Interview with James Winn, current pianist with the Argenta Trio

Conducted by Forrest Hartman

Name: James Winn

Age: 61

City of Residence: Reno, NV

Years with Argenta: 1998 to present

Forrest: How did you get into the musical life?

Jim: When I was 4 years old, a friend of the family gave us a little upright piano. It wasn’t a terrific piano, but it was pretty. It was polished wood, and it had some carving on the legs. That was sort of the style back then. My brother, who is three years older, was seven. That was about the time he should have been trying music lessons to see what he thought. Well, my brother is a very independent thinker, and because he was supposed to do it, my parents could hardly get him near it. But there was no pressure on me, so I would sit at the piano for hours. It was pretty, and it made noises. I would do that, and my parents realized that I wasn’t making random noises. I was imitating things I’d heard on the radio or little nursery songs or things like that. I was actually finding what keys meant. So, my mother decided, “If he’s going to spend that much time, obviously there’s something going on.” She taught me the notes and kind of how to read music. Then, she got me piano lessons.   

Forrest: Your mother was a player as well?

Jim: Yes, a family player. She didn’t get much beyond being able to accompany Christmas carols and do a church hymn and play “Happy Birthday,” that kind of thing. But she had piano training. My father was actually much more of a musician, but he was entirely self-taught and played only by ear. He actually earned a lot of money as a young man playing guitar and piano in bars, but he never had any formal training at all. He just had a great musical ear.

Forrest: Was he into pop music?

Jim: Jazz and popular sounds, mostly big band-style jazz. I’m not sure he would have considered modern jazz music, which is incomprehensible to me because modern jazz is the jazz I love. I remember I used to improvise and my dad would say, “You know, every time you do something, you go in one direction and I would have gone in another.” We never quite saw eye to eye on that. 

Forrest: Did you two get to play together then?

Jim: No, but both of my parents were totally supportive. I think it’s one of the reasons I am a musician. Neither parent had that attitude that too many parents have with kids who are really into music. “That’s all well and good. Now, think about what you’re going to do for a living.” Both of my parents said, “As long as you keep working and as long as you keep getting better, there’s no reason you can’t do that for a living until the world smacks you down and says no.” They were always completely supportive, and I think that’s the only reason I survived to become a professional musician. I didn’t have someone saying, “No, you really need to think about med school” or “You need to be an engineer because that’s where the jobs are.”

Forrest: It’s interesting to hear you say that because former Argenta members Louis Richmond and Philip Ruder said their parents wanted them to be lawyers, doctors or musicians. I was surprised to hear musician in that mix.

Jim: Well, the job market has changed somewhat… even more than somewhat. The question that you’re so often asked by a young person is, “If I go into this, will I make a living?” That really is not the question even though they think it is. The question is, “Can you see yourself happily doing something else?” If music is what you need to be doing, you will find a way to make a living. It may not be what you think. It may be cobbled together out of all sorts of different disciplines including a job of this and a gig of that. But if music is what you need to be doing, the music will keep you happy and it will make you able to create that lifestyle. If it’s not something you really need to do then, yes, it’s going to be a hobby. You’ll still get a great deal of pleasure from it, but go ahead and get that day job.  

Forrest: Going back to you, it seems like piano was more or less your instrument out of convenience.

Jim: Yes. It was what was there. Later on, I also studied the cello, and I enjoyed that a great deal. I kept that going strong all through high school. I was the principal cellist in my all-state orchestra and things like that, and I got to where I could play cello quite well. Unlike (former Argenta member) John Lenz, who could manage two instruments at the top professional caliber, I just couldn’t keep two instruments going well. I was a better pianist than a cellist, so when I went to college, I went with that. I don’t really play cello anymore.

Forrest: Was there ever a time when you stopped playing piano to focus on cello?

Jim: No, they were always simultaneous until I gave cello up because I just couldn’t be good enough at it.  I couldn’t keep both instruments adequately practiced.

Forrest: You talked about your father being a big band-style jazz player. Was classical music always more interesting to you?

Jim: Yes. I don’t remember this, but I am told when I was a little baby, still being carried around, not even old enough to do my own walking, that if my parents took me into the supermarket and they had Muzak playing, I would pitch a fit until they took me out. I’ve never had that flavor. I’ve had an allergy to that since pre-conceptual days. I like big band OK, but of the jazz genres, that’s my least favorite.

