Welcome to Solvitur Ambulando, which means "Solve It By Walking." On this journey, we explore the alchemic potency of walking for sorting through life's puzzles, exploring our world, and transforming ourselves. Like a good walk, you will encounter distinctive ideas, remarkable people and gorgeous scenery. I hope you will enjoy a beautiful walk today. And if you like what you read and hear, I’d love to have you along.
Welcome to the Walks of Life podcast. This is Russell Smith, and today I’m thrilled to be joined by Michael Cirigliano II. Michael studied and trained for decades on the clarinet before embarking on a marketing and writing career. Today, he helps orchestras and other classical music creators reach new audiences.
He also writes a beautiful newsletter called Shades of Blue about the stories behind, and power of, melancholy music. Michael’s approach and philosophy have a lot in common with what I write and talk about; slowness, solitude, internal peace, and seeking outward harmony, and discovering what Michael terms, the beautiful, more perfect world.
When I receive Michael’s new missive every other week, I can’t wait to dive in. We enjoyed a wonderful conversation and I know you will enjoy it. You can listen to the podcast or read the transcript below. Thank you, Michael!
Russell Smith: I want to talk for a few minutes about your introductory essay, where you announced Shades of Blue. It’s one of the most beautiful pieces of writing that I’ve ever read. It was thoughtful and, in its way, concise, and I want to ask a few questions about it.
You wrote: “Growing up in the flat, unremarkable world of suburban Connecticut in the ’90s, classical music became my form of rebellion against the aggressive music my parents enjoyed. At any point in my childhood, you could hear Ozzy Osbourne’s wail on Black Sabbath’s Paranoid erupting from my father’s stereo on one end of our house, while the sweet sighs of Beethoven’s violin concerto wafted through the air outside my bedroom on the other.”
I’m wondering: did you take anything positive, uplifting, memorable from the music your parents liked?
Michael Cirigliano: Yeah, absolutely. The joke I like to make is that my first musical obsession as a child wasn’t Ludwig van Beethoven, but Eddie Van Halen. So it wasn’t like warring factions in the house.
A lot of the music they listened to was definitely formative to me. I use the Black Sabbath example in my essay because it’s about as far as you can get from classical music. But to my parents’ credit, they also introduced me to David Bowie and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, all of whom still stand among my favorite musical artists.
What was really cool is I learned much later they were all inspired in some way by classical music — a full-circle moment. And of course, Bowie, Zeppelin, Floyd — they all wrote songs that live in that same world of melancholy and longing that felt like home as I discovered more and more classical music. “Let’s Dance,” “Stairway to Heaven” — they’re still incredible songs that move me profoundly today.
But something happened as I got older. My ear, which is connected to my mind, which is connected to my heart, was increasingly craving the quieter, more intimate moments I had discovered in classical music. That’s where I started to hear the more aggressive music my parents listened to as too aggressive for me.
Then, as a teenager, this music — especially the kind my father did not care for — became my act of rebellion. So it wasn’t that I was totally against the music they listened to. It was that I knew the music I listened to wasn’t very well liked, especially on my father’s side, and that became my point of rebellion.
As my musical training progressed, I started playing the clarinet in fourth grade and began playing in more and more ensembles. I fell in love with the sound of a symphony orchestra, and that was the rabbit hole that led me to explore more and more classical music.
It’s interesting, because people are often surprised how much music I listen to that’s outside the classical realm. I even published one of my melancholy mixtapes on Shades of Blue last summer that was the only one to feature no classical music whatsoever — my favorite songs by Radiohead, Jeff Buckley, Björk, and Lana Del Rey.
It was pretty revelatory to certain readers, which is funny to me, because the forms those songwriters use are going to be much different from a Mahler symphony, but the emotional content is exactly the same. Anyone who profoundly loves Britpop or Brit rock — I wouldn’t be surprised if they also love Elgar or Vaughan Williams.
But for some reason, when people hear someone is really obsessed with classical music, they think that’s it — that there’s this level of pretension, this difference between classical music and everything else. I don’t subscribe to that in any way, shape, or form. The way I connect to music comes down to emotional content, pure and simple, no matter the form.
Smith: Did you attach to anything in that “flat, unremarkable world of suburban Connecticut in the ’90s”? What lessons about how you wanted to live came from that?
