Check out Rory's Kickstarter Campaign for Pocket Concerts here.
I first met Rory when I was born. I wasn't sure what to think of him at first...
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| Me and Rory, circa 1986 |
...but over time we grew to be friends as well as siblings. I'll make no bones of it – I think Rory is
awesome, both as an older brother and as a mentor. Over the last few years our friendship has
strengthened over common ground as we've both pursued freelance music
careers. He often provides me with
invaluable advice and perspective on my chosen line of work. A few months ago, as we walked through
Toronto's High Park, Rory talked to me about his career path, and his new
chamber music series, Pocket Concerts...
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| Rory McLeod (photo by Bo Huang) |
We grew together up
in a musical family, but you didn't immediately pursue a musical career. How did you eventually come to be a
professional musician?
When I was 17 and applying for university, like most
17-year-olds, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And I hadn't really taken music all that
seriously up to that point, so I honestly didn't think of it as a career option. I applied for bachelor of arts programmes and
some arts and science mixed programmes, because I wanted to keep as many doors
open as possible, because I had so many different interests. And then when I was living in Montreal I was
paying for my own violin lessons and I just – as I got more and more serious
about practising and worked harder at it, over time I realised it was the most
interesting and fulfilling and challenging thing in my life, and that was what
made it so attractive to me. So that's
when I decided to study music and try to make a career out of it.
You were originally a
violinist. What made you switch to
playing the viola?
Alex, our older brother, was a violist. So I always knew that it was possible to
switch from violin to viola. And I'd
always been a bit curious about it, but I didn't really try it until I was 19
and my violin teacher went away for the summer.
I wanted to take some lessons because I had more time than when I was in
class, so I called up a viola teacher and borrowed a viola from the shop I was
working in, and I really fell in love with the sound. Then I started playing some chamber music on
viola, and I really enjoyed playing the role of violist – the middle
voice. I had always played second
violin, so the role of playing viola came naturally to me.
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| Rory playing his viola (photo by Vuk Pantovic) |
When I was living in Montreal, there was this strange and
very upsetting event when my violin was stolen from a car. I thought it was safe and that nobody would
see it covered up by a blanket in the back seat, but it got stolen. And at first I was really upset, of
course. But then eventually the
insurance money came through, and I had been playing enough viola at that point
that I started to consider maybe I should replace my violin with a viola. And I started trying out violins and violas,
and I discovered that I liked the sound of every viola I tried better than
every violin I tried. So I figured that
was probably a sign.
After finishing your
musical studies, you got a job with Symphony Nova Scotia. You left the job after two seasons and came
back to Toronto to freelance. What
motivated your decision to leave the orchestra job?
Well there was a combination of factors that led to that
decision. One is that Toronto is home
for me. My girlfriend lives here, and we
were doing long-distance for two years, and I was starting to get tired of only
seeing Emily once a month. Also, Halifax
is really far away from a lot of other places, and it starts to feel isolated
after a while. The musical community is
full of wonderful people there, and the Symphony is a very good orchestra, and
I really enjoyed my job. But the job
alone was not enough to keep me there.
So I decided to try my luck in Toronto and keep stretching myself
artistically, and have a bit more of a varied career combining chamber music
and teaching and orchestra.
And how are you
finding it now, working as a freelancer?
Overall it's great.
For the most part I've been pretty steadily employed since I came
back. I've been really lucky with the
combination of coming back at a time when work was available, and knowing the
right people who could get me that work.
And I'd done well in a couple of auditions – that helped me to secure
some orchestra sub work. The first year
I came back I knew by the beginning of the season I would have enough work to
survive on, so that was quite a relief.
I had thought it would be much harder than it was, to be honest. And then over the course of that first year,
I started to realise that just subbing in orchestras was not enough for
me. I wanted something that I could
connect with more. I’d always loved
playing chamber music and wanted to play more chamber music, and I wanted to
find a way to make that happen. That was
when I came up with Pocket Concerts, a home concert series. I also started teaching during my second year
in Toronto, and so now the combination of teaching and running the chamber series
and orchestra sub work provides a really good balance of different kinds of
work… and it pays the bills!
Tell us about Pocket
Concerts. How did the idea first come
up?
