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The Art of Conducting

October 24, 2024 - 4 minute read


Vincent Rodriguez, Aruba plater and aspiring conductor,found his rhythm at Concordia after questioning whether a college education was for him. Now he is studying to be a high school band teacher and enjoying every opportunity he has to lead a symphony orchestra, just as he dreamed of doing as a kid.

“The art of conducting is like interpretive dance, because you’re expressing the music through your face and your arm movements,” Rodriguez says. “I’m a very expressive person, and I love music, so when I am able to conduct, I give my sense of how I feel.”

As the son of a Marine, Rodriguez moved frequently before his family settled in Orange County. He was a big fan of DJ music and film scores by composers like Danny Elfman.

“I listened to film scores like Batman and Pirates of the Caribbean. That’s what I was into,” Rodriguez says. “It wasn’t until high school that I realized that [music] was something I could do.”

He began playing the baritone - also called a euphonium or a “baby tuba” - in sixth grade, and in eighth grade his teacher needed a tuba player, so Rodriguez donned the 40-lb instrument.

”My first reaction was, ‘This is big,’” he remembers. But he came to love the booming horn.

”I try to be steady and consistent,” he says. “In the wind ensemble there are hardly any breaks because I am the only bass voice, and a lot of the times I’m playing for an hour or two. Sometimes it’s whole notes, but sometimes they give us the melody. There is no copy and paste for how a composer will use us. I have to be versatile as a player to play whatever [Concordia Symphony Orchestra director] Dr. Held gives me.”

In high school, Rodriguez considered enlisting and playing the tuba in the Marine Corps band, but the idea of being a teacher was more attractive because his high school band teacher was such a positive influence.

“He was very inspirational and kind, and he wanted greatness out of his musicians,” Rodriguez says. “My freshman year we played a college-level piece, and I was really nervous to play it, but he said, ‘you guys have got it,’ and we did.”

Rodriguez began considering college only when he learned he needed a degree and a credential to be a teacher. He enrolled at CSU Fullerton in 2020, but the Zoom classes of the Covid era left him cold, “It was really weird for me. I didn’t enjoy it,” he says.

He dropped out and began working full time at a Mexican food chain to help pay his school bills. One day his tuba teacher, David Holben, who is a resident professional artist at Concordia, asked Rodriguez to sit in for him at concert rehearsals. Rodriguez accepted the gig.

”I needed that kind of opportunity and didn’t want to work at [a restaurant] the rest of my life,” he says.

Though he arrived with a huge case of nerves, he was impressed by the intimate size of the school and how friendly and proficient the players were. Later, Dr. Jeff Held asked him to play the tuba part for a symphony and gave him thirty minutes to learn the piece before their first rehearsal, Rodriguez embraced the challenge. That led to his first experience playing tuba in a symphony orchestra concert.

“It was a very frightening night for me,” he says. “My mouth was really dry.”

In addition to being the only tuba player, he was using an old, somewhat broken-down instrument donated to him by his high school principal.

”I was working twenty times harder at it than I needed to,” Rodriguez says. “I kept getting told to play louder. It needed a lot more power, and it taxed my lungs.”

But Held liked what he heard and saw in the young man and invited him to audition, then offered him a scholarship. A second scholarship, from the choir, made it possible for Rodriguez to enroll at Concordia full time to work toward his degree and teaching credential while still working part time in food service to pay his other expenses.

Not only that, but he upgraded to Concordia’s superior tuba.

“It was night and day,” he says, laughing.

Held says Rodriguez is “going to be a great teacher. He’s a really friendly guy, a hardworking musician, and very well-liked by his peers.”

In the past two years, Rodriguez has gotten to try his hand at conducting as well.

”A conductor is a teacher, and not many associate the two,” he says. “They are essentially the same thing: they have to lead a group of people through obstacles in order to fulfill something greater than they are. I like that aspect of it.”

As a kid, he would wave his arms and conduct the Batman score at home. At Concordia he has conducted orchestras twice, including for a video game concert last semester.

”I chose Batman, definitely fulfilling my inner child,” he says. “If you saw my face as I conducted the last phrase of the piece, I smiled big because it sounded like Danny Elfman.”

Last summer, Rodriguez participated in a high-level conducting workshop at UCLA. Now he is looking forward to finishing his education at Concordia so he can teach high school band and, he hopes, conduct an orchestra. He wants to inspire young people as he himself was inspired to pursue his dreams in the classroom and the concert hall.

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