Samuel Andreev is a Canadian composer who writes music for orchestras, soloists, chamber groups, and other ensembles throughout Europe and the world. He is also known for his YouTube channel, presenting an analysis of works that he believes are interesting and important. In this episode, we discuss the skills needed to be successful as an artist, where to start if you want to compose music, the hierarchy in Western Music, the importance of genres, how having a family is helpful to a career, and more. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a roadmap towards healing. In his new series, he provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope, and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. This episode was recorded back in February 2021. - Season 4, Episode 33, Season 4. This episode is a re-release from Season 3, Season 2, Season 3 of Dailywire plus. is available on Amazon Prime and Vimeo. . The original version of this episode is available wherever you get your epsiode of the Daily Wire Plus podcast is also available on Vimeo, wherever else you re listening to the podcast is available. Thank you for listening to this podcast. You can find it on your favourite podcast? Thank you! - Dr. Berg and I'm looking forward to hearing back from you. I'll be listening to it on the podcast in the next episode of DailyWire Plus. Thanks for listening and sharing it on Anchor and vlogging me on your social media! - Jordan Berg is looking out for you! - Thank you, Jordan Berg, - The Jordan B Peterson Podcast - and I hope you're having a wonderful day! -- Thank you so much for listening, ~
00:00:00.000Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.800Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:51.060Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, episode 33, season 4.
00:00:59.400This episode was recorded back in February 2021.
00:01:03.480Samuel Andreev joined my dad this episode.
00:01:06.980Samuel is a Canadian composer who writes absolutely extraordinary music for orchestras, soloists, chamber groups, singers, and other ensembles throughout Europe and the world.
00:01:16.580He hosts the Samuel Andreev podcast, is a professor at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg.
00:01:24.100Hope there's nobody German listening to this podcast cringing at my pronunciation.
00:01:28.260Samuel is also known for his YouTube channel, presenting an analysis of works that he believes are interesting and important.
00:01:36.080Dad and Samuel discuss the skills needed to be successful as an artist, where to start if you want to compose music,
00:01:41.980the hierarchy in Western music, the relationship of music and language, the importance of genres, tips on learning composition,
00:01:50.420how having a family is helpful to a career, and more.
00:01:53.340I'm pleased to have with me here today Samuel Andreev, someone I've known for many years now.
00:02:18.000I think it must be 15 years, probably.
00:02:21.260And Sam is a Canadian composer who has sought his fame and fortune in Europe.
00:02:29.580And we're going to talk today about his career, about the artistic endeavor in general,
00:02:35.720and how that can be rendered practical, and about music.
00:04:23.480And it got off to a rather slow start, which is to be expected with this sort of thing.
00:04:29.800And then it took off within, I would say, about a year or two.
00:04:35.740So my subscriber base currently is about 35,000.
00:04:39.480So I'm not breaking any records on YouTube.
00:04:42.900But nevertheless, for the sort of content that I'm doing, it represents a very significant audience.
00:04:49.260And 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.
00:05:00.840So professional musicians, people who have composers who are active musicians.
00:05:05.580And then complete neophytes, people who don't necessarily know very much at all about music but are curious about it.
00:05:12.540And one of the tricky things about running this channel has been finding a way to address both of those audiences simultaneously.
00:05:18.460So 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.
00:05:33.260But 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.
00:05:40.600So what made you decide to use YouTube?
00:06:14.300But 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.
00:06:26.160So after a couple of years of doing this, I had just a wealth of material just sitting there.
00:06:32.040I 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.
00:06:38.440So 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.
00:08:03.760And some of them, for reasons I don't understand, are a little bit less popular.
00:08:07.140But it doesn't influence my choices in terms of what to look at.
00:08:11.380You know, so I just try to go with the things that I think are worth looking at.
00:08:15.980And particularly works that aren't, let's say, particularly represented on YouTube.
00:08:20.760Because 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.
00:08:44.000It's starting to be a little bit more common.
00:08:48.380But certainly four or five years ago, there was nobody else.
00:08:51.460I mean, I was looking actually for content of this sort on YouTube and not finding anything.
00:08:56.500So, you know, I decided I would, you know, just step in and do what I could on, you know, in my very primitive way.
00:09:03.180The early videos were extremely crude.
