Adam Conrad
Interviewed June 3, 2015 | Written and photographed by Rita Kovtun
It begins to downpour as I’m driving to meet Adam Conrad, a conductor and composer living and working in the Twin Cities. I’m on the highway when he calls, just to make sure I haven’t had a rainy accident. We’ve agreed to meet at his house in Northeast Minneapolis — a place he’s lived for the past three years and spends most of his time writing music.
The first thing I notice about Adam when he lets me in from the rain is his energetic, upbeat personality — something I will later see channeled into his role as the conductor of Improvestra, an improvised large ensemble guided by an established vocabulary of hand signals. He promptly offers me tea, grabbing a root beer for himself. We decide to have our conversation in his room, where he spends most of his time creating. Once inside, I see the space is filled with items that help jumpstart Adam’s inspiration process, including pieces of art, plants, and an electric piano. Joined by his beautiful Siamese cat, Ding, which he found on the street, and Spaghetti, a big black labradoodle that lies patiently in a kennel in the corner, we take a seat across from one another, a chess board and a picture of his grandfather — two symbols of great importance to Adam — between us.
Adam is originally from California, where his grandfather Allyn Ferguson was known as a prominent, prolific composer. The two would often play chess — a game Adam greatly enjoys to this day and something that he says has helped him learn things in life the way music has. “I still make correlations to chess all the time, like how I feel about things and how I think, whether I think creatively or analytically,” he says. He remembers beginning to write music when he was around ten years old, when his grandfather started teaching him theory. “He started teaching me theory because he thought I was too old to learn how to play piano — my fingers were too well developed already,” Adam says, although he does play piano now to aid him in composing. His grandfather also gave him lessons in orchestration, harmony, and composition up until his death around six years ago. By that point, Adam had already started taking commissions for small chamber groups and creating film scores.
Around this time, Adam made the move from California to Minnesota to begin school at the McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul, studying music theory and composition. Adam continued working on film scores in college, largely in the interest of getting to know musicians and building a network in his new home. At McNally, he began taking composition “to a different level,” forming the beginnings of Improvestra by delving into improv conducting. He would assemble an ensemble between ten to thirty-five players and use made-up hand signals that meant different things in order to arrange a composition on the fly. The players would choose what they played, but Adam controlled who played and how, when, and why they played. Adam has always favored late romantic composers like Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, but started evolving his style in college by integrating improv conducting into his composition style. He also worked on many jazz arrangements — something he attributes to the large amount of good jazz teachers at the college.
After graduation, he became the musical director of a church, wrote his own musical, began getting involved with festivals like Fringe and Northern Spark, and started gigging regularly with his improv band that he had formed under the name Improvestra. Not long after, Adam created Potted Meet Mondays, a three-hour social that happens the second Monday of every month at Elsie’s in Northeast Minneapolis. The social features Improvestra as the house band — a high-energy way to open and close the evening — and a few other local artists that change every month. Each meet gives Adam the chance to do live arrangements with different artists, who are backed by Improvestra. Apart from these projects, Adam makes a living teaching composition and piano, creating freelance compositions for film, taking on commissions in many different ensembles, and conducting a church choir.
Through evolving his work over time, Adam has honed his style, although he says, laughing, that his work has gotten both better and worse over time. “The more I know about music and composition, or art in general, the more I realize how much I don’t know and how ignorant I am,” Adam says. When he first started out composing, Adam says he was like a mockingbird. “I would just copy people,” he says, referencing Igor Stravinsky’s quote that good composers borrow ideas while great artists steal. “It wasn’t until I had Improvestra that I really started finding my niche as a conductor and figuring out that I could improvise and sort of compose on the spot and use social skills that I might have to guide my music,” Adam says.
Adam believes that there are only a few artists who have their own voice that is completely devoid of other people’s artistic influences, at least to the blind eye. Adam admits this is something he initially struggled with, but began to hit his stride as he developed the late romantic style of music that he loves into something of his own. “It’s so beautiful and lush and aesthetic to a lot of people, and then [I’m] mixing it with my skill set of improv conducting, creating a form of music, and instead of writing a bunch of developments, using hand signals to sort of come up with whatever I can on the spot,” Adam says. “That’s the closest I’ve come to finding my specific voice, but then I hear a new composer on Wednesday and everything’s different.”
Because of his love for late romantic composers and history, it’s no surprise that Adam trusts time in identifying authentic artistic stimulants for himself. “If something has been around for a long time and it’s been appreciated by many cultures or many generations of people, then it has merit — it has something that I can learn from it,” Adam says. Growing up, he mostly listened to big band,
motown, hip-hop, folk, and classical music, with his grandfather to help him discern what was good and what wasn’t. However, Adam does like some modern music, like that of Timbaland, Bruno Mars, and John Mayer. During his ideation and writing process, Adam likes to pace around and process things verbally — something usually done in his room, or on walks with Spaghetti.
“I really like this space because it’s got a long narrow way to pace,” Adam says, referring to his room. He describes himself as a very social person who needs to be able to talk through his ideas, often with other people. “The place I probably get the most amount of creativity or work through my biggest problems is going on walks with my dog or sort of talking them out loud to people,” he says. The walls of Adam’s room bear pieces of art he likes — he prefers large, simple art, like one such piece that depicts Otis Redding — and favorite quotes he can refer to often. He describes his space as organized, but not clean, and fills it out with an assortment of plants, which he feels also aid his process of creating music. With a setup like this, it makes sense that Adam describes his process of writing as very particular. “I like to do things my way when it comes to a process. Not to say that I can’t do them other ways — I have — and every project is very different,” Adam says. Part of this process includes using a standing desk he built for himself and a specific kind of paper and pencil. “I still order score paper and pencils from a place in LA that I love,” he says. “There’s a kind of pencil that I love that’s soft and I love writing with that, so I write all my scores on paper still.” He uses an old Rhodes piano that doesn’t have a sustain pedal and is critical on having the right lighting in his room when he writes. “I’ll spend an hour setting myself up before I write,” he laughs. Before he writes a note, Adam listens to a song by Randy Newman or Harry Nilsson and learns it on the piano as a warm-up. “I’ll listen to music and warm my ear up and then ideas start flowing,” he says.
When asked what compels him to create, Adam’s answer is simple: it’s fun. “I like the people who write music and I like being around them,” he says. Adam describes himself as someone who lives in the past and can be nostalgic, and because of this, he enjoys history and discovering new things when looking back at the past. “I thoroughly enjoy listening to Rachmaninoff and thinking about where he was in his life when he wrote something and figuring out all the little puzzles he created,” Adam says, “and then doing those things myself and figuring out my own little puzzles.” Adam does hope that after his music outlives him, people will ask the same kinds of questions about where he was at in his life when he wrote a certain piece — “what I’m thinking about, what I’m listening to, what I’m reading, what games of chess did I play, or whatever it is” — especially because he journals a lot during this process. But upon hearing his music, Adam wants his listeners to make their own conclusions. To elaborate, he cites a quote by American author Samuel R. Delany that’s up on his wall: “The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectators experience should be identical to, or have anything to do with, the artist’s. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic.”
It’s easy to see Adam’s passion for music and working with musicians, as well as his love for digging into history. Through his unique blend of late romantic composing and improv conducting, he is able to pay respect to an established form of music while forging his own path.
