Any time a nonclassical Seattle musician gets gussied up for a crack at Benaroya Hall, it feels like an occasion. Besides the acoustic majesty of the S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium (even the name sounds kind of fancy), there’s a rarefied air whenever our town’s rock club inhabitants are invited inside the house of the Seattle Symphony. Especially when the vaunted orchestra is in on the fun.
Collaborations between the Grammy-winning Symphony and Seattle artists from the rock and pop world (Grammy winners or otherwise) have made for some of the most memorable homegrown concert moments of the last 15-plus years. It’s a rich legacy that boasts performances from some of Seattle’s brightest stars — including Brandi Carlile, Macklemore, Sir Mix-A-Lot and Nancy Wilson — and other 206 favorites.
There’s a just-for-us twinkle inherent to these one-off performances that carries a degree of pomp (by Seattle standards) and orchestral grandeur for a room full of friends, family and regionally connected supporters. And I know I’m not the only one who has left these gigs with something more than a memory and a ticket stub.
Artists who’ve played with the Symphony have testified to how profound of an experience it is.
This year, Thunderpussy and SYML became the latest in the lineage of Seattle’s “popular music” artists to receive the Symphony’s embrace, putting their own stamp on a Seattle tradition dating back to at least 2007, when the Seattle Symphony launched its pops program.
“Something I’m still buzzing on is the sense of belonging to the Seattle scene,” said SYML, aka Brian Fennell, more than a month after making his Benaroya Hall debut. “Throughout my years in music and living here, it’s not always felt like that. … It felt very much like belonging to a family … where it was like the city kind of putting its arm around me like an (approving) parent.”
There’s reason to believe more good things are in store for Seattle’s pop-and-classical combos. In October, the Seattle Symphony hired Andrew Joslyn as its associate director of popular programming, joining the team that produces these local collaborations and other crossover concerts under Raff Wilson, vice president of artistic planning.
Seattle’s well-connected lord of the strings has established himself as a first-call composer and arranger whenever hometown heavyweights like Macklemore, Nancy Wilson and Thunderpussy want to give their music the symphonic treatment. (Indeed, it was Joslyn who wrote the charts when those three Seattle stars performed with the Seattle Symphony.)
He’s still getting settled into his new role, but part of the “big dream” plan, Joslyn hints, is to make Seattle Symphony one of the go-to symphonies in the country when it comes to working with pop/rock musicians. Why? Because these partnerships are a win-win for everyone — fans, artists, venues — involved.
“I want us to highlight locally, but I also really want to push the meaning of what it is to be a classical symphony in the pop world,” Joslyn said.
Symphonic symbiosis
SYML won’t forget his concert with the Symphony on Oct. 25 any time soon.
Besides getting to hear his songs with a new orchestral heft, it was the first time since the pandemic that SYML’s kids — who were visibly cheering on Dad from the crowd — got to see him play as he presented his songs on the most ambitious scale of his career. The Washington-reared songsmith, whose parents brought him to the Symphony as a kid, was also joined onstage by his childhood best friend and frequent collaborator Brian Eichelberger — a composer who wrote the arrangements for the Symphony.
“I have really clear memories of different points along our musical life together where opportunities come or things happen that we weren’t planning on. … It’s this childhood giddiness of, like, ‘I can’t believe this (expletive) happened,’” SYML said. “And this is a really good example of that. When we were given the opportunity to do this, we had that moment of, ‘I can’t believe this.’”
That pinch-me factor and a reciprocal familial spirit that translates into a more meaningful experience for both the artists and audience also pervaded Thunderpussy’s spring Symphony date.
The imaginative multidisciplinary performance, which featured elaborate choreography from vocalist/dancer Molly Sides, Alice Gosti and Amy Lambert with a team of 10 dancers, doubled as an album release show and 10th-anniversary celebration for one of contemporary Seattle’s defining rock bands.
“I use this term, a color wheel of emotion,” Thunderpussy singer Sides said. “You’re kind of feeling it all and moving through it, the overwhelming sense of joy and excitement. … ‘Oh my God, this is happening.’ And whatever comes after, at least we made it here in the community that we love and (it) breathes so much excitement into our souls.”
Thunderpussy and SYML are just the latest artists to benefit from the Symphony’s pops program.
“It was around that time that popular music artists were really starting to explore their collaborations with orchestras,” said senior director of operations Kelly Woodhouse Boston, who booked the Symphony’s pops concerts then. “We were right at that time where artists like Ben Folds, Indigo Girls, Natalie Merchant — they were all coming to orchestras with shows that they wanted to do with us.”
The thinking was that these crossover performances would play well with Seattle’s “open and receptive” audiences, while artistically doing something a little different for the Symphony.
The response was overwhelmingly positive and today, nonclassical performances — which also include things like live film scoring and video game music — generate around 30% of the Symphony’s revenue. A Symphony spokesperson said those new fans often return for more traditional symphony performances, though the numbers vary year to year.
“They would come sometimes not really knowing what it was like to attend an orchestra concert, but because they really love the artist that was featured, and they would come away with a new appreciation of how symphonic music can still be relevant and exciting,” Woodhouse Boston said.
Among those early home state partners was Brandi Carlile, who first played with the orchestra in 2008, a year after releasing her breakthrough album “The Story.” Carlile returned two years later to record her first live album and has since done five separate runs with the Symphony over the years, most recently with a mesmerizing three nights in 2020.
The local pairings have morphed and evolved over the years, sometimes coming in various series the Symphony has launched. Easily the most famous — and one of the most fabled Seattle concerts of the last decade — was the Mad Season reunion/tribute in 2015, part of former Music Director Ludovic Morlot’s Sonic Evolution series.
