Classical Post Podcast: Jeremy Geffen on Building Community

“Building Community and Making Introductions Through the Performing Arts”

Interview of Jeremy Geffen, Cal Performances’ Executive and Artistic Director, by Jonathan Eifert, publisher and editor of Classical Post. This content is provided by Classical Post.

In August 2022, Jeremy Geffen was featured on Classical Post, a podcast, digital editorial platform, and newsletter run by the brilliant mind of Jonathan Eifert to “uncover the creativity behind exceptional music.” Other episodes feature leaders and music directors, composers, conductors, musicians, and more. You can view the article written about Jeremy’s interview on Eifert’s digital platform.

Transcript

Jonathan Eifert:
Music is central to our wellbeing. If you’re listening here, chances are you feel the same. The Classical Post podcast uncovers the creativity that exists behind great music. We believe music is interconnected with other art forms and life experiences. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but is often influenced by other sources. No matter who you are, cultivating your creativity is fundamental to being better in business and living a more holistic life. Discover more on this podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Eifert. Thanks for joining me today, and I hope you find something valuable in this episode.

For Jeremy Geffen, Executive and Artistic Director of Cal Performances at UC Berkeley, bringing to life all of the organization’s artistic and educational activities, about 80 events per season, centers around ideas of building and serving communities across the Bay Area. Since arriving on the Berkeley campus in 2019, and during his 12-year tenure as Senior Director and Artistic Advisor of Carnegie Hall, Geffen has worked tirelessly to transform the people he serves through the power of the performing arts. That means first and foremost, making introductions to emerging artists whose new ideas can spark meaningful conversations. As Geffen points out, even the biggest artists with the longest relationships with Cal Performances, including Yo-Yo Ma, Jordi Savall, and the Mark Morris Dance Group, weren’t always stars. When they were just starting out, it was Cal Performances that helped to give them a toehold. And Geffen sees fostering growth in the artistic powerhouses of tomorrow as one of the most gratifying aspects of his role.

In this conversation, we discussed Cal Performances’ upcoming season and how its marquee Illuminations series will explore technology’s many roles in creative expression and human communication. Plus, Geffen opens up about why he sees classical music “as a type of regenerative spiritual health,” how therapy has helped him tap into the creativity of the subconscious mind, and why he heads to Manhattan’s East Village when it’s time to celebrate with sake in New York City.

Jeremy Geffen:
My name is Jeremy Geffen. I am the Executive and Artistic Director for Cal Performances, which is the presenting organization on the campus of UC Berkeley in California. We present music, dance, and drama from around the world, and have about 80 events from August until the beginning of May every season.

Jonathan Eifert:
Where do you find inspiration as a leader in the arts?

Jeremy Geffen:
So, I feel very fortunate to work in the arts because the performances that we hear and see, what we experience in the arts are in themselves the inspiration for leadership. I was a violist and I stopped playing because I had problems with my right hand. But I think about the different roles that I had as a musician, that there are performances in which you are part of a chamber ensemble, small ensemble on stage, and there is no specific, no defined leader for that event. It’s a shared leadership model like a string quartet. And there are performances where there is a conductor before you that is responsible for balancing all the elements simultaneously. So the responsibility is much more entrusted to a single individual.

And even within those performances, with different types of models, there are moments that you step out of those models. That one individual in the ensemble has a moment in the sun and takes on greater weight within the work, and then recedes the next moment to allow someone else that same opportunity. So I really feel that the types of performances that we enjoy as entertainment, or even transcendental spiritual nourishment, give us a lot of the templates that we need for leadership off the stage.

Jonathan Eifert:
And when you think about your, I guess, external things that are shaping your approach to leading an arts organization, is there, I don’t know, various things that you can point to?

Jeremy Geffen:
Well, certainly the thing that I can point to most over the past two-and-a-half years is COVID. Whether or not we wanted it to be part of the factors that determine our course, it is. And I think we’ve all, within the performing arts and just within the world in general, have had to give over levels of agency, and be more fluid with and flexible in the way that we operate. It’s been a constant exercise in determining how to serve and maintain public trust, what constitutes an acceptable risk, and what success looks like under vastly different circumstances than we would’ve had pre-pandemic. So that’s one of the factors that has shaped my approach to leading Cal Performances.

