The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast XX
[0] Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, episode 33, season four.
[1] This episode was recorded back in February 2021.
[2] Samuel Andreyev joined my dad this episode.
[3] Samuel is a Canadian composer who writes absolutely extraordinary music for orchestras, soloists, chamber groups, singers, and other ensembles throughout Europe and the world.
[4] He hosts the Samuel Andreyev podcast, is a professor at the Haasul for Music Freiburg, Hope there's nobody German listening to this podcast, cringing at my pronunciation.
[5] Samuel is also known for his YouTube channel, presenting an analysis of works that he believes are interesting and important.
[6] Dad and Samuel discuss the skills needed to be successful as an artist, where to start if you want to compose music, the hierarchy in Western music, the relationship of music and language, the importance of genres, tips on learning composition, how having a family is helpful to a career and more.
[7] I'm pleased to have with me here today, Samuel Andriev, someone I've known for many years now.
[8] I think it must be 15 years, probably.
[9] And Sam is a Canadian composer who has sought his fame and fortune in Europe.
[10] And we're going to talk today about his career, about the artistic endeavor in general and how that can be rendered practical and about music.
[11] It's nice to see you, Sam.
[12] Thanks a lot for agreeing to talk to me. It's really good to see you, Jordan.
[13] Thank you.
[14] Thank you.
[15] I'm very pleased to see you.
[16] So why don't you fill everybody in to begin with on your background?
[17] Sure.
[18] So I'm a Canadian composer.
[19] I was born in Concordin, which is near Toronto, and lived in Canada until I was 22, at which point I decided to move to France.
[20] So I settled initially in Paris.
[21] I lived there for 10.
[22] 10 years studied composition at the Paris Conservatory.
[23] And then I received a one -year artistic residency in Madrid.
[24] I lived there for a while and then ended up here in Strasbourg in Eastern France.
[25] And I live currently right on the border between France and Germany.
[26] So my work involves many things.
[27] I have to juggle a lot of different activities.
[28] So the main thing and the sort of summit of my activity is my work as a composer.
[29] So I write music for orchestras and soloists, chamber groups, singers, all kinds of different ensembles throughout Europe and the world.
[30] And I also have a podcast called the Samuel Andref Podcast.
[31] I'm a teacher, I'm a professor at the Folchschilder for Music in Freiburg, Germany.
[32] And I have a YouTube channel where I present analyses of works that I think are interesting and important.
[33] And I try to render those works a little bit more accessible to people who might not be familiar with them.
[34] And how's your subscriber base on YouTube been doing?
[35] I haven't looked at your channel for some time.
[36] You started it about what?
[37] How long ago now?
[38] I started it in late 2016, and it got off to a rather slow start, which is to be expected with this sort of thing.
[39] And then it took off within, I would say, about a year or two.
[40] So my subscriber base currently is about 35 ,000.
[41] So I'm not breaking any records on YouTube, but nevertheless, for the sort of content that I'm doing, it represents a very significant audience.
[42] And the other thing that I've noticed reading comments and the many, many emails that I get all the time, is that it's an audience that seems to be divided between, on the one hand, professionals, so professional musicians, people who have composers, who are active musicians, and then complete neophytes, people who don't necessarily know, very much at all about music but are curious about it.
[43] And one of the tricky things about running this channel has been finding a way to address both of those audiences simultaneously.
[44] So I try to make my videos in such a manner that somebody who is, you know, getting into this topic for the first time can learn a lot, but not be completely overwhelmed with, you know, a barrage of rebarbative technical information.
[45] But I also try to make it specific enough so that somebody who has been a musician for 30 years can still get something out of it.
[46] So what made you decide to use YouTube?
[47] Why did you start your channel?
[48] Oh, well, I was a professor at a conservatory in Northern France for two years teaching analysis, and I had a class of between 10 and 15 students.
[49] And I put an enormous amount of work into those courses.
[50] So I would go and spend a week studying a particular musical work, and then I would present it to my students.
[51] And we would alternate classical repertoire with more contentious, temporary, specifically post -war repertoire.
[52] And I really enjoyed doing that.
[53] But it seemed to me anyway a disconnect between the enormous amount of work going into producing those courses and the very small number of people that were benefiting from them.
[54] So after a couple of years of doing this, I had just a wealth of material just sitting there.
