00:01:03.000You are, unsurprisingly, the first composer we've ever had on the show.
00:01:08.000And it's not an area that we normally venture into.
00:01:10.000We'll talk about music more specifically as the conversation goes on.
00:01:14.000But 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.
00:01:24.000And 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.
00:01:35.000Well, we have a difficult relationship with culture, with the arts today.
00:01:40.000And I think one of the things is that nobody really exactly knows what to do with the arts.
00:01:44.000You 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.
00:02:01.000I mean, given some modern art, I am sensitive to that particular point of view.
00:02:41.000And 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,
00:02:50.000that are a foundational part of the whole classical tradition.
00:03:48.000Oh, 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.
00:03:56.000So you can be, you know, you can insert any interest group.
00:04:01.000And that was something that I noticed right at the beginning of my career.
00:04:04.000I 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.
00:04:15.000And then later, you know, many times I was asked to write pieces that reflected Canadian culture.
00:04:21.000I was put on these all-Canadian programs.
00:04:23.000And even when I was 22, I thought, this is imbecilic.
00:04:28.000And it's gotten worse since then, right?
00:04:30.000So 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.
00:04:41.000We try to come up with ways of putting programs together that have nothing to do with art.
00:04:45.000And one of them is, you know, you can do whatever it would be.
00:04:48.000We'll do a concert of all trans people.
00:04:50.000We'll do a concert of entirely female composers.
00:04:53.000And 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.
00:05:06.000You know, and then it becomes a matter of a category.
00:05:17.000And 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.
00:05:29.000Samuel, do you think this is a problem when we make art political?
00:05:33.000Now, of course, some art is political.
00:06:26.000And each of them have their advantages and their disadvantages, of course.
00:06:31.000So 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.
00:06:48.000But it means that the art is easily corruptible, because it's, well, in a sense, you're working for the state.
00:06:58.000So 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.
00:07:15.000So 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.
00:07:21.000I 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.
00:07:34.000Because 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.
00:07:46.000Samuel, now there's the other argument which goes, look, the arts are becoming more and more inaccessible for reasons we've touched on.
00:07:56.000Shouldn'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?
00:08:08.000And actually, these programs, whilst crude, they are effective in getting people in through the door.
00:08:13.000I think that the way that you get people in through the door is through education.
00:08:17.000That has to be the way you do it, I believe.
00:08:20.000And if you want that to happen, if you want the arts to be accessible to everyone, as I passionately wish myself,
00:08:27.000then you have to expose people to it at a very early age.
00:08:32.000And what I don't really understand is why that seems to not be the case in a lot of countries.
00:08:40.000We've actually reduced the presence of arts in primary education and secondary education.
00:08:47.000Again, it's this idea that it's this frivolous accessory that is diverting time and resources away from more important things.
00:09:35.000And if you think about what it's worth, you know, because conversations about culture, within about five minutes, you start talking about money inevitably.
00:10:01.000You know, these things are of inestimable value.
00:10:05.000And to have to make the argument that they're worth preserving is, I don't know what to say about that.
00:10:12.000I 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.
00:10:20.000And the Beatles didn't need government funding.
00:10:23.000They sold tickets to their concerts enough to pay for everything a hundred times over.
00:10:30.000So 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.
00:10:43.000It seems to me that you ought to be able to make a case of why it's important.
00:10:48.000And that's why I'm asking the question.
00:10:51.000Well, 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.
00:11:00.000They've become something that's cordoned off, right?
00:11:03.000They've become a special occasion, a special event that you can very easily ignore, right?
00:11:07.000Because it's not woven into the fabric of our everyday lives in any manner, shape or form.
00:11:12.000So, for example, if you go out to a concert, then you might have to organize that weeks ahead of time.
00:11:18.000It might be expensive to go to the concert.
00:11:20.000And it's this sort of blip in your life, you know.
00:11:23.000And I think that's part of the problem.
00:11:26.000There'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.
00:11:37.000And that allows for, what, some kind of common language of symbols, so that we can actually talk to each other.
00:11:47.000And my sense is that that's just not present right now.
00:11:52.000So, 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.
00:12:02.000And that does complicate things in terms of providing an argument as to why they should continue to exist.
00:12:08.000You know, having this conversation, I'm not going to admit this, nor should I, but I went on TikTok.
00:12:16.000And 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.
00:12:25.000Middle class, you could tell from his accent and the way he presented himself.
00:12:28.000And he started saying that the English had no culture.
00:12:32.000All we do is take from other cultures and, you know, we're parasitic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:12:39.000And 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.
00:12:45.000And 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.
00:13:00.000If 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.
00:13:12.000If 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.
00:13:18.000Yet this kid had no idea about our rich cultural legacy because he was entirely ignorant.
00:13:25.000And that to me is a very real problem.
00:13:28.000Well, of course, but again, it's a question of education.
00:13:32.000You 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.
00:13:48.000So, you know, it's a greater problem in some countries than in others.
00:13:54.000I 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.
00:14:04.000I don't think that too many people would seriously question it.
00:14:07.000There's an implicit understanding that this is something valuable.
00:14:10.000It's valuable to the identity of the country.
00:14:12.000It's also valuable in terms of its international image.
00:14:16.000So there's an understanding of the implicit value of art.
00:14:20.000But 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.
00:14:30.000And you're saying it gets tricky, and it does.
00:14:34.000And what makes it even worse is that it's now become a cultural battlefield like everything else.
00:15:01.000It's something that requires engagement.
00:15:03.000It's not something that you simply accept sort of passively.
00:15:08.000But again, I think this has just completely disappeared somehow.
00:15:14.000And 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,
00:15:28.000perhaps having groups where they read together.
00:15:31.000But it has to happen on that kind of a level because there's no sort of wider societal impetus to do that.
00:15:38.000So 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.
00:15:50.000So because also as well, what we're seeing is the influence of technology on music.
00:15:59.000I'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?
00:16:13.000This technology is terrifying in some respects, but it also makes things possible that would have been completely impossible even five years ago.
00:16:26.000It's extraordinarily difficult to evaluate.
00:16:28.000I 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.
00:16:35.000So, 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?
00:16:45.000If 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.
00:16:54.000But you can create a robust community by using that technology.
00:17:21.000You 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.
00:17:29.000There's no sense of a collective we or a sense of engagement or community.
00:17:34.000You know, it's like everybody's staring at their phones.
00:17:36.000They're barely looking at where they're going.
00:17:38.000And 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.
00:17:53.000And 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?
00:18:06.000Because 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.
00:18:19.000People consume TV shows, you know, big sports, entertainment of various kinds.
00:18:25.000They're very, very good at making all of those things.
00:18:27.000I mean, American sports are so much more entertaining than sports elsewhere in the world, as I keep making the point.
00:18:34.000But do you think that's a big part of why we are where we are with our relationship with art?
00:18:39.000Yeah, well, the thing about mass entertainment is that it requires a certain degree of homogenization and standardization in order to be effective.
00:19:14.000And they will foster a more individual relationship with the work.
00:19:19.000So 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.
00:19:31.000I mean, there's no question about that.
00:19:33.000The diversity of range of forms of different genres that were invented in America in the 20th century is absolutely astonishing.
00:20:00.000And 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.
00:20:09.000And we decry about the decline of freedom of speech and the belief in it.
00:20:14.000And 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.
00:20:23.000And 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.
00:20:31.000And I was thinking, it's a great song.
00:20:53.000That song was probably inappropriate when it came out too.
00:20:56.000The thing about The Kinks is they were always diametrically opposed to wherever the culture was going.
00:21:01.000That's one of the things that made them great.
00:21:03.000When 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.
00:21:17.000So no, that was their role and I think they did a good job of filling that.
00:21:22.000As to whether a song like that could come out now, I think it could actually.
00:21:26.000I think it would likely come out on some kind of social media platform like YouTube or something like that.
00:21:32.000It probably wouldn't get into a major record label type of situation.
00:21:36.000But then again, those avenues of distribution are effectively moribund anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
00:21:42.000The 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.
00:21:52.000The 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.
00:22:05.000And it's basically been more or less killed off. That business model no longer works.
00:22:10.000So 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.
00:22:21.000There are to a degree. Of course, you can get demonetized and you can get into trouble in various ways on YouTube.
00:22:27.000But no, I think there is hope that these platforms can result in a democratization and in a broadening of what's possible to do.
00:22:38.000I think it would be much, much harder to get that across in a more conventional record label type situation.
00:22:44.000Because you talk about the atomization of society.
