Conductor / Pianist  William  Eddins

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie




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On his official website are two biographies, both of which are reproduced here.
The first is called 'Professional Bio', and the second is listed as 'A Personal Bio'.


William Eddins is the Music Director Emeritus of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and a frequent guest conductor of major orchestras throughout the world.

Engagements have included the New York Philharmonic, St. Louis Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, the symphony orchestras of San Francisco, Boston Minnesota, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Detroit, Dallas, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Houston, as well as the Los Angeles and Buffalo Philharmonics.

Internationally, Eddins was Principal Guest Conductor of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra (Ireland). He has also has conducted the Berlin Staatskapelle, Berlin Radio Orchestra, Welsh National Opera, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Bergen Philharmonic, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, and the Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra.

Career highlights include taking the Edmonton Symphony Orchestras to Carnegie Hall in May of 2012, conducting RAI Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale on Italian television, and leading the Natal Philharmonic on tour in South Africa with soprano Renée Fleming. Equally at home with opera, he conducted a full production of Porgy and Bess with Opera de Lyon both in France and the Edinburgh Festival and a revival of the production during the summer of 2010.

Mr. Eddins is an accomplished pianist and chamber musician. He regularly conducts from the piano in works by Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin and Ravel. He has released a compact disc recording on his own label that includes Beethoven’s Hammer-Klavier Sonata and William Albright’s The Nightmare Fantasy Rag.

Mr. Eddins has performed at the Ravinia Festival with both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Ravinia Festival Orchestra. He has also conducted the orchestras of the Aspen Music Festival, the Hollywood Bowl, Chautauqua Festival, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago.

A native of Buffalo, NY, Mr. Eddins attended the Eastman School of Music, studying with David Effron and graduating at age eighteen. He also studied conducting with Daniel Lewis at the University of Southern California and was a founding member of the New World Symphony in Miami, FL.

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William Eddins is a husband, father, Taoist, musician, writer, and entrepreneur living and working in the great city of Minneapolis. He has been married to Jennifer Gerth, Principal Clarinet of the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra, for twenty years, and they have raised two young men who are musicians and athletes. Bill is the Music Director Emeritus of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, and has also served as Principal Guest Conductor of the National Symphonie of Ireland, Resident Conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Associate Conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra.

Bill is co-founder of MetroNOME Brewery LLC, a socially missioned brewery established in the wake of the public unrest during the summer of 2020 with the objective of Nurturing Outstanding Music Education in the Twin Cities Metro. Proceeds from MetroNOME will go to providing musical instruments, lessons, and education for underprivileged youth in the Twin Cities Metro area. Bill strongly believes that education in general, and music education in particular, is the gateway to a better, more fulfilling life, and he wants to ensure that any child who loves music should be able to find a way to play.

Bill is the author of The Shadows of Venice, a historical fiction trilogy set in Venice (Italy) during November, 2013. The Shadows of Venice brings together Bill’s love of music, history, fantasy/fiction, food, and the city of Venice, and is due out in late 2021. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of The Shadows of Venice will go to supporting music education in the Twin Cities Metro.

Bill has an active and liberal life outside the music world. He is a certified Thai Yoga Massage practitioner who specializes in helping performing artists and athletes, an umpire for the United States Tennis Association, and is in an apprenticeship to become a concert piano technician. His many hobbies include road cycling, cooking, home brewing, and learning. Bill hopes that the music he makes brings you joy.





In the middle of April of 2001, we met backstage at Orchestra Hall for an interview.  He was leading four performances with the Chicago Symphony in a program which contained Rissolty Rossolty by Ruth Crawford Seeger, Appalachian Spring of Aaron Copland, and the Charlie Chaplin film City Lights.  It is pleasing for me to note that now (2022), after more than twenty years, his ideas are still solid, and his career and reputation have continued to grow.

The conversation was mixed with musical understanding as well as much laughter.

Here is that chat . . . . .


Bruce Duffie:   You said you are looking forward to getting home.  Where is home for you?

William Eddins:   That would be the twin cities of Minneapolis–St. Paul.

BD:   Do you like being based there?

Eddins:   I love being based there. The twin cities are a wonderful place to live.  We have a lovely house in a great neighborhood, and great neighbors.  I find it very civilized to live, and that counts for a lot in my book.

BD:   For your career you travel all over the world.   Do you like being a wandering minstrel?

Eddins:   Whoever invents the transporter will become my best friend.  [Laughs]  It’s the traveling that kills you.  I love visiting different places, and I love the fact that what I do for a living takes me to different places.  But it’s getting in the plane, and sleeping in someone else’s bed that will kill you after a while.

