The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 179. The Meaning of Music ｜ Samuel Andreyev

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00:00:51.060 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, episode 33, season 4.

00:00:59.400 This episode was recorded back in February 2021.

00:01:03.480 Samuel Andreev joined my dad this episode.

00:01:06.980 Samuel is a Canadian composer who writes absolutely extraordinary music for orchestras, soloists, chamber groups, singers, and other ensembles throughout Europe and the world.

00:01:16.580 He hosts the Samuel Andreev podcast, is a professor at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg.

00:01:24.100 Hope there's nobody German listening to this podcast cringing at my pronunciation. 1.00

00:01:28.260 Samuel is also known for his YouTube channel, presenting an analysis of works that he believes are interesting and important.

00:01:36.080 Dad and Samuel discuss the skills needed to be successful as an artist, where to start if you want to compose music,

00:01:41.980 the hierarchy in Western music, the relationship of music and language, the importance of genres, tips on learning composition,

00:01:50.420 how having a family is helpful to a career, and more.

00:01:53.340 I'm pleased to have with me here today Samuel Andreev, someone I've known for many years now.

00:02:18.000 I think it must be 15 years, probably.

00:02:21.260 And Sam is a Canadian composer who has sought his fame and fortune in Europe.

00:02:29.580 And we're going to talk today about his career, about the artistic endeavor in general,

00:02:35.720 and how that can be rendered practical, and about music.

00:02:40.180 It's nice to see you, Sam.

00:02:41.500 Thanks a lot for agreeing to talk to me.

00:02:44.120 It's really good to see you, Jordan.

00:02:46.060 Thank you.

00:02:46.520 Thank you.

00:02:47.060 I'm very pleased to see you.

00:02:49.300 So why don't you fill everybody in, to begin with, on your background?

00:02:55.240 Sure.

00:02:56.000 So I'm a Canadian composer.

00:02:58.000 I was born in Kincardin, which is near Toronto, and lived in Canada until I was 22,

00:03:03.480 at which point I decided to move to France.

00:03:07.420 So I settled initially in Paris.

00:03:09.260 I lived there for 10 years, studied composition at the Paris Conservatory.

00:03:13.600 And then I received a one-year artistic residency in Madrid.

00:03:19.400 I lived there for a while and then ended up here in Strasbourg in eastern France.

00:03:25.040 And I live currently right on the border between France and Germany.

00:03:29.420 So my work involves many things.

00:03:32.380 I have to juggle a lot of different activities.

00:03:34.060 So the main thing and the sort of summit of my activity is my work as a composer.

00:03:39.500 So I write music for orchestras and soloists, chamber groups, singers, all kinds of different ensembles throughout Europe and the world.

00:03:47.440 And I also have a podcast called the Samuel André F. Podcast.

00:03:52.400 I'm a teacher.

00:03:53.220 I'm a professor at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, Germany.

00:03:57.020 And I have a YouTube channel where I present analyses of works that I think are interesting and important.

00:04:05.440 And I try to render those works a little bit more accessible to people who might not be familiar with them.

00:04:10.760 And how has your subscriber base on YouTube been doing?

00:04:14.160 I haven't looked at your channel for some time.

00:04:16.820 You started it about what?

00:04:19.180 How long ago now?

00:04:20.620 I started it in late 2016.

00:04:23.480 And it got off to a rather slow start, which is to be expected with this sort of thing.

00:04:29.800 And then it took off within, I would say, about a year or two.

00:04:35.740 So my subscriber base currently is about 35,000.

00:04:39.480 So I'm not breaking any records on YouTube.

00:04:42.900 But nevertheless, for the sort of content that I'm doing, it represents a very significant audience.

00:04:49.260 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.

00:05:00.840 So professional musicians, people who have composers who are active musicians.

00:05:05.580 And then complete neophytes, people who don't necessarily know very much at all about music but are curious about it.

00:05:12.540 And one of the tricky things about running this channel has been finding a way to address both of those audiences simultaneously.

00:05:18.460 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.

00:05:33.260 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.

00:05:40.600 So what made you decide to use YouTube?

00:05:43.820 Why did you start your channel?

00:05:45.960 Oh, well, I was a professor at a conservatory in northern France for two years teaching analysis.

00:05:51.320 And I had a class of between 10 and 15 students.

00:05:55.580 And I put an enormous amount of work into those courses.

00:05:58.260 So I would go and spend a week studying a particular musical work and then I would present it to my students.

00:06:03.820 And we would alternate classical repertoire with more contemporary, specifically post-war repertoire.

00:06:11.480 And I really enjoyed doing that.

00:06:14.300 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.

00:06:26.160 So after a couple of years of doing this, I had just a wealth of material just sitting there.

00:06:32.040 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.

00:06:38.440 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.

00:06:48.500 And it did surprisingly well.

00:06:50.500 The first video, I figured, well, you know, 50 people watch it.

00:06:53.520 That's great.

00:06:54.120 That's 50 people more than the 15 that I have in my class.

00:06:58.580 But it was like a thousand people within a month or something like that.

00:07:01.860 And that was exciting.

00:07:03.480 So that showed me the potential of the medium.

00:07:05.680 And it just kept growing from there.

00:07:07.260 How many viewers are you getting on average for a video?

00:07:10.340 And what's the range?

00:07:12.420 It varies wildly.

00:07:13.660 I have videos with 200,000 views and I have videos with a few thousand views.

00:07:17.200 And the thing is, I'm utterly unable to tell what videos are going to be popular.

00:07:21.960 I mean, it's really strange to me that I can't, I have no sense of that at all.

00:07:26.920 I just throw up videos that are in line with my interests at the time that I'm doing the video.

00:07:32.600 Like, it's important to me that it has to be a topic that I'm obsessed about.

00:07:36.520 I can't just be merely interested.

00:07:37.900 I have to be obsessed with the topic so that I can research it in sufficient depth.

00:07:41.900 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.

00:07:48.940 And sometimes that process takes weeks or years.

00:07:52.300 I mean, if you consider that many of these works are pieces that I've been studying for years.

00:07:56.060 So I try to condense that down into, you know, approximately a 20 to 30 minute video.

00:08:01.320 And some of them are quite popular.

00:08:03.760 And some of them, for reasons I don't understand, are a little bit less popular.

00:08:07.140 But it doesn't influence my choices in terms of what to look at.

00:08:11.380 You know, so I just try to go with the things that I think are worth looking at.

00:08:15.980 And particularly works that aren't, let's say, particularly represented on YouTube.

00:08:20.760 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.

00:08:29.480 So it's also about filling a void.

00:08:32.160 I mean, you're an anomaly.

00:08:33.100 Is there anyone else that you know of doing this sort of thing publicly on YouTube, for example, like you are?

00:08:38.700 And how are your colleagues reacting to that?

00:08:41.240 There's very few people doing it.

00:08:44.000 It's starting to be a little bit more common.

00:08:48.380 But certainly four or five years ago, there was nobody else.

00:08:51.460 I mean, I was looking actually for content of this sort on YouTube and not finding anything.

00:08:56.500 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.

00:09:03.180 The early videos were extremely crude.

00:09:05.740 But these days, I would say there's two types of people producing content on music on YouTube.

00:09:14.800 In terms of, let's say, you know, things that are a little bit more theoretical or that try to present really specific information on music.

00:09:22.540 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.

00:09:39.120 And then on the other hand, you have people like me.

00:09:41.140 I don't really do that sort of thing.

00:09:42.600 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.

00:09:53.900 But they're not meant to be things that you can watch in five minutes necessarily.

00:09:58.660 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.

00:10:06.020 And I think that within the composition world, and 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.

00:10:14.900 There's a perception that YouTube is a place that people go to get their heads smashed in, to get insulted and embarrassed and humiliated and so on.

00:10:24.400 And I think there's a degree of discomfort amongst composers who, you know, they're not by nature the most extroverted people anyway.

00:10:34.740 I think a lot of them are somewhat reticent about doing something like this.

00:10:39.700 And the other thing is, you need to have a weird array of skills to do this sort of thing.

00:10:46.620 And they're not skills that typically go together.

