The Meaning of Music ｜ Samuel Andreyev ｜ EP 179 (rNcqLN42l8s)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rNcqLN42l8s

I’m pleased to have with me here today Samuel Andreev, someone I’ve known for many years I think it must be 15 years probably and Sam is a Canadian composer who has sought his fame and fortune in Europe and we’re going to talk today about his career, about the artistic endeavour in general and how that can be rendered practical and about music. It’s nice to see you Sam, thanks a lot for agreeing to talk to me It’s really good to see you Jordan. Thank you, thank you. I’m very pleased to see you. So why don’t you fill everybody in to begin with on your background? Sure, so I’m a Canadian composer. I was born in Kincardin which is near Toronto and lived in Canada until I was 22 at which point I decided to move to France. So I settled initially in Paris. I lived there for 10 years, studied composition at the Paris Conservatory and then I received a one-year artistic residency in Madrid. I lived there for a while and then ended up here in Strasbourg in eastern France and I live currently right on the border between France and Germany. So my work involves many things. I have to juggle a lot of different activities so the main thing and the summit of my activity is my work as a composer. So I write music for orchestras and soloists, chamber groups, singers, all kinds of different ensembles throughout Europe and the world. I also have a podcast called the Samuel André F. Podcast. I’m a teacher, I’m a professor at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, Germany and I have a YouTube channel where I present analyses of works that I think are interesting and important and I try to render those works a little bit more accessible to people who might not be familiar with them. And how has your subscriber base on YouTube been doing? I haven’t looked at your channel for some time. You started it about what, how long ago now? I started it in late 2016 and it got off to a rather slow start which is to be expected with this sort of thing and then it took off within I would say about a year or two. So my subscriber base currently is about 35,000. So I’m not breaking any records on YouTube but nevertheless for the sort of content that I’m doing it represents a very significant audience and the other thing that I’ve noticed reading comments and the many, many emails that I get all the time is that it’s an audience that seems to be divided between on the one hand professionals, so professional musicians, people who have composers, who are active musicians and then complete neophytes, people who don’t necessarily know very much at all about music but are curious about it. And one of the tricky things about running this channel has been finding a way to address both of those audiences simultaneously. So I try to make my videos in such a manner that somebody who is getting into this topic for the first time can learn a lot but not be completely overwhelmed with a barrage of rebarbative technical information. But I also try to make it specific enough so that somebody who has been a musician for 30 years can still get something out of it. So what made you decide to use YouTube? Why did you start your channel? Oh well I was a professor at a conservatory in northern France for two years teaching analysis and I had a class of between 10 and 15 students and I put an enormous amount of work into those courses so I would go and spend a week studying a particular musical work and then I would present it to my students and we would alternate classical repertoire with more contemporary, specifically post-war repertoire. And I really enjoyed doing that but there was, it seemed to me anyway, a disconnect between the enormous amount of work going into producing those courses and the very small number of people that were benefiting from them. So after a couple of years of doing this I had just a wealth of material just sitting there and I was just thinking well I have to be able to do something with this that would be a little bit more broad in its scope. So I just decided well what if I just film myself basically presenting a lecture as though I were in a classroom and just put it out and see what happens and it did surprisingly well. The first video I figured well you know 50 people watch it that’s great that’s 50 people more than the 15 that I have in my class but it was like a thousand people within a month or something like that and that was exciting so that showed me the potential of the medium and it just kept growing from there. How many viewers are you getting on average for a video and what’s the range? It varies wildly. I have videos with 200,000 views and I have videos with a few thousand views and the thing is I’m utterly unable to tell what videos are going to be popular. I mean it’s it’s really strange to me that I can’t, I have no sense of that at all. I just throw up videos that are in line with my interests at the time that I’m doing the video. Like it’s important to me that it has to be a topic that I’m obsessed about. I can’t just be merely interested. I have to be obsessed with the topic so that I can research it in sufficient depth and then I do a video that is a distillation of everything that I’ve discovered as I’ve looked very very closely into the work and sometimes that process takes weeks or years. I mean if you consider that many of these works are pieces that I’ve been studying for years so I try to condense that down into approximately a 20 to 30 minute video and some of them are are quite popular and some of them for reasons I don’t understand are a little bit less popular but it doesn’t influence my choices in terms of what to look at. So I just try to go with the things that I think are work looking at and particularly works that aren’t let’s say particularly represented on YouTube because there’s all sorts of repertoire that I think is really very significant and important work that nobody’s bothered to make a video about. So it’s also about filling a void in that sense. Hi there. I’m a composer and as an unelected representative of my field I would like to offer you some suggestions on how you might approach modern and contemporary music if you’re not already familiar with it. So I have a lot of friends and I’m constantly meeting people who don’t know this music very well if at all and I’ve noticed that very often there’s a certain degree of apprehension. People genuinely don’t know how to approach it and in some cases they’re actually somewhat reticent to do so for all sorts of reasons. So I’d like to go through this just offer a few points. So here they are. The first one is assume that music is vitally important to your personal survival. Okay so we have musical instruments conserved in museums that are as old as 40,000 years and we know that music exists in every single civilization, every culture around the world and this has always been the case. So it is safe to assume that humanity would not have invested so much time in something if it did not have some extraordinary intrinsic value. Okay because life is hard enough as it is we’re not going to spend hundreds and thousands of hours of our lifetimes engaging with something unless there’s a very good reason for it. So on a certain level you really can’t survive without music. This is absolutely, I think, absolutely true. Okay second point you need to cultivate an interest in the music of your own time. There’s absolutely no particular reason I can think of why someone alive today would be more interested in something that happened 200 years ago in the sort of distant past than something that’s happening today. So I would think that logically the music of today would command people’s most urgent attention. It absolutely should. That’s not to say you shouldn’t know about the music of the past but I think that the first priority has got to be given to things that are happening today. You would think that it would be incumbent on you to have some general degree of familiarity with the sort of important cultural artifacts of the time and this is assuredly one of them. So don’t be a rube, cultivate an interest in contemporary music. Third point assume low returns at first. Okay so this is the case with me, it’s the case with people who have never heard contemporary music in their lives. It doesn’t matter. When I hear a piece for the first time I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen and I don’t know if it’s going to be a good piece, a bad piece, if I’m going to like it, if I’m not going to like it. I don’t know what style it’s going to be, if I don’t know the composer already and so generally speaking the best you can hope for when you’re approaching something completely unfamiliar is that you’re going to achieve a sort of vague sense of its surface qualities and so that’s about it and I would be surprised if you got too much more out of it the first time around and for that matter it might take three or four listenings until you start to get more out of it than that. So you know the piece of music has an almost limitless potential to signify. That’s one of the amazing things about music. So a single piece by Mozart could generate hundreds of years of commentary. I mean when you think about it it’s an amazing thing and people can listen to it hundreds of times and not get bored of it. So that gives you a sense of just how deep and how vast a single work of music can be. So if you’re hearing it for the first time you know you’re lucky if you just sort of barely scratch the surface in terms of what that piece is. So be open-minded about it and give it a few listens because you’re not going to get all that much out of it the first time around and that is completely fine. The next point is don’t expect it to be effortless because frankly it’s not and one of the most insidious lies perpetrated by the advertising and marketing campaigns of orchestras and contemporary music ensembles is that modern and contemporary music is a blast. It’s fun. It’s easy. It’s not that simple. The truth of the matter is like anything if you want to develop a certain degree of familiarity with it to the point where you can appreciate it and enjoy it, it takes a bit of time and it takes a bit of effort in terms of you know being willing to listen to things more than once, being willing to listen to a range of things. There’s a cartoon that I’d like to show you that I really like that I think illustrates this point quite well. And again it doesn’t have to take hundreds of hours of your time but you know one thing you could consider doing is just setting aside an hour a week and listening only in that time to things that you’ve never heard of before and just even just doing that you will immeasurably broaden your musical culture. If you’re hearing a piece for the first time take 10 minutes to read about the composer, take 10 minutes to read the program note or go on Wikipedia or something and you know just something as simple as that could make the difference between you know feeling like this is the worst experience you’ve ever had and it’s like you know it’s like you’re being