by Trevor Rosen
June 2004

ince 1992, School of Music alum John Ferguson has traveled the world as artistic director of American Voices, a non-profit that brings American music to foreign countries around the globe. The pianist and Houston native founded the program at the end of the Cold War as a way to introduce the former Soviet Union to American culture, and he’s been expanding its reach ever since, making it his mission to foster positive perceptions of America through music. He and his team hold master classes with local musicians in each country they visit, and then perform—everything from Charles Ives to “West Side Story”—in the host nations’ most prestigious venues.

There are many American non-profit cultural groups with similar missions, but none quite like American Voices—which goes almost exclusively where others won’t. Ferguson has worked in Vietnam, Syria, Myanmar (Burma), Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Nicaragua, and Belize—just to name a few—and the warmth and enthusiasm American Voices receives gives him cause to feel encouraged about the world’s true opinion of America.

Fine Arts web editor Trevor Rosen had a chance to sit down with Ferguson last summer and find out how American Voices got started, what its mission is, and where Ferguson sees it going in the future.

R: So tell me how the idea came about to start this—is this something you wanted to do when you were a master’s candidate here?

F: No. I graduated in 1984 and then immediately had a job in North Carolina as a visiting artist. It was an artist-in-residence program in the western part of the state, in Appalachia. So at the time I was very busy with putting together programs that would appeal to a broad audience, and the idea was to bring different sectors of the community together—people who wouldn’t normally sit together the same concert hall or the same community center or whatever. So we would sit down and try to come up with these community-based programs to bring people together. And then in 1989 I took a break from that and went abroad to Europe to finish a postgraduate diploma in piano at a conservatory in Toulouse, in France. And that was the year the Berlin wall came down, and I had hooked up with two other Texans and we had an ensemble called “Paris Texas Ensemble.” We were all living in Paris and performing American music, and Paris Texas Ensemble got invited to perform in some of these new American embassies that were opening up all over Europe, like in Latvia and Lithuania, new consulates opening up in Poland, we did a lot of work in the former Eastern Germany. In nearby Eastern Europe, we made a bit of a name for ourselves performing American music programs.

R: When was that?

F: 1989—’89,’90,’91—those first few years immediately after the fall [of the Berlin Wall]. Of course in ’91, the Soviet Union dissolved, so from that point on we started working in the Baltic countries, going to places like Azerbaijan and parts of the Caucasus. And starting in 2001, in central Asia—all the ‘stans, like Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan. So the beginning of it all was this focus on Eastern Europe and what they called the “newly independent states of the former Soviet Union,” and their satellite countries in the eastern bloc. That was our focus in the beginning, in the first five or six years, and then we got pulled into programs in the Middle East, during the George Gershwin centennial in 1998. We basically visited all the gulf countries that year and then countries in the Syria, Lebanon, Jordan area. So we started a big focus in the Middle East. That was a big period of peace—the calm before the storm. Peace was breaking out all over between Israel and the Arab countries, and it was before September 11. It was a very nice time and a very positive time to be working in the Middle East. And since September 11 and the beginning of the Second Intifada, we haven’t been as active in the Middle East as we were, but we’re still going regularly to places like Lebanon and Oman and the emirates and some selected countries where things are basically going OK. It’s a part of the world we really like and there are some fantastic conservatories and very talented young musicians to work with there. We’ve also become more active in Latin America since the year 2000, and do an annual tour in central and South America. And I moved to Bangkok about a year ago in response to all the programs we were doing in Asia, so we have a big Southeast Asia focus now—Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam. Those are our main countries, and then o ccasional programs in places like East Timor and Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia. And then we’re also very active in more tradtional places, places more open to American culture, like Taiwan and Japan.

R: And you’ve gotten the majority of your funding through embassies?

F: Well we started that way. Now it’s really a mix—a three-way mix—between private donations through our fundraising campaigns with individuals and foundations, through embassy support, and through American businesses in the countries we go to. For example, our jazz festival in Azerbaijan is funded 90% by contributions from American businesses there. It’s got a big oil and gas sector, so Chevron-Texaco and Exxon/Mobil are sponsors. In countries like Vietnam, we work with a mix of U.S. and international business community sponsors—we have a lot of support from Singapore and Malaysian businesses as well as American businesses.

R: Is this American music by American musicians?

F: Yes, but what we do is very interactive. The core is educational, so we go in and work with the musicians, and then we put on a performance ourselves that’s maybe half of the program, and then a joint performance closes the evening. So for example in “West Side Story” in Vietnam—there were actually two performances, we did “West Side Story” and “Porgie and Bess”—we had about 100 young Vietnamese singers on stage, performing together with four American soloists. We also did our show, a short, Broadway sort of show with the four of us, but the majority of the show was Vietnamese singers singing Broadway and American opera for the first time.