00:10:48.980 And a lot of composers, frankly, would rather just spend their time doing their work and teaching if they teach.

00:10:55.940 So...

00:10:56.460 Yeah, well, you need a weird array of skills generally to be successful as an artist.

00:11:03.420 And unfortunately, perhaps, being technically proficient or even brilliant artistically is nowhere near enough to guarantee your success.

00:11:14.520 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.

00:11:26.840 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.

00:11:44.260 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 extremely difficult to manage.

00:11:56.940 First of all, you had to leave Canada.

00:11:58.800 And why was that?

00:11:59.820 There were a few reasons for that.

00:12:03.760 I actually formulated the project of leaving Canada when I was 16 or 17.

00:12:08.800 On one level, it's a difficult thing to explain because most of my life choices have been made instinctually.

00:12:15.840 So I don't actually sit down with a piece of paper with columns on it and think about all the pluses and minuses of various decisions.

00:12:23.480 Most of the major decisions I've made have been made on instinct, and moving to France was one of those decisions.

00:12:29.480 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.

00:12:39.820 I needed to go somewhere else.

00:12:41.040 There's a few reasons for that.

00:12:42.720 So one of them is, perhaps I felt that I was sort of too much in a very familiar environment and surrounded by too many like-minded people.

00:12:55.540 And I wanted to be in an environment that would, on one level, that would force me to reconstitute myself and learn an entirely new way of being.

00:13:07.020 So when I moved to France, I hardly knew anybody.

00:13:10.100 I think I had one phone number of one person to contact.

00:13:14.960 You know, it was extremely difficult.

00:13:17.780 You know, you're starting a new life all over again.

00:13:20.540 You're dealing with a language.

00:13:22.420 You're dealing with a completely different culture of people that have different priorities, different principles, and trying to work all of that out while simultaneously trying to start a career.

00:13:33.580 So it was extraordinarily difficult.

00:13:35.040 But I think that on one level, I'm instinctively drawn to difficult things.

00:13:39.420 I think I find the challenge exhilarating.

00:13:41.620 Well, open people are creative.

00:13:43.540 And the advantage to lead, and so they're destined in some sense to transform their personalities.

00:13:51.940 So creative people create, what would you say, objects.

00:13:57.840 They create for public benefit, but they also create themselves at the same time.

00:14:03.280 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.

00:14:14.820 It's not a simple matter, but there's great benefit in it if you can manage it.

00:14:20.060 And so you left Canada and you went to France.

00:14:22.560 What changed for you as a consequence of doing that?

00:14:25.420 How did you change?

00:14:28.700 Well, first of all, I was exposed to an entirely different musical culture, and I had to think very differently about music than I had up to that point.

00:14:37.460 So that was the first thing, and that involved an enormous amount of listening and being open to my teachers also to what they had to say, even though their perspective was radically different than what I had encountered up to that point.

00:14:53.400 It involved 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.

00:15:04.780 That's absolutely crucial.

00:15:06.440 You know, you have to have a favorite coffee shop. 0.99

00:15:08.260 It sounds stupid, but you have to have things like that, otherwise you'll go crazy. 0.98

00:15:13.080 You know, constituting a circle of friends. 0.96

00:15:15.580 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.

00:15:26.380 And a favorite coffee shop is a really good way of doing that.

00:15:29.200 You go there every day, you get to know people a little bit, and that stops you from drowning in,

00:15:34.780 the chaos of the unknown, and enables you to put down, start to put down some roots.

00:15:40.300 And, you know, it's easy to dramatize and romanticize creativity and constant freedom, but even very creative people need routine to keep them sane.

00:15:54.460 And they need a creative routine as well.

00:15:56.760 I mean, you, how much time do you spend a week composing, do you think?

00:16:00.820 I know fairly precisely because I have a schedule.

00:16:05.320 So I do minimum three hours a day of composition.

00:16:09.500 It's difficult for me to go too much beyond three hours.

00:16:14.080 It starts to be a question of diminishing returns after that point.

00:16:17.380 So 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 marshaled and ready for the task at hand.

00:16:27.420 And you can't be sort of half there and kind of checking your email and like you really do have to be focused on it.

00:16:33.160 And that sort of focus takes a lot out of you.

00:16:35.960 So, you know, I would find it difficult to go beyond about three hours, but that's typically what I do.

00:16:40.860 I try to.

00:16:41.880 I could work for more than three hours a day, but I couldn't do it for days or weeks on end.

00:16:46.620 I'd start to tire myself out.

00:16:48.220 And so I eventually realized that past three hours a day, I was robbing Peter to pay Paul.

00:16:53.800 I'm constantly telling this to students.

00:16:55.480 I mean, one of the things that I say to composition students, I teach composition privately online on Zoom.

00:17:01.680 And one of the things I'm constantly telling them 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.

00:17:11.340 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.

00:17:17.420 Some people can sustain that for 45 minutes.

00:17:20.000 Some people can do it for three hours.

00:17:21.820 Maybe some can do it a little bit more than that.

00:17:23.740 I don't find it credible when people say to me, I compose 12 hours a day, which you occasionally hear.

00:17:30.840 But I suspect that it's, you know, it's a bit of an elaboration of the facts.

00:17:36.420 So you've managed to establish yourself as a composer and that's your fundamental career, but you also have to teach.

00:17:46.440 And can you walk everyone who's listening through what a typical week would be like for you?

00:17:52.180 And that gives them some sense of what has to be done to make a living as an artist.

00:17:59.220 Yeah.

00:17:59.840 I mean, I would start by saying that it's not exactly that I have to teach.

00:18:03.820 There are other things that I could do instead of teaching in order to get the necessary income.

00:18:08.400 But I actually enjoy teaching and it's something that is enormously enriching for my creative practice as well.

00:18:15.560 So it's not like there's no, there's not one second of teaching time that is wasted time ever.

00:18:20.940 I mean, it really does feed directly into the work that I do.

00:18:25.760 But as far as a typical day, I mean, I try.

00:18:29.300 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.

00:18:40.460 And talking these things out is enormously helpful and it's stimulating, you know, and things come up all the time spontaneously during these lessons that you can't necessarily plan ahead either.

00:18:53.060 So it's a form of creative activity.

00:18:56.140 I think if I'm teaching composition the right way, then it's stimulating for both me and the student and it's surprising and it generates ideas.

00:19:06.240 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.

00:19:16.160 So these are Lutheran hymn tunes that were taken by Bach and harmonized in four voices.

00:19:23.720 So there's, I can't remember exactly how many of them, there's about 300 of these that survive.

00:19:27.940 And they feature in his cantatas and in his passions and oratorios and all of these, and they're, they're magnificent.

00:19:35.740 They're, they're like a miniature chorus in harmony and in voice leading.

00:19:41.720 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.

00:19:54.780 And you try to harmonize it yourself and you compare it to what Bach did.

00:20:01.020 And that's a, that's a very, uh, it's an extraordinary exercise.

00:20:05.100 It, it, it teaches you, you know, a hundred different things at the same time.

00:20:08.380 So that's something that I did for years and years.

00:20:10.740 I did hundreds, probably thousands.

00:20:12.360 What does it teach you?

00:20:13.620 And, uh, well, it teaches you to link up your ears, uh, your eyes and your fingers, first of all.

00:20:21.260 And that's really, really useful if you're a composer.

00:20:23.500 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.

00:20:33.980 So, uh, 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.

00:20:43.360 And, uh, and it also, you know, you have to analyze the melody before you harmonize it.

00:20:47.440 You have to know where it's going like that.

00:20:49.580 One of the hardest things I think for composers to learn how to do is to develop a sense of trajectory in music.

00:20:57.060 It's, it's excruciatingly difficult.

00:20:59.440 What, what beginner composers often do is they'll put a lot of effort into devising material.

00:21:04.260 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.

00:21:15.200 Those two things have to be born together.

00:21:17.860 And that's a very, very difficult thing to do.

00:21:20.480 And, and harmonizing those chorales gets you started on that in a sense, because the melodies have to lead somewhere.

00:21:27.020 They have to have a direction.

00:21:28.280 You have to work out where the cadences are going.

