Interview with Richard Myron, Paris based Baroque Bassist

WILLIAM: Hello and welcome to the MusiShare Young Artist Program Series Viewpoint. Today, I have the honor and pleasure to talk with Richard Myron, whom I've known since my years at the Juilliard School, where he earned his Bachelor of Music and Master of Music as a student of Homer Mensch and early music with Robert Fuller. Currently residing in Paris, France, Ritchie is a founding member of the Freiburger Baroque Orchestra and Consort, and has performed with Les Basques Rene, Ensemble Mosaique, and many other ensembles throughout Europe and the US. He is professor of contrabass and chamber music in the early music department at the Conservatoire Nationale Superior de la Musique de Paris. And gives masterclasses in conservatories throughout France, Switzerland, Canada, and the United States. Richie is a native of Brooklyn, New York. So with that, welcome to Viewpoint Richie. So Richie, I can still call you Richie, I guess.

RICHARD: Yes, yes.

WILLIAM: So you moved to France years ago. In fact, I remember walking with someone and we were walking on the Champs-Élysées and we were laughing because we were looking up and we saw someone walking towards us and I said, you got to see this. It looks exactly like Richie.

RICHARD: You know, Bill, I will tell you exactly where that was. I don't think, it wasn't Champs-Elysees. It was Place Saint-Michel. It was on the K. Place Saint-Michel, and you were with Andrea Byers. That's right. Another of our Juilliard violin people. And I heard behind me someone say, my goodness, there's a guy who looks just like Richie Myron. And I turned around and there you were.

WILLIAM: Do you remember how long ago that was? How long had you been in Paris?

RICHARD: Well, that must have been in 1984 or 85. I'm not sure exactly which year. I moved to Paris in 86. But as I recall, that was in the summer. And it was, I was on a visit. I think, I don't think I lived here yet. Although it could be. Now I can't really remember. But I moved here in 86. But I had visited for the first time in the summer of 84, then in the summer of 85, and then I moved in the end of the summer of 86.

WILLIAM: What made you want to move to Paris?

RICHARD: Well, funny enough, I'm not sure that I specifically wanted to move to Paris. How can I say? At that moment in 84, I had started to work in the early music world. And I also started to work, I was working in New York a little bit. And by 85, 86, I was actually doing some very nice commercial stuff and I was working. And I was also doing a fair amount of Baroque stuff. So I had no real plan to leave New York at that moment where I might've broken into the studio business, as it were, and I had some very good people, very generous guys in the recording business who were bringing me in, who will be nameless, but who know who they are in the great spirit of things. And so I met somebody in New York and we got together and she was Parisian. She is Parisian. And she was starting with, of course, Dorothy DeLay at Juilliard. Actually, we met, I think she was perhaps still in Sarah Lawrence when we met. But she went quickly thereafter to Juilliard. And we met, she was the roommate of someone who I'd done some gigs with or something like that at some concerts. And so we met like that and we got together and came 1986 for reasons that both of us had, some family reasons, some adventurous reasons, some looking for something new reasons and sort of carefree attitude when you're that age. I suppose. I said, well, okay, then let's move to Paris. So we got married and we moved to Paris. And so that's how I came to Paris, because that's where she's from. And that's where she came back to, because there was family, there's family here. And there were circumstances at the moment, at that moment.

WILLIAMO: So immigrating to Paris wasn't that difficult for you?

RICHARD: In a certain sense, it was less difficult for me because there was a family structure that was created around me. Even though, how can I say? Well, you went through the same. You were probably better at French when you married into a French family than than I was. I don't know who knows you never know those things but in any case I I had the support of a family around me but uh I also had difficulty communicating and in the beginning it was not so easy if people to wanted to know what exactly it was that I did. What does it mean being a freelance musician in New York? Why did you come to Paris? The whole thing. And I said the same to them as I came because I got married to your daughter. And that's why we came here and thought we could make a life here. And also, in the back of my mind, I knew. That the early music world would be more friendly here for me than it would have been in America.

