| High Profile: Jo Boatright Pianist keeps looking for new music and mountains to conquer 03/25/2001 By Olin Chism / The Dallas Morning News 
Damon Winter / DMN
Jo Boatright plays the piano inside and out when she performs avant-garde new music, with which she is closely identified.
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Jo Boatright remembers the first time she had to play the inside of a piano. It took her 30 minutes to find the first note.
Her decades of training and experience were all at the front of the piano, on the 88 black and white keys and the pedals underneath. But during the 20th century, composers began to explore ways of getting sound out of the inside, by plucking, strumming and banging on the piano's strings and other metal and wooden parts.
Nearly three decades after that first encounter with the piano's interior, Jo Boatright has become a master of unorthodox pianistry.
As co-founder and artistic director of Voices of Change, a Dallas new-music group, she may have seen and played from more avant-garde scores than anyone in Texas.
Voices of Change will perform a Hungarian program including music of Kodály, Kurtág and André Hajdu at 8 p.m. Monday in Caruth Auditorium at Southern Methodist University. The group received a Grammy nomination in 1999 and has toured Europe and Latin America.
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Date and place of birth: July 18, 1937, in Denver
Occupation: Musician
My heroes are: Unsung, anonymous teachers and survivors of human tragedy
Best advice: Focus your dreams and put them into practice every day.
Trademark: "Does that make sense?"
My worst habit: Multitasking
My best asset: Stubbornness and "stick-with-it-till-it's-done" attitude
Behind my back people say: "She does too much."
My last meal: Grilled salmon, super fresh crunchy green salad and my mother's peach cobbler
Fantasy dinner party: My family, Mozart, Clara Schumann, Bartók, Martha Graham, Modigliani, Margaret Mead, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marian Anderson, Toru Takemitsu, Primo Levi, Pablo Neruda and Lili Kraus
I wish I could sing like: Lily Pons
If I could do a different job, it would be: anthropologist, maybe.
My favorite book: No favorites, but for light reading I enjoy "whodunits" and any book on climbing Mount Everest.
My favorite time of day: 7 a.m., when I head for my piano with a cup of latte
My ideal vacation: Hiking a "fourteener" in Colorado
I am happiest when: Performing music with my friends
I regret: that more people don't make the effort to include great music in their cultural lives
My favorite movie: No favorite, but I would watch again – Babette's Feast, Billy Elliot, White Nights
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That was all ahead of Ms. Boatright when she sat down in the mid-'70s to start practicing George Crumb's 11 Echoes of Autumn. The first note was D below the staff. But the score instructed, "Play the fifth partial" – a term from the science of acoustics.
"I thought, 'Oh, no! I should have paid attention in physics!'" The fifth partial is an overtone, a subsidiary pitch that blends in with the main tone. There's not a black or white key for it; you have to find it inside.
"It was underneath one of the brass bars, so you really had to have flat fingers to find it. But I did find it," she says.
Mother of new music
Ms. Boatright's willingness to embrace new sounds has given her a reputation far outside of Dallas. Dan Welcher, a prominent composer who lives and teaches in Austin, calls her "the mother of new music in Texas."
He says that there are only three or four groups in the nation that are like Voices of Change – that is, they are professional, long-term new-music groups with a more or less stable group of performers. Other groups tend to come and go.
Ms. Boatright has not neglected the orthodox side of her musical talent. As one of the co-founders of the long-running Walden Chamber Music series, she regularly plays music of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and other old masters. She also has played plenty of free-lance engagements around the area.
In fact, serious music of all kinds is a Boatright family affair. Her husband, Harvey Boatright, recently retired after playing flute with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for 40 years. Their daughter, Camilla Boatright, plays cello in the Dallas Opera orchestra, as well as in smaller groups around the area.
Considering Ms. Boatright's sense of musical adventure, one of her favorite nonmusical pastimes seems perfectly in character: She loves to climb mountains. A native of Colorado, she has been around mountains all her life. But her activity was mostly limited to well-trodden trails until her nephew, Keith Williamson, persuaded her to try more rugged paths to the top.
With Mr. Williamson as her partner, Ms. Boatright has climbed 31 of Colorado's "fourteeners" – mountains 14,000 feet or higher. Her ambition is to climb all 54.
Mr. Williamson, a horticulturist who lives in Thornton, Colo., says, "She's in better shape than I am. Last year, we did three mountains in two days. We climbed two mountains the first day, camped overnight and climbed the third the next day."
Top of the mountain
Ms. Boatright is so enthusiastic about mountain climbing that she has seen the IMAX movie Everest four times. "I love getting to the top of a mountain," she says. "There's just nothing like it. The only thing that comes close is that perfect performance that you do once in a while. It usually eludes you, but sometimes it happens."
Despite her enthusiasm, Ms. Boatright says that she doesn't have nerves of steel. "I keep one limb on terra firma at all times. Last summer, I did a little of what they call 'exposure,' which means hanging out in the air. It didn't really frighten me, but I don't think I would do it for a long period of time."