BD:   You can’t use that time to rest, or study, or think?

Eddins:   [Sighs]  No is the short answer.  That kind of traveling is just tiring, and time lag just causes a person to become exhausted.  There’s nothing like sleeping in your own bed, there really isn’t.  There’s nothing like going down to your kitchen and making your own food.
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BD:   Is there nothing like conducting your own orchestra?

Eddins:   I suppose so, having not had that particular experience.  I’ve had some close relationships with some orchestras which I’m very fond of, this [the Chicago Symphony] being one of them.  But I have not been a music director somewhere, so I do not know for sure.

BD:   Is that something you want to do?

Eddins:   I suppose...  I’m not in any huge hurry.  I’m 36 years old, and I plan in doing this for another forty-five or fifty years, if I possibly can.  I have no plans to retire.  The very concept of retirement is completely foreign to me.  This is music, and is what keeps me alive.  I hope to do this until the day they shoot me into space, or bury me in the ground, or throw me to the ocean, whichever it is that happens at that time.

BD:   Do you want to go out conducting, or go out having just conducted?

Eddins:   Oh, I don’t think I need the drama of falling dead on stage!  [Has a huge laugh]  I don’t think I need that for an epitaph.

BD:   [With a gentle nudge]  I thought every conductor wanted to die in the second act of Tristan.

Eddins:   Oh, whatever!  [More gales of laughter]  No, no, it’s too long of a song, it really is.  Maybe having just walked off stage playing the Goldberg Variations.  That would be good.

BD:   You’re both a pianist and conductor.  Do you get enough time for each?

Eddins:   I don’t play Bach on the piano.  I know better.  [Much laughter]

BD:   Do you get enough time to divide your career between those two activities?

Eddins:   No, but I do it anyway.  The funny thing is the piano playing takes up a tremendous amount of time practicing, and I’m doing a tremendous amount of playing, much more playing than I thought I would be at this stage of my career, which is great actually.  It keeps me honest.  When you’re in front of your own instrument, there’s no one to yell at.  There’s no one to blame.  It’s just you and the instrument, and that keeps me very, very honest.

BD:   Do you consider the orchestra an instrument?

Eddins:   I don’t know.  I’m not so sure about those particular metaphysical ramblings.  It’s certainly a collection of instruments, that’s obvious.  Probably in a very broad sense, it would be an instrument, but with the orchestra you’re dealing with so many different individuals.  You can’t really compare it to the organ, because it’s still one person at the controls... unless the bellows go out, and then you need to rope someone else in.

BD:   Be sure to pay the pumper.

Eddins:   Yes, you’ve got to pay the pumper, and pay the piper.  [Much laughter]

BD:   Do you enjoy playing the orchestra?

Eddins:   Yes, I do.   What I do really beats work, and the day that I don’t take any joy from what it is that I do, I get to walk off stage and go home.  I will take out my applications for CIA, the Culinary Institute of America, which are sitting in my desk drawer, and put them in the mail.

BD:   [Mildly shocked]  And become a chef???

Eddins:   Absolutely!  I just have too much respect for music to do it if I don’t love it.  I take too much joy from what I do to ever just look at it as straight work.  But I love food.  [Laughs]  I really do.  We have a five-month-old son, and some of my friends are convinced that his first words will be, “I love food,” because he pretty much hears it every time that dad’s around.  I do truly and honestly love food, and I truly and honestly love music.

BD:   In equal measure?

Eddins:   [Thinks a moment]  It depends on how hungry I am.

BD:   If you’re away from music for a few days, do you get hungry for that?

Eddins:   Yes, but I do declare non-music days, especially if I’ve been working for stretches.  I’ll look up in the calendar and just see where I can take two or three days off, and I won’t even discuss music.  I’ve got three days coming at the end of April/beginning of May, and I’ve told my manager, who’s fortunately also my best friend, that unless it’s the Concertgebouw calling about a world tour and multi-disc contract, I don’t care!  I’ve got three days, and I’m going to spend it either sleeping, or with my son in front of the cartoon network, or in the kitchen.  I’m determined to do that, just for my own mental health.

BD:   Do you program off-times into your schedule several times a year?

Eddins:   I try to, and I try to program in longer breaks, too.  I have May almost entirely off this year.  I have June completely off, and then I work in July and August.  September is off, and that’s important.  People think I just get up in front of an orchestra and wave my arms, so it’s actually an easy thing.  Well, this is not an easy thing.  I worked in the field of business.  I’ve worked behind a desk.  I’ve schlepped in various parts of the economy at one time or another, and I know that conducting is very, very hard work.