WILLIAM: Did you already have contacts in the early music world in Paris?

RICHARD: No, I had international contacts. I had contacts that I made in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian, namely Yap Schroeder, for instance, or Justin Imbecil, two fantastic musicians. And these people I met in Washington, and they were based both of them in Europe, one in Brussels and one in Amsterdam. So and there was a few people in Paris that I was introduced to. And how else, I suppose I just waited a while until somebody needed somebody to be a sub somewhere, those kinds of things, you know, which is sort of what happens to everybody as it were.

WILLIAM: How long was it before you got your first...

RICHARD: It took a good year, year and a half before I felt secure. But you know, what happened to me was kind of interesting. I arrived in 80... Arrives in 86. In January of 87, I was asked to play, to go down to Cannes and do the MiDem. You never did you ever do that in your years in France? The media is a is a media fair. And so all your Radio France is very big there. And so I went down with the Ensemble Mosaic, which was run by Christophe Quandt, who was an absolutely marvelous musician here in Paris. And, and there, I met a violinist from Freiburg who invited me to come and play in his ensemble, a guy who's now quite well known as well as a conductor named Thomas Hengelbrock. And he's been a director of several major European orchestras, and he's a very well-known conductor now. And so he invited me to come in and play with his group in Freiburg. And that's how I sort of started to be able to live, by going in between. Kind of in between Freiburg and Paris, and wherever anybody needed someone to play, in Brussels, in Holland, I would go, I took a lot of nitrates, let's put it that way.

WILLIAM: Wow, wow. So, the world of early music in the US and the world of early music in France or in Europe, there wasn't a lot of difference. It really is that sort of an international thing that sort of goes on.

RICHARD: Yes and no. Now it is more than it was before because of a few people who have, Americans who have made impressions in Europe and especially who have then gone back. Juilliard now has a Baroque music department with people like William Christie who come in and work with the students, with Jordi Savall, very important people in the Baroque music world. And of course Indiana University has an excellent early music program. There are places in America where you can study early music but of course in Europe there are more places and how can I say in Europe it's a much more... In America, let's say in America, it's a much more academic pursuit in a certain sense. And in Europe, it's a cultural phenomenon. You hear Moliere and Lully played and sung and recited in 16th and 17th century French. And and so here you really hear what it you hear a Bach Motet with a choir that comes from Leipzig. And even though the accent is of course completely different. Than it must have been in Bach's time, it's certainly closer than anything I know about. So when I had the chance to play the Bach Motets in Leipzig, in Bach's church, with a choir that had at least half of the members from Leipzig, I didn't let that experience pass me by. And in America, I would have had a hard time having such an experience. Like that. So of course, however, in America, you have the American freelance work ethic, that is, of course, highly different than the French freelance work ethic, you know all too well. And so America has been able to, North America, because Toronto Teffel Music is a wonderful ensemble, and there are great Baroque ensembles now all over North America. It's a global phenomenon now, but I would not say that it was an international thing. Except for the fact that there was, yes, there was a large amount of interplay between European artists coming over to America and mostly at the, how would you say it, the great idea behind it all was formed by Albert Fuller. Who was, as you remember him, the harpsichord teacher at the Juilliard School when we were students there. However, Bill, I can just, as a sidebar, say that I remember incredibly well the New York String Quartet and I playing harpsichord concertos for a man named Fernando Valenti in Cooper Square in Manhattan. Many, many, many years ago. And Albert Fuller is the man who replaced Fernando Valenti as the harpsichord teacher at Juilliard. And so Albert is the guy who brought all of these people over to America. And was, he had been to France, he knew Lully's music. He was an amazing guy. And he was the one who got me into the uh i'll wait for your question about it but he was the one that got me into playing baroque music.

WILLIAM: Okay you're a student you're a bass player you're... I don't know, in Nebraska, and you have this dream of wanting to play Baroque bass. I guess you can say that. How would you guide that person?