Forrest: Did you ever play much jazz?

Jim: No. I’m actually a terrible jazz player. If I say so myself, I’m a very good improviser, and that’s something I love to do. I do it all the time. But when I play with my jazz colleagues here, it’s always free improvisation because that’s how I work. I do very poorly at sticking to the chart. I always want to zig when it zags, so I’m lost in seconds. I feel like, “No, I wanted to follow that idea and I can’t get back to your chord.”

Forrest: I’m backtracking a little, but you said if music is what you’re supposed to do, you’ll find a way to make a career out of it. Is that how you felt at an early age?

Jim: Very much so, and that saw me through some pretty discouraging times… My parents never nagged me to practice. Never. All they had to do was say, “Piano lessons cost money. If you don’t want to practice, we can’t afford to keep sending you.” That was always plenty of a threat because I thought, “No. I can’t give that up.” Then, I’d start to work hard again.

Forrest: At what age were you pretty sure you were going to play music as a career?

Jim: I think I really knew before I was in junior high. I was interested in lots of other things. I got very interested in biology, did some of the high school advanced placement versions of pre-med-type exploratory courses. I was good at math, although I can’t say I ever considered that for a career. I didn’t love it at all, but it wasn’t hard for me. I loved creative writing. I still do that sometimes just to amuse myself, but I would never show it to anybody.

Forrest: You never tried to publish anything?

Jim: Absolutely never. My short stories will go with me to the grave. I’ve got the shredder already. I had lots of things that I liked to do, but they would always get in the way of the music. Even composition, which is musical and which I love to do, is a hobby. That’s not the thing I do to make a living because if I put the time into it that it would take to do it for a living – even though I think I’m reasonably good at it –it would take away from the practicing and the playing. The practicing and the playing is what I have to do to define myself. That’s my essential core. Without that, I implode.

Forrest: By the time you reached high school, you must have been thinking about how you were going to move forward. How did you decide on a college?

Jim: I applied to a lot of places and didn’t get in, but I also applied to a lot of places and did get in. One of my closest friends, and the guy that I played two pianos with for years was a year ahead of me in college, and he’d gone away to New England Conservatory. So, that was definitely one of the ones that I was considering, and that was one of the ones that accepted me. Juilliard did not, although I had my revenge. I went to a summer camp three years later that was filled with all the Juilliard kids and a lot of Juilliard faculty. That entire summer, one Juilliard faculty person after another took me aside, as if they were keeping it a dark secret, and said, “Wouldn’t you really rather be at Juilliard? What is there at New England Conservatory for you?”

Forrest: Did you mention that you had applied?

Jim: No, but what was at New England Conservatory was Theodore Lettvin who was an absolutely superb, unmatched musical mentor. I’ve had master classes with Leon Fleisher, I’ve had master classes with John Perry and I’ve had master classes with lots of other people whose names I won’t go into. To me, Theodore Lettvin, hands down, was the most comprehensive teacher I ever encountered. He had this gift of never running out of ways to get ideas across. That’s the trick of teaching. Every student is different. You know what they need to do, but the trick is finding the language, finding the concept, finding the metaphor that will resonate with them. You just have to keep cranking them out. Ted Lettvin had a deeper bag of tools than anyone I’ve ever seen. He would say, “OK, that didn’t do it? Try this. That didn’t do it? Try this.” He just kept going until he found the one that you could latch onto.

Forrest: It sounds like he had quite an impact on the player you are today?

Jim: Very much so.

Forrest: Do you ever think of your college experiences when you’re working with students at UNR?

Jim: All the time. I would like to think that my approach as a teacher is based on Theodore Lettvin’s. I will never be as good as he was. That’s like a freak of nature. I can’t imagine how his background created who he was. That was just part of who he was and the way he thought. But I definitely try to use his approach, and I use all of the tools that he taught me to the very greatest extent that I can.  I also try to pass them onto my students, and I do keep trying to grow. I think I discover new things on my own, which is part of the process of learning. The whole point of being a teacher is that you’re really trying to create your own job obsolescence as soon as possible. You don’t want students to need you there forever. You want them to learn how to do things for themselves.

Forrest: Great student-teacher relationships can be rare. Do you feel like you develop them every now and then?

