The podium in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall at 50 Oak Street will see a new face for the final SFCM Orchestra performance of 2024: Kalena Bovell. Bovell has had a meteoric rise in recent years, becoming the first Black woman to conduct an opera in Canada: A world premiere reimagining of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha in 2023. She also won the 2024 Sphinx Medal of Excellence—the highest honor bestowed by the Sphinx Organization—and was named a 2022-2024 Awardee of the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship. Here, she answers SFCM’s questions about her life and work.

SFCM: How did you and SFCM Music Director Edwin Outwater arrive at the program for this performance?
KB: It was a conversation: He asked me, “Okay, what do you want to do?” And I said, “Well, what do the students need?” Because that’s the balance in situations like this: Students need to experience traditional repertoire, because that's what they're going to be auditioning on, but it still needs to be music they aren’t burnt out on. So that’s how we landed on Ottorino Respighi’s Fountains and Pines of Rome. Edwin also asked me if I would be interested in conducting Alex Malinas’ piece, and I said of course! So Alex and I met for about 90 minutes and just talked through his piece and his process. That was a really great educational experience— for both of us. I'm super-jazzed about this entire program and the students here are playing fantastically: They're so flexible, they really pull sound and they really go all-in, which is the type of conductor that I am. So I've just been having a blast.

When do you first remember music ‘clicking’ for you?
When I was nine. It's kind of funny because before then, I didn't know that I could sing. In elementary school, a choir teacher went to every classroom and gave us the aptitude test of singing pitches, and I was like, “Oh, I can sing, or at least hold pitch.” But before then, I’d never tried, was never curious. I didn’t even think that music lived in me. After that, though, it was like 24/7 music.

How did that progress as you got older? 
I sang in the elementary school choir and whenever I felt like singing. Then I started playing violin when I was 11, was self-taught for seven years, and had my first lesson when I got to college. So when I got to undergrad I realized that I was not going to be a performer. One, because I was so behind in terms of repertoire and lessons, and two, my body was just prone to injuries and just doesn’t move properly.

How so?
I have what’s called scapular dyskinesis, which is just a way of saying my shoulders wing. So it would always cause issues like tendonitis in my shoulder or forearms, all that stuff. It's totally fine now but at the time, realizing all of those hurdles, it was like, yeah, violin is really not in the cards for me.

That diagnosis actually only came about three years ago, which made sense after the fact why the violin was always so difficult to play: My shoulder does not know how to support itself properly. But if anything, it's just helped me become even more aware of how I use my body and the ways I need to use it properly on the podium.

At the time it was pretty difficult: I used to have like an hour and a half worth of exercises and I was pretty much in physical therapy my entire undergrad career, but I could only go once a month because I was paying out of pocket. The thing that I remember back then, though, is that all of my friends were also injured. We all had some form of tendonitis or carpal tunnel, and it was just, “Well, ice up and put on your bandages and go to rehearsal.” That was just the norm back then, and I thought that "This is what it means to be a musician, to live with a repetitive stress injury." No one was talking about the importance of stretching, yoga, Pilates, weight-lifting, cardio—all just for mobility and functionality.

 
So how did you transition from that to conducting?
I thought, I love teaching and I love playing, so why don't I just merge the two? We all had to take a year of instrumental conducting and I took the course and I was just like, “I love this. I love violin, but I think I love this more.” That was the first time I actually got on the podium and I conducted Wagner's Siegfried Idyll. Just three minutes of it for a conducting class, and I remember the teacher at the time told me, “I think you might actually have something.”

So then I took private lessons for two years, and I was in every school orchestra rehearsal and watching as much as I could from professional orchestras. Then in 2010 I did my first round of auditions at SFCM and University of Michigan. I had a terrible audition here, and I didn’t get in at the University of Michigan. So I went back to school at a community college and took theory and ear training. I never had a good ear as a musician or as a conductor: I had a teacher who said, “I knew that you were a really good conductor, but your ear sucked.” So that and the embarrassment from my failed auditions really motivated me: I was working six jobs at one point while in community college.

So then how did you get into the professional sphere once you’d successfully gone through school?
After I graduated, I started working at a boarding school in Windsor, Connecticut. Then I was fortunate to become a conducting fellow with the Chicago Sinfonietta and work with Mei-Ann Chen, who is absolutely lovely. One thing I will always remember from that first meeting with her, she said, “Sinfonietta will not make your career. You will”—meaning I still had to put in the work to get where I wanted to be. I believe it was 2015 or 2016 when I started applying for different assistant conductor jobs, but it wasn’t until 2019 when the job with the Memphis Symphony opened up and I auditioned and won and moved to Memphis.

 
When Mei-Ann was here, she talked about her experience as an Asian woman as far as some of the people she’d dealt with in her career. Has that been similar for you? 
You know, it has been interesting, because I don't feel like I have experienced outward racism or sexism, but I have experienced microaggressions being a Black woman Latina conductor. Typically when I walk into a room, before I'm announced as the guest conductor or any conductor, I get treated very differently: People don't give me the time of day, but then as soon as I step on the podium, all of a sudden it's, “Oh, that's our conductor.”  

But I remember in undergrad, I had a colleague who said, “You're a really great conductor, but there's just something about playing under a woman.” And I almost appreciated that someone was basically upfront about it and willing to have that conversation, because there’s also the people who won't be open about it but will say it to you behind your back. But on the other side of things, I can’t deny that being a black Latina conductor has helped my career, because after the aftermath of George Floyd, it very much was the time of Black conductors and assessing Black women conductors.

It is difficult, though: Growing up and being followed in the mall or being told, “Oh, that's far too expensive. Maybe you want to look at this item instead.” Those little things that make up what it means to walk in brown skin. So I used to joke that I'm a triple negative: I'm a Black woman and a Latina. I'm not “supposed” to exist in classical music, but I do.

How much of your preparation is score study vs. listening or watching performances?
First, I listen a lot. Obscure, old, recent, everything. I want to know what people have done and why. Because so often I hear something and think, “I didn’t like that, but why did they make that choice?” Also, I'm not a pianist, so I just need to be able to get the piece in my ear, so I know what it sounds like when I do get to the score. Then, once I start score-studying, I don't listen anymore until I've come up with my own idea.

So for example, when I performed Fountains of Rome, there was a recording where, in the fourth movement, Charles Dutoit does something in the fourth movement that I absolutely hate. But those are the moments I want to really understand, so that when I get on the podium, I want to be able to say, “This is how I do it,” and have that strength of conviction.

What advice would you give to SFCM students?
Go live life. Go make memories, because those are the things that influence your music. Everything else is secondary.

Learn more about studying conducting at SFCM.