Oral History Interview with Richard Kade

This oral history is provided free by the Archives of the Interlochen Center for the Arts (ARTICA). It has been accepted for inclusion in Interlochen’s audio archive by an authorized administrator of Interlochen Center for the Arts. For more information, please contact archives@interlochen.org.

00:00:00    IAN JONES    
So today is May 15, 2025. This is an oral history interview with Richard Kade conducted by Ian Jones on the campus of Interlochen Center for the Arts. Thanks for sharing your time and your story with us today, Richard.

00:00:12    RICHARD KADE    
My pleasure entirely.

00:00:14    IAN JONES    
Would you tell us your name, your connection to Interlochen and the years that you attended?

00:00:21    RICHARD KADE    
Richard Kade. I was a camper at National Music Camp, now Interlochen Arts Camp, 1967 through 1971 inclusive. The happiest summers of my early teens.

00:00:38    IAN JONES    
So tell me, how did you first find out about Interlochen? What drew you here? How did you find your way to Interlochen?

00:00:44    RICHARD KADE    
Somebody, I think, a music teacher at one of the schools where I was playing in a community orchestra, had posted a poster of Interlochen as of probably the spring of 1967 and my dad saw it and remarked how he remembered Interlochen from his high school days, that a lot of his classmates attended. He never had the opportunity, but that was fresh in his memory. And so I applied for a scholarship and was granted one and the next five summers were utter pleasure.

00:01:26    IAN JONES    
What was that first impression when you first arrived here? You'd heard about it. You show up on campus for that first summer-

00:01:33    RICHARD KADE    
The thing that sticks out as far as first impressions was this was the first time I was away from home and family for any period of time, and homesickness hit, and I was already thinking, I ought to pack it in and go back home. And fortunately, the director in those years was Dr. George C Wilson, who very cleverly, kind of dragged his feet and did nothing to help me get back home. And it was of all people, the Intermediate boys coach, or I forgot what his exact title was, counselor, who heard that I was wanting to go home, and he said, "Hey, why don't you, there's this concerto competition we have try out for that see if perhaps you can be able to hold your head high and tell people when you get back home. Well, I tried my best, and I entered this concerto thing." And instead, one thing led to another, I became a concerto winner, and also the hoop that one had to jump through in order to try out for concertos was to play for the faculty, in my case, harp instructor who listened and said, "Why don't you play like that always?" And I said, "Like what?" She said, "carefully musically." Because originally I was placed at about third or fourth chair World Youth Symphony, and with the homesickness, I sunk to about fourth or fifth chair in the High School Concert Orchestra, as it was called in those days. And she told me, next week, high school concert is going to be performing the Kalinnikov first symphony and World Youth is doing the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique. So I had been, I was familiar with both of those. I had played them a number of times long before setting foot on the premises of Interlochen, she said, "I think that you may be able to challenge your way into World Youth if you can get to first chair High School concert." And so traditionally, High School concert had their challenges on Thursday, so that any first chair could challenge his or her way into World Youth Friday, the following day. Shortening a boring story, I made it from fifth chair High School to first chair High School Thursday and to first chair World Youth Friday. I'm sure that's not a record. I'm sure it's been broken by others since then, and even before then. But that was the beginning of my delusion of, hey, I'm really great. I got my comeuppance when I realized, no, I'm just a human being like everybody else. And put it into perspective.

00:04:33    IAN JONES    
A couple of influential people, kind of you mentioned there. So you have your instructor, you talk about George C Wilson, who's the most memorable person from your time here at Interlochen?

00:04:44    RICHARD KADE    
From all five? There are so many, but if I had to say as of today, 15 May 2025, the person who's most on my mind right now is the gal who was second harp my last two summers at Interlochen. I think her full name is Mary Emily Mitchell, who went on to become a professor of harp at some college in New York City, then in Houston area of Texas. She's now long since retired, almost enjoying grandmotherhood in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and she's fighting stage four cancer, and very much in my thoughts. I sent her a text message just this morning: "Guess where I am right now." And I said, "Interlochen, and your name has come up a number of times. Everybody is pulling for you." And I told her that what I most respect about her, even aside in addition to the music, but aside from the music, is her ability to improvise. I said you improvised beautifully in music on an episode of Martha Stewart when you were part of a group backing up Bette Midler, and you're improvising even better in your battle against chemo and all these cures that are worse than the malady. One other person who figures peripherally in there is the conductor of the Santa Fe Symphony, another Interlochen alum, Guillermo Figueroa, who went on to co-found the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and I had the fun of reuniting with him at Interlochen in 2018 which was the 50th anniversary, almost to the day, of a performance we gave when I was a concerto winner that year in 1968.

