https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=tCKNKlJNDVo

So hello everybody I would like to present to you Samuel Andrea. Samuel is a composer he’s originally from Canada but he lives in France right now and so he’s been someone I’ve been following on YouTube and that I met through Jordan Peterson as well and has a very good perception of music a good way of analyzing music and for me music is something that I understand very intuitively I struggle to to to be able to analyze it so I’m very curious to find out more about how the patterns in music can connect to the other patterns of manifestations such as in stories and in images and and in our lives so so Samuel I’ll give you a chance to maybe introduce yourself a little bit tell us about your your background and what you’re doing right now. Okay so well first of all thank you for the invitation I’m absolutely thrilled to be on your channel because I have been watching your videos and I’ve been following what you’ve been doing for a while and I find what you’re doing is actually extremely fascinating so I’m really happy to get a chance to talk to you. So just to present myself briefly yeah I’m Canadian originally I was born near Toronto and I moved to France when I was 22 years old and I’ve been living here pretty much my entire adult life at this point and I came here actually because I wanted to among other things I wanted to study at the Paris Conservatory which is a very good very good school it’s got a very good composition program and it was a place that I always was very compelled by the idea of studying at let’s put it that way so I did that and I studied very very intensively in France for I guess about eight years I studied composition and music analysis, oboe, music theory, I studied orchestration, acoustics, electroacoustics, I had a very very complete education and also in parallel that whole time I was I was pursuing my my practice as a composer so I guess one thing I should say because I kind of jumped ahead there was that when I was still living in Toronto I was already active as a composer and as a musician and so that’s something that I always did in parallel to my my studies and so by the time I graduated from the Paris Conservatory I was already involved in in quite a lot of different projects making CDs doing orchestral pieces and writing chamber music and that sort of thing so I guess generally speaking you could say that my my practice stems out of the the European the sort of mainly European tradition of art music I say art music for lack of a better term there is really no ideal term to describe this this sort of music I suppose I don’t like the implication that other sorts of music are somehow not art that that carries with it but but that seems to be at least the term that’s used in common promise so I’ll stay with that for now and I’m profoundly obsessed with understanding the musical phenomenon as deeply as I can because it’s something that is almost inexhaustibly complex and it’s it’s absolutely astounding one of the more important experiences I had when I was a student was the analysis courses that I took and one of the things that really struck me about that was that first of all no matter what way you look at analysis no matter what country you’re studying in or what approach you’re taking there there really aren’t a lot of objective tools for describing music so that’s that’s one initial challenge is that you can have two people looking at the same piece of music and they are both you know very accomplished professionals with a very good amount of technical baggage and they they won’t necessarily describe the piece in the same manner so the the way that you approach the piece will be different depending on what analytical tool you bring to bear upon the work so I found that extremely interesting and then I started to to consider all of the different functions that music has had in different human societies throughout time and try to understand what they might have in common and if there might be certain archetypal uses or forms of music that are atemporal that that exist across the centuries and across cultures and so those are some of the questions that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately well that I mean that with the last thing you said I think is very interesting and I’ve been I’ve been curious because when you when you look at me when I approach music when I when I listen to music the the thing that really strikes me is on one hand it seems like in terms of pattern it’s probably the purest form of art because it seems it seems like it I mean it is it is abstract compared to all the other types of art because it doesn’t refer directly to to anything else of course it does suggest things especially within a culture and within you know when it’s embedded in a in a culture but the abstraction of it makes me makes me see like there is something there seems like there’s some I mean it seems like music is a human universal it seems like it’s an expression which which which manifests pattern in almost a pure way but for some reason I can’t totally analyze them and so I mean I would be curious with what you said the last thing you said I’m curious to hear maybe what do you feel are some of the the universals that say that carry through music through the ages and through cultures okay so there’s there’s a lot to talk about there so the first thing I would say is regarding the notion of abstraction in music that’s that’s in itself a subject that I find extremely fascinating because yes it’s certainly true that that music has a strong abstract component and we think of certain composers or certain styles of music as being more abstract than others which is also an interesting thing because it implies that there are different levels of abstraction and that some some musics might be somehow more concrete or more manifest or more immediate somehow in in terms of what their expression and other musics might be somehow less immediate so the mute with the human voice maybe be like the ground that makes us feel that some music is less is more grounded let’s say because it seems like at least for the in the human experience the the voice the the the tonalities of speaking and the tonalities in the human voice are our most immediate the most immediate place where we attribute meaning and sound together or attribute value to sound let’s say I think that’s certainly a big part of it and I think part of the the idea of this notion of abstraction in music comes from the fact that the idea that you would sit down and listen to a piece of music as a purely aesthetic experience in company with a few a few hundred other people in a concert hall is extraordinarily recent in terms of in terms of human civilization I mean this is what 200 years old maybe right idea this idea of the concert per se in other words a cultural experience that’s detached from any immediate function I suppose I would put it that way so almost all music that you can really think of until extremely recently had basically one of two functions one was dance and the other was the the expression of some kind of devotion or some some form of ritual or ceremony mm-hmm so the idea that you would sit down and listen to a piano sonata for example and that this would be a sort of aesthetic experience in an end of itself without having it be embedded in something relating to a what would you call it an overarching cultural practice that that that englobes the culture that you’re in this is very very recent so I think that’s probably where the idea of abstraction comes from if you’re not dancing and you’re not singing then what is it exactly what is the nature of the experience you’re having but even the experience of dancing is a very strange experience I mean it even dancing itself it’s difficult to find a a practical use let’s say I mean a building you know a building holds the rain away you know images remind you of past events remind you of things that are not present they’re they’re a reminder of things that aren’t present at the moment and so other arts you can kind of right away see what the grounded but even dancing itself there’s something very almost dangerous about dancing there’s something mysterious and and and because we exactly because we don’t exactly know what’s happening when we’re when we’re dancing one thing about dancing is that it allows you to have a collective experience so I think it has a very important social aspect right right it allows people to have a collective experience in which they abandon their individual identity and are subsumed in a mass of something something greater right so that’s why it’s so similar in a way it is so connected to ritual in that sense because ritual also has that function often absolutely absolutely so that must be in some manner an extraordinarily important thing to have within a society something that allows people to come together in that in that sort of very powerful manner so that’s one thing and and it also allows you to transcend I think the on one level the the limitations especially the temporal limitations that we are inevitably subject to in the earthly realm right so I think I think dance allows you to to connect with that in a certain manner in a way that’s extraordinarily powerful so that that would be one thing so to move a little bit further in the history of music so you talked also about the sort of abstraction of music one other way of thinking about it is that it might not be so much that is abstract as that it’s it’s actually immaterial in the sense that you know what is what is music well first of all it’s not a it’s not a commodity it’s not a physical object it’s not something that yeah by and sell it’s not something