BD:   Do you get enough time to study, especially new scores?

Eddins:   I try.  If you had told me ten years ago that I could learn music at the rate that I learn it today, I would have laughed at you.  Part of it is just experience, but some of it is just flat necessity.  As you get to a certain point in your career you can recycle a lot.  There are pieces that I love doing, and I will try and program them every year.  They’re easy for me to just pull out.  I don’t even pull out the scores.  I show up at the first rehearsal, and I give a downbeat because I know them.

BD:   You don’t re-study then at all?

Eddins:   No!  My theory is once I know it, I should know it.

BD:   Doesn’t it grow?

Eddins:   Of course, but that’s not growth coming from what’s on the page.  It’s going to grow from what’s coming from up here [points to his head].  It’s going to grow from basic musicianship ideas.  I should know what’s on the printed page, and 99% of the time that’s what it’s going to be.  But that’s not the music.  That’s a bare notation of what’s going on.

BD:   That’s the start?

Eddins:   Yes.
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BD:   Is the printed page always right?

Eddins:   [With a wink]  If you’d screamed at French publishers as often as I have, you would know the answer to that question.  [Both laugh]  There are some publishers that I would like to string up from a yardarm.  I want accurate information, I really do.  That’s first and foremost.  I really want to know what the composer had intended to put on the page.  You get used to certain composers’ use of certain methods of notation, but music notation is an inexact science, as any other kind of notation is, and you have to have a certain amount of creativity to go along with what you see in front of you.  Otherwise, it just doesn’t matter.

BD:   In the end, how much is the composer, and how much is you, the conductor?

Eddins:   Hmm... I don’t know!  I really don’t have a firm answer to that question.  For example, I’m one of those people who really wants to know what Beethoven thought when he was writing the First Symphony.  I really want to have his sound in my ear.  I really want to bring that alive.  [Sighs]  I think my interpretation is going to pale in front of his.  He wrote the piece, and that’s what I’m interested in.  I really want to have that go on.  I want to understand what his mind-set was when he wrote that piece.  Now, being who I am — and we all are individuals — there’s going to be a certain element of ‘Eddinsisms’ in there.  There’s no way out of that.  You can’t just take yourself out of the mix.  We’re not doing computer-programming here.

BD:   Would you want it to sound like it sounded for Beethoven?

Eddins:   I’ve love to hear that.

BD:   Would you want to perform it yourself the way that Beethoven performed it?

Eddins:   Sure, why not?

BD:   Even though we’re a couple hundred years removed, and have endured World Wars, and Depressions, and have different sounds in our ears?

Eddins:   Oh, sure!  Why not?  I don’t look at music backwards.  I look at music forwards.  The First Symphony of Beethoven was a shocking event.  He opens up in a C7 chord.  That so shocking.  I would love to have been a fly on the wall.  Today people are blasé about a C7 chord, but for me, no, no, no, no, no!  This was shocking because nothing like this had ever happened.  So this is supposed to be a surprise.

BD:   So how do you shock the audience of 2001?  Or can you?

Eddins:   Oh, I don’t think we have much problem shocking people!  [Gales of laughter]  I don’t think we’re ever going to have much problem with that.

BD:   Even with the Beethoven First?

Eddins:   [Thinks a moment]  This is just my personal approach...  I try to strip the veneer off a lot of the music that I hear, because all these assumptions have been built up over years and years and years.  It really drives me nuts, because it minimizes what these composers managed to accomplish with the music that they put out.  I was talking to one of the CSO violinists about this earlier.  There are a couple of recordings out of everyone else’s orchestrations of Bach, and for me, that’s just beyond anathema.  It’s well into being immoral, because Bach knew what he was doing.  Of all people, Bach knew what he was doing.  This guy was hitting on all eight cylinders every single day, and I want to enjoy that.  I don’t want to enjoy that with 250 years of historical weight on top of it.  I know where Bach takes us.  Bach was the great codifier.  Without him there is no western music of any sort of the last 300 years, no matter what anyone says.  All the way from punk rock back, without Bach there is nothing.  He laid down the law about how music should be, but that doesn’t mean that we need to look at him just through that prism of 300 years of music.  Why can’t we just look at him for what he was, which was a brilliant composer blazing new trails at the height of the baroque period?

BD:   Without naming names, are there others who approach that brilliance?

Eddins:   No one approaches the brilliance of Bach in music.  Maybe in some other things...  Albert Einstein would be called one of the great codifiers.  Also Michelangelo, and Leonardo Da Vinci certainly would be in there.

BD:   There are these giants, and then there seems to be a big gulf before you get to the next level.

Eddins:   Yes, but that’s going to be the way it is in most things.  You can talk about Renaldo all you want, but we still remember Pelé.  [Both laugh]  That’s a name that’s going to register throughout soccer history.  Certain people just put their mark so firmly on what it is that comes at that time, that you can’t ignore them.  You can’t really simplify their effect.  Here we are, almost seventy years after Gershwin’s death, and we still can’t figure out his effect on the concert and song in the twentieth century.  It’s still reverberating to every corner of this planet.

BD:   Are we supposed to figure it out, or are we supposed to just enjoy it?

Eddins:   At some point you have to at least attempt to think about figuring it out, if you are going to understand what comes afterwards.  It is an orderly progression.  You have to know Bach in order to understand what comes after Bach, and you have to know the Gershwin songs in order to understand where the Beatles were going, because it comes from that same wellspring.  But that should not preclude you from simply enjoying Embraceable You for what it is, which is a gorgeous, brilliant song.
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BD:   We’re kind of dancing around it, so let me ask the real easy question.  What’s the purpose of music?

Eddins:   To be enjoyed.

BD:   Simply to entertain?

Eddins:   Yes, absolutely.  I’m an entertainer.

BD:   Where does art come into it, if at any place at all?

Eddins:   The art is in the entertainment.  Hopefully good art is to be entertaining, also.  I’m not doing this for ‘some higher power’.  I don’t want people to walk out of my concerts thinking they need to go into the priesthood.  I want people to walk out of my concerts enlivened with possibilities, with joy, with just having had a wonderful experience.  People spend sixty hours behind a computer slaving away, and a teenager daughter’s going out with some guy who rides a motorcycle, and the son is getting in trouble at high school, and there are car payments, and house payments, and the cat just yacked on the carpet, and you’ve got to take the dog to the vet...  [Sighs]  They come to a concert for a couple of hours just to suspend all that.

BD:   To escape?  [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interviews with William Schuman, and Virgil Thomson]

Eddins:   Yes, absolutely.  It’s total escapism.  There’s nothing wrong with escapism.

BD:   Are you optimistic about the whole future of music?

Eddins:   Absolutely!  I wasn’t talking just about classical music.  I was talking ‘music’.  I consider myself a Musician, with a capital M, rather than a Classical Musician.  I enjoy many, many forms and ideas and styles of music.

BD:   Classical is just a part of all that?

Eddins:   Absolutely.  There are some parts of Music, with a capital M, that are in grave, grave danger.  Some of the classical music is.  Rock music is in a terrible shape.  I haven’t heard anything really creative out of Rock music in probably fifteen years.

BD:   Is Rock going to die???

Eddins:   I hope not, I really do.  I strongly hope not but it’s in bad shape.  The smartest thing that the Grammys could ever do would be to put in an Instrument Proficiency Exam.  [Both laugh]  You should have to pass a proficiency exam on an instrument before you can even be nominated for a Grammy Award.  That would eliminate 95% of the people who have won Grammys in the last ten years, and for a good reason!  It’s just not good music.  Name me the No. 1 album of last year, and I guarantee you it won’t be around in five years.  My wife left a double CD of Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour in our CD player in our car, and I’ve been driving around with this for the last month or so, thinking you could never get these two albums produced today.  You could never do it!  It’s absolute rampant genius, just brilliant, brilliant stuff.  It simply makes sense.  It works.  It’s going to be around.  They’ll be talking about Lennon/McCartney in the same breath that they’ll be talking about Gershwin, in the same breath they’ll be talking about the songs of Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms.  They won’t be talking about NSYNC, or any another boy bands in that breath.

BD:   There is one joker in all of this.  The manuscripts are in libraries, but there are all kinds of little flat plastics around that anyone can play.  Is that going perhaps let NSYNC have a little more life than it should?

Eddins:   No, it’ll kill them off faster, because there’s just so much out there.

BD:   Thirty years from now, at a garage sale some kid is going to pick up a CD and have this ancient CD player...

Eddins:   [Imitating an adolescent]  Yeah, what’s a CD???  [Much laughter all around]  Maybe you can use it for skeet shooting...

BD:   That’s actually what they did with a lot of the 78s!  [More laughter, then coming back to the discussion]  You used the term that I want to pounce on just a little bit, and that’s ‘good’.  What is it that makes a piece of music ‘good’, or even ‘great’?

 Eddins:   Hmmm... the $64,000 question.  I don’t know if you can define that.  Is there an overall standard or idea that makes music ‘great’?  You can take an individual piece of music and say it’s great because of certain particular elements, but the elements that make the Fourth Symphony of Brahms great, compared to what makes Yellow Submarine great, are very, very different.  One thing is obvious, and that’s that they’re very well crafted by people who had time to think.  There are stories about George and Ira Gershwin, and how they would sweat over every note, every turn of the word, every phrase, every quote.  They would sweat and sweat over their songs, and it shows, because if you deconstruct these songs, you see how they’re put together.  It’s absolutely brilliant.  That does not take anything away from the fact that they are just beautiful songs.  It’s the same thing with the Beatles.  One of the greatest of music theory classes I ever had was at the end of my Freshman year.  They gathered all the Freshmen music theory classes together, and this professor at Eastman did an analysis of the second side of Abbey Road.  It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever even heard of a music theorist getting a standing ovation at the end of the class.  It was just brilliant.  He deconstructed it, put it all together, showed how this harmony goes with this so that this rolls into this, and how it all just fit together.  We were sitting there with our jaws on the floor.  It was wonderful because this was something from ‘pop culture’, but, as I say, Lennon and McCartney sweated as much as George and Ira did.

BD:   But if you had a class full of people who had studied the Brahms Fourth, and loved the Brahms Fourth, and then the guy deconstructed it, would he get a standing ovation for that?

Eddins:   Well, this was more the shock value.  Here we were at the Eastman School of Music, and the last thing on Earth that we expected was a class on the second side of Abbey Road.  But we were shown that because it’s just as brilliant as anything else.  We knew it was brilliant.  We were from that generation.  By the time we were really aware of it, the Beatles had broken up, and everyone still knows Abbey Road.  This is brilliant music.  Why it was brilliant had never really crossed our minds in the ‘classical’ way, in the music theory way, and suddenly we were confronted with it and we knew it was just great.  That just rocked us all out.
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BD:   So, it works on all these levels?

Eddins:   It works on all those levels.  You can do that with any kind of music.  You just have to know what the kernels are, what the germs are, and how a particular piece of music is put together.  You could be talking about ragas from Northern India, or a work for Javanese Gamelan, or something by Lennon/McCartney at the end, or the Brahms Fourth.  If you know what the kernels are that makes this thing grow, you can figure out what it’s all about.

BD:   Do you have any advice for someone who wants to write concert music in this new Millennium?

Eddins:   [Laughs]  Listen to everything!  Listen to absolutely everything.

BD:   [Gently protesting]  By the time they get through that, they’re old and gray, and can’t write anymore!

Eddins:   [Smiles]  I didn’t say not to write anything until then, but I just said listen to everything.  The greatest composers took things from everywhere.  Think of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio with the Turkish sounds that you hear.  There are the Slavonic Dances of Dvořák, or the Hungarian Dances of Brahms, or Bernstein’s listening out of the window and hearing those New York sounds, as well as Lennon/McCartney once again, listening and hearing London, and the ragas from India from their own experience.  Don’t be afraid of opening up one’s mind musically, and then just writing.  To hell with academia, and to hell with having to do things in a certain way.  Screw that!  Those are the people whose music ends up lining bird cages!  Salieri is a footnote.  You remember Mozart because he pushed the limits.

BD:   What advice do you have for conductors?

Eddins:   Same thing, absolutely the same thing!  I take as much joy and enlightenment and understanding of what music is from listening to middle-period James Brown as I do anything else.  There is the passion, the way of approaching music.  You have to just love what you do, and you have to bring that every single night.  You can’t just get up there and think it.  There are too many people out there who do that, and who shall, unfortunately, remain nameless.  We need to get rid of them.

BD:   What about audiences?  Do you give the same advice again?

Eddins:   Absolutely, the same advice.  I’m a musical explorer, and I love exploring different kinds of music, and different music within kinds of music.  I would be so bored if I just had to do the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven week in and week out.  It’s a great piece, so don’t get me wrong!  I know how that work is put together, but to have to do it day in and day out would just be death.

BD:   In the end, is it all worth it?

Eddins:   Oh, man, as I said, it beats working!  It really does.  It beats it with a big old nasty stick!  People pay me to fly around the world and make music.  If that ain’t a scam, I don’t know what is!  [Both laugh]

BD:   Thank you for doing the scam!

Eddins:   Hey, believe me it’s my pleasure!  [More laughter]
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© 2001 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on April 17, 2001.  This transcription was made in 2022, and posted on this website at that time.  My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.  To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of other interviews, plus a full list of his guests.  He would also like to call your attention to the photos and information about his grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago.  You may also send him E-Mail with comments, questions and suggestions.