Play Is Learning w/ Yumi Kendall

In this episode, we discussed her experiences in Waldorf education, classical music's role in human flourishing and creating a feeling of all and transcendence, and her interests surrounding organizational flourishing. More generally, we also discuss her life changing experience as a mom and the development of her talent over the years. You and I have something very special in common that

I want to share it with you all. Both of our grandfathers are the reasonably learned how to play the cello, and in fact, her chair in the Philadelphia Orchestra is the same exact chair my grandfather Harry Gourdett's are occupied in the Philadelphia Orchestra for fifty years before her. So you, me and I clearly have this very special bond, and I'm so excited to shine the spotlight on her today. So without further ado, I bring you Umi Kendall.

a good friend of the family. And yeah, so anyway, So there's that amazing connection you currently hold you, I mean, you hold that chair, you're carrying on the torch in a beautiful, beautiful way, and then you're carrying on the torch bogo. And then secondly, it turns out, as I'm reading deeper into your work, that that well, both of our grandfathers are the reason why we both play cello. I play. I play cello too, not to the extent

you do, but both of our grandfathers are responsible. So can you tell me a little bit about your grandfather and how he influenced you, because I guess there's multiple grandfather levels here.

My American grandfather, John Kendall, is largely credited with introducing the Suzuki method of music education to the Americas back in the nineteen sixties, and he yeah, of course, my Japanese grandfather had no idea about classical music in Japan, like in the rice fields and no electricity until I think I was twelve or thirteen, and it was no running water until I was until we were visiting. So

really beautiful contrasts and in life in our family backgrounds. Grandfather, American grandfather John Kendall was always a violin pedagogue and saw a video of several hundred violinists all playing Japanese violinists, little ones to teenagers playing all together a violin concerto, and you couldn't believe. These teachers could not believe that what they were seeing was actually happening. And they thought, oh gosh, ninety percent of them they must be ringers.

They're not actually playing, They're just leaning on the five or ten folks who are actually playing their hearts out. And they this contingent of teachers flew over to Japan to investigate, is what we saw on this video actually happening?

also have beautiful hearts. And this was partly in the aftermath of the traumas of the of World War two, at least on the Pacific Front for Suzuki in Japan, and the atrocities and the traumas, and and a humanitarian kind of belief that music can make us beautiful people and that every child can. In fact, that is the prerequisite course for Suzuki teacher trainers, which I took my

teacher training. Before you can even take the teacher training, there is a course every every teacher in training must take called every child Can. And that is the innate belief that every child has potential. And yeah, a world, right, this is all your school.

creativity and your spirit. Can you tell me a little bit about what is Waldorf system while.

These are all how we learn. And it was so interesting for me when I went through MAP at Penn for Positive Psychology and hearing one of the presenters talk about positive education and how the data is showing how effective positive education is and all of the criteria and parameters for that. It was very, very similar to Waldorf education. And the problem quote unquote problem with walderf education is because it doesn't test, at least in the lower school

through the first eight grades. There are no formal tests. There is no data to show how successful it is as compared to another group. Because it understands the approach of education, understands that creativity and play and letting children learn at their own pace, in their own environment with each other, of course, in the social structure that is part of the school, meaning there is social network. It's

not in isolation. We know from experience. I knew from experience how wonderful my childhood was because of my Suzuki and Wilder educations. And the problem with the Wilder of education was that it wasn't being measured because that's not part of the education system is measuring those things. So

it was like an intrinsic problem. And I loved seeing this presenter at school at Penn doing this presentation because it just validated everything from a data perspective of my experience, of my positive experience with Wilder of education, and it Let's see, I think there were three tiers we learned at the end of senior year. The first sort of

tier is children learn through their through their senses. We learned through feeling, our sense of set we're taking in the world through our senses and so soft beautiful textures, natural fibers, wood, beautiful craftsmanship, soft cloth and rainbow cloth, and all of the texture in sight and sound and smell, like the baking that happens in kindergarten, that we all get to bake and roll the dough together and smell the bread as it's baking while you're going to go

outside and play. It's very it sounds very idyllic, and it is. The belief is that children first learn through their senses. The next phase, more through elementary school, is that we learn through our hearts, through our sense of goodness and through our innate sense of human kindness. And then in high school we learn more cerebrally, more cognitively and become more more the complete sort of thinking the whole person through the goodness in our sort of hearts,

as we've hopefully been established in the younger years. But that's that's why the whole weald of education is is about teaching the whole or cultivating the whole person. It's not about teaching like putting things in and you regurgitate correct facts out. It's about cultivating, like watering a plant.

believe he passed. You know when he saw cello in a window and he's like, oh cello. You know Jackuin Duprez heard heard it on the radio and she's like, oh, I want to play that instrument. Did you have a crystallizing experience?

my older brother plays violin. He's in Nick Kendall. He's in a group called Time for Three. I have an older cousin who is principal Viola of National Symphony. His dad, my uncle was second chair of Viola of the National

Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. Of course, my grandfather, I have an uncle who is in the arts performing arts world as well, and so and everybody plays or participates in music in the family, in the American my American family somehow, so at holiday gatherings and birthday parties, and we were all in the same area, and it was just normal for us to participate in music, and

so as an invite for me. Children, you know, children are a mirror of their environments and are and that's a Suzuki sort of philosophical belief that we will learn by imitation and positive encouragement and repetition. That triumphant is like one of the main teaching tenets in music in Suzuki. And so for that imitation, of course, I wanted to do what my family was doing because that's what I see. So my turn came when I was five and grand and grandfather had a pawn shop cello under their piano,

and that was my that became my cello. It was my aunt Nancy's cello when she was a little girl, and they just kept it and it became my cello, and so there was a sense of family connection. Although I was not aware of it at the time, I just knew I would get to start advancing. Instead of playing from cereal boxes with little rubber bands attached to it to pretend to participate in making music, I would get to play this this cello that was from a pawn chat that was Aunt Nancy's.

out of particular things, particular training regimens. Kobe Bryant got a pretty good bang for his buck with basketball. You know that that others would not get the same bang for their buck for you know, you got a great bang for your buck with the cello. You know. But but can you describe to me your first person experience about the acceleration of that curve and and you know what it was experientially like for you to work your way up to the Philadelphia Orchestra.

When I was I remember this passage in shastakovich First Cello Concerto on the second to last page that has a very fast thirty second notes with scales and some position. Each one is slightly different than the previous, very very challenging, and it was the first time in my cello playing experience ever that I cried. I was so frustrated because I did not know how to overcome that challenge. It was the first time that I was so challenged. I didn't know how. I know I had work ethic, I

know I had repetition. I knew how to practice. I knew how to break things down so that I could work them back up again at tempo in different patterns, in different permutations and backwards and forwards and slurs, articulations, all these different techniques that I knew of from my grandfather actually practiced techniques that he would call unit practice. And that was the first time I was so frustrated.

I felt like, I don't know if I can do this, And that was very good for me to go through that, to have that humbling experience. Eventually, the perseverance just kicked in. I just had to believe in myself that I would get it, and I did. I performed it. It went fine, but it took longer than my previous iterations of typical practicing had taken and that was very good for me to go through that because I realized I really have

to try. I mean, I was already trying, but before that point and even after that point, I had what I referred to as just lots of green lights. I'm so fortunate to have had the tools with a cello under my grandparents piano, to have had lessons which take financial resources from my grandparents it happens to be and opportunities, and that those opportunities were green lights for me. It didn't matter if I won second or first Pride, but

there were performance opportunities that helped me grow. And all of those opportunities from you know, age five or six, my first recital to up through winning the Philadelphia Orchestra job and since then, which my my one my orchestra job twenty years ago in two thousand and four, all of those are not just about having the tools and the lessons. It's about having the opportunities to challenge myself in those competitions or recitals, low key, big key, small

town to big national things. They're all growth opportunities. That's another thing I'd love to chat with you about, Scott, about is about increasing those opportunities for everybody because beautiful. Access to beautiful music and learning how to make beautiful music is for It's a part of the human experience. But anyway, the second story I wanted to actually tell you about as well was I did not decide to go into music until the day after my SATs and senior year.

