Five Minutes With Bill Wiedrich, Music Professor
Published: Jun 29, 2007
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One of Tampa's hardest-working musicians is Bill Wiedrich, music director of the Patel Conservatory Youth Orchestra at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and associate professor of conducting at the University of South Florida.
Wiedrich recently conducted the Youth Orchestra in a special concert at New York's Carnegie Hall. We caught up with the energetic maestro and asked about the music life.
Q. You are intimately involved with the creative process of young people. Does music act as an elixir for them?
A. Music is the most intimate and powerful form of communication we have as human beings. Music touches everyone and affects them in a very real way. Young people gravitate toward the innate energy that music making contains, and they often gravitate to it with a willingness to take a risk - a risk of intimacy, perhaps, or even a risk of failure. They find that they can achieve anything, believe in themselves and accomplish great things.
Q. Why is music, as a tool in education, so compelling?
A. What medicine does for the body, music does for the spirit. Music, innately, teaches a young person the perspective of what has come before, yet requires that person to synthesize it and make it relevant to the present, and ultimately the future. That's the ebb and flow of the process of music making - and life, for that matter.
Q. Do you see young people developing their personalities through the music itself?
A. Without fail. I see it over and over. One cannot helped but be changed by beauty. Music taps inner emotions only that person can feel or try to understand.
Q. Do you fear that support for music education in the schools as well as the arts is evaporating?
A. Of course, I do. Music and can be expensive. And when dealing with bottom lines with red and black zones, things that look long-term or are not personally familiar to the person with the pen are within easy striking distance. People who haven't experienced the wonder of music making don't have the perspective or vision to vouch for it. To cut music and art from any kind of experience is akin to shutting someone in a very dark room for the rest of their lives.
Q. Who is more relevant, Bach or the Beatles?
A. They both are. If the Fab Four had lived in Leipzig in Bach's time, they would have given him a run for his money. And I know for a fact that the Beatle's loved Bach. Listen to the trumpet part in "Penny Lane" or the string quartet continuo in "Eleanor Rigby." One of my teachers, Leonard Bernstein, once said that the best songwriters in history were Franz Schubert, Gustav Mahler, and Lennon and McCartney!
