In the fall of 2022, the Oregon Symphony hired Deanna Tham as their new associate conductor. Deanna is incredibly talented and she's an expert at drawing out rich sounds from large orchestras. When she needs to let loose Deanna goes rock climbing. You might think that scaling rock faces has nothing to do with conducting an orchestra, but for Deanna, the two disciplines have a lot in common.
In the fall of 2022, the Oregon Symphony hired Deanna Tham as their new associate conductor. Deanna is incredibly talented and she's an expert at drawing out rich sounds from large orchestras. When she needs to let loose Deanna goes rock climbing. You might think that scaling rock faces has nothing to do with conducting an orchestra, but for Deanna, the two disciplines have a lot in common.
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Deanna Tham:
Something about climbing outside, it gives you a respect for the sport that I find in music as well. That you are up against something so much bigger than you, and all you can do is be thankful that you are part of this. It just gives you a new respect, a different kind of respect for what you're trying to do.
Shelby Stanger:
In the fall of 2022, the Oregon Symphony hired Deanna Tham as their new associate conductor. Deanna is incredibly talented and she's an expert at drawing out rich sounds from large orchestras. Like many classical music fields, life as a conductor can be intense. Deanna spends most of her time studying music, rehearsing and performing. When she needs to let loose Deanna goes rock climbing. You might think that scaling rock faces has nothing to do with conducting an orchestra, but for Deanna, the two disciplines actually have a lot in common. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living an REI Co-op Studio's production.
It takes a lot of work to become a full-time conductor of a symphony orchestra. The process involves many years of school, thousands of hours of practice, and a deep understanding of instruments and ensembles. Not to mention it's a really competitive field. Deanna has dedicated more than half of her life to the art of conducting. When she was 15 years old, she had the chance to conduct an orchestra for the first time, and she was hooked. Deanna Tham, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Deanna Tham:
Thanks. It's like a weird dream to be on here, because it's just really cool to be able to talk about these two separate worlds in my life.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, I don't know anybody who's the conductor of a major orchestra and also a badass rock climber.
Deanna Tham:
Yeah, there's not that many of us, and I know musicians sometimes can be... I do actually have musician friends who climb with me, but yeah, I know a lot of musicians can be wary of danger of their limbs and things.
Shelby Stanger:
That's right. I didn't even think about that. You need your fingers.
Deanna Tham:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. Can you tell me a little bit about your world? I have a few friends who are musicians, but I really don't know anything about the path to becoming a conductor.
Deanna Tham:
I don't come from a musical family or anything. My parents played instruments when they were in the band in high school, and so I wanted to join the band in high school, but I thought I was going to be a doctor or something, or an engineer. Then I joined the band and I just loved the camaraderie of playing in a large group. Then I got an opportunity in high school to experiment with conducting through marching band. I had a really encouraging band director. He gave me an opportunity, and that talent just kind of came through.
Shelby Stanger:
What instruments did you play?
Deanna Tham:
I played piano from when I was really little.
Shelby Stanger:
How little?
Deanna Tham:
Like four.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow.
Deanna Tham:
Having a musical instrument, playing a musical instrument is really great for brain development that early, there's all these studies about it. I'm not going to bore you with all that, but honestly, when I was young, didn't really enjoy piano. I didn't like practicing. But when I joined the band in sixth grade when it became ensemble music, when it became something that I could do with other people. Then I picked up the French horn then, and that's when I really started to think, "This is something I really, really enjoy."
Shelby Stanger:
The French horn is cool.
Deanna Tham:
Yeah. My parents, when they were in the band, they both played the trumpet and I wanted to play brass instrument, but the French horn is the big star of all those John Williams scores. If you like seeing Star Wars or Jurassic Park or ET, all those big classic movie scores, John Williams just loves the French horn. I wanted to play that instrument. But it's when I got to conduct for the first time, I came up through that opportunity in the high school marching band. I don't know how much you know about marching band, but there's a student conductor, and they're called the drum major of the marching band. I saw that and I wanted to do that. Actually, this is where my little plug for representation matters because the drum major before me in high school, she was an Asian woman, as well. I just saw like, "Oh, that's, that's the thing that Asian women do."
She no longer is in music, but just having her up there really just made me think, "This is no big deal. This is something that I can do. This is something I want to do." I tried out for drum major and I found that I had some talent in conducting and hearing all the different parts of a musical piece at the same time, and knowing when they would come in and knowing how they fit together, and knowing what should come to the fore and what should come to the back. I didn't know that these were the things I was hearing when I was that young, but when I got up to conduct just to feel all of those parts coming at me and being able to filter them through me and then push them out to the audience, it was just a feeling like nothing I've ever felt before.
