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SPEAKER 1: This is rolling now.

SPEAKER 2: You're rolling.

SPEAKER 1: Thank you. Would you like to start with some of those stories as long as they've been pulled up just now?

SPEAKER 2: Yeah. Maybe I will just add one little bit of context. So I really have had, I think, 45 minutes with Jack a month or so ago. So I really answered some of these already from my own perspective.

SPEAKER 1: And things that we're not covering here like Minnesota Orchestra things--

SPEAKER 2: Yeah.

SPEAKER 1: --and Brian's own experience coming career at MPR and that kind of stuff. So if it seems like Brian is sitting back and not answering.

SPEAKER 3: OK. Yeah.

SPEAKER 1: He probably already answered.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah. I kind of want to. I'm just very curious about and go for whatever you want to say.

MINDY: Although there was something I was thinking about just as I was coming over here related to the education piece. And it dates back to the days when we didn't have an education agenda, really. And I recall doing something with the Minnesota Music Educators Association. This is back in the days when Marilyn, of course, was still here. And I think that was something that was of some interest to her.

And I got assigned to create a program of excerpts from the All-State concert. I don't even remember what year that was. It was '80--

SPEAKER 2: Mid-'80s?

MINDY: I don't know, '84 or '85, something like that. And I'm not sure if it was the best piece of work I ever did. But it did set me on a path. And every year, I'd spend my Saturday at Orchestra Hall, and we'd record all the concerts, the All-State band and the orchestra and the choir. And kids from all over the state would come in to be interviewed. And in the beginning, those first years, I would hear a lot from the girls. And they'd all say oh, it's so emotional.

What is it about making music? Or what about the All-State that's so and so? It's so emotional. Well, OK. I mean, you can hear that only a certain number of times. And then you want to move on. And actually, over the years, that's exactly what happened. The music making got better. And the kind of response I got from kids was much more nuanced, much more sophisticated. And it was-- I don't know, how many years did I do that? How many years did I do that, Brian?

I do recall that MPR received an award from the Minnesota Music Educators Association.

SPEAKER 3: That's really interesting because now we work with them very closely.

MINDY: Well. Yeah. Pardon me if this sounds like sour grapes, but I got to go to the ceremony. And Arthur Cohen was here at that time, and he told me he would prefer to accept the award instead of me. And it was, of course, for--

SPEAKER 2: For your work

MINDY: --my work, yes. So that was, oh, Arthur Cohen was a boss here.

SPEAKER 1: Oh, I don't remember then.

MINDY: Oh, no, he kind of fit in there in between-- or after you?

SPEAKER 2: Probably about 1990 to 1996 or '07 or something.

MINDY: I can't remember. He might have still even been around when I went to China in '98, but maybe not.

SPEAKER 3: Another neighbor.

MINDY: And that was not a high period for us.

SPEAKER 1: When you were doing that kind of-- putting that kind of program together, what was the goal in your mind? What was this program supposed to be?

MINDY: Well, it was supposed to be-- it was a highlights program that was an hour, or it might have been a little bit more, but to sample the best of the performances of that year and talk to kids involved in various kinds of musical pursuits from different places around the state and so on and so forth.

SPEAKER 1: But you didn't think of it as educational outreach really?

MINDY: Well, it was, but in a very modest way. It's not like now. Now we have a bazillion different educational things going on, varsity and all the other activities that have a staff, I mean, dedicated to doing that stuff. And so it took a while to get there. But I say more power to you.

SPEAKER 1: Before we stray from this, [? Brian, ?] you just mentioned that there's a strong connection now with the Minnesota Music Educators.

SPEAKER 3: Right.

SPEAKER 1: What is that?

SPEAKER 3: Well, my history here is I was a producer in National Classical Programming for 20-- well, not 20 years--

MINDY: A long time.

SPEAKER 3: --but a long time. And then I entered into this world of education, thanks to Brian. And we have several really strong, vibrant classical or just music education initiatives which I can tick down. I mean, I can just give you a sheet on all of them.

SPEAKER 1: I'd like to see the sheet.

SPEAKER 3: And there have been some incredible moving stories out of-- just last week, we were up on the Leech Lake Reservation with Gaelynn Lea.

MINDY: Oh.

SPEAKER 3: Yeah. This Tiny Desk Concert winner, who has brittle bone disease. She plays her violin like a cello. And as a thank you, the students gave her a grass dance. And so lots of things like that. I was in a school yesterday. with this pianist who was--

SPEAKER 2: Oh, [? Alex. ?]

SPEAKER 3: Yeah, at a classical academy. Very diverse school. Just the connection between these artists and these students is really moving and really powerful. I mean, a lot of them have never seen a live performance, so. And then we have a series of videos. We have the Minnesota varsity program, which has-- it's incredible, really, the kids that rise to the top, even though we don't call it a competition, it winds up being that, and other things. I'll just email you a sheet.

SPEAKER 1: While we're on the topic of the educational outreach, any other past or present or way past programs that strike you as having had an effect or being unusual or interesting for some other reason?

SPEAKER 3: When I was a producer on Saint Paul Sunday, very high-end artists, I mean, we took the St. Lawrence string quartet to the range. They're one of the great young-- well, they're no longer young, and I'm no longer young-- quartets. And it's almost scared the kids to be that close to that level of intensity. And they were real. I mean, it was very powerful. And we traveled with another string quartet, the Avalon Quartet, the week after 9/11. And they were based at Juilliard. And so they got to tell all the kids what they had experienced.

They played a Murray Schafer piece based on wolf cries, and they asked the kids if they had ever heard wolves, and everyone raised their hand. And none of the quartet had heard a wolf cry. So that was a great moment.

SPEAKER 4: Will you just maybe give just a brief history of how MPR came to invest so heavily in these education initiatives?

SPEAKER 2: I can.

SPEAKER 4: Yeah, I think that story is really powerful.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah. So Mindy's touched on one project we did, used to do with--

MINDY: Early, early on.

SPEAKER 2: There was another called the Minnesota-- the Music Listening Contest, which we were involved with, which tried to foster listening skills and just a better, deeper appreciation, high school students. And a lot of us were involved in that. And for a variety of reasons, before I got into this role, it migrated out of the building. And it still continues to this day.

MINDY: And I am still involved.

SPEAKER 2: And Mindy is still involved in it.

MINDY: I'm a judge. They love me. They love having somebody from the radio because there are college professors and so on and so forth. And then there's me. [LAUGHS]

SPEAKER 1: What does that mean? Listening skills.

SPEAKER 2: You probably can describe it for us.

MINDY: The Minnesota Music Listening Contest takes place all over the state, schools established teams. Some schools have more than one team. A team is three students, and they have a coach, a teacher in the school perhaps. I know that Melissa Ousley has coached teams I think in, I want to say Owatonna or someplace like that somewhere. And there's a workbook every year. There's a new workbook. There are general knowledge oriented subjects, but then there's always some kind of specific focus on a type of music.

One year, it was jazz. One year, it was Schubert. One year, It was klezmer music, which to me, of course, was very interesting to see all these kids. Some of whom may have never met a Jewish person before. And they're learning about klezmer music. So that was kind of interesting. And by the time I get involved, it's at the finals level. Although last year I did judge semifinals as well. They needed an extra judge, so I did that.

So there are 18 teams from all over the state. The competition is fierce. And there are these wonderful geeky kids who could otherwise, I suppose, be playing football or something. But no, they're really interested in music and very focused. And It's always fun to be around them.

SPEAKER 2: What is the contest?

SPEAKER 1: They do identify Things they hear.

SPEAKER 2: Identifying pieces of music and style?

MINDY: Well, Yes. It's usually identifying pieces of music or the style of a piece. Some questions are fill in the blank, some are matching. Some are multiple choice. And those multiple choice questions are often really, really, really tricky. And they have a lightning round at the end kind of like College Bowl. So it's always interesting. And I know there are some teachers who have been involved for many, many years.