But the others, and this is not pandemic dependent: It’s building community, or actually, it’s probably more accurate to say, for an organization that presents the variety of work that we do, building communities. We need to lead in a way that reflects the needs of our communities and speak to the many different constituencies in languages that they’ll understand. Cal Performances, as I mentioned before, is part of UC Berkeley, and the greater campus community is about 60,000 people, maybe a little bit more, between students, faculty, and administrative staff. And we definitely have a portion of our mission that is geared specifically towards the campus and particularly towards students, but we’re also a public institution. Over half of our audiences have no relationship at all with UC Berkeley, other than coming to Cal Performances. So we speak to the greater Bay Area and the cultural scene within it.

Jonathan Eifert:
When—and, actually, to follow up on that question—do you find that area, being in the Bay Area and that kind of local culture, if you will, is shaping your artistic leadership or influences, or doesn’t it play a role? I’m curious to hear more as it relates to the local area.

Jeremy Geffen:
Absolutely. I mean, I think no two groups of people behave exactly the same. They may be similar. So what works well in New York may not work well in the Bay Area, and may not work well in Billings, Montana, just to choose another place, market at random—one, by the way, that I don’t understand at all or claim no understanding of. So absolutely, one has to be aware of patterns within your constituency, within the communities, what they seem to respond to and what they seem to want more of. And you have to balance that with your own artistic instincts as to what to introduce to a community.

It doesn’t take a lot of artistic administration chops to book a major superstar. They’re absolutely important in this, into the season, and they bring a lot of artistic value. But the bigger risk, and where I think one demonstrates the level of connection that one has to one’s community, is which artists you are going to introduce. And when I say introduce, I mean artists who are at the beginnings of their careers or may not have had exposure in the Bay Area. Because who you choose to present is what defines you as a presenter. So there have been artists who have been coming to Cal Performances since long before I arrived, like Jordi Savall, Yo-Yo Ma, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Mark Morris Dance Group, that are really part of who Cal Performances is. And I think our audience members feel that they have very close relationships with those artists, but it’s really important to remember that those artists at one point in their career were not superstars. They were just starting out and it was Cal Performances who gave them a toehold.

And as a presenter, as a programmer, as an administrator, some of the moments that have given me the greatest career satisfaction have been those in which I’ve given an artist I believe in a shot. And more often than not, those artists have knocked the ball out of the park. And that’s as far into sports metaphor as I’m going to go because I’m really terrible at it. But if you demonstrate confidence in someone, more often than not, that confidence will be reciprocated and expectations will be exceeded. So it gives me great gratification to watch artists I saw something in early on grow into their full potential.

Jonathan Eifert:
It’s very interesting for you to frame it that way. It’s really noble because I know a lot of people do want to break into the market and you’re right, it is easy to get the superstars, but then how do you really choose and bet on the right horse, if you will, so that everyone wins? And yeah, no, it’s an interesting process for sure.

Describe a routine you have in place that helps you live a healthier life.

Jeremy Geffen:
I’m laughing at this because I’m not sure that I lead the healthiest life. I don’t have the best work-life balance, so I’m going to discourage anyone listening to this from trying to replicate what I do. But I do believe in the value of exercise, and I love high intensity cardio. High enough intensity that you don’t really, you’re unable to think about anything else. I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I have so many things on my mind at any one time, that those moments when you really are forced to concentrate on something else are so valuable, and that they give me the liminal space that I need to be able to let my subconscious take over and start to solve problems on its own.

I’m happy to say I have a great therapist. I recommend having a therapist to anyone who has the opportunity to have one. And one of the things that she underlines to me is that she raises questions for me, not necessarily for me to actively consider, but to get my subconscious working on them. And I really do believe that things are humming in the background, and there’s a reason why we have those ‘aha’ moments in the shower. It is a space where we’re concentrated on something else and you’re in sort of a state of relaxation, and that just allows something that has not yet jumped through the other side of the membrane to permeate.

