Major: I'm Jean Major, this is Minette Cooper. The date is March 10, 2006. Minette, tell me how your involvement with the symphony began.
Cooper: It began in 1965 when I heard that they were looking for a new conductor, and a friend of mine from New York called and said so-and-so is going to be applying for that position. And he’s marvelous, so please recommend him. And so somebody from the committee that was looking into hiring and then the search committee called me and asked what I thought of this gentleman. And in the course of it mentioned the other people who were coming as other alternatives. And I said, “Oh! Russell Stanger!” Well, we had seen him when he had been Assistant Conductor to Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic. And we were very impressed with that, so we said, “Gee, you’ve got an even better candidate than the one we had been told to recommend.” So that was our introduction. The next year--that was the beginning. I actually joined the Board in ’74.
Major: The board of the symphony?
Cooper: The board of the symphony. And the reason I joined it was Charles felt I was doing a lot of work for the symphony, and I really cared about it, and I should. He talked to Norman Willcox, who was then either the president or the immediate past president, and suggested me as a candidate. According to Charles, the conversation went something like this: Charles asked him, “Well, how much do you have to give to be on the board?” And Norman was affronted, and he said, “Well…” No, Charles said, “How much do you have to give? Would 1,000 dollars be enough?” And Norman was really upset. He said, “Nobody gives more than 100.” Well, anyway, I joined. I guess I was giving 100 dollars or whatever. In those days Virginians did not give to the arts. If they gave, they gave anonymously. Mrs. Darden gave, but she always was anonymous. And it was a real problem because you could never leverage what was given because you couldn’t say, “So-and-so gave such amount.” It is also what kept the arts in their infancy really in Virginia. For instance, Henry Clay used to give 10,000 dollars to the Virginia Museum, but he’d give 100 here because it wasn’t done.
Major: Very interesting.
Cooper: Anyway, that’s how I got started with the symphony. There’s also -- I know you’ve got another question coming later about Norfolk State, so shall I wait, or shall I go into that now?
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Major: Your choice.
Cooper: In 1965 I had already joined the board of Young Audiences, and I had gone to a national conference, the Young Audiences national conference, and I had heard that there was a project in Maine called “Music in MIM—M-I-M” and it was a way to engage professional musicians on a full-time basis. It had two universities in Maine , plus the Maine Symphony, plus an organization that was only in Maine that did school programs, and it had -- it sounded very possible for us to replicate it here. So, we started working on it to get it -- which was going to be called, “Virginians in Music—VIM.” Seemed like a good acronym. And using my in-laws’ connections, I went to the symphony and -- Bill Ames (ph) was the current president, but David Clark (ph) was the incoming president, or it might have been just the opposite. Maybe David was the president, and Bill was the incoming president. That’s probably what it was. At any rate, so I met David, and he thought, “Gee, this sounds like a great opportunity for the symphony.” I think at that point my brother-in-law, Joel, was on the symphony board. And that’s just about when Peter Smith was here, so he was in favor of it, and we put it together, and then David and I went to see Lewis Webb to get Old Dominion to join. In other words, they would have four or five, depending on how much we could afford, but assume four string players who could then be professors at ODU and at the same time play with the symphony and at the same time do the programs for Young Audiences in the daytime. We’d all each—we’d each have about a quarter of their time, and we’d pay a quarter of the fee, which seemed a very good deal. And he was fascinated. He thought that was a very good idea, and David Clark (ph) said to Lewis Webb, “We’ve had problems getting through to --senior moment -- NSU, to talk to them.”
Major: Harrison Wilson?
Cooper: No, oh long before Harrison Wilson. This is…oh, who is the, the man who started NSU?
Major: I don’t know. I didn’t know there was anybody before…
Cooper: Oh yes! Oh absolutely. The, the original…yes, right, of course, of course! Lyman Brooks. Well, we had no luck getting through to Lyman Brooks whatsoever. We tried; David had tried; and I had tried. So, Lewis Webb picked up the phone, and he called Lyman Brooks, and Lyman Brooks takes Lewis Webb’s call and says, yes, he will meet us. And we -- with Lewis acting as the connector between us; he arranged for the time and the date. We got over there. Now, sidetrack a bit. The summer before, I guess in June of ’65, there had been a large dinner party at one of the big hotels. I guess it would have had to be at the Golden Triangle. There was a very big dinner to celebrate One Man, One Vote. It was a dinner honoring Henry Howell, and Charles and I went, and I was seated next to a very interesting man whose name was Dr. Lyman Brooks. That proved
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to be extremely useful because he knew why I was there. We were all on the same team. So we get -- David and I get over to Norfolk State , and we sit there, and we wait. We arrive in time, no Dr. Lyman Brooks. I had been told that there was a wonderful woman who had just -- was the interim director of the music department. Her name was Dr. Rosemary Adams (ph). I had never met her, so I decided I wanted to meet her since I seemed to have lots of time sitting here. And I said, “I’ll be up in the office upstairs, so call me if Dr. Brooks arrives.” And I go upstairs, and I meet Rosemary Adams; we form an instant friendship, and we had many, many happy times thereafter. But I sit there, talk to her about what we are trying to accomplish and how wonderful this would be for NSU, and she thinks it’s great, and finally, you know, I still haven’t been called. So I traipse back down. I’m walking through the hall, and Dr. Lyman Brooks is walking through the hall, and I walk up to him and say, “Dr. Brooks, it’s so good to see you!” Well, he couldn’t say he hadn’t met me, but he had no intention of meeting with us. None whatever. And the reason soon became very obvious. We walked into his office. There was a sort of trap door that you could push through, and I introduced him to David Clarke (ph) and he said, “Come on in.” So we went back there. He did tell us to sit down, but he was really angry, and he had no intention of meeting with us. And the point was that we had never allowed blacks in the symphony, and we said, “Well, Dr. Brooks, that’s gonna change right now. But you have to let it do it, and you have to work with us. And if you want us to hold auditions this year at NSU, that is where we will hold our auditions. And we will audition anybody you want us to audition.” That’s what we did. And Jimmy Reeves became the principal bass as a result of, of that.
Major: I’ve read about him.
Cooper: Yeah, I mean it was absolutely fascinating. He, he had a long history of unhappiness with the symphony. He felt that we had been blatantly racist, blatantly uninterested in the black community, as did a number of other people because I went to see the Journal and Guide…
Major: Uh hum.
Cooper: And the publisher—
Major: P.B. Young?
Cooper: Yes, Mr. Young. Tom, Tom Young--
Major: Hm, okay.
Cooper: Was the publisher at that point and—no—it’s called P.B. Young Press, I think, but it was--Tom Young was the, the person who was in charge.
Major: The name of the man.
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Cooper: Yes, I think it was -- it had been started by his father, I believe.
Major: Uh hm.
Cooper: At any rate, Tom Young was married to Marguerite Young and I, I had several wonderful relationships with her, but he, he sat there and told me that there was no reason for them to write up the symphony because we had never wanted them before. I said, “But, you know, things are changing.” And he agreed that he would put an article about the symphony in the, the press. So that, that was a major change, but you could see the entire middle-class or upper-middle class, certainly the professional group of, of the black community had never been wanted or allowed in, and they were gonna hold it against us, and so we had, we really had to work to overcome that.