This sense of prudent adventure seems appropriate for a musician who combines enthusiasm for new music with a love of the classics.
Ms. Boatright's exposure to music came early. A Denver native who grew up in Sterling, Colo., she went to sleep every night listening to great artists by way of her father's record collection. Her first piano teacher was her mother – who is 88 and still has students.
When Jo was 10 or 11, her mother began driving her on the 240-mile round trip from Sterling to Denver every other weekend for lessons with Max Lanner. Dr. Lanner was a Jewish refugee from Europe who served in the U.S. Army in Colorado during World War II and loved the state so much that he stayed.
"He had been the accompanist for a lot of famous violinists, like [Zino] Francescatti, and he also played for numerous singers," Ms. Boatright says. "His doctorate was in piano, violin and conducting, so he was an all-round musician. I learned a great deal of music from him."
When she finished high school, Jo attended Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where Dr. Lanner also taught. Upon her graduation, she intended to take the usual outstanding young pianist's path to Juilliard in New York. But love intervened.
Harvey Boatright was also attending Colorado College. "When we met, he was with this friend of mine," Ms. Boatright says. "I thought he was her boyfriend, but it turns out he was her uncle." Harvey, a flute player, soon sprang a question: "Can you sight-read this Prokofiev sonata?" Jo responded, "'Yes, of course – and practically on top of that, he said, 'Will you marry me?' to which I said, 'Yes.'
"It's one of those rare things: We knew each other three months and got married. It worked – there's no formula, no guarantee, but it did. We're lucky."
Poor music students
Harvey was planning to attend the New England Conservatory of Music, so Jo abandoned her thoughts of Juilliard and went with him to Boston instead.
There the Boatrights lived the life of poor music students. Jo says, "Getting a Boston Symphony ticket was a rare thing to do, but one of the first things we did was to study the bulletin board, and we found somebody who had a half-season and they wanted to sell the other half. We hocked everything so we could have tickets to the Boston Symphony every other Saturday night."
Jo got to know the Boston Symphony better than most. One summer she was named the outstanding pianist at the orchestra's Tanglewood Festival, and she soloed with the Boston Pops, which is the Boston Symphony without some of its principals.
The Boatrights came to Dallas in 1960 after Harvey auditioned for and won a place in the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.
"The very first thing I did was try to find a church job," Jo says. I looked in the Yellow Pages and was quite appalled to see 'white' and 'colored' in our phone book – right here in Dallas. I really found that very shocking, and I still do.
"I found two or three churches that didn't list themselves that way. Of course, the Catholic Church didn't, but I didn't know the liturgy, so I didn't call there. There was a Congregational Church, and there was the First Unitarian Church, and I thought, well, I've been in Boston awhile and I know quite a bit about Unitarians, so I guess I'll call and see if they need an organist. They actually needed one in two weeks.
"So I went over there and I said, 'I'm not really an organist. I can play the organ, but I'm not an organist – there's a difference.'" She was hired by the Unitarian Church anyway. "I played there for years and years, and I'm the music director there and I do chamber music [the Walden series]. I've been there 40 years. It was a very good choice."
Voices of Change
Voices of Change originated in 1974, when clarinetist Ross Powell of the Southern Methodist University music faculty asked Ms. Boatright if she would join him in forming a new-music group. Despite some initial hesitation, she did, and in 26 years the ensemble has presented numerous world and American premieres, many of them commissioned by Voices. Featured composers often come to Dallas to hear their music and talk to Voices audiences.
The closest that Voices of Change comes to a standard configuration is what Ms. Boatright calls a "Pierrot ensemble" (for Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire) – two woodwind players, three string players and piano. There is often a singer, and "we almost always add percussion, and anything else the composer calls for." That last might be something as exotic as the Hungarian cimbalom that will be played at Monday night's program.
Ms. Boatright is almost always involved as the pianist. Other musicians take part as needed. Many are from the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. This explains why Voices concerts are on Monday nights. Monday is the DSO's day off. Other musicians in the area also take part.
Ms. Boatright has become strongly identified with new music in Dallas, but she is by no means an undiscriminating advocate. "There's so much wonderful music written out there. There's also a lot of bad music. That's just the way it is. It always has been and always will be."
Ms. Boatright doesn't see a bright future for the most austere music of our time, the intellectual formulations of composers such as Elliott Carter and Pierre Boulez. "That kind of music will always be for the few, because so few listen to it. The number is too small to keep it alive."
On the other hand, she thinks that the late Russian composer Alfred Schnittke is one who will some day be numbered among the greats.
"Sometimes, I think, 'My gosh, I've been doing this for 26 years, What's out there? What's going to still be here in 50 years?' I doubt very much of it will be, quite frankly. But I don't feel like I'm wasting my time. I know what we do is terribly important. And we've enjoyed doing most of it."
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