There are some people who started out as high school students and then graduated and went to college and then got involved either on the board of the contest. There was one young woman who came from, I think, Saint Cloud Tech, which has a great track record in that concert. And she wound up on the board and being the official photographer of the contest. Wow. The kids don't just leave school and go off and do something else. No, they come back and get involved. It's really good.

SPEAKER 3: Brian, can I--

MINDY: It's really good.

SPEAKER 3: Can I bounce off what you were-- I mean, you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but we really got into education with both feet because we were hearing from teachers that resources were being cut across the state dramatically. There was like a 30% reduction in a decade.

SPEAKER 4: And this was in the '80s, '90s?

SPEAKER 3: No, this was in--

SPEAKER 2: 2010, Minnesota cut 27% of its FTE in music teachers.

SPEAKER 3: So I mean, part of this was self-interest. We care about the art form, and we care about an audience for it for MPR and APM. But also we just really thought it was-- or I'm putting words in Brian's mouth, that I agree-- criminal that kids were not getting music arts as a matter of course.

MINDY: Count me in too.

SPEAKER 3: Yeah. So we've been very focused on trying to help teachers who are a very motley crew, very hard to reach, very busy, stressed. But that's kind of why our efforts became more explicit. We've always been implicitly educational, but we haven't been quite so bold about it.

SPEAKER 1: Is there a way to know what kind of effect these programs are having?

SPEAKER 3: Yes. Well, we have an impact director here who measures that, and there have been. It has been very positive. Reaching the teachers is the hardest thing. Once they see the materials and use them or have a class notes artist visit, they're thrilled about it. But getting the horse to water is hard sometimes.

SPEAKER 2: Maybe it'll be helpful if I just walk you through the chronology.

SPEAKER 1: Yes.

SPEAKER 2: Because all of what they've said is 1,000% true. So I took this job in 2010 as head of department. And right around that same time, Bill Kling had announced his retirement. Jon McTaggart was transitioning into a new CEO role. And Jon made it really clear that we wanted to focus our impact, and we use that word a lot and very intentionally. What is our impact we hope to have on our communities? If we are to live out this mission of enrich the mind, nourish the spirit, strengthen our communities, what does that mean in the practical?

The earliest, I think, iteration of that has changed somewhat since then is three areas. And they were health and health care. Education was the second one. And then it was business and economics and economics literacy was a major third component to it. So I'm new on this job. And I'm thinking, how am I going to do for health and health care? Because a lot of what the conversation, frankly, was around reporting, journalism around health care. Well, I kind of got nothing there.

Economic literacy, I don't have so much there either. So what can I do? So the remaining one was education.

MINDY: Boing! [LAUGHS]

SPEAKER 2: So at that time, we put a toe in the water, I think it might have been the year before, with new funding from the state that got us going with our Minnesota varsity project, which was our talent search, for lack of a better phrase. And it had been a nice success. And the legislature was eager to support it financially. And it gave us a new story to tell ourselves inside the building and tell our audiences about what we're doing for kids.

And the more we lived into that, the more I was struck by people kept coming up to me and saying, hey, that thing you're doing for kids, do more of that. And it was nothing fancier than that. And I kept hearing it over and over and over again. So I think it was that fall I just picked up the phone and I just started calling music teachers around the state, got their names from wherever I could find them. And basically, I asked them two questions. What is your daily life like in the classroom? Tell me about FTE. Is it up, down, or sideways? Resources, up, down, or sideways?

And then, having heard that, what might our response as a media company be? How could we be of greater service to you if we can be of service to you? And man, did I get an earful. So much so that we convened a group of-- I think that initial meeting was-- I think this was before you were in it, Vaughn. It was probably about 25 or so people came, just teachers from all around the state came inside the building, bought them lunch, and just had that conversation like, tell me what your life is like and then how might MPR respond.

And from that, really everything else has stemmed from that initial series of conversations of listening to the community, responding to the community. And then Vaughn can take you through the portfolio of stuff we do now, but it's all in service to that mission of the company and trying to have more impact to the community.

MINDY: Well, tell me if I'm wrong, but as I just listened to you speak, what comes to mind also is that that dovetails so perfectly with a shift in the way Minnesota Public Radio sees itself as not just being radio people. We do other things. And I think that--

SPEAKER 3: Live events.

SPEAKER 4: That's right.

MINDY: Yeah. I mean, to get back to the Music Listening Contest, there was a period of time when part of our commitment was to create the music CD that the kids would use as part of their learning process with the coach and the workbook that they were using and so on and so forth. And then we were playing-- I think, in the evening we'd play some piece or other that was part of their listening list. But apart from that, there wasn't much else to be done at that point.

I mean, we're talking about a long, long time ago. I remember Mark Sheldon was involved at one point in the making of the listening materials and so on and so forth. But that was also at a time when we thought of ourselves much more as an organization that does radio. And it's true, we do radio. We are Minnesota Public Radio. But over the years, with other opportunities, with print, with internet, with all the rest of that stuff, so we've also had an opportunity to get out of the building and get face time with people in other places with other interests and bring them into the fold. Am I way off?

SPEAKER 4: I think that's right. I think things like pay it forward and that--

SPEAKER 2: Play It Forward.

SPEAKER 4: Play It Forward.

MINDY: Well--

SPEAKER 4: The play onwards.

MINDY: That's interesting. Yeah.

SPEAKER 4: But in that conversation, we worked with current and classical together to try and move the needle on a give-back opportunity. But I think, Mindy, a thing I've experienced in the time that I've been here, and you guys who were here long before me can tell me if this is wrong. But what I have felt is that, because MPR News and classical were bound together for a long time, it felt like there was this assumption that we're a journalistic operation, and so we can't do some things because we're tied to that.

And as we've grown as an organization, now, we're an organization with journalism operations. And so the other parts of the organization are free to do more.

MINDY: I guess I haven't ever thought about it that way.

SPEAKER 3: That's true.

SPEAKER 2: I think that's true. I think that's largely felt from the board and the executive position. We kind of in the classical trenches--

MINDY: It's different.

SPEAKER 2: --we wouldn't notice that so much. But I think you're exactly right.

SPEAKER 4: Yeah. And I think Worthington helped express that a lot, where he would say, people say we can't do that. We're a media organization. And he'd say, we're an organization that has a newsroom. The rest of you can go do these things. But at the executive leadership level, I think there were those that-- as somebody with a brand management over both, I would get told you can't do that. And I was like, why not?

SPEAKER 3: That's right.

MINDY: Why not? Exactly. Right.

SPEAKER 3: You're not supposed to caucus.

MINDY: You know about Play It Forward, right?

SPEAKER 3: Yes, I remember that vividly.

SPEAKER 2: And just to spice this up a little bit, to take you behind the curtain, that's still is a push pull here.

SPEAKER 4: Oh, sure.

SPEAKER 2: I have colleagues in the building who will literally say to me, why do you want to do that? And that is either education or community events. I mean, they're very--

SPEAKER 4: The community service part.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah. They're very skeptical.

MINDY: Who's better positioned to do it than we.

SPEAKER 2: Very skeptical of the reasons and-- not so much skeptical as just-- and I say this, there's no judgment here, just ignorant of why we're doing it. So what I have found one of my main jobs is to preach gospel around here. This is why we're doing it. It's about our impact on the community. It's a bull's eye to the mission. It increases our relevance.

But I get pushback all the time. And it gets real when you ask for resources to do this thing that somebody thinks you shouldn't be doing. And I see this as a transitional moment for the company and certainly for classical, as we say, no, we are more than just a radio station. Mindy's exactly right. We've grown up as a radio station, and we pride ourselves on that name, Minnesota Public Radio, as we should. But there's just much more opportunity out there and a lot more fun, too. And when we get outside the building--

MINDY: Oh, gosh.

SPEAKER 2: --we're able to be relevant. See, kids, see their faces light up in a school gym with music making 10 feet in front of them. That's why we get up in the morning.

MINDY: Give me an opportunity, and I'll go. And this is part of what makes my continued involvement with the Music Listening Contest so important to me because it's a way in which I get to represent. Minnesota Public Radio and remind people, if they need reminding, that there is a connection between what we do as a media organization and how classical music lives on a daily basis for real people.

SPEAKER 3: I'm not originally from Minnesota. I came here for--

MINDY: We're all. Oh, no. Are you? Where are you from?

SPEAKER 4: I grew up in Miami.

MINDY: Miami. So we're all from someplace. What about you?

SPEAKER 1: Los Angeles?

MINDY: All right. New York. Illinois.

SPEAKER 3: Well, I've made this point to Ali and to Jon McTaggart and maybe probably Brian, but I think Minnesota Public Radio is a very direct expression of Minnesota itself. I don't know many places where MPR and APM could exist in the way it does other than Minnesota. And I think a lot of Minnesotans, it's the air they've always breathed. They don't necessarily get that.

SPEAKER 1: So it hasn't been a problem with the audience or listeners catching up with those changes.

SPEAKER 4: No.

MINDY: No.

SPEAKER 2: Not at all. Not at all.

SPEAKER 3: No.

SPEAKER 2: Not that I've experienced either.

SPEAKER 3: And the other point I want to make is we keep talking about MPR, but my first 19 years here, I was in APM. So I didn't have an mpr.org email address until I was-- well, I guess I've always had one, but we were told not to use it.

MINDY: Really?

SPEAKER 3: Yeah. Because they were trying to clarify the branding.

SPEAKER 1: You're MPR now?

SPEAKER 3: I am MPR now, although I still have the APM email address.

SPEAKER 2: And we all actually have two email addresses, whether one uses one or not. We all have two.

MINDY: Right. Two business cards.

SPEAKER 3: But the National programming was always the odd stepchild and yet also held up as the prize. So it was sort of forgotten for a long time. Bob and Bill, remember that show?

MINDY: Oh, sure.

SPEAKER 3: Saint Paul Sunday, Writer's Almanac, Prairie Home.

SPEAKER 2: Jack, maybe one more thing about the reality I experience every day around just this education piece is funding.

SPEAKER 4: Yes, thank you for bringing that up.

SPEAKER 2: Because I'm the guy who has to make sure the resources are in place for this whole department. And one thing I found is that, as soon as we show value to kids and make it real, authentic, and show results, there is a whole group of people who want to support that in a way that we've never experienced before, private donors, legislature. And they can be symbiotic. When the legislature sees a donor is on board, then they fund it and then vice versa.

With the headline here is it's given us a much larger story to tell about who we are and why we exist. And that's attracted new funding, which has kept the mission going. It allows us to have even more impact. So it's kind of virtuous circle that happens.

SPEAKER 4: And will you just stated for the record just to close out what you know about what music education does for a child's development? I

SPEAKER 2: Think they like to bond.

SPEAKER 3: Yeah. Well, I mean, we have been participating in an initiative called Music Makes Us Whole, which touts decades of research about how music helps kids learn, rewires their circuits, keeps them in school, gives them opportunities for collaboration and tenacity, sticktoitiveness, also emotional learning. A lot of kids now express trauma. Music helps them modulate their emotions, identify their emotions.

One of the things we do with-- Gaelynn Lea was great about this on the reservation. But even yesterday, Alex, whenever the artist will say, think about what you're going to feel when I play this piece of music. And then he'll circle back and ask them what they experienced. It was really a very powerful way up North. A lot of those kids are really struggling. They would cry, they would hug her. It was very, very [? powerful. ?]

Two of our videos are all about emotion and music. So anyway, just music education really is not just about music. It's also about all the other subjects and also about social skills and what's executive function. what's that other thing? Life skills. I'm missing something. Social something.

SPEAKER 1: Well, it sounds like emotional health, too--

SPEAKER 3: Yeah, right.

SPEAKER 1: --or mental health even.

SPEAKER 3: Yeah.

SPEAKER 2: Give me just a second.

SPEAKER 4: Thanks for that. And we can get you print materials that talk about the scope and scale of the projects that you have to refer to.

SPEAKER 1: I'd like to see those.

SPEAKER 2: Just to put an exclamation point on it. I think this sums it up really well. It's on this site that we actually built, which is called Music Makes Us Whole. It's a loose consortium of about 40 or 50 for-profits and non-profits all over in this work with us. But we built the website. And the one sentence I think probably has the most succinct answer to the question, we believe every child deserves a rich music education.

We advocate for this because of music's intrinsic value in the human experience and also for the whole brain and whole life benefits to the child as well as his or her community. That's it. And that's about as close a sentence as I can get. It's for the child, it's for the community. And that's why we're doing it. And it's just the gift of you can make music. You too can do this. And it's going to be a good thing, regardless of where you take it. We're not trying to make the next professional musicians. That's not why we do it.

SPEAKER 4: Thanks.

SPEAKER 1: OK. Thank you for that. Very helpful. On a related topic, it feels related to me anyway, regional orchestras and regional musical organizations. Can you talk a little bit about how those relationships have evolved and whether there's been a similar change? It seems like, when MPR got involved in saving the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra 25 years ago, that was a different thing to do. But was all that evolved?

SPEAKER 2: I wonder, Mindy, if you should talk about especially the various series such as Artists in Concert, which is regional artists from around the entire region, not just orchestras. Do you specifically want to know about orchestras?

SPEAKER 1: No, no. Regional musical organizations of any kind.

SPEAKER 4: Just to that point as I said to you, Brian, we have a lot of really wonderful content about the Minnesota Orchestra relationship.

SPEAKER 1: Yeah. I don't mean to--

SPEAKER 4: Yeah, we want to make sure--

SPEAKER 2: I kept talking. I couldn't stop talking about that.

SPEAKER 4: No, it's great.

SPEAKER 1: It's good stuff.

SPEAKER 4: Yeah. We want to make sure that both the SPCO relationship is well represented

SPEAKER 1: And these Fargo, Moorhead and [INAUDIBLE]

SPEAKER 4: But there's so many others. There's so many others that we've been critical to over the years, and we just want to make sure that that is a well-rounded part of your story.

SPEAKER 2: Where I might be most helpful is talking about the regional orchestras outside of the Twin Cities, because I blathered on so much about the Minnesota Orchestra before.

SPEAKER 3: And I can talk about SPCO.

SPEAKER 2: But the regional artists, these different series we had, that might be interesting for you to chime in.

MINDY: Yeah. Well, Artists in Concert was in production for many years. Michael Barone was music director at the time that I started working on it. And even when he was no longer music director, he continued to be the producer of the series to the extent that he chose the performances. And then I turned raw musical material into two-hour weekly program.

Back in those days, we did a lot of recording, a lot of recording. We'd go out to chamber concerts and all sorts of stuff. And at a certain point, there were other things that-- there weren't enough people in the operations department to go out and do all the things that were happening. And so we would get tapes from other recording engineers with certain basic standards for tone and silence and this and that, I mean, all the little technical stuff.

But Michael was really intent on making sure that we had a showcase for talent from around the state. Of course, there were also nationally and internationally-known artists who would come, say, for the Music in the Park Series that's now been folded into the Schubert Club. But at the time, Julie Himmelstrup held sway and had some really, really great artists. But there are so many ensembles.

And then there are the regional orchestras with which I think we had a more substantial relationship than we do now. But I can't really speak to that very well because I do tunes and talk on the National Service. I'm really not involved in Minnesota Public Radio, except in a very marginal way. But I remember, a few years ago, there was a flood down in the basement. And there were tapes that--

SPEAKER 4: Jack's aware. He's tried to dig through those boxes

MINDY: --had to be-- and I have to say-- I know this is going to sound really awful, but it just felt like a really true moment for me. And I used to be very meticulous. I've always been meticulous about-- I'm a little bit like Pig-Pen. I create a lot of detritus, but the product is clean. I've never missed an edit in my life, anyway.

We would have the Artists in Concert programs. This is back in the days of tape. So I would have two, sometimes three 10-inch tape boxes. And I would type the labels, and I'd highlight them with a yellow highlighter, so anyway. So after this flood, I came up in the elevator one day into the green room, and it took my breath away to see stacks and stacks of boxes. And I saw those labels. And I saw that yellow highlighter, and I could barely breathe.