Major: So, pick up the story about, about how the partnership…
Cooper: Well, we, the partnership had, we had a good run. We had, we had four applications. We had one to the -- it was, it was just, it wasn’t really the Virginia Commission at that point. ’65, the legislation at the national level, created the National Endowment for the Arts. Each state had to have a recipient agency, and Virginia ’s became the Marine Scientist, whatever. It, it was, it was something agricultural and, and Frank Dunham (ph) was the original person. And he had really come from agriculture to the arts. Don’t ask me how. At any rate, so we had, we had to put a grant application in there; we had to put a grant application into the Department of Education nationally; we had to put a grant application into Humanities. It was four applications, and the one that killed us was the Virginia one. They wouldn’t give us the money. And so the whole thing had to mesh in order for us to get enough money all together, and Virginia —typical! —wouldn’t go along with it. So that took care of it. But what, what we did -- it was the first time, at least I was told it was the first time, that Norfolk State and Old Dominion had worked together on anything. And it really led to a whole lot of wonderful things. Rosemary was very helpful, and then when Georgia got her degree -- Georgia Atkins Ryder, had, her husband had started the music department at Norfolk State , and she had been in it when he died unexpectedly and far too young. She went off to get her doctorate, and that’s when Rosemary took over for the two years, or a little bit more than two years maybe, and then when Georgia came back, Georgia was simply brilliant at creating enough money to hire people for her department who could be used by the symphony. And half a dozen people came in that way. She took care of getting Steve Carlson in, not Patti. She got -- well, he didn’t, he didn’t really play for the symphony very much, but he was in the community and that gave us clout. That was Gerry Errante. She brought Allen Shaffer in that way. She brought--she saw to it that John Lindberg, who had gone to Old Dominion, got enough to live on. I mean, she, she found what she called “pots of money”. That’s the way she termed it. She could get some money from here and some money from there and put them together
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so that it paid enough for them to be in the community, and then the symphony could use them. And it was really very, very helpful. And at the same time, it gave her the ability to hire doctorates, which she needed for the prestige of her department.
Major: Well, but it was at her initiative?
Cooper: Oh, yes. Absolutely.
Major: This was her deal?
Cooper: Uh hum. And, and it grew out of the fact that we were, we were connecting with Norfolk State at that point, successfully. And Russell did a very -- Russell really worked hard to make sure that he was part of the entire community. When Tom Wilkins was a kid in the projects, Russell actually worked with him before he went away to school. So, I mean, part of, part of the reason we, we have the wonderful conductor Tom Wilkins is because of Russell.
Major: I am aware that, that in earlier times Russell Stanger and I think others in the symphony leadership tried various approaches to identify ways for symphony musicians to make additional income so that they had something close to a full-time income. At this time, is that still an issue with the symphony’s leadership?
Cooper: Well, the symphony -- the, the members of the core orchestra, the 53 members of the core orchestra have a full-time job for forty--I think it may now be 38 weeks per year. They, they have to play eight services, eight services a week is eight two-and-a-half hour periods in one week, and that is considered full-time for a musician. I mean, the, the practicing is all done on their own; this is rehearsal. Or performing. And that does give them summer and that does give them time to teach, and they all need it. I mean, we’re still -- we’re a major, we’re the smallest of the major orchestras. And we’re still pay—underpaying. Going back to the ‘60s, the orchestra was a community orchestra; it was a per service orchestra. That means it paid for each service at an agreed union rate, but by 1984 or 5, somewhere in there, the members of the orchestra were getting forty-eight hundred dollars per person a year. At that time Jim Babcock led the effort to try to grow the orchestra. And we decided we were going to pay them a salary for a certain number of services per week. I’m not sure at that point whether it was seven services a week or what. But at any rate, we were going to pay them eighty-four hundred dollars, which was a huge jump, and it gave us a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar sales nut to crack. We had to make -- we had to sell two hundred and fifty thousand dollars more tickets in that year, which we didn’t do. And it led to part of the issues that we’ve still got, ya know, of, of running a deficit. The board had tried to grow the orchestra in the ‘60s. After they hired Russell, and I think they partly hired Russell on the idea that they were going to be able to grow it. Peter tried to push for growing it faster, and the board dug in their heels and said, “No, we can’t do it.” And the result was, Peter left.
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Now Russell stayed. At that time Russell was beginning -- I, I don’t know whether he had already married Millie or not, but it created a situation where he was tied to the community, and he couldn’t leave in a sense, certainly not as easily as Peter could, and that, that enabled the board to not push for growth as fast as they probably should have.
Major: Review for us the, the area, the several different kinds of contracts the symphony players are on. You talked about this core of 53 players who are on salary, and then what else?
Cooper: There is a separate group—the core group by and large can play most of the pops, with a couple of extras brought in, such as guitarist or something of that sort or an extra timpani or percussionist, but for the, for classical music you need an orchestra by and large that starts at about 70-some players. Those players are on a per-service contract now for a certain number that they know that they have at the beginning of the year. It’s all, it’s all organized by a master agreement with the union, and it currently -- let’s see, the basic core group, I think, has 287 services per season or something, something along those lines, and the other has something under 100.
Major: Okay. Let me go back to, to my earlier question about you and the board. I gather from what you’ve said that that your activity has been with the board and not much with the Symphony League?
Cooper: Oh, well let’s see. In ’74 when I joined, we were the Norfolk Symphony. There was also a Virginia Beach Pops, and there was also a Peninsula Symphony. Mind you, we still had tolls, tolls to go to Virginia Beach and tolls to go the Peninsula . And it -- I remind you that tolls to go to the Peninsula at that point were a dollar and a quarter each way. Now the dollar wasn’t what it is now; it was a lot stronger, and that was a big amount. If you bought a pack of tickets, I think it was 75 cents each way. That’s still a lot of money. So, in ’78 there was a great push to get us to merge. Clay Barr was the head of the nominating committee, and she was extremely prescient. She realized that in order to make this jump, we needed clout on both sides of the water. And she endeavored to get people to join the Board, such as Anna Lee van Buren (ph), who joined the Norfolk Symphony Board before it merged. She got a couple of people from the, the Beach who had real clout at the Beach, and she got all these people to join the old Norfolk Symphony Board so that when we merged, we had strength on what has, had come from the Norfolk Symphony itself. Now we put together three boards. We had 126 people on the board, and we had somebody down here from the NEA to wish us well when--our first meeting in 1979. I guess it was June of ’79 or something like, something along those lines. Anyway, we met at, in the ballroom of one of the hotels, and mind you, our budget had been three hundred thousand dollars. The Peninsula Symphony had a budget of, I think, ninety thousand, and they were in debt even then a little bit. The Pops, the Virginia Beach Pops, had a budget of, I don’t know, between sixty-five and ninety
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thousand. And the first budget that we all looked at was over six hundred thousand dollars, and we all turned green. I mean, the concept of us undertaking this enormous budget – it scared the heck out of all of us. But it soon made people who weren’t really interested in working that hard leave the board. We pared down the board by attrition to about 60 and then, I think we kept it at 60 for quite a long time. It’s now 30, which is in my view far too small because we are covering too large an area for it to be 30 people. But we -- the group that got together and really tried to merge all these personalities was Clay Barr, Patsy Blackwell, Ernestine Middleton, and me. And we had, we had a lot of fun. We all became very good friends. But it was -- oh, and Midge Morrow (ph) was there too, I think. But we were trying to get people on committees, you know. How do you get people who don’t know each other to function together? It was an enormous task. And our first president was John Hodgson. John was absolutely marvelous. John had come to the area as a retired vice president of United Airlines, and he’d been the person who dealt with the unions, had been his bailiwick at United—so you know he was a good-- a good gatherer of people, at finding how to make things work well. And he did a wonderful job of leading us. He really did. A whole lot of things—a lot of issues with the union—that could have hurt us immediately, he managed to solve, resolve one thing or another. And right after him came -- I’ll think of his name -- but it was Bob, and he was a wonderful president. He was the managing partner of Peat Marwick, and he was really terrific – Bob Sutton. And he was, he was a wonderful second president for us. At some point in there, Bob Sutton had a, a thought that he felt that we needed to do something to get the board together because we still had this very large board, and they didn’t know each other, and it was hard to work together when people hadn’t developed a sense of trust, so he made me the head of a committee—it was called the Glamour Committee. It was just a good name for the person who gave the parties after all the classical performances. And the concept was that, to have a party for the board so that they had a chance to relax and get to know each other. And it was… very, very—a very good idea, and it worked quite well. About the same time, we needed a league that would function in a different manner than the old league and guild had done. The symphony, the Norfolk Symphony, had had a group of people who were--league or whatever. I’ve forgotten what they were actually called. But they were very elite.