00:22:47.000One 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,
00:22:56.000what we listened to, what we watched, et cetera, et cetera.
00:22:59.000So 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.
00:23:08.000Now, the trade off is obviously that it's democratization.
00:23:12.000What do you think of the landscape now?
00:23:15.000Does it fill you with hope or is it more kind of tempered?
00:23:19.000Well, we don't have cultural giants anymore in the way we used to.
00:23:44.000And it's very interesting surveying the landscape of popular music today because, you know, it's funny.
00:23:49.000You can go on YouTube and you can find these artists that have, you know, 70 million views on their videos.
00:23:53.000It's like, well, I've never heard of them.
00:23:55.000You 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.
00:24:02.000And the thing that I've observed is that today, all art, all music, no matter how popular, is a niche taste.
00:24:13.000You know, we don't have any artists that can cut through this entire society.
00:24:17.000Well, we live in the era of mass customization.
00:24:20.000So I first discovered it when you go to the U.S., as I know you have done.
00:24:24.000And, 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.
00:24:33.000That would be twice as expensive as everything else.
00:24:36.000But 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.
00:24:47.000And so ultimately, because we're so technologically advanced now, everybody can have exactly what they like.
00:24:54.000So 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.
00:25:05.000But that was in the absence of alternatives.
00:25:07.000So in the era of the Beatles, if you were an 8 out of 10 band, you would literally be listened to by everybody.
00:25:15.000Now, 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.
00:25:22.000And so I think it's a really technological issue.
00:25:26.000The availability of the options now means that those big cultural figures are going to be so much harder to come by.
00:25:33.000Yes. Well, it's also made things exponentially more difficult for composers.
00:25:36.000But this is not a it's not a new story.
00:25:38.000It'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.
00:25:48.000Right. So if you went to a concert, the concert would be embedded in a very specific social context.
00:25:54.000You know, it might be a piece of liturgical music.
00:25:56.000It might be a piece written for a private occasion, a ball, for example, or it might be a pedagogical piece or whatever.
00:26:03.000But there was there was a purpose for that piece. OK.
00:26:07.000And the piece was tailor made for that purpose.
00:26:10.000So you would be overwhelmingly likely to hear a new piece on that occasion.
00:26:16.000What started to happen was in the second half of the 19th century, first of all, you see the rise of the European nation states.
00:26:22.000And 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.
00:26:34.000And that would sort of be these emblematic figureheads of that nation.
00:26:38.000It was part of the nation building exercise, in other words, to elevate these figures.
00:26:42.000And 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.
00:26:50.000Right. So you don't merely perform a Beethoven symphony once or twice or three or four times around the time of its creation.
00:26:56.000You perform it hundreds of times, thousands of times.
00:26:58.000You perform it in many different countries and you do this for an indefinite period of time.
00:27:04.000Right. So you create this this repertoire, this cohesive canon of works.
00:27:09.000And there are understandable reasons why you would do that.
00:27:13.000You would want the greatest achievements, the greatest cultural achievements of mankind to be properly venerated and properly available to the broadest number of people.
00:27:23.000But that does also create a situation in which artists are now competing with the greatest exponents of their art from the past.
00:27:32.000Right. So you're no longer only competing with your colleagues, with the three or four other annoying composers who live in your town.
00:27:38.000You're competing with Beethoven, with Bach, with all the Renaissance composers, with all the medieval composers, with every composer who has ever lived.
00:27:45.000And 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.
00:27:57.000And 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.
00:28:09.000And 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.
00:28:16.000Right. So that's that's a tremendous existential problem for composers. And so the repertoire is is a double edged sword in that sense.
00:28:26.000And it's also as well that Beethoven, Mozart, they're not human.
00:28:32.000I mean, obviously, they were human, but in our minds, we can't really picture.
00:28:36.000There are legends that there's something there. There's someone that we can't even think of what they were like.
00:28:46.000I mean, somebody could come along who could be even better than Beethoven.
00:28:50.000But if you just know him as Gary down the road, you're not going to take him seriously as Beethoven.
00:28:55.000No. Well, it is incomprehensible. I can tell you, I've been studying this music for my entire life and I can't comprehend it.
00:29:02.000One of the great mysteries to me is how Bach, at the height of his productivity, was writing an entire cantata.
00:29:08.000These are 20 to 25 minute long pieces of music written for the entire liturgical calendar year.
