Dinners with the maestro: ONNY founder reflects on life in music before appreciation dinners

Oct. 15—POTSDAM — When the Orchestra of Northern New York celebrated its 25th anniversary a decade ago, the orchestra's founder, conductor and director, Kenneth B. Andrews, found himself transfixed one evening in front of Hosmer Hall.

It was following an ONNY performance and after the audience had left, he reflected at the spot, taking in the concert fliers that were hung there. The fliers promoted all of the concerts the orchestra had performed in its history.

Mr. Andrews's wife, Nancy, had meticulously put them up — creating a harmonious timeline of progress. Mr. Andrews recalled it was more than 100 fliers.

"After the concert, I went out front after everyone had left and I just started going down and looking through all these posters on the wall," Mr. Andrews said.

The programs and the music reflected in those fliers all came back to him. "And every one I would look at was special to me. I'd look at one and go, 'Oh, this was special to me because of this and this.' But then I'd see the next poster, and say, 'No, this one was special because of this and this.'"

But it was about more than the musical repertoire.

"Faces would flash into my head — musicians who played during those concerts," Mr. Andrews said. "I spent quite a long time there thinking about how many of these musicians came in and out of my life and in and out of the orchestra."

Now, 10 years later as Mr. Andrews conducts his final season for the orchestra he founded, it's the people he reflects upon the most and credits with making the ONNY a solid north country cultural institution. And, he believes, he's just another one of those people in the orchestra. When he picks up his baton to conduct, he doesn't want to come across as the most important person in the room.

"Anytime I'm on the podium, I never forget what that feeling is on the other side of the podium," he said. "We're all equal. Conductors are not the most important. Everybody has a job to do. A conductor has to have thought and vision to create that concert. But without every individual musician, whether it's a principal player or a session player, if they don't do their job, I can't do my job. And if I don't do my job, they can't do theirs."

He conducts with a fact firmly in his grasp: "If you're not careful, then you forget that batons make no noise," he said.

As he steps aside, it's time for others to make some noise in his honor. Mr. Andrews will be honored on Saturday, Nov. 5 at a 35th anniversary gala at The Stables at Windy Point, Potsdam, and on Saturday, Nov. 12, at Hilton Garden Inn in Watertown at a 35th anniversary appreciation dinner.

After his final concert at the ONNY helm next July, Mr. Andrews plans to stay active in music.

"I hope to have more time to be able to do things with Nancy and travel," he said. "But I'm also looking forward to opportunities still in music, both as a player and also in conducting."

For example, he's a member (flutist) of Adirondika Pro Musica, a quartet of flute, violin, viola and cello — a compact group compared to the dozens under his baton in the ONNY.

"It doesn't matter how many ideas you have or what your dreams are," Mr. Andrews said. "I feel so humbled to be able to work with these great musicians over 35 years. The musicians have made this happen, and all those who served on the board and all our incredible volunteers over the years."

A life in music

Mr. Andrews has served as music director and conductor for the ONNY since its founding in 1988. It's one of the orchestras he's conducted. He's also served as music director and conductor for the Castle Farms Festival Orchestra, Champlain Valley Symphony Orchestra, the Ohio University Symphony and Chamber Orchestras, The Bay View Symphony Orchestra, the Crane Chamber Orchestra and as interim music director for the Crane Symphony Orchestra from 2009 to 2011.

He's also been a frequent guest conductor for youth and all-state orchestras in the U.S. and Canada. He served as the music director of the Syracuse Symphony Youth Orchestra from 2000 to 2008.

"I love working with young musicians and helping to mostly get across the fact that it doesn't matter what you do in life, as long as you do it with passion — whether they're on the soccer field, in academia or if they're playing an instrument," he said. "To not do it with passion is a waste of their time."

Mr. Andrews holds the rank of Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the Crane School of Music and SUNY Potsdam, where he taught for 33 years, retiring in 2019.

His own musical training began at age 6 in South Carolina with piano. Shortly after he began lessons, his family, which included two older brothers, moved to the Chicago area. Ken was in the second grade. His oldest brother was the first to give him flute lessons, an instrument Mr. Andrews took up in fourth grade.

He came from a musical family. His father, James Crandall Andrews, worked at Argonne National Laboratory and was a skilled pianist and organist.

"My mother (a former English teacher) was an extraordinary person," Mr. Andrews said. "She and my father both did everything they could to make sure that we had the training we needed. My father even turned down jobs in other cities because he thought the musical training we were getting was very good."

His parents were also active in scouts, which motivated the earning of Eagle Scout badges for Mr. Andrews and his two brothers, James and Robert.