If you ever get a chance to stand in front of an orchestra and just have them play at you, it is absolutely electric. The sound that comes at you, it's like a wall that just hits you in the face. Then to take all of that energy and really put your stamp on it and shape it and bring these people together, it's like... I'm trying to... I have this image in my head of a superhero or something that takes in a big laser attack and yodas it into a little ball and throws it back. But that's the feeling that you take all this energy and you kind of Jedi it into this ball, and you create something else out of it and you throw it out to the audience. It's absolutely electric. That was the moment I was like, "I can do this." My band director saw talent in me. He said, "You can do this. You have talent. This is a path that you can take."
Shelby Stanger:
After high school, it was clear to Deanna that she wanted to pursue a career in classical music. She holds a master's degree in conducting from Northwestern and a postgraduate degree in orchestral conducting from the Cleveland Institute of Music. Deanna's been working with prestigious orchestras and symphonies for the last 10 years. For those who don't know much about classical music, it's important to understand that conducting is a complex job that can be hard to put into words. Deanna isn't just up there telling the musician what notes to play. What is she doing standing in front of all those instruments?
Deanna Tham:
I get asked this all the time, "What does the conductor actually do?" I will tell you, I ask myself that at least twice a week, "What does a conductor actually do? What am I actually doing up there?" For the most part, especially with a group like the Oregon Symphony, they can, for the most part, play the notes in the right time together with or without a conductor. There are of course some spots where they need a little bit of help if a tempo shifts very suddenly. The question is, what do I do? A lot of it is to conduct the rehearsal process. Every week here we perform and we have, I think it's for rehearsals to put on the concert, and the next week they will have four different rehearsals for the next concert. It's not a lot of time to put together a two-hour show, especially with 70 people on the stage.
But also when you get to the actual gestures and what we're doing with the stick, it's extremely cerebral. You're receiving a lot of input and you're shaping it to create a cohesive structure over a piece. How do I make this arc make sense? How do I make this thing flow so that the players and the audience don't feel a disruption, they feel that the performance makes sense? The instrumentalists are really busy playing their own parts, especially if the music is really hard. They don't have time to think about what's going to happen three pages later. That's the conductor's job. That's what the stick waving is about. How do we shape this, that's happening now so that what is going to happen in 30 minutes makes sense. Added on top of that is the fact that they have music in front of them and they actually aren't looking at you most of the time. My influence is, I'm thinking ahead, I'm playing with your psychology and then group psychology. How do I make all these people do the same thing at the same time?
Shelby Stanger:
Conducting is incredibly physical. It demands energy, focus and flow. A few years into her conducting career, Deanna found another outlet that used a lot of the same skills. Instead of being up on a stage in front of musicians, she was rock climbing, balancing on holds, using her strength and focusing her energy to make it up the wall.
Okay. Tell me, how did you get into rock climbing? When in your path did you find rock climbing, and how did that stick?
Deanna Tham:
Yeah. I got into rock climbing later in my life. Probably what, around 24, something like that. I just gone through... I don't know, probably a lot of people start new things this way, but I'd gone through a bad breakup and needed something to do.
Shelby Stanger:
No, no one has ever told me that after a breakup, they found an outdoor sport.
Deanna Tham:
You need something to do. I was home and my sister was like, "We're going to go to the bouldering gym. You want to come?" I went and I just... I love introducing new people to rock climbing. I love doing that. \I found that there are two types of people. There are people that are like, "Oh, I'm not great at this. It's okay, I guess." Then there are people who are instantly addicted. I was the latter, just instantly addicted to it. I think it was a combination of things. One, you're out of a bad breakup, you're looking for yourself again. I wanted to feel strong again. Rock climbing makes you feel strong, which maybe 18 months after I started climbing, I was probably the strongest I've ever been in my life. Could never do a pull-up ever in life.
Then at 26, 25, did my first pull-up, and we're like, what happened? Also, I don't meditate. I'm just one of these people maybe I think I'm one of these people that should meditate but can't really stand it long enough to do it. My brain is very active. What climbing was able to do for me was focus it on one idea, especially when you're bouldering, right? You're working on the problem. I think that's why also I became so addicted to it. It just gave my brain something singular and focused and problem oriented to really work on and find peace in that singularity of thoughts.
Shelby Stanger:
I just love how your brain thinks. I think part of it is you've realized that rock climbing, just like music is a form of meditation in so many ways, and just sitting still, your brain slows. You have to focus. There is nothing like, when I first started going to the bouldering gym, you suck. But yeah, you suck enough times and you fail enough times and you keep getting to the top. Even if you do the easiest routes over and over, you get to the top enough times, you can't help but feel more badass after doing that.
Deanna Tham:
Yeah. For sure. When you're looking to find yourself again and feel like you have control again and feel strong again, that's an addictive feeling.