Cirigliano: It’s so interesting — looking back on that essay, the words I used to describe it as flat and unremarkable, I could still picture that view outside my bedroom window as a kid. It’s not that there was anything bad about where I lived. We had an amazing school system with a great arts program. But I think why I wanted to point that out is: it’s easy to look out your bedroom window as a kid and believe that’s all there is — that the world is small, that the paths you could take are limited.
On the street where I grew up, everybody worked a job, most of which they disliked. They had their half-acre or acre of land. They were married, had a family, two cars. Even as a kid, it seemed so prescriptive to me.
But the arts — music was a great passion, but visual art too. I loved drawing and painting as a kid. The arts as a whole sphere could serve as a passport outside that bubble. They launch you into the wider world — not just geographically but historically.
That’s what I love about classical music and painting especially. We’ve only had rock, rap, and metal music for sixty years or so. But classical music as we know it today has been around for four or five hundred years, so you get an incredible sense of how human creativity, how expression through music, has evolved over time.
Every album I got, I would devour the liner notes. That was my first introduction to program notes, which I write today for the country’s biggest orchestras. But it was the stories in there that fascinated me and put the music into context.
Learning all that, I realized there was so much I wanted to explore in the world. But I grew up working class. Money was always tight. My family didn’t take trips to Paris so I could walk in the footsteps of Ravel, or go to Vienna to walk in the footsteps of Beethoven or Brahms or Schubert. So until I became an adult and could make that kind of travel a reality, getting to know the world involved a lot of adventures of the imagination. I’ve always had a vivid imagination, and I think a lot of that came from having it fed and fueled by art and music as a small child.
So to go from that one view outside my bedroom window to everything I’ve been able to explore, and all the places music has brought me — that’s the most remarkable thing to come out of growing up with an unremarkable view outside your window.
Smith: Your first essay on your newsletter looked at Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. You called that essay a manifesto. Do you still stand behind it? Has your thinking evolved? If you rewrote it today, what would you add, cut, or keep the same?
Cirigliano: I’m sure I’d find several unnecessary adverbs I could cut — that tends to be my style. But as far as the manifesto of it all, I still stand proudly behind it. I believe classical music has a huge marketing and PR problem, one that’s sadly perpetuated by the industry itself.
The reason I even transitioned from being a performer in an orchestra to becoming a marketer for symphony orchestras and classical music presenters is because it drives me nuts how classical music is marketed — advocating for an art form purely because you call it important, or because it has a storied legacy.
I feel that’s so misguided today, especially when music education isn’t as prevalent in schools, and classical music isn’t as prevalent in popular culture as it used to be. Leaning on historical legacy and importance is misguided, because nobody is attracted to exploring new art because it’s important.
Advocating for an art form by telling someone about the transcendental experience they can have, how they can focus all their senses on the sound as it moves through them — I know firsthand, from the work I do, that this connects with a lot more people.
Here’s the example that was one of my first sparks toward making this my platform as an arts marketer: if I came up to you, Russell, and said, “Are you interested in hearing Johannes Brahms’s First Symphony? It’s about forty-five minutes of music for a full orchestra, written in the late nineteenth century, and I think it’s really great” — you’d probably say no. Maybe you’d say yes because we’re friends. But if a stranger said, “Listen to this because it’s important,” you’d say no. Yes, it’s a famous piece, but what’s the incentive to spend forty-five minutes of our busy world on it?
But if I said, “This music will make you feel like time stands still,” or “Watch it performed on YouTube — take in the sound of fifty or sixty string players playing as one, moving their bodies as one, phrasing as one. It’s going to remind you of the trust you can place in other people, the importance of friendship and collaboration” — or if I told you about the genesis of the piece, about Brahms himself. He was a super sensitive, super insecure artist, just like we all are, trying to make a name for himself in Vienna in the second half of the nineteenth century, in a very crowded field. Any German, Austrian, or Bohemian composer who wanted to make a name for himself had to go and find his way in Vienna.
It took Brahms nearly twenty-five years to write that first symphony. He was so overwhelmed with anxiety about how the music would be received — worried everyone would compare it to Beethoven, who was the be-all, end-all of German music in Brahms’s lifetime. If you were going to write a first symphony, people expected it to be a continuation of Beethoven’s style.
So Brahms wrote and wrote for years, then put most of the manuscript pages into a fire and burned them. He was notorious for burning his music. He wrote more, wasn’t happy with it as a first symphony, took the scraps he liked, and created a completely different piece from them. By the time he finally finished the score, it had been more than two decades. He was in his forties — talk about a late bloomer.