Major: Was it called the auxiliary?
Cooper: It probably was. Yeah, the Norfolk Symphony Auxiliary. And it was very elite, and you had to be invited to be a part of it, and they met over at the, they met on some day of the week over at the Hermitage, and that too was, shall we say, restricted. And it was not open, by a long shot. The--There was nothing that said that the people who were part of the auxiliary had to buy tickets or had to go to the symphony. It really was a ladies club that had connections to the symphony, and a lot of the women did go to the symphony and did love it. But it was not necessary. On the other hand, the Peninsula Symphony had a guild. Those ladies were there really to have a party. They used to --each, each party
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after a symphony concert had a theme, and the theme might be “Vienna.” And so all these magnificent hors d’oeuvres and, and flowers, and the centerpieces would all be beautiful, but the women never went to the concerts! I mean they were too busy getting the party, and the party was the point. Then the, the Virginia Beach Pops didn’t really have an auxiliary because the Pops, the whole group of them, worked together to sell the tickets, and they had tables so that it was really a social thing for them, and it was very heavily centered on Walter Noona. They all adored him; they all thought he was the best musician in the world, and their whole, their whole effort was focused on getting people to the concerts so that they could all enjoy a fun evening. Well, here you have three different groups and three different methods of operation, and somebody needed to mold them. So either John or Bob, I’ve forgotten which of the two of them, asked me to take over the presidency at the league, which I did. That was interesting. A lot of the women still remember that fondly because we used to meet for lunch at my other house on Talbot Hall Road , and my dog would eat their food. They, they put their lunches on the floor, and the dog would come in and eat [laughing] and they’d go, “Oh my gosh, my lunch is gone!” It was fun, ya know. It was hilarious. I mean the dog was cute, but I finally had to tell them, “Don’t put your food on the floor ‘cause he’s gonna eat it.” So, but we had a very good time, and that too proved an opportunity. The board of the league at that point probably had 30-35 people on it, and we made sure that we had people from all the different groups. We had a vice president for Virginia Beach ; we had a vice president for the Peninsula , and we had people working, trying to work together, and they really did form nice friendships, and it did work. So, I kept that job for two years. So I was very heavily involved in the league and in the re-making of the league.
Major: I’m very interested in, in your story about how Clay Barr molded the, the board in anticipation with this group. Tell me more about the lead up to the actual merger.
Cooper: When I joined the board, the meetings were one hour long and…
Major: Whether you needed it or not…
Cooper: Yeah, and, and they assumed that you could get everything done, and if anybody asked a question -- of course I never keep my mouth shut, so I asked questions. And that made the meetings go longer than they anticipated that they should last, which produced some feelings. And produced from a couple of the people, who were the male presidents, comments. At one point I was asking about -- I, I felt musicians were badly paid, which they still are.
Major: That’s right; nothing’s changed.
Cooper: Nothing’s changed, except the quantity of bad pay was much smaller. This is in the seventies, and Roy Martin was on the board. Roy Martin at that point was the mayor of Norfolk , and I said, “How can you possibly get people to
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play for that amount of money?” And he turned to me and said in his beautiful manner, “Mrs. Cooper, if you want people to pay, to have more money, you pay them!” And that was the way they treated people. At any rate, things did improve. The point was that, just as with now, with many organizations cycling off money—and if I tell you that in ’74 if you gave a hundred dollars that was a lot of money, and they didn’t want you to give more.
Major: Uh hum.
Cooper: Obviously the arts weren’t gonna go anywhere because that’s not enough money to work on—that doesn’t give you capital enough for anything. So, the board -- as I said, Peter had pushed them in the late sixties, and they had rejected it, and he had left. Russell was still here. Russell was still trying to push, and some of the younger men came on the board. Now, the old Norfolk Symphony had been primarily people who were born in Norfolk , were raised in Norfolk , probably died in Norfolk , but at any rate who were Norfolkians. Along came a group of administrators, professional executives who’d been moved around in their careers. Jim Babcock, who was not from here; he’s originally from New Jersey, and he’d been all over the world in the course of his career as a banker. Bob Sutton, who’d been with Peat Marwick all over the place. And there was a, a growing group of people who, if they had grown up here, were with corporations that were dealing with a larger spectrum of the outside world, shall we say. And they began to realize that we were -- if we didn’t grow, we would have major problems down the road. So, with the concept that -- I mean you’ve got John Hodgson, you know, coming from United Airlines, well, I mean he’d, he’d never really lived in Norfolk or Virginia Beach, and he had come to that from the -- he’d come from really the combination of the old Pops, but also he’d been invited on the symphony board. That’s why, that’s why Clay was so smart. She really was. Clay really had that ability, which Henry Clay had, too, which was trying to figure out people who could be very useful to the growth of something and then letting them do that, do what they were good at. So, she had, she had seen this, and the people that she had brought on, these professional executives from all over the country, began pushing for an enlarged part of the market share, and that meant that we had to have more money, and we had to have more tickets available to be sold, and we could not compete with these tiny little orchestras. So, the obvious move was to merge the three of them, and we did merge them. It was not a clean merger. I mean, in the sense that there were a lot of, there were a lot of issues. One of the issues was, we originally created the group, the Virginia Orchestra Group, and we decided we would have under that umbrella three orchestras. The smallest would be the classical orchestra, which is essentially what the core orchestra is now. Then you’d have the pops orchestra, which was a few more players because you needed a couple of extra jazz people and things like that. That was called the Virginia Pops. The second—and then the third was the classical orchestra—was the, the philharmonic. So we had the Virginia Classical Orchestra, we had the Virginia Pops, and we had the Virginia Philharmonic all playing under an umbrella organization called the
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Virginia Orchestra Group, which is still our, our legal name. We trade as the Virginia Symphony, but we’re technically the Virginia Orchestra Group. And that way, we could afford to have three maestros. That resolved some of the issues. We had as one of the conductors, a wonderful gentleman whose name was Cary McMurran, and Cary was a fine pianist early in his career and a, and also a - he played the harpsichord …and he created the Peninsula Symphony, but he was never a first-class conductor. And he had aged. I mean, he, he had created this orchestra, I think 20 years before, but anyway, quite a while before, and he had not gotten any younger, so there was a concert, which I attended, on the Peninsula. It was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and he lost his place, and he had to stop, and he turned around to the audience, and he apologized. And at that point it was obvious that there were real problems. And he was very gracious about it. He realized the problems himself, and he agreed to be -- let’s see… Russell became laureate, and Cary became emeritus or whatever. So that left us with two conductors, and about that time, it was time for Russell to go. He’d been with the orchestra since ’66, and the orchestra had progressed. Russell was a, was and probably still is, a marvelous conductor, but Russell was not a good artistic director and builder of orchestras. That’s a different skill, and it was not a skill that Russell really possessed. So the time came for him to leave, and we had a, a year of looking for another conductor, and we brought in Richard Williams. Well, that meant that our senior conductor became Walter Noona because he actually had seniority over Richard, and by this time, of course, Cary was a, a member—he was helpful, and he was here, and he was always very supportive, but he was not conducting. That created a real issue. The better the performers we got in the orchestra, the better the musicians in the orchestra, the more issues there were with Walter’s conducting. And finally we had an opportunity to come to grips with the problem. The musicians were using it against us. The musicians in the orchestra knew that, if Richard felt they were good enough, he would hire them for the philharmonic, and if they didn’t get hired, they would go to Walter and say, “Take care of us.” So Walter began to be a competitor, and we had a situation where a number of our performers threatened to leave... point blank, unless we did something about this situation. It was very volatile. So the board voted at a meeting which lasted until almost seven o’clock one night, to offer Walter more money for each of the, the performances that he conducted, but offer him fewer performances than Richard had, and Richard would have control over who was hired. We finished that meeting at seven. Jim Babcock was the president. He met with Walter, and by seven o’clock the next morning when the newspapers were delivered, we were being called the Vultures of Ghent, VOG, Vultures of Ghent. Walter had managed to put the article, put the news in the newspaper and, as he said, he didn’t call the newspaper, which was true; he’d gotten Sidney Berg to call. So he didn’t technically blab, but he hadn’t, he hadn’t even negotiated. I mean he, he had this one meeting, and within 12 hours it was all over the newspapers, and it managed to create huge problems.