Jim: Oh yes. I’ve had a number of students that I feel a real sense of investment in. I feel that way, actually, about most of my students, but I’ve had several that I would consider, as a teacher, spectacular successes. They got what I tried to teach them and then they took it further than I ever envisioned. They became their own people and became really serious artists and players. I feel that way about an awful lot of the people who study piano and composition with me. I get very invested in who they are, and it very much keeps me young, to the extent that I can be kept young at my age. I have no children of my own and before I started teaching as a major part of my life, I was missing that element… There was a long time when I could view the politics of the world with a lot more equanimity because I thought, “By the time this gets really awful, I’ll be dead.” Now, I’ve got young men and young women that I think of as dearly as if they were sons and daughters of my own body, and I can’t be that way anymore because they’ll still be a live. I care a lot more about many things than I used to when I was younger. It’s like being a parent.

Forrest: Did you do all of your schooling at New England Conservatory?

Jim: I got two degrees there. I got my undergraduate degree and my master’s degree. Then, I followed Theodore Lettvin out to the University of Michigan and got my doctorate.

Forrest: And your degrees are in…

Jim: They’re all piano performance.

Forrest: None are in composition?

Jim: No. I always studied composition, but I never took a degree in it. It’s also one of the hats I wear around here. Teaching composition is one of my faculty jobs.

Forrest: I know you had quite a career before coming to Reno. After graduating college, what did you do?

Jim: During the time I was getting my doctorate, my friend Cameron Grant and I were a two-piano team. We won a top prize at the 1980 Munich Competition, and we toured for Community Concerts for five years together. After that, we continued to do quite a bit of playing, although not in such organized tours as Community Concerts used to provide. I also taught for a year at the University of Texas in San Antonio as a replacement while they were holding a search for the position. I didn’t get that job. After that, I moved to New York, and Cameron and I gave our New York debut. We also both worked for years at New York City Ballet. He still works there. We were both solo pianists, and he’s one of their top flights now. He’s one of the two go-to guys for just about anything they need played on the piano. After about 14 and a half, 15 years of that, I needed to get out. Cameron has always enjoyed New York City, although he and his wife actually live in New Jersey and he commutes in. He decided he wanted a house, and they’ve lived there for awhile. He was always excited by New York. I loved the playing I could do in New York. I loved the friends that I made there, but I hated living in that city.  

Forrest: So, when you say you needed to get out, you don’t mean out of the ballet. You mean out of the city?

Jim: Out of the city and somewhat out of the ballet. As much as playing ballet can make great art, often it doesn’t. What dancers most want out of music is predictability, and that’s not really what musicians want out of it. They want freshness. The really great dancers could exist with inspired playing. So as to avoid insulting anybody else, I’ll just pick one. Performing with Merrill Ashley was magic because Merrill knew how music was going to work, and she knew what she would do with it. With her, you would consult about tempos and things like that that are important because dance moves can’t be done way too fast or way too slow. She didn’t expect you to tack the music onto her like you were composing for a cartoon. So, you could make some art, she would make gorgeous art, and the two of you together made something memorable. I used to love to play for her.  

Forrest: But that wasn’t the case with every dancer?

Jim: No. Dancers are trained from a very young age, and the bottom line is, they’re first training is actually as athletes. That’s incredibly demanding. I think it’s harder to be a ballet dancer than it is to be a football player and also more injurious to your body. The thing is, they started having to focus on the physical training in order to develop those skills, in order to develop a body that could do that amazingly difficult stuff. They have to start so young that a lot of times they don’t have time to pick up some of the other things, and their musical training tends to be, “I recognize this piece. I know where I am in it.” They frequently don’t have the time, and many of them don’t have the temperament, to go beyond and say, “I know why this piece is that way.”

Forrest: So, you needed to get out. What happened next?

Jim: Well, that’s when the job opened here. I had been coming to Reno for many, many years before that because John Lenz who had been on the faculty here since 1973 was my oldest college friend from New England. He and I had played chamber music forever, so I would come out in the summers and play chamber music with him. I actually played piano as a substitute in a lot of what were the current Argenta incarnations in those summer sessions. So, I played Won Bin Yim and I played with Cynthia Lang and I played with Philip before I was ever officially a member. I also played sonata recitals with John forever. So, I knew a lot about the Reno scene, and I knew when the job opened up that it was something that would appeal to me very much. I wasn’t like my New York friends who thought, “Reno. There’s nothing there but quickie divorces and gambling. Why would you want to go out there?” I knew Reno in a very different light, and I knew that I would be happy.

