Part 3 of an interview held with Thomas Hampson, divided into 4 parts.
We continue with excerpts from a fascinating interview with Thomas Hampson, held on January 11, 2012 in Los Angeles. Hampson, one of opera's leading baritones, speaks elequently, and often poetically about his life's passion for education through music, specifically classic song, and his commitment to helping young people become as passionately "engaged with life" as they can be.
The interview took place near the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in downtown Los Angeles, just two days before his performing with Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic, in Mahler’s Songs of Wayfarer, Jan. 13 -15, 2012.
You’ve shared that the Song of America projects are part of your non-profit organization, the Hampsong Foundation. What interests you about American Song?
I’m interested in -- us. And interested in what those things are that identify us. I think that even in a larger picture of what song does, what poetry does, what music does - is that if we recognize those creative elements as real identifiers of anyone’s culture – then it behooves to know our own, if we’re going to try to understand somebody else’s.
How hands-on are you with this Song of America project?
Oh, it’s my project! I’m the artistic director of it and design it. I hired the scripts writers specifically for the shows which I edit, re-write, and own. They do the writing work. I love writers.
I have terminal writer block. If I sit down to start to write, I just kind of freeze, but, I edit very well.. ..So, I get writers who do this for a living!
It’s a huge project!
Yes it is. And on the road too!
I know you are grateful and appreciative of the team work you have with the various producers and writers at Hampsong Foundation, and the producers at WMFT Radio with whom you work “hand in glove with.” You also point to the success of these innovative projects, to your executive producer, Steve Robinson, who runs WMFT Radio Chicago, which you've awknowledged “as one of the greatest radio stations in the world.”
With your busy international performing life, how do you manage to make this work?
Well, (for some of the radio shows) I’d be somewhere in the world, Zurich or someplace, and we’d be on Skype editing! And, then I’d be in studio, putting in to real time AIFF files that would be loaded up to a FTP server…So, yes, this is total Mobile media technology. In the multi media world we can do this. It’s very exciting.
What you are doing seems to be a really visionary, entrepreneurial and educational project.
Totally!
As a successful artist, performing with all the top and opera houses and orchestras in the world, how did you decide upon this visionary intention for yourself?
I appreciate the compliment, but I don’t see it that way. I want to give people the tools, the access points, that I have. What they do with them is their business. And this is something that we can do (with today’s technology).
What I’m really passionate about is: a lot of kids and young people, think that Now is now. And what they don’t realize, or that someone forgot to tell them, or won’t tell them, is that the Now of kids 200 years ago held the same problems, exactly the same associations, exactly the same cunnendrums, but handled in different ways, given different periods.
But people are people. And the arts and humanities are the diary of that. The arts and humanities are the blue print of that.
The idea that we’re going to solve economic problems, or world politic, or gratuitous abuse and violence because it is in our time? Without understanding other times? Is just naïve, if not insulting.
How do you see young people responding to these ideas?
Kids - every younger generation - is hungry to be taken seriously. I take young people very seriously.
It’s now my time, in mid-life, to turn around and look behind me and say: here are the road posts. Your journey is your journey. Don’t do it like me. Do it like you. Grab on to everything! And be alive, be awake, don’t waste a moment!
I love that quote “….As if you could waste time without injuring eternity”…
Oh that’s beautiful. Makes your mind stop.
Yes, isn’t that quote just wonderful!
So, this what I meant earlier. It’s not about deciding to be visionary or something. I’d like to believe I belong to a bunch of people in our time that believe that they can help, focus on their worlds, in the New Tools of Our time. That’s what I want to do!!
FINAL PART OF THIS INTERVIEW, CONTINUED IN PART 4
more information: www.SongofAmerica.net, Hampsong.org, or Thomashampson.com.
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