Education gets a bad rap in Southern Nevada. However, one academic area in which we excel is music education, and a lot of the credit goes to the people who teach it.
Oboist Stephen Caplan has taught at UNLV for 38 years, on top of performing around the world and with the Las Vegas Philharmonic. During that time, he has won accolades, shared stages with international superstars, and, most notably, tailored his teaching to include the physical and mental health of instrumentalists.
On Thursday night, he celebrates his retirement from teaching as a headlining performer at UNLV. The show will feature fellow UNLV faculty musicians as well as members of the Philharmonic.
How he arrived in Las Vegas four decades ago: "Musicians just go where the work is. ... I saw this job opening in Las Vegas. The cool thing about it was, even though it was, at the time, just a lectureship, it wasn't a tenure track-type position. It was aligned with playing principal oboe in what was [then] the Nevada Symphony [Orchestra]. So the idea that I would be both a performer and a teacher was really interesting."
How Las Vegas helped his career flourish: "Las Vegas, almost 40 years ago, certainly was not known for classical music. And [I was asked], why wasn't I going to New York City or some other big place where there's lots of stuff happening in the classical music world? If I had stayed in California, or if I moved to some place like New York, it's so much more competitive to make a career in a place like that, it's really difficult. So here, I had a lot of support, not only from the university, but I discovered the Nevada Arts Council had grants for artists. And so I really feel like my career blossomed in a way here that maybe it wouldn't have done in other places."
What is bodymapping, and why he studies and teaches it: "It's just the idea that musicians move in order to make music, and therefore we should be training movement. ... Unfortunately, for decades, maybe centuries, there have been a lot of myths about how the body works in relation to music that have been passed down from one teacher to student, on and on. They're considered gospel, but they're actually getting musicians into trouble because musicians into working against their body instead of working with their bodies. So we're trying to help musicians to get accurate anatomical information about how the body works, how it moves, so they can develop a healthy musical technique that allows them to be more expressive and more accurate with their playing. I found it profoundly helpful for my own performance. It totally revolutionized the way I taught students."
Who he's performed with: "I just love playing all kinds of music. I love doing the Broadway shows at the Smith Center. I'm old school. I love the old school sounds the Rodgers & Hart and Cole Porter and stuff like that. So early on getting to work with someone like Tony Bennett, who's one of the great exponents of that kind of music, is fantastic. ... On the classical side, I've been able to work with my idols Itzhak Perlman [and] Luciano Pavarotti. For me, being a musician was never about I'm going to be principal of the Berlin Philharmonic. It was always just about playing Bach and Mozart better."
Guest: Stephen Caplan, professor of oboe at UNLV, principal oboist with the Las Vegas Philharmonic