Forrest: New York and Reno are quite different cities. Has it been a good move for you?

Jim: In most cases and at most times, I’ve felt very happy about the change. Growing up in Denver before it had gotten so big, the climate was still high plains/high desert. It’s a mile high. The house where I live is almost exactly a mile high even though the mean height of Reno is maybe 500 feet lower than that. The climate, being able to look out and see mountains, all of that feels like home to me in a way that the damp flatlands of New York City never did.

Forrest: When you got hired, Ron Williams was still here. Were you hired as a composition professor?

Jim: No. There were two piano chairs when I was hired… When Ron retired, because of the transition, there had not been that much piano recruiting going on, so there weren’t that many piano students. When Ron retired, his job was actually turned into a percussion job… It took us a long time to get the second piano position back. We now have Adela Park, which makes me so happy because she is wonderful.  

Forrest: Did you always teach composition as part of your duties?

Jim: Yes. Ron did double duty. He was also in composition, so when he retired I inherited that, but it’s something I very much enjoy teaching. I actually think I enjoy teaching it more than I enjoy doing it. Or at least I feel like I’m more easily investing time in it. The problem about actually writing is it takes a lot of time, and I very infrequently have that much time. I’ve written some things I’m very proud of since taking this job, but not a whole lot of them. I’ll turn out a new piece maybe once every two or three years instead of a couple of pieces per year. If I were a professional composer, I’d have to be cranking it out a lot faster than that or I’d starve.  

Forrest: When you are composing, what do you like to write?

Jim: It’s almost always chamber music. Chamber music is what I know. Chamber music is what I love. I’ve written a few things for larger forces, but not many.

Forrest: I know you’re not trying to make a living as a composer, but it seems like a tough time to even get things played.

Jim: It’s very tough, and that’s where chamber music comes in. There are certain very good venues for composers right now that are buying. Electronic outlets for music, whether the music itself is created electronically using synthesized instruments or whether it’s just marketed that way – video games, movie scores, television scores, advertising – those places are still hiring. Even here in Reno we have International Game Technology. They keep a good staff of composers just to write the music to go in the slot machines because it gets more and more sophisticated. A lot of people are making livings doing that kind of writing. Concert music is more of a problem, especially for large forces. For large forces, the best markets right now are wind ensembles of various kinds and choral groups. There are more of them, especially at the university level, that are still purchasing things. Symphony is the real struggle because symphonies are finding it harder and harder to get backing from their audiences and from their boards for doing new music. They feel like they’re just barely making ends meet, and if they don’t do their quota of Beethoven symphonies, they won’t have an audience. The hardest sell around at the moment is full symphony.

Forrest: I know you have an interest in new music. Does that trouble you?

Jim: It all troubles me. I think the world at large has allowed merchandising to control the concept of art way too much. I’m not sure what to do about it. As educators, we try to do our part to expose people to the fact that it can be better than this. It doesn’t have to be that generic blonde singer that sounds like every other generic blonde singer doing songs that sound like every other song. It doesn’t have to be that, but the money behind that is enormous because it’s very cheap to produce. The returns on it are vast compared to what has to go into it. You know, that generic blonde singer is naïve, so you put her in a costume and she looks pretty, and you have a pitch corrector if she can’t sing in tune, which she probably can’t. It costs many thousands of dollars to make that CD, but it’s going to make many millions of dollars through her personal appearances, CD sales, record promotion and advertising. They look at that and say, “Why should we pay for a string quartet with players that have had to be practicing their instruments since they were four years old? It takes hours and hours of rehearsal on every new piece they learn. The little blonde singer here can turn out a new CD every couple of weeks if we need her to.” The basic thing that they’re selling is not even the CD, it’s how she looks. As a culture, we’re very dishonest about that. Really, you don’t need the music at all. The boys want to look at her. The girls want to be her. Just take a few pictures.

Forrest: What do you see as the future of new music in the classical realm?

