What Makes Kapilow Great?
Who is Robert Kapilow, and why does he want everyone back in the concert hall? His sharing of knowledge, insights and passion about great music -- classical and popular -- is not just his way of showing off. His mission is to turn "passive spectators" into "educated participants."

A recent New York Times article profiled 50-year-old composer, conductor and lecturer Robert Kapilow, best known for the 90 "What Makes It Great?" radio programs he has created over the past decade. In these National Public Radio programs, Kapilow has helped listeners understand the inner workings of works as diverse as Handel's Messiah and "Somewhere over the Rainbow," as well as compositions by Chopin, Schumann, and Leonard Bernstein.

His mission, which he now tackles by appearing on concert hall stages, playing, conducting, and leading the audience in multi-part singing, is to "tutor audiences in the fine art of listening."

Kapilow recalls novelist Nabokov saying that "a good reader is a somebody who writes in the margins, folds down pages, underlines -- who has a conversation with the book, rather than being a passive spectator. And in a way, that's what I'm trying to do: to have the audience not be passive spectators for a piece of music, but to engage in a conversation rather than just sitting back and having it happen to them."

Kapilow started his own musical activity with piano lessons at age 4, adding violin at 6, guitar by 9. Musical genres meant nothing: "Nowadays we have such separate categories for classical music, for popular music. I didn't grow up that way. I played electric guitar in rock bands, I played jazz and cocktail piano, and I played Beethoven. And I didn't really know they were so different."

This eclecticism has led Kapilow to various musical pursuits, from conducting the Yale Symphony Orchestra and a Broadway pit orchestra to setting Dr. Seuss to music. "I knew that if I could get permission to set 'Green Eggs and Ham' to music, people would come through the front door for that who would never set foot in a concert hall. And it's the only libretto in America that every kid knows by heart. So when you set it to music, they would 'get' what music can do."

Kapilow's current project is a symphonic setting to celebrate the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark's expedition, a collaboration with Darrell Kipp of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana.

During the most recent holiday season, he applied his "What Makes it Great?" approach to Handel's Messiah, at Lincoln Center, with a choir and orchestra from Church of St. Ignatius Loyola. The church's director of music ministries was pleased: "Rob creates these 'Oh my God' moments. He will get inside the composer's mind and show how very simple compositional materials became something very exciting and brilliant because of the choices Handel made. I expect to be seeing light bulbs going on all over the place."

Read the Dec. 3, 2003 New York Times article [fee required]

Read Kapilow's bio at the site of his publisher, Schirmer

Listen to Kapilow's "What Makes it so Great?" feature on NPR's Performance Today, discussing Harold Arlen's "Over the Rainbow" or Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring"