Interview with Bill Schwab

Author: Olivia Harrison | Majors: Music Performance and Psychology | Semester: Spring 2022

Olivia Harrison is an honors music performance student at the University of Arkansas in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. As one of several students selected to work on this project under Dr. Chelsea Hodge, of the Honors College, Olivia hopes to use the research to support her thesis about the cultural impact of classical music.

I had the privilege of being selected as a team member to help record and preserve the history of the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas (SoNA) in partnership with the Pryor Center during the Spring semester of 2022. Having attended some of SoNA’s concerts in my youth as an aspiring musician, I jumped at the chance to be able to not only learn more about the organization’s history, but also to help bring it to the forefront for patrons of the area. Dr. Chelsea Hodge and Dr. Louise Hancox have been out mentors for this project, in addition to the wonderful staff at the David and Barbara Pryor Center.

As a team of seven students, we were given a brief history compiled by one of the longtime supporters of SoNA and a list of people to potentially conduct interviews with, which included some of the founding members of the executive board to musicians who currently play with the orchestra. In reviewing the brief history of the Symphony, its story began to resemble that of a comeback kid; After nearly losing all funding and support, one ambitious and loyal volunteer of the organization worked to raise the money needed to help get SoNA back on its feet.

We collectively chose about five names from the list to start with and divided up into two groups: those who would pursue interviews with people who were more versed in the financial story of SoNA, and those who would pursue interviews with people who were more versed in the cultural impact and artistic aspect of SoNA. After choosing where we wanted our focus on the history of SoNA to be, we began to contact designated people of interest and set up interviews.

In preparation for the interviews, Dr. Hodge and Dr. Hancox guided us in creating general and tailored questions for everyone we interviewed. Each member of our smaller team was designated as the point of contact for a different interview, and after developing questions ourselves we reviewed them as a group before conducting the interviews. Under the guidance of Alessandro Salemme and Sarah Moore, we also learned the best interviewing practices and techniques, from how the recording process works all the way to how to create an engaging experience for the interviewee.

Our first interview was with Bill Schwab, a longtime supporter of the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas and a close friend of many of the founding members of SoNA, and I had the opportunity to conduct it. Fortunately, Bill Schwab works at the Pryor Center and was also briefly mentoring us on this project. Serving as our “test interviewee,” Mr. Schwab was able to provide us with some tips beforehand and some improvements following the interview.

As we took turns conducting our interviews, we of course ran into some speed bumps. Some of our contacts were not able to be interviewed in person, so we took to conducting a couple of interviews over Zoom. Others completely disregarded our correspondence completely, which left gaps in part of the narrative we were trying to piece together. Regardless of the speed bumps along our path, each member of our team was able to step in and offer a solution when we faltered.

This opportunity to research a Symphony I had grown up aspiring to be a part of was transformational in my understanding of how the project comes together. Each interview led to another puzzle piece of the narrative of SoNA being put together, and it truly revealed to me how significant teamwork is in creating the product.