Leo Eguchi

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Cellist Leo Eguchi has played all over the world in a variety of settings, from frequent appearances with the Boston Pops and the Portland Symphony to playing for some of pop music’s biggest stars, including Demi Lovato and Peter Gabriel. A career as a performer only, however, did not satisfy his itch to make music that would move an audience with its intimacy and immediacy, so he co-founded not one but two chamber music ensembles and began commissioning work from a broad array of contemporary composers.

He continues to co-lead Sheffield Chamber Players, which is based in Boston and performs in community members’ homes throughout the region, and the Willamette Chamber Music Festival, which performs in several Oregon wineries through its August season. The commissioning and performing of new work remains central to both ensembles.

Leo created the “UNACCOMPANIED” project, through which he commissions immigrant and first-generation American composers to create solo cello pieces that explore the very notion of American-ness. Among the commissioned artists are well-known composers such as Gabriele Lena Frank and William Bolcomb as well as newer talents, including Milad Yousufi, a recent refugee from Afghanistan whom Leo met while completing a residency in Kabul in 2012. 

He also commissioned a suite titled “Shared Spaces” that pairs new work by composer Kenji Bunch with the personal recollections of David Sakura about his time imprisoned with his family in a WWII internment camp. As for the Willamette Chamber Music Festival, in each season it highlights the work of a different composer in residence.

Here Leo explains how he developed the ethos that drives his artistry and leadership and details how he continues to put his passion into practice.

Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:

• You were studying music from a young age, but you also have a bachelor’s of science in physics. Was that kind of the fallback major? Was there a possibility you might become a scientist?
• Where did the idea for your project “UNACCOMPANIED” come from? How did you start putting it together?
• In the process of hearing these pieces being created, what did you hear was being said? And for the audience who experiences it, is there auxiliary material that accompanies the presentation of the pieces?
• I’d love to talk about how you went about co-founding two ensembles. How did you develop your mission statements? And what have you learned from that leadership journey about bringing classical music to an audience in the 21st century?
• What is the financial model? How do you support both ensembles?
• Are you seeing a different kind of audience than usually attends a larger concert hall as a result?
• How do you meet new potential hosts?
• What lessons have you learned from your experience that you think could be translatable to larger orchestras and that would help in bringing in new audiences, keeping classical music alive and important to contemporary audiences?

Pier Carlo Talenti: I’d like to start at the very beginning of your artistic journey. Clearly, you were studying music from a young age, but I also learned you got a bachelor’s of science in physics. Was that kind of the fallback major? Was there a possibility you might become a scientist?

Leo Eguchi: Well, actually, I did not study music from a young age. I didn’t have a musical background. I started playing an instrument in a fifth-grade public-school strings class that was a sort of once-a-week group class. I happened to live in a town that had a wonderful music program in the public schools. And it was fun. I liked playing the cello. 

In fact, I wanted to play the bass. We lived in this tiny little apartment, and I came home and I said, “Mom, I want to play the bass.” And my mom said, “Do you see how small this place is? Go pick something smaller.” So I came in sort of downtrodden and said, “Well, what’s the next biggest instrument?” And they said, “Here’s a cello, kid.” 

Pier Carlo: [Laughing] I think your mom was hoping for flute, but OK. Cello. Cello is OK.

Leo: [He laughs.] It could be. But no, I started in just a group class and with no private lessons, and somewhere around seventh grade, my teacher said, “You know, you should really get yourself some private lessons,” which was a little bit of a struggle for us, but my family figured it out. Even then, I liked it, but I had a lot of other interests. As you noted, I was into science and math, and I played sports. I was really serious about football.

Later in high school, I really caught the music bug. I was assigned a couple of pieces that opened my eyes to the fact that you can really say something with —

Pier Carlo: What were the pieces?

Leo: Let’s see. The E Minor Brahms Sonata was one. The first Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto was one. Some other fun pieces. Fauré’s Elegy. You know, standard cello-student repertoire, but suddenly there just felt like there was more to it and there were possibilities for me to say something. I loved that. 