[55] I was just thinking, well, I have to be able to do something with this that would be a little bit more broad in its scope.
[56] So I just decided, well, what if I just film myself, basically presenting a lecture as though I were in a classroom, and just put it out and see what happens.
[57] And it did surprisingly well.
[58] The first video, I figured, well, you know, 50 people watch it.
[59] That's great.
[60] That's 50 people more than, you know, 15 that I have in my class.
[61] But it was like 1 ,000 people within a month or something like that.
[62] And that was exciting.
[63] So that showed me the potential of the medium.
[64] And it just kept growing from there.
[65] How many viewers are you getting on average?
[66] for a video and what's the range?
[67] It varies wildly.
[68] I have videos with 200 ,000 views and I have videos with a few thousand views.
[69] And the thing is I'm utterly unable to tell what videos are going to be popular.
[70] I mean, it's really strange to me that I can't, I have no sense of that at all.
[71] I just throw up videos that are in line with my interests at the time that I'm doing the video.
[72] It's important to me that it has to be a topic that I'm obsessed about.
[73] I can't just be merely interested.
[74] I have to be obsessed with the topic.
[75] so that I can research it in sufficient depth.
[76] And then I do a video that is a distillation of everything that I've discovered as I've looked very, very closely into the work.
[77] And sometimes that process takes weeks or years.
[78] I mean, if you consider that many of these works are pieces that I've been studying for years.
[79] So I try to condense that down into approximately a 20 to 30 minute video.
[80] And some of them are quite popular.
[81] And some of them, for reasons I don't understand, are a little bit less popular.
[82] but it doesn't influence my choices in terms of what to look at.
[83] So I just try to go with the things that I think are work looking at and particularly works that aren't, let's say, particularly represented on YouTube because there's all sorts of repertoire that I think is really very significant and important work that nobody's bothered to make a video about.
[84] So it's also about filling a void.
[85] I mean, you're an anomaly.
[86] Is there anyone else that you know of doing this sort of thing publicly on you, YouTube, for example, like you are?
[87] And how are your colleagues reacting to that?
[88] There's very few people doing it.
[89] It's starting to, it's starting to be a little bit more common, but certainly four or five years ago, there was nobody else.
[90] I mean, I was looking actually for content of this sort on YouTube and not finding anything.
[91] So, so, you know, I decided I would, you know, just step in and do what I could on, you know, in my very primitive way.
[92] The early videos were extremely crude.
[93] These days, I would say there's two types of people producing content on music on YouTube.
[94] In terms of, let's say, you know, things that are a little bit more theoretical or that try to present really specific information on music.
[95] On the one hand, you have people that are producing videos that are circa, you know, between five and ten minutes that are very, very tightly edited and scripted and usually have animation and a very, very, you know, a very, you know, a very, elaborate visual presentation.
[96] And then on the other hand, you have people like me. I don't really do that sort of thing.
[97] I'm still basically filming a lecture, but I make it a little bit more visually interesting by having images and I edit them carefully and all of that sort of thing.
[98] But they're not meant to be things that you can watch in five minutes necessarily.
[99] So in terms of people who are sort of doing it the way I'm doing it, I honestly can't think of too many other people, even now.
[100] And I think that within the composition world, and I've talked to many other composers about this, there's a feeling of reticence, I think, about going on YouTube and doing this sort of thing.
[101] There's a perception that YouTube is a place that people go to get their heads smashed in, to get insulted and embarrassed and humiliated and so on.
[102] And I think there's a degree of discomfort amongst composers who, you know, they're not by nature the most extroverted people anyway.
[103] I think a lot of them are somewhat reticent about doing something like this.
[104] And the other thing is, you need to have a weird array of skills to do this sort of thing, and they're not skills that typically go together.
[105] And a lot of composers, frankly, would rather just spend their time doing their work and teaching if they teach.
[106] Yeah, well, you need a weird array of skills generally to be successful as an artist.
[107] and unfortunately, perhaps being technically proficient or even brilliant artistically is nowhere near enough to guarantee your success.
[108] I mean, one of the things that struck me, since I've studied creativity for such a long period of time now, is just how difficult it is to sustain yourself as an artist, to keep body and soul together.