that you can move from one place to another it’s it’s made of air literally and it’s it’s made of air waves being being propagated by you know by something that’s setting them into motion yeah so we could say it’s actually literally spiritual it’s literally made of air it’s literally you know the closest thing maybe that we have to to to air and we see that like in the in the Old Testament we have this sense that that to hear something like to hear God is as is a is a spiritual experience whereas to see God is impossible but to hear God is possible because there’s this I this this relationship between voice and spirit air breath and the notion of what’s immaterial and what is related to the intellect let’s say what’s related to the higher spheres of being so that’s yeah that’s interesting to think about of course yeah I mean obviously obviously that’s not all it is right because it’s it’s embedded within a culture and it has meanings and it’s it has a function and so on but but it is a very interesting phenomenon from that from that point of view so yeah so I think my big question then I mean regarding the things you said about the the universal aspects of our the universal aspects of music let’s say the the notion of creating a unity of experience within a people also maybe directing that experience towards something that’s transcendent in the in the sense of worship but also grounding in their body I mean the idea of dance or even procession like it wouldn’t have to be be dance in a more in the way we we think of it today in a club or anything but the notion of processing let’s say in a circle or something of that manner and so would that type of music the music that is geared towards those unity of goals or those purposes of bringing things together would the form of the music reflect the purpose of the music like would there with the way you pattern the music have a link between between how it’s structured and how it brings people together and does all the things we mentioned oh yes absolutely in a very profound way so I can give you a couple of examples of that if you if you listen to southern Indian music Carnatic music you’ll notice that the pieces are often extremely long and they have very little in the way of contrast in them so in other words you’ll have approximately the same what would you say quality from beginning to end now within that span of time of course you’ll have different people taking solos and the the relationship between the performers will change but you don’t have this sort of narrative structure that you get in a lot of Western music particularly of the past few hundred years right so or at least if there is a narrative structure maybe I don’t understand it because I’m not I’m not within that culture but the way it sounds to me anyway as an outsider is that it’s more contemplative in nature right I think I think you have you have musics that are essentially contemplative that that that can help you to enter into perhaps a different state of consciousness or that can slow time down for you in a certain manner or just allow you to sink into this experience in a very profound way and there are other musics that function much more analogously to for example a movie or a story where they’re actually explicitly narrative in a certain sense in other words you start in place a and then you end up in place B and there’s a sort of displacement that happens and then once you’ve ended up in place B it creates a certain form of nostalgia because you’re no longer where you started and that creates a tension and then you have to resolve that tension somehow and there’s all sorts of ways you can do that but it seems to me that the types of music that function in that manner are essentially narrative so but not all music is narrative I mean there’s there are all sorts of different just like there are all sorts of different types of discourse right you have there’s there’s four classical types of discourse you have argumentation narration description and exposition and you have you have similar phenomena in music as well where there are there are types of music that are basically you know very static in nature and they could go on for four hours and it wouldn’t make a difference you know they could be two hours long or four hours long and the nature of the music wouldn’t change yeah yeah yeah and you know so that type of music because because of its kind of permanence the permanence that it underlies it also would would bring someone to to kind of enter into that permanent somehow or to to feel drawn into to to like a contemplative of contemplative spirit I mean the music that I know a bit more that I’ve been more exposed to is Byzantine music of course just because of my whole story and so and in that music there’s something of that seems to be something of that because they you know they have this drone that is just this one sound this kind of bass sound and then on top of it you almost have this wave that’s kind of going on top of the of this just one sound and it also it doesn’t seem to have a narrative in it it doesn’t seem to have a it’s almost as if you could start anywhere it could end anywhere I mean there is there are melodies in there you know but they’re not as as explicit let’s say as what we would hear in a pop song right right yeah I mean I can’t get too specific about things like Byzantine music for a couple of reasons one of them is that I’m not I’m not an expert in the subject and the other is that I think that things like that and they’re also you can get CDs of people interpreting ancient Greek music for example and things like this the problem is the farther you go back if you go back if you go back before the 14th century and even then you’re sort of pushing it but if you go back farther than that it gets to be extremely difficult to know really what it sounded like and how it was played exactly because it’s really based on conjecture because the the idea of music being something that you can you can encode in some kind of written notation that is stable and that can be restituted hundreds of years later and so on is really fairly recent so with things that predate the formation of a relatively stable type of music notation it’s it’s it’s very difficult to know exactly how it was played now you can make a very good educated guess and you can you can base your research on extent instruments and things like this and and paintings and maybe if there’s a written document or a treatise or something like that then you can you can derive things from that but it’s hard to be too much more specific than that but in terms of the development of of Western polyphony and Western art music one thing that I think is extremely interesting is that the the very earliest music as far as we can tell was chanting it was it was it was monotic chanting and the chanting was simply well I had a couple of functions but I think the most important one was that it aided memorization of sacred texts so you have that and then everyone is singing the same thing in unison and gradually over time we start introducing a second voice or a second part and initially you had something called organum which is where the two parts are the same interval apart the whole time and they’re just moving in parallel motion and so different intervals are permitted in organum is very strict initially and it was controlled by the by the church and there was a lot of rules about what you couldn’t could and couldn’t do and gradually it got more and more complex so there is a there is a very interesting directional tendency in Western music towards ever greater complexity and richness of polyphony and I think that one thing one thing you can say about about the Western art music tradition that I think makes it distinct from others not better but distinct is the development of counterpoint which is really something that is really very highly developed in the West right because if you look at if you look at different musical cultures there’s they tend to focus on different things and so for example in Sub-Saharan African music you have extraordinarily complex rhythmic polyphonies and in in the Indian music that I described earlier you have extraordinarily sophisticated approach to melody I mean it’s it’s absolutely incredible they have a very large number of different scales all of which use different intonations they’re very very complex but in Indian in Indian music of that of that sort you basically don’t have polyphony you basically don’t have harmony for that matter you have a drone and you have a melodic line Western music is is extraordinarily simple compared to those other musics from the point of both melody and rhythm but it has developed counterpoint and and this sort of contrapuntal polyphonic idea that seems to be its its particularity which I find actually quite interesting right and and would you see a relationship between let’s say the the development of count of of counterpoint and the development of this of these let’s say these two ten pins in music that play off each other and I mean I it for me it’s hard not to see that there’s a relationship between the development of Western thought as well you know the the age of reason and the scientific development bringing about these this kind of dialectic way of thinking and of seeing the world I don’t know if you feel like there’s a relationship between those two things yeah I think I think there definitely is I mean the the the very nature of of counterpoint and polyphony is is dialectical so the idea is you have in order to have a meaningful counterpoint you need to have an idea a and an idea B and they need to be contrasted from each other in some manner and so that’s not enough to make a dialectic though right in