So I really do believe in creating the sort of space to allow for ideas to germinate, whether that’s through exercise or through meditation, or through taking walks or through social experiences. I think for everyone, it’s going to be slightly different, but that’s where the breakthrough moments happen for me. I think I really consider myself very fortunate to be working in an area that I am personally very passionate about. And I do recognize in conversation with people of other types of jobs, and to express a sort of wonder that once the workday has ended, that this is what I’m still thinking about. That the performing arts for me, especially music, give me a type of regenerative spiritual health.

They even me out, and with certain pieces of music that I’ve had a relationship with for most of my life, I find that at different times in my life, they have meant something different to me that had not revealed itself previously. And I know that’s about me, as much as it is about the work itself being great, but the work is a mirror.

Jonathan Eifert:
It’s so interesting. I actually want to go back to this idea of the therapist and planting ideas. That’s really fascinating. I totally get the idea of a therapist and how wonderful it is, but I’m not sure if I had heard the concept of this kind of planting ideas and then going forth in your life. And then later on, some great idea appears. I love that idea. And specifically though, having a therapist to almost plant ideas, that’s brilliant.

Jeremy Geffen:
Oh, no. Again, this is her. She is wonderful. If this weren’t a public podcast, I would remember—I would reveal her name, but I want to be able to get appointments with her in the future.

Jonathan Eifert:
But no, it’s a really cool concept on that specifically. Have you, I mean in terms of, I guess this is just can be for life at large, just personal and professional, but for your professional life, have you… I don’t know if she ever had planted a huge, fabulous idea and then later on it came to fruition, and then you executed it and it was a success. I don’t know if you want to talk about, and if that even happened or not.

Jeremy Geffen:
I think when the pandemic began, we were all faced with the question as to how we were going to allow the performing arts to still thrive in circumstances in which we weren’t able to gather together for in-person performances. And although we have, with the common element has been digital performances, the way in which we chose to frame those performances, in fact, the way that we chose to film them—were they being, were they live events that were streamed live and ceased to exist the moment the performance itself was over? Were they edited performances that were treated as one would treat a live performance, or were they edited performances that were treated much more as one would treat a recording? I think we all had to determine a path for our organizations that made sense in that moment.

And I certainly didn’t do this on my own. There is an incredible team of people working at Cal Performances who all have really specialized strengths that allow us to be greater than the sum of our parts. But I think we arrived at a result or a template for results that was successful, and that reached many more people than we were able to reach with in-person operations. We had subscribers and viewers in 36 countries on six continents and had no marketing budget to support that. So that was all through word of mouth.

So as difficult a moment as that was for all sorts of reasons, not just, let’s take the business model question now, but just the basic human questions of existence and health, and how you worry about one’s loved ones. There were so many factors that needed to be considered. An overwhelming number of factors that I think at a certain point, you have to let your tummy guide you.

Jonathan Eifert:
What is one specific product you highly recommend? And a really open-ended question here.

Jeremy Geffen:
I’m going to give you a very—I think this answer here is not going to be very satisfying to you. But I think the most critical product is a scale. And when I say a scale, not the sort of scale [where] the readout that tells you how many grams or how many ounces something weighs, but it’s actually the image of a scale that’s really important to me, because it is about balance. No matter how much you enjoy doing something, you can’t do it all the time or else you’ll cease to enjoy it. So we, in programming, balance is incredibly important. But in life, balance is really important as well. I mean, I love watching performances on at home. I love being in performances live, of course, but if I’m just speaking about home right now. But I also love The Real Housewives. They’re a constant. You have to balance the high and the low. And by the way, what you define as high and low in that with between those two could be completely different.

But swimming pools have shallow ends and they have deep ends, but the pool is still the pool. That’s its identity. So I sort of view myself as the pool and all of these things that I enjoy doing makeup who I am, even if I might be a little bit embarrassed to admit that I watch The Real Housewives of Orange County.