00:09:05.740But these days, I would say there's two types of people producing content on music on YouTube.
00:09:14.800In 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.
00:09:22.540On 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.
00:09:39.120And then on the other hand, you have people like me.
00:09:42.600I'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.
00:09:53.900But they're not meant to be things that you can watch in five minutes necessarily.
00:09:58.660So, 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.
00:10:06.020And 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.
00:10:14.900There'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.
00:10:24.400And I think there's a degree of discomfort amongst composers who, you know, they're not by nature the most extroverted people anyway.
00:10:34.740I think a lot of them are somewhat reticent about doing something like this.
00:10:39.700And the other thing is, you need to have a weird array of skills to do this sort of thing.
00:10:46.620And they're not skills that typically go together.
00:10:48.980And a lot of composers, frankly, would rather just spend their time doing their work and teaching if they teach.
00:10:56.460Yeah, well, you need a weird array of skills generally to be successful as an artist.
00:11:03.420And unfortunately, perhaps, being technically proficient or even brilliant artistically is nowhere near enough to guarantee your success.
00:11:14.520I 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.
00:11:26.840And 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.
00:11:44.260And 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.
00:11:56.940First of all, you had to leave Canada.
00:12:03.760I actually formulated the project of leaving Canada when I was 16 or 17.
00:12:08.800On one level, it's a difficult thing to explain because most of my life choices have been made instinctually.
00:12:15.840So 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.
00:12:23.480Most of the major decisions I've made have been made on instinct, and moving to France was one of those decisions.
00:12:29.480I 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.
00:12:42.720So 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.
00:12:55.540And 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.
00:13:07.020So when I moved to France, I hardly knew anybody.
00:13:10.100I think I had one phone number of one person to contact.
00:13:22.420You'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.
00:13:43.540And the advantage to lead, and so they're destined in some sense to transform their personalities.
00:13:51.940So creative people create, what would you say, objects.
00:13:57.840They create for public benefit, but they also create themselves at the same time.
00:14:03.280And 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.
00:14:14.820It's not a simple matter, but there's great benefit in it if you can manage it.
00:14:20.060And so you left Canada and you went to France.
00:14:22.560What changed for you as a consequence of doing that?
00:14:28.700Well, 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.
00:14:37.460So 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.
00:14:53.400It 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.
00:15:06.440You know, you have to have a favorite coffee shop.
00:15:08.260It sounds stupid, but you have to have things like that, otherwise you'll go crazy.
00:15:13.080You know, constituting a circle of friends.
00:15:15.580Well, 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.
00:15:26.380And a favorite coffee shop is a really good way of doing that.
00:15:29.200You go there every day, you get to know people a little bit, and that stops you from drowning in,
00:15:34.780the chaos of the unknown, and enables you to put down, start to put down some roots.
00:15:40.300And, you know, it's easy to dramatize and romanticize creativity and constant freedom, but even very creative people need routine to keep them sane.
00:15:54.460And they need a creative routine as well.
00:15:56.760I mean, you, how much time do you spend a week composing, do you think?
00:16:00.820I know fairly precisely because I have a schedule.
00:16:05.320So I do minimum three hours a day of composition.
00:16:09.500It's difficult for me to go too much beyond three hours.
00:16:14.080It starts to be a question of diminishing returns after that point.
00:16:17.380So 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.
00:16:27.420And 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.
00:16:33.160And that sort of focus takes a lot out of you.
00:16:35.960So, you know, I would find it difficult to go beyond about three hours, but that's typically what I do.
00:16:48.220And so I eventually realized that past three hours a day, I was robbing Peter to pay Paul.
00:16:53.800I'm constantly telling this to students.
00:16:55.480I mean, one of the things that I say to composition students, I teach composition privately online on Zoom.
00:17:01.680And 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.
00:17:11.340And 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.
00:17:17.420Some people can sustain that for 45 minutes.
00:17:20.000Some people can do it for three hours.
00:17:21.820Maybe some can do it a little bit more than that.
00:17:23.740I don't find it credible when people say to me, I compose 12 hours a day, which you occasionally hear.
00:17:30.840But I suspect that it's, you know, it's a bit of an elaboration of the facts.
