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Julian Wachner, Trinity Wall Street's new Director of Music and the Arts, talks about growing up with music, his vision for music and the arts at Trinity, and what he missed about working at a church.

What is your vision for the position you're stepping into here at Trinity?
I think that this can be a major artistic center for New York City. We have to get involved in what's going on with the reconstruction of [the World Trade Center] and the community of all these people who are living here [in Lower Manhattan]. When I was living in New York, I never even went to Trinity Church and my mom played a recital here. I never thought of it as a destination. I think that's changing and that I can help to build that. I want to see that happen.

The other side of it is that I see a thriving parish church that is just bubbling over with energy and ideas. I'm looking forward to helping everybody try to focus those ideas into something amazing. I also want to try to bridge congregational life and concert life. That's always a tricky one. At the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, the church was full every Sunday. And when we had concerts, the concerts were full. But they were not always the same people. That changed a little bit in the time that I was there. I'd like to see the Sunday crowd here Thursday night for concerts. (And vice-versa!)

What initially drew you to Trinity?
After my initial meeting with Anne [Mallonee], I told a friend that this is the position for which I was born and formed and trained. Especially for what it seemed they were looking for now. With all of the major league conducting I've done, but also the sacred music composition I've created, and the organ playing…it kind of all equals a perfect set of skills.

What is it like to be back in this tradition after your childhood experiences at St. Paul's Cathedral and St. Thomas?
My first day at St. Thomas was, I think, the first Sunday they moved the Gloria from the end of the Eucharist to its proper place. While I was there the place got higher and higher and we added all the weekday evensongs, but it was always Rite I. I know the 1928 prayer book and the 1940 hymnal very well from that experience!

There's going to be a learning curve because I don't know the '82 hymnal and I don't know LEVAS (Lift Every Voice and Sing). I know them as documents. It's going to be a huge self-modernization and getting up to what's going on in Anglicanism now. That being said, since I'm on the alumni committee of the St. Thomas school, I've been there fairly consistently over the past years, and my membership has always been at St. Thomas Fifth Avenue. But again, that place is very different from this place.

Do you remember the moment you knew you wanted to be a musician?
No, because I just always was. I was playing and writing "notes" when I was two or three years old. My mom is a pianist and my stepfather is a conductor, so it was just there.

I was always doing music, but as a profession, I thought I might go into something like math or economics because I also had some talent with mathematics. In fact I was teaching 8th grade algebra at Packer Collegiate when I was a 12th grader.

Your title here is Director of Music and the Arts. How do the other arts figure into your vision for Trinity?
I think there's two ways to go with that – there's the music programs that have other arts embedded on top of them, but there are also programs that are about the other arts, themselves, without the music. My feeling right now, in terms of my methodology, is let's get the music organized so that that's comfortable. And then start to do some really amazing theatre, dance, plastic arts, lively arts.

Here at Trinity, most people I've met over the past weeks introduce themselves to “our new music director” and actually, no, it's an impresario position about the whole arts. It's actually a new vision. I see that it's two major things: conductor and composer, but also visionary and artistic director as well.

In a city with thousands of other options for entertainment, how do we compete for people's attention and attendance at concerts?
I think – and this was in place before I was here – the choice to go in the early music area is really smart. From an international vantage point, New York City hasn't had a serious and regular baroque orchestra since the demise of the New York Collegium and Trinity can fill that void. I think Trinity is already the flagship when it comes to Bach, Handel, Haydn. I would also enlarge the contemporary music piece, as well. Aesthetically, those two worlds connect somehow. And that way, we are offering something you can't get anywhere else.

In addition to the purely professional musical offerings, we could have the equivalent of Washington D.C.'s Cathedral Choral Society here. So that we have the Trinity Choir that's the 20-voice ensemble and then we could also have a 120-voice community chorus.

Musically, how does preparing for a concert or an opera differ from preparing for a worship service?
The opera is a longer process, whereas the liturgical event is more ritualized daily. It's a faster thing, but there's still a drama, a sweep, a message, there's a sense to it, there's form, there's structure. I think they're very similar, actually. I think the reason that it was so comfortable for me to go to opera is that other than the subject matter being rather different, they're both talking about issues of the soul and the spirit and the human condition. A perfect example of looking at this is if you compare Handel's operas to Handel's oratorios, and see that there is a lot more in common with them than there is different.

You mentioned you took a break from being a church musician for a few years. What did you miss about working in a church?
As crazy as all churches are, everyone is generally there with a sense of altruism and doing good for the world and for each other. In other musical fields, often it is primarily about doing good for yourself. That's what I miss the most – the feeling of family, the feeling of a power higher than we are, and acknowledging human weakness and trying to do something about it.

You've conducted choirs and choruses all over the world. How do you coax great performances out of the artists that you work with?
My whole life has been spent thinking about that and, since I've been teaching, how to teach those skills. There are certain skills that I've learned that are just technical. There is material to be learned and experience to be had. My methodology now is just a culmination of that common learned experience: technique and enthusiasm and connectedness with the people and music. And honesty – I just go in and what you see is what you get. I don't have a lot of artifice in my sort of way of doing things.

Do you have a favorite piece or period of music?
There's a lot. Anything Howells is good. You can feel his faith and his sorrow combined in his music. He lost his son when he was young and that affected all of his music. There's a combination of hope and struggle in his music that I think speaks to our contemporary situation.

--Interview by Nicole Seiferth, assistant editor for website and parish publications.

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