Jonathan Eifert:
I was just going to ask you, which series, so Orange County? Not any of the other ones or that’s your favorite?

Jeremy Geffen:
I started with Orange County because I grew up there, and at the time that it started, I was living in New York and it was a reminder of California. And then I got a little sucked in. That was, let’s say it was a gateway drug to Below Deck.

Jonathan Eifert:
What restaurant or bar do you love to eat at when you’re in New York City? And then the follow-up obviously is what do you order there?

Jeremy Geffen:
Well, let’s start with one that doesn’t exist anymore. It was a sad casualty of the pandemic, but The NoMad at the NoMad Hotel was one of my favorite places to eat. And they made this chicken. Everyone that—people think chicken is boring, but what they did, it was anything but. You know what, I’m not going to do it justice by trying to describe it. So, I loved that place.

My favorite place in New York is Gramercy Tavern. And I eat, I need to eat. I watch the passion that other people have for food, and I realize I’m not a foodie on that level. But what makes a restaurant meaningful, attractive to me is actually the atmosphere. I just love the room at Gramercy Tavern, it’s so comfortable. It’s quiet enough that you can hear your neighbor, hear the people at your table, and you’re not competing with the other tables, which is a big problem in New York. So, people will definitely have more sophisticated food answers than anything I’ll give, but I’m just going to go with a room.

And then for on the occasion that I had, that I stayed out late, I can’t believe I used to stay out past midnight. That’s all really changed since moving to the West Coast and certainly through the pandemic. The rhythm of the West Coast is, in general, much earlier than in New York City, but there was a place in the East Village called Decibel, which was a sake bar. And I think it was around East 10th Street. It was this magical underground place, where I swear I was in a labyrinth and that new rooms were being created as I walked through them. But, it’s one of those things that if I were to try to diagram it, I would never be able to get it right.

Jonathan Eifert:
Let’s take a quick break.

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Now let’s talk about Cal Performances. So tell us about Illuminations specifically at Cal Performances, and what’s coming up this season.

Jeremy Geffen:
So, Illuminations is an initiative that we began shortly after I arrived. One of the things that distinguishes Cal Performances from other presenting groups, either within the Bay Area or beyond, is that it is our context on the campus of one of the great universities of the world, and a great public university at that. And there is so much fascinating research and thought leadership taking place on this campus that it seemed what was missing was an opportunity to bring all of that research together into a marketplace, where it could be met with by other units on campus, but also by the general public. So Illuminations focuses on one theme, generally a pressing issue of our time, or an idea worth exploring for an entire season. And we invite other units on campus into that exploration to present their own public-facing events, which Cal Performances, as an organization that is very oriented towards the general public, can actually help in getting the word out about.

And this season’s theme is ‘Human and Machine,’ and that’s about how humans have always relied on tools to communicate with each other, but also to amplify and more fully express their ideas, their creative potential. So under this theme this year, we have events that range from a performance on multiple forte pianos by Kristian Bezuidenhout, that shows the evolution of the—we tend to think of the forte piano as a fixed instrument, but it actually, it’s a catchall term for a lot of instruments that represent different phases of musical instrument technology that was dependent on what composers wanted to write for it. Beethoven’s Hamer, Clavier Sonata, I mean, it gives away in the subtitle of the piece, Hamer Clavier. It was subtitled for the name of the instrument for which he was writing it—an instrument that had expanded and dynamic ranges, and actually the base to treble range of the instrument was expanded as well.

So this is an opportunity to think about musical instruments as technology, but then also through some of the other works in the series, like a tribute to Steve Reich, a birthday celebration. Steve incorporated machines and even emulations of machines in his early works and continues to write for electronics today, but he combines them with acoustic instruments as well. And there is what I think is one of the highlights of the season, what William Kentridge’s SIBYL, which has his most recent, what he calls it, a ‘chamber opera,’ ‘Waiting for the Sibyl,’ which is a piece that is about a relationship with technology and the human desire to know our fates in advance, and how that desire meets up with the reality. Kentridge said that if the Sibyl—the Sibyl was the name for a prophetess in the ancient world, and he’s actually referring to a very specific sibyl. But let’s for the moment just say a general sibyl. If the sibyl were alive today, she would be an algorithm; that’s the predictor that tells us our future.