Well it started really by doing a couple of house concerts through
people that I knew. I had done a couple
of concerts up in Owen Sound through a personal connection, and I went up there
with my brother's quartet – the Ton Beau Quartet – and
performed a concert there. And Alex (our
brother) and I got talking about how it would be great to make more house
concerts happen. Because we loved
playing them so much and we could tell that the audiences loved it as well.
There's sort of a funny story around the beginnings of
Pocket Concerts as well. I was
undergoing a steroid treatment for my inflammatory kidney condition. I was on Prednisone – a high dose of
Prednisone – for six months. One of the
side effects of Prednisone is that you become incredibly energetic. And so I was an insomniac for five months. Not only was I waking up in the middle of the
night, but I was waking up with this feeling that I gotta do something, I need to make something happen. So I just started sending out emails and
brainstorming like crazy. And I had a
lot of face-to-face meetings with people who I thought would be interested in
the idea and could help me develop it.
And I spent a lot of sleepless nights sending emails to artists to see
if they would be interested in performing, and trying to make connections with
potential hosts.
It's been a year now
since you started Pocket Concerts, and it's already turned out to be quite a
success. What do you think the appeal is
of this concert format?
I think there's a combination of factors that are appealing
to people. The first is that this is
really how chamber music was meant to be heard.
Most of these pieces that we play were written to be played among
friends in a small room – hence the name "chamber music". So we're really bringing chamber music back
to its roots. And there's something
really authentic about that. But there
are a few other factors as well. I think
there's a movement nowadays back towards live music and live performance,
because people have realised that sitting at home and watching videos on YouTube
just doesn't give you the same feeling.
But also the involvement of our hosts – by basically asking them to
donate their homes and food and wine and chairs for our concert, we're
involving them on a much deeper level than we normally do in the classical
music world. It takes away that
artificial separation between performers and audience and the people providing
the venues. What we've discovered is
that we're building up a community as we go, and those connections last. People who've hosted become devoted fans of
the series.
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| The audience applauds a Pocket Concert featuring Rory, Rebecca MacLeod (no relation), and Rory's girlfriend Emily Rho - photo by Vuk Pantovic |
How do you see Pocket
Concerts fitting into the musical scene in Toronto and in Canada?
I think it has the potential to really change the way that
people relate to classical music. I
think people, when they experience chamber music in that intense environment,
they feel a deeper connection not just to the music but to the performers and to
each other. And by strengthening that
sense of connection, I think we make it possible for people to find a new
passion for classical music. So I see us
as part of the overall landscape of the classical music scene in Toronto. You know, the symphony is there and the opera
is there and the ballet is there and we've got many great early music groups
and other chamber music series going on – but we're offering something a little
bit more personal, and something that might be more appealing to young people
who haven't heard a lot of classical music.
What are your future
hopes and ambitions for Pocket Concerts?
We have several ideas in the works at the moment. We'd really like to expand our private
concert series, so we're working on a targeted marketing campaign to try to get
the word out to our potential customers.
But we're also talking about outreach programmes, one of which is to
offer little mini lessons online, called Pocket Lessons. Three-minute lessons done by our performers,
just giving tips on how to practise, how to work on certain technical aspects
of their instruments. And we would offer
that as a resource and also as a way for people to find out that we're
around. We're also talking about
starting an office concert series. We'll
probably call it something like Pocket Concerts: Music at Work (our tagline now
is Music at Home, so it's sort of adaptable).
We want to offer either early morning or noon hour concerts to people in
their offices who just want to fit something in to their day. So we're really trying to incorporate music
into people's daily lives.
What one piece of
advice would you give to a young freelancing musician?
Say yes. Say yes to
every opportunity that comes your way, and try everything until you find what
really resonates with you. Don't be
afraid to take a risk and do something you've never done before. Because that's how you learn and grow as a
person. And if you have an idea, do
it! If you think something could be
great, don’t just sit there and say "wouldn’t it be nice"... Every musician I
know has an extensive personal network that can help them if they actually tap
into it. One of the things I've realised
while doing Pocket Concerts is that people really want to help you. If you're passionate about something, it's
really easy to get people on board.
Thanks for chatting,
Rory!