Major: With the board and with the public?
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Cooper: With the board and with the public. The old -- the people from the old Virginia Beach Pops mostly walked, and those who didn’t…
Major: You mean resigned from the board?
Cooper: Yeah, they resigned from the board. And those who didn’t were ostracized in Virginia Beach . One of the members who stayed with us was an accountant who had a contract with the city of Virginia Beach , and Walter’s followers tried to get the city of Virginia Beach to annul that contract. It wasn’t annulled, but they tried. The tension was so bad that, at one point I said to Charles, “I’m going to Virginia Beach for a concert, not, not by our orchestra, but by another group, and I need protection; will you come?” It really—it was, it was that bad. It was awful. And there’s still people who won’t speak to me.
Major: Thirty years later?
Cooper: Well, twenty years later.
Major: 1979…
Cooper: It, it—no, it was ’84. ’84, ’85 something like that. But it, it was -- it really, really was bad. So, at that point--there are some people who are now coming back to the symphony, finally. There was somebody who just joined at the league whose first time since that, that episode. And it was really very unfortunate because there’s not that much -- there wasn’t certainly then that much of a community who loved classical music. And to have to split, it was a real problem.
Major: Did that incident have anything to do with your -- the pattern still that there are fewer audience members and fewer symphony supporters in Virginia Beach ?
Cooper: Well, not—I think actually there are more people from Virginia Beach who come to the symphony than any other city. Of course, it’s the biggest city in the state, too.
Major: Right.
Cooper: It created real problems.
Major: Uh hm. Real long-standing problems.
Cooper: Uh hm. Yup
Major: You started coming to the—started—attending the symphony at the end of the Edgar Schenkman period?
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Cooper: [Laughs.] Yes. My in-laws were very active in the arts community, and during World War II there was a young man who was stationed here named Isadore Feldman. Izzy Feld—
Major: The Feldman Quartet?
Cooper: Izzy Feldman was a string teacher, and he was stationed here, and after the war he stayed here. And he taught string players. And Edgar Schenkman and Izzy took instant dislike to each other, and you either had to be for the Feldman and against the symphony or for the symphony and against the Feldman. You couldn’t be for both of them. Can you imagine this community then? Having enough people to go to Feldman and the other? So you had to be against one. So the best players at that point were in the Feldman String Quartet. But they weren’t allowed to play in the symphony because that would be deadly. Ridiculous. Anyway Edgar Schenkman was not getting paid very much, and he also took on, I think probably 49 or 50, somewhere in there, I know, it’s in the book, but at any rate, he took on the Richmond Symphony. And I think Richmond probably paid him better than we did, and my mother-in-law and father-in-law liked Edgar. Here I was; I was married, newly, newly wed, but I was still a music teacher at, at Barnard---music student at Barnard. I came home and needed some materials; I had to write a paper over Christmas holiday, so Mother got Edgar and then Dr. Vogan to loan me things that I needed. But she -- I went to a concert of the symphony, and it -- I mean I’m --in New York Charles and I were going to the New York Philharmonic. Bernstein was there. It was an electric place! So we come back here, and we go to the symphony when we’re in town, and it was very different. And Mother quoted me to Edgar. Why, don’t ask me; I have no idea. So he took -- he really was offended. I mean, he should have been, but -- it wasn’t -- it didn’t compare to the New York Philharmonic under Bernstein. Just no comp, no comparison at all. Anyway. So I did hear Edgar, and I am told by a number of people that he was really quite a good musician… at some point in his career and that his wife Marguerite was a good musician. By the time I came, and I was comparing what I was hearing in New York , it was a decided difference.
Major: I have looked for some biographical information about Edgar Schenkman and find very little. The little snippets that I have uniformly report that he was the conductor of the Richmond Symphony, and it never refers to the Norfolk Symphony, which makes me assume that he, that there was unhappiness when he left.
Cooper: Well, I think that they wanted, I think the reason they were looking for someone to replace him was that he was giving Richmond more of his time and more of his energy too, I think, than he was giving here, and I think they probably felt that they really wanted more than he was willing to give. They probably wanted--didn’t want to pay him very much more, but… There are a lot of people around here who still remember Edgar at his prime, and they will tell you good,
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good stories—not only good stories about his performance, but good stories about things he did for other people, which are very nice.
Major: His wife is still alive, I believe.
Cooper: Yes.
Major: And she still has contacts here, right?
Cooper: I understand she does.
Major: I believe so. I believe so. Well. You’ve spoken a little bit about Russell Stanger and his strengths and the Russell Stanger period. Is there anything else that you might want to, to add about the Russell Stanger period?
Cooper: Well, Russell, as I said, was a fine musician. He really was. When we heard him in New York , we liked what we heard there. And I always felt that he had great integrity in his musical things. When he undertook to do a performance or something, he really did the best he could do, which was sometimes excellent, really outstanding. He, he, he gave us a lot of wonderful works, and if you look at the, the catalog of the things he did, he did most of the major works in the Romantic repertoire, and he did them very well. He had taken after Bernstein in some of his movements; he had sweeping movements. Of course, these days that’s probably not as, as import -- as strange as it was then. Apparently Schenkman’s movements are, on the podium, were quite controlled, and Russell’s were a great deal larger and, and more flamboyant. But, but he, he got good music out of them. I mean they played some really good things.
Major: How about Winston Dan Vogel and Richard Williams? Both of them came and went pretty fast.