00:07:08    IAN JONES    
So let me kind of shift gears a little bit. You talked about a couple of concerto wins. Is there a particular Interlochen project, a performance, an activity, something that really stands out in your memory, from your time here,

00:07:21    RICHARD KADE    
From my experience, or someone else who I observed.

00:07:25    IAN JONES    
Well, let's start with your experience, and then we'll do-

00:07:28    RICHARD KADE    
Well, okay, as I began to say, my objectives after that first summer, I thought, Okay, I got to come back. They gave me a scholarship to return. So I thought, This time, I'm going to do it right? I'm going to be first chair principal harp World Youth Symphony all eight weeks, not blow it and miss, miss the boat there, and I'm going to win concertos. Then I will have completed my goals for Interlochen as a camper. Instead, about two, three weeks into camp, because I won concertos, I thought I am really great. And so I had my comeuppance, I figured out a way to, I thought, torpedo challenges. The only number that had any harp in it was canceled. They decided to change a program slightly, and the replacement had no harp. I thought cool, so I turned the music in to the library, which was right next to the harp bungalow, practice hut, whatever you call that structure now long since gone. And when Clementine White, who was the harp instructor then, came Friday for the challenges, I said, "Oh, that's no longer in the repertoire." And she said, Okay, we're going to use the theme, the Howard Hanson eight or 16 bars from the first movement of his romantic symphony, that Dr. Hansen wrote at Interlochen decades earlier. I thought I was so great. The second chair harpist Sandy Bittermann beat me. She did whatever nuance better than what I did in my defending performance, so that when I tried to re challenge her back, she played perfectly. I played perfectly. She prevailed. And for the next five or six, until the last Friday, she played perfectly. I played perfectly. And the lesson I learned from that was not so much that I'm not that smart, although I know that now much better, I learned it doesn't matter if you're first chair or second chair, if you're enjoying what you're doing, and you're doing your best that you can making music or doing whatever activity is its own reward. And she and I, she's now a grandmother in Massachusetts. She and her husband, he's a retired veterinarian, are still in touch with me, and that friendship has endured. It's yet another of the Interlochen people that I'm grateful to have met.

00:10:33    IAN JONES    
How did your time here at Interlochen, your time studying music, how did that influence your personal life, your professional life after Interlochen?

00:10:43    RICHARD KADE    
By the my last summer 1971, I had probably a choice of any one of three scholarships. The first one was from a head hunter sent to Interlochen from the University of Rochester, New York, Eastman School of Music. I was given a scholarship that on that last Sunday when they announced winners of this, that and the other, and I had already been promised a scholarship by Altine White, who was Professor of harp at University of Florida Gainesville. And the third one was not in writing, but I probably could have activated it in 10 minutes. I met with Alice Chalifoux, who for many decades had been harpist with the Cleveland Symphony. One of her pupils was the assistant harp instructor at Interlochen that summer. Jean Altshuler, I don't know if she's still alive, she arranged for me to take off one day from camp and visit Cleveland and meet Alice Chalifoux, and she asked if I know the Debussy dances Sacred and Profane. And I've always hated those, even though I played it a lot in my youth. One of the main reasons I hated it was my third year at Interlochen, I tried using that for concertos and didn't even get into the finals. I always knew that that was a loser of a piece. Debussy really only wrote a handful of truly great things. The greatest of course, the Afternoon of a Faun, but anyway, Chalifoux gives me this line of nonsense, "One can spend his or her entire life studying that stupid piece." And I told her, no, it only took Debussy probably a matter of days to write it, and it was a commission, and his heart probably was not in it. It's substandard. And I think that my being a smart alec marked me as an interesting person. She said, I would like to invite you if you're interested to study at the Cleveland Institute. The shortened version of the long story is like Mark Twain in the back of my mind, I knew that higher education would take up too much time for my learning, so I never went to college. The other thing on that, in regard to the question is that my draft number was kind of iffy, so like many other musicians throughout the United States, when I mentioned this fact to Dr. Wilson, he had already done some checking around, and he told me the Air Force Marines and Navy Band in Washington, DC already had harpists, but the Army Band did not. So he gave me a list of people to contact, and before I had graduated from high school, the spring of 1972 I already had a enlistment date on an early enlistment. By 1973/74 I finally came to realize I was burnt out in music. And the most important thing about that was that 74 I met my wife. We got married in 1975 but she was the daughter of Professor of bassoon at Eastman. She was born 31 years before me, and during the summer of 1938, long before I was born, she went with the rest of the family to Interlochen because he was on the faculty teaching bassoon, and so she was able to drift in and out of things to observe it. She told how the most important, the most fun she had at Interlochen was learning how to use a bow and arrow accurately. And one night, when she thought she heard some sort of critter from behind the bushes approaching, she was near the lake, behind the bowl. She took out her bow and arrow to hit it, and narrowly almost hit Dr. Hanson, who was going out for a dip wearing, in those days, the one piece swimsuit with horizontal black and white, white stripes. Again, that's not my memory, because I wasn't born yet, but the Interlochen experience is one that so many people have shared and take delight in these memories, as I've told a number of people, you youngsters out there, that many of my memories are not really so much mine, but memories of experiences of people that I knew at various times in their later lives, and there's overlap. So that's about the most concise answer that I could rattle off, and it's already rambling too long.

00:16:05    IAN JONES    
It's a community, and you do continue to run into people who have a story, have an Interlochen story to tell, and who overlap with your either time here or the people you knew here, or your teachers or otherwise.

00:16:20    RICHARD KADE    
One such experience, and I never knew, I never got, I never met my father in law, because he had already passed six years before I met Diana, but I saw on a website a few years ago, some gal wrote a thesis about a gentleman named George Goslee, who for many years was the principal bassoonist of the Chicago Symphony. And part of her interview with him, she asked him about his early days, and he said, Oh yes, in the summer of 1938 I was a camper at Interlochen, and Professor Pezzi, I saw him and asked, could I buy a reed or two off of him? And he told me, "No, but I will teach you how to make double reeds." And he had explained that each person's embouchure and mouth is constructed differently. We're all individuals. And he said that you need to learn what's going to work for you. He said that he was very wise, and had I not met him, I never would have ended up at Eastman, where I studied with him and have tried to impart to my own students many of the lessons that I learned, not only at Eastman, but before that, at Interlochen. So, he's been gone for a long time, and I never met Professor Goslee.

00:17:59    IAN JONES    
You're connected to all of these people over all this time who have this Interlochen connection, who've experienced it and you've experienced it yourself. You've experienced it through the stories of others. How would you describe Interlochen to someone who's never been here, who's never heard of it?

00:18:15    RICHARD KADE    
The one constant that remains throughout everything I've heard is, for want of a better word, magic that happens. The selection of students, faculty, staff. There is something, again, no better word to describe it, magical, so that everybody does his or her best. Each of us are going to vary in our strengths and areas that we lack proficiency. So that the name of the game, and this is carried over long since, after Interlochen, for me, name of the game is to figure out how to make the entire operation allow everybody to rise to his or her greatest potential. One guy who I never met, never spoke with on the phone, but initially traded a few snail mail exchanges, and then once he discovered the internet was a fellow who's probably not a household named Jack Welch, who from 1981 until 2001 was the Chief Executive Officer of General Electric. And shortening a lengthy story, by the time he passed, I think that was just a few years ago, we had even exchanged email after his retirement from General Electric, and I felt like I had lost a family friend. I knew how the guy ticked. I knew that he hated yes men. Then I knew how to get into his face in my original contact, in a way that captivated enough of his attention and interest that he, even the last time we exchanged email, thanked me for writing, and he said, keep the good ideas coming. So that's the short, shortened answer of how Interlochen has affected me. Each of us have something to contribute, if only we can figure out how best to do it.