order to have a dialectic you need to have a and B interact in some manner and change each other right otherwise you simply have a duality or an opposition right that is in fact the direction that Western music went went into so and it gets more and more pronounced over time so things like especially in the classical period where it gets extremely codified and that corresponds with the with the age of enlightenment and you get this idea of a of an extremely well laid out form in which you you literally do have idea a and idea B and they’re presented first separately one after the other and then you have a development section in which the two ideas sort of are played off of each other and co and commingle and and change each other and then at the end you have a synthesis so you couldn’t have a more sort of explicit demonstration of enlightenment ideals I think in that sort of music hmm that’s really interesting and I’m curious about yeah I’m curious about we talked about this idea of of how the form let’s say of of music and you talked about the universals let’s say of music and so one of the things that I’m noticing as I look around and I listen to music today and listen to modern composers and I listen to just pop music or whatever I mean it feels like there aren’t there aren’t a lot of things that are trying to think about that unitive experience let’s say there rather it seems to have been a break a breakup and a fragmentation of musical styles and of musical intentions and so and it’s for me it’s hard not to see that as mirroring a little bit of the of the the kind of frenetic world in which we live and so I was wondering if you have some few things that to say about that that idea it’s a very interesting thing and the thing I would say about it is that there certainly is a progression and a change over time if you look at if you look at Western music it’s very it’s very clear there are there are different there are different stylistic periods that are relatively easy to identify even though obviously it’s it’s always difficult to slot composers into categories because history isn’t that simple and things are always a lot more nuanced than than the sort of labels that are that are created after the fact by historians and musicologists and so on but nevertheless there is there is a demonstrable technical progress and what I mean by technical progress is that over time we we became able to do more things and to do them relatively well now that that’s not to say incidentally that earlier music is in some manner crude or or less profound or less meaningful or or less accomplished that’s not the case but the the scope of what we are able to do has has continued to get bigger so and and also the scope of what is allowed to be done and what of things that could conceivably have some form of cultural meaning or value has gotten larger as well so that’s that’s an interesting thing and that process happened relatively slowly I would say over over the course of maybe 600 years and then you know with the with the Industrial Revolution and moving into the 20th century it it sped up exponentially and that’s certainly related to the rise of technology into the profound impact that it’s had on everybody’s lives but it’s also had another interesting effect a sort of byproduct which is not commonly enough discussed or understood I think which is the fact that until relatively recently the music that would be of most concern to you would be the music that was in your immediate environment and that was being practiced in your in your day and so a composer like Mozart for example had very little interest in listening to for example I don’t know 16th century Franco-Flemish music it just wouldn’t have occurred to him it just wasn’t in his in his milieu at all he had a he had an interest in an understanding of Bach for sure but I mean even Bach is relatively close to Mozart they’re separated by by what about 50 years or something like this so you know that’s that’s about as far as it went so you would be above all concerned with the music of your time and of the different stylistic practices that were dominant wherever you happen to live and with technology and with especially with recording technology all of that goes out the window so it becomes possible to make permanent documents of anything that that anyone in the world can listen to at any time whenever they want and and so a composer today you know can can go on the internet and listen to a recording of almost anything you can possibly think of mm-hmm so what does that where does that leave you because you’re not you’re not living in the center of your culture surrounded only by the artifacts of that culture you’re living in a in a chaos of potentially unlimited access to the the totality of human cultural production yeah yeah I can see how that would be I well I can see how that would affect the the way in which we perceive music and also the way I guess imagine how a composer has to face I can’t ignore this reality let’s say and has to to to to somehow manage it or deal with it or or embrace it somehow so maybe you can tell us about how what your strategy has been to kind of navigating through this ocean of possibility well okay so the first thing I’d say about that is that not everything will manifest itself to you as being either interesting or meaningful in fact the vast majority of it won’t and then the other thing is that even though theoretically I can listen to anything I want to in practice I don’t write in practice I tend to listen to the things that are closest to me and that even in terms of sonority like in terms of what you you’re you grew up you know listening to or that has formed your ear right you can’t you can’t become Chinese all of a sudden and and hear the way a Chinese person hears it’s not gonna happen absolutely absolutely so there is there is a cohesion to cultural identity that is stronger than I think we realize and we do have certain habits of listening that are relatively universally practiced in the West I would say yeah and I think that there are nevertheless despite the apparent chaos of different styles being practiced today I think that some of these styles have actually more in common than we might than we might think and then the other thing is people are are strongly conditioned by what we call taste no taste is actually not a very precise or a very meaningful term as far as I’m concerned I’m not actually altogether sure what it means exactly it tends to mean the things that that people sort of cultivate an interest in and enjoy listening to but I think it might actually go a little bit deeper than that I think that I think that music is just an incredibly fascinating phenomenon because you can’t really access the the profound inner core of a piece of music in a certain sense I’m not even sure that the composer who creates it can do that right you know so the piece actually exists and this is something I talked about with Jordan Peterson in the discussion we did on YouTube but the piece actually exists somewhere between the listener and the piece itself the meaning of in other words the meaning of the piece is not located entirely in the piece itself it’s it’s not it’s somewhere in between right which is very interesting thing so you have a certain set of perceptual filters on and a certain perception that that that sort of that governs what will manifest itself to you as being meaningful and interesting and I’m not sure how much you can really do about that you know you can cultivate an alt openness and you can cultivate a sense of curiosity and so on but there may be limits to that yeah you know yeah you might just be incapable literally incapable of perceiving the meaning in something because your perceptual faculties are not set up that way you simply won’t see it right well I mean I think if you take the languages as a as an analogy to that I mean you can if I listen I always use this example like it because I know French and English so if I hear some Spanish I’ll understand something of it if I hear some German I’ll understand something of it if I hear Russian I won’t understand the words but I can follow the tonalities I can understand the intentions but when I hear Mandarin I hear I understand nothing I just hear noise because I just it’s so far away from my perceptual capacity that it just it just I don’t hear it I just I just I can’t see the structure in it like I can’t hear the structure that’s there in those sounds so I imagine it’s this it’s similar for music as well I mean I know that for example for myself when I listen when I listen to modern composers I really struggle to listen to hear any structure I really do end up hearing what seems to me like a cacophony of chaotic sounds now I’ve I’ve spoken to music theorists and I’m sure maybe you’ll tell me the same is that no there is usually structure in all the pieces that you hear although for me anyways for myself it’s very difficult to hear it yeah okay so that’s that’s a really important point so let’s talk about that so I want to go back a bit and talk about Bach for a few minutes because I’m really preoccupied with Bach I think he’s mm-hmm well I don’t even need to say anything about how important he is because it’s kind of obvious but yeah but it’s just the only fact that if you ask anybody on the street what they think classical music is you’re probably thinking of Bach yeah they have a piece by Bach in their mind or maybe you know maybe Mozart but probably Bach I think he’s I think Bach is absolutely central and one one interesting thing I think is that the general public if you can use such a term because I don’t even know that there is such a thing as the general public there’s actually a mass of individuals