We do those often a projects—“West Side Story” and “Porgie and Bess”—because they’re two pieces of music that almost everyone in the world know the songs to. Everyone knows “Summertime,” everyone knows “Maria” or “I Want to be in America,” so that’s something people can grab onto. It’s also music that works well with classically trained voices. For example, in Vietnam, Broadway had never been performed, as far as we can tell, by Vietnamese singers living in Vietnam, especially since the end of the war because there was a 20-year period where American music and culture was basically forbidden. It’s only in the last five or six years that you can start to do American programming there again. So [in every country], we teach local musicians—advanced music students, conservatory musicians and young professionals—the American repertoire, whether it be Broadway like “West Side Story” and “Porgie and Bess,” or, in the case of our jazz festivals, give them one-on-one contact with jazz and blues musicians.

R: How many professional musicians are involved with American Voices?

F: Well, nobody’s full-time, just because of the slightly ad hoc nature of the way we have to operate. As it is now, there’s a core group of about ten musicians we work with regularly in all of our jazz and classical programming. The larger circle is probably 30-40 musicians who get pulled in anywhere from one to four or five times a year. We have a lot of different jazz musicians we work with, some of them quite famous. For example we work with, on occasion, Maynard Ferguson, who’s been at our festivals, or Toots Tilamones, Coco York. In the classical world, Kurt Ullman is perhaps our most famous singer—he sings “Riff” in the “West Side Story” recording with Leonard Bernstein. But the majority of the musicians we work with over and over again are about 6-10 names, about half of them jazz musicians and the other half classical singers and conductors, and of course myself as pianist.

R: What’s your title?

F: I call myself “artistic director” because I’m hoping someday an executive director will come along to manage all of this for me. But what I like to do most is work from the piano and coordinate the artistic things.

R: But you find yourself involved in the rest of it?

F: Yeah, everything from buying the airplane tickets to working with the press and sponsors—you name it. I’ve got two staff people working for me full-time on the fundraising and development things, one in Europe and one is in Houston.

R: What’s the importance of the mission of a group like yours? Why is this something that people should be doing?

F: When we started, I thought it was important because many of these countries we were going to were shut off from American musicians. Despite the glasnost of the Soviet Union in the mid to late 1980s, despite a certain political thaw, it was still very rare to have American musicians performing American music and culture for Eastern European audiences. So in the beginning, the goal was just to say “this is who we are as a people, this is our music, these are the things you’ve always wanted to hear performed live by Americans.” You know “Porgie and Bess,” “West Side Story,” Mississippi blues, “Jazz from A-Z”—which is a history and development of jazz program we do. So it was just a chance to do American Music 101 in countries where they had never been able to hear it live. Now they knew a lot about American music and composers, but they just hadn’t had that face-to-face contact with us. Now, 15 years later, as the world turns, it’s a much more serious situation. In some ways, there’s no better way than culture and the performing arts to give people a positive image of the United States, and that’s rare in certain parts of the world. In the Middle East and the Islamic world in general, the press is almost uniformly negative about the United States, but you can still give an American cultural performance and have a great reception and get across a good message about American culture and who we are as a people, and completely avoid politics.

R: So it’s easy for a cultural group like yours to go places that might be seen as having rigid sentiments against all things American? Are they welcoming of what you’re doing?

F: Yeah. To give an example, this was between the Second Intifada and September 11, but we went to Lebanon and did a big program sponsored by Kodak, called “An American Christmas.” It was three American Voices soloists with the Lebanese National Symphony Orchestra, and it was an all-American Christmas and traditional Christmas repertoire—everything from “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” to “Silent Night.” We were able to do that in Lebanon, in the year 2000, and we could go back this year and do the same program. We could do that in Syria to.

R: Really?

F: Yeah. You mentioned countries like Syria or Egypt—and I could name countries like Turkmenistan or Tadjikistan, countries you’d think would be completely unwelcoming to Americans—but in reality they are welcoming to Americans, and that’s proved over and over again throughout cultural programming. I can tell you American Voices has been one of the only music groups to go to Lebanon regularly, and we’ve performed American repertoire there basically without any problems. Sometimes politics enters into the newspaper reviews and that sort of thing—

R: Have things ever gotten so bad that they start shutting you out?

F: No, and I think that what that proves is, and we bring this message back to the states, that the whole world doesn’t hate us—they might hate our foreign policies, but they don’t hate us. In almost every country I’ve been to, the people were very good about separating what they don’t like about American foreign policy from American cultural programs and American individuals. So my message is that things really aren’t that bad out there. All the scary things you hear on talk radio and read in newspapers is really just fear-mongering on a certain level as far as I’m concerned. Yes there are serious threats, but on the other hand, things aren’t nearly as bad as they’re portrayed to be. There isn’t a huge clash of civilizations going on out there.

R: How many countries has American Voices performed in?

F: Hmmm. At last count it was about 60.

R: Wow. And that’s primarily in the Levantine area and southeast Asia? Have you been to Africa as well?