Anchored by Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready and Barrett Martin of Screaming Trees, the grunge supergroup — with Chris Cornell and Duff McKagan filling in for late members Layne Staley and John Baker Saunders — was accompanied by the Symphony for the first portion of the show, which turned into an all-star salute and partial reunion of Temple of the Dog, another ’90s supergroup featuring members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. (Thankfully, it was also captured for a live album.)
The orchestra players were so excited for the monumental, Seattle-as-hell affair that a handful of them stayed onstage even after the Symphony’s opening segment was done.
“It was electric,” Woodhouse Boston said. “I just remember we never wanted it to end. Chills whenever Chris Cornell would sing.”
Reinvention on the fly
It may come as a surprise to outsiders — and wrack the nerves of the arrangers and pop artists playing with an orchestra for the first time — but for all the buildup and intensely detailed preparation these symphonic blowouts require, there’s very little actual rehearsal time between the bands and the orchestral musicians. That’s largely because the orchestra players can sight-read charts so flawlessly that for them, not much rehearsal is necessary. (Not to mention, time is money when 60 to 80 musicians are on the clock.)
In SYML’s case, it wasn’t until a few hours before the show that he heard his somber, often minimal songs come into full bloom with the weight of the orchestra for the first time.
“I think the older I get, the fewer new experiences I have,” SYML said. “It was stomach-turning in a great way the first time I got to hear it, because we didn’t have more than one rehearsal and it was the day of, so it was like, ‘Oh my God, this is happening either way, so I hope it’s good.’”
In some ways, that freshness and the fact that there was no precedent for presenting his music this way helped lessen the intimidation factor of stepping into the Seattle Symphony’s world.
“These musical moments that the Symphony carried, where there had previously been nothing, was really like a reinvention on the fly because (we) hadn’t heard any of the arrangements in real life before the day of the show,” SYML said. “That made the show really special for me and I was able to be really present with it, like being carried along by this living organism performing a song I know better than anyone, but it had this totally new meaning and new life in that moment.”
As an arranger, part of Joslyn’s challenge is ensuring that these pop-classical unions are “true partnerships” and not just “a rock show with the novelty of a symphony backing it.” When working with an army of highly trained orchestra musicians, it’s important to keep them challenged and engaged.
“Because I’m a symphonic player and I respect the orchestra, I want to do right by the symphony. So, I don’t want to write really dumb charts where they’re just bored to tears,” Joslyn said. “I want to write stuff that’s complicated, that’s challenging, that’s artistically gratifying for them.
“With a lot of pops arranging right now, some pop shows, the orchestra’s just there. It’s not an integral part of the show. When you make them indispensable, you make it a real partnership.”
Cue the musical bridge builder
As fruitful as the team-ups between the Seattle Symphony and other local artists have already been, those connections could strengthen as Joslyn puts his fingerprints on the pops program.
Born into an accomplished classical music family (his grandfather was a founding member of the London String Quartet), Joslyn started playing classical violin at age 5. Growing up on Bainbridge Island, he was equally hooked on Roxy Music and High Renaissance music of the 16th century. Bridging the compartmentalized worlds of classical and pop has been his “life calling.”
Thunderpussy’s unforgettable Symphony concert came amid a series of major life moments for the 42-year-old, and in some ways it helped prepare Joslyn for his new role.
The weekend of the two-years-in-the-making Thunderpussy-Symphony concert — the “first full symphonic show” that Joslyn helped produce, working hand-in-hand with the band from conception to curtain call — was an emotional roller coaster.
Right before showtime the night of Friday, May 10, his mother informed him that his father, whom he’s had a complicated relationship with in his later years, wasn’t “doing so well.”
After finishing “one of the greatest shows I’ve ever been a part of,” Joslyn said, he left Benaroya Hall feeling like a “bazillion dollars.”
The next day, Joslyn visited his father, and it was “very evident my dad was on death’s door.”
The man who gave Joslyn “the gift of music” died that Sunday, capping a dramatic three-day swing.
“I felt like there was a weird closure to the weekend,” Joslyn said. “I finally feel fully realized as a composer and what I’ve been doing.”
On top of all that, days later Joslyn became a father.
Meshing the musical talents of artists like Thunderpussy with that of the Symphony just makes sense, Joslyn says: “It’s a beautiful marriage and I don’t know why more people aren’t aware of it or celebrate it.
“I don’t see why Thunderpussy shouldn’t have a giant symphony behind them for every show that they do already. Their writing style, their presentation elicits something so much grander and so much more epic that I feel like the only way that it can be properly celebrated and fully realized is with a symphony.”
It might not be a “giant symphony,” but Joslyn’s Passenger String Quartet will perform with Thunderpussy during a Dec. 21 show at the Crocodile.
Behind the scenes, Joslyn is a plugged-in arts advocate who’s been involved with the Recording Academy, the Seattle Music Commission and SMASH in various capacities. In 2020, he was tapped to curate and write arrangements for the Symphony’s Essential Series, pandemic livestreams pairing the Symphony with Seattle artists. Woodhouse Boston touted his record of doing arrangements for artists and “administering and creating programs.”
“He’s a really good fit for everybody here and I think he’ll just continue to make the program stronger,” she said.
In many ways, everything the musical bridge builder has done over the last 20 years has made him uniquely qualified for his new role with the Symphony. With the Symphony’s platform, Joslyn hopes to utilize and strengthen these types of connections across the music community.
“The arts in the city, obviously, we’re all kind of struggling in different ways. But when we are aligned, there is strength in numbers,” Joslyn said. “For me, partnerships with the symphony, local bands, local organizations — it’s mutually beneficial on both sides.
“The Symphony has such a great profile. It’s top-notch music, it is worldly recognized. You pair that with the core (popular) music ecosystem, organizations and artists, it celebrates our city and it puts us on the map in such a different way.”