Because I was doing this program on a weekly basis and never, never looked back. I would do one, and then I'd do the next one, and I'd do the next one. I never looked behind me. And--

SPEAKER 2: And there they were.

MINDY: --they were years. Yes, there was all this physical manifestation of my work, and I started to weep.

SPEAKER 2: Were they ruined? Did the tape get wet? Do you know?

MINDY: I have no idea. I didn't touch them. It made my heart pound a little bit. Because this was something that we did on a regular basis for years and years. There was a period of time, briefly, when it was known as Lunds Presents, Which was frankly a bit shocking, maybe even horrifying, because we've never had the name of an underwriter in a program before. Why would we do this now?

And the answer is in part because Lunds really stepped up and they said, not only will we underwrite, but we'll also help to promote the program. And so, every month, there was a flyer that you could pick up in a Lunds store, and it had a photograph of me and Lunds Presents, and it would outline the program, what's the date, who are the performers, what's the content. So they were really putting it out there for people to get expo-- I mean, maybe people who didn't listen to classical music otherwise would shop at Lunds and pick up, oh, here's a flyer in here.

SPEAKER 1: This was a compilation of performances from a wide area, from a lot of different--

MINDY: Sometimes it would be a single performance by a single ensemble. Sometimes it would be a potpourri, two or three different ensembles. Same as Artists in Concert. it's just that money was coming from outside and kept the series going.

SPEAKER 3: I mean, one of the big things we do is we record regional recordings around the state.

MINDY: Do we do it as much as we used to?

SPEAKER 3: Yeah.

MINDY: Do we?

SPEAKER 3: Well, I don't know. I mean I can't compare--

MINDY: Really I'm so out of that loop. I don't really know.

SPEAKER 3: It's a big part of what we do. And we use a lot of freelancers as well as our own people. Getting all of that onto the air is more challenging.

MINDY: And of course, none of that is on Classical 24, which is where I do all my work. So sorry, I can't say more about that.

SPEAKER 1: Do these recordings come about through strong relationships with colleges, universities, with organizations?

SPEAKER 3: Yes. Right. I mean, like Saint Paul Chamber or St. Cloud Chamber Music series, is that still going?

MINDY: Susan Dubin, I believe so. In fact, Michael and I were just talking about that.

SPEAKER 3: Alexandria music festival, which we used to do a series from, I think.

MINDY: God, we did. The very first broadcast we did was a live one that I hosted from Alexandria. Oh, that's a story. But I don't want to take up your time.

SPEAKER 1: Maybe another time to hear about it [INAUDIBLE]

MINDY: Yeah.

SPEAKER 3: So yeah, I think it's important to-- certainly the education work we do, geographic diversity is very important to that. It's not just metro focused all over the state.

MINDY: I think that's really important.

SPEAKER 2: Recordings happen. They show up on our door one of three ways. We either send a freelance engineer, excuse me. We either send one of our own engineers into Greater Minnesota to make them happen. We use freelancers to record on our behalf. And the other one is they just show up on our door like orphans. A CD will land in my mailbox, and sometimes it's labeled, sometimes it's not.

And sometimes it'll land on Steve Staryk, who does a regular weekly Thursday afternoon little module called Regional Spotlight. And because listeners know that he does that, they just send them to him directly. And that's kind of the mess of it is that we try to streamline it, make it into a nice process. We know stuff is getting on the air, but it's coming from all sides, so it's a little hard.

A big part of our legacy budget is devoted to regional recordings. So it's intentional on our part. And we do exactly, I want to confirm what Vaughn said, showing geographic reach throughout the state is critical to that. We can't just be in the metro. We have to be in Greater Minnesota, whether we make it happen or somebody helps us by sending us recordings.

SPEAKER 1: And then what about the orchestra part of the story?

SPEAKER 2: Yeah, yeah. So not the Metro Orchestra. So they are basically five of them we've got relationships with. They are Fargo-Moorhead Symphony, Sioux Falls Symphony, Saint Cloud Symphony, Rochester Symphony, and Duluth Superior Symphony. There are others, but those are the five. And we've had varying relationships with them throughout forever, basically. And that gets to what we live or die by every day, and that's rights.

A soloist who has a solo cello, unaccompanied cello recital can really declare his or her own rights in a way that a union orchestra cannot that doesn't have the flexibility to do that. And we try to be really good stewards of our relationships, both with the orchestra and to the National Union to which we have signatory relationships with. So we got a lot of balls to keep up in the air. And those have changed. They constantly change.

For instance, right now, this weekend, so December 3rd, 2016 is the first recording we will make happen with the Duluth Superior Symphony in--

MINDY: Many years.

SPEAKER 2: --maybe more than a decade, because their rights have changed just recently, just this fall. And we kept asking them, we'd love to come record your concerts. And they said, ah, we can't because of how we've got our union situation configured. And finally, they arrived at a new agreement that allows us to go record their concert and then put it on the air, which is great, and which lives up to our ambition to be of service to the whole state.

It's kind of that way with each one of those five I named. They come and go all the time. Fargo-Moorhead, at the moment, we don't have much going on with them because of this very issue about the rights situation. Sioux Falls, the same. Rochester, we recorded them last spring. So it's hit or miss, but it's something we do very intentionally every year.

SPEAKER 1: Maybe another thing that's changed is that my understanding is that it used to be that those orchestras and maybe other regional organizations in different places had relationships with the MPR stations in those places.

SPEAKER 2: That could be.

MINDY: Actually that's a very good point.

SPEAKER 2: I think you might be right.

SPEAKER 1: And that that's no longer [INAUDIBLE]

SPEAKER 2: There was a recording engineer, for instance, in Fargo-Moorhead and a local station manager who could work the relationship, and that's changed. That's gone away. I think that's a really good point.

SPEAKER 4: We have a station manager but not the recording engineer.

SPEAKER 2: We don't have a station manager on site in Fargo-Moorhead. It's Kristi Booth from Bemidji. Most local relationship--

MINDY: That's a very good point.

SPEAKER 2: Somebody you run into at the grocery store and say, hey, my concert is coming up, that's different now.

MINDY: Lois Hanson. That was interesting, too, because Lois Hanson was the manager of KCCM, our station. And her husband, Robert Hanson was the conductor of the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony. They moved to the Twin Cities. When they retired, they came to the Twin Cities. But actually, that's a very significant point because, whereas Minnesota Public Radio has grown and grown in terms of the number of stations that we have, the management structure has become--

SPEAKER 3: Streamlined.

MINDY: --very much streamlined, perhaps even diminished, to have somebody who is not on site where there's a station, but rather is a regional manager. Kristi is perfect example.

SPEAKER 3: We have done this thing--

MINDY: It does change things, I think.

SPEAKER 3: --called narrowcasting.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah, that's [INAUDIBLE]

SPEAKER 3: The Bemidji symphony, wasn't it? And some other symphonies.

SPEAKER 2: Rochester have done as well.

SPEAKER 3: So narrowcasting is where you-- so all these network stations around the state, we just focus on one subregional area. And the Bemidji Symphony would be the Bemidji Brainerd area.

SPEAKER 1: So only they are hearing?

SPEAKER 3: Yeah, only they are hearing it.

SPEAKER 1: And at the same time, someone in Duluth is hearing--

SPEAKER 3: Regular programming.

SPEAKER 1: --what everyone else is hearing or something--

SPEAKER 2: Saint Paul based program, yeah. The network. Yeah.

SPEAKER 3: That's part of the complexity of the-- you never know when you're listening to the national or the regional service. Because they're so well-localized.

SPEAKER 1: And it's seamless.

SPEAKER 3: Yeah, seamless. Yeah.

SPEAKER 1: Interesting.

SPEAKER 2: Mindy had a great memory. You go for it.

MINDY: It just really stirred up something about when you talked about narrowcasting and what it meant for stations in a particular station getting to hear one thing when other stations hear something else. And it brought to mind-- I'm a little bit fuzzy on this now, and I don't remember exactly how long it lasted. But I seem to recall that Sunday mornings there was mass.

SPEAKER 4: Yeah.

SPEAKER 2: That's right. That's right.