00:17:36.420So you've managed to establish yourself as a composer and that's your fundamental career, but you also have to teach.
00:17:46.440And can you walk everyone who's listening through what a typical week would be like for you?
00:17:52.180And that gives them some sense of what has to be done to make a living as an artist.
00:17:59.840I mean, I would start by saying that it's not exactly that I have to teach.
00:18:03.820There are other things that I could do instead of teaching in order to get the necessary income.
00:18:08.400But I actually enjoy teaching and it's something that is enormously enriching for my creative practice as well.
00:18:15.560So it's not like there's no, there's not one second of teaching time that is wasted time ever.
00:18:20.940I mean, it really does feed directly into the work that I do.
00:18:25.760But as far as a typical day, I mean, I try.
00:18:29.300Oh, 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.
00:18:40.460And 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.
00:18:56.140I 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.
00:19:06.240So 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.
00:19:16.160So these are Lutheran hymn tunes that were taken by Bach and harmonized in four voices.
00:19:23.720So there's, I can't remember exactly how many of them, there's about 300 of these that survive.
00:19:27.940And they feature in his cantatas and in his passions and oratorios and all of these, and they're, they're magnificent.
00:19:35.740They're, they're like a miniature chorus in harmony and in voice leading.
00:19:41.720And 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.
00:19:54.780And you try to harmonize it yourself and you compare it to what Bach did.
00:20:01.020And that's a, that's a very, uh, it's an extraordinary exercise.
00:20:05.100It, it, it teaches you, you know, a hundred different things at the same time.
00:20:08.380So that's something that I did for years and years.
00:20:13.620And, uh, well, it teaches you to link up your ears, uh, your eyes and your fingers, first of all.
00:20:21.260And that's really, really useful if you're a composer.
00:20:23.500So 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.
00:20:33.980So, 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.
00:20:43.360And, uh, and it also, you know, you have to analyze the melody before you harmonize it.
00:20:47.440You have to know where it's going like that.
00:20:49.580One of the hardest things I think for composers to learn how to do is to develop a sense of trajectory in music.
00:20:59.440What, what beginner composers often do is they'll put a lot of effort into devising material.
00:21:04.260That'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.
00:21:15.200Those two things have to be born together.
00:21:17.860And that's a very, very difficult thing to do.
00:21:20.480And, and harmonizing those chorales gets you started on that in a sense, because the melodies have to lead somewhere.
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00:25:24.800Yeah, well, so you mentioned the B-side of Abbey Road, which is a great example.
00:25:30.080That's, I mean, that's an amazing achievement on multiple different levels.
00:25:34.840There'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?
00:25:49.700McCartney did that with Uncle Albert, too.
00:25:53.560Yeah, 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.
00:26:06.760It's almost like a collage in a sense.
00:26:08.660But it works, and it has a kind of incredible cohesiveness to it, and you might wonder, you know, where does that cohesiveness come from?
00:26:16.460So there has to be some kind of higher level framework that ties the whole thing together.
00:26:21.100So there's a few things that can do that.
00:26:23.900So one of them is the expressive context.
00:26:27.260So what is the expressive thrust of the song?
00:26:30.480So 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.
00:26:43.200The 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.
00:26:55.680Unpredictability is going to be a feature of the song.
00:27:35.460And so, and the probability that it will kill you is not zero.
00:27:39.780And 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?
00:27:47.680And I've thought about this for a long time.
00:27:51.900Trying to figure out what it means that something is differentially unpredictable.
00:27:56.620So imagine that you have a representation of the world, and that representation enables you to get from one place to another.
00:28:04.240And the farther, there are things that you rely on as constants within that map.
00:28:17.380So let's say you're married to someone, and you're thinking about your future.
00:28:21.880And you assume the presence of your marital partner as a constant.
00:28:27.340And then you get divorced or they die.
00:28:29.860Because a tremendous number of your plans, or because a huge proportion of your map is dependent on that constant, that's extraordinarily disrupting.
00:28:41.040And so it's like, the more something is, the more unpredictable something is, the more it disrupts in potential when it makes itself manifest.
00:28:53.460And sometimes you have to guess at that, but that's basically the issue.
00:28:57.340And your nervous system, it's more complicated than that, too, because you're nervous.
00:29:04.300So if the question is, how upset should you get when something unexpected happens?
00:29:08.220The answer is, you have to guess, and you have to calibrate that a variety of ways.
00:29:12.000So your trait neuroticism calibrates that.
00:29:15.360So people who are low in neuroticism prepare for an emergency much less proportionately for every degree of uncertainty.
00:29:26.680So 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.
00:29:33.360But 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.
00:29:41.440Okay, 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.
00:29:52.020Your position in the dominance hierarchy or in the competence hierarchy also matters.
00:29:56.260So 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.
00:30:07.860And 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.
00:30:16.960So if you're barely clinging on to the edge of the world, any stressor can knock you over the edge.
00:30:23.640So, okay, so back to the unexpected in music.
00:30:27.100I 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.
00:30:38.660And 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.
00:31:08.800A genre tells you a bunch of things you can't do, as well as a bunch of things you can do.
00:31:15.200And you might think, if you're thinking romantically and not too clearly, that the fewer limitations on you, the better.
00:31:21.980You'd have more freedom with fewer limitations.
00:31:24.780But paradoxically, that's not exactly right.
00:31:28.640And 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.
00:31:39.660You 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.
00:31:46.320Although you can play with the borders in an interesting way.
00:31:48.920But if those limitations weren't there, well, you wouldn't have that genre.
00:31:53.440You know, and some people might think that's good in relationship to country music.
00:31:56.860But there's great country music, just like there's great music of all genres.
00:32:01.020And so that seems to me to be associated with a point that we made earlier about training of the artistic temperament.
00:32:07.860Which is that, you know, you have to go through an apprenticeship and discipline yourself before you can become free.
00:32:15.200And 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,
00:32:23.600you don't want to be thinking that constraints are your enemy if you're a creative artist.
00:32:52.360And 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,
00:33:01.320So 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.
00:33:13.520You can play with those to some extent, but you can't completely violate them.
00:33:17.380If 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.
00:33:28.620So you come up against that very quickly.
00:33:30.260And 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.
00:33:41.460Now, 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.
00:33:59.880They're less sort of outsourced to the reigning genres or practices of the day.
00:34:07.540So 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.
00:34:17.920But 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.
00:34:46.220But I think that there are, that's an, it's an extraordinarily difficult thing to avoid.
00:34:51.360And 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.
00:35:06.040And 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.
00:35:21.680And here are, you know, huge numbers of different things from all over the place.
00:35:25.400And that's just the world that we're in.
00:35:28.160And obviously that's taken to the nth degree with internet as well.
00:35:31.940So 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.
00:35:43.240And that would be sort of broadly understandable to the, the, the public.
00:35:48.100To some extent, that role is now filled by popular music and commercial music.
00:35:53.120Uh, 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.
00:36:24.080So 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.
00:36:34.560So 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.
00:36:53.880And 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.
00:37:03.580So in other words, he's not, he's not writing for everybody.
00:37:05.980He's, he's, he's writing for a particular type of person that wants that kind of experience.
00:37:10.640Uh, 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.
00:37:27.260Um, and is expecting a certain type of experience.
00:37:30.120And 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.
00:37:53.760You started to have enormous numbers of, um, Baroque recordings being sold, um, arpsichord music and recorder music and things like that.
00:38:02.420That's, that's like a, it's like a sub audience within the broader world of classical music.
00:38:09.440And you see that within the popular music world as well.
00:38:14.380There's like hundreds of little micro genres within it.
00:38:17.240So, uh, I think that's just partly a consequence of the dramatic expansion of, uh, the means of reproduction of music.
00:38:25.460Perhaps 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?
00:38:36.900I 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.
00:38:57.020Yeah, 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.
00:39:18.080It'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.
00:39:25.320Uh, 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.
00:39:38.700Uh, so that, that I think results in twin dangers.
00:39:42.460So 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.
00:39:51.760And 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.
00:40:01.760That's not something that I want to do with my own work.
00:40:04.420So 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?
00:40:14.760It'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.
00:40:28.040So given that I have this to say, uh, how can I present that in the most direct and enticing and engaging way possible?
00:40:42.320And so what do you think, what do you think you have, do you think that your music has something to teach its listeners?
00:40:49.220Like 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.
00:41:27.540So, so artists, visual artists teach us how to see.
00:41:30.540And 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,
00:41:42.500we've all been exposed to it so much that that just looks like the world in some sense.
00:41:48.380We can see the world as an impressionist place.
00:41:52.220Musicians, do they teach us how to hear?
00:41:54.620Are they structuring our auditory perception?
00:41:56.900What, what do you think musicians have to teach people?
00:41:59.840Well, a piece of music embodies a lot of different things at the same time.
00:42:06.360I mean, it's music, music has a lot of different components to it.
00:42:10.040It has a, it has an entertainment component to it.
00:42:44.280Uh, they're able to do, you know, several of those things simultaneously in a very powerful way.
00:42:49.580And what that really does is it articulates a sophisticated worldview.
00:42:53.340And 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.
00:43:05.040And it's also positing like a, a potential universe within which you could live.
00:43:11.200So, yeah, so it speaks, so it speaks of something profound.
00:43:15.380I got that impression, for example, with Johnny Cash's last albums.
00:43:19.420I don't know what happened to him when he hit 80, but man, something changed.
00:43:23.860I mean, I like Johnny Cash's music, much of it, um, throughout his entire career.
00:43:28.940But his last few albums were profound.
00:43:34.220And, and that's, that word comes to mind too.
00:43:36.480And 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.
00:43:46.960And 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.
00:43:56.600It seems to us, it seems to me that we depend on that.
00:44:01.260Well, and it also, it happens within a sensual domain, right?
00:44:04.920That's the other thing, uh, music is, it has a, a level of, let's say, immediate seduction.
00:44:11.780I 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.
00:44:20.880You can, you can experience it directly through your senses.
00:44:24.240Uh, and I think that's one of its most powerful aspects.
00:44:27.980You know, Hitchcock talked about that.
00:44:29.280He 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.
00:44:36.980You know, I always, I always loved that.
00:44:38.900And a piece of music can do that as well.
00:45:03.480And, 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.
00:45:16.880And 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.
00:45:25.800But it also allows you to connect with something higher than yourself and, and to experiences that are beyond your conscious understanding.
00:45:35.160And I think all of those are extraordinarily important things.
00:45:40.080You 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.
00:45:51.000And I never knew what that higher thing that it was speaking of was, you know, I've investigated that.
00:45:57.420Um, but the fact that music, music provides an immediate experience of that, that's in some sense, inarguable, it just happens.
00:46:07.140And then you can think, well, that just happened.
00:46:09.020And, and it's, it's as real as anything else that happens.
00:46:13.780And, um, that, I suppose, is part of what you referred to as the religious function of music.
00:46:21.900And it's not based on argument, right?
00:46:24.040It's based on the evocation of direct experience.
00:46:26.540And I suppose dance is like that, too.
00:46:29.480It's so interesting that people, young people, you know, their, their, their work is work.
00:46:36.960It's something they have to force themselves to do.
00:46:38.840But they'll take what they've earned as a consequence of that tedium, and then spend it voluntarily on exposure to music and dance.
00:46:49.160And they'll do that because it's intrinsically rewarding and pay for the privilege of doing so.
00:46:55.740And that's, that's another indication of the action of something like a religious instinct, as far as I'm, I'm concerned.
00:47:02.180And it has that communal element that you described, too.
00:47:04.580It'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.
00:47:12.320And we're all in the same place at the same time in a concert when, when the musician is really communicating with the audience.
00:47:19.780And that can be, well, that, that's a remarkable experience.
00:47:24.160It's a high point if you're there when that happens.
00:47:26.840And 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.
00:47:37.040And there's something unbelievably powerful about that.
00:47:39.760And the, and the musicians are communicating with each other and with the audience simultaneously.
00:47:46.880And 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.
00:48:05.480And 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.
00:48:18.320And we, we no longer need those sorts of communal experiences.
00:48:21.880I 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.
00:48:33.860There's something about that experience that is irreplaceable fundamentally.
00:48:38.560Well, you know, we also don't know exactly how crucial those experiences are.
00:48:43.340I 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.
00:48:58.820Um, there's something about communal musical exposure that seems to catalyze group identity at a very fundamental level.
00:49:07.700And 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.
00:49:18.060And that, that, that's what brought us together as functioning cooperative units.
00:49:22.440And so you bond with, you bond with your tribe when you're 16 or 17.
00:49:28.480And you do that around exactly these, particularly music and dance.
00:49:33.280And that, that, that catalyzes your identity permanently, I think, as the member of a particular group.
00:49:39.960And, and, and, uh, well, and we, maybe you don't become completely human without that.
00:49:47.920It 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.
00:49:55.940Um, and that's, that's true in every musical world that I've encountered.
00:50:00.040I mean, it's extraordinarily important to people to have a sense of engagement with whatever community it happens to be.
00:50:05.940Yes. Well, and it's amazing how, how much people identify with their preferred genre, you know, um, it was funny.
00:50:15.480I 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.
00:50:25.840So 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.
00:50:39.460And 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.
00:50:55.100And that was because they, the, the, my, my classmates still liked country music, but all the stuff I played was too old.
00:51:03.380So, you know, they're bound to a genre, but also to a time.
00:51:07.120And 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.
00:51:14.480Um, 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.
00:51:28.160But it's still striking how much people identify with a particular narrow genre, and, and take pride in exactly that identification.
00:51:37.080It says something very deep about our group nature.
00:51:41.980And that, that is a, that's a hard wall to break through.
00:51:44.860And 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.
00:51:54.320And it contains all kinds of things, uh, and just, uh, cultivate a, uh, an attitude of openness towards listening to different things.
00:52:03.600And, 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.
00:52:16.060And 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.
00:52:22.540But, uh, but you can really discover extraordinary things that way.
00:52:26.540And 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.
00:52:33.100And 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.
00:53:00.080Well, 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.
00:53:14.640And often, you know, there's a kind of a click and they, they realize, oh, this is, this is what this connects to.
00:53:21.600And, and you can sort of enter into that world much more easily.
00:53:25.380So, and that's, that's an incredibly effective thing.
00:53:28.200Whereas I think if there's no context, uh, then it's terrifying.
00:53:32.540And 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.
00:53:42.040You 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.
00:53:52.340And 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.
00:54:01.880And that can go a long way to removing those sorts of barriers, I think.
00:54:06.240Well, that's one of the advantages to YouTube, isn't it?
00:54:09.040Is that you can communicate with people who would normally be excluded from, well, from, you can communicate with people that would normally be excluded.
00:54:21.480It'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.
00:55:00.860Advice for people who are interested in composition.
00:55:06.860Like, how do you build yourself into an artist?
00:55:08.640What do you have to do to be successful?
00:55:10.360And what pretensions do you have to drop?
00:55:12.840The first thing is that being a composer, let's say professionally, is almost impossible, right?
00:55:22.580So, 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.
00:55:32.680So the odds that you're going to fail are, are high.
00:55:36.080So that's the first thing you have to confront.
00:55:38.700So that, that gives you a certain degree of humility, I would say.
00:55:41.760The second thing is you have to have a range of skills, I would say.
00:55:46.740And I mean, we, we mentioned this at the outset.
00:55:48.360You said that it's, you know, being talented and creative is not enough.
00:55:51.820In fact, it's, it's really not enough.
00:55:55.380There are, you know, I've met so many brilliant, talented people who haven't been able to establish themselves professionally.
00:56:00.900They haven't been able to get a foothold because they don't have the other skills necessary.
00:56:35.580Well, 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.
00:56:47.620There's a network of, of ensembles and orchestras that commission pieces and so on.
00:56:53.620And there are audiences attached to all of these different structures.
00:56:55.820So 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.
00:57:01.160But I think what's incredibly important to understand is that increasingly today, you have to really constitute your own platforms yourself.
00:57:10.840And 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.
00:57:21.040You know, you can't guarantee that the state funding is going to go on indefinitely.
00:57:24.320And 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.
00:57:33.140I mean, I found this with book marketing is that the old go-to sources for publicizing a book are no longer relevant.
00:57:43.840And the book publishers don't know what to do about this.
00:58:21.540And 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.
00:58:29.080And so you have to drop your contempt about communication.
00:59:19.660It's been shoehorned into it, partly because it's not obvious where composers fit or where they should go.
00:59:26.300But 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.