Transcript of Interview with between Ed Greenebaum and Donna Lafferty, May 2025

Donna: First, congratulations on your remarkable tenure with the BSO, Ed. You’ve been part of the orchestra since when – the first rehearsal in 1969, right?

Ed: Early Spring 1969, so I and the orchestra are both 56 years old.

Donna: Hah, very good. Ed, I’ve seen you ever since I started in 1998. So you’ve always been a fixture, and the fact that you’ve done all this as a string bass player with the biggest, heaviest instrument – that shows remarkable dedication. Do you ever think “Oh boy, I wish I’d picked the flute or something lighter?”

Ed: Well, I started playing the bass when I was 11 years old, I think. And before that time I tried various instruments and was not successful in starting them – among them was the flute. If things had turned out differently, I might have been playing the flute, however it didn’t work out. I think maybe it’s possible that when I got to be of the age I was when I started to play, maybe I was sufficiently coordinated to begin to play an instrument. Also, the fact that my brother was already playing the double bass and we had a double bass in the house may have helped anyway.

Playing the flute has advantages because of its size, but there are advantages to playing the double bass – like you’re very much in demand.

Donna: Tell me, what were things like back in the beginning? What was the general atmosphere, the attitude of the musicians, the conductor, the guest artists?

Ed: Well, in many ways the same. This is a community with a lot of people with backgrounds that might have included playing an instrument in high school and college orchestras, and they come here. When I came was in ‘67 so I’d already been here about two years before the BSO was started. The music school certainly didn’t need me. So I and others were very grateful that Geoffrey Simon undertook to start an orchestra in which we could play. And it’s always attracted people who wanted to play and didn’t have other opportunities. So we started off with a pretty full orchestra, not not much different in size than we have now. We had no treasury. The first board adopted a budget that pretended to have money, but we never had it. Geoffrey did a lot of it out of his own pocket, I think.

The music school was not terribly interested in supporting us. They didn’t support us – just indifferent, I think it wasn’t that they were antagonistic. We played concerts in schools all over Bloomington – elementary schools, junior high schools. Eventually, in the high schools. I remember early on playing a children’s concert in the multi-purpose room at child’s elementary school where we did Peter and the Wolf and mayor Frank McCloskey did the narration for Peter. So we were catch as catch can in a lot of ways. We played a fair amount of chamber music and little things on along the side.

Donna: What you could afford to put together on a non-existent budget.

Ed: Well, that didn’t take much. Putting it all together, we played in people’s living rooms or garages or wherever, wherever. So it was fun and good from the beginning. But not as established.

Donna: So this kind of presages another question I was going to ask later, but let’s ask it now. I know you’ve had different roles within the orchestra, always as a musician, obviously, but didn’t you serve as like the board president? Or weren’t you on the board at some point?

Ed: This is a good time to ask it about as we were near the beginning of the orchestra. Yes, I and Janeth Welch were among the first players and first board members. And I was the 2nd President, oh, probably in years two or three. We were active in helping getting it started in the in the early years.

Donna: Had a lot of stuff to get done but no staff to do it.

Ed: But I have not been on the board in many, many years.

Donna: I mean I’ve been associated with managing the orchestra since I joined, basically. And I know there’s an awful lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that most people don’t see. I imagine when you guys were doing it, there was even more because you had to establish us as a nonprofit. You had to line up so many things.

Ed: Yeah, we did all those things – we established our nonprofit status and drafted bylaws and did all that, all that good foundational stuff.

Donna: Neat. Thank you!

Ed: We also tried to raise money as best we could.

Donna: Hah, that’s a recurring theme!

Ed: Yeah.

Donna: Well, you kind of referenced this already, but has the orchestra changed much over the years and if so, how?

Ed: I don’t know that the orchestra itself has changed so much, but a lot of what we do has. We used to do children’s concerts regularly. We had many years where our big fundraising event was a Night in Old Vienna. Where we played mostly the same waltzes and polkas every time.

It was a it was a fun event, but eventually given up for other things. We have the side by side event every year and you remember this yourself with a mass of students led by Jane Gouker from the school’s orchestras.

Donna: A couple hundred violinists and violists, yeah.

Ed: We’ve had a huge number of conductors – I’ve given up pretending that I could kind of get through naming them all in order because I can’t. I don’t think I could do that anymore, but they were special. Every conductor is different and has different challenges. In some ways, this is part of what keeps it engaging. Assuming you like the new conductor, which I mostly have. It makes it interesting.
Maybe it started with Charles? That’s where we got young conductors who were with us for 2, 3, 4 years before going on to advance their careers in other capacities, but we’ve had that pattern for a while now. It’s been working out very well for us. I have enjoyed playing for those conductors, a couple of them got opportunities to go elsewhere after a single year. Others were around for a while.

