agreed to narrate there.
• 57:22
  Peter Boyer: That was just also just announced within the last couple of weeks, and Pacific Symphony, which is in Orange County, in Costa Mesa, which is the same concert hall in which Ellis Island was filmed for PBS, which is a Sagerstrom concert hall they have co-commissioned and their new music director, alexander Shelley, will be conducting in late May 2026.
• 57:44
  Peter Boyer: And then also the Williamsburg Symphony around historic colonial Williamsburg.
• 57:50
  Peter Boyer: They have co-commissioned and the piece will be performed in colonial Williamsburg.
• 57:54
  Tiffany Woolley: It's such a cool place.
• 57:58
  Scott Woolley: So, when a piece is being commissioned by all these different places, how are they finding you?
• 58:05
  Scott Woolley: Do you have an agent, a manager?
• 58:06
  Scott Woolley: How is that all being designed in terms of being put together or coming?
• 58:11
  Tiffany Woolley: together.
• 58:11
  Tiffany Woolley: I want to go to the one at the Kennedy Center.
• 58:13
  Scott Woolley: You should definitely come.
• 58:15
  Peter Boyer: So actually, I mean I have a publishing agent who handles my rentals of my catalogs to answer your question about that because there's so much of that going on.
• 58:26
  Peter Boyer: You know multiple pieces every month and my publishing agent handles that.
• 58:31
  Scott Woolley: But in this case you call it rentals, I call it licensing.
• 58:34
  Peter Boyer: Yeah, well, it's actually, it's the rentals of the orchestral music and the licensing is actually done through BMI.
• 58:39
  Peter Boyer: So BMI is the Performing Rights Organization, All of these orchestras that play my music.
• 58:53
  Peter Boyer: Of course they have blanket licenses that allow them to play works by all composers at BMI and the other one is ASCAP.
• 58:55
  Peter Boyer: Works by all composers at BMI and the other one is ASCAP, and so.
• 58:58
  Peter Boyer: But my publishing agent handles just the actual rental so they can get the physical music to them and distribute it to the orchestra and play it and then get it back to the rental agent.
• 59:03
  Peter Boyer: But in the case of this piece, I actually acted as my own agent, for in terms of promoting the project.
• 59:10
  Peter Boyer: So over the course of the last almost two years I have approached many orchestras with this idea.
• 59:17
  Peter Boyer: But I'll say that I went to the Kennedy Center first because I thought this is a piece that is so appropriate to be premiered in Washington and you know, and in the National Cultural Center, so to speak.
• 59:29
  Peter Boyer: So, the Kennedy Center and the National Symphony Orchestra.
• 59:32
  Peter Boyer: We had collaborated before.
• 59:33
  Peter Boyer: I wrote a piece called Balance of Power that they commissioned and that was premiered in 2021.
• 59:38
  Peter Boyer: So it was a natural way to approach them.
• 59:41
  Peter Boyer: They said yes and said we'll be what we call the lead commissioner, and then we created a plan to engage other orchestras and so far three others have come on board and I will say that there are a half dozen other major orchestras who are also considering the project for the summer of 2026, because it will be the big USA 250 celebrations.
• 1:00:02
  Peter Boyer: So I'm hopeful that in the next couple of months that consortium of four may grow to say six or more.
• 1:00:09
  Peter Boyer: I'm pretty hopeful that that will happen, as well, I would think so.
• 1:00:12
  Tiffany Woolley: I mean with the Fourth of July performances and that kind of thing.
• 1:00:16
  Tiffany Woolley: I feel like it goes right with fireworks.
• 1:00:19
  Peter Boyer: Yes, yeah, and actually we have some wonderful imagery at the very end that Joe captured in two different years.
• 1:00:27
  Peter Boyer: He got amazing video shots of fireworks over Washington and over the Washington Monument, but also in the previous year he got the same thing over the Washington Monument.
• 1:00:35
  Peter Boyer: But also in the previous year he got the same thing over the arch in St Louis, which is where he's from.