His grandfather, James Clarence Andrews, was a biochemist who worked at the University of North Carolina in its biochemistry department.

"I had seen him in his laboratory where he did all his work, but what I knew him as was someone that I grew up playing chamber music with," Mr. Andrews said. "He played viola. He played for the North Carolina Symphony and turned all his checks back in."

The ONNY's James and Katherine Andrews Young Artist Instrumental Competition is named after Mr. Andrews's late parents. It's one of the only competitions in the U.S. that offers both cash prizes and a performance with the orchestra for the winners.

"My parents loved anything that had to do with organizations for kids," Mr. Andrews said. "When my father passed away in 1996, the family decided to use the estate money to create the Young Artist Competition."

The Andrews brothers and their father would often perform chamber music at home.

"When I was growing up, my father and I played sometimes two or three hours a night, sight-reading music, viola literature and we did a lot of transposition work that way, playing off different instruments," he said.

In high school, Mr. Andrews started his own chamber orchestra made up of musicians from the Chicago area and taught lessons. He and a buddy also created a jazz dance band, The Sybarites, named after the ancient Greek city of Sybaris known for its decadence. "We played all over the suburbs of Chicago."

Mr. Andrews said that in 1969 also while in high school, he wrote a musical comedy, "Wooden You," which over four performances grossed $10,000 (nearly $81,000 in today's dollars) for a youth group at his school. He noted he also selected the pit orchestra for the musical and conducted it.

Before college, Mr. Andrews, a graduate of Lyons Township High School in a suburb of Chicago, studied under Emil Eck and Richard Graef, seasoned veterans of the Chicago Symphony.

He went on to study at Indiana University, where influential instructors included James Pellerite, Kent Terry and Harry Houdeschel. His conducting teachers have included Karl Ahrendt, Tibor Kozma and Wolfgang Vacano.

"I was very fortunate to go to Indiana at that time," Mr. Andrews said. "Indiana, Juilliard, Eastman (School of Music), and Curtis (Institute) were putting perhaps the most musicians into orchestras at that time on the East Coast."

In 2016, Mr. Pellerite received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Flute Association. He retired from the Indiana faculty in 1987 and now lives in New Mexico. Mr. Andrews said he was one of his most influential mentors and instructors in the field of conducting.

"People ask me, 'How can that be? He was your flute teacher,'" Mr. Andrews said. "I say, 'Conducting is not just about what you do with the stick and learning that way. It's about learning about color and rhythm and other aspects.'"

As a college senior, Mr. Andrews earned a plum spot: associate principal flutist, with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He said about 400 people from around the world auditioned for the spot.

"I felt very fortunate," he said. "They boiled it down to six, then two. They were already people playing in orchestras. As far as I'm concerned, any one of those people could have gotten that job."

But Mr. Andrews couldn't live in the orchestra's home city because of a prior commitment. He said he promised an instructor, Mr. Pellerite, who went on sabbatical, that he would teach some of his classes. So, the Montreal symphony orchestrated a solution.

"They flew me back and forth between Bloomington (Ind.) and Montreal," he said.

He was with the symphony for nearly four years.

A change in plans

Mr. Andrews came to SUNY Potsdam's Crane School of Music in 1986, having formerly taught at Indiana and Ohio universities.

"I thought I'd be here for only two to three years," Mr. Andrews said. "But the orchestra started in my second year and it was such a wonderful studio. I let a lot of other opportunities and jobs go, because I thought the combination here was very special."

One of the reasons he started the orchestra was to offer such an opportunity for professional musicians in the area.

"At that time, any musician who wanted to do this had to go to Portland, Maine, Burlington or Syracuse or other orchestras outside," Mr. Andrews said. "But nothing in our region."

With the idea of creating an orchestra, Mr. Andrews met with John R. Lindsey, who retired as violin professor from Crane in 2016, after teaching there for 35 years, and Sally Busch, viola, who would later move to New York City to perform at gigs such as Broadway shows.

"We stayed up until 3 or 4 in the morning, two or three nights, talking about this, thinking about musicians and such," Mr. Andrews said.

"It was Ken's idea to have the group and he was not sure, from a practical standpoint, what to do and how to do things," Mr. Lindsey, the founding concertmaster of the ONNY, recalled. "Sally and I played at other concerts at other places. She played as far away as Maine and I played in the Vermont Symphony, so I knew a lot of musicians in this part of the Northeast."

Mr. Lindsey said that Mr. Andrews sought the basics about orchestra formation and management.