It’s magnificent to behold. But you can hear that frustration, that anxiety, right at the beginning. There’s this roar of sound, this pulse throbbing in the drums. It doesn’t relent — it drives the beat forward, and the strings rise up in a melody that’s painstakingly rising note by note, while the woodwinds behind them play a falling melody, like a waterfall of tears. Are those tears of frustration? Relief? Joy? Pride? All of the above. That’s how you sell someone on listening to Brahms’s First Symphony for the first time. Who wouldn’t want to experience that kind of emotion, seeing themselves mirrored in it?
That’s the kind of storytelling, the kind of marketing, the kind of experience people should know they could have when they devote time to music like this.
Smith: That answer is exactly what I love about your newsletter. You talk about a piece, and I want to go listen to it right then. I wrote down in my notes as we were talking: “Listen to Brahms’s First Symphony right after this.”
Cirigliano: I love it. Please follow up — send me an email after you listen. What moved you in that roar of sound at the opening?
Smith: What, if anything, has changed or evolved about your approach to the newsletter in the three years since you began writing it?
Cirigliano: It’s been wild that I’ve been at it for three years. It took me probably three years of cultivating confidence just to get it started, so the fact that there’s this body of work now is really incredible to me.
From day one, I’ve considered writing this newsletter an act of service. I want to share music that could bring people relief, respite, a few minutes where they can shut out the world and turn inward — to connect with beautiful, moving, human expressions of joy and loss and love and ecstasy. Things we don’t make much time for anymore.
Over the first year, I realized I could do that through a couple of different formats to meet readers where they are. I’m a content marketer by day, so I know not every reader reads the same way. I have full-length essays that go deep into one piece, and then things in between — the melancholy mixtapes, where there isn’t much storytelling. I’ll give a sentence or two to introduce the work, and people can take it on the go, listen without any commentary, or listen with it the first time and then make it their own.
What’s changed most in my mindset is realizing this newsletter isn’t just an act of service for readers — it’s an act of service to myself. Writing about the music I want to write about, in the way I feel will connect with others, is a gift I don’t get in my day job. I’m hired by orchestras to write about the music they’re performing. Sometimes there’s great overlap and I get an assignment about a piece I love, or a piece I don’t know, and in researching it I realize it’s incredible. Other times the piece is just okay, and I try to find the human story that will excite people to listen.
But sitting down with music of my choosing — some works I’ve known for decades. I just published my third-anniversary post, about Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony, which I’ve known since high school — thirty-two years now. Other times it’s a work I just discovered and can’t stop listening to, with an incredible story behind it. Writing this newsletter, I’ve never had more opportunity to follow my curiosity and make connections I wouldn’t otherwise have had space to consider.
One of my favorite quotes, which relates to being a writer in charge of what you write, is from Marcus Aurelius: “The soul becomes dyed with the color of the mind’s thoughts.” Watch what you think, because your soul will become dyed with those thoughts. If you live your life from a place of anger, resentment, hostility, that will infect you. But if you choose to live from a place of calm and connection and inspiration, healing yourself and healing others, that will transform your soul too.
Living in this world of melancholy music for three years now, especially with the cataclysmic ups and downs of the outside world, I know my soul has been dyed the most beautiful shade of blue from spending time with this music, and with everyone who engages in the comments, who writes to me. That’s probably the most profound shift — realizing I’m giving a gift to others and to myself through this creative venture.
Smith: Michael, where is your line of demarcation between melancholy as insight and embodied experience versus melancholy as indulgence?
Cirigliano: That’s such a great question, because I don’t consider embracing the melancholy aspects of life an indulgence at all. Maybe more people feel this way than I think, but I think certain people picture melancholy as Proust lying in bed for decades, sleeping all day and writing his epic at night, thinking only about tea and cookies.
But that’s not truly engaging with the melancholy aspects of life. Our society today is out of touch with what humans need to flourish, to fully embody our place in the world. We make so little room for expressions of emotion — they’re even demonized. Nonsense like “boys don’t cry.” What is that supposed to mean? Even empathy has become a dirty word in certain corners of the world.
I don’t consider it indulgence at all — I consider it an aspect of truly embracing our humanity and our place in the world. I love that you put it as melancholy as insight, because I think that is what melancholy offers us when we choose to explore and embrace it. It becomes a point of perspective from which to observe the world. That’s how we improve our lives — by observing the world, realizing our place in it, and realizing what we can do to make it a better, more loving, more beautiful place.