00:20:38    IAN JONES    
Let me turn to something different. So you spent five summers here. Tell me about a favorite spot on campus. What's the, what's your favorite spot that you remember, or that you're here now that you've been back to, what stands out in your memory, and why is it a favorite?

00:20:56    RICHARD KADE    
Kresge Auditorium and the Bowl. Those were the two places that I have the most memories of, Yeah, I did it! But even beyond that, there are the subsidiary memories, the sillier things after "Les Preludes" performance I still remember like it were yesterday. Each of those years, Clementine White, the harp instructor, would stand between the Bowl and the various practice structures. Back in those days, immediately behind the violin section was the harp practice area. Behind the percussion was the bass, and I forget exactly the order of the other ones, but she would stand there with a roll of toilet paper to when she would see campers crying, "this is the last time that we're going to be together this summer," and she would hand out little pads of toilet paper that remains a fond memory. Actually playing some of these concerts where the thing went better than anybody ever dreamt possible. Those are great memory triumphs. The human spirit is something wonderful, and this magic of Interlochen tends to encourage its optimization to the highest.

00:22:33    IAN JONES    
When you came that first summer, what did you hope to get out of the experience? And then over the course of the first five summers, what did you take away the experience overall. What did you hope to get, and what do you think you actually got out of it?

00:22:44    RICHARD KADE    
Well, by the time the first summer was complete, I thought, I got a scholarship. I need to come back, win concertos and be principal harpist World Youth all eight weeks. And as I mentioned, I lost to Sandy Bittermann, now Atwood is her married name, but I thought, okay, I blew that principal chair bit. Next summer, I'm going to win concertos and principal all eight weeks. I was principal all eight weeks for the next three summers, but did not win concertos until my final summer, 1971. Now there where I got the comeuppance that I'm not all that great, when I got back home, my mom, obviously a proud mom, like many parents who live vicariously through their kids, she said, "Yeah, we're proud that you won concertos with that first moment of the Glière. How does the second movement go?" I said, "Oh, let me get the phonograph record. You can hear it." She said, "No, no, I want to hear how you would do it." I thought, okay, so I had to spend two, three nights practicing, I didn't intend to memorize it, but it was a pretty easy thing. I memorized it. And I said, "Okay, mom, here's how it goes," and I played it for her. Her response, she had totally sandbagged me. She said, "You've got two thirds of a concerto. Why don't you get off your butt and do the third movement so you can perform a full concerto sometime." And where that becomes even funnier is that by the time I met Diana and realized that I was burnt out on music, as was she, despite having performed all over the world and doing amazing things, I was able just in the last few years to impart unwanted advice to another Interlochen alum, a friend of a family friend, Isabel Cardenes, is the daughter of two other former campers, Andres Cardenes and Monique Mead. And both Izzy and her younger brother became themselves Interlochen campers in the summers of 2018 and 2019. My dad was the one who instigated Andres becoming a camper in 1972 and he went on to receive a scholarship for the Academy 72 through 73 which led circuitously to scholarship to Bloomington, Indiana, where he studied under famous violinist, I forget his first name, Gingold, who gave him the encouragement to compete in the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in the early 1980s where he won silver. So Interlochen is often the spark that sets people on their careers. Lastly, before I forget about giving advice, my best advice is something that I heard secondhand about from my dad, from his father, two bits of advice. The first one is, never give advice. Smart people don't need it. Dumb ones won't take it. And both of these are probably, were probably very old when my grandfather heard them over a century ago. The second bit of advice is, never argue with a woman, especially if you're married to her. So, dated.

00:26:59    IAN JONES    
So let me go really, really broad for a second now. We've talked a lot about music. We've talked about the magic of this place. Why do you think that art matters all kinds of art, music, or otherwise? Why does it matter in our world today?