And you know, I had different teachers and in eurrhythmy, which is a sort of movement spiritual related movement, almost dance with music, classical music, I had very supportive teachers who were encouraging me to quote unquote go into their genre,

study deeply in their arena, in their field. And I loved all of that, and so I didn't decide to go to take auditions from music school until the day after my essayts when my friends and I were discussing what at the time was personal essays for entrances entr or entrance applications, and I was struggling with what my personal essay content would be. And that's when I realized, oh, music, that's my personal story. That's how I tell my story

is through music. And it all made sense then and then I so then I changed from doing homework first to practicing, to them doing practicing first and then my homework, and that wasn't until senior year. So I had many green lights when I talk about green lights and music, with the competitions and the recital opportunities and family recital opportunities when it's just a very safe space with people who love you no matter what, and it's just a

chance to have fun with friends playing. We had four family get togethers where our four of our Suzuki families would get together and all the kids would play, would play Capture the Flag outside in the afternoon on a Saturday afternoon once a month, go in have dinner. We would program our own recital with each of us play in whoever's living room we were at, and then we'd play our little recital in whatever order. I remember being under the dining table, like right handwriting out the program

and the order in which. You know, Jay, You're going first with Lafolio, okay, I'll go second with the swan. Who's got something fast to follow the swan okay, and then we'll all do a big group thing at the end, after all ten of the kids had played. And so it was just fun and all of these, all of these opportunities for green lights happened in each of the kind of arenas in which I was studying at Waldorf School. It was all just it was fun, it was intriguing.

It was just I want to learn more, and okay, well now i'll study music, I'll audition for music conservatories. And that all worked out fine. But I always knew I wanted to know, I wanted I always want to learn more. It doesn't stop for me. I'm a I'm a forever student. Okay, i'll stop.

is Jack and Duprey. Yes, and there's such a childlike well I am thinking about her her age sixteen performance, you know, you know, with Baron Baum conducting, which is little interesting that they ended up and then they ended up getting together. Yeah, but we won't go there. But yeah, it's just interesting. You know, there's this there's this like childlike wonder and and uh and excitement and they and I've seen you play too, and uh and and I

see something similar. So do you think that's kind of an essential part of being a creative musician, whatever that is, whatever that essences.

He's great with just hearing where something needs to be where, like musically speaking, ah, this needs to have a jam in it, just like this rhythmic rhythmic section coming along here. His whole group is super super adept at that, and I certainly could learn the language as as he is.

But he never had any formal training in this. He's just been drumming his whole life in the basement, driving us nuts with upturned trash cans, and then climbing the streets of Philly outside Curtis, like banging on the lamp posts with sticks is drumming, and I mean he is. If you think I'm creative, Nicholas is oodles or what I would call creative. But I think to your point, playfulness and curiosity, which I think I do as a personality and body, I do feel like the help me

continue to keep learning and growing myself. I'm never I'm not done, never finished. And you know, interviews when I first got into the orchestra, I was twenty two when I won the job. I finished Curtis and I started when I was twenty three, and I had some interviews like, what do you do now that you've reached the top

of your twenty three? But this is always just the beginning, as soon as we think of ourselves as a finished product, which society often treats us as consumers, and we're just supposed to absorb things and turn them out, but we're living. I think the human experience is about varieties of interaction and creativity, of interactive interaction with creativity, and it's our opportunities and it's the tools that were given that can

cultivate our creativity. So I haven't had less. I don't feel like it searching my brother to comparison with my to compare with my brother in improvisation, specifically in music, he is easily a stronger improvisation like just jam hands down than me. I'm really good at interpreting classical music that somebody else has written. Nicholas is really excellent at generating music on the spot. I'm also capable of generating music.

It takes me longer, but the time. If we're not constrained by time, then the whole concept of creativity for me does change, because, like Adam Grant says, with procrastination and procrastination you know, everything that gels in our minds sometimes needs time. Maybe if we have a conversation again when I'm fifty or sixty, and we'll see when I'm not so sleep deprived other things that that grow.

Philadelphia Orchestra. It is like being It is like sitting on your favorite couch and it just envelops you and you are covered up in your favorite blanket or your favorite cozy fuzzy if that is your texture of choice. But it is so it feels so right, and I'm so grateful every day that I get to go to work. And or as Amy, we're just a Nebsci would say, it's my calling. I feel like I get to do what I'm supposed to be doing. I call it work

because it's functionally that's what it is. But it is I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, and I feel so fortunate to be able to do that. Is it challenging some days? Yes? Is it also rewarding while also being challenging. Yes, socially and also musically, meaning there are interactions, you know, with any workplace or group of a social network. We need to work things out and that's rewarding as well as it is to make the music.

Sitting on stage. I still remember the very first day that I substituted as a student after winning an audition to be able to do that, and that lit my fire even more that when the audition would happen, I said, oh my gosh, if I could do this every day, I would take it in a heartbeat. And what a blessing it is to get to do that. I was sandwiched at the back of the cella sections section, in front of the double basses, so as in the low dark chocolate register of the taste buds, like sixty seven

percent dark chocolate is my favorite chocolate. And I get to I get to live.

Mozart's Requiem. And for me, there is a connection in time between myselves from the twenty twenty nineteen version of the Mozart Requiem at Saratoga to the twenty eleven version of the Mozart's Requiem that we performed in Reisenhall when grandfather died, and to honor him, I was playing it that week to honor him. Nobody else needed to know that was my own personal avenue of delivery in our

performances that week. And so when I ended up crying in that twenty nineteen version in Sarahga, I, I was doing a lot of internal reflection and transportation of my sort of inner self, of sadness, of grief, of anger, of also the musical anger that happens in Konfutatis in

the specific movement with dun lumpumpum. It's a very angry movement, and so that helped conjure my own emotional connection to that with the many layers of my own personal experience, so that that had, you know, grandfather's death, grief, the beauty of the piece itself just separate from me personally, to transcending time with myself, from my from my current then to the past self, sort of reliving some of the grief that I felt or maybe unacknowledged grief that

was coming out eight years later. So there are a lot of layers in all of that that I live. When I perform piece, I'm thinking about my past self that introduced that first met a piece of music, that same piece of music to my current self, to sharing of course with the audience. Somebody in the audience is a grandfather, they're living it for the first time or sadly maybe the last time. Maybe they don't know it.

So there are a lot of a lot of emotional connections for me in any given performance week, but that particular one, the tears of transcendence for me that that was really specific to that piece and those moments in time that I was just describing, does that make sense.

unique pathway to peak experience. Yes, I mean I think I know you're really interested in excellence, and you know, I think sometimes we make too much of excellence as being the goal, you know, as opposed to just self actualization.

is for me, what this reaching our potential? Yes, but also continuing to grow our potential because like I said, I don't stop learning, so we just keep growing, We just keep using, We just keep growing, keep being curious, keep being interested in things beyond ourselves that challenge us, that push me, that interest me. When I had the baby, I really couldn't doin anything else, So that was kind of a fermata, a pause button with self compassion, because we need the ebbs and flows of life or if

someone has a grieving time or all of these. You know, the ebb and flow of life happens. But when we're when we're able, we I put my foot on the accelerator, not in terms of I shouldn't say accelerator. I fuel myself with the nutrients for growth, That's what I should say, because accelerator sounds like it's externally motivated and I want to be fast, and that's not That's not how I think of reaching or continuing to strive. For knowing our potential and seeing it. There's so much there, Scott.

do you refuel? That's my and that's the big And even in nature in the season, of course, we are natural beings in nature. We have in the tropics anyway, we have the seasons where there's hibernation, the bears go into hibernation the plants, at least here in Pennsylvania, they the leaves fall off, the trees, the wind, the nature

goes to sleep for the new springtime. And I think this is also Waldworf Like immersion in nature and appreciation for in connection to nature, I think is a key part of our understanding ourselves and how we work.

These are like the rhythm, the Cicadian rhythms of life. We need to emulate that absolutely. In fact, I wonder if there's studies on excellence without sleep like you can't or the equivalent, the analogy, the equivalent of sleep and rest.

You've got this Masters of Positive of Applied Positive Psychology, which is where I met you at Penn, and I know that you're really interested in classical music's role in human flourishing and the importance of cultivating healthy organizations as pathways to serve the arts and public community. Where's your thinking these days around how we can cultivate healthy organizations? I know this is a deep passion of yours.

We had to. The organization had to restructure for its long term health. So I'm not going to discuss disagreeing we're agreeing with the actual decision to go through that process, except to say from an experience point of view for

the musicians, it was very traumatizing. And I found myself at the then Barnes and Noble at the corner of eighteenth and Walnut and Philly in Center City, at the Barnes and Noble in the business section, looking at a lot of red books like Power and Leadership Authority, you know, because I was looking at what do other organizations do when they go through a struggle. We can't be the

only ones who are facing a challenge. What do other people do when they're struggling with motivation or employee connection and all of these I loved it. I just soaked up as much as I could, and I read specifically

two books whose authors I ended up writing. Dan Pink's book called Drive subtitled The Surprising Truth of Intrinsic Motivation, and then Adam Grant's book Give and Take, and I wrote both of them and very brief emails saying, hi and Fanks, and do you have any knowledge of application of your research to the classical music industry blah blah blah, and the orchestra Adam Grant, I wrote on a Sunday evening at like eleven pm hits end, and at seven

twenty one I got the auto reply, like very excellently written, beautiful auto reply, And then like a minute later got a personal reply from Adam Grant seeseing me into the directors at the Positive Psychology Center saying, ah, there's a bunch of interaction here, intersection here that might be interesting. And literally ten days later, this was December twenty eighth,

so no, it was about fourteen days later. The map class, the pen class and Positive Psychology came scheduled came to a Philadelphia Orchestra concerto and then the roof just blew off with all the connections there because I met James, I'd met them backstage. We chatted. They invited me to come the next morning, Sunday morning, at like eight am to Penn to help the class debrief their concert experience, which for many of them was their first classical music experience.

And that for me was the beginning of everything map for the applied positive psychology program. So, to go back to your original question, I believe that healthy arts organizations, healthy nonprofit organizations that deliver public good goods like arts. If those are we can only be as good as our arts organization is, right, the organization needs to run well in order to be able to be effective for

the public good. And so I feel like the healthier the more we know about positive psychology and its possible applications to arts organizations, the healthier we can be, and the more effective we can be in our delivery in our concerts, in our and we're already giving our we're already pouring our hearts out on stage as the musicians, but from the patron experience to programming to EDI efforts that we're doing, you know, making strides on in an

otherwise very antiquated industry, and antiquated because of its history in Western Europe aristocracy and so is this was the original sort of nucleus connection to positive psychology and the program at PEN And while I have not officially applied it back to the Philadelphia Orchestra, I feel that the organization has, for a variety of reasons, grown and flourished

in ways. Maybe it's from post traumatic growth, maybe it's from just being aware of the possibilities, but we have definitely grown from the challenges of before and artistically, at least with the leadership of jan Nique, our music director, we are we are just poised ever more for continued beloved representation and delivery of arts messengers of music to Philadelphia and the country and internationally on tours. But that's

the anyway, that's that's the answer to that question. Is that's where it stems from my my belief in strengthening arts organizations. Was that serendipitous email exchange with Adam Grant, Adam, thank you.

so there's a lot of things that are happening. She wanted to start cello because I think she wanted to imitate me, which of course makes sense as a parent, and our connection is great, but it's been definitely a challenging thing to manage practice time from a practical standpoint. Emotionally, sense of meaning has skyrocketed because I just have.