MINDY: There was mass--

SPEAKER 4: From Saint John's

MINDY: --from Saint John's, and then there was also something else going on. Wasn't there something else from KCCM? Something in Moorhead. They had chapel every day, 11:00 in the morning. No, I think it was 11:00.

SPEAKER 3: OK.

MINDY: Yeah, for a half hour or something. And so we had to hit the time so the station could break away. They'd do their own thing while we were still doing classical music. Then they'd come back. Gosh, I haven't thought about that in the longest time. And of course, I mean, OK,

SPEAKER 2: A couple of weeks, whatever. I spoke a couple of weeks ago with an elderly monk at Saint John's at the very beginning. And he, to me, expressed regret that the mass is no longer broadcast.

SPEAKER 4: They would love for us to do that again, especially in January 22nd.

MINDY: We also used to have the Christmas Eve service

SPEAKER 2: Saint Paul's from Saint John's.

MINDY: That's my thing, working Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

SPEAKER 4: I was hoping you'd bring that up.

MINDY: Really?

SPEAKER 4: Yeah.

MINDY: Really? It's not my holiday, as you all well know. And you know something, that from the very first time that I worked at Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I thought, if I'm going to be alone, I'd much rather be alone at work than alone at home. I mean, I'm a social person. I'm not around other people nearly as much as I would like to be. And there's something about having time with family and friends.

And here I sit. I'm by myself. I've never had any relatives in Minnesota or anything, and I'm just, I would rather just be at work. Why not? And it's become part of my-- even when I was gone the year and a half that I was gone in China, I worked on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. it's just the thing that I do.

And for me, as a Jewish person, I feel that's exactly the thing that I should be doing, because the only thing that I can give to any of my colleagues as a gift for Christmas is time.

SPEAKER 2: Excuse me. The way you framed it, Mindy, is so genuine to who she is. And so authentic.

MINDY: And don't make me cry.

SPEAKER 2: For those of us who do celebrate Christmas, just to know that perennial like, OK, who's working Christmas Eve? Now who's turn is it? Just to know that that is-- for as long as she wants to do it is not an issue we have to face. That is such a gift that she gives the rest of the staff.

SPEAKER 3: Also, you should mention Candle Shining Brightly.

MINDY: Thanks, man.

SPEAKER 4: Yes.

MINDY: Candles Burning Brightly. Oh yeah. Candles Burning. I want to finish first with Christmas Eve because that was part of the magic of the holiday. And that was carrying midnight mass from Collegeville. That was always fun. It's like the peace of Christmas would descend on this place and on me, and just being-- the boy choir and all that, I mean, all the different-- and the whole community. Have you been to Collegeville ever?

SPEAKER 2: Yeah, I was there just--

SPEAKER 4: He's been there a couple--

MINDY: I mean, there's something about the Breuer Chapel that is so extraordinary. I mean, apart from the fact that you can be miles away on 94, and you can see it. It's so massive.

SPEAKER 2: It's where you don't expect it.

SPEAKER 3: Yeah.

MINDY: As I would be sitting in the studio, I could just imagine that building packed with people, not just the monks and not just-- I mean, the students at St John's, they were probably with their family. No, the community, people from Saint Joseph and people from Saint Cloud and farmers, from all this. There's not much out there. Once you get past Collegeville, there's not a lot, from Albany, and I forget some of those other places around there.

And people would come and pack that place. And it would just be-- I don't know, it was that sense of community, even though I was sitting by myself knowing that all those people were there observing this most important holiday. It was like, Wow. Really something. And then nutcracker on Christmas morning, so I could fix a little coffee and have a little breakfast.

SPEAKER 3: Have you heard about Lessons and Carols?

SPEAKER 1: Yes. Yeah, I spoke with-- I forget his name.

SPEAKER 3: Nick Nash.

SPEAKER 1: Nick Nash.

SPEAKER 3: I'm glad you spoke to him.

MINDY: That's good. [LAUGHS] That's good.

SPEAKER 1: He could go on for a long time.

SPEAKER 3: Yeah, right.

SPEAKER 2: And he wrote a book or part of a book.

SPEAKER 4: And you spoke to Dennis Hamilton?

SPEAKER 1: I spoke with [INAUDIBLE]

MINDY: Dennis Hamilton Good, good, good, good. But candles, since you brought up the subject of candles. Candles is only-- I think the first time I did that program was 2000 or 2001, so it hasn't been all that long. I mean, in the grand [INAUDIBLE]. Yeah, for me. It's fun.

SPEAKER 4: But do you want to talk about the derivation of that? How did that come-- was that your idea? Was that--

MINDY: Actually--

SPEAKER 4: [INAUDIBLE] who started that?

MINDY: Oh, gosh. No. Actually, it was the most-- it was Jack. Yes.

SPEAKER 3: Jack Allen?

MINDY: Allen. Yes. He called me into his office one day. This was the shortest meeting I've ever had with anybody. Closed the door, looked me right in the eye, and he said, you're going to produce a program for Hanukkah, and you'll call it Candles Burning Brightly. That's it. And I'm thinking, where do I find material?

SPEAKER 3: Yeah, that's so hard.

MINDY: Back in the early days of making that program, there wasn't--

SPEAKER 3: There still isn't a a lot [INAUDIBLE]

MINDY: --a lot to choose from. But more and more, over the years, I found stuff. And then the relationship with Judith Clurman in New York, Essential Voices USA. She has a great group, and she's commissioned a whole bunch of-- I mean, she's also Jewish. And she's very scholarly about Jewish music, although they do other things. And Theodore Bikel, my beloved Theo, who is no longer alive, sat down and recorded that for me. And it was the last time I saw him alive. It was like, wow.

SPEAKER 3: You were talking about other music, other musical ensembles. I mean, we should not leave out the choirs. Maybe you've already covered that.

SPEAKER 2: No, I could use--

MINDY: Oh, yes.

SPEAKER 3: Dale Warland Sing-- Yeah.

SPEAKER 2: I didn't write anything about choir stuff.

SPEAKER 4: Yeah. We haven't covered the choral initiative. So in the fall stream, could be talked about.

SPEAKER 3: It goes way back. Brian can talk endlessly about Dale Warland.

SPEAKER 4: And we do have an essay from Dale in the book.

SPEAKER 3: OK.

MINDY: Oh, good.

SPEAKER 4: Tying that in.

SPEAKER 3: And just Harmony in the Park, of course, was for five years, four years.

SPEAKER 2: I think just three.

SPEAKER 3: Three years?

SPEAKER 2: Yeah. Yeah, three.

SPEAKER 3: Where we would go around the state and showcase regional choirs, including the Twin Cities and others. I think it's a big part of what we've done.

MINDY: People sing around here.

SPEAKER 4: Do you want to talk about choral and its importance to us and focus on it?

SPEAKER 2: Yeah, we've got--

SPEAKER 4: Which one of you want us to start?

SPEAKER 3: We didn't really talk about SPCO. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah. We need to get to that.

SPEAKER 3: I've had a lot of ancillary relationship with them. They were the first ensemble to perform on Saint Paul Sunday with the Dale Warland Singers in 1980.

MINDY: Really?

SPEAKER 3: And the host of that show was the associate conductor under

SPEAKER 2: Dennis Russell Davis?

MINDY: Dennis Russell Davies. Yes.

SPEAKER 3: Bill McLaughlin, who had this wispy Philadelphia accent that people loved. So Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, I feel like, has a long, rich-- we used to-- we had a weekly show which was national?

SPEAKER 2: Yes.

MINDY: Yep.

SPEAKER 3: Hosted Michael Baron and then more recently Bill Morelock.

SPEAKER 2: No, Bill didn't host the nat.

SPEAKER 3: Oh, not the national? Just the regional?

SPEAKER 2: No, no.

SPEAKER 3: OK.

SPEAKER 2: No, the national series wrapped up, I want to say, about 10 years ago when Michael was no longer the host. I believe that also marked the sunset of the national show. I could be wrong about that, but I don't think there was another national host after Michael.