RICHARD: Well, excellent question, actually. The first thing to do. Is to, well I suppose that that's already been done, but listening and listening to recordings and going online and watching, because now there's films online of the great European ensembles playing in concerts all over the place. And I mean, you can see them now with the great conductors, Bruggin and Harnancourt and Christie and Saval, Koppmann, you know, the leaders, the Coikin family, the Coikin brothers, the leaders in the field, where in a Jacob's, I can think of Jean-Claude Maguire, there's plenty of people like that. And they're all online and you can see the stuff and you can see what it's all what it's all about. Then I would say do a summer academy for instance in Toronto with Tafelmusik or in San Francisco with the American Bach soloists. Or in University of Massachusetts with the Amherst Pop Baroque Festival, there are places to go to for a summer course. And in Toronto, for instance, the Tafelmusik course, they make it really easy for you. I was there for six or seven summers, and then they have a new bass player, a wonderful bass player, who will be the new teacher there. A young English woman who was a terrific player and will have lots of interesting things to teach and people would only need. To inquire about that but if you go online and you tap in baroque base academies or things like that you know you you always get you always get moved to some site somewhere that can that can be a start and then there are programs, there is Julliard there's uh uh well not too many others but there are there are pp body i think has a program there are programs all over the country now.

WILLIAM: So, would you suggest, for example, that they venture to come to Europe to do a course?

RICHARD: In the end, they could do that as well, because there are excellent courses in Europe as well. It's a bit of a bigger investment for them, of course, but the payoff is quite... How can I say, in French we say, it's worth the effort, you know? The payoff is that if you come to Europe for 10 days or for whatever, however long, then you get a Uriel pass and you hang around Europe for a while and then you come to a stash somewhere. The payoff is that you've lived in that. Language and you've lived in that culture and you've seen firsthand ways of playing music that's a part of our cultural heritage that we lose track of a little bit in America. Just as I wouldn't send my own child, for instance, to study jazz at the Conservatoire de Paris, I would much rather send them to Texas or to, you know, or to one of those, or to Juilliard even now with the jazz department. Because you know you get source water from the source you know and so and that's what I would but it's great to be here at the source if you know I've been extremely fortunate in Europe that was why it was such a good move in the end for me coming here the serendipity would have it it really was a good move I was able to make a living I was able to be teaching in the Conservatoire Paris, which is a wonderful institution. I have very interesting students, but the most interesting thing that I think that has happened to me is that I've played, for instance, with a group in Spain that only played 17th and 18th century Spanish music for about 10 years. And so, yeah, so you learn how to play that music by participating in rehearsals in Spanish with singers who were singing their own language, and the guy who was leading the group transcribed the whole opera. And he would get this religious music from Guatemala and places like that, that was Spanish music by great Spanish composers that had been sent to colonies, to the churches, to their musicians in the colonies. And so he would get this stuff and bring it back to Spain. It was fantastic music. So I got to do that with that group. I got to do Spanish music with Spanish people. I played for about six years in Freiburg, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, which is a wonderful orchestra that's one of the best in the world now. And I was able to play Bach with them and play Muffat and Bieber and fantastic, Buxtehude, fantastic 17th and 18th century German music with Germans. And so it was a fantastic experience learning how they work and learning why does that music sound like it does and then saying, well, because why? Because it couldn't sound any other way. That's just how it is, you know. And so it was a wonderful experience for me. It was great. I've learned to play French music, the Ramo in the Garnier with a huge Ramo orchestra with Bill Christie. So, I mean, how can I say that I've not been very fortunate with that kind of apprenticeship? And now I do what I do in much smaller settings, because in my heart, I'm just an old rock and roller. I want to play chamber music.

WILLIAM: Ok, you've talked about language, you've talked about working in Spain, you've talked about working in Germany, all over the place, France, I mean, you know, you know, these languages to be able to communicate.

