The high-flying flautist

Musician Adrian Spence hasn't looked back since an invitation to study in the US took him to Florida and eventually to California - and his own chamber ensemble, writes Michael Dervan

THERE ARE QUITE a few interesting questions to be asked about Adrian Spence. What's a flute player from Newtownards doing in a place like Santa Barbara on the so-called American Riviera, where he doesn't play in the local symphony orchestra (a professional but part-time band) and he hasn't set himself up as a teacher. How did he come to establish the extremely busy chamber ensemble, Camerata Pacifica, in the city? And, most pertinent of all, how did he build it up into an organisation with an annual budget of $1.25m (€783,000)?

Santa Barbara and Camerata Pacifica are a far cry from Spence's earliest engagement with music. He began taking piano lessons at the age of seven, and wanted, like a boy next door, to play the drums in Lord Londonderry's Own CLB Flute Band. It wasn't as a drummer he joined, however, but as a flute player. His mother knew the conductor and made sure that she wasn't going to have to endure the intrusions of drumming practice at home. He turned out to be good at the flute, "and when you get that kind of validation as a wee lad, you just keep plugging away at it." And when it came to pursuing music as a profession, he says, it wasn't actually a matter of choice. "There was nothing else for me, just absolutely nothing else."

It was an invitation to study with James Galway's teacher, Jeffrey Gilbert, when he graduated from the London College of Music that took him to Florida. Studying under the LA Chamber Orchestra's Dave Shostak took him to the West Coast. And then he landed in Santa Barbara. "People ask me why did I stay in Santa Barbara. And I say, 'Have you seen Santa Barbara?' As far as I'm concerned, I live in the land of milk and honey. Growing up in Newtownards I didn't have any aspiration to live in the United States. With my flute in my hand, I guess I always saw myself as London-oriented." But Santa Barbara changed all of that. "Its proximity to Los Angeles is very important. Santa Barbara is a small town - the population is around 90,000. But, flute in hand, you need to be close to a big town."

SPENCE WAS IN HIS mid-20s when he arrived in Santa Barbara late in 1989, and at that most difficult stage in a musical career, the no-man's land between no longer being a student and becoming an experienced professional. "I was starting to do things, and that's why I started the Camerata. In the US, if you're a flute player, you're a bottom feeder, you just take whatever work you can get, in the lousiest orchestras, whatever. To use a northern term, I was 'scunnered' at the gigs I was having to play, and I thought I can do this better myself. With the impunity of ignorance, that's how I started the Camerata. It's the classic story of 'if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have attempted it'. It shouldn't have happened, that's for sure."

The first Camerata was a chamber orchestra called the Bach Camerata, and for its first season Spence spent about $130,000 (€81,400), "a ridiculous amount of money for somebody that doesn't have any," and raised about $120,000 (€75,100), "outstanding coming from a standing start". Stuck to his desk he had a Gary Larson cartoon of an elephant sitting at a grand piano on a concert stage, thinking: "What am I doing here, for Chrissakes, I'm a flute-player." The orchestra took off "and very rapidly generated an audience and a following".

But, according to Spence, he really didn't know what he was doing. "I actually got busted by the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service, because I was meant to file a tax return for the organisation, and I didn't know this, because we don't pay tax, it's a non-profit organisation." And he made another bad decision which cost him half the budget. A second season was planned and he felt obliged to go through with it, which he managed with a small surplus.

"But that didn't really address the deficit. So I had to stop presenting orchestral concerts, to reset, and did private and semi-public chamber recitals just to keep everything ticking over. That was a major point of change, not just for the organisation, but for me. Because that's where I really saw a personal connection with music, and that's when the mission of the organisation truly evolved.

"Before, with the chamber orchestra, it was get a bunch of boys together and let's play some concerts and make them as good as we can. But Camerata Pacifica's mission is not about presenting concerts. In the United States on your official filings, you have to state what the mission of the organisation is. And if you look at the LA Philharmonic it's, like, in some flowery language, saying we're here to present concerts. The Camerata's mission statement is to affect positively how people experience classical music. What I became concerned with, this was about 1993, was what should be - but most often is not - a very dynamic relationship between the audience and the musicians, rather than the passive relationship we see so many times. That's been my driving mission for 15 years.

"That's why this is Camerata Pacifica's first tour. I haven't been interested in touring, I haven't been interested in recording. What I've been interested in is developing an ongoing relationship with my audience, so we can start to explore what this music is in terms of expression and what it means to people on a personal and emotional and spiritual and visceral level. And you can't do that if you come into a city for a night and then take off." The Camerata runs what Spence calls "a flagship series of chamber music concerts," with nine programmes a year in four cities, Santa Barbara (with two shows), Ventura, Pasadena and Los Angeles.

"Then we do private events, outreach events, individual concerts. We probably play 80 to 100 performances a year, and the budget is about one and a quarter million dollars (€783,000)." The crossing of the Atlantic for the Messenger Project is part planning, part happenstance. Pianist Barry Douglas, who has guested with the Camerata, suggested Catherine Leonard when Spence was looking for a principal violinist.

LEONARD, "AN INCREDIBLY far-sighted, subtle musician," introduced Spence to the music of Ian Wilson. "I was struck by the power and integrity of expression of his music. And so I commissioned Ian to write some pieces for the Camerata." Those commissions included a chamber version of his First Violin Concerto, Messenger, written under threat of bombing in Belgrade, and premièred by Leonard with the RTÉ NSO in 2001.

"I think I'm representative of what we're seeing so much of at the moment, somebody from home who's gone abroad and developed his career, and I now want to integrate my homeland as part of it." So, with his promotional hat on, Spence began to explore the possibilities of the Irish connections in his West Coast work. The whole thing has developed so fast and all by itself that I'm holding on by my fingernails. Some of the representatives of Culture Ireland suggested that I look at touring this, which really would not have crossed my mind at all. And then Tourism Ireland came on as a sponsor and provided, I can't use the term 'seed funding', but 'foundation funding' - they made it possible to tour. All of a sudden, we're taking Ian's piece around the place. We're starting with a huge splash at Los Angeles's new landmark Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, we're going to the Library of Congress in Washington DC, the Morgan Library in New York, the Wigmore Hall in London, the National Concert Hall in Dublin, the Guildhall in Derry and finishing at St Anne's Cathedral in Belfast.

"It has become a very Irish thing, a pan-Irish thing. What is particularly beautiful to me is that Catherine is engaged with the Camerata because she's the violinist that captured my attention and fitted with the acoustical, the aural image I had for the ensemble I was building. And Ian is engaged because he's a fantastic composer. It so happens that we all come from Ireland. But that hasn't been the driving force of this, which I think gives the project a certain integrity.

"What has happened is that the then New York consul general, Tim O'Connor, who was a major inspiration for what this has become, came up with the term 'Music as the Medium of Engagement'. And what we've found now is that we have political agencies, we've got diplomatic agencies, we've got corporate agencies involved with us, people that would never have been involved with classical music before. All around this fantastic musical product. It's become emblematic of what 21st- century Ireland is."

The Messenger Project plays in Washington DC tonight, New York tomorrow, Derry on Tuesday, Dublin on Wednesday, London on May 2, and Belfast on May 3, www.cameratapacifica.org