SPEAKER 3: OK.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah, I'm probably [INAUDIBLE] about who that might be. I think--

MINDY: He hosted and produced. I mean, this was--

SPEAKER 2: So about '06 or so. But the SPCO was so important for one other reason. I spend my parts of my day dealing with lawyers and fundraisers, and that kind of gives you maybe a back story about how stuff gets done. So one of the things that the SPCO did years before any other orchestra in the country, which is to their credit, is to create a brand new way of working with the media organization.

Before, it had been very limited. Really, really limited. Like we would ask for one-time regional only broadcast or one-time national. And as new media, what we called at the time, new media came along and this thing called the internet, and more and more is available, we realized that agreement was so outdated. And the SPCO was the first one to get that.

SPEAKER 3: In the country?

SPEAKER 2: In the country. It's was Bruce Coppock basically really deserves the lion's share of the credit. And he fought-- I interviewed him five or six years ago when he left that job. Probably longer, I don't know, maybe eight or nine years ago now.

SPEAKER 4: 2009?

SPEAKER 2: Probably is about right. Yeah.

SPEAKER 4: She's looking at their 25th-- their anniversary, 50th anniversary.

SPEAKER 2: This is a quote. He says he fought Titanic wars with the National Union of Musicians. to get that new rights agreement hammered out.

SPEAKER 1: So that concerts could be streamed online?

SPEAKER 2: Streamed, broadcast unlimited number of times, put on television, made into movies, downloaded. Downloads, actually, maybe I should not say that.

SPEAKER 4: That's different.

SPEAKER 2: That's a separate thing. Downloads is a whole other tricky part. But just a brand new frontier for working classical music into media. And we were the beneficiaries of that. Our audience was the beneficiaries of that. Right away we were able to send more concerts recorded four blocks away to our partners in Geneva, Switzerland, the European Broadcasting Union, and then have them distribute them globally. So the SPCO was both the bellwether and the first beneficiary of doing that.

SPEAKER 4: What year was that?

SPEAKER 2: I can get you that answer. But I want to say like--

SPEAKER 3: The Integrated Media Agreement?

SPEAKER 2: IMA, yeah. I think even before it was called the IMA. They had some other title for it. The IMA came like two-ish, three-ish years later. I want to say '05, '07.

SPEAKER 3: Yeah, because I was music programmer for PT.

SPEAKER 2: PT. And you could use it.

SPEAKER 3: Right. It was a huge relief. We didn't have to adhere to the three to two--

SPEAKER 2: Exactly. Three plays in two years. That was really this shoehorn. We had to bottle everything and track all those, keep watching it.

SPEAKER 1: What about them made them the orchestra that first recognized the value of changing it?

SPEAKER 2: For a long time, they have had a mantra that they want to be America's most accessible professional orchestra or chamber orchestra. But that phrase, most accessible, has been in their DNA for a long time. And I just heard it spoken at a pre-concert talk last week. They've got low ticket prices, no ticket prices for kids. So this is how they were expressing it 15-ish years ago. And however they arrived at that, and I think a lot of credit for that goes to Bruce Coppock, probably board leadership as well. But that would be a question for them, why declared that.

SPEAKER 3: They also pioneered this artistic partner model, which is-- when they first started doing it, I thought it's just not going to work. And it has really worked beautifully for the most part, hasn't it?

SPEAKER 2: Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER 3: So again, this I feel the same way about the Schubert Club. A lot of these institutions exist because Minnesota is such a unique culture and also has had a lot of money and funding and donors who really care about the arts and accessibility and education.

SPEAKER 2: This might raise a smile, Jack, for you. One of my first, I think, months here, so at the same time that Mindy was here, so I'm thinking it was 1983 when we started.

MINDY: Yeah, when you started.

SPEAKER 2: The head of development at that time was a gal named Gloria Sewell.

SPEAKER 1: I remember her.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah. She's unforgettable. Unsinkable, unforgettable, Gloria Sewell.

SPEAKER 3: The unsinkable Gloria.

SPEAKER 2: And I remember walking down the hall. I just came out of the door, and she was walking down the hall. And she had an envelope in her hand. And she had just opened it, and she was laughing. Because I worked with Gloria on a project really at the time. And I said, what's up? What's so funny? She said, I just got a check for $30,000. And this is 1983 at $30,000.

MINDY: That's a lot of scratch.

SPEAKER 2: It was a little different than it is now. It still is a lot, but-- and I said, you're kidding. I said, this stuff just drops in your lap? She said, yeah, it happens all the time here. She said, somebody will give us-- write us a check, or I get a note from them that we're in their estate, and the estate is now distributing funds. And that's actually what this was. It was a disbursement from an estate for 30k. 30k

And I said, you're kidding. She said yeah, Minnesota-- she says, my colleague, my peers around the public radio system, this doesn't happen to them. This happens in Minnesota. I still remember her-- there was like three sentences. Look at this happen. Yeah, it happens for me here, and it doesn't happen for my peers elsewhere. So that just confirms I'm saying.

MINDY: I want to go back to one little thing since you brought up the name of Gloria Sewell. When I first got to Minnesota Public Radio, actually, the day that I was here for my job interview was Brian's first day on the air. So we really we go back. We go back a long time. So Brian will remember when we did a series called Live from Landmark, which long predated the courtroom concerts that the Schubert Club does now. And Gloria Sewell was a very important figure in this whole enterprise because she was the person who interfaced Minnesota Public Radio with the Schubert Club.

And we used to go over to the landmark center down in the basement. There's an auditorium. And that's where we did the show. It was. It was an hour of live music and conversation with whomever was in town playing-- the Ordway, I mean, was new in, what, '85? So there were lots of artists coming to town. And Gloria, she was the reigning queen of Live from Landmark. And I think the series lasted for 10 or 11 years. And then it went away.

But it was a great way. It was with a live audience. These people who come to the Shubert did the courtroom concerts. They would come, and they'd sit-in the auditorium. They'd listen to music. I loved that. And actually, that was the first live broadcast I ever did, was a Live from Landmark. And Marilyn Heltzer, our boss, made sure that each of-- we took turns hosting. So it was maybe once every two months or three months we could-- it was great fun, I loved it.

SPEAKER 2: I have a memory. I don't know if it's right or not. But in Live from Landmark of Gloria's daughter, Laura, playing [INAUDIBLE]

SPEAKER 1: That's right.

MINDY: Oh, yeah. Oh, and you know who else? Oh, gosh. Now I'm losing-- Mark Kosower. That's it.

SPEAKER 2: Oh, Mark, yeah.

MINDY: Yeah. There was Paul Kosower and his two kids, Paula and Mark. He was a professor in Wisconsin Eau Claire, yes, and a cellist, and he taught his kids to play. And they were the Dolce-- No.

SPEAKER 2: Oh, that's right.

MINDY: Do they call themselves Dolce Trio. yeah,

SPEAKER 2: I think they're the Dolce Trio.

MINDY: The father and his two kids playing cello. Mark Kosower is now principal cellist of the Cleveland Orchestra. And we can say we knew him when he was just a little pisher kid. I mean, you don't have to. That's not a direct quote, but--

SPEAKER 2: Was that a Yiddishism?

MINDY: It is. Yes, it is. Yes, yes it is. That is not going in. That is not going in. We did not know.

SPEAKER 2: Can we get a translation?

MINDY: But he was just--

SPEAKER 4: It takes many words.

MINDY: He was just a little boy. And I remember they'd play, then they'd get up, and the kids would look at their dad for the signal when to bow. And they would bow. And it was very like, wow. But a moment that I had with him, they came back, I was hosting that one, and two years later, they were back again on a wet Thursday when I was hosting.

And the little kid had started in the two years intervening, had started doing some composing. And the dad was the spokesperson for the group because it was him and his two little kids. And he started to talk about Mark composing. And I just turned to Mark. This was backstage.

And I said, tell me about what you wrote. And I didn't mean to be disrespectful to his father, but I wanted to know from the kid what-- so anyway, so now he's principal cellist with the Cleveland Orchestra.

SPEAKER 3: I would say, and maybe this is worth mentioning--

MINDY: Do not use that word.