RICHARD: Well, you have to be able to communicate a little bit. You don't have to be able to, I don't have to be able to read Cervantes, but I have to be able to go to a restaurant and I have to be able to go to the bank. You know, in those days you had to change money and, you know, I had to get on the train, how to get on the train and how to order in a restaurant if you want to get a good meal. These kind of things you have to learn and also to be helpful in a rehearsal. You know, you don't want them always to be translating for you. So you try to, I used to call it rehearsal languages, I can Dutch. You know, I could speak rehearsal Dutch. You know, anything you want to say to me in a rehearsal, I can understand. I can do the numbers, you know, and all that stuff. So it was okay. In Belgium, you're half Dutch and half French, but you learn in a different way in Belgium. I played with wonderful musicians in Belgium. And most of whom were educated, Jesuit educated in Belgium. And that's a whole different way of working, not like France or like Germany. And so it's been really a great education for me to be here. And after all, all four of my grandparents were born in Europe. I'm not that far away from European roots.

WILLIAM: Well, I remember my first rehearsal in France. I spoke no French besides we know. Maybe the four. I remember the struggles that I had through all of that. Do you remember your first rehearsal?

RICHARD: Well, what I remember the most is yes. What I remember the most is that I understood a little bit. I came in the end of August and I had a bit of a crash course in family situations where I was hearing a lot of French. And I would watch, funny enough, I remember very well, I would watch Star Trek reruns. You did that as well? Yes, in French, of course, of course, because we knew all the stories. And so we knew, you know, we knew what they were going to say even. And so hearing it in French, it sort of, how can I say, it was part of the effort to de-complex. The fact that French was a foreign language. It was no longer a foreign language for me. It was going to be my principal language in my day-to-day life. And so I had to get that idea out of my head that it was a foreign language. That was difficult. I found that after my first rehearsals, I was unbelievably tired. And it was, of course, because I was translating all the time. And you know how tiring it is when you come to a new country and you first hear the language, you're translating to yourself all the time before that stage goes away and you can just open your mouth and make sense. But in French, I found, for instance, that I was able to express myself before I was able to understand what the answers were. And that was also quite frustrating. It's dangerous.

WILLIAM: It's dangerous if you can.

RICHARD: Yeah, because you know, musicians, we have a little bit of an advantage over some other species of strata of society. For us, language is pitched in rhythm, not unlike music. And so we can fake languages before we can even understand them. And it's a dangerous thing. So it took me a while to get all of that stuff together. But then after a while it all came, and I was also working a lot in Germany, so I was learning German at the same sort of like street, I was learning non-academic kind of German. Where if I have to read a German article in a musicological article or something, it takes me a week to read three pages. I mean, it's just horrendous. It's a language, it's very complicated to read and write, but it's not so complicated for me to understand. And so, you know, I was learning that, I was getting it all mixed up, and. But, you know, that was part of it all, I think. And now, you know, now, I mean, now, you know, my son was born here. And, well, your kids were born in France, weren't they?

WILLIAM: Exactly.

RICHARD: Yeah, so, you know, but my son stayed, although he did spend a year in Brooklyn. He's made his life in Paris. And, you know, and I think basically we've made our life here because it's been a good place for us to be. Like you say, it's not easy adapting, you know, to all that. And it's not easy accepting, how can I say, accepting that you have to change your behavior in a certain way in order to understand behavior, to understand how does a student react in America? How does a student react in France? It's really quite a different, quite a different thing.

WILLIAM: When you start talking about students and teaching, I remember when I first started teaching in France, and I remember how difficult that was. And the translating, as you're talking about in my head, was just, I mean, it was like, it was crazy.