Cooper: Well, Richard was the best of the conductors we saw that time, I think quite truthfully, but he came at a time of tremendous change, and I’m not sure that anybody could have survived the competition with Walter that he found himself in on a daily basis that undermined his ego, frankly. You can’t be a conductor without a good ego. And that really undermined his ego. It made him question everything he was doing, significantly. I understand when he left here, he and his wife split up, and I think that had to do with the same issues that, that while he was here, if he ever had depression, he had it while he was here. There were days when I thought he was extremely depressed. And having to deal with this confrontation and the board’s split on Walter just undermined his whole sense of well-being. He was a good musician, not a great one, but he was a good one, and he did, he did change the orchestra in significant ways. Now, part of what he left us with, though, I have the feeling, and I’ve always had the feeling, that he engaged some of the younger players, who are now some of the older players, based on: this orchestra’s going to grow, and it’s gonna grow soon, and
[14]
you’re gonna get a lot better salary. Well, with all this confrontation, with the undermining of the parts of the community that, that no longer having Cary as a conductor and no longer having Walter and his group to play to, didn’t happen. So, we started in ’86 a capital campaign. And as I turned the reigns over to Ray Dezern -- I was president of the symphony from ’86 to ’88. That was not intentional ‘cause I was already president of Ohef Sholom Temple , and I didn’t want to be president of both of ‘em, but there was a crunch; it was needed so I took it on. The players heard us talking about, we were raising millions of dollars. They think in terms of immediate gratification, as they should, but of course a capital campaign doesn’t have very much for immediate gratification, and we got into a situation where we had, we had really raised about two million, one hundred thousand dollars out of goal of three million dollars. Now that doesn’t sound in today’s money like a lot of difference, but a lot of the deficit could be taken care of by that nine hundred thousand dollar difference. And don’t forget, we had not made the two hundred and fifty in the jump in the ’85-’86 to pay for the enlarged orchestra and put them on salary. So we got through June; I turned the thing over to Ray, and in September the orchestra went on strike. We had over five hundred thousand dollars worth of asks out. We had more than that, as a matter of fact. We had, we had probably nine hundred thousand dollars worth of asks. Anyway, it was a huge amount considering that the whole campaign was three million. With us on strike, that money walked. It never – it -- some of it came back years later, but most of it never came back. And there are some people who still hold it against us. There are, there are people in our community who will not give to us because we have a union orchestra. Well, I mean, you -- orchestras are unionized.
Major: Yeah. Are there no non-union orchestras?
Cooper: Well-
Major: I mean, are there any non-union orchestras?
Cooper: Actually, you don’t have to be a member of the union to be a member of the orchestra.
Major: Of course not; this is a right-to-work state.
Cooper: Right. And there are smaller orchestras that don’t have unions, I guess. But, I mean, they don’t have professional players. So, no, as far as I know, there’s no orchestra that doesn’t have a union. But they still hold it against us, and I think finally 20 years later, we’re finally getting to the point where some of those people are beginning to understand. But they really, they, they forced us to under-capitalize the whole orchestra from ’88 on. We never got that extra. Well, we got, we got some of it, but we never -- we got up to three, we got to two million two, but we never got to three million. And that’s part of where we still are.
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Major: Tell me about Winston Dan Vogel.
Cooper: Well, Winston came. We had, again we had a surge. We had some very good candidates, and Winston was a wonderful musician, but in typical Israeli fashion, I’m told, ‘cause I don’t know all that many Israelis, but I, I understand that they are very frank and in-your-face, I’m told. And Winston was frank and in-your-face. He also was given the task of getting rid of the dead wood ... from the orchestra.
Major: Uh huh.
Cooper: And there are certain things you can say when you’re getting rid of people, and there are certain things you can’t, and Winston never understood the difference. So, when Patsy was -- Patsy Blackwell was the president of the symphony. It became her task with me to go and tell Winston that he had lost the job. Now, he couldn’t understand it because he’d made wonderful music. But he, he had a terrible method of, of getting people to play better. He was, he was insulting to people, and he thought that that was what produced a good orchestra. I mean he would literally bombard people in a, in a rehearsal with insults. It was horrible. And we simply couldn’t tolerate it any longer. So. But he was a fine musician. I mean, it really—if he’d only learned how to deal with people, he would have been perfect! So then by that time we had Michael Tiknis (ph), and Michael had his own set of problems. But one of the things that he did was he told us to engage Joe Silverstein -- who at that point was still Concertmaster and actually Resident Conductor of the Boston Symphony, and he was just about to leave that and go to Utah -- as our consultant, and Joe Silverstein knew just about every conductor in the United States. I mean, not necessary Americans, but all the conductors. And he was marvelous, and he helped us get a real panel of people that were simply divine, and we had a wonderful year of interviewing them all, and I think Michael Tiknis felt the one thing, if nothing else, that he had done for the Virginia Symphony was get us JoAnn, and I think he still takes credit for that. But Joe Silverstein had a lot to do with it, and Clay had a lot to do with it, too, because she was very good about organizing the search committee. She really understood how to get people to work well together and to evaluate properly. When we had hired Richard, we had brought in a company that told us how to, how to evaluate people, and they had given us a form that we asked people to fill out. Well, several people refused to fill it out. So we lost some real potential at that point by asking people to fill out this form. Clay didn’t go that way. She went through Silverstein and through the knowledge of people, and we ended with JoAnn, and I think we’ve been thrilled ever since.
Major: For a long time I -- one of the, the threads that I picked up, was the expectation in this area that whoever was the conductor of the symphony, the Artistic Director, would make his home here, and this would be his only real… professional…
[16]
Cooper: Well, when we were looking at conductors, when we looked at JoAnn, we were very much aware that we weren’t gonna get that. The really best of the people already had at least one other orchestra, and we might get them to give up one orchestra for us, as JoAnn did, but we wouldn’t get them to give up all of their other conducting, and there was no way it -- the world had changed. Conductors were beginning to get much larger salaries and in order to get these big salaries, they were, at every level, they were conductors for at least two orchestras, if not more. So, we, we, we tried to negotiate as we still do, a certain amount of days that the conductor will be here. And I must say that if JoAnn is here, she is here all day. She will go to breakfasts; she will do parties after concerts; she is truly here to sell the orchestra. That was an interesting thing about Winston. We made a couple of big mistakes with, with, with … trying to settle Winston in. Now Winston did live here. He did, he did other conducting jobs, but he really did live here. He went to a party, and we didn’t have someone at his elbow. This was within the first three or four months that he was here. And a man who we were trying to cultivate came up to him and said -- you know, he was introduced to him, and he greeted Winston with, “I can’t stand symphonic music, but I know it’s good for the community.” Well, Winston was mortified and affronted and insulted, and that became a real issue because he was very uncomfortable from then on going to parties ‘cause he didn’t know who was gonna insult him next. So, it, it really became an issue that we had to make very sure that if he went to a party, that we had somebody going with him, somebody to say, “Here are the people you should be talking to” and to make sure that he didn’t feel insulted. It was such a devastating situation for him.
Major: But, but the change that this residence thing, the change came when it became clear that, that the market was different than it had been and that this was not a reasonable expectation anymore.
Cooper: Not if we were going to get conductors from a, a higher level than we had been getting. I mean, that was one of the things Joe Silverstein told us. He said, “You’re not going to get somebody to live here full-time.” So, we came to grips with that.
Major: And why did people want somebody who would be here full-time?
Cooper: Well, you -- the more days you have of somebody’s time, the more they can sell the orchestra. I mean, it’s still a question of selling the orchestra, and we’re still dealing with the same issues. JoAnn tries to get as many interviews and have as many cultivation events as possible when she’s here. We have learned to use other members of the orchestra. We’ve had to, we’ve had to do other things. Carla does some of this herself. When, when John was here, of course. When John Morison was the executive director, he was really so well known in the community that we were able to -- well, we did a lot of the fundraising based on his reputation. That was very useful. Now Carla, you know, is making her reputation as we speak, but she has used, she has encouraged us
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to use members of the orchestra to help sell. They are -- I don’t know that she has, at least to my knowledge, she hasn’t used them to go out and do fundraising of any major quantity.
Major: Okay. What did the, the women’s committee, the auxiliary, the Symphony League, all together, what has it contributed to the viability of the Symphony?
Cooper: Well, it seems to me that without ‘em, you wouldn’t have seventy-five thousand dollars a year. That’s a big, big hunk. I was very impressed when I was, when I was president of this newly-reconstituted group, I had a difficult time trying to persuade them to raise six, six thousand dollars. And now they’re in the seventies, and that’s, of course, that doesn’t compare to some auxiliaries that raise two or three hundred thousand, but nevertheless, it’s a lot more than it used to be.
Major: It’s a significant amount of money.
Cooper: Oh yes!
Major: What about their role in the subscription campaign. I gather that way at the beginning, that it was the women’s auxiliary that, that initiated a subscription campaign.
Cooper: When, when I was president we used to have -- and, and this had been true for a long time -- don’t forget that it used to be the women’s auxiliary, then it became the auxiliary, then it became the league, with no gender.
Major: Right.
Cooper: So that we have men as members, and that has to do with the change in culture across, across the whole United States that women have less time; they’re working more, and they have less time, and, and men can do an equal job, but it what, what we used to do, and what I still think has some value, although we’re not doing it, is to have parties. They used to have parties, summertime parties where they would invite people over, and you’d have a couple of musicians come, as well as some staff members, and you would sell the concept of going to the symphony. Now, the point is, people go—why do people go to the symphony? Number one, they can like classical music, but number two, and frankly, it’s a larger group, they go because it’s a nice evening out with friends. So that you try to persuade them to join you in going to the symphony, which is a social thing, and, therefore, it’s capable of being sold in the social context of a party at somebody’s home where you, you find people you like, and they’re going to go to the symphony, so you go to the symphony, too.
Major: And there was a time when the League and its antecedents did that kind of selling—
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Cooper: Oh yeah, they did it all.
Major: I, I gather that for a period of time they did all the subscriptions.
Cooper: They, well they did all the initial sales, sales. The renewals came from the staff. I mean, the staff—when I joined the board, I think it had the staff as one and a half people. It was Matt Werth and some, and a secretary and that was it.
Major: And now the subscription seemed to be generated from the staff.
Cooper: Yes, they are generated from the staff. They also are generated from the Web.
Major: Yes.
Cooper: More and more people are, are renewing on the Web. More and more people are buying on the Web, and you have to sell that way, through the Web. So you have phone, you have phone contacts as a follow-up to the Web site.
Major: Tell me where the VSO Foundation fits in, in the whole picture of viability.
Cooper: [Laughs.] When, when we went out for the capital campaign, the way Jim Babcock set it up: he had set up another foundation for some other organization not long before that, and we were to have a totally separate 501c3, which would be -- which would keep the funds at arm’s length from the symphony. But the election to that group in -- when we set it up, it was perfectly okay. It could be two totally separate entities, but the election of the board of the foundation was by the symphony board. The election was five people from the community and six people from the symphony board, including the president, or whatever the chair was called. The name, the title has changed in the symphony itself. I was president, and now it’s a chair. But, the point was, that you had eleven people on the board of the Symphony Foundation. Their job was to oversee the investment policies of the symphony foundation money. Thank goodness there was money there, because without it, we’d be out of business. The, the money has been mortgaged, I guess you’d say. It’s been, it’s been collateralized at the very least. But they changed the accounting rules that if something were controlled 100% by another organization, you could put it on one balance sheet, and that’s the way it is now. Technically they have two separate boards, and they have two 501c3 numbers, but they’re on one balance sheet because the rules now say if it’s 100%--if the election to this board is 100% by this other organization, they have to be on one balance sheet. It is not the way we anticipated it’d be, but it’s the way it is.
Major: Um hm.
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Cooper: It’s still has six members from the symphony board and five members from outside and the current president, of course, is one of the outside members—Gordon Goodson (ph), who is a very conscientious, very capable man.
Major: Tell me about the investigation of a possible merger with the Richmond Symphony in 1989.
Cooper: That was only one of the times.
Major: Oh, really?
Cooper: Well, ya know, it had been talked about. It had been talked about before we ever merged with the other symphonies. The Richmond Symphony and the Virginia Symphony have quite different perceptions, in my view -- this is personal view. It had quite different viewpoints of the relationship between the board and the musicians. The Richmond Symphony also has a number of major corporate headquarters. I understand they had dipped into their endowment, and that in order to change their whole complexion of the way they were doing business, they ended up giving people a -- I don’t know how big a golden parachute, but they actually bought out the contracts of some of their senior musicians in order to get rid of them and were able to hire younger people for much less money -- which is one way of dealing with issues. We really never had that opportunity because we don’t have the corporate people that they have. And when we were talking to the Richmond Symphony people, which was done very quietly, and it was really person to person rather than organization to organization, truly. They were -- they indicated, at least the people I heard about, indicated that they would just as soon that the organization went bankrupt if it required it. And our folks never felt that way. They also, in actually talking about it, and trying to figure out where would you put the orchestra? Put ‘em in Williamsburg ? That doesn’t make sense. Williamsburg is a small town; there are not enough people for the kids to—not enough students to provide extra income, not enough gigs for them to play Sunday services and things like that. So it really—it, with a question of, “Where would you put it?” You’d either leave it in Richmond , or you’d leave it in Hampton Roads, and in either case, the other community would feel disenfranchised, so it just wouldn’t work.
Major: How strong do you think the symphony has been in the last ten years?
Cooper: How strong?
Major: Hm.
Cooper: Oh, I think they--musically I think they’re wonderful. I think they’re far better than we pay them for. I know they’re far better than we pay them for. It’s terribly sad, but one of the things that’s really troubling about the whole industry –
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- I remember when, at one point we had the negotiator from ROPA (ph) that was the -- that’s when we were a regional orchestra. Regional Orchestra PA; I’ve forgotten. Anyway the guy from, from, from the union was down here, and I said to him, “You’re turning out too many musicians. There’s not enough places for them to play.” And he got furious at me. But when you have a, a position for say Second Oboe, and you have 80 people showing up, paying their own way to come to a, to audition for a situation that will pay twenty-five thousand, give or take. That’s, that’s upsetting. I mean, there are very -- teachers are getting thirty-seven to enter the field, and these are mostly people with masters degrees and some with doctorates. It’s terrible.
Major: It is.
Cooper: It’s really below the salt. Mozart would feel right at home.
Major: [Laughs.] What additional things, do you think, need to happen to increase the symphony’s viability? Other than having more Fortune 500 companies in our area.
Cooper: That would help. That would help.
Major: Sure it would.
Cooper: Or, it would help if some of -- there is still a legacy. The senior people --we’re facing two different legacies, which are sort of both unhelpful. The first one is, back in the era where the FFVs controlled Virginia or at least, if you didn’t control it, you, you, you allied yourself with the Byrd Machine. Music and the arts were considered fluff. If you, if you supported them, you were unusual. When Mrs. Darden married the governor and supported the arts throughout her whole life -- she was a wonderful musician herself. She played the violin and the viola. When I moved here, she was the only person in Virginia who belonged to Chamber Music America .
Major: [Laughs.]
Cooper: She was so unusual that she just was one of a kind. Most of the rest of the folks who lived here didn’t go the symphony, didn’t go to the Feldman, didn’t go to the museums. They may have gone to the Virginia Museum , but that was because it was the Virginia Museum , and it was in Richmond . And they really never learned the value of the arts. I can remember when Josh Darden first began to realize that the arts were useful. He commissioned a, a report called Blueprint for a Rainbow in ’75 or six, ’76, I think. And they went down to Charlotte and to -- and they talked to the people in Winston Salem. Winston Salem was completely re-doing their whole downtown using the arts. Charlotte was doing something similar. That persuaded him that the arts were valuable to a community. Not personally. I still don’t think he thinks they are. But, but valuable to the community, and that’s when he first began seeing a reason to support it.