We can only do that, we can only truly live the totality of our experience, if we realize that joy has to dance with sorrow, that life is precious because it’s fleeting, that love fuels the universe. I don’t think anyone who spends their days exploring that kind of perspective would ever harm someone or call someone a slur in public. Maybe it’s the budding Buddhist in me, but if you take the time to experience the profound beauty of the world, you will not want to harm it.
In those terms, melancholy transcends discussions of aesthetics and mood and vibe — it becomes a philosophy to practice, to get better at moving through the world, to be less surprised by the sorrow and the challenges everyone will face. It teaches us to embody every aspect of our lived experience with grace and gratitude. I think we need so much more of that in this world.
Smith: You talked about this earlier, but I want to hear an elaboration. Can other types of music take us on the same internal journey toward what you wrote as “the beautiful more perfect world”? I think a lot about jazz and blues, but can other music besides classical take us on these inward journeys?
Cirigliano: Absolutely. First, I want to make sure that phrase — the beautiful, more perfect world — gets its proper credit. It’s actually a quote from Susan Cain, an incredible writer. She wrote a book about a decade ago called Quiet, on the power of introverts, and then, four or five years ago, a second book called Bittersweet, on how longing and sadness help us connect more with the world. That proved a catalyst for me writing Shades of Blue, because I’d been throwing around the idea of a newsletter about classical music but didn’t have my angle. Reading her book, I realized so much of the classical music I listen to lives in this world of melancholy, this bittersweetness — and when I sit down and listen to it, it transports me to that beautiful, more perfect world. So I want to make sure Susan Cain gets credit for that.
But to answer your question — absolutely. I touched on it earlier with Radiohead, Portishead, Björk, Lana Del Rey. There are plenty of musicians outside the classical realm whose sense of the bittersweet resonates with me profoundly. I wish I were better versed in jazz or blues, honestly. A few artists hit that melancholy sweet spot for me — Chet Baker, Billy Strayhorn, Bill Evans. But I don’t know that much jazz or blues, and it’s interesting you bring it up, because when people come to me wanting to get into classical music and don’t know where to start, I respond to that so much, because jazz and blues is also this huge body of music and artists, and I don’t know where to start either.
I hope at some point to find someone doing the Shades of Blue of jazz — someone bringing that kind of perspective to that music, because I know there’s a lot I’m missing out on. I see the same kind of overwhelm in trying to get into jazz and blues. That said, I think this sound world can live in every type of music, because again, it’s not the form, the structure, or the instruments — it’s the content. What’s the expression being made?
One thing that gives me a deeper sense of why classical music speaks to people in this way is the time involved. You could meditate for five minutes and get some sense of calming clarity out of it. But if you meditate for thirty minutes twice a day, you’re digging deeper into that inner ocean of feeling. I feel the same way about music. I can listen to a five-minute song that immediately brings me into the emotional world I’m craving. But if I sit down with Mahler’s Third Symphony, which is eighty-five minutes, and find the focus and flow that comes with a work of longer duration, it gives me more time to dive deep into that emotional world and come out refreshed. Sometimes certain pieces change you on a cellular level. With the length of a lot of classical works, that pool of emotion you’re swimming in is there for longer, and it moves through you on a much deeper level.
Smith: What are you listening to now? What’s on your playlist these days?
Cirigliano: Definitely stuff for Shades of Blue. But I think what’s getting the most play on my Tidal account these days — I was obsessed with it when it came out about a year and a half ago, and I’ve recently become re-obsessed — is a recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations by the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson.
The piece is one of the most miraculous things written for the keyboard, and every pianist who wants to make their name in recording has recorded it. But there’s something very specific about the way Ólafsson performs it — and a lot of his music. If you’ve read Shades of Blue for a while, you’ve seen his name and his performances come up several times. There’s something about the way he approaches the music that creates a state of mind that’s meditative and calm, where you’re just positioned to absorb what the music is doing as it moves through you.
His technical abilities are incredible. The Goldberg Variations open with a simple little theme Bach called the aria, then thirty variations of different levels of complexity, speed, and emotion, and then the aria returns at the end. In terms of structure and technical prowess, it’s astounding. But two of the thirty variations are slow and melancholy, and those are the ones that fascinate me most. I’ll find time at some point to dive into them on Shades of Blue.
