PORT ANGELES — Having tried something completely different, Ron Jones is invigorated.
Jones, music teacher, high school orchestra conductor, double-bassist and karaoke champion, became a dancer this month.
In “Dancing with the Port Angeles Stars,” a fundraising show for the Juan de Fuca Foundation for the Arts, he learned the East Coast swing.
“It was sheer panic,” Jones recalled of the Sept. 20 event at Port Angeles High School’s Performing Arts Center.
When he got out there, rocking a pair of jeans just purchased at Goodwill, Jones won cheers from the audience plus joking accolades from the judges.
Though he didn’t win the dance contest — fellow Port Angeles Star Steve Methner did — Jones came away feeling good.
The experience reminded him: “All of the arts, whether it’s music, dance, theater, is about the show,” and about putting oneself out there to communicate emotion.
Jones’ next big moment is here already. Tonight and Saturday night, he’ll lead 66 members of the Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra in the annual Pops and Picnic concerts, all while applying for a job.
At 64 and fully intending to keep his position as orchestra director at Port Angeles High School, Jones is a candidate for conductor of the symphony.
Leading the community orchestra has been a principal goal “from the moment I landed here,” he says, adding that yes, he can see himself doing both jobs: full-time educator and part-time conductor.
Seated in his office, Pops and Picnic music on his computer, Jones waves his hands and carves the air, as if conducting the conversation. He doesn’t feel 64, still has “the flexibility, the stamina,” he says, as evidenced by his “Stars” turn. Then there are his 140 Port Angeles High School musicians.
After four decades with the school district, Jones could retire from teaching any time. But the time has not yet come.
“I get to the end of the year, and I’m already looking forward to what we’re going to do next year,” he says.
And if chosen as the Port Angeles Symphony’s conductor, “it’s a matter of doing that for as long as they would have me.”
As Jones raises his baton for the Pops and Picnic concerts, he’ll join a field of candidates that includes two other locals, James Ray III, teacher of Port Angeles’ elementary and middle school strings programs, and Peninsula College music professor Kristin Quigley Brye.
The rest come from all over: Jonathan Pasternack of New York City, Jooyong Ahn from Chattanooga, Tenn., Wesley Schulz from Seattle, Richard Sparks from Denton, Texas, and Matthew Savery of Bozeman, Mont., have all applied.
Each hopeful will lead a Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra or Chamber Orchestra concert between now and next May, when the Symphony board hopes to choose the next conductor.
At each concert starting tonight, audience members will have the chance to fill out conductor evaluation forms, says Marie Meyers, chairwoman of the Symphony’s search committee. While Jones will speak briefly about the musical selections throughout the concerts, the rest of the candidates will give pre-concert chats, adds Meyers.
“There will be opportunities for them to have close contact with the audience,” she says, so patrons can ask questions of each guest.
Jones, for his part, is stepping up to the podium after a turbulent summer. In late May the symphony board of directors chose not to renew conductor Adam Stern’s contract, letting him go after nine years.
“We want to make this a better symphony for the community,” longtime board member Chuck Whitney said of the 82-year-old orchestra, whose musicians come from Port Townsend, Sequim, Port Angeles and Forks.
This unleashed a wave of letters to the Peninsula Daily News from June into September, for and against the symphony board’s move. Stern himself penned a guest commentary about how he tangled with the board over severance pay, and ended up with none.
Jones, for his part, says he’s kept his distance from the fray. He recalls taking a call from the symphony office and hearing that Stern would not be conducting the Pops and Picnic concerts. Was Jones available?
“My next question was: What’s the date?,” he says.
Turns out one of the concerts, Saturday night, would coincide with Elton John’s show at Key Arena in Seattle.
Jones had tickets. He gave them up.
Then he got to work on the Pops and Picnic program. Stern, using Symphony patrons’ input, had chosen movie sound tracks as this year’s theme — a genre Jones calls today’s classical music.
Jones kept the theme but changed about half the music, to arrive at two concerts featuring excerpts of “West Side Story,” “Star Wars,” and “The Blue Danube” from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” He and the orchestra will add in a suite of classics: “The Pink Panther,” “Moon River” from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “Lara’s Theme” from “Doctor Zhivago.”
The finale comes from “Pirates of the Caribbean,” in a kind of reprise of Jones’ 2013 trip to Carnegie Hall with the Port Angeles High School Roughrider Orchestra. Jones has been performing with his students every four years since 1989.
In a nod to younger music lovers, Jones added a song from Disney’s “Frozen”: “Let It Go,” with elementary and middle school children from Sequim and Port Angeles lending their voices.
“Let It Go” could be the symphony’s mantra for the year, Jones quips.
Seriously, conducting the orchestra “allows me to shape the music … so it touches people,” he adds.
Rehearsing with the Port Angeles Symphony is “a lot more intense” than practicing with a roomful of student musicians.
“They’re there for the music,” and they’re quite serious. Yes, several have played in Jones’ Roughrider Orchestra, and it’s nice that he no longer has to tell them to sit down and stop talking or texting during practice.
As conductor, Jones wants to nurture their love for the music, and be a collaborator instead of a tyrant.
“My hero is Leonard Bernstein,” who would sometimes drop his hands and drink in the sound.
“One thing I hope I can do is bring out the inner lines,” the musicians playing the harmonies, “so people can hear the richness of the orchestra, the full richness of what’s going on.”
“Can I do this, with adults?” he asks. The conductor spreads his hands wide, shaping the question.