[21]
But it was not that it was useful to him personally. Frank Batten had apparently felt a little bit differently ‘cause I didn’t know until recently that he actually played; he took violin lessons as a kid. But, the people who control this community were not supporters of the arts. So, they began to support the arts when they realized that there was a value to the community of the, the entities. And then they started really working on it. They, they supported especially things, ya know, that have buildings, like the museums. Then the next generation comes along, and music gets cut out of the schools. Visual arts too, but in a different way. So, we lost a lot of that generation. We had people who played in bands, and we, we kept them ‘cause marching bands were big things here. But, the arts, per se, suffered from, first, the leadership antipathy and then the next generation’s loss of information. And it’s now a, an effort, huge effort being made to try and get back in the schools, which of course, “No Child Left Behind” and the SOLs are fighting. Most of the arts are now relegated to after-school, and the arts that are in school are being used to teach something else. They’re there, but they’re being used to teach something else, and at least there’s an integration process, but it’s, it’s really tough. We’re, we’re trying to grab the kids to bring their parents back with them. And it’s remedial, but it’s absolutely essential if we’re to have anything like classical arts going forward.
Major: All, over all this time when you’ve spent, when you’ve given to the board and you’ve worked on the board and so on. What do you regard as your area of expertise? Or have you had various roles at various times?
Cooper: I’ve had various roles at various times. Throughout my whole career, ever since I came into Norfolk , arts education has been my field. And I’m still very, very happily involved in it with Young Audiences, with the symphony. I chair the committee. I was, I was very much into it when I chaired the Arts Commission. I was very much into it when I was working on Virginians for the Arts in advocacy. I’m very much into it as the president of the Cultural Alliance. I was into it when I was on the, the old Norfolk Consort Board, ya know. It’s been part and parcel of my--my vision of the future is, if you don’t go into arts education, the arts don’t have a future. And that to me is absolutely untenable. I can’t imagine a future without the arts.
Major: Was the Community Music School in operation during any of the time that you’ve been active?
Cooper: Yes, but I never really dealt with it. And I don’t, I don’t know exactly why. I mean, Winnie did. It, it may have been… I don’t know exactly why. To some extent, they used as teachers some of the people that I didn’t feel were as qualified as some of the other teachers. But I never really got into how they were working it. I mean, I, I know more about the Academy of Music than I ever knew about the Community Music School .
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Major: The Academy of Music , is that a successor to the Community Music School , or did the two have nothing to do with each other?
Cooper: I don’t think they had anything to do with each other. Steve Kolb came in and, and started the Academy of Music when he was working at First Presbyterian, and First Presbyterian was willing to help, and they wanted the kids to have a place to learn music. And it grew. But, I don’t know that the two ever had any interaction at all.
Major: Okay. Did you ever have anything to do with the Youth Orchestra?
Cooper: Oh yes. Oh yes. One of the, one of the issues -- Winnie had been chair of the, of the education, Education and Youth Services, it was called at that point. It’s now called Education and Community Outreach. But, and that’s, that’s a big difference. But, as head of the Education and Youth Services committee, she had been supporting the Youth Orchestra. Well, the Youth Orchestra was organized by Sidney Berg. Sidney Berg was the supervisor of music of Norfolk Public Schools. Now mind you, this was from late ‘50s until the early ‘70s. The, the largest school system at that point was Norfolk , and he was the senior person in music, so all of the other music supervisors in all the different surrounding towns and counties deferred to him. He was the timpanist with the symphony and what he brought to the symphony at that point was six thousand dollars a year in ticket sales from the kids who came to the symphony. Now, mind you, as I said, in ’79 the Norfolk Symphony had a three hundred thousand dollar budget. Six thousand dollars was a lot of money. So, he had a lot of clout. Sidney Berg didn’t want any competition with himself. When we started Young Audiences, he actually came to our reorganization meeting in 19, in January of 1964 and made the comment that if Heifetz were a member of his staff, he wouldn’t give him time off to play for Young Audiences. Now mind you, what we’re trying to do at that point is create audiences for his musical students, but he doesn’t see it that way, and he sees it as a competition for a dollar, and he’s not gonna tolerate it. So, the first time we really got into -- this is Young Audiences -- the first time we really got into the Norfolk Public School System was when Mr—Dr. Ayers (ph) was hired, and he had worked with Young Audiences out in Spokane, where he had come from, and when we brought in dance ensembles, he was very much in favor of this kind of education. So, Sidney started the Youth Orchestra, and it became the youth orchestra for the symphony, and it was controlled by Sidney, and Sidney had -- he brought along his, his assistant Greg Barnes (ph), both of whom at best were band masters and conducted like band masters. So, when I took over the process of the committee, we were faced with, well, what are we going to do with this orchestra? At that point, the -- what was called the Virginia Symphony Youth Orchestra was actually a group of kids coming who had to have people going up and down the aisles telling them to be quiet. For the senior group or the -- I don’t know, it may at that point have been the only group -- they still had to have someone tune their instruments. So the first 20 minutes of a rehearsal would be spent with the, the string instructors going up and down
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tuning all the instruments. I mean, they weren’t capable of doing it. And then we hired Luke Douglas Sellers. And we were faced with a really good conductor who was very young, very energetic, and he would tell us, “You know, I get there, and they won’t be quiet; they don’t come prepared; they can’t tune. Why are we doing this?” So, Sidney took his group and walked, and we created what we thought was a higher-level string -- complete ensemble. It had strings and brass and winds and everything, percussion. And it was conducted by Luke Douglas Sellers, and then we started running into real flaps because some of the teachers who were helping Sidney were in the public schools, and they would send their kids to that one, even their better students. And the students would say, “Well, why can’t I go to this other one when presumably it’s a higher level?” So, we had a meeting, a luncheon meeting at Virginia Wesleyan, where we invited all the superintendents to come. And we said, “We have an issue for you, and we need your advice.” And we laid it out. We said, “We think there are two competing ensembles. We would like to know what your feeling is.” And they said, “Don’t put us in the middle. We only need one set of ensembles.” And we said, “Okay, if that’s what you want, we’re getting out of the youth orchestra business. There’s no reason for us to do what the kids should be learning in school anyhow and pay a first-class conductor to conduct it.” So, that was the way we left it. With the proviso that if JoAnn -- by this time we’d gotten to JoAnn -- if we, if JoAnn felt the group was good enough, she would occasionally guest conduct them; she would occasionally offer them the opportunity to do a side-by-side with the orchestra, and if it wasn’t good enough, she wouldn’t. And then that’s when the Bay Youth Orchestra really began. They’ve gone on to do some very, very good things, and JoAnn has been very pleased with them. We tried to encourage the Old TAM Orchestra, Tidewater Area Musicians Orchestra, first under Geraldine Harding (ph), I think, and then under John Jenkins (ph). We helped; we talked to the Peninsula Youth Orchestra, tried to encourage them. We tried to encourage every other group, but we would not run it if it was gonna be run as basically a training orchestra for kids who couldn’t tune their own instruments. And, and it has, I mean, certainly under Leslie Stewart, it has come up tremendously. It’s done wonderful things, and she now has, you know, different levels of orchestras, so that there’s an entry-level for younger kids and a really superb other one. And when they have played side-by-side with the, with the Virginia Symphony, they’ve done very nicely indeed.
Major: Last question. I know you’ve been involved in the current incarnation of the Symphony Chorus, and I know that this is not the only time there’s been a symphony chorus. Were you involved in earlier ones?
Cooper: No, the first one was—the original title was the Norfolk Symphony and Choral Association.