But this was also pretty late in the game, in middle of high school, to be saying, “I really like this. Maybe I want to do this.” So when you ask about the physics major, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t in some way a fallback, but also I felt like I had different roads open to me, some of which were more difficult than others, and I was having trouble choosing what I wanted to do with my life. All of my music mentors, when it came time to — I shouldn’t say all — some of my music mentors were not encouraging that I choose that path.

Pier Carlo: Was that based on your perceived skill or on the industry? What was the reluctance?

Leo: I think both. My private teacher, who I think was very much looking out for me, said: “I can’t really support this. You have a lot of work to do that most of the other people applying to schools would have done when they were 12. You’re catching up, and I don’t know that I can support you doing this. This would just be so hard. I can’t imagine you being able to support yourself and a family later in life.”

That’s fine. I heard her out, and then I quietly went and took all my auditions behind her back. And I worked hard, and I scratched and clawed my way to —

Pier Carlo: So you made your choice!

Leo: Exactly. I will say, though, that my dad is an engineer, and he had trouble picturing what a life in music —a career in music, supporting yourself in the arts — might look like, and there was friction there too.

And I love science and math, as I said, so when I entered school, I felt uncertain what was going to happen, what path was the right one for me. As I was in school, it became pretty clear. And I did finish my physics degree, but I was having way more fun in the practice room than the lab.

Pier Carlo: You said about the moment when you realized in high school that music might really be your thing, “It was a possibility for me to say something.” This leads me to your commissioning projects, which seem to me to be about you wanting to say something.

I’d love for you to talk about your project “UNACCOMPANIED.” Where did the seed for that idea come from? How did you start putting it together? 

Leo: Sure, thank you. Well, the “UNACCOMPANIED” project has roots in my personal history, growing up in an immigrant family in the Midwest.

Pier Carlo: You are first-generation yourself?

Leo: I am. My father is an immigrant. I feel like particularly people in my situation, where they are immigrant families that are mixed, perhaps mixed-race, you live the immigrant experience in one sense and you also have the privilege of seeing the other side, depending on situation. Sometimes I’m with my white family, and one set of circumstances happens and sometimes another. We all chew on these questions in different ways, but I feel like it’s a really interesting lens into some of the societal views on immigrants and who’s accepted and who isn’t.

Having grown up in that climate and having, especially in my early years where we lived, not known that many other Asian families or mixed- race —

Pier Carlo: Where did you grow up?

Leo: In Michigan. As I started collaborating with musicians and working in other places — I have a project out in Portland, OR, which is full of half-Japanese people like myself — I started realizing, “Here are finally people that look just like me that have absolutely different experiences than me. Absolutely different viewpoints.” I thought, “Here are my people and I can connect with them,” and it’s way more complicated than that.

I was chewing on these questions around the same time that the 2016 presidential election was happening and some really nasty anti-immigrant rhetoric was working its way into mainstream political discourse and anti-Asian violence was on the rise. I wanted to have conversations with people about this. I kept finding that when I would enter into a conversation with someone about immigration, whether we were well-aligned or not in our viewpoints, it was never much of a conversation. We each had our prepared talking points and we shared them, and nobody listened to each other, and we moved on. So instead of a conversation, it was like a couple of monologues sort of happened, and then we moved on.

I found that to be really sad because I don’t know how we solve any of our societal problems unless we can relate to each other and hear each other. So I wondered if we might be able to connect better through art. This project was really an attempt to move past the political issues and get to the people and the situations and the stories and the needs that underlie them and hopefully find things in each of their experiences that we can relate to no matter how far removed we are from the immigrant experience. Because if we’re honest, we are all immigrants, and if we are not, we’re Native people, who have been perhaps the most affected by immigration.

The project is an attempt to step back from the rhetoric and just have a chance to relate to stories of our fellow Americans without words.

Pier Carlo: In the process of hearing these pieces being created, what did you hear was being said? And for the audience who experiences it, is there auxiliary material that accompanies the presentation of the pieces?

Leo: Let me answer the second question first and that is, yes, each piece is preceded by a short video of the composer just sharing just a few words about their story and about the piece. I love that because first of all, it really humanizes this piece of new music that people are about to hear, no matter where I bring it. Second of all, it also allows me to step out of the spotlight of the performance and let each piece be about them, put the focus on that person.