given voluntary brain surgery and you know actually really enjoying yourself so just take a tiny bit of time and put a bit of effort in and you’ll get way more out of it. Okay next suspend judgment for as long as possible. Okay so it’s often happened to me that I would go to a concert particularly in my student years and I would sort of arrogantly proclaim that that was the absolute worst piece of music ever written and it is just an abomination on every level etc etc etc and then you know for one reason or another two weeks later or a month later I’ll encounter the piece again and I’ll be like oh it’s not that bad you know actually it’s quite a good piece so and then be kind of embarrassed about it so the truth is it’s very difficult to formulate a real opinion about something that you’ve only just discovered and you’re not particularly familiar with so assume that the piece has some value and that if you expose yourself to it enough you’ll eventually get to that even if you don’t necessarily get it right away. Okay approach it as you would an adventure because ultimately that’s what it is you’re going to have the amazing experience of going into a concert hall and hearing something where you have absolutely no idea what it’s going to be like you don’t know how it’s going to start how it’s going to end you don’t know what’s going to happen in between what sort of path the composer is going to take you on you don’t know what the style is it could be anything I mean contemporary music is is actually extraordinarily vast and diverse I mean in terms of in terms of the different styles that are being practiced today you have absolutely everything from sort of neo-romantic music or minimalist music sort of the most hardcore experimental music and then you have things that take their inspiration from rock and all sorts of things I mean it’s an extremely diverse field so you don’t know what it’s going to be and the odds are it’s going to be something that you are not familiar with so approach it that way assume that you don’t know anything about it assume that it’s going to be a new experience and try to see the adventure in that. Okay so here’s the next point assume that there’s something to be gotten out of it now I’ve noticed that if you go to for example an exhibit of abstract expressionist paintings you know one of these blockbuster shows that’s always being put on at the at the Museum of Modern Art in New York or whatever you’ll notice that there is a kind of frenzy there’s extremely high attendance rates to these kinds of things you get hundreds of thousands of people sometimes going out to these shows and if you look at what the equivalent to that might be in terms of musical expression there is a barrier somehow to that kind of level of of participation and I think that the simple reason for that it’s it’s got nothing to do with the content of the work it’s simply that if you go to an art show and you don’t like a painting you can just walk past it you know you don’t have to you don’t have to stand in front of it for longer than you want to whereas with a piece of music if it’s 20 minutes long you know you pretty much have to sit there for 20 minutes and what I would say is that if you are having that experience you’re listening to a piece you don’t like it that much it’s not a big deal because you can get something out of it anyway even if you don’t like it I’m actually fascinated by music I don’t like because it it broadens my perspectives and it sharpens my critical faculties and it makes me think harder about why it is I like certain things and why it is I don’t like certain things and is there actually a valid reason for that is it just a you know a prejudice of mine is it just something that I’m not I’m not able to get in the in the piece itself and maybe with repeated listenings I might actually be able to access something of tremendous value that I don’t necessarily see the first time around and when you have that experience multiple times it’s incredibly enriching okay so the final point and this is a crucial point assume that the composer is not a moron right so the thing about being a composer is that it’s an absolutely brutal field and it takes years and years and years of constant hard work in order to get to a point where your work is performed publicly and professionally and so you should assume that if a composer has gotten to that stage then they’ve already been through an extremely difficult and lengthy process of sort of trial by fire so to speak so keep that in mind and assume that they have something to say and that they’ve spent years formulating what they have to say and that they’re they’re not morons and they’re not charlatans now okay so composers are a subspecies of of the human race so statistically it’s true some of them are morons and it’s it’s also true that statistically some of them are absolute brilliant geniuses and so assume that the composer in question has something of value to to give to you and try to cultivate a sense of receptivity so that there is a minimum of barriers between what they are trying to communicate and your ability to receive it that’s it for now and thanks for listening I mean you’re an anomaly is there anyone else that you know of doing this sort of thing publicly on YouTube for example like you are and how are your colleagues reacting to that there’s very few people doing it there it’s it’s it’s starting to it’s starting to be a little bit more common but certainly four or five years ago there was nobody else I mean I was I was looking actually for content of this sort on YouTube and not finding anything so so we’re trying to find something I was not finding anything so so you know I decided I would you know just step in and do what I could on you know in my very primitive way the early videos were extremely crude but these days I would say there’s there’s two types of people producing content on music on YouTube in terms of let’s say you know things that are a little bit more theoretical or that that try to present really specific information on music on the one hand you have people that are producing videos that are circa you know between five and ten minutes that are very very tightly edited and scripted and usually have animation and a very very you know a very elaborate visual presentation and then on the other hand you have people like me I don’t really do that sort of thing I’m still basically filming a lecture but I make it a little bit more visually interesting by having images and you know and I edit them carefully and all of that sort of thing but they’re not meant to be things that you can watch in five minutes necessarily so in terms of people who are sort of doing it the way I’m doing it I honestly can’t think of too many other people even now and I think that within the composition world I’ve talked to many other composers about this there’s a feeling of reticence I think about going on YouTube and doing this sort of thing there’s a perception that YouTube is a place that people go to get their head smashed in to get insulted and embarrassed and humiliated and so on and I think there’s a degree of discomfort amongst composers who you know they’re not by nature the most extroverted people anyway I think a lot of them are somewhat reticent about doing something like this and the other thing is you need to have a weird array of skills to do this sort of thing and they’re not skills that typically go together and a lot of composers frankly would rather just spend their time doing their work and teaching if they teach so yeah well you need a weird array of skills generally to be successful as an artist and unfortunately perhaps being technically proficient or even brilliant artistically is nowhere near enough to guarantee your success I mean one of the things that struck me since I’ve studied creativity for such a long period of time now is just how difficult it is to sustain yourself as an artist to keep body and soul together and it isn’t obvious as well that when people acquire their artistic training they also acquire along with that any appreciation for what has to be done in order to make themselves able to live while they pursue their art and you and I have talked an awful lot about career development and you’ve been successful at it but I know it’s been an extremely difficult it’s been extremely difficult to manage first of all you had to leave Canada and why was that? There were a few reasons for that I actually formulated the the project of leaving Canada when I was 16 or 17 on one level it’s a it’s a difficult thing to explain because most of my life choices have been made instinctually so I don’t actually sit down with you know a piece of paper with columns on it and think about all the pluses and minuses of various decisions most of the major decisions I’ve made have been made on instinct and moving to France was one of those decisions I had a sense that in order to go as far as I possibly could in a given direction in order to give everything I had to give let’s say that I needed to leave I needed to go somewhere else and there’s a few reasons for that so one of them is perhaps I felt that I was um sort of too much in a in a very familiar environment and surrounded by too many like-minded people and I wanted to be in an environment that would that would on one level that would force me to reconstitute myself and learn an entirely new way of being so when I moved to France I hardly knew anybody I had think I had one phone number of one person to contact uh you know it was extremely difficult you have to it’s you know you’re starting a new life all over again you’re dealing with a language you’re dealing with a completely different culture people that have different priorities different principles and trying to work all of that out while simultaneously trying to start a career so it’s extraordinarily difficult but I think that on one level I’m instinctively drawn to difficult things I think I find the the challenge well open people are creative and the advantage to lead and so they’re they’re destined in some sense to transform their personalities so creative people create uh what would you say objects they create for public benefit but they also create themselves at the same time and one of the advantages to moving somewhere drastically new is that you can leave old parts of yourself behind and remold yourself in a new configuration if you’re willing to take advantage of that it’s it’s not a simple matter but there’s great benefit if benefit in it if you can manage it and so you left Canada and you went to France what changed for you as a consequence of doing that how did you change well first of all I was exposed to uh an entirely different musical culture and I had to think very differently about music than I had up to that point so that was the first thing and that involved an enormous amount of uh listening and and being open to to my teachers also and to what they had to say even though their perspective was radically different than what I had uh encountered up to that point it involved you know all the basic practical things of learning how to live in a new place developing routines developing routines that can sustain you when you’re in a completely unfamiliar environment that’s absolutely crucial you know you have to have a favorite coffee shop it sounds stupid but you know you have to have things like that otherwise you go crazy um you know constituting a circle of friends well it’s really it might be useful for everyone who’s listening to know that if you do make radical change like that it is of crucial importance to establish these islands of predictability and a favorite coffee shop is a really good way of doing that you you go there every day you get to know people a little bit and and that stops you from drowning in the chaos of the unknown and enables you to put down start to put down some roots and you know it’s easy to um dramatize and romanticize creativity and constant freedom but even very creative people need routine to keep them sane and they need a creative routine as well I mean you how much time do you spend a week composing do you think uh I know fairly precisely because I have a I have a schedule so I do minimum three hours a day of composition it’s difficult for me to go too much beyond three hours it starts to be a question of diminishing returns after that point so when I’m when I’m working I want to be in a state where I’m razor sharp where I’m completely present where I’m you know I have all of my forces marshalled and ready for the task at hand and you can’t be sort of half there and kind of checking your email and you know you really do have to be focused on it and that sort of focus takes a lot out of you uh so you know I would find it difficult to go beyond about three hours but that’s typically what I do I try to I could work for more than three hours a day but I couldn’t do it for days or weeks on end I’d start to tire myself out and so I eventually realized that past three hours a day I was robbing Peter to pay Paul I’m constantly telling this to students I mean one of the things that I say to composition students I teach composition privately online on on zoom and one of the things I’m constantly telling them is is you know in addition to the obvious musical skills and all of that and all the work that goes into composing you have to know how to work and you have to get that right you know as early as possible in the process because it’s incredibly important and it’s different for everybody some people can sustain that for 45 minutes some people can do it for three hours maybe some can do it a little bit more than that I don’t find it credible when people say to me I compose 12 hours a day right which you occasionally hear but I I suspect that it’s you know it’s it’s a bit of an elaboration of the facts so you’ve managed to establish yourself as a composer and that’s your fundamental career but you also have to teach and can you walk everyone who’s listening through what a typical week would be like for you and and that gives them some sense of what what has to be done to make a living as an artist yeah I mean I would start by saying that it’s not exactly that I have to teach I there are other things that I could do instead of teaching in order to get the necessary income but I actually enjoy teaching and it’s something that is enormously enriching for my creative practice as well so it’s not like there’s no there’s not one second of teaching time that that is wasted time ever I mean it really does feed directly into the work that I do but why is that as a typical day I mean I try oh well because you discuss things with composition students and the problems that they’re having are very likely to be versions of the same problems that you’re having but in a different form and talking these things out is enormously helpful and it’s stimulating you know and and things come up all the time spontaneously during these lessons that you know that you can’t necessarily plan ahead either so it’s it’s a form of creative activity I think if if I’m teaching composition the right way then it’s it’s stimulating for for both me and the student and it’s surprising and it generates ideas so that all of that keeps you in a good frame of mind what’s the best way you found to develop your musical thoughts from ideation to finished on paper so the first thing I’d say about that is it’s obviously an extremely individual thing there’s no one way to do it there’s a lot of different composers working in very different directions and they all have very different approaches to how they actually go about doing their work in my case it’s something that’s evolved over a very lengthy period of time so generally what happens is I usually begin with an idea for an instrumentation that’s definitely the most important thing so I actually literally cannot imagine music unless I have a detailed idea of what the instruments are going to be once I’ve determined the instrumentation then I can start to set about working so the instrumentation actually determines pretty much everything about the piece it determines the sound world it determines the timbre it determines the types of harmonies and the types of textures that I’m going to be writing and all of this comes out of not only the actual material sonic characteristics of the instruments I’m using but also their history and also the associations that these instruments have so I might choose to work with these associations writing music that is relatively idiomatic for the instruments in question or I might choose to work against them and do something that is noticeably unusual for that particular instrument but whatever it is I’m working either with or against that idea that image that received image of the instrument in question once I have the instrumentation what I usually do is I just sit down at my desk and I start imagining figures and or harmonies that I think would work particularly well with that group of instruments rhythmic figures harmonies chords textures this sort of thing and I just work them out on pieces of paper really not knowing what I’m going to do with them at this stage I don’t know exactly what the form of the piece is going to be I don’t know what the length will be I have absolutely no idea about that so I can only start to imagine a form once I have some actual materials that I’m sitting down and elaborating the form and that what I would call the temporality of the piece the sort of temporal extension of these materials that I’m developing is encoded in the very DNA of the sounds that I’m starting to develop at this early stage of the process so what that means is if I’m writing a particular chord that chord will have qualities of relative consonants relative dissonance relative thickness relative sparseness relative tension relative relaxation etc etc etc and those qualities of course will become even more pronounced if the chord is embedded in a context of other chords if it’s if it’s part of a sequence or a a progression of chords and these sorts of materials have a temporality in them in a certain sense so they’ll suggest a length of piece again I can work with that or I can work against it so I could take a very rich assortment of materials and do something with them that is somewhat temporally constrained where it’s as though there isn’t quite enough time to do them justice and that can create a particular type of tension that can be interesting or I can choose to treat the materials in a way that is completely adequate to their sort of temporal requirements all of this is actually way less abstract than it might actually sound because it really involves just sitting down and imagining sounds and so that’s also something that I’ve noticed a lot of people have questions about because they wonder how anybody can sit down and imagine sounds mentally and write them down on paper without actually using an instrument because generally speaking when I compose I don’t do it at an instrument I write at a desk that’s just simply a skill that you develop over time and I remember when I first started taking composition lessons my first composition teachers insisted on developing my inner ear so that I would be able to sit down and write and not have to necessarily use a piano to know what I was doing and that discipline was very difficult at first because obviously you need to be able to hear the intervals very precisely you need to be able to hear complex sonorities complex chords inwardly before you write them down but again it’s something that you can work on you can train your ear you can do exercises you can get good at it over time it can take a few years but it’s it’s worth developing that skill so now I’m at a point where I can write quite complex things and have a very very precise idea of exactly what they’re going to sound like mentally before I actually attend a rehearsal or before I hear the piece which you would think would be a fairly standard requirement if you’re going to write something but there are strands of composition that are conceived in such a way that there’s a there’s a highly prospective aspect to them so this in other words the sounds and the temporal trajectories of these sounds are so complex that they need to be worked out on paper beforehand not necessarily being heard inwardly but in other words you need to write them down in order to hear them so that’s a that’s a very different strand of composition and I’ve actually I’ve attempted things like that in the past but I’m not actually terribly good at it I actually need to be able to have a precise idea of what something is going to sound like during the act of writing so certain composers would say well that’s a limiting factor because you can only write down sounds that you are able to imagine but I don’t find that limiting in the least because the the the scope of what I am able to imagine is potentially limitless so I really don’t find that to be a particular problem on the other hand there is also a current in especially 20th century literature and and music and painting and all sorts of things that involves using externally imposed constraints in order to push yourself in a direction that you wouldn’t be able to get to consciously so in other words imposing some form of arbitrary restraint like for example writing an entire novel without using the vowel e which has actually been done to tremendous success by the french novelist georges perrec so in other words you you invent some kind of absurd constraint and because you have to operate to best advantage within that constraint it ends up pushing you in some kind of unusual direction and you end up doing something that you would never have done otherwise so that actually can be a very useful technique so there’s a lot of different approaches that you can take but what tends to work best for me is imagining these sounds in great great detail so I mean for example right now I’m involved in writing a cantata for for soprano and ten instruments and I wanted to have an interlude movement so there will be three songs and then an instrumental interlude and then the last two songs at the end and this instrumental interlude is written for bass flute vibraphone celesta and solo violin these are instruments