Major: I know.
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Cooper: So, it had a chorus, and as I understand it, that was disbanded in ’66 when Russell came because they really needed to spend the money on the orchestra. Whatever money they had they needed to spend on the orchestra. And Russell, during his tenure, used the UVA -- UVA chorus. He used, I think, NSU chorus at one point. And they would bring in various choruses. The reason for the incarnation that is in existence now was--first of all, in ’84 Don McCullough arrived, and he created the Chorale, which became the first professional group of singers, and it lifted the level of potential for singing in this community just over night. Winston Dan Vogel tried to do a Vaughan Williams Fantasia on choral themes, and he tried to put four choruses together. He spent a lot of time going to each of them and trying to make them sound alike. The, the result was a disaster. Well, I mean, they got through it, but the choruses didn’t have the same technique; they didn’t understand—it was awful. It was awful. So Winston, getting ready to do Beethoven Nine, not realizing it’s going to be his final performance here, asked Don to create a chorus and become the chorus master of it. And Don liked the challenge, and, I mean, it sounded like a great opportunity. It was a great opportunity for him. And it was supposed to be as it is now—a small core of paid performers and all the rest volunteer. But all auditioned, and we auditioned every year at that point. We still do pretty much, but we did then every year. And he created a chorus that was really something to be part of. And I had--personally, I hadn’t sung since I was in college. Thirty-one years I hadn’t sung, but the opportunity to, to sing, I mean, I didn’t think I was good enough for the chorale, so I had never even applied to that.
Major: Oh no.
Cooper: But the idea of being part of a chorus, a big chorus, where I really had a high level of expertise that was required sounded tempting, so I went down there and among other things I had sung with Iva Dee Hyatt. Iva Dee Hyatt had been head of choruses at Smith College , and she was and still is a name that is highly respected. So that helped, and I signed in downstairs, and I walked upstairs to do the auditions, and I am right behind a young man, young enough to be my son, and he’s a professional tenor. I thought, “What the hell am I doing here! I’m out of my mind.” But by that time I had signed in. You know, I would lose face, so I had to go through with it. Well, Don was cute. He said to me, “Minette, you’re only using ten percent of your voice.” And at that point, I didn’t even know what he meant. It had been so long since I’d sung, and he sort of took me provisionally. I mean he didn’t say it was provisional, but he, he admitted later on that it probably was. But, the first—the quality was so high, even that first year, that it was a real challenge. And I don’t know about anybody else; I used to come home every night and work one hour because I’d always been playing the piano, but I -- to make my voice do what I saw on the page was a different issue. So I would go home and work and work and work and work and work. And thank God, it’s a lot easier now than it was then. But it was—it’s been great fun. It, it has been very, very rewarding. I don’t think there’s anybody in the chorus who doesn’t feel that this is something that has added greatly to their musical education. I felt, and I
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still feel, that every single rehearsal is like having a singing lesson. And if I am—if I take what, first Don, and now Bob explained in order to get to the right sound, and do it at home the same way, then I really do improve. It’s great! But it’s very exciting.
Major: Is there anything that, that you hoped you’d be able to talk about in this interview, anything, any more that you’d like to bring out before we finish?
Cooper: There was something that we started on and we didn’t get to. One of the things that has been, been very important for the orchestra has been the Executive Directors. Matt Werth was a sweet man—is a sweet man, very sweet man. But I have no idea why he was hired to do, to run a symphony. Of course it was a much smaller thing. He was actually the executive when I first joined the board, and it was quite obvious that this wasn’t his forte at all. We looked for and hired Francis Crociata. Now Francis was an interesting man. Musically, extremely literate. I mean, he had, he had a phenomenal musical background. He had much less in finances, and once, one June, or maybe it was even May, the board was having problems figuring out, what do we owe, or what, what was our financial position? Bob Sutton, I guess it has to have been ’80—Bob Sutton asked me to run the symphony, and I said no, I didn’t want--I had planned other things for the summer, and I wasn’t gonna spend my whole summer running the symphony. But he put it, put us in as an oversight group. It was Ernestine Middleton, Pat Roebuck—this was before the flap over Walter—John Hodgson and me, with me being the chair of the committee, and we were overseeing how things were working. We came in one -- we came in every week and met with the staff. We came in one week, and we were thirty thousand dollars on the plus side -- in the black. The next week we came in, we were sixty thousand dollars in the negative side, and we said, “This is ridiculous. There is no way we’ve lost ninety thousand dollars in one week.” So, Charles and I were getting ready to go away, and I had spent every time the planes came down calling Bob Sutton to try and talk over this issue, and the result was we asked for Francis’ resignation because it was obvious that he just couldn’t control the numbers. And especially with Bob being an accountant, it was very frustrating for him.
Major: [Laughs]
Cooper: So, one of the things that was extremely fortunate was Jerry Haynie had just left position of the Executive Director of the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Turned the reigns over to Peggy Baggett. Mostly because John Dalton had come in as, as Governor, and Jerry didn’t think he could work with him. Anyway, so Jerry was available, and he was selling real estate in Virginia Beach , and I knew that, so we quickly invited him in and said, “Would you like to run the symphony?” And he said, yes, he would. Thank God. So we turned it over to him. And we brought in David Page, who had been with the Portland Maine Symphony, I think, as the number two person. So we had somebody in operations and somebody in, in management, really. And that gave us the ability to go forward at that point,
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which would have been otherwise extremely difficult. Jerry was wonderful, but he was a very quiet, very laid-back person, who had been first chair horn in the Nashville Symphony. He was an extraordinary musician. And when we got into the strike -- first of all, he lived through the flap of Walter and took a lot of abuse because of that, and then he got to the strike, and as I said, I think Richard promised people things that he couldn’t deliver, and Jerry caught the brunt of it. Jerry was not, he wasn’t an extrovert, so he was not the, the hail-fellow-well-met, and he was so badly hurt that the musicians would feel that he didn’t care about their rights that he quit. He then moved to Richmond and went into a position with the Virginia Independent Schools Foundation. He never went to the symphony there. He lives in Charlotte ; he never has gone to the symphony there. He was so badly hurt, he has really turned against all of the orchestras. He just doesn’t participate. So then we had to hire somebody else, and we went through all kinds of people. One of the things that bothers me about the process of hiring is that people who want to get rid of an executive will lie to you.
Major: Right.
Cooper: And tell you that they’re doing a fine job where they are, and you find out afterward that that’s not true, that there are all kinds of issues, and unless you actually know somebody on the inside of the other orchestra who will tell you off-the-record, you can’t find out. So, we went through Ben; then we got Michael. We had problems with Michael. Our problems with Michael really had to do with the fact that he was a marketing genius, but also probably, I don’t know, a depressive kind of person. He was either up or down, and he wanted to spend a certain amount of money on marketing one year, and the board literally cut the two lines of those items back to where we felt they should be, and he went ahead and spent the money anyhow. And that was that. You know, we couldn’t have it continue. But that put us over budget because we had said this wasn’t gonna take place, and it did. Then we went through a whole other series of people, and we were extremely grateful when John Morison was willing to tackle it. He was, his arm was twisted; he agreed to take it on for a limited period of time, and he did a brilliant job. And I think Carla’s doing a brilliant job. I think it’s a very thankless job, frankly, because if anything goes wrong, you get the blame, and if anything goes right the maestro gets the credit. [Laughs]. It’s difficult, but we’re find -- we found that trying to find somebody who really was qualified as people said they were, was totally misleading and sometimes deceptive.
Major: Thank you very much. This has been a fascinating afternoon.
Cooper: It’s been a fascinating life.
END OF INTERVIEW
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