These two movements are instances where it feels like time stands still — like there’s poetry being spoken through the piano, through the touch he brings to the keyboard, the range of colors he creates, the emotions coursing through him as he performs. It’s such poetry, and there’s not a single word to it.
This was an assignment Bach received. The legend goes he composed it for a keyboard player employed by a count who had insomnia — the count wanted music to listen to as he tried to fall asleep. So it’s eighty or ninety minutes, mostly in the same key, all these variations, so the mind can keep following what’s going on but also essentially tune out at any moment, because it’s all one idea being thrown through. The most uninspiring of commissions, and yet fascinating to think there was a time when rich people commissioned music to fall asleep to. Ólafsson finds some way to transcend all of that and just provide poetry for us to experience. That’s what’s filling my ears these days.
Smith: I can just picture this count trying to fall asleep in bed with people actually playing the instruments in his bedroom.
Cirigliano: Exactly. And it’s interesting — the two slow variations, one is about halfway through, one about two-thirds of the way through. I think it might be the golden mean position. I like to think those slow sections were put in to make sure the count fell asleep, and maybe the pianist could call it quits a little earlier than usual — picturing him peeking over: “Is he asleep? Is he asleep?”
Smith: Do you like to listen to music alone or with others? Or does it depend?
Cirigliano: It definitely depends. For sitting and discovering music, for researching, for sitting with the music I’m going to write about, I like to be alone, especially since listening to music can be a form of meditation for me. I practice transcendental meditation twice a day, but if I can find twenty or thirty minutes to sit with one work and really dive into it, feel the music moving through my body, note how my mind and my heart are responding — there’s such power in listening alone.
But there’s an equal power in listening with others. I love sharing music. Part of the fun of going to a music conservatory is that all your friends are as into music as you are, and the body of classical music is so large you can spend lifetimes exploring it and not know everything. Especially at eighteen, nineteen, twenty, when someone says, “I just heard this for the first time, you’ve got to listen to it,” and you’re sitting across from someone with a huge smile on their face pointing out, “Isn’t this part great?” — there’s nothing quite like that spark of excitement when people share music that’s meaningful to them.
If it were a more analog world, I’d love nothing more than to start a Shades of Blue listening club, where we all got together, everybody brought one work, about five minutes of music they love, and told us why they connect to it — does it bring back a memory, a certain experience? I can’t think of anything more inspiring than hearing about other people’s experience with music. Just like I want the way I connect with music to be a portal into other people’s experience, I crave that from others too. That’s the entry point. So if we were back in the days of record clubs, I’d absolutely want to do that. It could be just as great to listen alone as in a group, depending on how you want to experience it.
Smith: I want to ask you a few questions about your career. What did playing the clarinet for twenty-three years, many of them professionally, teach you about life? I never played music professionally, so I don’t have that reference point.
Cirigliano: That’s a great question. As I mentioned earlier, I think the first thing is that music serves as a passport for discovering the world — but that’s true of the arts in general. In terms of playing the clarinet specifically, it was my first entry point into honing a discipline, honing my focus, in a way that not many other experiences can do. Of course, you could get that from sports, from woodworking, from writing. But what I learned most from playing clarinet, specifically from playing in orchestras: the clarinets sit relatively in the center of an orchestra. The cellos are to my right, the drums and horns behind me, the bassoons and violas to the left.
Being at the center of the sound of an orchestra is absolutely electric. But being at the center of a group of eighty or ninety people working together gave me an incredible perspective on all the different parts of an orchestra at work. I learned to interpret body language — the woodwinds are guided by the principal flute, whose voice sits at the top of the section. When the whole section needs to enter together, the flute guides everyone in with a shoulder gesture or a lean. It’s a subtle visual cue — not trying to be the conductor, since we still have a conductor on stage, but giving a cue: let’s all do this together.
You learn the art of negotiation like very few other experiences can teach you. There are so many people on stage, so of course there are disagreements on matters of style — how long should this note be held, how hard should you attack a note that has an accent, should it be a ping or a thwap. Every one of those matters, even in a forty-five-minute piece where you’re discussing how to attack one note. Every one needs resolution — if not agreement, then at least everyone coming to a point of, “okay, that’s okay with me.” You can’t go it alone in an orchestra. For an orchestra to excel, there has to be an impenetrable sense of harmony created by every part working together. I think there’s a lot of society at large, and governmental bodies in particular, could learn from how an orchestra works.
