TRIGGERnometry - Making Music in a Woke World - Samuel Andreyev

00:00:00.000 One plus one equals more of the greatest stories.

00:00:03.000 Hulu on Disney Plus.

00:00:05.000 Stories about...

00:00:06.000 Survivors.

00:00:07.000 Monsters.

00:00:08.000 The most dangerous planet. 0.91

00:00:09.000 Family.

00:00:10.000 Retribution.

00:00:11.000 Murder.

00:00:12.000 Prophecy.

00:00:13.000 Fear and propane.

00:00:14.000 Bobby Miller!

00:00:15.000 Black Panther.

00:00:16.000 The Thunderbolts!

00:00:18.000 The ultimate soldier.

00:00:20.000 Chicago, alright?

00:00:22.000 The best of the best stories now with even more from Hulu.

00:00:25.000 Amazing!

00:00:26.000 Have it all with Hulu on Disney Plus.

00:00:30.000 When the predominant model becomes that individual artists should be funded by the state, it means that the art is easily corruptible.

00:00:39.000 Because it's, well, in a sense you're working for the state.

00:00:43.000 We try to find ways of rehabilitating them and making them palatable.

00:00:47.000 And one of the ways you can do that is by predicating the art upon people's identities.

00:00:52.000 And that's something that certainly has happened.

00:00:54.000 In music?

00:00:55.000 Oh, yeah.

00:00:56.000 In composing?

00:00:57.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:00:58.000 How so?

00:01:00.000 Samuel Andrejev, finally.

00:01:01.000 Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:02.000 So great to have you on.

00:01:03.000 You are, unsurprisingly, the first composer we've ever had on the show.

00:01:08.000 And it's not an area that we normally venture into.

00:01:10.000 We'll talk about music more specifically as the conversation goes on.

00:01:14.000 But the reason we wanted to have you on is you're one of an increasing number of people from all sorts of different fields now where, you know, I might sit down and have a cup of tea or France as mine.

00:01:24.000 And suddenly we find out that this kind of mind virus that everyone in our space is talking about is literally infected like everything, including, you tell us, music.

00:01:33.000 Yes.

00:01:34.000 Yes, absolutely.

00:01:35.000 Well, we have a difficult relationship with culture, with the arts today.

00:01:40.000 And I think one of the things is that nobody really exactly knows what to do with the arts.

00:01:44.000 You know, if you look at how it's viewed in the public space, there's this idea that the arts are kind of suspect somehow, that maybe we shouldn't be devoting resources to this, that this is a sort of what a kind of strange, vaguely demented hobby that people are engaging with and that should not be taken seriously.

00:02:01.000 I mean, given some modern art, I am sensitive to that particular point of view.

00:02:06.000 Right, right, right.

00:02:07.000 Well, you know, you're facing a living, breathing composer and you might think, well, composer, you know, that's a dodgy thing.

00:02:13.000 But yeah, no, no, I think we don't know what to do with artists because our society is awash in entertainment, right?

00:02:24.000 Entertainment and mass popular culture, and those are the things that masquerade as the arts these days.

00:02:32.000 And the first thing I would say is there's a distinction to be made on that level.

00:02:36.000 So entertainment and art are not the same thing.

00:02:39.000 They can overlap, right?

00:02:41.000 And so one of the things that you see very quickly if you look at the history of Western art music is that there are popular styles that are necessary,

00:02:50.000 that are a foundational part of the whole classical tradition.

00:02:55.000 And then there are savant styles.

00:02:57.000 And those two things can overlap.

00:02:59.000 And when they do overlap, you can have a brilliant shower of fireworks, as is the case in the late operas of Mozart, for example,

00:03:06.000 where you have the coming together of the greatest degree of compositional sophistication with something immediately accessible.

00:03:15.000 And what I'm seeing now is that the fine arts have become utterly debased in some manner or another.

00:03:22.000 We've completely lost faith in them.

00:03:24.000 And, you know, we don't know what to do with them.

00:03:29.000 And so we try to find ways of rehabilitating them and making them palatable.

00:03:34.000 And one of the ways you can do that is by predicating the art upon people's identities.

00:03:39.000 And that's something that certainly has happened.

00:03:42.000 In music?

00:03:43.000 Oh, yeah.

00:03:44.000 In composing?

00:03:45.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:03:46.000 How so?

00:03:47.000 Absolutely.

00:03:48.000 Oh, well, the easiest thing to do is to put programs together that are about this or that group of people and to have that be the subject of the concert.

00:03:56.000 So you can be, you know, you can insert any interest group.

00:03:59.000 It doesn't matter which one.

00:04:01.000 And that was something that I noticed right at the beginning of my career.

00:04:04.000 I was asked in my 20s to write a piece that would reflect my experience as a, what was it, the son of Macedonian immigrants to Canada or something like this.

00:04:15.000 And then later, you know, many times I was asked to write pieces that reflected Canadian culture.

00:04:21.000 I was put on these all-Canadian programs. 0.98

00:04:23.000 And even when I was 22, I thought, this is imbecilic. 0.98

00:04:26.000 I've got nothing to do with this. 0.99

00:04:28.000 And it's gotten worse since then, right?

00:04:30.000 So because we don't understand our relationship to art, we don't understand the pieces and we're not familiar with them and they're not a part of our daily lives.

00:04:39.000 They're something very separate.

00:04:41.000 We try to come up with ways of putting programs together that have nothing to do with art.

00:04:45.000 And one of them is, you know, you can do whatever it would be.

00:04:48.000 We'll do a concert of all trans people.

00:04:50.000 We'll do a concert of entirely female composers.

00:04:53.000 And the problem with that is, A, I don't think it does those people any good at all to be put in that kind of a separate category because it deflects the attention away from the important thing, which is the work that they're doing.

00:05:06.000 You know, and then it becomes a matter of a category.

00:05:09.000 And that's not an aesthetic category.

00:05:11.000 It has nothing to do with art.

00:05:14.000 So that is actually quite widespread.

00:05:17.000 And there is pressure placed on musical organizations to do this sort of thing as a way of, what, redeeming the apparent uselessness of their activity.

00:05:29.000 Samuel, do you think this is a problem when we make art political?

00:05:33.000 Now, of course, some art is political.

00:05:36.000 That's fine.

00:05:37.000 And always has been, always will be.

00:05:39.000 But isn't this a problem when you try and make all art political?

00:05:43.000 Well, absolutely, because art fundamentally has nothing to do with politics.

00:05:48.000 Art is an activity of the spirit.

00:05:50.000 And reducing it to politics, I think, is a disservice to art.

00:05:55.000 And there again, it's partly due to the fact that we have this very problematic relationship with the fine arts now.

00:06:02.000 And it's not taken seriously by anyone.

00:06:04.000 So again, the other side of it really is that we have a massive problem in terms of figuring out who should pay for it.

00:06:12.000 Now, that's been an issue throughout the entire history of Western art from the beginning, right?

00:06:18.000 So somebody does have to pay for it.

00:06:19.000 And so it can be the nobility, it can be the aristocracy, it can be private patrons, or it can be the state.

00:06:25.000 There's various ways of doing it.