"I had a lot of experience, and he wanted to know how much to pay, who to ask and all those details," Mr. Lindsey said. "There was some people that obviously would be very good for the orchestra and other people maybe not so good. We helped him set it up. We had a lot of ideas, a lot of things we could control, but it was Ken's idea in the first place."

Mr. Lindsey said it's gratifying to see how the orchestra has developed.

"It's a really good orchestra now," he said. "Back then, it was kind of a community orchestra. There were a lot of students playing, some adults who had studied violin in the past or viola or whatever and not all of them played as well as the ones do now."

A tough sell

When created, the orchestra was known as the Chamber Orchestra of Northern New York. For many people, expectations were not lofty.

"I was told by several people that it had been tried many, many times and they just wanted to warn me that it would probably fail in the first year," Mr. Andrews said. "Here, it's 35 years later."

Mr. Andrews recalled that in the first few years of the ONNY, he wore many hats, from being the orchestra's publicist and grant writer to personnel manager.

"I did all the hiring, was the business manager, did all the booking, raising money and even subsidizing concerts and rehearsals. Money was low."

But the weight of creating a successful orchestra began to take its toll on him. There was an orchestra board of directors, but it wasn't active.

"It was, what I considered a paper board," Mr. Andrew said. "People wanted to serve but didn't want to do meetings and stuff like that. It was a who's-who of musicians from the area, but all of them were so busy. They didn't have the time."

He said that in its 10th year, the Rev. Congreve H. Quinby of Potsdam's Trinity Episcopal Church, approached him.

"He was worried about me — which I was also at the time as well," Mr. Andrews said. "He said, 'I think you need help to get this thing going.'"

With Rev. Quinby's help, a "working board" was created.

The Rev. Quinby, who was the first board president of the ONNY, retired from Trinity in 1993. He died in 2018 at the age of 89 at his home in Burlington, Vermont. His wife, Constance L., lives in Shelburne, Vermont. In a phone interview, she recalled her husband's dedication to the orchestra.

"My husband was a music major in college and was quite taken by what Ken was doing," she said. "Prior to his retirement, he said, 'It's not a matter of what I'm going to retire from, it's what I'm going to retire to.' He said, 'The first thing I'm going to do is to get the orchestra in order, to get its nonprofit status and get a board formed.' That's when things started rolling to get it more organized."

"The board has gone through so many wonderful board presidents and board members who have been so gracious giving of their time," Mr. Andrews said. "Betsy Northrop, Vernice Church and Tim Savage steered the orchestra through some very difficult times."

Chameleon orchestra

The orchestra adopted its current name in 2000 and serves all of the north country, from Massena to Lake Placid. In the north country region, its members have come from such communities as Potsdam, Canton, Massena, Alexandria Bay, Clayton, Plattsburgh and Lowville. It's also attracted musicians statewide, from Long Island to Buffalo, and from Canada.

"The idea was to hire musicians from our region," Mr. Andrews said. "But in a symphony orchestra like this, and with the kind of population we have, it wasn't possible to create the orchestra with only local musicians because we just didn't have enough of certain instruments, particularly in strings."

The region, Mr. Andrews said, has very eclectic musical tastes, which is taken into account when planning concerts.

"I'm very proud that we've done everything from classical to pops," he said. "I've always said, this is the chameleon orchestra."

The maestro said he is often asked if he truly enjoys conducting "pops."

"I like anything that I'm conducting," he said. "It doesn't matter what it is. I treat it with the same respect and intensity, whether that's a 'Sleigh Ride' at a pops concert or whether it's a Beethoven symphony. You owe that as a musician."

It's those musicians that Mr. Andrews will miss working with in the ONNY when he steps down in July, following the annual Independence Day-themed concerts. But he'll still be performing and also plans to conduct occasionally, sharing his love of live music.

"There's an old adage: rehearsals are for conductors and concerts are for the musicians," he said. "That's why live music is so great. No two concerts are the same program. No two performances are identical. We may have favorite recordings. Live music is a different feeling. That's the beauty of it."

The details

WHAT: Two appreciation dinners for retiring Orchestra of Northern New York founder, director and conductor, Kenneth B. Andrews.

WHEN: 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 5, 35th anniversary gala at The Stables at Windy Point, 215 Sissonville Road, Potsdam. Cost: $65 per person until Oct. 14, $75/pp until Oct. 21. 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 12, 35th anniversary appreciation dinner at Hilton Garden Inn, 1290 Arsenal St., Watertown. Tickets are $60/pp. RSVP by Friday, Oct. 28. For more info on both, call 315-212-3440 or email executivedirector@onny.org or visiting onny.org.

ON THE WEB: ONNY's website is at onny.org