FORT SMITH — Music director John Jeter waves away the attention that centers on him and his baton for conducting the Fort Smith Symphony.
“I can’t do anything by myself,” Jeter says. “I have to have 100 other people.”
Besides, he says, “I didn’t write this stuff.” Verdi and Stravinsky and company, they did.
But Jeter, 49, brings a new distinction to his 17th season with the symphony: This year’s Governor’s Arts Award, given to an individual artist, from the Arkansas Arts Council. In more than 20 years, he is the first conductor to win the annual honor.
“In the past, we have honored a lot of visual artists, musicians and performers,” says Joy Pennington, arts council executive director. Jeter came out tops in the selection committee’s review of art-related accomplishments across the state.
“In a national climate where many orchestras are struggling or even gone out of business, the Fort Smith Symphony is thriving,” Pennington says. “And I think that has a lot to do with John’s leadership.”
Jeter takes his place in formal wear, white tie, hair swept back in a silver gleam, lofting the violins with one hand, alerting the percussion, calling up a crescendo.
In this role, he has led the symphony to three recordings on the Naxos classical music label, expanding the group’s audience from the 86,000 residents of Fort Smith to listeners around the world.
But elegance is only half the job. The other part, he barely admits. Along with being the symphony’s music director and conductor, he is also and officially - but you won’t see it on the program - executive director.
Adding one too many titles to the job “just confuses people,” Jeter says. From him, the audience wants Puccini and Mahler. He expects the crowd will turn out for this year’s “Simply Sinatra” Christmas concert. But who wants to hear the business side of a symphony?
He does, knowing his plans depend on keeping the budget in tune. The symphony’s finances determine how freely he can choose the programming he wants, the limit right now being “some sense of realism.” He made do with no appearance by Lady Gaga last season, but the symphony did perform “The History of Rock ’n’ Roll.”
Basketball sneakers-wearing, shirt-tail-out businessman Jeter keeps track of the symphony’s $750,000 annual budget. Every note, every guest artist to play it, he squints at the price tag.
He counts the red seats in the symphony’s home, the Arkansas Best Corporation Performing Arts Center in Fort Smith: 1,327. With concerts routinely sold out, he calculates how many of those seats to fill with season tickets: About 1,200. The rest, he keeps open for newcomers, especially the youngest he works to attract.
“Earquake!” is the symphony’s trademarked school concert for sixth-graders. Thundering with the clamor that only a symphony can throw at them, it ranks “in some respects, the most important concert we do,” Jeter says. The commotion comes with rock star-like video screens, and guest soloists the young audience’s age.
“A 10-year-old walks out and plays a violin concerto,” he says, “and the kids are going, ‘Oh, my gosh. I could do that.’” He imagines some might try, and others are going to want to hear more.
He knows that a show like this would have clobbered him at the same age, growing up in a military family on the move.
“I used to go over to a friend’s house,” he remembers - this was in California - and there, discovered the classics. His pal’s German immigrant parents had a record collection.
“Other kids were buying toys,” he says, “and I wanted to buy Beethoven.”
Jeter took up music theory and piano at the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford in Connecticut with the idea that “I’d teach in a university, something like that.” But his focus slipped off the keyboard.
“The understanding of a piece was as interesting to me, almost, as playing it correctly,” he says. The pick-it apart questions he asked were a conductor’s questions; his notations on the sheet music, a conductor’s notes.
Jeter’s degree in orchestra conducting is a master’s from Butler University’s Jordan College of Fine Arts in Indianapolis, where he developed the style he likens to flying an airplane.
“It’s about small adjustments,” he says, “reminding” the players of what he wants.
At the same time, he learned in conductor’s training how to run the business - is that right?
“Are you kidding?” he says, or in a word: “No.”
“A lot of conductors just want to conduct. Everything else, they leave to administration,” Jeter says. “I think I wear more hats than most.”
VIBRATO (VARY THE PITCH)
Arriving in Fort Smith, as Jeter tells it, he did not see that he had come to one of history’s hardest-edged frontier towns. Old-time Fort Smith endures in Arkansas native Charles Portis’ novel True Grit as home to the one eyed U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn, who packed a revolver, not a cello.
The new conductor confronted his version of outlaw territory: A rough orchestra.
“The orchestra was not in the best shape artistically,” he says. “I was very focused on the orchestra.
“It’s been a gradual ascent the whole time.”
