Super Women: Monique Mead, Music Missionary

MM: At age 19, I was invited to perform at the Schleswig-Holstein Summer Music Festival and tour with Bernstein, who was the guest conductor. I worked with him for several weeks preparing. What struck me most: People never spoke from the stage to the audience—it was not part of the tradition of classical music. But Bernstein did; he spoke to audiences to give them a window into music. He always traveled with a thick book of Shakespeare. When we were performing Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, he read to us about the Queen Fairy, giving us an image of who Queen Mab was and why her sounds would be spidery and light. He didn’t have to teach us how to play violin. He went directly to our minds to inspire us. “That’s what I want to do,” I told myself.

MLB:How did your career change as a result of your time with Bernstein?

MM: After receiving my Master’s, I was playing as a substitute in the Indianapolis Symphony and directing the Indianapolis String Academy. That’s when I saw the disconnect between the rigorous training of young string players and the decline in classical music audiences. This made me broaden my view on what it means to be a classical musician, and I set out to create a performance career around audience engagement. In other words, I wanted to inspire people to love music and support musicians (rather than training more young musicians with uncertain futures.) Bernstein did this, and I believed I could do my own unique version. I developed a three-part model (teacher training, school workshops and interactive concerts) that  turned out to be very successful in Germany where I began creating classical music shows with major orchestras. In the style of Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, I engaged audiences with theme-oriented concerts. When I noticed German kids loved soccer, I put on a show around music and soccer. I brought a retired baker on the stage to make a seven-layer cake to illustrate the structure of music. (I love cakes, and the Germans make the best ones.) Mormonism came in handy here—you were supposed to convert people. I was a missionary for music.

MM: I got married to the concert master of the Pittsburgh Symphony in 2003 and then had two children. I was continuing my work in audience development when CMU hired me to build an entrepreneurship program for musicians that would teach business skills and marketing, as well as how to  to deal with performance anxiety, write thank you notes, answer the phone, manage time and schmooze. You don’t have to be the best oboe player, but you have to get along with people. I train students to talk to audiences, not with a bunch of jargon like what key the music is in or when the composer was born or died. But, for example, what was the context of that piece—did Mozart write this because his mother just died? It’s possible to say something with just notes on a page, but that’s only 30 percent of it. As Mozart said, music is between the notes.

MM: The year I turned 50, I got knocked off my own stage. I was getting divorced and helping my kids through the trauma of the breakup. At the same time, I was asked to perform one of music’s most difficult and sacred pieces, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, at the Edgewood Symphony. I had never done it before, but what inspired me to take it on was that Beethoven was deaf when he wrote it, and besides being deaf, was also anxious and depressed. If he could overcome such adversity to write such beauty, I could learn to play it. It was my own therapy. In February, 2020, I announced that I would perform the concerto 50 times in 250 days for people struggling. I called the project “Beethoven in the Face of Adversity.” At the time, Pittsburgh was reeling from the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, and I got a number of performance requests from families. I also played for someone with ALS,  a chronic pain group and many more. I didn’t solicit, it was all by request, and I got referrals through my music network. For my 50^th concert, I threw a party for Beethoven’s 250th birthday in Carnegie Hall. In the lobby, I featured photos of people I played for to pass on their stories about what gives you the strength to get up every morning.

MLB: Since then, how would you describe the trajectory of your career?

MM: The irony was just after Beethoven’s birthday, everything went silent and deaf. That summer, I launched “Porch Concerts.” I gave classical music performances on my front porch, along with my kids, who play the piano and harp, and guest musicians who had very few, if any other, gigs. I invited mostly neighborhood folks who would sit outside on the lawn—masked up—and listen.  [The successful series just ended this summer.] Starting with “Beethoven in the Face of Adversity” and continuing with Porch Concerts, Azure Family Concerts (music for families with autism) and now the Lullaby Project, my career has gone from being a music missionary to taking the path of Citizen Artist, inspired by Yo-Yo Ma. Instead of bringing people into the hall, I’m going out to the community.