RICHARD: Well, you know, I find that that is part of it, of course, but I find also a very interesting, I find a very interesting thing about teaching here. And how can I put it? You know, the French base, the world base in general, The Baroque, there were a few, when I came here, there were very few people playing early music, just a few, and now there are more, but the French modern bass world is quite a special world, and very soloistic-driven, but a fantastic school, a fantastic school of bass playing. But my way of teaching, the values that I expect of a student. So I don't, you know, I'm not a kind of guy who gives them exercises every week to reinforce a hand position. I say to them, look, you have a problem with your arm or you have a problem with your elbow and I want you to do this for a week and I want you to do that for a week. And they don't really understand what I'm getting at sometimes. And I say, look, don't worry about understanding it. When you do it, you'll understand why you've done it. But they want a sort of, they're a result-based system here. I have a feeling that many of my students have grown up in this system, the French system, which is based on the result that you get. I'm not sure how much the process of getting there is as important as the fact that you have to get there. And so I try, in my personal teaching, I don't really talk about that part of it so much. You know, I say to them, as I believe personally very profoundly, when you don't interpret music in the sense that, as Stravinsky said, music interprets his thoughts already. So don't interpret my interpretations of my thoughts. This is a very interesting concept. And Baroque music, of course, it's very, very applicable and very strong in 17th, especially, and 18th century music, where the road, as it were, is paved by the composer. The only interpretation, as I would say in quotation marks, is how you take that road. But you are surely going to take that road because that's the road that's been traced. You can't interpret that you can go this way or that way. You have to go this way. You go fast, you go slow. These are the things that, okay? So this is how I try to teach them. They have learned in their past, perhaps, and the same time it takes me to try to explain this to them and say, look, I'm not gonna tell you how to play this i'm going to tell you how to play it and then you show me how to play it and uh okay and then so that goes over some heads but not all and and we i go for i go at it that way however they are often uh that same time that i take to tell them this they have often taken with another teacher one, two, four, one, three, shift, eighth note equals one oh eight, slur, et cetera, et cetera, spicado, and this kind of note for note roadmap of how to play a piece. And I much prefer allowing a student to make his own roadmap. So I've run into a little bit of,how can I say, a little bit of misinterpretation or miscomprehension from students who don't get my way, but after a while they get it. I mean, I, you know, after a while they either get it or they go on to someone else. But now when I came to Canada to teach and they were mostly North American students, I had to let them play a little bit more than they were used to. And so that broke down a few of the barriers. And you know, sometimes I have the feeling they were used to playing a phrase and then waiting for what was wrong with it or waiting for a judgment of it, but I would force them to go and play more and play for me. And so this was an interesting, you know, I sort of try now in either situation to, I'm hoping to come back after the plague (COVID), as it were, after the virus plague, I'm hoping still to come back to North America and do a few. I have a few invitations standing from some of my friends who are teachers in America so we can, you know, so I can come and do some master classes as well and still come back because it's, and now it's becoming kind of a unique fusion of, well, you've got to let them play and you've got to let them play music. And yeah, but you can't let them play badly. You have to also make the groundwork and make it stick. So it's been an interesting ride for these 30-some years.

WILLIAM: Wow. That's how long it's been? 30?

RICHARD: It's been 34 years because we're in 2020. So yeah, 34 years that I've lived here. Longer than I lived in America.

WILLIAM: That's amazing. That's amazing.

RICHARD: Funny.

WILLIAM: I have a former student who has a group, I don't know if you've run into him, Julien Chauvin.

RICHARD: Yes, of course. Of course, he has a very well thought of group and is a very interesting guy. And he's a former pupil of yours. Yeah, Julien is has a group that's very, very well thought of. And he, as well as a concertmaster leader, is very, very well thought of. You had him in Lavalois?

WILLIAM: No, this was in Fontainebleau.

RICHARD: Ah, Okay.

WILLIAM: He grew up there and asked me if I would teach him when I taught at Conservatoire du. Well, I said, Dusantra, in terms of Dusantra. So he was a student of mine there.

RICHARD: Oh, okay. Yeah, sure, he understood very well.

WILLIAM: Well, Monsieur Myron, it is a pleasure to sit and talk about all of this stuff with you.

RICHARD: Thank you, Bill. It's great to see you, and I wish you and all of your family and friends at least a safe and happy end to the year. I have a feeling that we'll be back at least to some sort of, how can I say, some sort of performing-based life again in 2021. I'm counting on spring of 2021 to get back into the world and start playing again. And best wishes to all of you and yours. Thanks for asking me to come on and help you out.

WILLIAM: Thank you, sir.

RICHARD: See you next time. Bye bye.

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