that all have astonishingly varied listening habits actually but I would say that the vast majority of his production is not very well known you know what we actually listen to by Bach is maybe five percent or less of his production and he spent you know the bulk of his career writing essentially liturgical music yeah and it’s it’s it’s astonishingly amazing music and the bulk of that actually he wrote in the 1720s when he was living in Leipzig so the reason I brought up Bach is that if you were attending the the church that he was the the cantor of in the 1720s in Leipzig then the the songs that he was basing his compositions on because he would always close with a chorale and the chorales were composed by Luther right so those those would have been familiar to everybody in his congregation they would have been I don’t know if you can say they were the popular music of his day exactly but they were certainly they were they were commonly understood and known and their their significance was immediately understood the texts were immediately understood and so on and that and that would be woven into every aspect of the composition and in addition to that Bach used all sorts of stylistic and rhetorical devices that were also commonly understood by everybody who would have been attending those services at the time and I mean in the text or in the music itself oh both but I suppose I’m referring more to the music so in other words so I don’t know what that would mean a rhetorical what would be a rhetorical style in music I don’t know what that refer I know what rhetoric is in in speech but what would that be in music well I think that it’s difficult to speak of a symbol per se in music because there’s very little in music that is stable enough and simple and direct enough to have the value of a symbol but you can speak of rhetoric and rhetoric is basically a device that you use or a figure that you use in a piece of music that has a certain function that is that is commonly understood it means something specific it points okay it points to something let’s put it that way so it’s it’s a way of saying something that has that carries with it a certain meaning so so we would have those in you in movies soundtracks for example because it seems like there’s some tropes in movie soundtracks you know if someone’s you know running up a hill it seems like that’s just always similar music and if someone’s falling down then it’s another kind of music and if it’s dark and dreary then so we have all these tropes that we we immediately you know can associate with images so is that the type of thing you’re talking about in terms of rhetoric rhetorical structures let’s say that’s it that’s it exactly so if box setting a contata and the text is you know hot tears were streaming down his cheeks there would be a certain type of music that went with that you know and you’d have something very very chromatic and very complicated to go along with it to indicate suffering there are there are there are devices that Bach uses that that symbolize separation from God and there are there are rhetorical devices that symbolize a proximity to the earth concern a preoccupation with earthly matters and there are contadas that that literally move from one to the other and there’s a dialectic between the two and in something as simple as a as a chorale so where Bach is taking a popular him tune you know composed by by Luther and and setting it in four parts is something as simple as that there it’ll be actually loaded with all sorts of very sophisticated references to what’s going on in the text but sort of illustrating it musically and if we’re listening to it today without knowing anything without understanding German without knowing anything of the period without knowing anything about this stylistic and rhetorical devices that were being used in that music at the time now I’m not saying that we won’t be able to enjoy it because obviously that’s not true but I would say that a very significant percentage of what is actually significant in that music will completely go beyond that listener mmm because they’re not embedded in that culture because simply because you’re not it’s not 1722 and you’re not in Leipzig right so now you can cultivate a knowledge of those things and you can you can you can listen more carefully and you can read the texts and you can read a little bit about the period and you can certainly come to understand it and it’s not you know it’s not it’s not even that challenging to understand I would say if you if you put the time and the effort in but but you do need to approach it in that manner as though you are looking at something that you might not intuitively be able to access whereas the music the popular music of today is is interesting because it’s it’s made in order to be instantly understandable by everybody yeah you know and that that can function because we are embedded in that culture and when we’re surrounded by it and so we don’t have to think we don’t have to interpret those those things with something with something like Bach which and his music is often referred to as being universal in some manner which is an interesting claim I’m not sure actually that it is universal to the extent that you do actually need to make an effort to go back and understand the period a little bit if you want to extract out a larger amount of the meaning and the significance that is contained within the music one of my kind of basic theories about art has been that the we talked about this dialectic one of my theories has been that the dialectic of art has increased let’s say from the Renaissance but but more and more faster and faster let’s say into the modern age and and the dialectic you can see it in in the art with these opposing movements that come to fight each other and then you know one wins over the other and there’s this this speeding up until let’s say until World War one at least but I one of the aspects of the dialect that I’ve seen is also in this notion of the high art and the low art let’s say because there seems to be at least now today there seems to be a rip a total rip apart between what you would call let’s say art music and what we commonly call pop music the you know the the let’s say if you if you take in the time of Bach or in the Middle Ages the the basic cultural music would have been the liturgy let’s say yeah that would have been the thing that would have been a musical language that would have united you know that’s all of society from the king to the peasant and then after that then maybe you would have had you know folk music and dance music for the masses and then maybe you know you might have had more elite music or more complex music for the for the elites but there was still that that place where things kind of got together and one of my theories has been that that there is no longer that place where the meeting meeting happens and so we have extremely music that very a very select few people listen to and then you have this kind of very drudgy pop music that is in a way very accessible but is also kind of like you know eating shuffles of sugar like it doesn’t has no sustenance and and maybe I’d like you to comment on that but also comment on the fact that one of the things I’ve seen on your YouTube channel which is interesting is that you seem to want one of the things you seem to want to do is to find places of contact between those two worlds and to to show how maybe some bridges can exist between those two worlds so that’s a really complex question so I’ll let you go from there from there that’s that’s a desperately important problem I think and it’s it’s it’s it’s something that we we can’t survive very much longer without finding some kind of an approach to so I think there’s there’s one thing that I’d like to say about that which is that we often confuse the terms popular and the terms and the term commercial it’s not the same thing right so commercial art and commercial culture are not is not the same thing as popular art and popular culture and so in other words you can you can have a piece of art that is that is grounded in some form of vernacular expression but that is not mass marketed and that is not intended to be mass marketed right and that is in fact only really appreciated by a relatively small number of people so and then you can have you can have mass market art and and massively what would you say art that sort of massively saturates the culture that isn’t necessarily grounded in anything particularly vernacular or popular right okay so maybe give me an example the second one because the second one the first one I yeah I understand second one is is vaguer to me well let’s see it I suppose it I suppose it really depends on where you draw the line in terms of yeah what what constitutes you know massive saturation but I think that you could take something like a lot of art that was produced in the interwar period and also in the after the Second World War so take his realism for example it’s very interesting thing it actually had a profound impact on popular culture right so that that’s not that’s not a vernacular art by any means but you had Salvador Dali you know working with Walt Disney at one point I mean it was yeah so and I think that though the ideas that were contained within surrealism certainly had a massive effect on the on the popular culture yeah I think surrealism definitely won the the fight between the different movements at the beginning of the century surrealism definitely won even until today the way people perceive art they have a they think that something that is creative is something that is like a Salvador Dali painting right right right right yeah so I believe profoundly that art needs to be grounded in