00:06:26.000 And each of them have their advantages and their disadvantages, of course.

00:06:31.000 So when the predominant model becomes that individual artists should be funded by the state, which is the case in pretty much every Western European nation, and well, not so much in North America, because they have a fairly robust system of private patronage there.

00:06:48.000 But it means that the art is easily corruptible, because it's, well, in a sense, you're working for the state.

00:06:58.000 So that's not a message that a lot of artists would be very keen to hear, because there are a lot of people who are struggling to survive, I can tell you, and you have extremely few options in terms of generating income from their work.

00:07:13.000 And that might be one of them, right?

00:07:15.000 So I'm not suggesting for a minute that we should, I'm not in a position to suggest what we should do about that necessarily.

00:07:21.000 I do think that artists generally would do well to diversify their range of options as far as income goes and try to detach themselves from an over-reliance on state funding.

00:07:34.000 Because I think that in terms of individual artists and their production and their relationship to their society and to the people who are funding them, I think that it has resulted in an extraordinarily artificial culture.

00:07:46.000 Samuel, now there's the other argument which goes, look, the arts are becoming more and more inaccessible for reasons we've touched on.

00:07:56.000 Shouldn't we also try and hold the door open as far as possible to people who wouldn't have access to the arts to become a composer, an actor, a musician, whatever it may be?

00:08:08.000 And actually, these programs, whilst crude, they are effective in getting people in through the door.

00:08:13.000 I think that the way that you get people in through the door is through education.

00:08:17.000 That has to be the way you do it, I believe.

00:08:20.000 And if you want that to happen, if you want the arts to be accessible to everyone, as I passionately wish myself,

00:08:27.000 then you have to expose people to it at a very early age.

00:08:32.000 And what I don't really understand is why that seems to not be the case in a lot of countries.

00:08:40.000 We've actually reduced the presence of arts in primary education and secondary education.

00:08:47.000 Again, it's this idea that it's this frivolous accessory that is diverting time and resources away from more important things.

00:08:56.000 Why isn't it a frivolous accessory?

00:08:58.000 Well, because it sits at the bottom of our culture, once again, it's absolutely foundational.

00:09:04.000 What art is, really, is the expression of that part of you that is most alive and vital.

00:09:11.000 It's the way that the individual can compensate for the leveling tendency of society.

00:09:18.000 And if you take that away, then you'll be dominated by mass culture, essentially.

00:09:25.000 There won't be any room for individual idiosyncratic, subjective forms of expression.

00:09:32.000 So, you know, it's absolutely vital.

00:09:35.000 And if you think about what it's worth, you know, because conversations about culture, within about five minutes, you start talking about money inevitably.

00:09:46.000 It's very difficult to avoid.

00:09:50.000 But, you know, if you were to have that conversation, what's it worth?

00:09:54.000 Well, what's Shakespeare been worth to the United Kingdom?

00:09:57.000 How about the Beatles?

00:09:58.000 What's that been worth to Liverpool?

00:10:01.000 You know, these things are of inestimable value.

00:10:05.000 And to have to make the argument that they're worth preserving is, I don't know what to say about that.

00:10:12.000 I guess the reason I ask is, for example, even the examples you give, I mean, I would think of the Beatles more as popular culture than the fine arts.

00:10:20.000 And the Beatles didn't need government funding.

00:10:23.000 They sold tickets to their concerts enough to pay for everything a hundred times over.

00:10:30.000 So I guess if I'm uneducated in the arts, as I am, by the way, then the question of it speaks to the point you were making earlier about us not knowing what to do and how to relate to art.

00:10:43.000 It seems to me that you ought to be able to make a case of why it's important.

00:10:48.000 And that's why I'm asking the question.

00:10:51.000 Well, OK, so the reason why it's difficult to make that case in a few sentences, I think, is that art has become, or the fine arts have become this very separate thing.

00:11:00.000 They've become something that's cordoned off, right?

00:11:03.000 They've become a special occasion, a special event that you can very easily ignore, right?

00:11:07.000 Because it's not woven into the fabric of our everyday lives in any manner, shape or form.

00:11:12.000 So, for example, if you go out to a concert, then you might have to organize that weeks ahead of time.

00:11:17.000 You might need to get a babysitter.

00:11:18.000 It might be expensive to go to the concert.

00:11:20.000 And it's this sort of blip in your life, you know.

00:11:23.000 And I think that's part of the problem.

00:11:26.000 There's also the fact that in order to have a lively and robust artistic culture, there needs to be, on some level, a degree of social cohesion that allows for a common language of some kind.

00:11:37.000 And that allows for, what, some kind of common language of symbols, so that we can actually talk to each other.

00:11:47.000 And my sense is that that's just not present right now.

00:11:52.000 So, I can't offer a prescription because what I see is that the conditions for, you know, a lively and robust arts sector are simply not there right now.

00:12:02.000 And that does complicate things in terms of providing an argument as to why they should continue to exist.

00:12:08.000 You know, having this conversation, I'm not going to admit this, nor should I, but I went on TikTok.

00:12:16.000 And I was presented with this clip of this young man, maybe mid-twenties, and he looked like he was in some kind of, you know, Ibiza-type place.

00:12:25.000 Middle class, you could tell from his accent and the way he presented himself.

00:12:28.000 And he started saying that the English had no culture.

00:12:31.000 We've got no culture.

00:12:32.000 All we do is take from other cultures and, you know, we're parasitic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 1.00

00:12:39.000 And I was looking at it and then people were steaming in and saying whatever they were saying, like, he's an idiot, he's stupid. 1.00

00:12:45.000 And I actually thought the reason he thinks that is because our arts education is so bankrupt that actually he's completely ignorant of everything that this country has given the world. 1.00

00:13:00.000 If you think about music, if you think about theatre, if you think about literature, if you think about poetry, all of these different art forms where we have influenced and changed the world.

00:13:12.000 If you go anywhere in the world and you say you're from London, people will talk to you about artists or Shakespeare, whatever it may be. 0.98

00:13:18.000 Yet this kid had no idea about our rich cultural legacy because he was entirely ignorant. 0.98

00:13:25.000 And that to me is a very real problem. 0.91

00:13:28.000 Well, of course, but again, it's a question of education.

00:13:32.000 You know, if you don't have the base assumption that this is something valuable, that it might be worth preserving this extraordinary heritage, then there's no use dragging people out to concerts.

00:13:46.000 They won't know what to do.

00:13:48.000 So, you know, it's a greater problem in some countries than in others.

00:13:54.000 I think that the country that I am now a citizen of and living in, which is France, I think that there is a fairly broad general recognition of the importance of the arts.

00:14:04.000 I don't think that too many people would seriously question it.

00:14:07.000 There's an implicit understanding that this is something valuable.

00:14:10.000 It's valuable to the identity of the country.

00:14:12.000 It's also valuable in terms of its international image.

00:14:16.000 So there's an understanding of the implicit value of art.

00:14:20.000 But again, when it comes to figuring out exactly what we should do with it, then that's where things get very, very tricky, which is one of the reasons why I decided to start a YouTube channel, incidentally.