• 1:00:39
  Peter Boyer: So at the very end we're going to have some very cool firework shots that go from city to city, but it's an embarrassment of riches visually.
• 1:00:47
  Peter Boyer: And what's really so interesting about this project is essentially we're going to have a kind of a movie with narration, but the movie is being created to the score rather than the score being created to the movie, and I have an opportunity to very closely collaborate with Joe as we make all these decisions.
• 1:01:06
  Peter Boyer: And the piece is.
• 1:01:06
  Peter Boyer: It's very cool because it's in 11 sections that are two and a half to three minutes each and it is based the narration is based around quotes from American history, and so our bookends at the beginning, at the end are both from Benjamin Franklin.
• 1:01:21
  Peter Boyer: We have some couple of great Ben Franklin quotes, and the first one is he wrote in a letter in 1788, near the end of his life.
• 1:01:29
  Peter Boyer: He said I almost wish it had been my destiny to be born two or three centuries hence, and he talked about what the future of America might be.
• 1:01:37
  Peter Boyer: And that opens up the door to where we are, which is 250 years.
• 1:01:41
  Tiffany Woolley: Right.
• 1:01:41
  Peter Boyer: So, anyway, great Ben Franklin quotes and some of the founding fathers and more recent quotes from American history.
• 1:01:47
  Peter Boyer: So each section has its own quote, its own context and its own sort of visual design to it, and it comes from this incredible collection of imagery that Joe has.
• 1:01:58
  Peter Boyer: Some of these drone shots that he's gotten around America are really just breathtaking, and we know that when we put this with a full symphony orchestra, a big screen and a narrator, I think we will have a very emotional experience for the audience.
• 1:02:14
  Tiffany Woolley: I think I would think so.
• 1:02:17
  Scott Woolley: Do you feel that the classical orchestral music is still growing in popularity?
• 1:02:25
  Peter Boyer: Yes, although obviously it has evolved over the years.
• 1:02:28
  Peter Boyer: And I mean, what's so interesting is, you know, orchestras in general, the audiences for orchestral music, always have tended to skew older and orchestras have always at least that I am aware of been seeking younger audiences, obviously because they want to replenish and to grow the art form.
• 1:02:48
  Peter Boyer: And I mean in recent years I think a couple of things have happened that have allowed doors to open to the orchestra as a kind of delivery system for music that are really interesting, and both of them have to do with visual media, movies and also video games.
• 1:03:04
  Peter Boyer: Now, I'm not a big video game guy.
• 1:03:06
  Peter Boyer: I mean I was when I was young.
• 1:03:08
  Peter Boyer: It's amazing how video games have become an avenue for orchestral composers, and big budget video games, of which there are many, have gotten lots and lots of big orchestra scores.
• 1:03:23
  Peter Boyer: Again, talking about recording it, you know abbey road and the great studios.
• 1:03:26
  Peter Boyer: So there are lots of younger people, as I am seeing it, that are getting introduced to the orchestra for the first time through that medium and then those things are sometimes those scores are performed in concert with a live orchestra.
• 1:03:38
  Peter Boyer: Now we're not saying that we can draw a direct line from that to.
• 1:03:41
  Peter Boyer: You know the symphonies of gustav mahler, but what they have in common is that the orchestra is the kind of delivery system and also uh, I think movies, full films played in concert, which, of course, is what used to happen way back in the silent era, when orchestras were accompanying silent film been facilitated partially through technology and through the means of syncing, synchronizing a live performance to film.
• 1:04:17
  Peter Boyer: That technology has grown a lot and has become more accessible.
• 1:04:21
  Peter Boyer: So we're seeing this all over the place and, interestingly, so many orchestras are.
• 1:04:25
  Peter Boyer: You know they're finding this is a great way to both to get new audiences and also, frankly, to sell out their concert halls.
• 1:04:32
  Peter Boyer: I mean, you know, you do the Star Wars films in concert.
• 1:04:34
  Peter Boyer: People love the films, people love John Williams' score and to see and hear it played live.
• 1:04:39
  Peter Boyer: I've gone to the Hollywood Bowl, for example, and you're seeing 15,000, 16,000 people who are sitting and watching ET with John Williams' score live.
