32 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY OCTOBER 12-18, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com FACE TO FACE Symphony conductor JungHo Pak moved to Monterey County for the best possible reason: because he wanted to. A lifelong Californian, he started his musical education with the San Francisco Conservatory, then as a young piano player. Much later education and work brought Pak to Southern California, confronting him with the fact there are two different cultures in his home state—two different states of mind. Monterey County, where he used to visit his in-laws, turned out to be the sweet in-between, not only reminding him of the Northern California of his childhood, but also having its own grounding, soul-nourishing quality that Pak describes as an immediate “sense of belonging.” Before touching down in Carmel Valley in 2006, Pak worked all over the country. Perhaps you know him through his affiliation with the San Diego Symphony, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra, the World Youth Symphony Orchestra at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, the San Diego Chamber Orchestra (later Orchestra Nova San Diego) or the Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra—not to mention professorship and conducting at several colleges. Weekly: It’s one thing to be introduced to piano at age 6, but not everybody ends up a famous symphony conductor. What happened? Pak: My mom saw me pounding at the piano at someone’s house. My parents came to this country after the Korean War; they wanted the best for me. But playing piano felt lonely. Then I started to play with other human beings, and it was life. In junior high I had an opportunity to conduct, filling in for an absent teacher. And once you start conducting, anybody—and I mean anybody— when you are standing in front of people, moving your arms, telling them what to do, it’s like a drug. A very dangerous drug. You famously turned a bankrupt symphony [now Orchestra Nova San Diego] into a great commercial success. What you learn is that it’s not a game. That there are people’s lives on the line. I look at Starbucks and I would look at Apple and think: Why don’t we think like an entrepreneurial company? I want to use all the techniques of Madison Avenue—the high-tech, retail and sports industries—to sell to millions, and hundreds of millions. My competition is not another orchestra. My competition is Netflix, TikTok. That’s where people are spending their time and money. What is the state of music—or arts, if you prefer—in Monterey County? In the spirit of Beethoven, who was an anarchist and a humanist at the same time: We perform to the same 800 people over and over again. We have a moral obligation to bring love and music to every single person in the county. But in order to change, we need courage and we are afraid to lose our donors and our audience. We are afraid to take risks. But everything has a lifespan. Anybody who thinks that orchestras will exist for the next million years is stupid. If you didn’t become a conductor, who did you think you would be? I wanted to be a high school teacher, like in the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus. Throughout our lives there are people who teach us music, choir, theater, and they change our lives. But then I discovered an orchestra. Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven and I could not go back. I went back to school and I thought that after graduating I would become like Leonard Bernstein. I thought I would quickly get famous. But my first conducting job was actually at a jazz band. It taught me that classical music is not the best music in the world. Go on. Beethoven and Bach are wonderful composers. But so is Miles Davis. And so are the Beatles. If I’m going to make music for the world, I have to realize that the world is much more eclectic in its taste than I think it should be. When I work with young people, I’m trying to make them believe that who they are can come through the instrument. We are taught to obey, but that’s not very American. The best artists were successful because they were not afraid to show exactly who they are. Your take on the role of music in education? The Greeks understood it much better. There’s no difference between mathematics and music, or philosophy and music. We’ve dehydrated arts like beef jerky; we turned it into a college degree or an expensive ticket for Saturday night. We have to give music back to the people. Future Conductor Music is a human right, and Jung-Ho Pak wants to use symphony to keep it that way. By Agata Pop˛eda Jung-Ho Pak fell in love with music and conducting. 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