Robert Franz: Photo: Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival
By KRIS CAPPS

Conductor Robert Franz has a specialty and it isn’t Bach or Beethoven. It’s bringing that and other classical music to people who don’t know anything about it.

“I have sort of based my career on creating education programs for orchestras I work for, around the country,” he said.

Franz is associate conductor of the Houston Symphony, music director of the Boise Philharmonic and music director of the Mansfield Symphony.

He is currently a guest artist at the 30th anniversary edition of the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival, a two-week immersion in the arts. At 8 p.m. on July 31, he'll lead the Festival Orchestra in concert at UAF's Davis Hall.

Certainly, he has favorite pieces - such as the passage in Strauss’s "Also Sprach Zarathustra" - and there is no doubt that he is passionate about music.

“Making music, for me, is such a pleasure,” he said.

His interest in sharing that passion with others was all a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

During two years of rural residencies, he discovered he was bringing classical music to people who knew nothing about classical music.

“I learned pretty quickly that it was important for me to learn how to describe music,” he said. “I created, with my colleagues, all sorts of programs, which really built bridges, unique venues, all part of the process.”

One of those programs involved placing a woodwind quintet in an elementary school. The question was: would student test scores improve just from listening, not playing classical music?

“After three years, we had enormous success with test scores,” he said. Scores soared from 44 percent to 80 percent.

He also helped develop hour-long woodwind concerts for 5, 6, and 7 –year-old students.

The final assessment? The children developed active listening skills.
“That is key to enjoying classical music,” Franz said. “It’s not a passive activity. More pertinent, it is also one of the ingredients to being a good reader.”

“Once you’re a good reader, you’re a good listener,” he said. “It was really an amazing discovery.”

He excels at working with other art disciplines and connecting in different ways.

He has collaborated with an artist, who created an original painting onstage, as the orchestra performed. Once, he tied in with school curriculum and conducted a concert called “Music In The Clouds” that compared the high and low pitch of music with cirrus clouds.
“It was music and a science experiment,” he said.

Occasionally he has surprised his musicians by interviewing them on stage after their solos. When he conducted a concert based on the planets, he read horoscopes on stage.

“There are other ways to get people involved in music, besides just a piece of Bach,” he said.

Earlier this week, he led the chamber orchestra as Caitlin Warbelow and Kyle Sanna performed with fiddle and guitar and highland dancers and contra dancers performed on stage at the same time.

“There are all these disparate activities and part of my function is to see where the bridges can be built,” he said.

His greatest asset, he believes, is that he did not come from a classical background.

His first musical AHA moment came in third grade when a teacher suggested Franz might want to learn to play the cello.

“Immediately, the first day I touched it, I knew I was a musician,” he said. “In sixth grade, I changed to oboe.”

He pursued a bachelor’s degree in oboe until the day he took a conducting class.

“I stood up that first day, opening Beethoven’s Symphony, and I knew I was a conductor,” he said.

He earned a master’s degree and during a rural residency, he started his own orchestra. He learned how to raise money and to sell tickets. He actually experienced all the steps that must happen to make an orchestra successful.

All those experiences have led him where he is today. No matter what techniques he employs or programs he leads, the most awesome sound remains hearing an orchestra perform live.

“To get that impact, there is nothing like it,” he said. “That is the best sound I’ve ever heard.”