F: That’s all over the world. We’re going to Africa this coming year—we’ll be doing some programs in Equitorial Guinea and Ghana and Mauritania and places like that. We’re going there, but we haven’t been to North Africa yet—Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt. Another part of what we do is that we donate some collections of American music everywhere we go, and we raise funds from the American embassies to do that and from our private sponsors, and we’ve put together a sort of basic collection of American scores—everything from jazz teaching methods and Broadway anthologies to Charles Ives and chamber music and collections of American opera arias and spirituals—Aaron Copeland, Samuel Barber, etc. So it’s a very wide-ranging collection, a little of something for everyone—for choirs, chamber music, soloists—and we’ve donated that now I think at last count in 65 countries around the world. And that’s one of the problems we notice in places like—I was just in Kazhakstan and Krygistan two weeks ago—very strong conservatories, music school systems, all of that is going quite strong, but the libraries are just empty of American repertoire, except for maybe a few old pieces from the Soviet Union of things like Gershwin and a few other short American pieces, but they don’t have anything in their libraries. So we give this collection everywhere we go so the students and the faculty have something to work with, and we try to follow that up by going back and performing with them the following year—a choral concert or “West Side Story” or a jazz concert or whatever. Everywhere we go, we try to be as practical as we can in addressing the needs of the local musicians, so that it’s not only about us going to perform for them but really leaving behind the materials that they can work with, some expertise that they can build on to explore American music and r epertoire on their own.

R: So is American Voices a 50/50 split between educational and performance?

F: Well, every educational thing we do culminates in a performance, so the two are integrated. We’re doing our performances in those countries at the highest levels, with some of the best ensembles that those countries have to offer, but I think that what most captivates the interest of the public is that we go in and work with them, and we work with local people to perform American music. Unfortunately, no one else is out there doing that to the extent we are, and in the countries we’re doing it. A lot of people go to Tokyo and Singapore and Berlin and London, but not enough folks are going to places like Bishkak and Phnam Phen and Rangoon and Algiers and Damascus, and that’s really what I would like to encourage American performing arts organizations to do—expand their horizons and think beyond the known geography, to think about these huge swaths of the planet that just don’t get visited by American cultural programs.

R: When you go into a country, you’re almost always going through the American embassy. Have you ever ended up in a situation where the government says “no, we don’t want you here”?

F: Yeah, we have those problems all the time, in Myanmar, for one. We did a CD called Jazz Bridges, which was basically produced from recording of a live concert we did with local musicians. And we did it once in Rangoon and went back the following year to take it up to Mandalay, and the Burmese government closed us down two hours before the performance. And they wouldn’t let the Burmese musicians perform with us. They would let us perform, but not them.

R: Where haven’t you been? What’s at the top of your list?

F: Afghanistan. It’s an interesting country because all of the musicians left during the Taliban, but some of them are starting to come back. Many of them went to Pakistan, some went to the former Soviet Union—many of them are now in Russia—and some ended up in Western Europe. But it has a fascinating traditional music, and they had a very wonderful sort of pop scene in the 1970s. They had this one musician, Ahmad Zair, they called him “the Afghan Elvis,” and he was this really popular pop musician, and he was murdered in 1979 or something like that, during the period when the Russians were there. So we want to go back and do a project with his music and with our jazz and pop musicians and try to give some sort of impetus to Afghan pop, which is just now sort of making a resurgence. The popular music there is very close to Bollywood and Indian pop music, as well as to Central Asian traditional music, so it’s a fascinating country. And I personally have a lot of friends from Afghanistan, so I’m also very curious about being in the country.

R: What’s your 10-year goal for American Voices?

F: Our main goal is to get established in the United States and get ourselves on better financial footing. Since September 11, we’ve gone from being busy to being incredibly busy, and it’s been nonstop until now—as we speak. Fortunately, there’s a bit of a lull this summer, and we’re taking advantage of it to reorganize ourselves and reorganize ourselves in the states. Our goal is to get stabilized so we can be more in control of where we do our projects and what we do and how we do it, so we’re not relying so much on sponsors. We love our sponsors, but we’d also like to have some financial independence. And then in countries where it’s difficult to work with the American embassy for whatever reason—because of budget cuts or lack of interest on their part—we can still go to those countries and do a project.

R: How are you pursuing fundraising in the US?

F: Well we just got our 501c(3) status, so that’s the first step. We already have some funding through some of the corporations we’ve worked with abroad as sponsors in the countries we go to. Their foundations here in the states are making some matching contributions and gifts to us, and just talking to individuals…I think people are confused about what’s going on in the world, and that America is, through a series of misunderstandings, developing a sort of ugly reputation in the world, and I’d like to think that there’s something I can do about that. I feel that in our own small way, we’re addressing that hunger to get a positive image out about the United States and create good will, and show that the United States is more than just big corporations and government throwing their weight around, that it’s a very diverse and interesting culture that cares about the world more than parts of the world sometimes think we do.