Smith: Did playing the clarinet and working in an orchestra make you a better marketer or a better writer?
Cirigliano: As a marketer, I think in terms of the deep knowledge I have of these works — I’m very rarely approaching a piece I’m marketing for the first time, so I already know the story behind it. A big part of my job for part of the year is copywriting the program descriptions for an orchestra season — twenty performances, each with three or four pieces. It’s not just what am I writing about each work, but what’s the thread that unites them, what’s going to make people say, “That’s a mix of ideas and emotions I’d really want to enjoy — that sounds fascinating.”
But I think being submerged in music has made me a much better writer than I probably would have been otherwise, because rhythm and melody are the connective tissue between music and speech, or writing. Spending so much of my life playing clarinet, focusing on rhythm, on how rhythm moves a piece along, on melody and the pace a line unfolds — does it blossom slowly, does it drive right through to a pivotal note you’re not expecting, what’s the harmony blossoming underneath — gave me a sense, in writer’s terms, of sentence structure, word choice, essay structure. Being able to think about how my writing hits the reader in terms of melody and rhythm helps me every day. So many stylistic ideas around pacing, cadence, and flow that a writer spends a career thinking about relate directly to rhythm and melody.
One of my favorite compliments is when a reader writes and says, “Your writing is so musical,” or, “The structure of this essay felt like moving through a four-part symphony.” Compliments like that always make me smile, because I know the only reason I can make that work is that I devoted the first two decades of my life to performing and studying music. Even though I don’t perform anymore, I’m still thinking constantly about rhythm and line and harmony, and imparting those ideas to others through words.
Smith: You’ve written about getting burned out as a professional musician. What was the actual breaking point that moved you from performing into making a shift? Was that burnout specific to the music industry, or have you worried about burnout as a marketer and writer too? Those are both high-performance careers under a lot of external pressure.
Cirigliano: Very honestly, I think about burnout every single day. The PTSD of a former life as a performer is very real, and there’s enormous pressure as a writer too, a lot of it self-inflicted. But the difference between the burnout I faced as a performer and what I sometimes feel as a writer is that with writing, I choose how I move through the work, the pacing of it. Depending on my energy level, on how good a night’s sleep I had, I choose which threads of research to follow — is today a research day, a writing day, an editing day. Those trigger different parts of the brain. Because I worked as an editor before becoming a writer, editing has a lot less pressure for me. Once I get past the first draft and the top-down rewrite that follows, the copyediting stage is where I have fun — clarifying every image, finding better words, stronger verbs.
Being able to pick and choose how I do my work each day as a writer makes the pressure so much easier to navigate, because you don’t get that in the music world. When you’re in rehearsal, especially as an orchestral player, you have to be one hundred percent on. You could have five hours of rehearsal in a day — usually, with union rules, two and a half hours in the morning, an hour break, then two and a half more. If you’re not feeling well, if your dog was sick all night, you still have to show up and do your part. Same with performances.
I get a little misty-eyed thinking about not performing anymore — being part of that roar at the opening of Brahms’s First. But then I think about all the nights where it was the last movement of the last piece on a concert, and there’s a big solo you have to nail, and it could be ten o’clock at night, but you have to nail it. No other choice. If you’ve prepared well enough, you’ll have the muscle memory — you’ve played it hundreds of times, rehearsed it with the orchestra for a week, and you trust your instincts to get through it. But it’s still ten at night, and once I hit my early thirties, my body and mind told me I couldn’t keep performing until ten or ten-thirty at night. As a freelance musician, you might be playing with an orchestra two hours from home — you pack up your instrument, get in the car at eleven, might not be home until one-thirty. That fast-tracked my burnout, because classical musicians are as much athletes as they are artists, and in some ways as much nightlife entertainers — the same way a DJ is working at ten-thirty at night, or a drag queen is getting into her wig to start a show at ten-thirty. A classical musician could be on stage that late, and that’s just not how I work.
So even though there’s more self-inflicted pressure as a writer, you learn to work through those challenges and respect your body and mind in a way you just don’t get as a musician.
Smith: Your marketing headlines read — let me quote — “Copy that demystifies classical music and inspires a lifetime of engagement,” and, “Grow your fan base with friendly, human-centered storytelling that makes classical music relevant and enjoyable as part of people’s lives.” I love every word of this. Tell us more about your work today — what you do, and who you do it for.