00:14:30.000 And you're saying it gets tricky, and it does.

00:14:34.000 And what makes it even worse is that it's now become a cultural battlefield like everything else.

00:14:41.000 So it's not just about the art.

00:14:43.000 It's about what the art represents.

00:14:45.000 What does it mean?

00:14:46.000 I think it's toxic.

00:14:48.000 What do you think about that way of viewing it?

00:14:50.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:14:51.000 Of course it's toxic.

00:14:52.000 See, art isn't something that you buy or that you use as a badge or something that you use to tell people about yourself.

00:14:59.000 It's something that you do.

00:15:01.000 It's something that requires engagement.

00:15:03.000 It's not something that you simply accept sort of passively.

00:15:08.000 But again, I think this has just completely disappeared somehow.

00:15:14.000 And so the only solution I can see is to have, you know, perhaps smallish local communities of people getting together, discussing things, perhaps putting on concerts in their own homes,

00:15:28.000 perhaps having groups where they read together.

00:15:31.000 But it has to happen on that kind of a level because there's no sort of wider societal impetus to do that.

00:15:38.000 So what I'm trying to do is to do things on that level through my channel and also through a musical ensemble that I've recently started to develop.

00:15:50.000 So because also as well, what we're seeing is the influence of technology on music.

00:15:57.000 So, for example, TikTok.

00:15:59.000 I've spoken to a few musicians and what they have told me about how the music industry now goes to TikTok to find stars and what it's doing to music is quite frankly terrifying, isn't it?

00:16:12.000 Well, yes and no.

00:16:13.000 This technology is terrifying in some respects, but it also makes things possible that would have been completely impossible even five years ago.

00:16:22.000 See, I don't know.

00:16:24.000 I don't know what's going to happen.

00:16:26.000 It's extraordinarily difficult to evaluate.

00:16:28.000 I think the positive side of it is that it has allowed people to come together on a global level that would never have found each other otherwise.

00:16:35.000 So, for example, it turns out that on a global level, the number of people who are interested in, let's say, contemporary musical composition is in the hundreds of thousands or the millions, right?

00:16:45.000 If you were to be restricted to the number of people that might be interested in it in Strasbourg, where I'm from, it's not going to be in the millions, that's for sure.

00:16:54.000 But you can create a robust community by using that technology.

00:16:59.000 So that's the positive side of it.

00:17:01.000 The negative side of it is, well, there's a price to pay, and the price to pay is the decimation of everybody's attention spans.

00:17:07.000 So I don't know how that's going to play out.

00:17:10.000 Are we going to learn to live with these technologies?

00:17:12.000 Are we going to learn to foster a healthy relationship with them?

00:17:16.000 Or is it going to become something much more sinister?

00:17:20.000 I don't know.

00:17:21.000 You know, when I was walking to the studio this morning, you can't help but notice walking through London that everybody is sort of separate from each other.

00:17:29.000 There's no sense of a collective we or a sense of engagement or community.

00:17:34.000 You know, it's like everybody's staring at their phones.

00:17:36.000 They're barely looking at where they're going.

00:17:38.000 And that is, you know, we've created this technology that is unbelievably powerful, far more powerful than we have the wisdom to know how to use.

00:17:50.000 And that does frighten me.

00:17:53.000 And to what extent do you think this dominance of mass culture that you talk about, to what extent do you think that's a phenomenon caused by the fact that America is so dominant in the world?

00:18:06.000 Because it seems to me, as someone who's a very kind of superficial observer, that America is very, very mass culture dominated in terms of the things that you would see on TV, in terms of things that people consume.

00:18:19.000 People consume TV shows, you know, big sports, entertainment of various kinds.

00:18:25.000 They're very, very good at making all of those things.

00:18:27.000 I mean, American sports are so much more entertaining than sports elsewhere in the world, as I keep making the point.

00:18:34.000 But do you think that's a big part of why we are where we are with our relationship with art?

00:18:39.000 Yeah, well, the thing about mass entertainment is that it requires a certain degree of homogenization and standardization in order to be effective.

00:18:49.000 Otherwise, you can't sell it.

00:18:50.000 You can't have an industry, right?

00:18:51.000 So some movies tend to all be the same duration.

00:18:53.000 They're all 90 minutes long.

00:18:54.000 They all have a three act structure.

00:18:56.000 They all have, you know, basically an identical system of producers and different roles that go into producing them.

00:19:04.000 They're totally homogenous.

00:19:07.000 But artworks are not like that.

00:19:08.000 You know, artworks are highly individual.

00:19:11.000 They're difficult to sell.

00:19:12.000 They can be difficult to interpret.

00:19:14.000 And they will foster a more individual relationship with the work.

00:19:19.000 So I'm not going to say that the influence of mass culture has been necessarily only bad because, I mean, the 20th century belongs to America, musically speaking.

00:19:31.000 I mean, there's no question about that.

00:19:33.000 The diversity of range of forms of different genres that were invented in America in the 20th century is absolutely astonishing.

00:19:40.000 So I'm not making that claim.

00:19:42.000 But no, it has made it, I think, more difficult to survive, certainly, if you're doing something that doesn't sort of fit into that mold.

00:19:50.000 That's for sure.

00:19:51.000 And also, as well, I was listening to this, I was in the gym and I was listening to the song Lola by The Kinks, you know?

00:19:58.000 Oh, yes.

00:19:59.000 Yeah.

00:20:00.000 And I was actually thinking to myself, because we talk about political correctness a lot on the show, what is acceptable that you can say now, but you can say back then, vice versa, all the rest of it.

00:20:09.000 And we decry about the decline of freedom of speech and the belief in it.

00:20:14.000 And I was listening to The Kinks by Lola and one of the lyrics was, I'm not dumb, but I can't understand why she walks like a woman and talks like a man, Lola. 0.90

00:20:23.000 And it's about a guy who went out to a nightclub in Soho, met a woman, fell in love, turned out to be a man.

00:20:31.000 And I was thinking, it's a great song.

00:20:33.000 It's lyrically beautiful.

00:20:36.000 Ray Davis was just a master lyricist.

00:20:39.000 But I was thinking to myself, would that even be able to be made now or would that be perceived to be transphobic?

00:20:46.000 And is there a particular issue in the arts when it comes to freedom of expression?

00:20:52.000 Oh, I don't know.

00:20:53.000 That song was probably inappropriate when it came out too.

00:20:56.000 The thing about The Kinks is they were always diametrically opposed to wherever the culture was going.

00:21:01.000 That's one of the things that made them great.

00:21:03.000 When the hippies were going on about their acid trips and so on and producing these absurd things, The Kinks were talking about sipping tea and having a rheumatic back and so on.

00:21:17.000 So no, that was their role and I think they did a good job of filling that.

00:21:22.000 As to whether a song like that could come out now, I think it could actually.

00:21:26.000 I think it would likely come out on some kind of social media platform like YouTube or something like that.

00:21:32.000 It probably wouldn't get into a major record label type of situation.

00:21:36.000 But then again, those avenues of distribution are effectively moribund anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

00:21:42.000 The traditional channels for the dissemination of artworks, whether they're from the mass popular culture or whether they're something more esoteric, aren't really functioning anymore.