SPEAKER 3: There are a lot of musicians who grew up listening to NPR and grew up being presented by NPR, who have gone on to big national careers.

MINDY: Yeah.

SPEAKER 3: Who is the guitarist?

SPEAKER 2: Sharon Isbin.

MINDY: Sharon Isbin.

SPEAKER 3: There's the flutist for the Dorian Wind Quintet, a very esteemed quartet. Laura Sewell, who's [INAUDIBLE].

MINDY: Founded the Lark Quartet.

SPEAKER 3: The kid from Lakeville, Chad Hoopes.

SPEAKER 4: Chad Hoopes.

MINDY: Ooh, yeah.

SPEAKER 2: We had Chad Hoopes listening. We were always getting--

SPEAKER 4: We have a lot of photos of Chad for potential inclusion in the book.

SPEAKER 3: Yeah.

MINDY: Good, good.

SPEAKER 3: But I think that's worth mentioning that, again, because I have more of a national orientation, a lot of these artists were--

MINDY: Minnesota Public Radio has been really important to a lot of people in ways that we can't even begin to--

SPEAKER 3: Yeah.

SPEAKER 1: Some of them [INAUDIBLE] a lot of the [INAUDIBLE] participants have talked about getting their first exposure to music.

SPEAKER 3: Yeah.

SPEAKER 1: And listen.

SPEAKER 3: I'm glad you're talking to them. That's great.

MINDY: Yeah.

SPEAKER 3: Yeah.

SPEAKER 4: And on the SPCO thing, just to close that out, there's plenty of documentation about the Save the SPCO that we can--

MINDY: Oh, that was so great.

SPEAKER 4: But I just want to make sure that you guys feel like anything you want to say about the SPCO relationship or SPCO's importance is covered before we move on, because I do think choir and choral is an area you guys want to touch on.

SPEAKER 2: [? Kyu's-- ?] did you see [? Kyu's ?] sentence?

SPEAKER 4: I didn't see it. [? Ann ?] told me she got it.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah. I got the draft same time. And he really goes into the whole relationship of-- zeros in on that Save the SPCO. So that's really well covered.

MINDY: That was some of the best radio, I think, that we ever did.

SPEAKER 2: So we had--

SPEAKER 4: Oh, that's a good thing.

SPEAKER 2: They had Kyu-Young Kim [? wrote an essay. ?]

SPEAKER 4: No one talks about what it sounded like.

MINDY: Oh. Well, first of all, it was live. It was live. I remember interviewing Eddie Blitz. Do you remember Eddie Blitz? He was a cellist in the SPCO, an older guy. I don't know, he smoked cigars, and he was rude. A terrific musician.

But he came in and sat down with me. And we had a conversation about the-- I mean, this was all about, because the orchestra was on the brink of financial disaster. And I believe that it was one of a very small number of times, when the FCC actually gave permission.

SPEAKER 2: One time.

SPEAKER 4: Second.

MINDY: There was also Wolf Trap, right?

SPEAKER 2: Oh, to us, though.

MINDY: Yeah.

SPEAKER 2: Well, we had one exemption.

MINDY: And we had to be ready at--

SPEAKER 4: Second set, we did the hurricane relief.

SPEAKER 2: MPR did?

SPEAKER 4: Mm-hmm.

MINDY: We did?

SPEAKER 2: Which hurricane? When?

SPEAKER 4: Katrina.

MINDY: Oh, Katrina.

SPEAKER 4: We broadcast live with a bunch of other organizations for hurricane relief.

MINDY: But I think this was the first time that we were in a position to be doing fundraising for some organization other than ourselves. And so there had to be permission granted by the FCC. We wouldn't know until we knew. And then how much time would we have to put it all together.

So there was a lot of prep that went on, and we had to just wait for the go or no-go. And we got the go three days before or two days before or something like this. I don't know, I love live radio. I will produce things. Candles burning brightly gets produced. The Cottage program was produced to the breadth of a hair.

But for me, there's something about doing live when you're ready, and you're-- I mean, it feels like flying to me. It's a real adrenaline rush. Brandon, yeah, Brian, does it every week. I don't get to do it anymore.

SPEAKER 3: I think that was part of the SPCO thing. I do think some mention of the conductors should be made, like Pinchas Zukerman. I mean, a truly great musician. Hugh Wolff, McGuigan.

MINDY: Another great.

SPEAKER 3: Another great musician.

SPEAKER 2: Hogwood.

SPEAKER 3: Hogwood, worldwide famous talent.

SPEAKER 2: They landed some key people, both in the full flowering of their career.

MINDY: Yup. The relationship with Bobby McFerrin, when they started having that creative chair or whatever it was. John Adams, the composer, had a relationship with the SPCO.

SPEAKER 3: And Christian Zacharias was a great pianist. Is it Christian?

SPEAKER 2: Yeah. Christian.

MINDY: Yeah.

SPEAKER 2: Mm-hmm, yeah.

SPEAKER 4: And I think this liquid music thing that they're doing now to reach new, younger audiences and bridge that gap with--

SPEAKER 3: It's pretty amazing. Another pioneering. It's a [INAUDIBLE]. I'm in the middle of that.

MINDY: I have to ask you to excuse me. I have to go because I have to come--

SPEAKER 2: See you, thank you.

SPEAKER 1: Thank you, Mindy.

MINDY: Thank you for another meeting.

SPEAKER 1: And you had a lot of good stuff to say.

MINDY: Thank you.

SPEAKER 4: Thank you for making time.

MINDY: Sure. [INAUDIBLE], you have to say about the personalities.

SPEAKER 3: Yeah, that's the whole backstory that--

MINDY: Yeah. Yes. Yes, that's the stuff that doesn't belong in print.

SPEAKER 2: We really should talk about choirs, at least for a few minutes.

SPEAKER 1: OK.

SPEAKER 2: Because that's so much a Minnesota story and so much about who we are. And I haven't seen Dale's essay, actually. Have you seen it? I don't know what he says.

SPEAKER 4: Yeah, it's great. We can share it with you.

SPEAKER 3: A lot of ellipses.

SPEAKER 2: That's right.

SPEAKER 4: And it's [? an edit. ?] No, it's great. It just talks about what it's like to hear yourself on the radio and how important his relationship has been over the years. But if you want to talk about all of our choral relationships and how choral fits in with classical and how the choir and choral stream came to be.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah. So I'll chime in. And, Vaughn, please correct and amend as you-- and color, yeah, maybe just for context, to make it really personal. So I grew up singing in choirs and singing.

SPEAKER 3: I did, too.

SPEAKER 2: And if you set one foot outside this office door, "You can't swing a dead cat without hitting--" somebody will say the same thing from the Midwest, especially. It's just woven into the fabric, as it is here, like perhaps in no other place in the country. I mean, Vaughn's from Montana. I'm from Illinois. But in Minnesota, it's almost a blanket, almost, in that way.

SPEAKER 3: It's part of the Christiansen tradition on one hand.

SPEAKER 2: And that means F. Melius Christiansen from St. Olaf. And it really does stem from St. Olaf College where Vaughn's a graduate of. So I walk into this place. And right away, the first thing I'm struck is-- struck by two things. One is, my gosh, there's a lot of choirs in Minnesota. When I moved here, it's like, they're everywhere. I've never seen anything like it. Place is lousy with choirs.

And then second thing was, I was so struck by one choir in particular and how they took this thing that I'd been doing my whole life and just took it to the level of Renoir, Einstein. It was just kind of whatever ultimate achievement is found in other endeavors of human activity. This one choir, I thought, was doing it at such a level. And that was Dale Warland.

And it wasn't just really, really good. It was communicative and warm-hearted and emotional in a way that just spoke to me immediately. So we started doing broadcasts. I think he'd been-- yeah, he'd been involved with MPR since 1980, if not before-- no, before then, with other groups he was conducting in early iterations of the Warland Singers.

But when I started here in '83, my first Christmas season, they were doing "Echoes of Christmas," which was his annual broadcast. And then that became a national broadcast. And Dale was in the building a lot. We would do interviews with him, and it caught on.

