Violin virtuoso and entrepreneur Miha Pogačnik will perform Thursday, May 1, at 6:30 p.m. in Herndon Gallery, in a benefit concert for local nonprofit Chamber Music in Yellow Springs. (Submitted photo)
Violinist Pogačnik to perform at Antioch College’s Herndon Gallery
- Published: April 28, 2025
Slovenian violinist Miha Pogačnik will perform Thursday, May 1, at the Herndon Gallery at Antioch College, bringing his unique blend of music, social engagement and innovation to Yellow Springs.
The concert is a benefit for Chamber Music in Yellow Springs, which brings world-renowned and emerging chamber music artists to perform for village and area audiences annually.
Pogačnik told the News in a recent interview that he trained as a classical violinist at University of Cologne in Germany and toured as a Fulbright Scholar of IU Bloomington.
However, he added, he knew early on in his career that there was “more to the world than just to play the violin.”
“If you are good enough, then you are a performer, an entertainer, more or less — and I was, at heart, always an entrepreneur.”
This realization, Pogačnik said, led him to shift his focus — particularly after he performed in France’s Chartres Cathedral in 1980. The acoustic resonance of the centuries-old Gothic cathedral was so extraordinary, he said, that he was “positively knocked out” by the interplay between the “violin, a micro instrument” and the “macro instrument, which was the whole cathedral.”
Pogačnik decided to create a festival held at Chartres, which he organized for three years, and which featured both musical performances and lectures on “the deeper meaning of music within context of everything else,” he said. The festivals grew a dedicated audience — one that Pogačnik said was “really willing to experiment.”
“So from there, I took off with a social innovation which had never happened before,” he said. “Namely, I invited my audience to go other places with me.”
He dubbed the new idea the “IDRIART” movement, in which he and audiences would travel via caravan to European countries experiencing crisis, interacting with local communities and aiming to affect social change.
“I chose places where there had been war, or were just before war, or anything else which was critical, and I would bring hundreds of people — thousands, in some cases — with me,” he said. “By the beginning of 2000 I had done more than 200 festivals like that all over the world.”
But Pogačnik’s appetite for experimentation had not yet been sated. He had found, he said, that the blend of music performance and social interaction was a powerful tool — and it was one he could use on an entirely different stage.
“I started working with companies and corporations — which was a completely new concept — to learn to use musical masterpieces as a basis to unlock people’s potential,” he said. “Usually people only get a lot of PowerPoint — and there’s not much power in a PowerPoint, but I have a method to help people forget about their routines and how they look at the world, and make what I call a ‘creative detour.’”
Pogačnik calls his method the “Miha Method,” which encourages participants to create and perform together. He said the method lifts up a class of workers who are “usually caught up in horrible, top-down oppression.”
“These people need rescuing,” he said. “They all have unique talents that need to be enabled, and when I do my sessions, I take them out of their oppressive world. … Of course, on Monday, they are again doing the old stuff — but something has now taken place that does not leave. They now have tools — ‘soul tools,’ one could say.”
When it comes to performances for an audience like the one he’ll encounter in Yellow Springs, Pogačnik takes a similar approach, he said, by subverting both expectations and the traditional roles inherent in performance spaces. He said he aims to break down the “dualism” of performer and audience, of “stage and auditorium,” interacting with those gathered to create a kind of performance-as-workshop.
One of the guiding principles of his work, he said, is a belief that the aim of music, and all forms of art, is to move people — not just emotionally, but in new, sometimes unexpected, directions.
“If you go to a beautiful concert, you are moved, and that’s good enough — and that’s important and should not be taken down,” he said. “But for me, it’s the beginning, not the end — when people are moved, that should be the starting point to something.”
Pogačnik said he values authenticity and genuine connection while interacting with the folks he leads in workshops or performances. It’s one of the reasons he tends not to use a script of any kind when he’s presenting, preferring to react as he learns about the people who have gathered to hear him, addressing them out of his “direct intuition and not something fixed.”
In doing so, he said he hopes to inspire people to discover their own “world beyond.”
“The materialism in which we live heavily relies on the outer appearance, but it’s the inner world that makes all the difference,” he said. “That’s where the sources are — for renewal, for discovery, for creativity, for complete transformation in life and in society. … Being all the time in a position to reinvent yourself — that is where living happens.”
The violinist said that, on a larger scale, he hopes his work will help reposition art within society as something beyond entertainment — “You can’t entertain yourself to death; you have to find some serious moments in life,” he said — and with real, meaningful power for change. He pointed to political negotiations, for example — arenas in which most of those involved already have their minds fixed on a solution before they even arrive.
“But imagine if I would appear there and take them to music, and maybe something would happen that was absolutely not decided upon before,” he said. “Art should be there to invite the unexpectable, to invite the unusual.”
Pogačnik said he looks forward to meeting villagers who come out for the benefit event. Born and raised, as he was, in Slovenia, he said Ohio — which has a large Slovenian population — holds a certain home-feel.
“In Slovenia, they say, ‘What’s the biggest town in Slovenia? Cleveland, Ohio!’” he said, laughing.
Pogaˇcnik will perform for the benefit of Chamber Music in Yellow Springs Thursday, May 1, beginning at 6:30 p.m., in Herndon Gallery at Antioch College. Tickets are $40, and may be purchased online at http://www.cmys.org.
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