Shelby Stanger:
There were so many aspects of climbing that Deanna fell in love with, the power of her body, the way climbing helped her focus on the present moment and quiet her mind, and the amazing community she met through the activity. When we come back, Deanna talks about the types of rock climbing she does, how the sport has influenced her relationship with failure, perfectionism, and more.
Conductor Deanna Tham started rock climbing to get over a breakup more than 10 years ago. Little did she know she would fall in love with the sport. She squeezes in time at the climbing gym between rehearsals and concerts with the Oregon Symphony. During the symphony's off season, Deanna and her partner climb more technical routes outside. You were in your twenties when you found rock climbing, and then eventually you went outside and started to like... I've seen pictures of you. You're climbing some serious, straight-up vertical walls of granite.
Deanna Tham:
Yeah, I'm lucky that my partner lives in the Denver area, so there's like a lot of great climbing out there. It's so accessible that we just, during the summer when I... Orchestra's off during the summer and if I don't have a summer engagement, I just go out there and we hang out, and just climb every weekend or climb before work. It's that easy to just get out there and do it. Gym climbing is great. I feel strong, and it's awesome. But something about climbing outside, it gives you a respect for the sport that I find in music, as well. That you are up against something so much bigger than you and all you can do is be thankful that you are part of this. It just gives you a new respect, a different kind of respect for what you're trying to do.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm not a huge rock climber. I do a bit in the gym. I've only climbed outside a handful of times. It seems like such an individual sport, but it's not in some ways.
Deanna Tham:
Yeah, in some ways it definitely is, right? It's just you and the wall a lot. But also it's not because it's you and the wall and your belayer who's keeping you alive. There's similarities to conducting in all of those roles. Let's talk about the belayer. You're trying to set up your leader for success, and you're trying to give them what rope when they need. You're trying to give them not rope when they don't need it so that they can concentrate on the climb. You're almost trying to protect their psychology from the ground. You can feel their energy through the rope. I know that me and my partner have that.
If one of us is on edge on the rope, you can feel it through the rope. Especially if we're climbing in a place like El Dorado Canyon where we climb a lot. A lot of those climbs, you can't see your partner and you can't hear them because the creek is so loud. You're communicating through this rope. It's a lot of what I do as a conductor. We talked about that manipulation and that psychology that you have with people who aren't even really looking at you. That's kind of the role of the belayer, as well, to just set your climber up to do the best they can so that they're not afraid to take the risk.
Shelby Stanger:
While climbing is exhilarating and challenging, scaling giant rock walls can also be scary. Moving through fear is something Deanna practices all the time in climbing and conducting. Both disciplines involve a bit of risk. One wrong move can have a big impact. So much of music, I'm sure conducting especially, is perfectionism. One note off and the music sounds different. In rock climbing, you have to kind of one, get over perfectionism but also you could die. I want to talk to you about how rock climbing has maybe helped you.
Deanna Tham:
Yeah, classical music especially the way that we're educating is still, it's a classic art. It's like ballet. You all have the stereotypical vision of what a ballet master is like. It's very dictatorial and old-fashioned. Classical music is one of those arts, as well, that's just old. The way we're educated maybe sometimes isn't the healthiest. We're pitted against each other constantly. Because there's one spot and you have to win. When we're being educated, it's about being the best. It's not just about professional, it's about beating other people. It's not the healthiest mindset to be in, because we're educated in this way in music, our fear of failure is really acute. A lot of times that can paralyze you. I found that in my own life, if you don't take the risk, you can't fail.
But when I found climbing, failure is how you learn to climb. You don't get to the top without falling off the wall a bunch of times. That failure is placed on you in a very visceral way. That is a basic fear that we all have falling to our deaths, falling off of something high. You're faced with that fear that butts up against this very primal instinct that you have, like "Don't fall." But you inevitably do over and over and over. You're faced with a very real kind of consequence of your failure that you get to train out of you. Conducting is the same way, where if you do something wrong in front of the orchestra, there's 70 people... Especially me, right? I'm a younger conductor right now. There are people in the orchestra that have been playing their instruments longer than I've been alive.
I'm up here telling them how they should play Beethoven or Tchaikovsky or whatever. If I say something wrong, if I say, "No, that note was right," when it was in fact wrong or if I say, "No, that was sharp," when it was in fact flat. There is an distinct and immediate reaction that you feel in the orchestra, you feel their trust in you drop, instantly. That's a really a similarity that I found between rock climbing and conducting that was really interesting is that you're just faced immediately with your failure. You have to get over that fear. You push the button of like, "Am I going to fail," a lot. Sometimes it's really helpful when I actually do go and reflect on falling and what I've learned from it. Sometimes it's really demoralizing. Sometimes it can paralyze you even more. You're like, "I don't want to keep failing. I just don't want to keep doing it." I'm still working out exactly how those two things either help or hurt each other. But I do know that they are similar. Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
What about flow? You feel it so much in these sports, but in music, too. I'd love to hear your experience with flow and your thoughts on it.