00:21:30.560 You have to work out, you know, what, what key it's going to be in and all of these sorts of things.

00:21:34.740 And how do you, how do you lead the phrase?

00:21:36.820 So it teaches you a lot of things at the same time.

00:21:40.980 How do you know where one song ends and another begins?

00:21:44.780 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.

00:21:53.560 Not that that makes me special, but it is a, it is an agglomeration of a bunch of song fragments.

00:22:01.220 And yet it works brilliantly.

00:22:03.140 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.

00:22:09.480 And that's kind of, that's interesting too, because it's tantalizing.

00:22:12.180 It doesn't fully satiate you.

00:22:14.360 It leaves you wanting more.

00:22:15.880 And that's somehow even more satisfying than, than being beat over the head with, with the same thing again and again.

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00:25:14.680 How is it that we have a sense of what constitutes a song in its entirety and know that one song is different than another?

00:25:21.920 The key makes a difference.

00:25:23.840 What's crucial?

00:25:24.800 Yeah, well, so you mentioned the B-side of Abbey Road, which is a great example.

00:25:30.080 That's, I mean, that's an amazing achievement on multiple different levels.

00:25:34.840 There's an earlier example of that with the Beatles, 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?

00:25:49.700 McCartney did that with Uncle Albert, too.

00:25:51.780 That's right, yeah.

00:25:53.560 Yeah, it's an exceptionally strange song in the sense that you have absolutely no way of determining what the next section is going to be like on any level.

00:26:04.880 It's totally unpredictable.

00:26:06.760 It's almost like a collage in a sense.

00:26:08.660 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?

00:26:16.460 So there has to be some kind of higher level framework that ties the whole thing together.

00:26:21.100 So there's a few things that can do that.

00:26:23.900 So one of them is the expressive context.

00:26:27.260 So what is the expressive thrust of the song?

00:26:30.480 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.

00:26:43.200 The other thing is you figure out fairly quickly when you're listening to that track, or indeed to the B-side of Abbey Road, that predictability is going to be low.

00:26:55.680 Unpredictability is going to be a feature of the song.

00:26:57.560 You figure that out very quickly.

00:26:58.920 So that then starts to become paradoxically one of your expectations.

00:27:02.600 So then the game becomes, what is the precise way in which this unpredictability is going to be manifested?

00:27:09.800 When am I going to be surprised?

00:27:11.640 How long is this fragment going to go on?

00:27:13.580 Okay, so that's an unbelievably important point.

00:27:16.940 Now, imagine something unpredictable happens to you.

00:27:20.560 So let's say you wake up this morning, tomorrow morning, and your side aches.

00:27:26.320 Okay, so now your nervous system has a major problem, because that could be nothing.

00:27:33.000 Or it could kill you.

00:27:35.460 And so, and the probability that it will kill you is not zero.

00:27:39.780 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?

00:27:47.680 And I've thought about this for a long time.

00:27:51.900 Trying to figure out what it means that something is differentially unpredictable.

00:27:56.620 So imagine that you have a representation of the world, and that representation enables you to get from one place to another.

00:28:04.240 And the farther, there are things that you rely on as constants within that map.

00:28:17.380 So let's say you're married to someone, and you're thinking about your future.

00:28:20.500 You've got your future mapped out.

00:28:21.880 And you assume the presence of your marital partner as a constant.

00:28:27.340 And then you get divorced or they die.

00:28:29.860 Because a tremendous number of your plans, or because a huge proportion of your map is dependent on that constant, that's extraordinarily disrupting.

00:28:41.040 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.

00:28:53.460 And sometimes you have to guess at that, but that's basically the issue.

00:28:57.340 And your nervous system, it's more complicated than that, too, because you're nervous.

00:29:04.300 So if the question is, how upset should you get when something unexpected happens?

00:29:08.220 The answer is, you have to guess, and you have to calibrate that a variety of ways.

00:29:12.000 So your trait neuroticism calibrates that.

00:29:15.360 So people who are low in neuroticism prepare for an emergency much less proportionately for every degree of uncertainty.

00:29:25.380 And sometimes they're wrong.

00:29:26.680 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.

00:29:33.360 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.

00:29:41.440 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.

00:29:52.020 Your position in the dominance hierarchy or in the competence hierarchy also matters.

00:29:56.260 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.

00:30:07.860 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.

00:30:16.960 So if you're barely clinging on to the edge of the world, any stressor can knock you over the edge.

00:30:23.640 So, okay, so back to the unexpected in music.

00:30:27.100 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.

00:30:38.660 And 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.

00:30:52.720 That's exactly right.

00:30:54.360 That's exactly right.

00:30:55.540 That's exactly right.

00:30:56.540 And that's a very, very crucial point, because these things are determined contextually.

00:31:02.100 And sometimes the context is a broader stylistic one attached to a particular genre.

00:31:08.460 Right.

00:31:08.800 A genre tells you a bunch of things you can't do, as well as a bunch of things you can do.

00:31:15.200 And you might think, if you're thinking romantically and not too clearly, that the fewer limitations on you, the better.

00:31:21.980 You'd have more freedom with fewer limitations.

00:31:24.780 But paradoxically, that's not exactly right.

00:31:28.640 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.

00:31:39.660 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.

00:31:46.320 Although you can play with the borders in an interesting way.

00:31:48.920 But if those limitations weren't there, well, you wouldn't have that genre.

00:31:53.440 You know, and some people might think that's good in relationship to country music.

00:31:56.860 But there's great country music, just like there's great music of all genres.

00:32:01.020 And so that seems to me to be associated with a point that we made earlier about training of the artistic temperament.

00:32:07.860 Which is that, you know, you have to go through an apprenticeship and discipline yourself before you can become free.

00:32:13.820 And that's a good way.

00:32:15.200 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,

00:32:23.600 you don't want to be thinking that constraints are your enemy if you're a creative artist.

00:32:27.880 They're not your enemy.

00:32:29.240 Routine isn't your enemy.

00:32:31.000 Discipline isn't your enemy.

00:32:32.340 Genres aren't your enemy.

00:32:33.620 You can push against those constraints, and you should.

00:32:36.460 But you want to push against them with respect, because if the constraints weren't there, you wouldn't have music.

00:32:41.120 You'd just have noise.

00:32:42.120 And, you know, anybody can bang their fists on a piano, and there's infinite ways of doing that.

00:32:47.360 But none of them are interesting.

00:32:50.260 That's exactly right.

00:32:51.500 That's exactly right.

00:32:52.360 And on one level, I mean, you could take it a step farther and say that there's actually very little freedom in creativity in a certain sense,

00:32:59.400 because we're talking about genres.

00:33:01.320 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.

00:33:13.520 You can play with those to some extent, but you can't completely violate them.

00:33:17.380 If you want to make something that is meaningful enough to make something that's capable of carrying meaning within that genre, there's only so far you can really push it.

00:33:28.620 So you come up against that very quickly.

00:33:30.260 And then, you know, once you start, let's say, developing a style as a composer, then that style has certain expectations attendant upon it as well.

00:33:39.840 So you're not actually that free.

00:33:41.460 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.

00:33:59.880 They're less sort of outsourced to the reigning genres or practices of the day.

00:34:07.540 So do you think that that's one of the, like, I find the more modern, the classical music, let's say, the more difficult I find to listen to it.

00:34:17.920 But 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.

00:34:30.660 Yes, is that, is that a reason?

00:34:33.380 So instead of having, instead of assuming the context that the listener brings, you build that context into the piece.

00:34:40.280 But that also seems to place tremendous demands on the listener.

00:34:44.400 It does.

00:34:46.220 But I think that there are, that's an, it's an extraordinarily difficult thing to avoid.

00:34:51.360 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 to music a lot more seriously than they would have been able to in the past.

00:35:06.040 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.

00:35:21.680 And here are, you know, huge numbers of different things from all over the place.

00:35:25.400 And that's just the world that we're in.

00:35:28.160 And obviously that's taken to the nth degree with internet as well.

00:35:31.940 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.

00:35:40.940 And that would have its own codes.

00:35:43.240 And that would be sort of broadly understandable to the, the, the public.

00:35:48.100 To some extent, that role is now filled by popular music and commercial music.

