For conductor Sarah Hicks, the orchestra is “a slightly utopian representation of the best that human beings can do” – and music itself is a “healing modality”. As the Minnesota Orchestra’s Principal Conductor of their Live at Orchestra Hall series, and as a guest conductor with many other North American and international orchestras, she is increasingly moving towards work that integrates mindfulness and wellbeing into audiences’ experience of music, upending more traditional models of concert-going.
Her approach to performance and programming is a deeply personal one. “People have this image of a conductor as an authority figure, up on stage, on a podium, perhaps being somewhat dictatorial.” In contrast, Hicks explains, “my approach has always been that I’m a medium: things have to come through me and go back through me. I’m a vessel through which music needs to flow, to be able to explain to musicians without words, with just a gestural vocabulary, the things that I understand to be in the music, that they then play, and it needs to transmit back through me, to the audience. It’s a two-way exchange of energy.”
Music was a calling from an early age. “I was a pianist when I was very young.” Born in Japan and growing up in Hawaii, a hand injury prompted a career pivot and she started conducting when she was 17. A composition degree from Harvard and a conducting degree from Curtis followed, and she’s been working in the field ever since – “many, many decades at this point”.
The idea of music as a shared, reciprocal experience is key to her vision of how conducting works. “I’m very reliant on the skills and goodwill of others to help me bring this vision to life. It’s very much a communal activity”. It’s a communality that extends to Hicks’ way of thinking about the relationship between concert halls and their audiences. “My understanding has always been that there are multiple genres of music that can be played within the orchestral medium. If it’s good it’s good, if it’s not it’s not, it doesn’t matter who wrote it or who’s performing it.”
This openness is tempered and structured by a sense of the needs of diverse audiences. “What is an arts organisation? What does it mean within a city, a neighbourhood, a community? Who are we serving? What are we serving them? Where do we meet them? And what connections can be made there?” Hicks’ philosophical worldview has a direct impact on programming and direction in her wide-ranging projects, summed up in her words as “trying to connect as many people as possible”.
Connection is something on the mind of many performing arts organisations too, particularly in the since the Coronavirus pandemic, when orchestras and venues became more heavily involved in online streaming. But four years after the first lockdowns of 2020, simply broadcasting concerts online is no longer enough – especially if organisations want to stand out against a wide field of offerings. “Everyone is broadcasting now. Can we think about creating bespoke digital content that is not necessarily wholly performative? What does that look like?”
Hicks has spent a lot of time thinking about this question. In February, under the title Music & Healing, she worked on a project with the Minnesota Orchestra that included a concert performance alongside conversations around the neuroscience of anxiety: “how composers make music about it, how players deal with it, how psychiatrists think about it, how wellness experts use it in their practice.” The idea was that this content could be accessed either as a framework to the performance, or in its own right – in Hicks’ words, using the technology to create content that is aligned with the music, and the music-making, but also looks beyond it. It’s a way of thinking that also informs her collaboration with classical streaming platforms like Symphony.live.
Hicks’ personal sense of music as a connecting force informs her work at the intersection of classical music and mental health. Throughout her career, she has always been open about her own personal experience of living with depression and anxiety, and the way that music has been a source of support and comfort for her. “It helps me process emotions, it gives me a safe space to feel things. I think it’s a great way to sit with really complicated feelings, and to feel like someone else understands where you are, that we’re not alone.” (Later in the conversation, she mentions the idea of the “commonality of our inner feelings”.)
For the last fifteen years, she’s stepped into the mindfulness sphere, both as a long-time meditation practitioner and as a conductor. This makes perfect sense to her, as an extension of her experience on stage. During performances, she describes entering a state she calls “the flow”. “That's the core of meditation, being able to meet life in the present. I wanted to be able to find a way for other people to understand that when we focus on music as something that's unfolding moment to moment, that is in itself a meditation. And that more and more is informing the way I look at music and the way that I hope other people encounter music.”
I ask her if she thinks our widespread sense of anxiety is something specific to the modern world. “Well,” she demurs, “I can’t speak to 100 years ago, but I feel like with the proliferation of information and our ability to quickly hear news and to know what's going on everywhere, ironically, I think that level of information, instead of making us feel safer, causes a great deal of anxiety.” The pandemic, she suspects, forced a lot of people into a heightened state of introspection that led to a number of useful, if not comfortable, revelations about the way we live now. “I'm glad that there's more conversation around it now, so it’s not some sort of taboo topic, but I think now many people don’t quite know what to do with this newfound insight that they are anxious.” She sees music as having the potential to belong to “an adaptive coping mechanism category”.
Orchestras have had to cope, too, and Hicks is interested in the ways that the culture of live performance have shifted. “For any live performance organisation, it was a reckoning to say, well, how do we reach our audiences, how do we get our audiences coming back into the live performance venues?” She describes a “cloud of economic doom” hovering. In this context, the direction, as she sees it, shifted, and not just for economic reasons: the return to live performance forced a shift away from the old model, which she sums up wryly – and perhaps a little nostalgically – as “here are the great works of art, listen to them because they’re great”.
“A lot of orchestras I’m working with now have wellness programs, whether it’s yoga in the concert hall or musical relaxation, so there are steps being taken into that arena because even these hyper-traditional organizations realise, here’s something that people need and we are able to provide it.”
The other major change to the landscape was the pivot towards live-streaming services, and other kinds of content accessible outside the concert hall. Hicks mentions practical reasons for the enduring nature of the shift – the fact that orchestras had to purchase hardware and are now equipped to continue streaming, for one – and the unknowns orchestras are facing in this arena post-pandemic. “I would say that anecdotally, we've been able to reach people who would not otherwise be able to see a full orchestra concert. And in that sense, I think that outreach has been tremendously important and very impactful.” She tempers this by adding: “Whether that is part of a business plan of an orchestra in terms of meeting revenue goals, I'm not quite sure if we’re there yet.”
Overall, the shift into the 21st-century digital realm is not always an easy one. She describes any kind of desire for change in the orchestral world as “like slowly steering an enormous ship in a different direction”. For musicians, this means striking a new balance between the ephemeral experience of live performance and the way “things now live in perpetuity on the web”. She also talks about the move from the old-fashioned subscription model of concert-going towards more curated individual experiences: in other words, how to cater to an audience that is no longer monolithic? Then there’s the question of balancing the needs of in-person and online audiences.
Large digital platforms like Symphony.live, which Hicks is collaborating with this year, will be a key arena in which these conversations play out. “That’s the power of those platforms – things become a bit more universal and less local, a kind of clearing house for so many artists and orchestras with so much repertoire and so many possibilities. I think that's really exciting.” The project will take the form of a playlist, with the notion of mindfulness at its heart. In Hicks’s words, “If we mindfully listen to music it becomes an opportunity for us to engage in the present and be engaged and aware and really alive for ourselves. Music can help us do that every day, every time we listen to it. It’s such a powerful force.”
View Sarah Hicks’ All Stars Playlist on Symphony.live.
Symphony.live is available online, via iOS and Android apps, and via Roku, Apple TV, Samsung TV, LG TV, Fire TV, and Google TV.
This article was sponsored by Symphony Media.