Cirigliano: Thanks — as a copywriter, I appreciate that the headline and subhead get a reader excited. When I stopped performing, I got into the editorial world, and the visual arts world was the first to snatch me up. I worked as a writer and editor for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for several years, then the Whitney. Then I realized what I was doing there, I could be doing for classical music — I missed the musical part of my life. For about six years now I’ve been working as a freelance arts marketer, specifically with classical music presenters — orchestras most of all, but also chamber music presenters and recital series, so a wide range of ensembles and music. It’s interesting moving between writing about an orchestral program and a piano recital, because those come together in very different ways.
My work falls into two categories. The first is marketing copywriting — everything from season brochures to program descriptions, email marketing, the newsletter space that’s become my forte, and more conversion-based things like digital ads and out-of-home campaigns. The second is longer-form storytelling — program notes. Anytime you go to an orchestral or classical concert, you get a program book with short essays about each work, giving you a sense of who the composer was and what to expect.
Both excite me, but I especially love the longer-form storytelling, because I feel program notes are usually abysmal. You’ll open a program book and read, “Beethoven was born in 1770, his father was this, his mother was this, he had two siblings, and at eighteen he moved from Bonn to Vienna, and then he did this.” By paragraph five, before you even get to the piece you’re about to hear, I’m checked out — and if I’m checked out, with a lifetime of interest in this, most people are too.
My whole idea is to plunge people right into what was going on when the composer was writing that piece. Take Brahms’s First Symphony — no one cares where he was born, what his father did for work, how many times he moved as a child. What matters is the heat of the moment of composing. What was going on in the composer’s world, and in the world outside his door, as he was writing this?
People love Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto” — magnificent, grand melodies, lots of fanfare. Beethoven wrote it after his hearing loss had started, which is miraculous enough on its own — that’s the point you should open with. But he was also writing most of it holed up in his brother’s basement, because the Napoleonic Wars were happening outside in the streets of Vienna. He was downstairs with a pillow over each ear, trying to protect his hearing, and writing this work. As a human, are you going to feel more inspired by a greater sense of resilience and creativity and the indomitable human spirit hearing that story, or hearing that his father got drunk a lot and made him practice piano as a child?
I feel very blessed to do this work. As a child, getting those records and reading the liner notes was so formative to my exploration of music, so to be writing program notes for the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Oregon Symphony — some of the biggest orchestras in the country — and to have fifteen hundred people a night pick up one of those programs, read the essay, and hopefully get inspired, is an absolute blessing. It goes to show your life can take very circuitous routes and still bring you to the thing you dreamed of doing as a child.
The ups and downs of a freelance life are very challenging — it’s not for the faint of heart. But building your own business as a writer, in a world where writers are getting less and less value and respect, makes it a lot easier to go through the work knowing that the work is meaningful and important.
Smith: I have just a few final questions, and they relate to why I reached out to interview you — I see a lot of confluence between your work and mine, your newsletter and my newsletter, the themes we talk about. Earlier, when you talked about Brahms’s First Symphony taking twenty-five years, that resonated with me about slowness in life, about taking the time things take. There are people who strike gold the first time out, but many more of us take apprenticeship, effort after effort, to do something worthy of note in the world.
Do you agree with that? Do you think our two approaches — melancholy music and walking — converge? Where do they converge, and where do they part ways? And do you personally walk as part of your meditative or creative process?
Cirigliano: Walking is very important to me. I remember when we first met a couple of years ago, being so excited that someone was writing a newsletter from that perspective — how we become better people, better creatives, cultivate more creativity through walking. It’s the simplest, most human thing we can do.
I’m very lucky to live in a walkable city. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the walks I take around my neighborhood remind me how lucky I am to live there. They help me cultivate a sense of calm, but also make me realize the abundance around me — especially this time of year, when everyone’s gardens are blooming and these mighty trees, some of which have surely been standing for centuries, form these beautiful canopies over the streets. About a fifteen-minute walk from me is Lake Harriet, one of the chain of lakes Minneapolis is famous for. It’s a wonderful way to get out of my head and into the larger world.
Like so many writers and composers — Beethoven, Mahler — I know they wrote about going on walks in the country to think through their music, though I don’t actively use walks that way myself. If I go out purposefully to work something out, that puts pressure on me, because then the whole point of the walk is to figure it out. Instead, I just go for a walk and let my mind empty out. I don’t stay attached to any thoughts — I let the subconscious do the work. The biggest revelation I’ve had as a writer is learning to let go and let the subconscious do the work when it’s necessary, and there’s no greater mechanism I’ve found for that, other than meditation, than walking.