00:35:53.120 Uh, but within the sort of world of art music, it's not, you know, it hasn't been the case for well over a hundred, maybe you could argue 130 years that there's something like, uh, a, you know, a broader cultural, um, set of expectations about what's going to happen in a particular piece.

00:36:15.080 That's a long time ago.

00:36:17.380 So, you know, so that's, that's, it is challenging for listeners on one level, but here's the other.

00:36:23.120 Side of that.

00:36:24.080 So people often say X, Y, or Z piece is challenging for the audience, or this is a piece, you know, this is a very old remark, uh, that you get in, in early instances of modernism.

00:36:34.560 So for example, when James Joyce was working on his final novel, Bennington's Wake, he had a lot of extremely withering comments from older writers, this older established novelists and poets who said, effectively, uh, you're leaving the common man behind with this book.

00:36:51.660 And this is, this is going too far.

00:36:53.880 And I think that, you know, first of all, Joyce's response to that was, well, I'm writing for an ideal reader with an ideal case of insomnia.

00:37:02.940 So, right.

00:37:03.580 So in other words, he's not, he's not writing for everybody.

00:37:05.980 He's, he's, he's writing for a particular type of person that wants that kind of experience.

00:37:10.640 Uh, and, you know, I, I think part of it is the dissolution of the 19th century idea of the audience in, in air quotes, like the idea that there is a, uh, a cohesive, mainly middle-class audiences that goes to, uh, symphony concerts and operas.

00:37:27.260 Um, and is expecting a certain type of experience.

00:37:30.120 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, uh, that was, uh, that sort of took the world music world by storm.

00:37:53.760 You started to have enormous numbers of, um, Baroque recordings being sold, um, arpsichord music and recorder music and things like that.

00:38:02.420 That's, that's like a, it's like a sub audience within the broader world of classical music.

00:38:09.440 And you see that within the popular music world as well.

00:38:12.380 There isn't one audience for it.

00:38:14.380 There's like hundreds of little micro genres within it.

00:38:17.240 So, uh, I think that's just partly a consequence of the dramatic expansion of, uh, the means of reproduction of music.

00:38:25.460 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?

00:38:36.900 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.

00:38:57.020 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, it's a surprisingly broad one, uh, but it's not a universal one.

00:39:18.080 It's not, you know, it's, it's, it's not, uh, it's not nearly as, as wide as the audience of people that, that listen to pop music.

00:39:25.320 Uh, but nevertheless, there is an audience that exists and it has its, its own sort of professional, uh, infrastructure and there are, there are, there's a pathway towards entering into that world and, and to being successful within it.

00:39:38.700 Uh, so that, that I think results in twin dangers.

00:39:42.460 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.

00:39:51.760 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.

00:40:01.760 That's not something that I want to do with my own work.

00:40:04.420 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?

00:40:14.760 It's, it's more of a question of what happens if I remove barriers or what happens if I make it so that there's no extraneous barriers to understanding, appreciating, appreciating, and enjoying this work.

00:40:26.320 So that's something I've tried to do.

00:40:28.040 So given that I have this to say, uh, how can I present that in the most direct and enticing and engaging way possible?

00:40:42.320 And so what do you think, what do you think you have, do you think that your music has something to teach its listeners?

00:40:49.220 Like I've, I've, 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.

00:41:03.920 Seeing color is very complicated.

00:41:05.980 There's an objective element to color, but the color of something depends very much on the color of all the colors around it.

00:41:12.580 Um, and, and much more on that than you might even think.

00:41:16.080 Um, sorry, I lost my train of thought there for a moment.

00:41:24.680 Um, learning how to see.

00:41:27.080 Oh yeah.

00:41:27.540 So, so artists, visual artists teach us how to see.

00:41:30.540 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,

00:41:42.500 we've all been exposed to it so much that that just looks like the world in some sense.

00:41:48.380 We can see the world as an impressionist place.

00:41:52.220 Musicians, do they teach us how to hear? 1.00

00:41:54.620 Are they structuring our auditory perception?

00:41:56.900 What, what do you think musicians have to teach people?

00:41:59.840 Well, a piece of music embodies a lot of different things at the same time.

00:42:06.360 I mean, it's music, music has a lot of different components to it.

00:42:10.040 It has a, it has an entertainment component to it.

00:42:12.140 It has an emotional component.

00:42:14.240 It has a scientific component to it.

00:42:15.880 It has a religious component to it as well.

00:42:18.700 Uh, different composers, different artists are going to focus more on one or the other.

00:42:23.500 Some of them may succeed at doing all of these things simultaneously.

00:42:26.300 It might also have a pedagogical dimension to it.

00:42:29.320 Um, it, it slightly depends on, on the, on the individual artists and what their, what their focus is.

00:42:35.520 Uh, 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.

00:42:43.220 It doesn't matter to me.

00:42:44.280 Uh, they're able to do, you know, several of those things simultaneously in a very powerful way.

00:42:49.580 And what that really does is it articulates a sophisticated worldview.

00:42:53.340 And it, it, it shows, this is what, this is how you could construe the world, uh, aesthetically, spiritually, physically, uh, and all of these things at the same time.

00:43:05.040 And it's also positing like a, a potential universe within which you could live.

00:43:11.200 So, yeah, so it speaks, so it speaks of something profound.

00:43:15.380 I got that impression, for example, with Johnny Cash's last albums.

00:43:19.420 I don't know what happened to him when he hit 80, but man, something changed.

00:43:23.860 I mean, I like Johnny Cash's music, much of it, um, throughout his entire career.

00:43:28.940 But his last few albums were profound.

00:43:33.140 They're moving.

00:43:34.220 And, and that's, that word comes to mind too.

00:43:36.480 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.

00:43:45.720 It's something like that.

00:43:46.960 And that's, that's, that's so important for people to be immersed in a world where profound, what's profoundly meaningful is made real.

00:43:56.600 It seems to us, it seems to me that we depend on that.

00:44:01.260 Well, and it also, it happens within a sensual domain, right?

00:44:04.920 That's the other thing, uh, music is, it has a, a level of, let's say, immediate seduction.

00:44:11.780 I think that can be extremely powerful so that you, you don't need to understand intellectually or technically how a piece is doing what it's doing.

00:44:20.880 You can, you can experience it directly through your senses.

00:44:24.240 Uh, and I think that's one of its most powerful aspects.

00:44:27.980 You know, Hitchcock talked about that.

00:44:29.280 He talked about how, when he was plotting out a movie, uh, he would be playing the audience members' emotions as though they were stops on an organ.

00:44:36.980 You know, I always, I always loved that.

00:44:38.900 And a piece of music can do that as well.

00:44:41.780 Right?

00:44:42.980 So it, we have these highly trained people who devote themselves to a particular art.

00:44:47.620 And then the consequence of that devotion is all of us have a broader range of potential experiences that we can engage ourselves in.

00:44:55.940 And we pay for that because we want that to, to add depth to our lives and color to our lives.

00:45:02.880 That's it.

00:45:03.480 And, and also to, to give you a glimpse of the infinitude of possibilities, I think, uh, and the, the, the range of potential worlds that, that can be explored.

00:45:14.520 I think that's incredibly important.

00:45:16.880 And that's perhaps one of the functions of artists, you know, and it, 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.

00:45:25.800 But it also allows you to connect with something higher than yourself and, and to experiences that are beyond your conscious understanding.

00:45:35.160 And I think all of those are extraordinarily important things.

00:45:40.080 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.

00:45:51.000 And I never knew what that higher thing that it was speaking of was, you know, I've investigated that.

00:45:57.420 Um, but the fact that music, music provides an immediate experience of that, that's in some sense, inarguable, it just happens.

00:46:07.140 And then you can think, well, that just happened.

00:46:09.020 And, and it's, it's as real as anything else that happens.

00:46:13.780 And, um, that, I suppose, is part of what you referred to as the religious function of music.

00:46:21.900 And it's not based on argument, right?

00:46:24.040 It's based on the evocation of direct experience.

00:46:26.540 And I suppose dance is like that, too.

00:46:29.480 It's so interesting that people, young people, you know, their, their, their work is work.

00:46:35.180 It's, it's often tedious.

00:46:36.960 It's something they have to force themselves to do.

00:46:38.840 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.

00:46:49.160 And they'll do that because it's intrinsically rewarding and pay for the privilege of doing so.

00:46:55.740 And that's, that's another indication of the action of something like a religious instinct, as far as I'm, I'm concerned.

00:47:02.180 And it has that communal element that you described, too.

00:47:04.580 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.

00:47:12.320 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.

00:47:19.780 And that can be, well, that, that's a remarkable experience.

00:47:24.160 It's a high point if you're there when that happens.

00:47:26.840 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.

00:47:37.040 And there's something unbelievably powerful about that.

00:47:39.760 And the, and the musicians are communicating with each other and with the audience simultaneously.

00:47:45.440 That's it.

00:47:46.200 Yeah, that's it.

00:47:46.880 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 situations where there's a bunch of performers, they're all in different rooms and they're being, you know, they're playing together over Zoom and then it's being live streamed and so on.

00:48:05.480 And I mean, to some extent, you can say that that's, you know, 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.

00:48:18.320 And we, we no longer need those sorts of communal experiences.

00:48:21.880 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.

00:48:33.860 There's something about that experience that is irreplaceable fundamentally.

00:48:38.560 Well, you know, we also don't know exactly how crucial those experiences are.

00:48:43.340 I mean, I've been struck, you know, 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.

00:48:58.820 Um, there's something about communal musical exposure that seems to catalyze group identity at a very fundamental level.

00:49:07.700 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.

00:49:18.060 And that, that, that's what brought us together as functioning cooperative units.

00:49:22.440 And so you bond with, you bond with your tribe when you're 16 or 17.

00:49:28.480 And you do that around exactly these, particularly music and dance.

00:49:33.280 And that, that, that catalyzes your identity permanently, I think, as the member of a particular group.

00:49:39.960 And, and, and, uh, well, and we, maybe you don't become completely human without that.

00:49:47.920 It could be, yeah, it could be a kind of a necessary rite of passage in that, that, uh, is, you know, central in forming your identity.

00:49:55.940 Um, and that's, that's true in every musical world that I've encountered.

00:50:00.040 I mean, it's extraordinarily important to people to have a sense of engagement with whatever community it happens to be.

00:50:05.940 Yes. Well, and it's amazing how, how much people identify with their preferred genre, you know, um, it was funny.

00:50:15.480 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.

00:50:25.840 So I made this tape, because I had listened to a lot of old country music from the 30s through the 60s, and, um, Hank Williams, and, and some country swing, and classics of country music.

00:50:37.840 And I really liked it.

00:50:39.460 And I brought this tape to play at my 50th reunion, and I put it in my car stereo, and I, 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.

00:50:55.100 And that was because they, the, the, my, my classmates still liked country music, but all the stuff I played was too old.

00:51:03.380 So, you know, they're bound to a genre, but also to a time.

00:51:07.120 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.

00:51:14.480 Um, it's nice to have that limited, 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.

00:51:28.160 But it's still striking how much people identify with a particular narrow genre, and, and take pride in exactly that identification.

00:51:37.080 It says something very deep about our group nature.

00:51:41.000 That's very true.

00:51:41.980 And that, that is a, that's a hard wall to break through.

00:51:44.860 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, you know, the world of music is, is quite big.

00:51:54.320 And it contains all kinds of things, uh, and just, uh, cultivate a, uh, an attitude of openness towards listening to different things.

00:52:03.600 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 an openness and, you know, listening to it with curiosity.

00:52:16.060 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.

00:52:22.540 But, uh, but you can really discover extraordinary things that way.

00:52:26.540 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.

00:52:33.100 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.

00:52:41.360 And there's various reasons for that.

00:52:43.660 A lot of the music that I cover, uh, doesn't necessarily have a very broad exposure, but they hear it and they get drawn into it.

00:52:51.440 And they, and especially if you can connect that up with something that is familiar to them.

00:52:56.880 Mm-hmm.

00:52:58.260 A bridge.

00:52:59.560 Yeah.

00:53:00.080 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.

00:53:14.640 And often, you know, there's a kind of a click and they, they realize, oh, this is, this is what this connects to.

00:53:21.600 And, and you can sort of enter into that world much more easily.

00:53:25.380 So, and that's, that's an incredibly effective thing.

00:53:28.200 Whereas I think if there's no context, uh, then it's terrifying.

00:53:32.540 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.

00:53:40.700 People hate that.

00:53:42.040 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.

00:53:52.340 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.

00:54:01.880 And that can go a long way to removing those sorts of barriers, I think.

00:54:06.240 Well, that's one of the advantages to YouTube, isn't it?

00:54:09.040 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.

00:54:21.480 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.

00:54:38.000 So there's, that's it.

00:54:41.280 Yeah.

00:54:44.420 So let, let's round this out.

00:54:46.800 Now, you've spent the last 20 years developing a creative career.

00:54:56.220 It's a very rare thing to accomplish.

00:55:00.860 Advice for people who are interested in composition.

00:55:06.860 Like, how do you build yourself into an artist?

00:55:08.640 What do you have to do to be successful?

00:55:10.360 And what pretensions do you have to drop?

00:55:12.840 The first thing is that being a composer, let's say professionally, is almost impossible, right?

00:55:22.580 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.

00:55:32.680 So the odds that you're going to fail are, are high.

00:55:36.080 So that's the first thing you have to confront.

00:55:38.700 So that, that gives you a certain degree of humility, I would say.

00:55:41.760 The second thing is you have to have a range of skills, I would say.

00:55:46.740 And I mean, we, we mentioned this at the outset.

00:55:48.360 You said that it's, you know, being talented and creative is not enough.

00:55:51.820 In fact, it's, it's really not enough.

00:55:55.380 There are, you know, I've met so many brilliant, talented people who haven't been able to establish themselves professionally.

00:56:00.900 They haven't been able to get a foothold because they don't have the other skills necessary.

00:56:04.260 A lot of that is interpersonal.

00:56:06.240 A lot of it is practical.

00:56:07.560 You have to be deeply pragmatic in order to do this.

00:56:11.180 And so what does it mean to be pragmatic?

00:56:13.660 And I mean, people often, you know, they have contempt for musicians or artists who sell out.

00:56:19.040 But it's not that easy to put yourself in a position where you have the privilege of selling out.

00:56:24.480 Let me tell you.

00:56:25.700 So you might want to, you might not want to start by being contemptuous of developing that as a, as a temptation.

00:56:34.260 Absolutely.

00:56:34.660 Absolutely.

00:56:35.580 Well, I think one thing that's very, very important is to understand that there, as I mentioned earlier, there is an infrastructure in place for people who want to be composers.

00:56:46.100 So there's a network of festivals.

00:56:47.620 There's a network of, of ensembles and orchestras that commission pieces and so on.

00:56:53.620 And there are audiences attached to all of these different structures.

00:56:55.820 So on the one level, you could say, well, there's, there's a, there's an audience that already exists and maybe you can tap into that.

00:57:01.160 But I think what's incredibly important to understand is that increasingly today, you have to really constitute your own platforms yourself.

00:57:10.840 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.

00:57:21.040 You know, you can't guarantee that the state funding is going to go on indefinitely.

00:57:24.320 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.

00:57:33.140 I mean, I found this with book marketing is that the old go-to sources for publicizing a book are no longer relevant.

00:57:43.840 And the book publishers don't know what to do about this.

00:57:46.480 You know, they're still stuck.

00:57:48.080 Well, maybe they're stuck five years in the past, but that might as well be 20 years.

00:57:52.060 And so you do have access to all these technologies like YouTube and Spotify and so on.

00:57:58.760 But that also means to use those, you also have to dispense with any contempt you might have for sales and marketing.

00:58:05.500 And I think it's a big mistake to think about it as selling out.

00:58:08.800 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.

00:58:16.380 Because if you don't communicate about it, no one knows it exists.

00:58:20.020 And so it might be of high quality.

00:58:21.540 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.

00:58:29.080 And so you have to drop your contempt about communication.

00:58:32.560 That's right.