some form of vernacular expression I think that’s I think that’s absolutely essential and the farther that you get from that I think that it tends to it wilts and it loses meaning it loses power so when I say vernacular I mean I mean the everyday I mean things that are are just in our immediate environment that doesn’t mean writing pop music necessarily but it means something that is immediately manifest in our everyday lives and I do believe that very strongly but it’s not it’s not unfortunately as straightforward as that as I would like it to be for all sorts of reasons I mean the one thing that I think is is making it extremely challenging is the fact that you can’t really you can’t really have vernacular art on a global scale if you see what I mean right because vernacular practices tend to be locally based and they tend to be located within you know populations of people that are small enough that there is some kind of possible interaction between them and I think that as societies get more and more complex and and more globalized and you have people traveling all over the place and instantaneous transmission of information it’s not clear to me exactly how you could create a vernacular art in that sort of environment although it’s not impossible I would be interested to know your thoughts on that actually well I mean I think that in terms of in terms of stories I think that in terms of stories and in terms of image it seems like there are universals that that kind of cross through the different the different patterns let’s say and so for me it’s hard to see like I said to talk about music but for sure in stories when you when you back back away and you look at fairy tales and you look at let’s say myths and then you look at stories in the Bible you really find these patterns that cross through and so I think that can become the base of even an art that exists today and the same thing in in a in an image let’s say because the image can be an image of the cosmos and so let’s say really basic things that we don’t think about today but the fact that the ground is down and the sky is above and and you know someone lying down has a certain connotation and someone standing up has a certain connotation with their head closer to to heaven and their feet on the ground because it’s not it’s not obvious that in your everyday life when you’re going through a house that you have that kind of clear analogy let’s say between a person standing against a background and that being a kind of vertical against a heaven and earth but in an image that’s in a traditional image you’ll see that you’ll see that as much in an icon as you’ll see it in a Buddhist image or you’ll see it in an Indian painting or you know a Persian miniature and so there are these these patterns that can exist but that like you said they’re grounded in the vernacular in the sense that they’re grounded in the kind of universal experience of being a human being so that’s maybe that’s how why I kind of proposed at the beginning this idea of the voice as being a stabilizer let’s say or like a ground that we all can we hear because when I listen like when I listen to some to contemporary composers for sure like if I listen to Stockhausen I hear such a range of sounds that are so extreme that I really feel like I’m being ripped pulled apart because and I think I don’t know if that’s true but I think it’s because they’re so far away from the human voice that I that I don’t recognize myself in them so but I but I’m not sure that’s what it is because it’s very intuitive so maybe maybe yeah you can say some things about that yeah well we talked we talked earlier about some of the different rhetorical devices that are used in Bach and I was referring to the cantatas when I was talking about that but an interesting thing is that if you look at his instrumental works you find approximately the same level of referentiality and rhetorical devices and and sort of implicit meaning in things so it’s actually very difficult to find anything that isn’t it’s very difficult to find anything neutral in that music that doesn’t have some kind of implicit meaning in it and so if you take a fugue for example and the fugues are always held to be in some manner the most sort of abstract of the musical genres I suppose because well actually I don’t know actually why that is perhaps it’s because a fugue isn’t a particularly directional form and it’s a it’s a contrapuntal form and you have four different voices that are engaging in a dialogue of some kind but even in even in something like a fugue if you take you know one that was written by Bach he uses dance figures in them you know the art of the fugue is supposed to be the apex of musical complexity and abstraction but it’s all based on dance rhythms and if you if you pull them apart even even you know even farther you find that there are all sorts of little gestures that refer to certainly the idea of an ascending line is the idea of moving closer towards the heavens there’s no question about them and there are there are things that refer to phenomena of stability and mobility and foreignness and being at home and so on and so forth and so I was reflecting on this and I was reflecting on certainly the the situation of contemporary music and trying to trying to understand these things for myself in terms of where we might be today and and to what extent these sorts of devices might still be able to carry meaning today and that led me to focus on the question of what music in fact is and that turns out to not be a terribly easy question to answer right because there’s always going to be someone somewhere who’s going to say that’s not music yeah or whatever but I think that in terms of what tends to have the most meaning for the broadest number of people there are certain things about music that it seems to me are irreducible regardless of culture regardless of time period regardless of whatever so the first thing is that fundamentally I believe music is about movement so that can be a concrete movement in the form of a dance or it can be highly abstract movement but that you have to have the idea of displacement of we’re here and now we’re going here there has to be some some form of movement and obviously movement can only exist within the dimension of time so you have movement which happens in time and the vehicle for that displacement is sound and that’s about it and I can’t get too much more specific than within that without shutting out entire avenues of musical inquiry but I think that this idea of movement somehow being the core of the musical experience is really interesting why would that be so important you know what what is it about that that that drives people you know to to states of ecstasy or to you know complete obsession or because that that’s ultimately I think that’s that’s really what it is so different types of music different genres of music affect different types of movement so some of them are very regular and pattern oriented and and predictable in the sense that there’s a recursion of a limited number of figures right so broke music is is highly repetitive from a from rhythmic point of view I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s so popular right now in the West and has been actually since the 1970s which was sort of also the dawn of disco so that’s kind of an interesting coincidence but but broke music has a very strongly rhythmic aspect to it and it’s based on this sort of motor like rhythm that’s very regular in a certain sense and there are other types of music that that use movements that are much less predictable there’s still types of movement but they’re not necessarily pattern-based or rather the patterns might be so complex that you can’t perceive them you can’t you can’t well let’s say you can’t perceive them directly it doesn’t mean that because you can you can perceive something obliquely right so you in other words you you encounter a surface quality of something that was generated by a structure that you are not able to perceive mm-hmm so the structure is still operating on your perception you just can’t put a name to it yeah so well one of the things that I’ve been maybe I can bring in a little bit of the my dealing with contemporary art and because I think a lot of the questions that are you’re asking and that are being asked in music were questions that are there in contemporary art because you know the sky’s the limit anything can happen anything can be done and then you know different all these different movements kind of split apart and and things go in all their directions and then the question of what is art is asked you know again and again and again what is painting does is painting dead all these these questions and it seems like for me when we talked about the notion of grounding in vernacular I think that my kind of solution in life has been to find this ground in the sense that it’s it might be easier for for me because I’m making objects and so for me to make an object which will have a function like an actual practical function in someone’s life to me has been kind of the discovery of how to solve let’s say the big the big question of art because I don’t have to ask that question I make an icon you know it’s like if it’s as if I’m making a chair it’s like why are you making a chair I’m making a chair so someone can sit in it it’s very clear and and and and I I fulfill a real need that a person has now of course making icons is different from making chairs because in the icon there is this whole language of pattern and of image and of color which reaches you know into the highly abstract and the very spiritual and so it’s the the the solution of kind of going back into let’s say the pre-renaissance world going back into the medieval mindset has been for me to find this solution where the there’s a ground the icon is attached to a tradition to a culture you know someone puts it in their house they live with it they they pray before it and so it participates in the light but at the same time I can play the the same I can ask myself the aesthetic questions and the questions of form and of composition that someone would would have asked themselves in a in a in a painting but I never have to ask myself like what is art it doesn’t I don’t care what art is I know what I’m doing I’m making this image for this person or for this church to participate in their their life and in their liturgy and so I mean some people might say that it’s a cop-out it’s possible but at least for myself it’s been like this this this grounding of the art form and at the same time we’re reaching towards the transcendent and so yeah so maybe you can you can you can offer some thoughts about that in terms of because I know some comps some composers personally that have that have kind of taken that route like I’m in real part of the journal that I edit we have one of our contributors his name is Ivan Moody father Ivan Moody he’s a composer who lives in in Portugal and he he both makes contemporary music but also creates liturgical music for churches and so he has that kind of grounding in liturgical music and then and then uses liturgical music as a base to explore maybe more concert type music but always comes back to his kind of and the fact that he is actually a priest grounds his life and his his actions in that world so yeah so I’ll let you give us your thoughts on that okay so a couple of things the first is you talked about the the situation of contemporary artists in the sense that anything goes and there is such a wealth of different practices that are not only permitted but also that have some kind of critical discourse around them so that there’s a kind of a pre-existing slot that they can kind of fit their work into and it’s just a matter of choosing what particular slot do you want to aim for I think and I suppose that’s true to a certain extent to a certain extent but I would say that it’s very difficult to manufacture the quality of meaningfulness and I think that if that is not somehow strongly present in your work and if that’s not the quality that you’re that you’re aiming for somehow then you can you know do all of the stylistic investigations that you want to but you’ll be producing essentially a meaningless object and the thing about meaningless objects is it’s very easy to produce them and they have basically little little value right they might they might have a temporary transactional value in the sense that they might fit into something that is perceived as having a cultural value in a given time but that value might not be very long-lasting so one of the things that I’m always having to get back to and when I when I talk to people about contemporary music and and certainly I’ve made this point a few times in my YouTube channel is that you know the vast majority of it is things that I would not want to hear twice and some of it I wouldn’t even want to hear once so so I’m sympathetic with with with listeners who you have that that question when they come to it and I think that that’s partly just a question of perspective I think so you know if you were living in the the 1740s for example and just attending any random concert of broke music mm-hmm the odds would be very low that you would you would chance upon a timeless masterpiece mm-hmm right you would you would probably be hearing the work of a third-rate composer played rather badly that’s what you would that would that would be the average experience that you would be having if indeed you were even lucky enough to be in a position to be able to hear music at all so the question of perspective I think is is crucially important because when we look when we look upon the art of previous times obviously there’s been a an entire critical apparatus that’s been brought to bear upon that art and we’ve sifted through it and we’ve decided as a as a as a species as a population this is this is this is something that has enough significance that we actually want to spend our precious time looking at it interpreting it and preserving it across across multiple generations and the fact that that ever happens I think is almost miraculous you know that the fact that you have objects that are thousands of years old that are preserved in museums that that people actually take the time to interpret and understand and preserve it’s it’s amazing I think that says something extraordinary about about human nature actually but so that’s that’s a process that that it takes a very long time to come about and so when we when we think about Byzantine art or classical art or or or whatever or romantic art we’re seeing it through the lens of today and and through the lens of everything that’s been done to it and and and also through the filter of all the art that’s been lost forever and that we’ll never get to see and and the the objects that sometimes for completely coincidental reasons although obviously not always have been handed down to us so we’re seeing fragments of a past and we’re reconstituting it and we’re trying to understand it from the vantage point of today and when you when you approach contemporary art and contemporary music and contemporary culture you don’t have that perspective you are you’re in a sea of noise right and it’s potentially unlimited right so there must be I’ll hazard a guess that there are 20,000 active composers in France alone today you know imagine each of them makes ten pieces a year you know you can it’s you can’t keep up with it and even if you know you know so so there it’s very difficult for somebody who’s speaking in general terms about contemporary music and is sort of trying to wade through it without already having some kind of idea in place about what’s being done and what some of the categories of investigation are and what some of the different types of music are that that have been done because the odds are you’re going to be confronted with all sorts of music that maybe isn’t going to be remembered ten years from now or 50 years now and that may have fulfilled a local function you know in the career of one artist where they needed to write a commission or something or they needed to whatever write a piece for whatever reason and and that’s the piece that you’re left with and maybe it’s maybe it’s a terrible piece maybe it’s no good you know yeah so so we don’t we haven’t we haven’t experienced that that filtering process that extracting out of the of the gold from the garbage and and so the listener who’s just going to any any random sort of contemporary music concert who doesn’t have a very broad understanding I would say of what some of the what some of the the the the what would you call it the streams are within that music that would allow you maybe to make more more rapid distinctions between what is good and what isn’t good and so on it’s going to have a really hard time there’s no question there’s no question hmm one of the things like maybe one of the differences it seems also one of the differences that in in let’s say in the past or even in the time of Bach a piece of music let’s say Bach is writing music I don’t know it in terms of Bach but I know that that even maybe before that art would would be commissioned in the sense that that someone would ask an artist to make something for a specific purpose and so you you you create a piece of music for this event or you create a poem you know for this this event you know like the idea of the the knight who who who asks a poet to write about the battle or or something like that and so the the let’s say the even if like even if the the even if the piece itself doesn’t survive or doesn’t move into history at the point at the time when it was made it had a participative role in society like it it it created a moment for this unity of experience to to to exist let’s say whether it’s bringing the court together or let’s say it’s it I mean obviously the liturgy seems to me like the most obvious you know simple example of that and so I think like my questions keep kind of coming back to the same to the same thing but it’s like are there places today are there spaces today where that type of bringing together can can happen let’s say I mean I gave the example of I would I would say like the example of the music that we hear in movies seems to be one of the places where that that we we experience music let’s say when you go to the cinema and you experience music as a group at least you know your hundreds of people kind of you’re participating in a story and it’s not and it’s not people who are there to listen to music right they’re not there to listen to music they’re there to for a kind of wider experience and so but it’s still an entertainment it’s entertainment it’s not it’s not it’s not productive in the sense of of let’s say you know writing a piece for the coronation of the king or for you know someone’s bar mitzvah or you know something like that like it’s not it doesn’t have that that same so maybe I don’t know are there you feel like there are places today where that that unitive possibility is still still exists I think it depends on the size of the group I think that’s really important consideration because in in in in the in the 18th century for example there would have been what maybe a hundred people maximum at a service like that and and that would have been it and then those pieces wouldn’t have been played necessarily outside of that circle they wouldn’t have been widely circulated so there were there were a small number of composers in the in the broke period who had something approaching commercial success where their works were actually published and reproduced and you could buy them and you could play them at home and so on but that’s really something that happens a little bit later in music history for the most part so the vast majority of this music would have been played once maybe twice and and then put away and that’s it so but it was part of it seems like we’re heading to that same direction with your thousands of composers in France like how many times can their pieces be played because it there’s a limited amount of space and time for those I’m sure a lot of them never actually do get played right because it seems like that’s not it seems like that’s impossible that it would unless it’s done electronically but for for actually musicians to come and play these pieces it seems like there’s not enough concert halls in the in the country to do it oh for sure yeah the vast majority of them are people that nobody’s ever going to hear about outside of a very small circle of maybe the composer and their friends and and maybe a few people outside of that but yeah so the the question of the of the group size is an interesting one because if you if you use movie music as an example so that movies are not always but can be a form of mass culture right in the sense that you have millions of people watching the same movie so that’s that’s an extraordinarily recent phenomenon the idea that you could produce anything that millions of people would see almost instant instantaneously after it after it appears right so using that as the yardstick for what art should do I think I’m not implying that you’re doing that but some people do do that actually there are composers who feel frustrated because they know that for example at John Williams has an audience in the tens of millions right yeah so and and then they they measure themselves against him and of course you there’s no there’s no contest there’s there’s there’s no way any contemporary composer is going to have anything like that degree of cultural penetration so of course if you use that as your yardstick then you’re going to come up short and it’s going to appear that what you’re doing is hopelessly I was gonna say hunger yeah hopelessly futile and and just irrelevant by comparison mm-hmm so I think I’m mostly groping for places where where art not just music but art in general can can can play an anchoring purpose like a because you know the the ancient the ancient word art like ours in Latin and in Greek technique he actually meant to bring things together and so the the the notion was you know the art the artisan or the artist gathers the materia prima and then brings it together and so that it becomes like the incarnation of a of an idea let’s say but I tend to want to see that in a larger context in the sense that that’s also what I think it leads least traditionally what art the role that art played in a society that it was there to gather people and to gather communities into a unitive experience or a unitive identity or or also a unitive turning towards the transcendent so I think that that’s really what I’m groping for is to try to see are like is that possible today like are there places where that can can happen also because I it’s also because of my own looking at the world and seeing what it seems to me like like the other fragmentation of our culture and and and you know the polarization also of the of the political discourse and the polarization of different segments of society and so I’m like I’m just looking for places where we can as artists can participate in somehow creating community or creating a stable ground for people to stand on yeah yeah I mean I think that’s an open question I keep coming back to the same point though which is that it depends really on the size of the community because what you’re talking about the idea of bringing together you can certainly do that in a in a smaller scale community and and I think that can that can work very well and it can it can give cohesion to the group and it can it can it can produce something that is of let’s say obvious utility and meaning to everybody I think that’s possible on a large scale on a global scale which is what a lot of commercially industrially produced art can do and not all the types of art can can achieve that that level of distribution it’s just not it’s not technically feasible it’s not financially feasible and then you’re going to be competing with with corporations that have the means to to put things in everybody’s face and so on yeah so and also a lot of the a lot of the art that is globally that it perceived globally doesn’t necessarily have the purpose of of creating unity experience on the contrary you know like maybe you know the jingle of a product will be the music that that it plays over and over in my mind but its purpose and it’s directed towards getting me to desire their product it’s not there to create a huge experience between between people right right right exactly so the other thing that I would say is my perspective might be slightly different on that because I live in Alsace and this is a very interesting region of France it’s what it’s the smallest region of France and it’s it’s rather cohesive and you can go in pretty much any random village in Alsace and you’ll see the same type of architecture you’ll see the same type of decorative arts you’ll hear the same accent you’ll have you know there’s there’s an extraordinary cohesion to this society which which is also a kind of an island into itself because you know to the east you have you have the Rhine and that separates us from Germany and I shouldn’t say us because I’m not Alsatian but but I I live among I guess almost almost now and then and then to the west you have the Vosges which sort of separates you from the rest of France and so it’s it’s really this little island of people and they have their own dialect and so I don’t have the sense living here that I live in a completely fragmented society that has no center it doesn’t really feel like you need to come back to Toronto maybe yeah right yeah in Toronto in Toronto I do have that experience so that’s it’s it’s very very different but my point is there are parts of the world that I think you could say that are highly cohesive but it’s it’s not the case in it’s not the case in North America it’s a it’s a very strange condition for sure and I don’t know and so let’s say like let’s say that take Alsace as an example since that’s where you’re you’re living and that’s what do you see let’s say in terms of music are there styles of music or or composers or people who are in the music world that you feel have been able to kind of tap into the like to into Alsace and have been able to create modes of representation or modes of music that are able to to create that sense of community or of a unitive experience yeah I have to say musically not so much no I haven’t really had that experience so much although one thing you can say about Alsace is partly because of the the German influence Germans are very good at collective music making that’s actually something that’s that’s very very strong in their culture and you know music and in classical music in particular is is just an everyday thing that you do in your home in Germany they have a very very strong culture with that which isn’t so strong in France for the most part except in Alsace where you do have that to a certain degree and and that’s something that I really do appreciate there’s a great deal of music here but I wouldn’t say that it ties in with the specific local culture in a particularly obvious way I don’t think it does that I am very interested in in folk musics and music that that has some kind of a vernacular attachment to to to the locale like for example I recently went to Liechtenstein on vacation which is this beautiful little alpine state between Switzerland and Austria and they still do yodeling and they’ve got alphorns Wow and it’s so cool and I’m sure that the the the kids of these people are just like mortified beyond belief that their parents are doing this kind of stuff but you know wearing their traditional costumes and so on but I just think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen like wow like it’s um it’s it’s the reason that that music exists it’s it’s directly tied into the landscape and what these wide open spaces and these echoing valleys and so on and yeah you know so it’s it’s it’s not some it’s not some abstract arbitrary thing where you’re doing something in a certain style because it appeals to you it’s it’s it’s embedded in the very landscape itself that you live within hmm well one of the things that I’ve heard people especially my friends that are from Europe and and who who are spend a lot of time in Europe is that in in the countries where they still celebrate let’s say certain festivals where they still have you know they’ll celebrate your st. John the Baptist day they’ll have the bonfires and although they’ll do you know st. Nicholas day or they’ll have those type of celebrations seems like where they still have the parades in the street and they still have the costumes and all that then the the the folk music is still living because it’s it’s really still part of the the the culture like here in Quebec we have a kind of folk music but that it has become a museum exhibit let’s say right we don’t have the festivals anymore we don’t have the the the parades we just have this folk music and and so we can you know we you’ll you’ll have a band that will come and they’ll do folk music for you but it won’t be as if you know you’re having a New Year’s Eve party and your uncle just take this fiddle out and and starts to fiddle and do a rigodon as we called it you know and so it seems like art and and it’s almost seems as if people see folk music as something that necessarily has to be dead in the past and something that our ancestors did well rather than something that is part of life whereas you know I have my cousin lives in Switzerland and he said you know they still do st. Nicholas and they still have all the parade and the costumes and the and you know these these crazy traditions that only these little towns know about and and and there the folk music is still living it seems yeah oh absolutely absolutely well here’s here’s an interesting point to consider with with regards to that so one of the contemporary well not contemporary but one of the modern composers that I like quite a lot is a as a guy named Morton Feldman and I’ve done a I did one of the first videos I did actually was an analysis of one of his pieces so he was a New Yorker and he died in in 1987 actually but so he was a he had this really thick strong New York accent he was sort of an outrageous guy and he wrote this very sort of quiet soft music that’s very sort of minimalistic and very slow-moving and so on and it was perceived by a lot of people at the time as being rather esoteric and rather strange music and but he had a circle of people around him that completely understood what he was trying to do and really appreciated it and enjoyed it and supported him and performed his music and were enthusiastic about it and wrote about it and talked about it and so on and so forth and so his his response to people who would say to him you know your music’s getting pretty far out there you’d say well I’m actually writing folk music I’m writing New York folk music you know so in other words in the in the circle of which he was the center or in this sort of cultural world that he moved in this was a kind of vernacular art you know so that’s that’s kind of an interesting thing so if you if you if you look at it that way then I suppose you could say that everybody who’s not you know in that circle or he’s not familiar with that style of music or is not a friend of the composer or so what or whatever you could you could say well they’re being excluded but you could also say well this is this is his environment that’s that’s the culture that he’s living and moving within and within the boundaries of that culture you know he’s absolutely central it’s just that it’s it’s it’s a it’s a certain culture you know it has that seems that’s really interesting because when you as you’re speaking out about that I realized that it seems like that’s probably why also teenagers graph themselves onto a type of music and then you know create their identity and their group you know around music and so you have gods and punks and whatever hip-hop people and and they they they take on let’s say you know almost a uniform and they they they kind of become that that style and maybe not so much today but at least when I was growing up you know you had punks and gods and and people would just take a style of music and and create an identity around it and so it seems like that’s an interesting I hadn’t even thought about that that how music even pop music can be part of this this notion of creating these small you know identities even if they are somewhat fragmented and limited but still like it it drives people towards this unity of experience so that’s something I had not thought about well I think I think it’s profound human need to feel that you are that you are a part of a community a larger community something larger than your individual unit or even your family unit I think that’s just a profound and possibly an eternal human need and and art is one of the means by which we can have that sort of experience so you know I think that’s I think that’s something that’s extraordinarily important and so maybe as we because I we’ve been going for a while now I’m thinking my last question for you will be how do you see the the future of music I mean what do you see coming about let’s say and it’s hard because I know it we’re living in a kind of chaotic time or maybe I would say what do you hope for the music for the future of music maybe that’s a better question what do I hope for the future of music well I would hope that for one thing that the well that’s you know that’s actually a very difficult question that’s it that’s a very difficult question because what I suppose that one thing that my own hopes have been tied up with is that I personally will get better at making music let’s put it that way my hope it’s very difficult for me to have aspirations for music in general outside of my own practice right because it’s too big and it’s it’s too it’s too complicated and chaotic I would say that my hope is that I will improve as a musician and that I will be able to make works that will that will last longer than I do and then in some manner that will have the ability to to speak to a lot of different people regardless of their background that’s that’s the aspiration that I have for myself now obviously that’s a very selfish sort of aspiration as far as music itself I don’t think I don’t think music needs my hopes in particular because there’s no there’s no indication that music is a permanent feature of humanity as far as I can determine and yeah and what I’m going away it’s not going away anytime soon and I find it actually quite heartening that see I know a lot of people who come from rather difficult circumstances and who somehow managed to scrape together the money to go to music school or to take some lessons or to travel to a different place to go to a conservatory or something and made tremendous personal sacrifices in order to do that and in some cases I mean you have to give up everything you know I know a lot of people who’ve left their country and they’re not going back and it’s in order to pursue a life in music in a way that they wouldn’t be able to do where they’re from so it’s like you you leave your family you leave your country you leave everything that’s close to you in order to pursue this so what you know you have to think hard about why somebody would do that when you could just stay at home and and do something else so obviously you know clearly music has a kind of extraordinary intensity and a pull and a force to it that is is capable of obsessing people and I don’t I don’t see that that obsession waning anytime soon let’s put it that way and yeah I suppose I hope that music will will continue to to let’s put it this way I want it to remain grounded in in in an awareness of history I think that’s extraordinarily important one thing that I can say is that there is a somewhat concerning trend that I’ve seen amongst younger composers where they don’t have much of an understanding of art history or of the history of music or or anything really beyond maybe a very a very narrow range of repertoire that they might be familiar with my hope is that music can be grounded in practices of the past because you can’t start from nothing it’s impossible you know you what what’s what you can do is you you think you’re starting from nothing but what you’re actually doing is you’re unconsciously imitating things but not doing it very well yeah right so what I’ll be aware then right right so it’s it’s much better to to be aware of what’s being done have a very developed profound historical consciousness I think and to use that grounding to then to then explore that’s what I would hope for because in order to keep traditions alive I’m very I’m actually very preoccupied by the notion of tradition and a few people on YouTube describe me as an avant-garde composer and so on which is a label I actually don’t like and I don’t particularly I don’t particularly identify with because I’m intensely preoccupied with with the repertoire that exists already but I what I believe is that if you love that repertoire deeply the way to keep it alive is to add something to it and to to do something that it hasn’t already done perhaps or or two because reality is infinitely complex and our perception is infinitely complex and the number of things that you can perceive and the number of different types of meaning that can manifest to you I believe is unlimited and you know I I get up every day and come to my desk and you know I hear things that just make me want to fall out of my chair they’re so exciting and beautiful and strange and new and interesting and I hope that experience for everybody and I hope that we can move forward with a sense of understanding the the past of music and then the immense cultural treasures that are uniquely ours that we can that we can you know that we can have that we can that we can value and then to move beyond them also and explore new territory that’s that’s what I hope for all right well well I’ll tell I will put the link to to your YouTube channel in the description so people will be able to hear some of your compositions and also hear you speak on both let’s say high art composers but also you analyze some popular music and so people can can explore more of your your capacity to analyze music and so well it really helped me to think in directions that I hadn’t thought about so I think that at least for myself that our conversation has been has been has been good and productive for me to to move forward in my understanding of music so thanks a lot yeah thank you so much I really enjoyed it all right if you enjoyed this content and our exploration of symbolism get involved I love to read your comments in the comment section below please go ahead and share this on social media to all your friends and also please consider supporting us financially on patreon you’ll find the link to the patreon page in the description below you