that I know extremely well I know the bass flute inside and out I know what every register sounds like I know what a low c-sharp sounds like I know what a very high a flat with four ledger lines at the top of the staff sounds like I know what the dynamic characteristics are the relative thickness of the overtone spectrum in different registers of the instrument I also know how I can blend it with other instruments I know what the relative strength or weakness of a bass flute against a celesta is or against a violin and I take all of these sonic aspects into consideration as I’m writing once I’ve established these materials and I have an idea of the instrumentation then the next step is to find some kind of way to get from point a to point b so to speak within the piece so in other words where do I want to start where do I want to end up what is the overall trajectory of the piece and how do I do that again it really depends on the type of piece because some pieces are going to be directional and or processual in their nature so in other words you’ll start at point a and through a given process or through a given transformation that happens over time you’ll end up at point b through a series of discrete steps so when you’re writing a piece like that you have to know precisely what the beginning point is and what the ending point is and then you have to have some kind of a motor or some kind of way that allows you to move from point a to point b other pieces might be more exploratory and or meditative in character where there isn’t so much a strong directional aspect as an intense focus on the individual moment so a lot of my pieces actually tend to work more in in that sense but even when I’m focused on the individual moment through the active composing I still have to have a sense of how do I connect sound event a with sound event b and that involves actually the establishment of some kind of a musical grammar or language that I can deploy in the piece because I don’t want to be faced with a seemingly infinite number of choices every time I sit down to write a note I want there to be walls around the piece walls around the project so that there are certain things that fit within the scope of the piece and certain things that don’t that allows me to make meaningful choices and by meaningful choices I mean either again working with the grain of the piece or working against the grain of the piece but you can only do that if you have some kind of relatively defined parameters about what can and can’t happen my writing process has a very typical sort of trajectory it’s the same almost every time where it starts out exceedingly painfully horribly hideously slow at the beginning that phase can go on for a couple weeks a few weeks what’s going on as I’m actually slowly discovering the potential of the materials that I’m using what I can do with them what their scope is what sorts of development might be appropriate given the nature of those materials and I know when that process is over because I can start to sort of mentally move these objects around and in such a way where it becomes very fluid and fluent and I have no trouble doing it and I have such a precise image of what those sounds are going to be and what their expressive characteristics are going to be like and what their sort of emotional impact is going to be and once I get to that state that’s when I can sit down and actually start to write the score from beginning to end so the story doesn’t quite end there because I tend to write most of my pieces twice and that’s not something that I’m particularly pleased about necessarily but that’s just how it is I mean what usually happens is I write the piece the first time it’s premiered it’s performed maybe a few times and then I sit on it for a few months I come back to it I look at it again and I realize given this material that I now know extraordinarily well because I’ve actually sat down in a concert hall and listened to it being performed and I might want to go back to the piece and strengthen it and revise a few things and get it absolutely as good as I possibly can there’s no point for me in putting out a piece of work that isn’t 100 as good as it can possibly be I have no scruples whatsoever about taking something that I’ve written and either withdrawing it completely or revising it or rewriting it in certain cases and making it even stronger so the the entire process from conception to writing the piece to having it performed to having it published and recorded and broadcast and everything else that goes along with that it’s actually a very long process and in some cases it’s been years from the conception to the work being what I would consider definitively finished so I hope that’s a reasonably lucid explanation of how I go about my work so again if you if you asked another composer that same question you would get an extremely different answer Thank you. So with respect to apprenticeship and learning how to compose I mean one of the things that is almost like a rite of passage for composers is that you take chorale melodies so these are Lutheran hymn tunes that were taken by Bach and harmonized in four voices so there’s I can’t remember exactly how many of them there’s about 300 of these that survive and they feature in his cantatas and in his passions and oratorios and all of these and they’re they’re magnificent they’re they’re like a miniature chorus in harmony and in voice leading and these very short little melodies which were the sort of very you know popular tunes in their day you can you can just take the melody and you scrap the other three parts that Bach wrote and you try to harmonize it yourself and you compare it to what Bach did and that’s a that’s a very it’s an extraordinary exercise it it teaches you you know 100 different things at the same time so that’s something that I did for years and years I did hundreds probably thousands what does it teach you and well it teaches you to link up your ears your eyes and your fingers first of all and that’s really really useful if you’re a composer so in other words you can see the music on the page you can hear it inwardly and you can also you know you can also bang it out on the piano all at the same time so and you can sing the lines and also you can spot obvious technical mistakes very quickly so that you you don’t make them anymore and and it also you know you have to analyze the melody before you harmonize it you have to know where it’s going like that one of the hardest things I think for composers to learn how to do is to develop a sense of trajectory in music it’s it’s excruciatingly difficult what what beginner composers often do is they’ll put a lot of effort into devising material that’s interesting like an interesting chord or an interesting melody or an interesting whatever it is a rhythm or something but you have to invent the material and its trajectory simultaneously those two things have to be born together and that’s a very very difficult thing to do and harmonizing those chorales gets you started on that in a sense because the melodies have to lead somewhere they have to have a direction you have to work out where the cadences are going you have to work out you know what what key it’s going to be in and all of these sorts of things and how do you how do you lead the phrase so it teaches you a lot of things at the same time how do you know where one song ends and another begins and I’m thinking about the b side of abbey road which I think is well I’m a great fan of that along with millions of other people and not that that makes me special but it is a it is an agglomeration of a bunch of song fragments and yet it works brilliantly it’s brilliant and and and you can listen to it over and over and you wish the songs would go on longer but but they don’t and that’s kind of that’s interesting too because it’s tantalizing it doesn’t fully satiate you it leaves you wanting more and that’s somehow even more satisfying than being beat over the head with with the same thing again and again so how is it that we have a sense of what constitutes a song in its entirety and and know that one song is different than another the key makes a difference what’s crucial yeah well so you mentioned the b side of abbey road which is a great example that’s I mean that’s an amazing achievement on on multiple different levels there’s an earlier example of that with the beetles which is the song a day in the life which is similar in the sense that it consists of a series of fragments where the level of predictability in that song is extraordinarily low right it’s you know mccartney did that with uncle elbert too that’s right yeah yeah it’s it’s uh it’s it’s an exceptionally strange song in the sense that you you have absolutely no way of determining what the next section is going to be like on any level it’s totally unpredictable it’s uh it’s almost like a collage in a sense uh but it works and it has a kind of incredible cohesiveness to it and you might wonder you know where does that cohesiveness come from so there has to be some kind of higher level framework that ties the whole thing together so there’s a few things that can do that so one of them is the expressive context so what is the expressive thrust of the song so you can have enormous stylistic shifts within a song but as long as there’s some kind of a cohesiveness to the aesthetic or expressive project of the piece that can still work the other thing is you figure out fairly quickly when you’re learning when you’re listening to that track or indeed to the b side of abbey road that predictability is is going to be low unpredictability is going to be a feature of the song you figure that out very quickly so that then starts to become paradoxically one of your expectations so then the game becomes what is the the precise way in which this unpredictability is going to be manifested when am i going to be surprised how long is this fragment going to go on okay so that’s an unbelievably important point now imagine something unpredictable happens to you so let’s say you wake up this morning and tomorrow morning and there’s a little your side aches okay so now your nervous system has a major problem because that could be nothing or it could kill you and so and the probability that it will kill you is not zero and so you might ask yourself well why shouldn’t you just run off to the emergency ward instantly every time something minor happens to you and i’ve thought about this for a long time trying to figure out what it means that something is differentially unpredictable so imagine that you have a representation of the world and that representation enables you to get from one place to another and the farther there are things that you rely on as constants within that map so let’s say you’re married to someone and you’re thinking about your future you’ve got your future mapped out and you you assume the presence of your marital partner as a constant and then you get divorced or they die because a tremendous number of your plans or because a huge proportion of your map is dependent on that constant that’s extraordinarily disrupting and so it’s like the more something is the more unpredictable something is the more it disrupts in potential when it makes itself manifest and sometimes you have to guess at that but that’s that’s basically the issue and your nervous system there’s it’s more complicated than that too because you’re nervous so if the question is how upset should you get when something unexpected happens the answer is you you have to guess and you have to calibrate that a variety of ways so your trait neuroticism calibrates that so people who are low in neuroticism prepare for an emergency much less proportionately for every degree of uncertainty and sometimes they’re wrong so maybe if you’re really low in neuroticism you’re not anxious you’re not depressed you’re not shame ridden you’re not guilty etc but if you have a small ache in your side you’ll go to the hospital and now and then that stops you from dying of cancer okay so neuroticism is one and your nervous system is built as a guess some people assume the world is more dangerous and some people assume it’s less dangerous and that’s built right in your position in the dominance hierarchy or in the competence hierarchy also matters so as you move up a hierarchy your brain produces more serotonin and that dampens down the degree to which you respond physiologically to every unit of threat and that’s because the higher you are in a competence hierarchy so the more successful you are the less dangerous the world actually is because you have more resources around you and so if you’re like barely clinging on to the edge of the world any stressor can knock you over the edge so okay so back to the unexpected in music i presume there’s a hierarchy of rules that’s sort of implicit in every song and also in the corpus of songs that you’re familiar with as a listener and the more the more all the songs you know depend on the integrity of that rule the more dissonant or unexpected the transition that violates those rules is that’s exactly right that’s exactly right that’s exactly right and that that’s a very very crucial point because these things are determined contextually and sometimes the context is a is a bright broader stylistic one attached to a particular genre right a genre tells you a bunch of things you can’t do as well as a bunch of things you can do and you might think if you’re thinking romantically and not too clearly that the fewer limitations on you the better you’d have more freedom with fewer limitations but paradoxically that’s not that’s not exactly right and that’s really demonstrated in music because the fact that there are genres seems to increase the range of possible productions rather than decreasing them you know so if you’re writing a country song well there’s a bunch of things you can’t do before it becomes a rock song or a blues song although you can play with the borders in an interesting way but if those limitations weren’t there well you wouldn’t have that genre you know and some people might think that’s good in relationship to country music but there’s great country music just like there’s great music of all genres and so that seems to me to be associated with a point that we made earlier about training of the artistic temperament which is that you know you have to go through an apprenticeship and discipline yourself before you can become free and that’s a good way and I want to bang this point home to some degree because especially for people who are out there who are young that are listening to this don’t you don’t want to be thinking that constraints are your enemy if you’re a creative artist they’re not your enemy routine isn’t your enemy discipline isn’t your enemy genres aren’t your enemy you can push against those constraints and you should but you want to push against them with respect because if the constraints weren’t there you wouldn’t have music you’d just have noise and you know anybody can bang their fists on a piano and there’s infinite ways of doing that but none of them are interesting that’s exactly right that’s exactly right and on one level I mean you could you could take it a step farther and say that there’s actually very little freedom in creativity in a certain sense because we’re talking about genres so the instant you say I’m going to write an opera or a pop song or a jingle for a tv commercial instantly there are all kinds of expectations attendant upon those forms you can play with those to some extent but you can’t completely violate them if you want to make something that is meaningful enough to you know to be to be the make something that’s capable of carrying meaning within that within that genre there’s only so far you can really push it so you come up against that very quickly and then you know once you start let’s say developing a style as a as a composer then that style has certain expectations attendant upon it as well so you’re not actually that free now I think one major difference between music being composed today and music being composed 300 years ago is that the stylistic parameters of a piece today are much more embedded within individual works or let’s say within the style of an individual composer they’re they’re less sort of outsourced to the the the reigning genres or practices of the day so do you think that that’s one of the like I find the more modern that the classical music let’s say the more difficult I find to listen to it but your your claim is that now in some sense people it sounds like now what people are trying to do is to invent a genre that’s that piece within which the piece is to be interpreted yes is that is that a reason so instead of having instead of assuming the context that the listener brings you build that context into the piece but that also seems to place tremendous demands on the listener it does but I think that there are that that’s an it’s an extraordinarily difficult thing to avoid and again you have to bring it you have to connect that back to the industrial revolution to people suddenly having a lot of leisure time to taking the listening out to of music a lot more seriously than they would have been able to in the past and having a much broader middle class with with you know people with time on their hands to actually listen to things and not wanting to listen to hundreds of iterations on basically the same thing but wanting variety and being able to consume music much more quickly and here are huge numbers of different things from all over the place and that’s just the world that we’re in and obviously that’s taken to the nth degree with internet as well so it’s it’s very difficult in a situation like that to to posit that there could be something like a universal style that would be practiced by everybody and that would have its own codes and that would be broadly understandable to the public to some extent that role is now filled by popular music and commercial music but within the world of art music it’s not it hasn’t been the case for well over 100 maybe you could argue 130 years that there’s something like a you know a broader cultural set of expectations about what’s going to happen in a particular piece that’s a long time ago so you know so that’s that’s it is challenging for listeners on one level but here’s the other side of that so people often say x y or zed piece is challenging for the audience or this is a piece you know this is a very old remark that you get in in early instances of modernism so for example when james joist was working on his final novel fitting in his wake he had a lot of extremely withering comments from older writers this older established novelists and poets who said effectively you’re leaving the common man behind with this book this is going too far and i think that you know first of all joist’s response to that was well i’m writing for an ideal reader with an ideal case of insomnia so in other words he’s not he’s not writing for everybody he’s he’s writing for a particular type of person that wants that kind of experience and you know i think part of it is the dissolution of the 19th century idea of the audience in air quotes like the idea that there is a cohesive mainly middle-class audiences that goes to symphony concerts and operas and is expecting a certain type of experience and that falls apart pretty quickly in the 20th century because you start to see the the rise of not the audience so to speak but a lot of different audiences consisting of individuals who might have broadly ranging tastes and might be listening to very different things in this in the 1970s for example in north america there was a craze for early music that was uh that sort of took the music world by storm you started to have enormous numbers of baroque recordings being sold harpsichord music and recorder music and things like that that’s that’s like a it’s like a sub audience within the broader world of classical music and you see that within the popular music world as well there isn’t one audience for it there’s like hundreds of little micro genres within it so i think that’s just partly a consequence of the dramatic expansion of the means of reproduction of music perhaps the problem with the dissolution of the idea of the audience is that wouldn’t that go along with finding it more and more difficult to find an audience to play to i mean because you always as a composer you you must be constantly fighting between the tendency to write for you and for the small number of people who can perhaps understand music at the same level and producing something that’s of sufficiently broad appeal so that you actually acquire an audience yeah again there are different there are different expectations i would say within different uh musical worlds but there is an audience for contemporary classical music and it’s a fairly surprisingly broad one but it’s not a universal one it’s not you know it’s it’s not it’s not nearly as as wide as the audience of people that that listen to pop music but nevertheless there’s an audience that exists and it has its its own sort of professional infrastructure and there are there’s a pathway towards entering into that world and to being successful within it so that that i think results in twin dangers so one of them is you start playing for a particular type of audience that expects that particular type of musical experience and it becomes a closed circuit rather quickly and when that happens and when the audience is essentially uh shut out of it or at least you know not not particularly invited into that world then i don’t like that that’s not something that i want to do with my own work so one of the things that i’ve tried to do with my channel but also with my own creative work it’s not so much about numbers in the sense of you know how big can i make my audience it’s more a question of what happens if i remove barriers what happens if i make it so that there’s no extraneous barriers to understanding appreciating appreciating and enjoying this work so that’s something i’ve tried to do so given that i have this to say how can i present that in the most direct and enticing and engaging way possible so what do you think what do you think you have do you think that your music has something to teach its listeners like i’ve often been struck by the possibility that what artists do visual artists is to teach us how to see literally you know that seeing is very very complicated seeing color is very complicated there’s an objective element to color but the color of something depends very much on the color of all the colors around it and much more on that than you might even think oh yeah so so artists visual artists teach us how to see and so now we can all see like impressionists saw or anybody who’s who’s exposed to to the internet can see like an impressionist saw because that even though that was a shocking way to see when it was first invented we’ve all been exposed to it so much that that just looks like the world in some sense we can see the world as an impressionist place musicians do they teach us how to hear are they structuring our auditory perception what what do you think musicians have to teach people well a piece of music embodies a lot of different things at the same time i mean it’s music music has a lot of different components to it has a it has an entertainment component to it it has an emotional component it has a scientific component to it it has a religious component to it as well different composers different artists are going to focus more on one or the other some of them may succeed at doing all of these things simultaneously it might also have a pedagogical dimension to it it slightly depends on on the on the individual artists and what their what their focus is but i think that really powerful works of musical art regardless of genre i i don’t care if it’s a pop song or a symphony it doesn’t matter to me they’re able to do you know several of those things simultaneously in a very powerful way and what that really does is it articulates a sophisticated world view and it it shows this is what this is how you could construe the world aesthetically spiritually physically and all of these things at the same time and it’s also positing like a potential universe within which you could live so yeah so it speaks so it speaks of something profound i got that impression for example with joanie cash’s last albums i don’t know what happened to him when he hit 80 but man something changed i mean i like joanie cash’s music much of it throughout his entire career but his last few albums were profound they’re moving and and that’s that word comes to mind too and that’s so interesting because music has a movement and music moves you and it moves you to a domain where the profoundly meaningful becomes a reality it’s something like that and that’s that’s so important for people to be immersed in a world where profound what’s profoundly meaningful is made real it seems to us it seems to me that we depend on that well and it also it happens within a sensual domain right that’s the other thing music is it has a level of let’s say immediate seduction i think that can be extremely powerful so that you don’t need to understand intellectually or technically how a piece is doing what it’s doing you can you can experience it directly through your senses and i think that’s one of its most powerful aspects you know hitchcock talked about that he talked about how when he was plotting out a movie he would be playing the audience members emotions as though they were stops on an organ you know i always i always loved that and a piece of music can do that as well right so it we have these highly trained people who devote themselves to a particular art and then the consequence of that devotion is all of us have a broader range of potential experiences that we can engage ourselves in and we pay for that because we want that to to add depth to our lives and color to our lives that’s it and also to to give you a glimpse of the infinitude of possibilities i think uh and the the range of potential worlds that that can be explored i think that’s incredibly important and that’s perhaps one of the functions of artists you know and it allows you also i mean music is there’s something communal about music in the sense that it allows you to connect with other people but it also allows you to connect with something higher than yourself and into experiences that are beyond your conscious understanding and i think all of those are extraordinarily important things you know that’s been life preserving for me i would say generally through my life music because it’s always spoke of the possibility of something higher and i never knew what that higher thing that it was speaking of was you know i’ve investigated that but the fact that music music provides an immediate experience of that that’s in some sense inarguable it just happens and then you can think well that just happened and and it’s it’s as real as anything else that happens and that i suppose is part of what you referred to as the religious function of music and it’s not based on argument right it’s based on the invocation of direct experience and i suppose dance is like that too it’s so interesting that people young people you know their their their work is work it’s it’s often tedious it’s something they have to force themselves to do but they’ll take what they’ve earned as a consequence of that tedium and then spend it voluntarily on exposure to music and dance and they’ll do that because it’s intrinsically rewarding and pay for the privilege of doing so and that’s that’s another indication of the action of something like a religious instinct as far as i’m i’m concerned and it has that communal element that you described too it’s something that we want to share with other people and that we do share because you know we we match our bodies to the beat and and everyone moves in harmony and we’re all in the same place at the same time in a concert when when the musician is really communicating with the audience and that can be well that that’s a remarkable experience it’s a high point if you’re there when that happens and the whole stadium is a musical instrument in some sense because everyone’s on the same they’re in the same place at the same time having the same experience and there’s something unbelievably powerful about that and the and the musicians are communicating with each other and with the audience simultaneously that’s it yeah that’s it and i mean one of the things that i think covid has revealed we you know we’ve had many attempts at trying to put on concerts online virtual concerts and so on or in situations where there’s a bunch of performers they’re all in different rooms and they’re being they’re playing together over zoom and then it’s being live streamed and so on and i mean to some extent you can say that that’s um you know it’s better than nothing but i can’t think of a single musician that i know who would say well that’s good enough you know that that’s that’s good enough and we no longer need those sorts of communal experiences i think everybody that i’ve interfaced with over the past year or so has a sort of a real sense of weariness at not being able to do concerts and just have people together in the same room there’s something about that experience that is irreplaceable fundamentally well you know we also don’t know exactly how crucial those experiences are i mean i’ve been struck you know i if push came to shove i suppose i’d have to admit that my favorite music is the music that i enjoyed when i was 18 or 19 or 17 in the 1970s or 1980s 19 late 1970s um there’s something about communal musical exposure that seems to catalyze group identity at a very fundamental level and i can’t help but think that that’s tied very deeply into our tribal nature you know that we united into cohesive tribes as a consequence of shared music and shared dance and that that’s what brought us together as functioning cooperative units and so you bond with you bond with your tribe when you’re 16 or 17 and you do that around exactly these particularly music and dance and that that that catalyzes your identity permanently i think as the member of a particular group and and well and we maybe you don’t become completely human without that it could be yeah it could be a kind of a necessary rite of passage and that that is you know central in forming your identity and that’s that’s true in every musical world that i’ve encountered i mean it’s extraordinarily important to people to have a sense of engagement with whatever community it happens to be yes well and it’s amazing how how much people identify with their preferred genre you know um it was funny i went to my 50th high school reunion a while back a couple of years ago and i made this tape of because i lived up in northern alberta and i suppose the preferred genre there was country music so i made this tape because i had listened to a lot of old country music from the 30s through the 60s and hank williams and and some country swing and classics of country music and i really liked it and i brought this tape to play at my 50th reunion and i put it in my car stereo and i got objections from the crowd the same way that objections used to come up when teenagers squabbled about what music should be played at a given party and that was because they the my my classmates still like country music but all the stuff i played was too old so you know they’re bound to a genre but also to a time and it’s nice to have like i exposed my kids to all sorts of music of all sorts of genres and i think that was really good for them it’s nice to have that limit arbitrary limitation in some sense blown apart because then you can enjoy a wider range of music and then you have more things to enjoy but it’s still striking how much people identify with a particular narrow genre and and take pride in exactly that identification it says something very deep about our group nature that’s very true and that that is a that’s a hard wall to break through and that’s one of the things that i’ve tried to do with my channel is just to just nudge people a little bit farther and say well the you know the world of music is quite big and it contains all kinds of things and just cultivate an attitude of openness towards listening to different things and and to try to do that without necessarily thinking too much about the question of i like it or i don’t like it the first time you hear it but just cultivating it and openness and you know listening to it with curiosity and then you know if you if you hate it and you’re really having an awful time then fine you know don’t don’t don’t insist upon it but but you can really discover extraordinary things that way and what i’ve discovered through the channel is that the number of people that are willing to do that is actually much greater than we realize and there are all kinds of people who are open to those sorts of experiences but might not necessarily come across them in their daily lives and there’s various reasons for that a lot of the music that i cover it doesn’t necessarily have a very broad exposure but they hear it and they get drawn into it and they and especially if you can connect that up with something that is familiar to them a bridge yeah well with with with with my analysis or composition students if there’s if there’s a particular area of repertoire that they’re not familiar with and they’re having trouble entering into it then you show them an example of the painting or the architecture or the poetry of that time and often you know there’s a kind of a click and they realize oh this is this is what this connects to and and you can sort of enter into that world much more easily so and that’s that’s an incredibly effective thing whereas i think if there’s no context then it’s terrifying and there’s nothing more upsetting for audience members than to listen to something and have the feeling that they have no ability whatsoever to tell if it’s good or bad people hate that you know it’s like uh how am i supposed to maybe i’m not having a good time but i don’t know if it’s because the piece is bad or if it’s because i’m not able to hear it because i don’t know what’s going on and so i try to i try to reduce that as much as i can just provide some context explain what the the the work is trying to do what it comes out of and that can go a long way to removing those sorts of barriers i think well that’s one of the advantages to youtube business is that you can communicate with people who would normally be excluded from well from you can communicate with people that would normally be excluded it’s certainly the case that i’ve found that there’s a massive market for the discussion of long-form discussion of philosophical ideas far bigger market than anyone would have ever possibly imagined including me so so let’s round this out you’ve spent the last 20 years developing a creative career it’s a very rare thing to accomplish um advice for people who are interested in composition like how do you build yourself into an artist what do you have to do to be successful and what pretensions do you have to drop the first thing is that uh being a composer let’s say professionally is almost impossible right so so that’s the first thing to understand i think when you’re getting into it is that it’s unbelievably almost inexpressibly difficult to do so the odds that you’re going to fail are are high so that’s the first thing you have to confront so that that gives you a certain degree of humility i would say the second thing is uh you have to have a range of skills i would say and i mean we mentioned this at the outset you said that it’s you know being talented and creative is not enough in fact it’s it’s really not enough uh there are you know i’ve met so many brilliant talented people who haven’t been able to establish themselves professionally haven’t been able to get a foothold because they don’t have the other skills necessary a lot of that is interpersonal a lot of it is practical you have to be deeply pragmatic in order to do this uh and so what does it mean to be pragmatic and i mean people often you know they have contempt for musicians or artists who sell out but it’s not that easy to put yourself in a position where you have the privilege of selling out let me tell you so you might want to you might not want to start by being contemptuous of developing that as a as a temptation absolutely well i think one thing that’s very very important is to understand that there as i mentioned earlier there there is an infrastructure in place for people who want to be composers so there’s a network of festivals there’s a network of uh of ensembles and orchestras that commission pieces and so on and there are audiences attached to all of these different structures so on the one level you could say well there’s there’s an audience that already exists and maybe you can tap into that but i think what’s incredibly important to understand is that increasingly today you have to really constitute your own platforms yourself and you can’t rely on those institutional structures because a lot of them are actually rather tenuous you know in the sense that a lot of these things are state funded you know you can’t guarantee that the the state funding is going to go on indefinitely and you don’t know at all if the state can actually communicate with the audience you know especially with especially with the rise of new technology i mean i found this with book marketing is that the old go-to sources for publicizing a book are no longer relevant and the book publishers don’t know what to do about this you know they’re still stuck well maybe they’re stuck five years in the past but that might as well be 20 years and so you do have access to all these technologies like youtube and spotify and so on but that also means to use those you also have to dispense with any contempt you might have for sales and marketing and i think it’s a big mistake to think about it as selling out i think the way you should think about your art is that not only do you have to create it but you have to communicate about it because if you don’t communicate about it no one knows it exists and so it might be of high quality and and it might be deeply engrossing for you to engage in it but that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to keep body and soul together and so you have to drop your contempt about communication that’s right that’s right because it’s extremely easy to ignore a new composition that’s very very easy and even the even the people that listen to these things it’s very easy for them to ignore it so you have to come up with a compelling reason why somebody would want to do that in the first place so that’s that’s a very important part of it the other thing is when i talked about institutions there’s also the universities and it’s extremely common in north america for people to study composition at a doctoral level and i would i would encourage people to be open-minded about alternatives to doing that so the reason for that is that fundamentally composition you know if you really think about it it doesn’t it doesn’t actually belong in the academy it’s not really an academic pursuit it’s been shoehorned into it partly because it’s not obvious where composers fit or where they should go but framing composition as research which is what happens in doctoral programs you know i i can’t think of a more dismaying outcome than reframing composition as a form of research so that nobody has to listen to it so i would be i would be skeptical about that and i would think about you know where it might be optimal to take your work and where it might be optimal also to try to to learn and so where do you think it is if someone wants to learn and are you talking about composition in the broadest sense like let’s say there are listeners to these to this discussion who want to write a rock song or want to write a blues song or how how how generalizable is your advice and where should people go apart from your channel what should people do if they want to learn how to compose music find people who know more about it than you and and get all the extract all the knowledge you can out of them i believe actually in a kind of apprenticeship system which which i think is optimal and that’s actually how things did work for centuries and like a very practical hands-on pragmatic approach to all of the aspects involved in being a composer not just obviously the artistic side of things but also how do you write a score how do you format it how do you get a publisher how do you work with a record label how do you get your pieces performed and all of these other aspects to it so all of those are incredibly important as well and i think that the the best place to learn those things is to find a composer who they don’t have to be a superstar in the composition world but they just have to know more than you do and figure out you know how they did it and work with them and see if you can help them and that’s a powerful way of doing it so there are there are various pathways that exist that can that can help people to achieve their goals and is it is it where would you like where would you start to look for that like if i wanted to learn how to compose a rock song to write a rock song where would i start looking i guess i could google it yeah google is you know a logical first place to look and that’s what a lot of people do what what seems to happen quite often is you’ll you’ll google it and you’ll come up with you know a youtube channel or an artist who has a you know a particular prominence let’s say on social media and you’ll look at their content for a while and then at some point you may reach out to them so that that often happens but it can also be just someone in your community or someone local you might you might find going to concerts is a good way to meet people obviously you can’t do that now but eventually we will be able to again so going to concerts if there’s a piece that you find striking talk to the person who wrote it if there are performers that you want to get to know just go up to them musicians are you know fairly open to that sort of thing because we’ve all had to we’ve all had to deal with multiple almost insurmountable barriers in order to get you know even a toehold in this profession so what i’ve found is that generally speaking composers are happy to help out other people that want to do the same thing you know within reasonable limitations well there is pleasure in mentoring someone absolutely it’s like you’ve got some hard-won skills and truths that you’ve managed to sort out after you know two decades of bloody combat trying to do something impossible it’s like you’re thrilled to share that with somebody else maybe it’ll save them some time all right well you have a family now yeah you’re married you have a daughter yes i do yeah she’s almost three impediment or help to your career oh it’s a it’s a help it’s a huge help unquestionably in fact why why i don’t i don’t think i could do it otherwise because the the nature of my work you know i’m always going out on a limb what i’m doing is barely possible right so if i didn’t have an adequate support system that you know that held this whole thing up together then i’d be i don’t think i could do it i really don’t so that’s that’s probably going to be true for most people and occasionally there’s going to be someone who for one reason or another either they can’t live with somebody else or or whatever but for most people that’s going to be the case and so there’s a level on which my life is predictable in the good sense right there are certain things that i don’t have to worry about on a daily level and that frees you up immensely and there’s a a 19th century french poet who said that in order to be properly free in your imaginative creative work there needs to be something predictable and almost boring about your home life not boring in the bad sense boring in the sense of let’s say free of of terrifying chaotic disorder well i think you know you you spoke of music continually representing the relationship between order and chaos and so then the same thing applies in your creative life is you want to order everything that can be ordered so that you can tolerate the exploration and the risk necessary to engage in a creative enterprise and so again we’d say you know don’t art gets romanticized in a counterproductive way for the for the want to be artist frequently and leads them to be what contemptuously avant-garde about things they should be grateful for having and that would be friends family intimate relationship some daily routine discipline a work ethic all of that it sounds so bourgeois you know it’s not it’s at odds with well maybe you want to die at 27 of alcohol poisoning and if that’s the case then you can forego all that but if you want to have a long and creative career it’s not such a bad idea to nail down some stability around you so that well so that you can survive over the long run that’s it well people forget also that the romantics lived in an era where life expectancy was considerably lower than it is today so it’s like well you can you can do the you can have a bohemian lifestyle and and die at 30 and you know comparatively speaking perhaps you’ve lost a little bit less of life compared to what you might have had otherwise today you know you can live to 90 you can live to 95 maybe beyond like you don’t want to you know be in a horrible state already at 30 or 40 so if you can avoid that it’s and this romantic myth of the artist that needs to be enmeshed in chaos and suffering needs to be definitively destroyed it’s a it’s a pernicious myth people talk about artists like van Gogh and Beethoven and so on but the Beethoven would have been more productive had he not had to contend with the things he had to contend with you know van Gogh would have would have had a much longer career and they would both have preferred not to suffer right not to be dealing with all kinds of tragic circumstances they would have preferred that you know artists would generally prefer to have a nice home and a stable existence and and something happy and fulfilling about their life well there’s also the proclivity of people who are living a dis- dissolute and undisciplined lifestyle to pass that off as artistic engagement and you can get away with that for quite a long time when you’re young but it starts to deteriorate pretty badly by the time you hit i would say the end of your 20s that’s it and one other thing that i would tend to say to composers is to is to try to not waste time because you have the sense that you have an unlimited vista ahead of you and you really don’t and you have to be extraordinarily careful about how you’re using your time what you’re aiming towards and how how you try to get there and having a sense of articulating that i think is extraordinarily important and so you well did do you have concrete goals set up so for example when you’re working about three hours a day i think this is the last question i’ll ask you but when you’re working about three hours a day do you have a productivity idea in mind like are you trying to hit a target for the year for two years or for three like i have a friend who writes a novel a year that’s he’s done that for 25 years that’s his he writes every day he wants to produce a novel a year and he imposes that on himself it could be a different strategy but it can’t be none yeah it well i have to i have to compose a certain number of pieces in order to have the income from from commission so that’s part of it and so i i kind of have it but at the same time relative to the other things that i do commissions are are not particularly well paid on an hourly level let’s say i mean that’s just the reality of it it might take me 10 000 hours to finish a piece so nobody’s going to pay me 100 an hour to write a piece for 10 000 hours you know the economics of it are impossible so you have to understand also that when you’re writing a piece as a composer you know you’re you’re going to be taking time away from things that you could be doing that would earn more money so you have to figure out what the balance is how you know how much can i do that before it starts to eat seriously into my my possibilities financially so in my case but also you have to think reasonably about how much you can produce and maintain a certain level of quality consistently and also have enough time to regenerate yourself and come up with new ideas and not just merely repeat the same things over and over again so it’s going to be different for different people some artists are very spontaneous and gestural and intuitive and they don’t need a lot of planning when they when they write a piece others take a long time to think and and and carefully plot out what they’re doing and produce a lot of sketches and so on in my case i’m rather slow i’m meticulous and i need to take the time to do it properly and it still happens that i have to write a piece twice recently i wrote a violin concerto for a group in switzerland and then completely rewrote it i spent eight years sorry eight months writing an entirely new draft of the piece for an orchestra in kiev and ukraine and that second version of the piece was not a commission so it’s it’s hard to justify doing things like that but sometimes you know the the the piece hasn’t quite coalesced it hasn’t quite gelled and you have to do that so typically it’s you know for me it tends to be about two to three pieces a year something like that i can’t really push it too much more than that so i know with writers i tell writers um start writing how well pick a question that you’d like to investigate this is more non-fiction writing because i i can’t give advice about fiction writing but non-fiction writing pick a question you’re interested in and start trying to answer it and start writing and maybe you start writing for 15 minutes a day every day and maybe it’s 20 minutes and maybe it’s 25 minutes but you do that every day sort of religiously because you set your mind to it and then maybe you can expand that upward to the three hours and you get better at something by doing it and by analyzing it and if you don’t have anything to say then you should read some more because about your question the specific question that compels you so you need a question that compels you i don’t know how much overlap there is between that and composition like do you would you say to someone who wants to write music to start writing music like do you do you jump right into it and what do you do that’s it and the other thing that i tell them is write for the wastebasket do that ritualistically so what that means is you say to yourself for the next half hour i’m going to sit and write and i’m going to write on scrap paper or whatever it is and then the rule is the the the agreement you make with yourself is that at the end of that half hour you have to throw it out okay and you do that every day you do it for two weeks and see what happens and that’s an extraordinary exercise a lot of students find that very liberating because they’re no longer thinking in terms of well you know this is not good enough to keep it’s not an issue you know you’re going to throw it out and that just takes away those inhibitions well you know there is there is neurological evidence that the creative linguistic facility and the inhibitory linguistic facility are not they’re not the same brain area which is to say that the production unit and the editing unit are separate and if you try to like i see with beginning writers that they’ll try to they’ll write they’ll try to write a sentence properly it’s like jesus get the sentence down then worry about whether it’s proper you can’t do that and then they do that partly because they don’t want to throw away i want to get this right it’s like well that isn’t how to get it right the way to get it right is to write a bunch it’s darwinian over produce and cull over produce and cull and then you separate the editor and the producer absolutely that’s exactly it yeah and and these strategies are incredibly powerful so there’s no reason why somebody has to be blocked or unable to write a single thing you just have to find out some strategies sometimes and that’s part of the process of learning to be a composer or a writer well you can lower your expectations to the point where you can meet them you know like you can type 400 words they don’t even have to make sense in terms of they don’t even have to be structured in sentences like there is a there’s a lower bound for quality that you can definitely hit you can write 400 bad words and so and if you do that repeatedly then they won’t be so bad that’s exactly it it’s just it’s the same with with with sports or athletic endeavors it’s like you don’t start out if you’ve never run before by doing a marathon it’s you’re just going to hurt yourself you’re going to fail and you’ll feel bad it’s the same in in creative endeavors like you don’t you don’t start out by trying to write a 900 page novel if you’ve never done it before so you have to you have to have proximal goals that you have a hope of actually being able to meet and and you set the target a little bit back so that it’s not dead easy it has to challenge you a little bit but it can’t be so difficult that that you’re going to feel like a hopeless failure you know even through trying to do it and then you what you do is you you you pile up these sort of little successes it’s like okay can you do a 15 second piece can you do a 30 second piece and then you just you just keep moving the target slightly back and if you do that realistically over years you can be you can become a master at something well so so so then the other thing you’re learning while you’re doing that is to is to master your own time like you don’t want to suffer from the delusion that your time is your own first of all you’re not very disciplined to begin with and so your time is wasted by preoccupations that you can’t control your involvement in facebook your your your tendency to go off task and do something you know that’s maybe you’re watching television or looking at pornography or god only knows what it is but it’s not it’s not focused attention on on your on your on your explicit goals if you start with these incremental projects the way that you’re describing you can also learn to gain control over your own mind so that you can start to have some time every day that’s actually yours and creative and that’s just as important it’s just as important to learn the discipline to do that as it is to make the project itself and so maybe you start with 15 minutes a day if you can do that and and if you’re lucky you can end up with a couple of hours that you can have for yourself and your creative projects that’s it you know i feel silly telling these things to you because i learned a lot of them from you and you don’t learn these and you don’t learn this in composition school you know you don’t learn this in a conservatory but they’re in their in their way they’re as crucial they’re as critical to being being able to do it as to being able to write a correct piece of counterpoint and what i often see are artists or young people aspiring to be artists who don’t have the first clue about just how how to work how to go about it how to establish a work routine and you know without that component to it it’s it’s hopeless all right sam that was good thanks very much for talking to me it was wonderful to see you it was a great pleasure to see you jordan it was really really nice thank you for doing this so