Broadening that out, because he can't focus on just one because there's so many-- Philip Brunelle, the visionary entrepreneur here in Minnesota, what he's done with choral music. Minnesota Chorale, the Bach Society, the Oratorio Society, the Rose Ensemble, and the list just-- there's just kind of almost no end to it.

SPEAKER 3: And then Concordia Choir, Luther Choir. Saint John's, I think, has a strong choir.

SPEAKER 2: All these feeding into the ecosystem. Yeah.

SPEAKER 3: Augsburg.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah, yeah. And creating this culture of singers in the state.

SPEAKER 3: Right.

SPEAKER 2: So we were kind of not doing our homework if we didn't do something with that. So in the last handful of years-- again, this is since I can talk what I've wanted to do. And what we've done together is create something called a choral works initiative, which is a loose portfolio of activity. So we've always been doing broadcasts, making radio shows out of them. So that continues. But we presented more choirs, international touring choirs in concert.

So we've been a sponsor. We hire Voces8. We hire the King's Singers. We hire Chanticleer to come in and do concerts in venues in the state. And then we record them and turn them into media. For a year and a half, we had a choral educator on our staff, [? Tesla ?] [INAUDIBLE]. And he went around the state firing up high school kids to be in choirs.

I think the launch date was April 2013, we started the choral stream. And that was just another expression of, well, this is where the audience is going. It's not just about radio anymore. It's about being present in more people's lives on devices that are convenient to them.

And choir singers, they're geeks. They're tribal, because you do form and choir literally in tribes. And that tribe is defined as a choir, small or large. And they love to talk about composers, repertoire, experiences, tours, stuff that went wrong in the last concert. And they hang together, and they talk together.

So we wanted to put something down in the middle of that network that would be attractive to them. So it's the choral stream, which is a 24-hour-- it was initially a loop. So it repeats. We refreshed it, but now it's programmed fresh many times a week. It's stuff is pulled out. Stuff is put in. 50% of it, the content is Minnesota choirs. The funding to do it comes from Legacy. So that's our commitment to the Legacy Amendment legislature.

And, yeah, it's for the world now, but it started here in Minnesota. And I don't know that another place could have started it. It would have been weird to do it in-- name another market that's not like this one. But for here, it was natural. And the response right away that we got from the choir community was like, oh, thank goodness. Finally, somebody did this.

SPEAKER 1: And are there listeners from far away?

SPEAKER 2: Yeah, yeah. About half of the audience is Minnesota. Half of it is everywhere else. Yeah. And just a new expression we did a month and a half ago, we presented on Facebook Live. So this new video streaming application within Facebook, a joint concert by Cantus, who's here in the Twin Cities, and Chanticleer, who came from San Francisco to Minneapolis. First time ever they'd gotten together to sing a concert together.

Maybe the last time they'll ever do it, we don't know. So we did a live broadcast of that, fed it into Facebook Live. And the audience was global then because of the global brands of those ensembles, but we were the convener of it. So again, it's another way we try to be relevant to more people with this art form that we love.

SPEAKER 3: I just want to talk about bringing the sing-- we've also been doing mass community sings, choral sings. Probably the apex of that was when we did something called bridge of song after the murder of Philando Castile and also the Dallas police officers. We connected to them via satellite. And [? Tesla ?] [INAUDIBLE] and Philip Shoultz from VocalEssence led a mass choir at Westminster Presbyterian. It was a beautiful event.

SPEAKER 1: How big was the mass choir?

SPEAKER 2: Westminster was standing room only. And so that's about 2,000 people. So that was full. We linked together with a full Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas. That's also about 2,000 people. And then we lit up Facebook Live again for that. And we had around-- I think in that number, it's kind of varied, but it's about 20,000 people who watched it and took part in it via laptops and their devices.

And so part of that event was we sang together with Dallas, same song, same time. Add up all those numbers, and that gets you the physical and the virtual audience.

SPEAKER 3: We've also done events in Duluth and Saint Paul. We're doing ones in Rochester, Duluth again, and Collegeville, if that works out.

SPEAKER 2: She got a thumb up.

SPEAKER 3: I really want that to happen.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah.

SPEAKER 3: So they're hard to pull off because-- and we're trying to simplify. Brian is really arguing for more simplification because we give sheet music to all these people, and they have to learn it. But all Minnesotans know how to read.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah, they could read music.

SPEAKER 3: But, yeah, I mean, choral tradition does go way. The [? sale ?] of Christmas festival, that's a big, big deal.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah.

SPEAKER 3: Lessons and carols.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah. Yeah, that's, again, the reasons those things started here. And now those are national. Those two concerts you just mentioned are the two highest carried of our Christmas portfolio programs-- the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, and then the St. Olaf Christmas Festival. There are upwards of 300 radio stations will pick those up. And they were either imported by MPR, or they're right next door from MPR.

It's a funny thing, but I'm running with it. Because I love it to bits. And as long as I get to where the director job-- this is what I kind of do executive choice on this one. The audience has to show up for it, too. And they are.

SPEAKER 3: It's also, when I left St. Paul Sunday, I went to performance today as the music director. That was all live performance. At MPR, where the show came from, there was, with some exceptions, this great prejudice against vocal music, especially solo.

But because our assets were so strapped when we did that, I started programming more choral music. And really, it boosted the audience, I think. And that's my own little theory. Choral music is much easier than solo vocal music to process on the radio. Yeah, so--

SPEAKER 2: Thank you for dropping the quarter and letting us check on that.

SPEAKER 3: Yeah, yeah. Are we neglecting anything with choral?

SPEAKER 4: You got [? Conscious ?] in there. You got VocalEssence in there. We've done anything with Minneapolis Gospel Choir? Is that a--

SPEAKER 2: Rarely, rarely, because it's more gospel. And sometimes that works on classical. We're not against it. But sometimes they'll have a really rocking rhythm section that, if you've just listened to Bach, it's kind of a little bit of a gear shift. Yeah.

SPEAKER 3: We did commission Chanticleer; a great young composer, Peruvian-Latino-Jewish, Gabriela Lena Frank, who wrote this setting of Hispanic-- or what did they-- Chicano poetry for Chanticleer. Saint Paul Sunday commissioned that. And it's probably worth mentioning, too, just our long-standing relationships with composers, like Dominick Argento, Stephen Paulus, Aaron Kernis, Nicholas Maw-- not a Minnesota composer but--

SPEAKER 2: There's one more commission I want to pile on just a bit. Edie Hill, we commissioned her to write a piece when we presented the Estonian Chamber Choir in concert three-ish years ago. Beautiful, beautiful piece. Spanish text.

SPEAKER 1: Do you have a strong connection with the American Composers Forum? Is that how some of this happened?

SPEAKER 3: Yes. Yeah, I think we do have a strong connection. Yeah.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah.

SPEAKER 3: In fact, we're doing an event with them Friday in Studio M, to which you are welcome to come. But should we also meant-- what is that choir of Alzheimer's?

SPEAKER 4: Alive Inside.

SPEAKER 3: Alive Inside.

SPEAKER 2: It's called Giving Voice.

SPEAKER 3: Yeah, Giving Voice.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah, we've covered them, and done some-- select things with them. Yeah.

SPEAKER 3: And ComMUSICation, probably worth mentioning.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah.

SPEAKER 1: What is that?

SPEAKER 3: It's like an El Sistema for choirs. Yeah, based in Minnesota.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah, kids at risk who get rigorous music education in this form of choral music lessons, after school program in the Frogtown area.

SPEAKER 1: So it's like choral education boot camp.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah. And it's even more basic than-- yes. And they get fed, which isn't always a given for those kids when they go home at night. So it's an amazing program. So we've got a good relationship with them, too.

SPEAKER 1: Thank you.

SPEAKER 4: Thank you.

SPEAKER 1: This helped a lot.

SPEAKER 4: If there's anything on your list, Jack, that we didn't cover, maybe you just send an email.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah.

SPEAKER 1: OK.

SPEAKER 4: A couple of--

SPEAKER 3: We have still not talked about Saint Paul Sunday, which is--