00:27:19    RICHARD KADE    
Because it's the closest to expression human earthlings have been able to develop. The term art encompasses so much more than the non hard quote, non hard sciences. But where it begins to fall apart is with interpretation. We're talking about everything from law, from philosophy, from spiritual thought, such as what is known as religion. If you think just of music for the moment, and Western music, because that's what most of us here at Interlochen have studied the most, the standard piano keyboard with 12 different tones within an octave. We're accustomed to that, but yet, people in India, for example, listen to quarter tones, eighth tones, and most famously, the sitar music of Ravi Shankar, comes to mind those folks who have grown up listening to that think that our western music has as many holes in it as we tend to think when we listen to the traditional Chinese pentatonic scale or even the Negro spirituals that use the black keys of our keyboard. The reason this comes up is that another Interlochen alum was the daughter of Ravi Shankar. In most Western civilizations, more people know of Norah Jones than they know of Ravi Shankar, or Ravi Shankar's recordings. He even, interestingly enough, collaborated on a violin sitar concerto, I think it was called with Yehudi Menuhin, who became a practitioner of yoga and other- he had backaches, and so he studied yoga. And on the web, you can find performance that Yehudi Menuhin conducted, I think it was for a benefit concert for the Berlin Philharmonic, where he conducts Beethoven's Fifth first movement, standing on his head with a mat, and he's conducting with his feet. And so all of these things, the arts transcend everything else. There's nothing particularly sacred about the 12 tones between our western octave, or the five tones or the many sitar tones, but, where interpretation falls apart, is what I call the Ruskin Berlioz divide. John Ruskin was an art critic who wrote a five volume treatise on art. I think it was volume three around 1840 ish, where he talked about the greatest thing that a human soul does is to be able to see something and explain in a clear way, I'm paraphrasing, clear way, what is being seen. He said, the ability to see and perceive is the most important because for everyone who can see, you find I forget what the exact ratio is, 100 people who can explain and for those 100 people, you find another 100 people who can interpret it in better terms, some I forget the exact ratios, but he said, seeing therefore is prophecy, poetry and religion all in one. Over about a century later, give or take, Hector Berlioz was being honored at a concert of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. And for that occasion, they performed his only work for solo violin and orchestra, Rêverie and Caprice. And there's contemporaneous correspondence still in existence, where Berlioz was gushing to some friend in the audience, "Never before has anybody so completely captivated the inner meaning and significance of what I'm trying to convey." Meanwhile, backstage, the soloist, the concert master was Ferdinand David, who later went on to be concert master for Wagner, and he his biggest claim of fame, he wrote the cadenza everyone plays for the Beethoven violin concerto. He's unloading to the conductor, who was Felix Mendelssohn, says, "I'm glad I got through that. I have no idea what that thing could have been about or why anyone would write such drivel." And so that's the disconnect, and we can't ever really fully interpret anything. Another alum that I remember fondly is Guillermo Figueroa, who went on after Interlochen to study at Juilliard, and then he co-founded the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra that became famous for performing without a conductor. He said that, next to Beethoven, his other favorite composer, if he had to pick just one, is Berlioz. And he sent me a web link to a performance he did with Orpheus many years back of this Rêverie and Caprice, and. When he returned to conduct the World Youth Symphony in 2018 and I visited him at Kresge, we relived a bunch of fond memories, and by the time we got done with dinner, I had insisted I was going to pay for the dinner, I had ticked him off enough that he plunked down enough money to pay for his drinks, dinner, tip and everything for the three of us - my army buddy came with me. He had never been to Interlochen, so he wanted to see. But things got patched up with in about a year, and he's given me great help with trivia on Babe Ruth's musical career outside of baseball.

00:33:52    IAN JONES    
So many connections.

00:33:54    RICHARD KADE    
That's Interlochen for you.

00:33:56    IAN JONES    
So let me ask you one more thing. We're talking about this a couple of years before Interlochen’s 100th anniversary. What's your hope for Interlochen for the next 100 years?

00:34:07    RICHARD KADE    
That everybody connected with Interlochen at every level will continue to find ways to enable everyone to do better than their wildest dreams ever made them think was possible. That's the real magic of being a human being on planet Earth, as far as I can observe from my pinhole vantage point.

00:34:32    IAN JONES    
Thank you, Richard, I have to tell you, it is my great pleasure to be able to talk to you about this today, and to have you participate in this.

00:34:40    RICHARD KADE    
Mine entirely, Ian.