Then Toshi Reagon and her mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon, who founded Sweet Honey in The Rock, have a work that is based on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which is a work of science fiction from the 1990s that unfortunately pretty accurately depicts what happens if we rely a little bit too heavily on technology, and the darker side of technology, and how there is perhaps a trade-off between our reliance on, our interest in an alternate world or a technological world, and the destruction of the physical world.

Jonathan Eifert:
Yeah, it’s a really profound way to present a series, I think, to kind of frame it like a human and machine. I think it’s really, yeah, I could see the kind of huge implications of that for people who are attending these various events, and then coming away and pondering this viewpoint or the viewpoints of the different events. Would you say, obviously, I know it’s all connected, but it sounds like you’re kind of talking about different topics, shall we say, or different viewpoints throughout the whole season, even though it’s all under this one theme. Is there a particular message that, one message that is stitching this all together that’s not just like a theme, but more of a message to people who are hearing all of this?

Jeremy Geffen:
I think the message that people are going to take away will be different for each of them, based on what they’ve heard and seen. And I think that that’s by design. One of the things that I value so much about live performance is that you can be sitting next to someone you’ve never met, and you may never see in your life again, but based on the information that you have received together, that experience that you’ve received together, you’re forever bound. And yet, your understanding or what you took away from that performance could be so drastically different from the person next to you. And that is the beauty of live performance, that from the same experience, we get a diversity of reaction and a diversity of thought. And that’s really powerful. So, no, again, there’s no explicit conclusion that we’re asking audiences to draw. That’s why we’re presenting the information, so that they can go on the journey for themselves.

Jonathan Eifert:
Yeah, no, it’s excellent. Yeah, well done with curating all of that because I think that’s, and especially it’s so timely right now as the world grapples with, I don’t know, internet privacy issues and data breaches, and that the numerous other things of the algorithm gods, and the rise of TikTok and that list goes on. So yeah, it’s very fascinating. One last question. In terms of success, it’s personal for everyone. What does it mean to you?

Jeremy Geffen:
I think, in short, success to me looks like connection. It’s going to, it’s sort of like the way I just described what I hope audience members take away from performances. The type of connection is going to be different every time. But the common thread is that one, that a connection has been established between audience and stage, and performer, between audience members and neighbors—in this specific case, between university and broader community. When I lie in bed at the end of the day and feel like I’ve had satisfaction because of something that is accomplished that has happened during the day, it’s generally because I have had some meaningful connection. That something that was not just, that wasn’t transactional.

And just to expand that a little further, the superpower that lies at the center of the performing arts is that they are a moment through which we get to experience the world through another person’s eyes. Whether that’s the author, the composer, or the performer, you’re actually directly receiving emotional information on a non-didactic, completely direct level. And as a result, I think the performing arts are unrivaled in their capacity to build empathy. And that’s what we need more than ever.

So that is the greatest success. And just on it, going back to something that we talked about earlier, it’s also success to me means introducing and creating bonds where there weren’t before. We have some wonderful debut artists coming up this season, soprano Ying Fang and violinist Alexi Kenney, and actually, violinist Rachell Ellen Wong. And this is the first time they will have performed for our audiences. And I know that the audiences are going to love them and that they’re going to be, these artists are going to be part of the future of Cal Performances.

Jonathan Eifert:
Thanks for listening to the Classical Post podcast. I hope you have found it meaningful and that it gave you new ideas to cultivate your creativity, to be better in business and life. So let’s stay in touch. Remember to follow this podcast to get notified of new episodes, and sign up for our monthly newsletter for album recommendations and editorial on leading artists. Just head to classicalpost.com/subscribe.