San Francisco’s Outside Lands festival is a high point for the city’s music fans, and this year, a familiar face from SFCM will be taking the stage alongside one of the festival’s headliners.

The Conservatory’s Music Director, Edwin Outwater, will be conducting the Berkeley Symphony backing Beck on the ninth and final stop of a tour that’s included shows across the U.S. and Canada, a tour that Outwater has been along for months now.

“Beck and I met in 2023 when he played with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the Steinmetz Hall in Orlando,” Outwater says. “I always loved his records with orchestration because his dad, David Campbell, is a prolific composer and orchestrator, and the voice leading and more subtle things going on in those songs were pretty amazing. So even aside from the songwriting, which is incredible, there was just a huge amount of craft there.”

For this tour, Beck is leaning heavily on two of his most orchestrated albums, Sea Change and Morning Phase, as well as covers from ‘60s icon Scott Walker. With a huge resurgence of Beck’s cover of “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime”—recorded for the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack in 2004—via TikTok, the tour is a prime chance to showcase Campbell’s contributions to Beck’s music.

Playing with local symphonies while on tour, Outwater allows, “you never know what you're gonna get.” One of the early hills to get over, he adds, is that “not everyone in these orchestras knows this music. But they know that the charts are good, and so my goal with this music is to get them to care about it, essentially, and play these charts as expressively as they can. A lot of my classical energy and phrasing and shaping goes into the show, which is a reason why I like doing it over and over again.”

As for his advice for students who look to his approach in crafting a career, Outwater says, “My students Jaco [Wong] and David [Baker] were actually in Orlando with me when I was working on the festival where I met Beck. So for my students at SFCM, the answer is just ‘follow me around,’” he jokes. 

Outwater adds that conductors should put forth just as much effort into concerts outside the realm of classical. “I am a classical musician, but I’m at a stage in my career when I have the luxury of doing projects I’m really passionate about. So I really know and feel the music that I'm going to conduct, and that translates into your relationship with an artist. You're collaborating with them, and they feel like you ‘get it.’ These concerts represent their whole lives’ work; they’re living composers. So it’s always an advantage when you can go into these situations genuinely enjoying and understanding the music, as opposed to just taking the job for financial reasons or anything else.”

Outwater also sees multi-genre work like this as important to the overall health of classical music. “I think perhaps the biggest challenge that both musicians, music directors, and administrative people in orchestras have is how to make the repertoire that we all love so much accessible and attractive to more people? That question hasn't been answered. It takes a lot to process even a ‘smaller’ symphony for the first time. So if someone’s hearing these lush strings on, for instance, a Beck album, that can serve as a bridge to getting them to that symphony.”

Learn more about studying conducting at SFCM.