00:21:52.000 The music industry peaked around 1992, which was when CDs were at their height and precipitously declined after the rise of Napster and file sharing websites and MP3s and all of that.

00:22:05.000 And it's basically been more or less killed off. That business model no longer works.

00:22:10.000 So if you're a young up and coming artist, then odds are you're going to get known, as you said, through TikTok or through YouTube or some medium like that, where there basically aren't really gatekeepers.

00:22:21.000 There are to a degree. Of course, you can get demonetized and you can get into trouble in various ways on YouTube.

00:22:27.000 But no, I think there is hope that these platforms can result in a democratization and in a broadening of what's possible to do.

00:22:38.000 I think it would be much, much harder to get that across in a more conventional record label type situation.

00:22:44.000 Because you talk about the atomization of society.

00:22:47.000 One of the things that actually helped our society bond was that we had gatekeepers and they were the ones who decided what we listened to,

00:22:56.000 what we listened to, what we watched, et cetera, et cetera.

00:22:59.000 So you're never really going to get a Madonna or a Michael Jackson or George Michael because we're simply not as homogenous as we used to be.

00:23:08.000 Now, the trade off is obviously that it's democratization.

00:23:12.000 What do you think of the landscape now?

00:23:15.000 Does it fill you with hope or is it more kind of tempered?

00:23:19.000 Well, we don't have cultural giants anymore in the way we used to.

00:23:22.000 That's absolutely right.

00:23:23.000 You know, I remember the early 1990s.

00:23:25.000 I'm old enough to remember that.

00:23:26.000 I remember that Michael Jackson was, he was present on every level of society.

00:23:32.000 It didn't matter who you were.

00:23:34.000 It didn't matter if you were an intellectual at Oxford or if you were a cab driver.

00:23:38.000 Everybody knew about Michael Jackson and everybody was familiar with the songs.

00:23:41.000 And we seem to have lost that.

00:23:44.000 And it's very interesting surveying the landscape of popular music today because, you know, it's funny.

00:23:49.000 You can go on YouTube and you can find these artists that have, you know, 70 million views on their videos.

00:23:53.000 It's like, well, I've never heard of them.

00:23:55.000 You know, and probably most people wouldn't have heard of them because 70 million relative to the number of people who go on these platforms is a minority.

00:24:02.000 And the thing that I've observed is that today, all art, all music, no matter how popular, is a niche taste.

00:24:12.000 How odd.

00:24:13.000 You know, we don't have any artists that can cut through this entire society.

00:24:17.000 Well, we live in the era of mass customization.

00:24:20.000 So I first discovered it when you go to the U.S., as I know you have done.

00:24:24.000 And, you know, here, if you go to a shop and you want to buy a soft drink, there's Coke, there's Fanta, there's maybe, I don't know what else, water.

00:24:33.000 That would be twice as expensive as everything else.

00:24:36.000 But in America, you have these machines where it's like you can have your Coke with 74 different flavor choices, diet zero, sugar this, sugar that, whatever.

00:24:47.000 And so ultimately, because we're so technologically advanced now, everybody can have exactly what they like.

00:24:54.000 So we're no longer having to settle, I use the term advisedly, for the Beatles because the Beatles were such a big cultural phenomenon because they managed to be liked by lots and lots of people.

00:25:05.000 But that was in the absence of alternatives.

00:25:07.000 So in the era of the Beatles, if you were an 8 out of 10 band, you would literally be listened to by everybody.

00:25:15.000 Now, why would I listen to an 8 out of 10 band when I can have exactly the music that I like? It's a 10 out of 10.

00:25:22.000 And so I think it's a really technological issue.

00:25:26.000 The availability of the options now means that those big cultural figures are going to be so much harder to come by.

00:25:33.000 Yes. Well, it's also made things exponentially more difficult for composers.

00:25:36.000 But this is not a it's not a new story.

00:25:38.000 It's an intensification of something that began in the 19th century, which is that prior to approximately the mid 19th century, we didn't have a concept of a repertoire as such.

00:25:48.000 Right. So if you went to a concert, the concert would be embedded in a very specific social context.

00:25:54.000 You know, it might be a piece of liturgical music.

00:25:56.000 It might be a piece written for a private occasion, a ball, for example, or it might be a pedagogical piece or whatever.

00:26:03.000 But there was there was a purpose for that piece. OK.

00:26:07.000 And the piece was tailor made for that purpose.

00:26:10.000 So you would be overwhelmingly likely to hear a new piece on that occasion.

00:26:16.000 What started to happen was in the second half of the 19th century, first of all, you see the rise of the European nation states.

00:26:22.000 And one of the things that came along with that was the was the elevation of artists to the role of these sort of national heroes, these godlike saviors that could incarnate the soul of the people.

00:26:34.000 And that would sort of be these emblematic figureheads of that nation.

00:26:38.000 It was part of the nation building exercise, in other words, to elevate these figures.

00:26:42.000 And one of the things that goes along with that is you elevate particular works of them to the status of basically permanent features of the cultural landscape.

00:26:50.000 Right. So you don't merely perform a Beethoven symphony once or twice or three or four times around the time of its creation.

00:26:56.000 You perform it hundreds of times, thousands of times.

00:26:58.000 You perform it in many different countries and you do this for an indefinite period of time.

00:27:04.000 Right. So you create this this repertoire, this cohesive canon of works.

00:27:09.000 And there are understandable reasons why you would do that.

00:27:13.000 You would want the greatest achievements, the greatest cultural achievements of mankind to be properly venerated and properly available to the broadest number of people.

00:27:23.000 But that does also create a situation in which artists are now competing with the greatest exponents of their art from the past.

00:27:32.000 Right. So you're no longer only competing with your colleagues, with the three or four other annoying composers who live in your town.

00:27:38.000 You're competing with Beethoven, with Bach, with all the Renaissance composers, with all the medieval composers, with every composer who has ever lived.

00:27:45.000 And so there's this kind of antagonistic relationship between the work of the past, the sort of museum culture, if you like, and the work of living composers.

00:27:57.000 And it's it's the same for audiences, because it's like if you have a choice between going out and hearing Beethoven's Night Symphony, for example, or hearing, you know, here's a completely untested work by a composer you've never heard of before.

00:28:09.000 And it could be literally anything. Well, you know, they'll probably go with the Beethoven because it's a it's a sure bet. Right.

00:28:16.000 Right. So that's that's a tremendous existential problem for composers. And so the repertoire is is a double edged sword in that sense.

00:28:26.000 And it's also as well that Beethoven, Mozart, they're not human.

00:28:32.000 I mean, obviously, they were human, but in our minds, we can't really picture.

00:28:36.000 There are legends that there's something there. There's someone that we can't even think of what they were like.

00:28:42.000 They just created this amazing music.

00:28:46.000 I mean, somebody could come along who could be even better than Beethoven.

00:28:50.000 But if you just know him as Gary down the road, you're not going to take him seriously as Beethoven.

00:28:55.000 No. Well, it is incomprehensible. I can tell you, I've been studying this music for my entire life and I can't comprehend it.