Jim: I have faith in the resilience of it. You will hear people constantly talking about how our audiences are getting older and older, but I remember Bob Levin – who I think is an absolutely brilliant lecturer – talking about that. He said, “It’s always been the case, and yet somehow the audience never dies. It’s because as you get older, you’ve had life experience. You’re no longer interested in that soda pop blonde singer. It doesn’t say enough, and that’s when you begin to discover classical music or sophisticated jazz. You start saying, “Wait. There could be more here. That’s not enough. I’m no longer going to just watch her shake her hips and that’s going to do it for me. I want some substance in what she’s singing.” Then, you start wanting Ella Fitzgerald instead of Britney Spears or Lady Gaga.

Forrest: So, as audiences mature, you think they grow into great music?

Jim: Yes. I think there’s a great deal of resilience about quality music. Now, what that music will be, I don’t know. One of the things about the latter half of the 20^th century and the beginning of the 21^st is that new music has exploded into a million different avenues… It’s kind of what happened at the very beginning of the 1600s. Eventually, it was the Camerata that then developed opera and the Baroque styles and all of that. That became the branch that flourished. I don’t know which one is going to flourish now. My feeling is that it may be not so much the concert music but the modern jazz music. But modern jazz is getting to a degree of sophistication that it’s starting to scrape off a lot of casual listeners.

Forrest: Going back to Argenta, it’s nice that you’re able to champion new music as part of the group.

Jim: We feel like it’s definitely part of something we do, and I think most music educators do… One never gets tired of playing a Beethoven trio or a Brahms trio or a Schumann trio, but by the same token, there are a finite number of those. You’ve got to find some new things to keep growing.

Forrest: You’re only the second pianist that Argenta has had, correct?

Jim: Yes.

Forrest: Does it feel special to be a key component of such a long-running group.

Jim: I don’t really think about it. I’ve enjoyed all of the incarnations that I’ve had the privilege of experiencing. Each one is very, very different. The group dynamic changes enormously, but I’ve never had one that felt like, “Ughh, this bird just can’t fly.” There’s always something very special about them.

Forrest: It doesn’t sound like there have been many personality conflicts in the group despite all the different players. That’s pretty remarkable.

Jim: Before I came into the group, I could not say, but I have not played with any version where I felt like we could not get along. There were some very different directions in which things were going. You can’t even say there was a progression where it was getting better or it had a valley here. That’s not what it was about. It was what it was at each point along the way, but I think it’s always provided something very special.

Forrest: It’s probably fun to play with different people at different points.

Jim: It is, but it’s also fun to live with people. With the Nevada Chamber Music Festival, the Reno Chamber Orchestra and Theodore Kuchar bring in all these extremely glamorous, high-powered guests. Some of them come back every year, and there are some new ones. When playing in that festival, you’re throwing together repertoire very quickly in a way that you can only do with people who are this incredibly polished and accomplished and familiar with how it all works. But it’s not the same thing as having a group that you live with where you get to know each other’s musical body language. That way, if you hear something, you know what’s coming next.

Forrest: Speaking of the Nevada Chamber Music Festival, that’s a reminder of what an extraordinary part you play in the Reno classical music scene. You take part in that event, and you play with the Chamber Orchestra, the Philharmonic and Argenta. You’re everywhere.

Jim: Well, it’s cobbling that career together out of whatever I can get.

Forrest: It has to feel good to be doing so much.  

Jim: Well, it feels busy, and busy is always better than not busy enough, even though sometimes I think this may be the season they carry me out on my shield. I’m looking at the amount of music I have to learn and keep learning, and I wonder if I’m going to make it out of this one. But I’ve had that feeling before and somehow one manages. 

Forrest: Do you ever think about cutting back.

Jim: Katharine, my significant other, is always saying, “You need to stop doing this. You’re a workaholic.” But I look at it and, first of all, there’s not that much of what I do that I don’t like doing. That’s really the problem. I could cut back, but in general, the small handful of things that I really don’t like doing are not the things I have the option of saying “no” to. So, the only way to cut back would be to thin out the things that I really want to do. I think, “Why would I do that? That’s where I’m having fun.”

Forrest: So, your future, as you see it, is doing just what you’re doing now?

Jim: I have high hopes of dying in harness because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to afford to retire. I want to be one of those concert legends. “Right in the middle of a Beethoven sonata, he just fell off the bench.”