This is part of a conversation between Grammy winning orchestra conductor Jeff Tyzik and journalist and podcaster James Brown. Tyzik shares his intense travel schedule and how he managed to continue it during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also compares working in front of audiences large and small.
JAMES BROWN: At the height of your travel schedule, how often did you go out of town?
JEFF TYZIK: Well, before the Pandemic, I had two years where I was only home ten days a month for a seven or eight month period. So I was really booking it back then. Then the Pandemic hit, and actually, a lot of orchestras closed down during the Pandemic because there was going to be nobody in the theater. You couldn't have people that were all over the country. But orchestras decided they needed to stay relevant, and they wanted to do something. So within the guidelines of social distancing, which affected how many people could be on stage, orchestras got into streaming, so they were trying to still reach their subscriber base by saying, hey, you can now watch us on Friday Night Live. We're going to be doing a live concert.
And we were limited to the number of players we could have on stage because of social distancing rules. So I actually had to write a ton of music for a small orchestra because not a lot of music exists for that. So I'll never forget. So anyway, before I get to that, during the Pandemic, I was traveling and my wife and my manager both said, you're out of your mind because this is before testing, before vaccines.
So I was masking up and gloving up and all the stuff that we find out later, it really didn't make a difference anyway. And I was flying and I was going to Detroit and Dallas and places and we were doing these streaming concerts. So we were playing in a theater, a 2000 seat theater to nobody except cameras and there was no music. So I created a couple of concerts. One was a ragtime concert. And it was the music of Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, W.C. Handy, all this kind of early jazz which was kind of written for small orchestras. Anyway, that kind of was the nature of the music. So I put together a concert that was very successful.
And then the Detroit Symphony wanted to have this group, Troop Vertigo, which is a circuit group, come and perform for streaming. And they do all these classical masterworks like the Dvořák Symphonic Dances and all these different pieces that are for full orchestra. So I had to take those pieces which are written for full orchestra and condense them so that they could be played by 24 people and still sound real, still sound right, which, I mean, it took hundreds of hours.
I ended up writing a lot of music during that time period. So we would do these concerts, we play this big piece. Piece would finish Dead Silence, nobody in the hall. And then you turn around and there's a camera out there and I'd have to talk to the camera. So then they started letting in, in a 2000ft hall, 50 people. And they would sit like 40ft apart, like all over the hall. And I'll tell you one thing, 50 people, when they're clapping can make a hell of a racket in the 2000 ft room.
So then we play and there would be 50 people and we would be still streaming. And I'll never forget that Buffalo asked me if I would come and help them out because the conductor that they normally use was quarantined and couldn't come. So I went there and did a few weeks. But one of them, some of the restrictions had been lifted and we actually had 250 people in the audience and the orchestra was crying because people were back in the room.
This kinetic energy that happens between the listener and the musicians it hadn't been there for months and months and all of a sudden there were people and it was like, it was unbelievable, the emotion on stage. So that was a pretty crazy time period. Anyway, since the pandemic after that I've cut back a bit,...