Fort Smith Mayor Sandy Sanders agrees. “We have a marvelous symphony right now,” he says, so good that the mayor sends copies of the symphony’s recordings to companies he hopes to bring in.
Cities compete for new business in terms of utility rates and transportation, Sanders says, and then amenities - the finer points of life in Fort Smith, in which “the symphony plays a key role.”
Sanders is a past member of the symphony’s board of directors, and his wife, Sandi, is the organization’s director of development. But the symphony’s success, the mayor says, centers on Jeter.
“We’ve got a terrific conductor,” he says.
ALLEGRO! (PLAY WITH VIGOR)
Jeter, pronounced “jetter,” is not to be confused with Johnny Jeter, the professional wrestler. Athletic as the conductor’s performance might appear - the sweeping arm gestures, the hair-tousling head turns - the symphony’s Jeter describes his daily exercise routine as a two mile walk.
Born to a Marine family, married into a Marine family, Jeter makes a history buff’s study of admirals and generals - a military strategy enthusiast when he isn’t coaxing the most delicate ting out of a composition.
What is a conductor, after all, if not a better-dressed general in the lead of an army equipped with woodwinds and kettle drums? But unlike the commander of a standing regiment, Jeter has to muster his troops time and again.
Seventeen of the orchestra’s 80-to-100 paid musicians (depending on the concert) actually live in Fort Smith, he says. The others drive and fly in from states neighboring Arkansas and as far away as New York and Florida.
Violinist Lori Fay of Fort Smith, associate concertmaster and one of the symphony’s 23 board members, tells how the assembly works.
“People travel great distances for the opportunity to play with the Fort Smith Symphony under John Jeter,” she says. “John is a consummate musician and a very fair person.
“You run into people with egos in the music world,” she says from experience that includes playing with the Houston Grand Opera Orchestra and Houston Ballet Orchestra. “That’s not the case with John.” No hollering over a missed beat, she says, no firing on the spot for a sour note.
“He might grin” at a clinker, she says. “He might ‘ouch.’ But he knows we heard it, too, and we’re going to fix it.”
The symphony rehearses only a couple of times for some concerts, she says. They can pull together so quickly because “we typically get our music six weeks ahead of time to practice. We have plenty of time to learn it,” depending on rehearsal just to polish the nuance.
Jeter credits the Arkansas Best Corporation Performing Arts Center in downtown Fort Smith for making the symphony “pretty much first in line” when it comes to setting dates.
“We do everything way in advance,” he says. With the 2012-13 season yet to be played, “the 2013-14 season is done already - the artists, the repertoire, everything planned.”
For him, the chance to stay ahead allows for a rare treat in the life of a musician: Silence.
ADAGIO (AT EASE)
Ask him what’s on the iPod, he has no answer - in fact, no iPod.
Apple’s little music machine might suffice for a drizzle of light pop listening, Jeter says. But a symphony “is too much to compress,” he objects - 80 musicians crammed into a gizmo the size of a package of gum. He won’t hear of it.
He carries a cell phone grudgingly. The old flip-thing refuses to wear out.
At home, he says, “we don’t even own a television.” He and his symphony violinist wife, Karen, and 8-year-old violin-playing daughter, Nicole, keep company with the family’s two Shetland sheepdogs, Sadie and Gracie, “and we read a lot.”
One way he has found to love music, Jeter says, is to know when to give it a rest - or at least, as they say in music, a half rest.
LEGATO (SMOOTHLY)
Just as musicians travel to play in Fort Smith, so does the audience to listen.
“We have season ticket sales from a fairly large area,” says Becky Yates, director of marketing: As far south as Texarkana, as far north as Springfield, Mo.; west to Sallisaw, Okla., east to Conway.
Not every symphony trumpets such good news.
“Bleak future for U.S. orchestras” was the headline in The Strad, a magazine for string players. Blame today’s economy, or blame another trend that the Library of Congress magazine, Civilization, detected almost 20 years ago - a declining interest in classical music. Either way, it can be hard to pay the piper.
Money troubles closed the North Arkansas Symphony in Fayetteville in 2008. Bills paid, they revived as the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas three years later.
Jeter says people ask his secret - how to keep an orchestra on the up - and the answer sounds too simple to be for real.
“Fit the orchestra to the community,” he says. “It should work.” The Fort Smith Symphony’s 2012-13 season starts with Mozart, Holst and the “Sounds of the Universe” at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 29, the first of six concerts. More information is available at fortsmithsymphony.org or by calling (479) 452-7575.
Style, Pages 47 on 09/02/2012