Deanna Tham:
Yeah, so I've learned, first of all a couple of things that are really interesting about climbing and conducting, and they might be a little bit technical, but the first things that helps to contribute to this flow that we're talking about is to stay really grounded. We learned this in conducting, which seems really weird, but they... Like I talked about, I'm a really energetic conductor. A lot of my energy comes out of my limbs. When I was learning how to conduct and the teachers that I was studying with, they would say, "Look, you have all this energy, but it's really diffused and it's all out there. You're not communicating this energy in a way that these musicians cannot understand. What you need to do is stay grounded and stay on your feet," because that's where we have balance and power with the ground.
When your feet are touching the ground through our legs, through our core, that's where the power comes from. It's a really weird technical thing, but in conducting that is where the music comes from. It comes from the ground and the core. I've really taken that... When I'm struggling with my climbing, which we all do. There's plateaus and all sorts of that when we're climbing. I always come back to that.
I was climbing the other day and there was this one move that I was having trouble with and I just kept trying it over and over. I just remembered to stay grounded in your feet just like you do when you're conducting. That's where the music and the energy comes from, and the flow comes from. I tried the move again and this time really focused on before the move, sinking into the wall, feeling the wall, feeling how the wall feels against my feet instead of pulling with my hands and trying to get up from the top, but really pulling from the bottom and staying grounded and I stuck the move.
It's a really weird technical thing, but to stay grounded, because that's where your power is. I just remind myself both ways when I feel like I'm not communicating effectively on the podium, am I in my feet? Am I grounded? Am I really harnessing all the potential of my power and my balance? The thing I really found interesting, as well, is this analogy of gripping. When climber's in for the first time, or if you're struggling with a problem, you're like holding the holds really tightly and you're pulling up with your arms.
Especially now that I've gotten more into sport climbing where the routes are longer and you have to endure the whole time and be more efficient. This analogy of not over gripping on the wall is really helpful. When you over grip on the wall, you interrupt the flow, you're trying to control everything that your body is doing, and you stiffen the body, and you stiffen the art. I have to remind myself, you can't over grip the orchestra. You can't exercise too much control over them because then the flow of the music becomes stilted. It becomes choppy. It doesn't make sense anymore. It's a really interesting analogy of having the right amount of control. One of my conducting teachers used to say, "You want to have a wide lens and a soft focus."
Shelby Stanger:
That's a good analogy for life.
Deanna Tham:
Yeah, definitely.
Shelby Stanger:
When we over grip, it's not so fun.
Deanna Tham:
Yeah. Another thing that I've found translates between the two disciplines is this idea of trying to repeat a performance because it went well one time. If I have to perform, I'm performing next weekend and I will perform the same concert four times. When we're climbing, it's called a redpoint attempt is when you've been working on the route and working and working and working, and now you're going to try to do the whole thing clean. A lot of redpoint attempts are fraught with performance anxiety, or you're thinking about all the drills you did. Like, "Okay, that move has to be like this because I practiced it like that."
You're trying to repeat a performance. And for those of us who ever tried to repeat a specific performance, when something went well, the percentage of times that has worked is very low. Music, it happens and then it's gone, right? Sound happens in time. Climbing is like that, too, where when you're on a route, once you do the move, it's gone and you're onto the next move. How do you reconcile something that is fleeting? How do you control something? How do you repeat something that is fleeting like that where you can't just sit in that moment forever?
What I've learned from performing is how to achieve that repeat performance. I remember the first time I kind of figured it out was during one of my recitals and I was like, "The rehearsal went so well, and I just have to remember to that the trombones have can't be too loud here and the strings have to be softer here, but I can't go too fast here. Or also when I get there, it's going to be too fast."
I was thinking about all these things, and the performance is inevitably stilted and robotic, even though you're trying to do all the things right that you rehearsed. But when I figured it out, it was like, "You know what? It's not necessarily about all these specific things. You've rehearsed them, they're in your body, and now what you need to concentrate on to repeat the performance is intention and mindset." That translates to climbing so much for me, if I maintain this larger intention and mindset about what you're trying to do, that's when I'm the most successful. That's when I can repeat a performance or even make a performance better the second time. That's how I can get the send.
Shelby Stanger:
There's so many of us who are chasing a repeat performance, whether it's catching a wave, ascending a difficult climb, or repeating a concert. Deanna Tham, wow. I love your insights. If you want to learn more about Deanna Tham, you can get tickets to the Oregon Symphony and see her conduct in person. You can also watch the livestream of Deanna's concerts online at the Oregon Symphony's website orsymphony.org. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, rate it and review it wherever you listen. Remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.