I love walking on my own, but nothing makes me happier than taking long walks with my husband, or going on a hike. It’s fundamental to me. In fact, we’re having a huge heat wave in Minnesota right now, and nothing makes me sadder than it being too hot for my afternoon walk — I need it, but I can’t deal with a hundred, hundred-and-five-degree heat index and still feel like a creative person afterward.
As for where walking and melancholy music converge — I think it’s as simple as this: both invite us to look inward and outward. They call us to observe the world around us, to move through each day knowing we’re part of a larger tapestry. Walking does that externally — seeing everything growing around you, seeing the bees on the flowers. We’re of no more or less value than that bee. Music does it internally — it invites you to realize that emotions a composer felt three or four hundred years ago resonate within our bodies the same way today. They’re invitations to dig deeper into those feelings, that experience of life, and they let us slough off the anger and the rage and the division we encounter in politics, online, and so much of the larger world.
It’s really impossible to feel stressed or overwhelmed when you’re in the good flow of a walk — when you realize you meant to turn right five blocks ago but were so enraptured in your thoughts, or in the trees you were admiring. The same is true of music. To take a walk, to sit down and listen to a beautiful piece of melancholy music — it’s a choice. A choice to choose calm over rage. A choice not to let anxiety or despair fester, but to alleviate it, to find a release for it.
There’s so much scientific evidence, so much literature, on the physical and mental benefits of both. But I think the most important thing is that musical experience and walking return us to our humanity. I don’t think anything could be more important in a world that’s spiraling out of control. We crave meaningful experiences, beauty, connection — they’re the only way we can truly flourish. Every time we choose a route to walk, or a piece of music to listen to, we’re giving ourselves the chance to experience beauty and connection. We give ourselves room to be human. And when time seems to be collapsing, when life seems to be getting faster and faster, I don’t think there’s any greater gift we can give ourselves than the room to be human.
Smith: Michael, I have totally loved this conversation. I’ve learned so much, I’ve had so much fun talking with you. Let me get you out of here on this last question. Besides reading Shades of Blue, which I think everyone listening should — what’s one thing you’d recommend to people who want to, or are open to, learning more about classical music, listening to it, making it part of their lives?
Cirigliano: If you don’t know whether it’s for you, or if you’ve self-selected out of classical music, the first thing to do is go experience a concert live. We all listen to a lot of music through earbuds — you get a sense of the music moving through you. But if you can attend an orchestral concert, spend an hour and a half or two hours watching seventy or eighty people create music in unison, thinking and moving as one — if you can sit through that and see the couple next to you hold hands during a tender moment in a slow movement, or see me start crying at a certain point and still think, “This isn’t for me” — well, that’s the only real way to find out it’s not for you. And then I might ask you to sit down and spend more time with your emotions.
The first thing to do is go see music performed live, because not only do you get the full, supercharged experience of being in a space where everyone’s energy and focus creates this almost religious, transcendental experience — everyone focused, the music moving through everyone — you understand how visceral that can be. Then it’s just a matter of finding the music that’s right for you, that speaks to you. The great thing about classical music is there are about five hundred years of it. You’re going to find works that speak to you — works I may never have heard myself — and you’re going to be excited to share them with others.
There’s nothing I love seeing more than scrolling through the comments on an orchestra’s Instagram post and seeing someone write, “I loved the experience so much, I’m going back next month and bringing a friend.” You want to share that experience with the people you respect and love and care for. Sharing music is a message of love. We all deserve things in our lives that rev us up, that make us excited to be part of the world. Go experience that with fifteen hundred other people in an auditorium, and you’ll be surprised at the change that takes place in you, and how much it inspires you to realize, “I could be experiencing this all the time. Sign me up.” Then reach for Shades of Blue to figure out where to start.
If you want to channel the absolute power of a large orchestra, I’d give you a whole different set of recommendations. If you heard a Shostakovich symphony he wrote during World War II, while bombs were flying outside, that power, that aggression — you’ve got a whole world of music to explore. And if you want the melancholy, sentimental, sweet side of it, that’s when you come to Shades of Blue. But either way, you’re going to find something that resonates with you.
Smith: I love it, Michael. I loved our conversation. Thank you so much for joining me — I’m very grateful for your time.
Cirigliano: Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Russell.
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