00:29:02.000 One of the great mysteries to me is how Bach, at the height of his productivity, was writing an entire cantata.

00:29:08.000 These are 20 to 25 minute long pieces of music written for the entire liturgical calendar year.

00:29:15.000 He was writing one of those every single week, in addition to teaching dozens of students, in addition to, you know, the 17 or 18 children that he had.

00:29:22.000 And in addition to all the other compositions that he had to write as a matter of his obligations to his employer.

00:29:29.000 It's an insane, unfathomable degree of productivity at the absolute highest level.

00:29:36.000 To finish the point of what I was saying earlier.

00:29:39.000 So we talked about the antagonistic relationship between the music of the past, the composers who are continuing to create new works.

00:29:47.000 And to relate it to today, I mean, that's been intensified to the nth degree, right?

00:29:53.000 Because not only do we have the repertoire, not only do we have the teeming chaos of all of the works that are being created now.

00:30:02.000 But we have everybody's fleeting thoughts and perceptions, you know, this constant unimpeded spill stream of information coming at you like a hose at all times.

00:30:14.000 And so it's extremely difficult to get your bearings in a situation like that, right?

00:30:18.000 And also our relationship to these things tends to be extremely ephemeral, right?

00:30:23.000 So there will be artists that will get a lot of attention, a massive amount of attention for a relatively short amount of time.

00:30:29.000 And five years later, we've forgotten about them.

00:30:32.000 It does seem that it's easier to have a hit and become a thing, a moment, but it's far more difficult to have a career.

00:30:44.000 Is that fair?

00:30:45.000 Well, the one hit wonder thing is not a desirable situation. No, absolutely not.

00:30:51.000 And that level of success, when it comes on that quickly, is extraordinarily dangerous for people.

00:30:58.000 It's very, very difficult to withstand that.

00:31:01.000 And, you know, imagine if you peaked when you were 23, and that was that, you know, and everything that you did subsequently was of less interest, and you were constantly being measured against that.

00:31:12.000 Imagine if you had a hit song when you were 23, and for the next 60 years of your life, all anybody wants from you is for you to play that song again.

00:31:19.000 That would be an absolute nightmare. It would stunt your growth.

00:31:22.000 Britney Spears' evolution, let's put it like that, seems to suggest that you're right.

00:31:27.000 Yeah, yeah. So that's one of the limitations of mass culture, incidentally, is you are valuable to the culture to the extent that you're able to sell records.

00:31:37.000 You know, and you'll get trapped into that, and it'll be very difficult to extricate yourself from that modality.

00:31:44.000 So, for example, there have been plenty of enormously talented musicians and bands who have done extremely interesting things,

00:31:52.000 only to be met with extreme resistance from the interested parties, whether they be record labels, or whether they be their bandmates,

00:31:59.000 or, you know, the whole mass of sycophants that is around them.

00:32:05.000 Samuel, is there a science to music?

00:32:08.000 Yes, of course. Well, music is a multi-dimensional art form, right?

00:32:11.000 So, we talked earlier about how it has an entertainment component to it, right?

00:32:15.000 There's an aspect to music that is, you know, diverting. There's a scientific component to it, absolutely.

00:32:24.000 I mean, if you look at the historical origins of music in the Western world, it's Pythagoras.

00:32:30.000 It's Pythagoras determining how you can take a stretched length of string and divide it up into exact proportions,

00:32:36.000 and thereby obtain all of these different harmonic intervals. That's always been a component of it.

00:32:42.000 And any kind of technological change that affects musicians is also, of course, a reflection of that as well.

00:32:48.000 So, yes, music is part entertainment. It's part an activity of the spirit.

00:32:54.000 It's an expression of our technological innovations and of our capacity to invent.

00:33:00.000 It's all of these things at the same time.

00:33:02.000 The reason I ask is, one of the things I've been wondering about, so my son, he's two,

00:33:07.000 and he's absolutely obsessed with musical instruments.

00:33:10.000 And we stayed with a friend of mine who's a musician,

00:33:14.000 and my son is just engrossed completely in the music that my friend is playing.

00:33:19.000 And my friend couldn't believe it. He's like, how is someone so young so drawn to this?

00:33:25.000 And it almost feels magical in some way. Or do we know why human beings are even attracted to music?

00:33:34.000 See, people talk about deciding to become a musician. They talk about, you know, when I was 11, I decided I was...

00:33:41.000 My son has clearly not decided anything. He can barely decide where to go to the toilet.

00:33:46.000 Right, right. Well, fair enough.

00:33:47.000 I think it's the point that you're making.

00:33:48.000 I mean, that describes a lot of musicians, Mike.

00:33:50.000 Yeah, I was gonna say, we have that in common.

00:33:53.000 Yeah, no, but on a broader level, if you're going to be crazy enough to pursue this,

00:33:58.000 then it's not something that you've decided to do. It's something that's happened to you.

00:34:02.000 It's a form of affliction.

00:34:04.000 No, no, you don't decide to do it. If you have any sense, you would do something else,

00:34:08.000 because it's too difficult.

00:34:10.000 It manifests itself as an irresistible compulsion.

00:34:15.000 And the call is so strong that you would move mountains to respond to it.

00:34:20.000 So, I don't know why that happens.

00:34:23.000 You know, when I was five or six years old, I had a, what?

00:34:26.000 An intense and immediate reaction to the phenomenon of music that was undeniable.

00:34:32.000 There was never any question in my mind that I would ever do anything else.

00:34:36.000 So, it's a psychological thing, I think, fundamentally, right?

00:34:39.000 There are portions of the population that are off the charts when it comes to openness,

00:34:45.000 trade openness, right?

00:34:46.000 And I think that's a huge part of it.

00:34:48.000 You know, people who tend to be interested in the arts, tend to be interested in music,

00:34:52.000 tend to have that predisposition towards openness.

00:34:57.000 And that's not a trait that you can acquire, as far as I understand it.

00:35:01.000 I suppose the question would be, you're looking, obviously, given that it's your job,

00:35:06.000 from a creator's point of view, but I was also partly asking about it from a consumer's,

00:35:11.000 unpleasant term for you, I'm sure, but from a music consumer's point of view,

00:35:16.000 why are people, why do we listen to music?

00:35:19.000 Why do we feel so strongly connected to it? 0.99

00:35:21.000 Why do we map, I know it might sound like a really stupid question,

00:35:25.000 why do we map emotions onto sounds that don't seem, they're not, it's not a picture,

00:35:31.000 you're not seeing something, not literally anyway.

00:35:34.000 Why do we experience music as something powerful?

00:35:38.000 Well, music is only anecdotally sounds, right?

00:35:41.000 What music really is, is patterns and trajectories and transformations over time of patterns.

00:35:47.000 So, why is that so fundamental to us?

00:35:50.000 Well, I think because music offers the possibility of experiencing vicariously

00:35:56.000 a field of pure meaning and pure movement that we can't experience in any other way.

00:36:05.000 And it's a deeply moving thing.

00:36:08.000 It's also a thing that brings us together.

00:36:10.000 I think one of the most fundamental attributes of music is that it's community building.