The way the program runs, I usually say a few words to open the concert, but then I sit in the chair, just the lone chair on stage, and the eight pieces just run together with the video with no applause. I get to fade into the background and just be the medium for their stories, which is very powerful for me, to be able to just get out of the way.

To the first question — what did I hear them saying in the pieces? — I heard eight different things. What I heard is that each person tackled the question in a way that was personal. I should say I tasked them with a specific question, and it’s a clumsy one but it was the best I could come up with at the time. I asked them each to put their American-ness into sound, into music. And that could be anything. 

Pier Carlo: That’s interesting because the assignment could have been, “Put your immigrant-ness into sound.”

Leo: Exactly.

Pier Carlo: Yes, it’s a very different question.

Leo: It is a very different question. I wanted to know what they felt they had contributed to the country. I wanted to know what the country had contributed to them. I wanted to know what’s been left behind, what’s been gained. But I want it to be about learning more about what is the same in each of us, if there is such a thing. While I’m not sure there is one thing — certainly there’s not one thing — there are absolutely commonalities that we all relate to, no matter our background and our experience or where we live in this country. It’s such a big country with so many different strengths and issues and things that are beautiful and things that are hard. What they all said was something that came from deep inside. 

Several of the composers took me to task on the question, Earl Maneein being one of them. Earl sort of said, “I’m American because I’m me. Here’s how I grew up, and I would have written you the same piece no matter what, because that’s my American-ness, whether you asked me the question or not.” And I value that. 

And further, James Diaz, who’s from Colombia, really challenged me on just the premise of America, that I was asking this question from a United States-centric place where I think America refers to our 50 states plus Puerto Rico, etc. And he said, “Look, America is two whole continents’ worth of people. The United States does not have the rights to only use that word.” He really challenged me on that, and he wrote a piece that really explores some different dualities of experiences and meanings that happen at the same time. At every moment, you have to choose a path: “What does this word mean right now? What is this experience right now?”

Pier Carlo: I’d love to talk about how you went about co-founding not one but two ensembles. How did you develop your mission statements? And what have you learned from that leadership journey about bringing classical music to an audience in the 21st century?

Leo: Oh, boy. Well, mission statements are hard. I actually love the challenge of being able to sit down and put all your priorities down on paper, all of the things that you want and love and hold dear about a project, the things you want to have it aspire to, the things that it already does well, and then try to boil it down to a sentence. [He laughs.] It’s daunting, and it’s also very informative because you can’t include everything. That actually probably means you shouldn’t include everything. You should focus on the things that are really the kernel, the DNA of this institution you’re building.

A few things that are important to me about both projects, both the Willamette Valley Chamber Music Festival and Sheffield Chamber Players, is that I feel that people are thirsty for an immediate experience and I think that that is difficult when we pull them into the concert hall. It’s not impossible, and it can be amazing to go to the concert hall. I don’t ever want to get rid of the concert hall. But I think that there is a need for something that feels on a more human scale, and I think chamber music really lends itself to that. And I think it’s most powerful in small spaces.

For both groups, we very intentionally play in small venues. In Sheffield Chamber Players, one of the primary components of what we do, the heart of what we do, is a series of house concerts where instead of playing for hundreds of people in the concert hall a handful of times a year, we break that up and we play for 40 people, 30 people, maybe 50 times a year, 60 times a year. 

Pier Carlo: That’s a lot more work for you!

Leo: It is a lot more work. It is. But it is a lot more joy and it is a lot more connection. The way we’ve set up the house concert series for Sheffield — and this is the second component of what I wanted to say about both groups — is that we’ve really worked hard to remove some barriers that people have that they didn’t know that they had in seeking out chamber music.

In the case of Sheffield at these house concerts, it feels like a party. It feels like going over to your neighbor for cocktails. Because of that, we can play a lot of new music. Because of that, we can tackle big questions because people aren’t looking at the program first to see, “Oh gosh, I don’t really want to go see the symphony tonight if they’re going to play Ligeti.” They say, “Oh, I’m going over to Bill’s House. Bill always has good beer. Yeah, let’s go see what this event is.”

This is our favorite comment: Frequently people say, “I came here not thinking I liked classical music, but I loved that Caroline Shaw piece. I loved that Shostakovich.” It’s often the new music that they’re drawn to, and that is a really powerful thing.

We can tackle big questions because people aren’t looking at the program first to see, “Oh gosh, I don’t really want to go see the symphony tonight if they’re going to play Ligeti.” They say, “Oh, I’m going over to Bill’s House. Bill always has good beer. Yeah, let’s go see what this event is.”

Pier Carlo: You think it’s just because the atmosphere of the place makes them more open to the experience?

Leo: I think that is a part of it. We do our best to make it as unstuffy as possible. We encourage people to clap whenever they want to clap. They can come dressed however they want to be dressed. They don’t have to worry about parking. 

There are many unspoken rules of the concert hall that frequent concertgoers are accustomed to. It’s a social code that they know. For people that don’t go, it’s a little daunting. It takes a little bit of emotional effort to put yourself out there and go into a situation that’s not what you do all the time. I don’t think all that many people are willing to do that when it’s so easy to just sit down and watch Netflix or something.

One other component of this that we have worked hard to remove barriers from is we also make all of those events pay-what-you-can for the guests, so there is not a financial barrier. It can be quite expensive to go to concerts these days. It’s taken a lot of work to create what is essentially a new financial model for concerts. 

Pier Carlo: Yes, I don’t want to gloss over that. What is the financial model? How do you support both ensembles then?

Leo: Sure. I should say for the Willamette Valley Chamber Music Festival, the pay-what-you-can model is not possible with the way that we do concerts. 

Pier Carlo: So this is Sheffield we’re talking about?

Leo: This is Sheffield we are talking about. For the Festival, there are other things that we have done to try to provide new inroads and add fewer barriers. 

Pier Carlo: Because I’d love for musicians who hear this episode and who live in a town anywhere in the country to be like, “Wait, there’s a way for me to replicate this model in my town.”

Leo: Absolutely. And I think it would be different in every town. We do ask for a suggested donation for every concertgoer. It absolutely can be zero, and some guests absolutely give more. We are also a 501(c)(3), so we do fundraising and grant-writing to help support, and we also ask for some support from the hosts of the concert.

But there are many ways to make it flexible in this model. If the house is really full of guests, the average suggested donation can cover what we need to pay our bills. If it’s a host that would like to just cover the cost of the concert, that’s also fine. 

Pier Carlo: Right. Because the host could just decide, “I’m throwing this wonderful party. I’m inviting people to hear this amazing music ensemble.”

Leo: Exactly.

Pier Carlo: I see.

Leo: We’ve found a model that can be flexible and sustainable. Also if someone needs it to be, it can be absolutely free for them to come to every concert we do.

Pier Carlo: Are you seeing a different kind of audience than usually attends a larger concert hall as a result?

Leo: Yes, absolutely. I would say our audiences skew younger than what you see at traditional concert halls. The community of people that come to a specific event are very specific to the host and their networks. If our host is a young family, then we may get lots of families. If our host is a retiree, then we may get people in their peer group.

Pier Carlo: So how do you meet new potential hosts?

Leo: It’s been very interesting the way the web of people has sort of grown organically. Sheffield Chamber Players started as a one-off concert at the house of a music lover. It was just some friends coming together, just throwing it together and having fun. When we saw how meaningful it was to the people that were there … because I mean, let’s face it, if you are sitting eight feet from a Beethoven string quartet and you’re not moved at some point, you might be dead. [He laughs.]

We were also really taken aback by how meaningful it was for us, and we started having conversations about “How can we do this more?” We just started talking to people, some of the guests that were there: “If this is something you’d like to do, be in touch.” A couple more hosts got in touch, and slowly the network has just grown organically.

A beautiful thing that has happened at this point — this is our 10th season — is that we frequently are able to open up some seats at a concert for other people in our mailing list that maybe aren’t in the network of the host. Slowly communities from different neighborhoods are meeting each other and connecting. We’ll see somebody who we met in this town is now coming to concerts in this town because they came to one and they made friends with the host. We’re really building organic community in a way that we didn’t plan for, and it is absolutely thrilling.

Pier Carlo: And so, Willamette works in a different model, it sounds like.

Leo: That’s true. The Willamette Valley Chamber Music Festival works on a different financial model. We do charge for tickets. However, there, we still keep the immediate personal, intimate experience at truly the heart of what we do.

We are playing music there in Oregon wine country in a place where there are such amazing wineries with very interesting people that come to stop and taste the wine. I started thinking how similar these two things can be and how elitist wine can be and how opaque it can be for someone who doesn’t know about wine. Classical music can be exactly the same way, and sometimes there’s overlap in the communities between the two and sometimes there’s not. 

But I feel so strongly in both categories that the mindset that “I need to know something to appreciate wine” or “I need to know something to appreciate classical music” is so false. Anyone with an open mind can appreciate either. And so there, we’re trying to build on just the pure enjoyment of being in a moment together, tasting something, listening to something. 

I feel so strongly in both categories that the mindset that “I need to know something to appreciate wine” or “I need to know something to appreciate classical music” is so false. Anyone with an open mind can appreciate either.

Pier Carlo: Yeah, purely sensual. The wineries must be thrilled also because they probably come up against the same thing in terms of bringing in new people: “Let’s break down the walls.”

Leo: Absolutely, absolutely. We have tried to build a real symbiotic relationship there where it’s great for both of us. We’re meeting some of their customers, they’re meeting some of ours, and in both cases, we’re trying to really make it accessible so that you don’t feel like you have to know anything.

We share program notes from the stage so that no matter what we are playing, you have something to hang onto. Similarly, I pair wines from each winery to the program of music, and I share my notes about why I think that this particular pinot goes with this particular Shostakovich coverage quartet.

It’s just one extra level of feeling like, “I can just be here in this moment and just use my senses and appreciate something for this moment, just gathered together in a small group and just here right now. This wine will taste different tomorrow and this Beethoven string quartet will be different tomorrow and I’m just here right now.”

Pier Carlo: What lessons have you learned from your experience with both chamber ensembles that you think could be translatable to larger orchestras and that would help in bringing in new audiences, keeping classical music alive and important to contemporary audiences?

Leo: That is an excellent question because orchestras ... . Well, let me start that sentence from the opposite direction. Chamber ensembles, chamber music organizations can be quite nimble and flexible and experiment. We’re quite agile. And orchestras are very difficult ships to steer. It takes a long time to change course.

I will start with some criticism of the orchestra industry. I find that orchestras are often playing defense to the actual problems. They’re worried about people not buying enough subscriptions, so the marketing department gets involved and says, “Beethoven sells tickets. We need to do an all-Beethoven season.” Or, “If we could only get Yo-Yo Ma.” I understand that mindset. They have data that Beethoven sells well and that Yo-Yo Ma will always bring a big house. Then in between that all-Beethoven program and the Yo-Yo Ma program, they’re sort of wringing their hands about their audiences getting older and smaller.

What I wish is that they would shift their thinking out of how do we put a band-aid on this problem and get more into the mindset of “What does our audience need and want?” and “What do they not even know that they need and want?” Which is an impossible question to ask. “What can we present with an artistic vision that is so honest from us and from really truly the center of our human beings that they can relate to?”

Sometimes that takes experimentation and some things aren’t going to sell well, and that is difficult. But I think programming music by composers of color because there was an uproar post-Black Lives Matter is the wrong approach. 

Pier Carlo: Right. People can see through it.

Leo: Exactly. It’s a start, and absolutely, they should be doing it and they should be doing it all the time. And if they weren’t doing it, shame on them, but I’m glad that they’re getting started. But the point is not to just check some boxes and throw some composers of color on the program because you’re supposed to. 

I feel like they need to really stop and question and live in, “What stories need to be told for our community? What are some human experiences that everyone can relate to that really tell the richness of our city, of our community, of our country?”

Orchestras are such different things. What the Boston Symphony programs versus the —

Pier Carlo: Right, the communities are different.

Leo: Exactly. Versus the Baltimore Symphony versus the Baton Rouge or Detroit. Some have to think very internationally, and some have to think very locally, and probably they would all do well to do both. But I think when they are solving problems from a sort of defensive business end as opposed to really having a vision that’s centered in someone’s human experience, then at best they just provide band-aids for their business model.