• 1:04:51
  Peter Boyer: There's this incredible communal experience that's different from just seeing a movie and hearing the orchestra on the soundtrack.
• 1:04:57
  Peter Boyer: It's different when it's actually happening live.
• 1:04:59
  Peter Boyer: So I think these things are.
• 1:05:01
  Peter Boyer: They're helping to introduce many new audiences to orchestras.
• 1:05:05
  Peter Boyer: And, let's face it, this great music that goes back to Bach, to Mozart, to Beethoven, to Haydn, that music was great and it is, is still great and it still exists and there may be people who will have their interest piqued by movies and by video games and maybe will become more classical music aficionados.
• 1:05:24
  Peter Boyer: So I think it's growing, but also it's changing as things do.
• 1:05:29
  Scott Woolley: Have you moved or done anything in the theatrical movie feature film?
• 1:05:36
  Peter Boyer: so I've one.
• 1:05:37
  Peter Boyer: One sort of segment of my career has been as an orchestrator and, as we were talking about earlier, you know that process of orchestrating from sketches.
• 1:05:45
  Peter Boyer: Uh, and so I have, I have orchestrated, I have contributed orchestrations to a bunch of movies from some very well-known composers, including James Newton Howard and Thomas Newman and Michael Giacchino and Mark Isham.
• 1:05:59
  Peter Boyer: So it's interesting in those cases because I was not the composer of those scores, they were the composers and wrote wonderful music and I was a sort of small contributor to the process, did get myself some nice screen credits et cetera, but in terms of being engaged to actually compose music for a feature-length film.
• 1:06:18
  Peter Boyer: So this remains the kind of big, elusive thing and I feel that one of these days director is gonna invite and say we know we want this kind of score.
• 1:06:27
  Peter Boyer: But for quite a few years my work as an orchestrator, working on Hollywood movies as part of orchestration teams, was happening alongside my own concert composer work.
• 1:06:37
  Peter Boyer: And in the last several years the concert composer work has really grown a lot and orchestration work has sort of withered away, partially, I think, because I've been focused so much on being a composer.
• 1:06:48
  Peter Boyer: So we'll have to see how those things may perhaps rebalance in the future or maybe just doing concert music is going to be the majority of what I'm doing, but that has grown so much.
• 1:06:59
  Peter Boyer: That has really become it's kind of a positive feedback loop as I've gotten more work, I've also done more work and it leads to more opportunities et cetera, in that, in that realm.
• 1:07:09
  Scott Woolley: Well, we appreciate you spending time with us.
• 1:07:12
  Tiffany Woolley: I know so wonderful.
• 1:07:13
  Scott Woolley: Love this conversation Me too.
• 1:07:14
  Tiffany Woolley: I feel like we could do a whole nother one.
• 1:07:16
  Tiffany Woolley: So many more questions.
• 1:07:18
  Peter Boyer: Great to talk to you and you know it's so nice to often I talk to people who were all in the kind of classical music realm and it's really interesting to talk to people who come from another realm and to know the kind of you know the kind of curiosity that people who are not doing this every day may bring to it and ask the kinds of questions that show that curiosity, and hopefully I've been able to shed a little bit of light on what it is that orchestral composers do.
• 1:07:43
  Scott Woolley: Well, I'm going to reach out to you about finding out where and when you're going to be doing another piece and also keep in the back of your mind if you happen to be coming to florida, you gotta let us know.
• 1:07:56
  Scott Woolley: Yes absolutely.
• 1:07:58
  Scott Woolley: That would be great, that would be wonderful appreciate the time and it was a great conversation and thank you very much thank you, scott, thank you thank you.
• 1:08:07
  Peter Boyer: Thank you meet you in person again one of these days, absolutely Thank you for listening to another iDesign episode iDesign Labs podcast is an SW Group production in association with the Five Star and TW Interiors.
• 1:08:23
  Voice Over: To learn more about iDesign Lab or TW Interiors, please visit twinteriorscom.