00:58:33.340 That's right.

00:58:33.780 Because it's extremely easy to ignore a new composition.

00:58:37.460 It's very, very easy.

00:58:39.680 And even the people that listen to these things, it's very easy for them to ignore it.

00:58:44.640 So you have to come up with a compelling reason why somebody would want to do that in the first place.

00:58:50.720 So that's a very important part of it.

00:58:53.960 The other thing is, when I talked about institutions, there's also the universities.

00:58:58.480 And it's extremely common in North America for people to study composition at a doctoral level.

00:59:03.740 And I would encourage people to be open-minded about alternatives to doing that.

00:59:10.960 So the reason for that is that fundamentally composition, if you really think about it, it doesn't actually belong in the academy.

00:59:18.060 It's not really an academic pursuit.

00:59:19.660 It's been shoehorned into it, partly because it's not obvious where composers fit or where they should go.

00:59:26.300 But framing composition as research, which is what happens in doctoral programs, 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.

00:59:40.820 So I would be skeptical about that.

00:59:43.060 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 learn.

00:59:52.020 And so where do you think it is if someone wants to learn?

00:59:55.080 And are you talking about composition in the broadest sense?

00:59:57.700 Like, let's say there are listeners to this discussion who want to write a rock song or want to write a blues song.

01:00:04.620 How generalizable is your advice and where should people go apart from your channel?

01:00:11.340 Well, what should people do if they want to learn how to compose music?

01:00:15.700 Find people who know more about it than you and extract all the knowledge you can out of them.

01:00:22.400 I believe actually in a kind of apprenticeship system, which I think is optimal.

01:00:27.640 And that's actually how things did work for centuries.

01:00:30.800 And like a very practical, hands-on, pragmatic approach to all of the aspects involved in being a composer,

01:00:38.380 not just obviously the artistic side of things, but also how do you write a score?

01:00:43.000 How do you format it?

01:00:44.320 How do you get a publisher?

01:00:46.020 How do you work with a record label?

01:00:47.780 How do you get your pieces performed?

01:00:49.200 And all of these other aspects to it.

01:00:51.460 So all of those are incredibly important as well.

01:00:54.040 And I think that the best place to learn those things is to find a composer who,

01:00:59.100 they don't have to be a superstar in the composition world,

01:01:01.300 but they just have to know more than you do and figure out, you know, how they did it

01:01:05.660 and work with them and see if you can help them.

01:01:08.540 And that's a powerful way of doing it.

01:01:10.940 So there are various pathways that exist that can help people to achieve their goals.

01:01:17.400 And is it, where would you, like, where would you start to look for that?

01:01:21.440 Like if I wanted to learn how to compose a rock song, to write a rock song,

01:01:25.720 where would I start looking?

01:01:26.960 Hey, I guess I could Google it.

01:01:30.040 Yeah, Google is, you know, a logical first place to look.

01:01:33.560 And that's what a lot of people do.

01:01:35.280 What seems to happen quite often is you'll Google it and you'll come up with,

01:01:40.220 you know, a YouTube channel or an artist who has a particular prominence,

01:01:44.840 let's say, on social media.

01:01:46.240 And you'll look at their content for a while.

01:01:48.620 And then at some point you may reach out to them.

01:01:51.160 So that often happens.

01:01:52.880 But it can also be just someone in your community or someone local.

01:01:55.960 You might find going to concerts is a good way to meet people.

01:02:00.540 Obviously, you can't do that now, but eventually we will be able to again.

01:02:04.140 So going to concerts, if there's a piece that you find striking,

01:02:07.040 talk to the person who wrote it.

01:02:08.520 If there are performers that you want to get to know, just go up to them.

01:02:11.540 Musicians are, you know, fairly open to that sort of thing

01:02:15.780 because we've all had to deal with multiple,

01:02:20.700 almost insurmountable barriers in order to get, you know,

01:02:23.820 even a toehold in this profession.

01:02:26.200 So what I've found is that, generally speaking,

01:02:28.760 composers are happy to help out other people that want to do the same thing,

01:02:32.840 you know, within reasonable limitations.

01:02:35.220 Well, there is pleasure in mentoring someone.

01:02:39.180 Absolutely.

01:02:39.860 It's like you've got some hard-won skills and truths

01:02:44.340 that you've managed to sort out after, you know,

01:02:46.820 two decades of bloody combat, trying to do something impossible.

01:02:50.980 It's like you're thrilled to share that with somebody else.

01:02:53.620 Maybe it'll save them some time.

01:02:58.560 All right.

01:02:59.380 Well,

01:02:59.920 you have a family now.

01:03:05.540 Yeah.

01:03:06.080 You're married.

01:03:06.660 You have a daughter.

01:03:09.000 Yes, I do.

01:03:09.880 Yeah.

01:03:10.000 She's almost three.

01:03:10.760 Impediment or help to your career.

01:03:16.220 Oh, it's a, it's a help.

01:03:17.840 It's a huge help.

01:03:19.980 Unquestionably.

01:03:20.540 In fact,

01:03:20.800 why, why?

01:03:22.340 I don't, I don't think I could do it otherwise because the,

01:03:25.100 the nature of my work,

01:03:26.760 you know,

01:03:28.200 I'm always going out on a limb.

01:03:29.840 What I, what I'm doing is barely possible.

01:03:32.160 Right.

01:03:32.600 So if I didn't have an adequate support system that,

01:03:36.440 you know,

01:03:37.100 that, that held this whole thing up together,

01:03:39.080 then I'd be,

01:03:40.720 I don't think I could do it.

01:03:42.240 I really don't.

01:03:45.020 So that's,

01:03:46.400 that's probably going to be true for most people.

01:03:48.840 And occasionally there's going to be someone who,

01:03:50.660 for one reason or another,

01:03:52.600 either they can't live with somebody else or,

01:03:54.700 or whatever,

01:03:55.200 but for most people,

01:03:56.920 that's going to be the case.

01:03:58.160 And so there's a level on which my life is predictable in the good

01:04:03.440 sense, right?

01:04:04.200 There are certain things that I don't have to worry about on a daily

01:04:08.000 level.

01:04:08.700 And that frees you up immensely.

01:04:12.840 And there's a,

01:04:13.420 a 19th century French poet who said that in order to be properly free in

01:04:18.160 your imaginative creative work,

01:04:19.760 there needs to be something predictable and almost boring about your home

01:04:24.880 life,

01:04:25.520 not boring in the bad sense,

01:04:27.380 boring in the sense of,

01:04:28.240 let's say free of, 0.54

01:04:30.100 of terrifying chaotic disorder.

01:04:37.180 Well,

01:04:37.700 I think,

01:04:38.180 you know,

01:04:38.440 you,

01:04:38.700 you spoke of music continually representing the relationship between order

01:04:44.760 and chaos.

01:04:45.480 And so then the same thing applies in your creative life is you want to order

01:04:51.260 everything that can be ordered so that you can tolerate the exploration and the

01:04:56.820 risk necessary to engage in a creative enterprise.

01:04:59.380 And so again,

01:05:00.580 we'd say,

01:05:01.360 you know,

01:05:01.780 don't art gets romanticized in a counterproductive way for the,

01:05:08.540 for the wannabe artist frequently and leads them to be what contemptuously,

01:05:15.420 the avant-garde about things they should be grateful for having.

01:05:20.060 And that would be friends,

01:05:22.980 family,

01:05:25.300 intimate relationship,

01:05:27.260 some daily routine,

01:05:29.640 discipline,

01:05:31.040 a work ethic,

01:05:32.340 all of that.

01:05:33.180 It sounds so bourgeois,

01:05:34.740 you know,

01:05:35.060 it's,

01:05:35.280 it's not,

01:05:35.800 it's at odds with,

01:05:37.000 well,

01:05:37.260 maybe you want to die at 27 of alcohol poisoning.

01:05:39.720 And if that's the case,

01:05:40.660 then you can forego all that.

01:05:42.020 But if you want to have a long and creative career,

01:05:44.740 it's not such a bad idea to nail down some stability around you so that,

01:05:51.800 well,

01:05:52.240 so that you can survive over the long run.

01:05:56.680 That's it.