Donna: I’m thinking about Nick Hersh. You know, we were thinking about retaining Nick. But we knew he was on the way up, and the next year, he’s assistant conductor at Baltimore!

Ed: And then there was one of them before him who had a space in his name. The Chinese gentleman who left us to direct an orchestra in Hong Kong. What’s his name now? I can’t remember.

Donna: He did not like being hugged. I remember that! I am a big hugger after concerts and I just go around hugging everybody and I grabbed Ho Man Choi – that was his name – and hugged him. He looked at me like I was deranged or something.

Ed: Well, they have a different culture. Yes, but he was marvelous. He was active with us. I remember very much him helping to us in recruiting his successor. And when they would come to audition, he would plant bad notes in the orchestra, to see if the conducting candidate would notice them.

Donna: I don’t remember that. That’s so great!

Ed: Back to how it’s changed, though. Lately I see lots of enthusiasm. I think community support is growing a lot, especially in the most recent years.

Donna: Let’s talk about what you look forward to. What do you enjoy the most about your involvement in the orchestra, rehearsing? Performing? What keeps you coming back?

Ed: Aside from the fact that it’s the thing I’ve done longest in my life and I’m superstitious about stopping, I just enjoy playing, engaging in the orchestra. I’m getting my enjoyment – I mean, it’s not that I don’t enjoy listening to music and going to concerts – but it’s much more of the active participation and the challenges of playing with others. That’s probably what keeps me going most?

Donna: Yeah, I hear you about that. I go to other performances because it’s important to support other performing organizations, but boy, I’d rather be up there myself with my trombone, you know, doing the playing.

Ed: And you do a lot of it.

Donna: Well, not as much as some folks. All right, if you could give young musicians any words of wisdom on how to keep their love of music alive, what would those be?

Ed: I think we just talked about that. I think very much it’s a matter of what captured you about music to start with. You know, I think a lot of music is something that happens to you more than something that you planted the seed for and cultivated. I mean, there’s a lot of cultivation once you’re into it, but initially, I think it’s something that happens to you. To keep your love of music alive, just keep on doing what it was that captured you to start with.

As I said a moment ago, for me it’s the joy of actually participating and playing and that that’s what it is for you well. Find the opportunities for doing it. I’m an amateur, and always have been. You know if you need community orchestras and other opportunities like that, then you may need to go and search for them. After I graduated from law school, I I spent a year in in Chicago and I lived on the South side, but I found a civic orchestra in Evanston, way up north. You know, I drove my double base up there to play.

Donna: Holy cow, that’s a hike! You know, I played in that orchestra a couple of times. I went to Northwestern, I think I did Respighi’s Pines of Rome with them one time. So neat. Probably a different year than you were there.

Ed: Probably. Yeah, I’m talking about 1961.

Donna: Well, I was born in ‘61, so I was not playing in orchestras in ‘61. Well, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about that we haven’t covered so far?

Ed: You know, it’s just amazing. On the one hand, it seems inevitable, that the orchestra would still be here, because why not? What’s to stop it? On the other hand, that we would last 56 years. I don’t know that anybody was predicting that. So yeah, so I won’t be here in another 56 years, but I hope the orchestra is.

Donna: That’s really cool. One thing my brother says is “My plan is to live forever. So far so good.”

Ed: Well, so the orchestra I played in during college, its parent company claimed to be the oldest existing orchestra in the world. The New York Philharmonic would probably like to dispute that, but it was founded in 1808 and it’s true that it was continuously existing. During the Civil War years, by the good grace of a flute player who rehearsed by himself and kept minutes of his own meetings.

Donna: So a one person orchestra?

Ed: Yes, he kept it going for a few years.

Donna: Wow, that makes my job sound easy.

Ed: That’s about existing a long time.

Donna: Thank you, Ed. Your dedication to the orchestra, your willingness to lug that string bass all the time…

Ed: Well, it’s benefited me more than I’ve benefited it, probably. But anyway, glad to be here.

Donna: Yeah. I’m so glad you are, too. If I was there, I’d give you a hug and hopefully you wouldn’t make an ick face like Ho Man did.

Ed: You have given me enough hugs over many years. I can imagine what this one would be like, and it’d be okay.