00:36:16.000 And you can do that without words, right?

00:36:20.000 You can do that without expressing anything whatsoever except what it is that you're playing.

00:36:25.000 It's an amazing thing to see.

00:36:27.000 And we desperately need that.

00:36:29.000 We desperately need that.

00:36:31.000 You know, I was telling Francis earlier that I started my career as a teacher teaching

00:36:36.000 in an economically depressed mining town in Northern France and working with teenagers there,

00:36:43.000 which was an extraordinary experience.

00:36:45.000 And these are people who don't have an easy time.

00:36:48.000 That's putting it mildly.

00:36:51.000 And they were so passionately devoted to the music that they were doing.

00:36:55.000 And they were extraordinarily open-minded also to all different forms of music.

00:37:00.000 And one of the things I did in my classes was we would look at classical pieces,

00:37:05.000 we would look at some bits of popular music, and then we'd also look at more contemporary things.

00:37:10.000 And we would keep alternating them.

00:37:11.000 And they were just interested in everything, you know?

00:37:13.000 And it brought them together and it gave them something to look forward to.

00:37:18.000 And that was a deeply moving experience.

00:37:20.000 So, you know, my thinking at the time was, you know, if you can do this here and have such a transformative experience on people's lives,

00:37:30.000 then what could you do at scale?

00:37:32.000 You know, what could you do using these new platforms?

00:37:35.000 Sam, what you said was really interesting when you described music as a compulsion.

00:37:42.000 And I think a lot of people who seek their careers in the arts, they're driven by compulsion.

00:37:48.000 Certainly, if you look at actors, comedians, writers.

00:37:52.000 All forms of deluded people.

00:37:54.000 Yeah.

00:37:55.000 All forms of deluded people.

00:37:56.000 Exactly.

00:37:57.000 And I look at that and you think, is that why there seems to be such a high preponderance

00:38:05.000 of people who suffer with mental health conditions, mental illnesses, addiction issues?

00:38:11.000 Is there something about creativity and mental instability that goes together?

00:38:19.000 Well, there's a fragility, certainly.

00:38:22.000 I think that creative people tend to be, well, one of their fundamental attributes is they're extraordinarily sensitive.

00:38:29.000 Right.

00:38:30.000 So they, they, and they can't help that.

00:38:32.000 That's just a basic attribute.

00:38:33.000 So they're, they're, when you're more sensitive, you're more easily, what you're more easily,

00:38:38.000 I wouldn't say damaged exactly, but you're, you know, things affect you more, let's say.

00:38:43.000 There's, there's a quote by the American poet, Ezra Pound, who said that the, the function of artists fundamentally

00:38:48.000 is that they're the antennae of the, of the human race.

00:38:50.000 They're the ones that pick up these vibrations that are, that are there, that are, you know,

00:38:56.000 anybody could in principle pick up on, but that not everybody is attuned to.

00:39:01.000 So sensitivity comes with the territory.

00:39:03.000 And the other thing is that artists are placed under extraordinary pressure at times in their careers.

00:39:08.000 And, you know, that combined with the high degree of openness, let's say, and tremendous sensitivity makes people extremely vulnerable.

00:39:18.000 There's no question.

00:39:19.000 Because I was reading about one of the original founders of Pink Floyd, Sid Barrett, who unfortunately became profoundly mentally unwell.

00:39:28.000 And I was reading, I think it was an interview with Roger Waters, where he actually said, look, people attribute...

00:39:33.000 He's mentally really well at the moment.

00:39:35.000 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:39:39.000 Talking to himself on TV.

00:39:41.000 There's a poster child for, for mental stability.

00:39:44.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:39:45.000 That's a great point.

00:39:47.000 Sorry, man.

00:39:48.000 No, no.

00:39:49.000 The joke was there.

00:39:50.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:39:51.000 Yeah.

00:39:52.000 And I mean, yeah, bless Roger.

00:39:53.000 Anyway, but he actually made the point that people think that Sid, it was psychedelics.

00:40:02.000 But the reality is, and all of us thought that this was inevitable.

00:40:07.000 This was inevitable.

00:40:09.000 And there just seems to be, if you think about Brian Wilson, it's just time after time where you have these, you know, these incredibly creative people who change the world and change music.

00:40:20.000 And the way we see things and the way they transform people's lives.

00:40:25.000 Yet at the same time, they're so powerful as well as being so completely fragile.

00:40:31.000 It's such an interesting paradox.

00:40:32.000 Well, it's interesting you mentioned Sid Barrett and Brian Wilson, because they have a lot in common, in fact.

00:40:36.000 And in both instances, what you have are exceptionally gifted and sensitive individuals who are put into a situation that they're completely unequipped psychologically to handle.

00:40:44.000 And in addition to that, you surround them with, as I mentioned earlier, with sycophants, with people who are attempting to milk them for every cent that they can generate with their work.

00:40:54.000 And on top of that, it's like if you have a hit, then the pressure is to reproduce that hit and to keep on producing more work in that vein, which completely kills the spontaneity and the quirkiness and the individuality that you need in order to be an artist in the first place.

00:41:08.000 Right. So those two things come into conflict with each other and it destroys people.

00:41:12.000 In the case of Brian Wilson, it's terribly sad.

00:41:14.000 It's terribly sad, you know, because there was a period there for about two years where he was able to slip one past the goalpost somehow.

00:41:23.000 He was able to do a couple of albums that really did reflect the very best of what he was able to do.

00:41:28.000 And it was immediately squashed, you know, by the record label, by the other members of the band.

00:41:33.000 And the rest of the career of the Beach Boys was just one long, miserable train wreck, you know, of just horrible, horrible albums, one after the other.

00:41:44.000 It's a terrible story.

00:41:46.000 As for whether that could not have been prevented, that's a complicated issue.

00:41:51.000 I mean, clearly both of them were extremely sensitive and would have been subjected to pressures one way or another, I think.

00:41:58.000 Sid Barrett is an interesting one also because, you know, he had no support whatsoever.

00:42:03.000 The people who were around him behaved horribly, to say the least.

00:42:08.000 And there's also the fact that, you know, the music business is a singularly corrosive and corrupt environment to be in.

00:42:17.000 I don't think it's necessarily any better now than it was back then, but I can only imagine how truly sorted it must have been in the 1960s.

00:42:26.000 Well, any combination of a place where you have vulnerable people, lots of money and very, very, very disproportionately allocated rewards.

00:42:36.000 You put those three things together, it's guaranteed to produce abuse, sycophancy, advantage taking, drug addiction, all sorts of things.

00:42:46.000 Comedy is very similar in some way.

00:42:48.000 Well, the miracle is that anybody can withstand it.

00:42:50.000 That you do have people who have relatively lengthy careers and come out of it reasonably unscathed.

00:42:55.000 There are examples of that, you know, there are extraordinary artists like David Byrne, for example, as one who are somehow able to keep going and produce compelling work and also reach very large numbers of people.

00:43:10.000 And that is something that I deeply admire, you know, because, you know, there's a thing in my field, because what I primarily do is I compose scores, right?

00:43:19.000 So I compose pieces that are played by orchestras and chamber ensembles and soloists and vocalists and so on.

00:43:25.000 There's a sense in which there's a kind of satisfaction very often in my field with a very kind of low level of cultural penetration.

00:43:33.000 It's like, okay, you know, you've got your 50 listeners, that's enough, you know, you can keep on with that.

00:43:40.000 And one of the things that has become abundantly clear to me as I increasingly step into a public role is just how, you know, the fine arts simply do not exist in people's lives.

00:43:53.000 It's like, we don't know what you guys are doing.

00:43:56.000 We're not aware of your production.

00:43:58.000 We've never heard of you.

00:43:59.000 We don't know what you're up to.

00:44:01.000 You know, and this is actually a relatively new thing.

00:44:04.000 If you look at the 1950s, 60s, even in the 1970s, you had these titanic figures who, again, I mentioned Michael Jackson earlier, but from the fine arts, you had people like Picasso or Stravinsky, writers like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and so on,

00:44:21.000 who were actually broadly known to the societies that they were working within.

00:44:27.000 There are no comparable figures today, not at all.

00:44:30.000 In France, recently, until recently, we had Pierre Boulez, who is a French composer and conductor who was broadly known to the French public.

00:44:38.000 He died about five or six years ago, and there's been no one to replace him.

00:44:42.000 And, again, it's partly a question of the total atomization of our societies, the atomization of our culture, the atomization of our attention spans.

00:44:52.000 Instead of having a vista of giants, we have a vista of little tiny butthills extending out into infinity of people who are able to have a moderate impact for a short amount of time, but that will never attract any kind of critical mass of public attention.

00:45:14.000 Do you think part of the problem is, and let's go, if we're going back to the education, we're not, what's so important with art, and people never, don't really understand this, and it's true with comedy, it's true with painting, music, acting is technique.

00:45:29.840 It's technique, it's a rigorous technique, and rehearsal, and for, you know, hour after hour after hour, playing the scales if you're a musician, learning breath control, projection, connection with words and verse and all the rest of it if you're an actor and so on and so on.

00:45:48.040 Do you think part of the problem is, because we've lost this art education, we've lost the technical rigor that is needed to become a virtuoso in your field?

00:45:58.800 You're suggesting that we need technique in order to be a virtuoso. That makes you an elitist. Okay? That's the problem. This has become associated with elitism. We don't make a distinction between elite skills and elitism. We think it's the same thing. It's actually, it's two distinct categories.

00:46:18.000 But yes, of course, you're absolutely right. You need to have a rigorous education and a rigorous training, and it's extraordinarily difficult to become a professional musician.

00:46:26.600 It's insanely difficult. The amount of training that is required, the amount of application, of effort, the number of ways that you could easily fail at it, the insane difficulty of getting into the profession in the first place and making a living at it.

00:46:42.500 Yeah, it's very, very, very difficult. But yeah, we've really de-emphasized the importance of technique. There's no question about that.

00:46:53.180 And the other thing that goes along with that is a lot of schools are simply getting rid of their arts curriculum altogether. There are major universities that will no longer teach music with sheet music.

00:47:06.780 It's like, well, that's too, it's too elitist, or it's too difficult, or it's not accessible to people. So the response to that is, well, we'll just do away with it, because it, you know, it's too hard. It's like.

00:47:15.920 It's so interesting, that point about elitism, because there's a big, big difference between elitism in the traditional sense, which is a group of high status people, whose high status is often unearned, and a discrimination based on actual skill, which are very, very different things.

00:47:36.780 Because status acquired by virtue of ability and technique and whatever else, I mean, is totally, that's a totally good reason to distribute reward and all sorts of other things, right?

00:47:50.020 Versus elitism whereby people are in the position they are by virtue of their birth or parentage or whatever.

00:47:58.760 And it's so interesting that you make that point, because I think there are many, many areas in which we've got those two confused.

00:48:03.560 Oh, absolutely. If I, if I get on an airplane, I would hope that the pilot would be an elite pilot.

00:48:09.280 Yeah.

00:48:09.580 You know, and I think this is the case for most people in a lot of areas of their lives. We don't necessarily think of it in those terms, but you would want to have the absolute most qualified, most competent person doing most things that you depend upon for your life.

00:48:23.960 Provided they're a trans black woman. 1.00

00:48:25.420 Yes, well, yes, obviously. So, but no, no, when you apply that to the arts, though, that's where people start getting a bit, you know, a bit funny, because it's like, oh, so you think you're, you think you're an expert, you think you're, you know, such an elite artist, huh?

00:48:40.480 Okay. Well, what about all these other people who also have pretensions to being creative? You know, what about them? Do you think you're better than them?

00:48:47.220 Okay. And then because we've de-emphasized skill and we've, we've made it all about identity, which we often have in arts programming, especially as pertains to public funding, then the very notion of skill itself has, has completely come under attack.

00:49:03.400 How have we got to this point in the arts where we have de-legitimized skill? Because when you look, when you think about the, the masters of their art, I mean, whoever, like a Nina Simone, Nina Simone, as you know, was classically trained, you know, a virtuoso musician.

00:49:21.600 I mean, how have we got to the point where we take somebody like her or Coltrane, all these different people and say, well, you know, that's elitist. And you go, but you look at these people, a lot of them came from poverty. A lot of them were black or female, whatever else. And they still produced magnificent art.

00:49:44.680 There is not one moment where I can't, I've noticed actually, I can't put, if I invite someone around, I can't put Nina Simone on because everybody just ends up listening to Nina Simone.

00:49:55.340 That's how magnificent her talent and her voice is and her phrasing. How have we got to this point?

00:50:00.920 Well, because it's not obvious what constitutes technical virtuosity in a society in which art has become so individualized and so, you know, microscopic in its reach that the criteria have sort of gone out the window.

00:50:15.400 Like what would be your criteria to judge whether somebody has excellent technique or not when what they're doing might be unintelligible to you or it might be part of some microscopic little niche?

00:50:24.860 I think that's part of the problem, right? You need to have some kind of objective standards, a common language on some level so that you can determine what the profundity is of a work or what the technical ability is of the artist.

00:50:39.840 And we don't have that. You know, it's like every artist can develop this entirely idiosyncratic mode of expression and they might have their little microscopic audience.

00:50:51.140 And it's like, yes, it's extremely difficult because there are no objective standards and it's difficult for music schools and art schools as well because, you know, we're being taught that art is entirely about individual expression and whatever you do is fine as long as you're expressing yourself.

00:51:10.500 That sounds familiar.

00:51:11.740 Yes, but there's a lot more to it than that.

00:51:14.340 Sure. And Samuel, you mentioned your YouTube channel and the attempt to bring this conversation to a more general audience. What are you attempting to do?

00:51:25.720 Well, the YouTube channel came about because of my experience teaching in conservatories in France and also just the amount of material that I was starting to accumulate as a teacher because, as you know, Francis, when you're teaching, you have to constantly prepare.

00:51:38.740 Did he tell you he's a teacher?

00:51:39.760 It came up somehow. You know, you have to generate all this material. You have to have it at your fingertips.