01:05:57.340 Well,

01:05:57.520 people forget also that the romantics lived in an era where life expectancy was

01:06:01.400 considerably lower than it is today.

01:06:03.020 So it's like,

01:06:04.080 well,

01:06:04.220 you can,

01:06:04.440 you can do the,

01:06:05.080 you can have a bohemian lifestyle and, 0.94

01:06:07.360 and die at 30.

01:06:08.580 And,

01:06:08.980 you know,

01:06:09.500 comparatively speaking,

01:06:10.480 perhaps you've lost a little bit less of life compared to what you might've had

01:06:14.080 otherwise.

01:06:15.120 Today,

01:06:15.600 you know,

01:06:15.880 you can live to 90,

01:06:17.060 you can live to 95,

01:06:18.280 maybe beyond.

01:06:19.540 It's like,

01:06:19.900 you don't want to,

01:06:20.620 you know,

01:06:21.180 be in a horrible state already at 30 or 40.

01:06:25.400 So if you can avoid that,

01:06:26.880 it's,

01:06:27.340 and this romantic myth of the artist that needs to be enmeshed in chaos and suffering

01:06:32.960 needs to be definitively destroyed.

01:06:35.600 It's a,

01:06:35.940 it's a pernicious myth.

01:06:37.340 People talk about artists like Van Gogh and Beethoven and so on,

01:06:40.280 but the,

01:06:41.240 Beethoven would have been more productive had he not had to contend with the

01:06:44.400 things he had to contend with.

01:06:46.240 You know,

01:06:46.620 Van Gogh would have,

01:06:47.680 would have had a much longer career and they would both have preferred not to

01:06:52.460 suffer,

01:06:53.140 right?

01:06:53.320 Not to be dealing with all kinds of tragic circumstances.

01:06:58.520 They would have preferred that,

01:06:59.720 you know,

01:07:00.360 artists would generally prefer to have a nice home and a stable existence and,

01:07:05.020 and something happy and fulfilling about their life.

01:07:09.820 Well,

01:07:10.320 there's also the proclivity of people who are living a dissolute and

01:07:14.320 undisciplined lifestyle to pass that off as artistic engagement.

01:07:19.360 And you can get away with that for quite a long time when you're young,

01:07:21.960 but it starts to deteriorate pretty badly by the time you hit,

01:07:25.300 I would say the end of your twenties.

01:07:28.600 That's it.

01:07:29.340 And one other thing that I would tend to say to composers is to,

01:07:32.780 is to try to not waste time because you have the sense that you have an

01:07:36.780 unlimited vista ahead of you and you really don't.

01:07:40.020 And you have to be extraordinarily careful about how you're using your time,

01:07:43.860 what you're aiming towards and how,

01:07:46.560 how you try to get there.

01:07:47.880 And having a sense of articulating that I think is extraordinarily important.

01:07:53.520 Yeah.

01:07:53.680 And so you,

01:07:54.460 well,

01:07:54.720 do you have concrete goals set up?

01:07:57.060 So for example,

01:07:57.720 when you're working about three hours a day,

01:07:59.840 I think this is the last question I'll ask you,

01:08:01.840 but when you're working about three hours a day,

01:08:04.400 do you have a productivity idea in mind?

01:08:08.180 Like,

01:08:08.320 are you trying to hit a target for the year or for two years or for three?

01:08:11.500 Like I have a friend who writes a novel a year.

01:08:13.600 That's he's done that for 25 years.

01:08:15.580 That's his,

01:08:16.480 he writes every day.

01:08:17.700 He wants to produce a novel a year and he imposes that on himself.

01:08:22.040 It could be a different strategy,

01:08:23.880 but it can't be none.

01:08:25.800 Yeah.

01:08:26.640 Well,

01:08:27.140 I have to,

01:08:27.740 I have to compose a certain number of pieces in order to have the income from,

01:08:31.680 from the mission.

01:08:32.980 So that's part of it.

01:08:34.580 And so I,

01:08:35.020 I kind of have it,

01:08:36.180 but at the same time,

01:08:37.660 relative to the other things that I do,

01:08:40.200 commissions are,

01:08:40.840 are not particularly well paid on an hourly level,

01:08:43.360 let's say.

01:08:43.920 I mean,

01:08:44.080 that's just the reality of it.

01:08:45.300 It might take me 10,000 hours to finish a piece.

01:08:48.000 So nobody's going to pay me a hundred dollars an hour to write a piece for 10,000 hours.

01:08:53.040 You know,

01:08:53.220 the economics of it are impossible.

01:08:55.420 So you have to understand also that when you're writing a piece as a composer,

01:08:59.020 you know,

01:08:59.540 you're,

01:08:59.760 you're going to be taking time away from things.

01:09:02.980 That you could be doing that would earn more money.

01:09:04.980 So you have to figure out what the balance is,

01:09:06.900 how,

01:09:07.240 you know,

01:09:07.420 how much can I do that before it starts to eat seriously into my,

01:09:12.440 my possibilities financially.

01:09:15.580 So in my case,

01:09:18.220 but also you have to think reasonably about how much you can produce and maintain a

01:09:22.920 certain level of quality consistently,

01:09:24.580 and also have enough time to regenerate yourself and come up with new ideas and not just merely

01:09:29.160 repeat the same things over and over again.

01:09:31.440 So it's,

01:09:32.080 it's going to be different for different people.

01:09:33.580 Some artists are very spontaneous and gestural and intuitive,

01:09:37.360 and they don't need a lot of planning when they,

01:09:39.600 when they write a piece,

01:09:40.360 others take a long time to think and,

01:09:42.780 and,

01:09:43.060 and carefully plot out what they're doing and produce a lot of sketches and so on.

01:09:47.340 In my case,

01:09:48.200 I'm rather slow.

01:09:49.200 I'm meticulous and I need to take the time to do it properly.

01:09:53.060 And it still happens that I have to write a piece twice.

01:09:56.880 Recently,

01:09:57.280 I wrote a violin concerto for a group in Switzerland and then completely rewrote it.

01:10:01.920 I spent eight years,

01:10:03.020 sorry,

01:10:03.380 eight months writing an entirely new draft of the piece for an orchestra in Kiev and Ukraine.

01:10:07.760 And that second version of the piece was not a commission.

01:10:11.560 So it's,

01:10:11.940 it's hard to justify doing things like that,

01:10:14.020 but sometimes,

01:10:15.440 you know,

01:10:16.160 the,

01:10:16.840 the,

01:10:17.100 the piece hasn't quite coalesced.

01:10:20.240 It hasn't quite gelled and you have to do that.

01:10:22.580 So typically it's,

01:10:25.280 you know,

01:10:25.480 for me,

01:10:25.820 it tends to be about two to three pieces a year,

01:10:28.000 something like that.

01:10:28.940 I can't really push it too much more than that.

01:10:31.580 So I know with writers,

01:10:33.200 I tell writers,

01:10:34.660 um,

01:10:35.720 start writing.

01:10:37.220 How?

01:10:38.000 Well,

01:10:38.440 pick a question that you'd like to investigate.

01:10:40.540 This is more nonfiction writing because I,

01:10:43.940 I can't give advice about fiction writing,

01:10:45.800 but nonfiction writing,

01:10:46.960 pick a question you're interested in and start trying to answer it and start writing.

01:10:50.680 And maybe you start writing for 15 minutes a day,

01:10:52.960 every day,

01:10:53.600 and maybe it's 20 minutes and maybe it's 25 minutes,

01:10:56.500 but you do that every day,

01:10:57.480 sort of religiously because you set your mind to it.

01:10:59.660 And then maybe you can expand that upward to the three hours and,

01:11:03.320 and you get better at something by doing it and,

01:11:06.180 and by analyzing it.

01:11:07.280 And if you don't have anything to say,

01:11:08.820 then you should read some more because about your question,

01:11:12.140 the specific question that compels you.

01:11:13.920 So you need a question that compels you.

01:11:15.780 I don't know how much overlap there is between that and composition.

01:11:19.220 Like,

01:11:19.520 do you,

01:11:19.780 would you say to someone who wants to write music to start writing music?

01:11:24.080 Like,

01:11:24.360 do you,

01:11:24.600 do you jump right into it?

01:11:26.100 And what,

01:11:26.740 what do you do?

01:11:27.700 That's it.

01:11:28.880 And the other thing that I tell them is right for the wastebasket,

01:11:32.140 do that ritualistically.

01:11:33.520 So what that means is you say to yourself for the next half hour,

01:11:38.100 I'm going to sit and write and I'm going to write on scrap paper or whatever it is.

01:11:43.160 And then the rule is the,

01:11:44.940 the,

01:11:45.120 the agreement you make with yourself is that at the end of that half hour,

01:11:48.840 you have to throw it out.

01:11:50.760 Okay.

01:11:51.160 And you do that every day,

01:11:52.240 you do it for two weeks and see what happens.

01:11:54.540 And that's an extraordinary exercise.

01:11:56.880 A lot of students find that very liberating because they're no longer thinking in terms of,

01:12:02.400 well,

01:12:02.600 this is not good enough to keep.

01:12:04.500 It's not an issue.

01:12:05.620 You know,

01:12:06.060 you're going to throw it out and that just takes away those inhibitions.

01:12:09.480 Well,

01:12:09.640 you know,

01:12:10.020 there is,

01:12:10.560 there is neurological evidence that the creative linguistic facility and the inhibitory linguistic facility are not,

01:12:19.360 they're not the same brain area,

01:12:20.640 which is to say that the production unit and the editing unit are separate.

01:12:26.100 And if you try to,

01:12:27.640 like I see with beginning writers that they'll try to,

01:12:30.360 they'll write,

01:12:30.900 they'll try to write a sentence properly.

01:12:33.020 It's like,

01:12:33.720 Jesus,

01:12:34.320 get the sentence down,

01:12:35.460 then worry about whether it's proper.

01:12:37.280 You can't do that.

01:12:38.160 And then they do that partly because they don't want to throw away.

01:12:40.620 I want to get this right.

01:12:41.660 It's like,

01:12:42.040 well,

01:12:42.460 that isn't how to get it right.

01:12:43.580 The way to get it right is to write a bunch.

01:12:45.620 It's Darwinian overproduce and call overproduce and call.

01:12:50.640 And then you separate the editor and the producer.

01:12:54.220 Absolutely.

01:12:54.900 That's exactly it.

01:12:56.000 Yeah.

01:12:56.180 And,

01:12:56.540 and these strategies are incredibly powerful.

01:12:58.440 So there's no reason why somebody has to be blocked or unable to write a single thing.

01:13:03.720 You just have to find out some strategies sometimes.

01:13:06.200 And that's part of the process of learning to be a composer or a writer.

01:13:09.540 Well,

01:13:09.680 you can lower your expectations to the point where you can meet them.

01:13:14.100 You know,

01:13:14.660 like you can type 400 words.

01:13:17.060 They don't even have to make sense in terms of,

01:13:19.340 they don't even have to be structured in sentences.

01:13:21.300 Like there is a,

01:13:22.620 there's a lower bound for quality that you can definitely hit.

01:13:26.080 You can write 400 bad words.

01:13:28.340 And so,

01:13:28.760 and if you do that repeatedly,

01:13:30.300 then they won't be so bad.

01:13:32.100 That's exactly it.

01:13:33.100 It's the,

01:13:33.340 it's the same with,

01:13:34.300 with,

01:13:34.680 with sports or athletic endeavors.

01:13:36.620 It's like,

01:13:37.040 you don't start out if you've never run before by doing a marathon.

01:13:39.860 It's,

01:13:40.060 you're just going to hurt yourself. 0.70

01:13:41.140 You're going to fail and you'll feel bad.

01:13:43.540 It's the same in,

01:13:44.660 in creative endeavors.

01:13:45.580 Like you don't,

01:13:46.180 you don't start out by trying to write a 900 page novel if you've never done it before.

01:13:49.380 So you have to,

01:13:50.420 you have to have proximal goals that you have a hope of actually being able to meet.

01:13:54.560 And you set the target a little bit back so that it's not dead easy.

01:13:58.320 It has to challenge you a little bit,

01:13:59.720 but it can't be so difficult that,

01:14:02.500 that you're going to feel like a hopeless failure,

01:14:04.820 you know,

01:14:05.260 even through trying to do it.

01:14:07.200 And then you,

01:14:07.740 what you do is you,

01:14:08.420 you,

01:14:08.780 you pile up these sort of little successes.

01:14:11.200 It's like,

01:14:12.020 okay,

01:14:12.200 can you do a 15 second piece?

01:14:13.660 Can you do a 30 second piece?

01:14:15.820 And then you just,

01:14:16.680 you just keep moving the target slightly back.

01:14:18.860 And if you do that realistically over years,

01:14:22.780 you can be,

01:14:23.860 you can become a master at something.

01:14:26.120 Well,

01:14:26.640 so,

01:14:26.960 so,

01:14:27.360 so then,

01:14:28.480 um,

01:14:29.400 the other thing you're learning while you're doing that is to,

01:14:31.940 is to master your own time.

01:14:33.980 Like you don't want to suffer from the delusion that your time is your own.

01:14:37.680 First of all,

01:14:38.320 you're not very disciplined to begin with.

01:14:39.960 And so your time is wasted by preoccupations that you can't control.

01:14:43.760 All your involvement in Facebook,

01:14:45.880 your,

01:14:46.100 your,

01:14:46.680 your tendency to go off task and do something,

01:14:49.260 you know,

01:14:49.600 that's maybe you're watching television or looking at pornography or God only

01:14:53.580 knows what it is,

01:14:54.360 but it's not,

01:14:55.200 it's not focused attention on,

01:14:58.180 on your,

01:14:58.820 on your,

01:14:59.720 on your explicit goals.

01:15:01.480 If you start with these incremental projects,

01:15:05.280 the way that you're describing,

01:15:06.540 you can also learn to gain control over your own mind so that you can start to have some

01:15:11.600 time every day.

01:15:12.360 That's actually yours and creative.

01:15:14.540 And that's just as important.

01:15:16.160 It's just as important to learn the discipline to do that as it is to make the project itself.

01:15:22.840 And so maybe you start with 15 minutes a day,

01:15:25.560 if you can do that.

01:15:26.460 And,

01:15:26.740 and if you're lucky,

01:15:27.500 you can end up with a couple of hours that you can have for yourself and your creative projects.

01:15:33.120 That's it.

01:15:33.920 You know,

01:15:34.160 I feel silly telling these things to you because I learned a lot of them from you and you don't learn

01:15:38.640 these in,

01:15:39.740 you don't learn this in,

01:15:40.800 in composition school,

01:15:42.320 you know,

01:15:42.760 you don't learn this in a conservatory,

01:15:44.620 but they're in their,

01:15:47.340 in their way,

01:15:47.900 they're as crucial,

01:15:49.060 they're as critical to being,

01:15:50.480 being able to do it as to being able to do it.

01:15:52.360 to be able to write a correct piece of counterpoint.

01:15:54.740 And what I often see are,

01:15:56.820 are artists or young people aspiring to be artists who don't have the first clue about just how,

01:16:03.560 how to work,

01:16:04.340 how to go about it,

01:16:05.260 how to establish a work routine.

01:16:08.180 And,

01:16:08.860 you know,

01:16:09.580 without that component to it,

01:16:11.560 it's,

01:16:12.020 it's hopeless.

01:16:15.900 All right,

01:16:16.940 Sam,

01:16:17.860 that was good.

01:16:19.680 thanks very much for talking to me.

01:16:23.180 It was wonderful to see you.

01:16:25.520 It was a great pleasure to see you,

01:16:26.960 Jordan.

01:16:27.360 It was really,

01:16:28.200 really nice.

01:16:28.840 Thank you for doing this.

01:16:29.900 Thank you for doing this.

01:16:29.940 Thank you for listening to this.

01:16:38.920 Thank you.

01:16:39.760 Thank you.

01:16:39.820 Thank you.

01:16:47.560 Thank you.

01:16:48.360 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - June 24, 2021

179. The Meaning of Music ｜ Samuel Andreyev

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