"In my world, I am usually the first and only Native person that anybody knows."
Episode 85: Timothy Long - Music, Migration, Metamorphosis
@timmy.long is a musician, conductor, and music professor
@eastman.school , based in New York City and Rochester, NY.
Link to listen in bio
@aonypod .
"In a way, I always wanted to be here because I grew up in such a small town...I was always looking for the bigger town."
"I auditioned for a job as..a beginning coach at the Juilliard Opera Center. And I got it."
"People have always found me a little unusual, a little too direct, a little too open about my private life...suddenly, in New York, I was kind of normal."
"In effect, we were raised like first-generation immigrants, trying to learn how to be here."
"When my mother was sliding deeper into dementia, she was only speaking Choctaw."
"I didn't know that I was an Indian when I was a little kid."
"When I went to my first stomp dance, it was at night and there was a fire and I started hearing the singing start. And I started crying because I thought the Indians were going to get me."
"Most people know nothing (about Natives) because it's not taught in this country."
"By a million different miracles, I arrived in this life of privilege, while millions of people like me do not have that."
"It was what it must be like to have like a deep love of cocaine...(music) changed my entire system and I could not wait to get home to put on certain recordings to get that fix."
"I never had the thought, 'Should I go into (music) or what should I do?' I never had that thought."
"Everything that I do needs to be world-class."
"People assume you have other abilities, like conducting...I had no talent for it. I had no ability to do it. But I was getting conducting offers and not piano offers."
"As a conductor, a large segment is always going to not like me and a segment will like me no matter what I do."
#timothy #long #music #conducting #orchestra #Eastman #metopera #Juilliard #aonypod
