By Katherine Gass, Jumeirah Curator
He steps onto the podium modestly and faces the audience. Quiet conversation and chatter echo around the room. Without fanfare, the Maestro raises his arms and with a quick movement of the baton, melodic orchestral music suddenly envelops the ballroom and silences the crowd who are seated among musicians and their music stands. There was no announcement of what we would hear, no indication of what would happen next. Just as suddenly the music stops. Now we’re listening.
We are gathered for a special evening event and book signing given by Associated Luxury Hotels International and Jumeirah Essex House, and have purposefully been mixed in with the orchestra. We are not told what we will hear, what to do, or what will happen next. At the center of the event is American Maestro Roger Nierenberg, conductor, author and inventor of The Music Paradigm, a motivational philosophy about leadership and teamwork that is inspired by the powerful metaphoric possibilities of music.
For the next hour and a half, the Maestro talks about collaboration, systems of support, types of information dissemination, liberating others by tapping into their creative potential, and the notion of the communal voice. Throughout he is demonstrating his ideas by having the orchestra play the same passage from Mozart’s Symphony #36 over and over, responding to a wide range of clues and information that he decides to give or not to give them. The results each time are surprisingly different and we can hear the discord or harmony depending on what message he is trying to convey. He engages the crowd constantly, asking what they hear, what they see, why the passage sounds different to a woman in the back of the room (“I can only hear the horns next to me,” or “that violinist sounds stranded,”) than it does to someone up front. He discusses why, when people are isolated from their leader or when they receive inconsistent messages, the collaborative potential begins to weaken. He consistently points to the importance of the leader’s ability to listen, respond and root out problems. He draws parallels between the rows of chairs in the audience and the management structures and information flow found in the corporate world, and demonstrates how each player makes a difference to the group dynamic.
The non-verbal energy in the space between the Maestro and the musicians is visceral, and he uses this invisible bond of communication well to exemplify a leader’s responsibility to unlock the creative potential. The joy, energy and enthusiasm he emanates while he does this is infectious. He weaves the language of business and music together seamlessly when he speaks peppering his points with poetic metaphor. “A leader can envision a path towards a performance that the musicians feel is rewarding and worth working towards,” he says. “The conductor reveals this to them until they see that they can make it their own and how.”
During one moment, he hands his baton to an audience member who he has invited up to the stage. “Disappointing isn’t it,” he jokes as she holds it and realizes how thin and light it is. Later, when I comment on the funny remark over a lunch of mushroom soup he says, “ The great power of the baton comes from knowing how to take advantage of its liabilities.”
At the end of the event, he invites the audience to listen to the orchestra play the entire symphony in all its glory one last time but this time from anywhere in the room they choose. Everyone gets up and crowds behind the Maestro around the podium. The clarity and emotional power of hearing a full orchestra perfectly in tune from the Maestro’s podium is astounding.
For Roger Nierenberg, the music must always be where it all begins and ends. “What I have discovered is that when music is used in a metaphoric way, it becomes more beautiful, not less beautiful.” When asked whether he thought music in movies had the same metaphoric potential he vigorously disagrees. “I think of Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now. That’s not metaphor. It is asking the music to represent something else and that cheapens it.” He always wants the music to be itself, not a stand-in for emotion or as backdrop for an idea. It has to be the powerful center. This credo was crystallized for him when he was creating his Music Paradigm.
Nierenberg’s career path to inventing The Music Paradigm began organically and quite by accident, as most good and lasting things do. In the mid-1990s, during his tenure as the conductor of the Stamford Symphony, Nierenberg was invited to speak on teamwork by a corporate executive who wanted to stay competitive in the market and was interested in moving away from the vertical business model prevalent during the time. Nierenberg decided to bring in a string quartet to illustrate some of his ideas, and during that performance another Chief Executive Officer who attended was so impressed he asked him to do the same for his corporation but to bring in a full orchestra. Around this time he was invited to give a concert for a charity event that was being held by the Stamford Hospital to support the Center for Hope, a therapy organization that helps families deal with terminal illness. The hospital was partnering with this organization in order to learn how to treat the whole patient, not just the illness. The hospital requested that Nierenberg also produce a video on teamwork and leadership and screen it during his performance, but he felt extreme resistance to the idea. “It was too costly and I didn’t believe in taking attention away from the music. At this time I was reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. This book had enormous impact on me. I was particularly interested in one of the book’s ideas, which is the discipline of saying ‘yes,’ and putting incongruent concepts or practices together to synergize and enhance the value of things. I thought, somehow I’ve got to find a way to be true to my principles and also say ‘yes.’ So my challenge was to find a way to bring in information without spoiling the concert.”
Nierenberg went to the heart of the cause and visited the Center for Hope. He was moved and inspired by the courage and outlook of the patients he met there. “They told me ‘when you get a diagnosis like this you begin to hear the time in between the tick and the tock.” Nierenberg left the Center wondering how he could use the orchestra to develop a system of support that was in concert with the aligning principles of the two organizations while keeping the focus on the patients, and the music. A tall order.
When it was time for the event, the Maestro was ready. He had his orchestra play the final movement of Bach’s B minor Mass, and when he was supposed to stop and screen the video, he instead instructed the orchestra to play softly while the lights dimmed and a dramatic pin light shown down on him alone. “I addressed the audience and said ‘The way musicians support each other is so important, and is much like the way this hospital supports the Center for Hope. When someone gets the call and diagnosis, it’s like the stranded violinist in an orchestra – they need a new system of support.’ Then I had a video screen slowly descend in the dark behind me while I was speaking and when I was done, it played interviews of all the doctors and patients I met at the Center for Hope. At the end of the video, the orchestra began to play with more energy and continued to build to a huge, glorious crescendo. When the lights came back on, the video screen was gone and it was just the music. Then I brought out the doctors.”
He is visibly moved as he recounts this, particularly when he talks about Bach’s B minor Mass. “This project totally consumed me. I had enormous creative energy to do it but no idea that I was also inventing my Music Paradigm, and inventing the idea of music as metaphor. The music makes the ideas come alive, it is not representing anything other than itself.” Luckily, those who cannot attend his events can still enjoy the journey and learn about the process in his new book Maestro, A Surprising Story About Leading By Listening. In the book Nierenberg offers an effective and entertaining parable based on his own experiences about the challenges a business executive must overcome while trying to advance a new vision with a difficult, divided team.
The seeds for Nierenberg’s career were planted back in his childhood and he attributes his love of music to early exposure. He was raised in Long Island, and learned to play the trumpet at the age of ten in the public school orchestra. It is the memory of this first experience that sits at the base of his musical practice and everything he does now with The Music Paradigm. He tries to put his audience in that pure place of discovery. “The thing that drives me is giving them an experience of music with intensity and directness. You know, no music can awaken something in you that is not already there. There are realms of human experience that await just the right stimulant to awaken something in each of us. That’s what music does.”
Nierenberg’s new book Maestro A Surprising Story About Leading By Listening is published by Portfolio is available online at www.MaestroBook.com