00:29:15.000He 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.
00:29:22.000And in addition to all the other compositions that he had to write as a matter of his obligations to his employer.
00:29:29.000It's an insane, unfathomable degree of productivity at the absolute highest level.
00:29:36.000To finish the point of what I was saying earlier.
00:29:39.000So we talked about the antagonistic relationship between the music of the past, the composers who are continuing to create new works.
00:29:47.000And to relate it to today, I mean, that's been intensified to the nth degree, right?
00:29:53.000Because 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.
00:30:02.000But 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.
00:30:14.000And so it's extremely difficult to get your bearings in a situation like that, right?
00:30:18.000And also our relationship to these things tends to be extremely ephemeral, right?
00:30:23.000So there will be artists that will get a lot of attention, a massive amount of attention for a relatively short amount of time.
00:30:29.000And five years later, we've forgotten about them.
00:30:32.000It 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.
00:30:45.000Well, the one hit wonder thing is not a desirable situation. No, absolutely not.
00:30:51.000And that level of success, when it comes on that quickly, is extraordinarily dangerous for people.
00:30:58.000It's very, very difficult to withstand that.
00:31:01.000And, 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.
00:31:12.000Imagine 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.
00:31:19.000That would be an absolute nightmare. It would stunt your growth.
00:31:22.000Britney Spears' evolution, let's put it like that, seems to suggest that you're right.
00:31:27.000Yeah, 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.
00:31:37.000You know, and you'll get trapped into that, and it'll be very difficult to extricate yourself from that modality.
00:31:44.000So, for example, there have been plenty of enormously talented musicians and bands who have done extremely interesting things,
00:31:52.000only to be met with extreme resistance from the interested parties, whether they be record labels, or whether they be their bandmates,
00:31:59.000or, you know, the whole mass of sycophants that is around them.
00:40:09.000And 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.
00:40:20.000And the way we see things and the way they transform people's lives.
00:40:25.000Yet at the same time, they're so powerful as well as being so completely fragile.
00:40:32.000Well, it's interesting you mentioned Sid Barrett and Brian Wilson, because they have a lot in common, in fact.
00:40:36.000And 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.
00:40:44.000And 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.
00:40:54.000And 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.
00:41:08.000Right. So those two things come into conflict with each other and it destroys people.
00:41:12.000In the case of Brian Wilson, it's terribly sad.
00:41:14.000It'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.
00:41:23.000He was able to do a couple of albums that really did reflect the very best of what he was able to do.
00:41:28.000And it was immediately squashed, you know, by the record label, by the other members of the band.
00:41:33.000And 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.
00:41:46.000As for whether that could not have been prevented, that's a complicated issue.
00:41:51.000I mean, clearly both of them were extremely sensitive and would have been subjected to pressures one way or another, I think.
00:41:58.000Sid Barrett is an interesting one also because, you know, he had no support whatsoever.
00:42:03.000The people who were around him behaved horribly, to say the least.
00:42:08.000And there's also the fact that, you know, the music business is a singularly corrosive and corrupt environment to be in.
00:42:17.000I 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.
00:42:26.000Well, any combination of a place where you have vulnerable people, lots of money and very, very, very disproportionately allocated rewards.
00:42:36.000You put those three things together, it's guaranteed to produce abuse, sycophancy, advantage taking, drug addiction, all sorts of things.
00:42:48.000Well, the miracle is that anybody can withstand it.
00:42:50.000That you do have people who have relatively lengthy careers and come out of it reasonably unscathed.
00:42:55.000There 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.
00:43:10.000And 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?
00:43:19.000So I compose pieces that are played by orchestras and chamber ensembles and soloists and vocalists and so on.
00:43:25.000There'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.
00:43:33.000It's like, okay, you know, you've got your 50 listeners, that's enough, you know, you can keep on with that.
00:43:40.000And 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.
00:43:53.000It's like, we don't know what you guys are doing.
00:44:01.000You know, and this is actually a relatively new thing.
00:44:04.000If 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,
00:44:21.000who were actually broadly known to the societies that they were working within.
00:44:27.000There are no comparable figures today, not at all.
00:44:30.000In France, recently, until recently, we had Pierre Boulez, who is a French composer and conductor who was broadly known to the French public.
00:44:38.000He died about five or six years ago, and there's been no one to replace him.
00:44:42.000And, again, it's partly a question of the total atomization of our societies, the atomization of our culture, the atomization of our attention spans.
00:44:52.000Instead 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.
00:45:14.000Do 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.
00:45:29.840It'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.
00:45:48.040Do 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?
00:45:58.800You'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.
00:46:18.000But 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.
00:46:26.600It'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.
00:46:42.500Yeah, it's very, very, very difficult. But yeah, we've really de-emphasized the importance of technique. There's no question about that.
00:46:53.180And 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.
00:47:06.780It'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.
00:47:15.920It'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.
00:47:36.780Because 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?
00:47:50.020Versus elitism whereby people are in the position they are by virtue of their birth or parentage or whatever.
00:47:58.760And 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.
00:48:03.560Oh, absolutely. If I, if I get on an airplane, I would hope that the pilot would be an elite pilot.
00:48:09.580You 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.
00:48:25.420Yes, 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?
00:48:40.480Okay. 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?
00:48:47.220Okay. 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.
00:49:03.400How 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.
00:49:21.600I 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.
00:49:44.680There 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.
00:49:55.340That's how magnificent her talent and her voice is and her phrasing. How have we got to this point?
00:50:00.920Well, 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.
00:50:15.400Like 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?
00:50:24.860I 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.
00:50:39.840And 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.
00:50:51.140And 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.
00:51:11.740Yes, but there's a lot more to it than that.
00:51:14.340Sure. 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?
00:51:25.720Well, 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.
00:51:39.760It came up somehow. You know, you have to generate all this material. You have to have it at your fingertips.
00:51:48.700And so I was putting together these really complex and thorough lesson plans and just thinking, you know, I've got this massive material.
00:51:56.080I love communicating with people. It would be so fantastic to be able to share it with more.
00:52:00.840And 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.
00:52:09.280You were seeing more long form content. You were starting to see university professors putting their lectures up online.
00:52:15.480And I thought, well, you know, I'll try it as an experiment and see what happens.
00:52:19.500And 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.
00:52:28.820And I was absolutely not expecting that.
00:52:30.920You know, my expectations were set very low.
00:52:34.980I thought, OK, if 100 people watch this, then wouldn't that be amazing?
00:52:38.560Because 100 is more than 15, which is the number of people I had in my class at the time.
00:52:42.040And it just kept growing and growing and growing.
00:52:44.940And 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.
00:53:08.460And 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.
00:53:23.440So 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.
00:53:45.960How do you talk to both of them at the same time?
00:53:48.160Do you talk to experts and novices in a way that engages both of them?
00:53:53.740It was very difficult to work all that out.
00:53:56.120Well, it's great that you're doing it.
00:53:57.620And 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.
00:54:06.020But 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?
00:54:12.460Before Samuel answers a final question, at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our locals.
00:54:19.860The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this.
00:54:23.160I'm curious how music soothes the animal within us.
00:54:25.940It has been shown dogs respond positively to classical music.
00:54:29.420Please expound on this and tell us what instrument reaches your emotional core in this way.
00:54:54.340What if the fine arts were to disappear altogether?
00:54:56.800What 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?
00:55:05.880If they were to just disappear tomorrow, what would the effect be if we were to completely remove the arts from our curriculum?
00:55:13.160There would be a lot more mentally ill, homeless people.
00:55:18.660Sorry, I feel like that may have done up your point.
00:55:54.640And 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.
00:56:11.140And it's like, if you think about what, it's not easy, it's not difficult to make things that are appealing to people.
00:56:16.460It's like, okay, like, processed foods are appealing, you know, it's like, we can have that.
00:56:25.440But 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.
00:56:45.160You know, if you look at the Viktor Frankl book, Man's Search for Meaning, he talks about this.
00:56:50.060He 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.
00:57:04.240They found a hut somewhere that wasn't being used and put on a show.
00:57:08.580And 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.
00:57:24.200Because 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.
00:57:36.620And there are countless stories like this.
00:57:38.980The French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1941 wrote a piece called The Quartet for the End of Time, which was written in a concentration camp.
00:58:39.300There's no reason for them to continue to exist.
00:58:42.080The 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.
00:59:03.260Tamil Androv, thank you for coming on.
00:59:05.780Head on over to Locals where we ask Samuel your questions.
00:59:08.200In 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?