Alonzo King, esperanza spalding & Esa-Pekka Salonen discuss the role of collaboration while creating San Francisco Reopening Night along with its empowering and creative nature.
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TRANSCRIPT
No one has all the answers, nobody.
That's why we need each other. You take the best of each contribution.
I can't fathom what is not collaboration.
I feel like many offerings artistically, it's like a tuning that's being sent to your body so that you can feel a different aspect of your own sense perception that maybe isn't activated anywhere else in your life.
And then I think that that activated sense perception stays with you.
And maybe you, you, you can hear different things or feel new things when you go out of the concert hall.
Most of my best ideas are bone in conversation in dialogue and in discourse.
And I thought that if we had a group of people who don't necessarily come from the very hardcore center of the circle of classical music, that would be an incredible energy boost to the entire organization.
But also to me personally.
I always hope that when symphony players get to work with proficient jazz musicians, I always pray that when we walk away, they feel a little more permission to trust their own improvisational power.
And maybe we get permission to trust that it's also okay to do something the same tonight, tomorrow and the next.
That the sameness provides a beauty to like the serving to a thing that existed before you stepped into it offers a kind of beauty. That's a really generous gift that the arts can give us.
The idea of bringing in musicians and artists from different parts of the artistic world that have historically been divided to me just seems like the logical way to make the coolest art, to make the coolest music, to have the most fun.
Collaborating with people who have a different background from you is more challenging and more exciting than collaborating with people who come from a similar world from you.
We realize now that the world is very small and so we're interrelated and there's also an interdependence.
And so the art is telling us that collaboration is the future.
Every time I speak with my collaborators, I feel inspired and challenged, um, and somehow positive and optimistic about the future of the orchestra as an institution.
If we have people like our artistic collaborators guiding an institution into the future, then we are doing okay,