00:51:48.700 And so I was putting together these really complex and thorough lesson plans and just thinking, you know, I've got this massive material.

00:51:56.080 I love communicating with people. It would be so fantastic to be able to share it with more.

00:52:00.840 And so, you know, as a total experiment, this was in 2016 when YouTube was just kind of sort of starting to become a serious thing.

00:52:09.280 You were seeing more long form content. You were starting to see university professors putting their lectures up online.

00:52:15.480 And I thought, well, you know, I'll try it as an experiment and see what happens.

00:52:19.500 And much to my shock and surprise, the videos that I put up, which were on relatively specialized and esoteric topics, were getting thousands and thousands of views.

00:52:28.820 And I was absolutely not expecting that.

00:52:30.920 You know, my expectations were set very low.

00:52:34.980 I thought, OK, if 100 people watch this, then wouldn't that be amazing?

00:52:38.560 Because 100 is more than 15, which is the number of people I had in my class at the time.

00:52:42.040 And it just kept growing and growing and growing.

00:52:44.940 And then I started realizing that there was a real hunger for this, that the traditional media, the legacy media, have absolutely abdicated any responsibility that they may have had in the past as to informing the public about cultural matters.

00:52:59.060 It's just gone.

00:53:00.840 You know, it's like all you have is coverage of entertainment.

00:53:03.940 But the fine arts, again, are absent.

00:53:07.180 So there's a vacuum that was created.

00:53:08.460 And what I attempted to do was to create videos that would be accessible to a broader audience and that would talk about things that I think are important and that I wanted to share with as many people as possible.

00:53:23.440 So it was very difficult at the beginning because one of the weird things about YouTube, maybe you've found this as well, is in a certain sense, you don't really know who you're talking to.

00:53:33.100 Or at least I had no idea at first.

00:53:35.020 So I didn't know how to calibrate what I was doing.

00:53:40.100 You know, is this for professionals?

00:53:41.960 Is this for highly trained people?

00:53:43.460 Is this for beginners?

00:53:44.500 Is it for a mixture of them?

00:53:45.960 How do you talk to both of them at the same time?

00:53:48.160 Do you talk to experts and novices in a way that engages both of them?

00:53:53.740 It was very difficult to work all that out.

00:53:56.120 Well, it's great that you're doing it.

00:53:57.620 And we're going to move to our locals in a second and ask you questions from our supporters that they've asked quite a few of.

00:54:06.020 But before we do that, the final question we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

00:54:12.460 Before Samuel answers a final question, at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our locals.

00:54:19.860 The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this.

00:54:23.160 I'm curious how music soothes the animal within us.

00:54:25.940 It has been shown dogs respond positively to classical music.

00:54:29.420 Please expound on this and tell us what instrument reaches your emotional core in this way.

00:54:33.540 Are kids even into music anymore?

00:54:35.840 The internet seems to have dulled the emotional connection with music and the hormonal adolescent heart.

00:54:41.140 That's something that I would say to anybody who's coming to classical music for the first time is start with that piece.

00:54:46.080 It's absolutely one of the greatest achievements of our species in any medium.

00:54:52.000 Well, here's a hypothetical for you.

00:54:54.340 What if the fine arts were to disappear altogether?

00:54:56.800 What if we were to just do away with the museums and the symphony orchestras and the ballets and all of those sort of inconvenient and expensive forms of art that we have?

00:55:05.880 If they were to just disappear tomorrow, what would the effect be if we were to completely remove the arts from our curriculum?

00:55:13.160 There would be a lot more mentally ill, homeless people.

00:55:18.660 Sorry, I feel like that may have done up your point.

00:55:21.600 Okay, fair enough.

00:55:24.080 What is your point, Samuel?

00:55:25.900 My point is, look, the right tend to emphasize shoring up Western values, the values that are essential to Western society.

00:55:38.540 In my view, those values are encapsulated and expressed in a sensual and immediately understandable medium in the fine arts.

00:55:48.340 And that's their function.

00:55:50.220 That's one of their many functions.

00:55:52.180 It's a vessel for the preservation of culture.

00:55:54.200 Absolutely.

00:55:54.640 And if we were to give up on that entirely and just leave it to the dogs, as it were, and just say, well, you know, the rule of the majority, whatever is popular, you know, whatever is most appealing to people, you know, that will be our culture.

00:56:11.140 And it's like, if you think about what, it's not easy, it's not difficult to make things that are appealing to people.

00:56:15.560 We know how to do this.

00:56:16.460 It's like, okay, like, processed foods are appealing, you know, it's like, we can have that.

00:56:25.440 But what the arts do is they encourage a more considered form of expression where you can dive within, you know, you can have a rich inner life.

00:56:38.200 It keeps people alive.

00:56:39.580 It's not a frivolous decoration.

00:56:43.900 It's necessary.

00:56:45.160 You know, if you look at the Viktor Frankl book, Man's Search for Meaning, he talks about this.

00:56:50.060 He talks about how in the worst of conceivable situations, you know, people being tortured in these camps, that there was a moment when they put a little cabaret show on somehow.

00:57:03.220 They were able to do this.

00:57:04.240 They found a hut somewhere that wasn't being used and put on a show.

00:57:08.580 And that there were inmates there that decided to forego their evening ration of a little crust of bread or whatever it is in order to attend that show, you know, because they needed that.

00:57:24.200 Because in that moment, the idea of being able to connect with other people through the medium of art was more nourishing than that crust of bread.

00:57:36.620 And there are countless stories like this.

00:57:38.980 The French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1941 wrote a piece called The Quartet for the End of Time, which was written in a concentration camp.

00:57:47.120 And they had nothing.

00:57:51.360 They had like a broken piano and a cello that was missing one of its strings.

00:57:55.040 And he wrote a piece that for the players that he was able to gather together in this camp.

00:57:59.780 And it's one of the most legendary pieces of 20th century music.

00:58:03.140 The point being that people will do this no matter what the circumstances are.

00:58:09.540 You know, if you're on board the Titanic and it's sinking, you still pull your violin out of its case, you know.

00:58:14.000 You know, so we have to reconsider our relationship with art and understand that this is not a bonus.

00:58:21.380 This is something that we need to do.

00:58:23.600 If it were a luxury, you know, we wouldn't have it anymore.

00:58:28.640 You know, if it were a purposeless activity, it would have ceased long ago because it's too difficult.

00:58:35.980 You know what happens to purposeless things?

00:58:38.180 They shrivel.

00:58:39.300 There's no reason for them to continue to exist.

00:58:42.080 The fact that in all of these horrific situations that I've outlined, that there is this groping for some kind of a, what, a connection with culture, with something higher, indicates to me very strongly that we can't do without it.

00:59:03.260 Tamil Androv, thank you for coming on.

00:59:05.780 Head on over to Locals where we ask Samuel your questions.

00:59:08.200 In the arts, do you think we're seeing the death of the maverick, the person who busts taboos, you know, in this age of mass consumption and conformity where everybody is, must have the correct opinion?

00:59:22.520 Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - September 15, 2024

Making Music in a Woke World - Samuel Andreyev

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript