Welcome to the Walks of Life podcast. This is Russell Smith, and today I’m thrilled to be joined by Michael Cirigliano II. Michael studied and trained for decades on the clarinet before embarking on a marketing and writing career. Today, he helps orchestras and other classical music creators reach new audiences. He also writes a beautiful newsletter called Shades of Blue about the stories behind, and power of, melancholy music. Michael’s approach and philosophy have a lot in common with what I write and talk about; slowness, solitude, internal peace, and seeking outward harmony, and discovering what Michael terms, the beautiful, more perfect world. When I receive Michael’s new missive every other week, I can’t wait to dive in. We enjoyed a wonderful conversation and I know you will enjoy it. You can listen to the podcast or read the transcript below. Thank you, Michael! Russell Smith: I want to talk for a few minutes about your introductory essay, where you announced Shades of Blue. It’s one of the most beautiful pieces of writing that I’ve ever read. It was thoughtful and, in its way, concise, and I want to ask a few questions about it. You wrote: “Growing up in the flat, unremarkable world of suburban Connecticut in the ’90s, classical music became my form of rebellion against the aggressive music my parents enjoyed. At any point in my childhood, you could hear Ozzy Osbourne’s wail on Black Sabbath’s Paranoid erupting from my father’s stereo on one end of our house, while the sweet sighs of Beethoven’s violin concerto wafted through the air outside my bedroom on the other.” I’m wondering: did you take anything positive, uplifting, memorable from the music your parents liked? Michael Cirigliano: Yeah, absolutely. The joke I like to make is that my first musical obsession as a child wasn’t Ludwig van Beethoven, but Eddie Van Halen. So it wasn’t like warring factions in the house. A lot of the music they listened to was definitely formative to me. I use the Black Sabbath example in my essay because it’s about as far as you can get from classical music. But to my parents’ credit, they also introduced me to David Bowie and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, all of whom still stand among my favorite musical artists. What was really cool is I learned much later they were all inspired in some way by classical music — a full-circle moment. And of course, Bowie, Zeppelin, Floyd — they all wrote songs that live in that same world of melancholy and longing that felt like home as I discovered more and more classical music. “Let’s Dance,” “Stairway to Heaven” — they’re still incredible songs that move me profoundly today. But something happened as I got older. My ear, which is connected to my mind, which is connected to my heart, was increasingly craving the quieter, more intimate moments I had discovered in classical music. That’s where I started to hear the more aggressive music my parents listened to as too aggressive for me. Then, as a teenager, this music — especially the kind my father did not care for — became my act of rebellion. So it wasn’t that I was totally against the music they listened to. It was that I knew the music I listened to wasn’t very well liked, especially on my father’s side, and that became my point of rebellion. As my musical training progressed, I started playing the clarinet in fourth grade and began playing in more and more ensembles. I fell in love with the sound of a symphony orchestra, and that was the rabbit hole that led me to explore more and more classical music. It’s interesting, because people are often surprised how much music I listen to that’s outside the classical realm. I even published one of my melancholy mixtapes on Shades of Blue last summer that was the only one to feature no classical music whatsoever — my favorite songs by Radiohead, Jeff Buckley, Björk, and Lana Del Rey. It was pretty revelatory to certain readers, which is funny to me, because the forms those songwriters use are going to be much different from a Mahler symphony, but the emotional content is exactly the same. Anyone who profoundly loves Britpop or Brit rock — I wouldn’t be surprised if they also love Elgar or Vaughan Williams. But for some reason, when people hear someone is really obsessed with classical music, they think that’s it — that there’s this level of pretension, this difference between classical music and everything else. I don’t subscribe to that in any way, shape, or form. The way I connect to music comes down to emotional content, pure and simple, no matter the form. Smith: Did you attach to anything in that “flat, unremarkable world of suburban Connecticut in the ’90s”? What lessons about how you wanted to live came from that? Cirigliano: It’s so interesting — looking back on that essay, the words I used to describe it as flat and unremarkable, I could still picture that view outside my bedroom window as a kid. It’s not that there was anything bad about where I lived. We had an amazing school system with a great arts program. But I think why I wanted to point that out is: it’s easy to look out your bedroom window as a kid and believe that’s all there is — that the world is small, that the paths you could take are limited. On the street where I grew up, everybody worked a job, most of which they disliked. They had their half-acre or acre of land. They were married, had a family, two cars. Even as a kid, it seemed so prescriptive to me. But the arts — music was a great passion, but visual art too. I loved drawing and painting as a kid. The arts as a whole sphere could serve as a passport outside that bubble. They launch you into the wider world — not just geographically but historically. That’s what I love about classical music and painting especially. We’ve only had rock, rap, and metal music for sixty years or so. But classical music as we know it today has been around for four or five hundred years, so you get an incredible sense of how human creativity, how expression through music, has evolved over time. Every album I got, I would devour the liner notes. That was my first introduction to program notes, which I write today for the country’s biggest orchestras. But it was the stories in there that fascinated me and put the music into context. Learning all that, I realized there was so much I wanted to explore in the world. But I grew up working class. Money was always tight. My family didn’t take trips to Paris so I could walk in the footsteps of Ravel, or go to Vienna to walk in the footsteps of Beethoven or Brahms or Schubert. So until I became an adult and could make that kind of travel a reality, getting to know the world involved a lot of adventures of the imagination. I’ve always had a vivid imagination, and I think a lot of that came from having it fed and fueled by art and music as a small child. So to go from that one view outside my bedroom window to everything I’ve been able to explore, and all the places music has brought me — that’s the most remarkable thing to come out of growing up with an unremarkable view outside your window. Smith: Your first essay on your newsletter looked at Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. You called that essay a manifesto. Do you still stand behind it? Has your thinking evolved? If you rewrote it today, what would you add, cut, or keep the same? Cirigliano: I’m sure I’d find several unnecessary adverbs I could cut — that tends to be my style. But as far as the manifesto of it all, I still stand proudly behind it. I believe classical music has a huge marketing and PR problem, one that’s sadly perpetuated by the industry itself. The reason I even transitioned from being a performer in an orchestra to becoming a marketer for symphony orchestras and classical music presenters is because it drives me nuts how classical music is marketed — advocating for an art form purely because you call it important, or because it has a storied legacy. I feel that’s so misguided today, especially when music education isn’t as prevalent in schools, and classical music isn’t as prevalent in popular culture as it used to be. Leaning on historical legacy and importance is misguided, because nobody is attracted to exploring new art because it’s important. Advocating for an art form by telling someone about the transcendental experience they can have, how they can focus all their senses on the sound as it moves through them — I know firsthand, from the work I do, that this connects with a lot more people. Here’s the example that was one of my first sparks toward making this my platform as an arts marketer: if I came up to you, Russell, and said, “Are you interested in hearing Johannes Brahms’s First Symphony? It’s about forty-five minutes of music for a full orchestra, written in the late nineteenth century, and I think it’s really great” — you’d probably say no. Maybe you’d say yes because we’re friends. But if a stranger said, “Listen to this because it’s important,” you’d say no. Yes, it’s a famous piece, but what’s the incentive to spend forty-five minutes of our busy world on it? But if I said, “This music will make you feel like time stands still,” or “Watch it performed on YouTube — take in the sound of fifty or sixty string players playing as one, moving their bodies as one, phrasing as one. It’s going to remind you of the trust you can place in other people, the importance of friendship and collaboration” — or if I told you about the genesis of the piece, about Brahms himself. He was a super sensitive, super insecure artist, just like we all are, trying to make a name for himself in Vienna in the second half of the nineteenth century, in a very crowded field. Any German, Austrian, or Bohemian composer who wanted to make a name for himself had to go and find his way i
