Since he was a teenager, Scott Yoo has been almost restlessly performing in concert halls around the world. He started playing the violin at age three, and became serious about the craft at age eight. When he was 11, he played with an orchestra for the first time in Seoul, South Korea with the Korean Broadcasting System Symphony. It has been go, go, go, until the world halted due to the pandemic.ย
Though his schedule remains busy, his physical presence has remained in Columbia, where he lives with his wife and associate professor of flute at MU, Alice Dade. โItโs been great,โ Dade says about life with her husband since the pandemic. โThis is the most Iโve seen him since we got married in 2014 โฆ itโs been awesome.โ
Simply put, Yoo is a conductor and a violinist. A musician. But as Dade describes him, โHeโs like an onion. Heโs got so many layers.โ
Yoo is the chief conductor and artistic director of the Mexico City Philharmonic Orchestra. Heโs the music director at Festival Mozaic, a music festival in central coastal California. One of his newer titles is host and executive producer of Now Hear This, a miniseries about classical music presented by Great Performances on PBS. The show's second season is premiering Friday, Sept. 18 at 8 p.m.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Well, what is Now Hear Thisย about?
Iโll start at the beginning: I played a concert four years ago. The day before the concert, I gave a talk on the composer Brahms. It was a lot of work to put the talk together, but only seven people came to that event. I was disappointed. But the next day, after the concert, someone came up to me and said, โHey, I really like your concert.โ I said thank you. Then, he said, โBut I really like what you did yesterday.โ He said he was Harry Lynch and he was a producer from PBS, and that we should make a TV series together. Originally, the idea was to take that lecture I did and film 20 or 25 of them. We kept talking about it, and then he asked me, โWhatโs your goal for the show?โ
I said it would be great if we could replicate the success of Young Peopleโs Concerts from 50 years ago. He told me if I wanted to do that, the show as it was would be too narrow. The types of shows that are the most appealing on PBS are shows like Antiques Roadshow and all the cooking shows that incorporate culture and travel, like Anthony Bourdainโs. We decided to do a show that had those elements, but rather than cooking, it was music. We showed PBS the pilot and they loved it. And now weโre already working on season three.
The ultimate goal of Now Hear This is to get more people to put classical music on their smartphones. Itโs simple. They donโt have to listen to it all the time, but just put one thing on. If that one track of Vivaldiโs "Four Seasons," or a Schubert song, or a Mozart piano concerto โฆ weโve won. I feel like weโve won, music has won and humanity has won.
The first episode of the second series will be centered around composer Haydn and his contributions to the string quartet form and repertoire.ย
How can someone start enjoying classical music?
The reason why pop music is so catchy and popular โ and this is not an insult or a compliment โ is that first of all, pop songs are very short. Theyโre four minutes, five minutes. Secondly, the material repeats over and over and over. The chorus of a Britney Spears song might repeat 15 times in four minutes, so by the time you hear a song once, you might actually already remember the tune. Whereas, a Mahler symphony can last over an hour and nothing repeats. The human brain needs repetition to sort of remember. With repetition, classical music is the kind of thing that rewards you more and more, the more you listen to it. Itโs much more vertical than horizontal. If youโre willing to invest a little bit of time, if it means just putting one piece of classical music on your playlist โฆ those pieces of music stand up to repetition in a way that I think other music doesnโt.
Is classical music dying?
Itโs true and itโs not true. I would say classical music isnโt necessarily dying, but itโs changing. The way people are listening to music today has changed. People arenโt watching TV anymore for broadcast. Theyโre streaming on Netflix and listening to radio on Spotify โฆ there are all of these platforms that are so difficult to understand, so itโs hard to quantify how much music people actually consume. Iโd agree that audience numbers are declining slowly, but I think the Now Hear This project is one effort to stem that tide. But, itโs not happening everywhere. There are places where classical music is actually taking off, such as in South Korea and the Far East in general. In Europe, classical music is still extremely strong.
And I think this generation thatโs coming up is a pretty special generation. I see lots of creativity and lots of skill in that generation. I tell every young person that I encounter that this is your time now. You should really do something and change the world. I see good things in Generation Z. Iโm very hopeful.
Do you have any tips for people who are starting out with classical music?
I have some blog posts on PBS.org and I list things to listen to for certain composers, and I just did one on Beethoven, so people can definitely look for that.
Classical music can be intimidating. Itโs like saying you want to get into Shakespeare. The corpus of work is just so huge. Each play is so monumental. So, how do you begin? But I will say this: if you hate something, thatโs valid. If you love something, thatโs valid. If youโre indifferent to it, thatโs valid. I think people are worried about having the wrong opinion like, โif I donโt like this, there must be something wrong with me.โ No. Thereโs nothing wrong with you, thatโs absolutely a valid point. Peoplesโ opinions are very personal, and everyoneโs opinions matter.
That being said, if youโre a novice to classical music and want to start off with Beethovenโs Fifth Symphony โ thatโs a great place to start. Everyone knows how it goes, but thatโs Beethoven at the height of his power. If you like that, if you get that, if you understand the drama in that piece of music, then you get classical music. Itโs not above you. For me, the real tragedy is when people feel, โI canโt understand thatโ or โI donโt have that kind of intellect.โ Thatโs baloney. Anybody can understand that, just give yourself a chance.