[109] And it isn't obvious as well that when people acquire their artistic training, they also acquire along with that any appreciation for what has to be done in order to make themselves able to live while they pursue their art and you and I have talked an awful lot about career development and you've been successful at it but I know it's been an extremely difficult it's been extremely difficult to manage first of all you had to leave Canada and why was that?
[110] There were a few reasons for that.
[111] formulated the project of leaving Canada when I was 16 or 17.
[112] On one level, it's a difficult thing to explain because most of my life choices have been made instinctually.
[113] So I don't actually sit down with a piece of paper with columns on it and think about all the pluses and minuses of various decisions.
[114] Most of the major decisions I've made have been made on instinct.
[115] And moving to France was one of those decisions.
[116] I had a sense that in order to go as far as I possibly could in a given direction in order to give everything I had to give, let's say, that I needed to leave.
[117] I needed to go somewhere else.
[118] There's a few reasons for that.
[119] So one of them is perhaps I felt that I was sort of too much in a very familiar environment and surrounded by too many like -minded people.
[120] And I wanted to be in an environment that would, on one level, that would force me to reconstitute myself and learn an entirely new way of being so when I moved to France I hardly knew anybody I think I had one phone number of one person to contact you know it was it was extremely difficult you have to it's you know you're starting a new life all over again you're dealing with a language you're dealing with a completely different culture of people that have different priorities different principles and trying to work all of that out well similar trying to start a career.
[121] So it was extraordinarily difficult.
[122] But I think that on one level, I'm instinctively drawn to difficult things.
[123] I think I find the challenge.
[124] Well, open people are creative.
[125] And the advantage to lead, and so they're destined in some sense to transform their personalities.
[126] So creative people create, what would you say, objects?
[127] They create for public benefit, but they also create themselves.
[128] at the same time.
[129] And one of the advantages to moving somewhere drastically new is that you can leave old parts of yourself behind and remold yourself in a new configuration if you're willing to take advantage of that.
[130] It's not a simple matter, but there's great benefit in it if you can manage it.
[131] And so you left Canada and you went to France.
[132] What changed for you as a consequence of doing that?
[133] How did you change?
[134] Well, first of all, I was exposed to an entirely different musical culture.
[135] And I had to think very differently about music than I had up to that point.
[136] So that was the first thing.
[137] And that involved an enormous amount of listening and and being open to my teachers also to what they had to say, even though their perspective was radically different than what I had to encounter it up to that point.
[138] It involved, you know, all the basic practical things of learning how to live in a new place, developing routines, developing routines that can sustain you when you're in a completely unfamiliar environment.
[139] That's absolutely crucial.
[140] You have to have a favorite coffee shop.
[141] It sounds stupid, but you have to have things like that, otherwise you go crazy.
[142] You know, constituting a circle of friends.
[143] Well, it's really, it might be useful for everyone who's listening to know that if you do make radical change like that, it is of crucial importance to establish these islands of predictability.
[144] And a favorite coffee shop is a really good way of doing that.
[145] You go there every day.
[146] You get to know people a little bit, and that stops you from drowning in the chaos of the unknown and enables you to start to put down some roots.
[147] And, you know, it's easy to dramatize and romanticize creativity and constant freedom.
[148] But even very creative people need routine to keep them sane.
[149] And they need a creative routine as well.
[150] I mean, you, how much time do you spend a week composing?
[151] you think?
[152] I know fairly precisely because I have a schedule.
[153] So I do minimum three hours a day of composition.
[154] It's difficult for me to go too much beyond three hours.
[155] It starts to be a question of diminishing returns up to that point.
[156] So when I'm working, I want to be in a state where I'm razor sharp, where I'm completely present, where I'm, you know, I have all of my forces marshaled and ready for the task at hand.
[157] And you can't be sort of half there and kind of checking your email and you really do have to be focused on it.
[158] And that sort of focus takes a lot out of you.
[159] So, you know, I would find it difficult to go beyond about three hours.
[160] But that's typically what I do.
[161] I try to.
[162] I could work for more than three hours a day, but I couldn't do it for days or weeks on end.
[163] I'd start to tire myself out.
[164] And so I eventually realized that past three hours a day, I was robbing Peter to pay Paul.
[165] I'm constantly telling this to students.
[166] I mean, one of the things that I say to composition students, I teach composition privately online, on Zoom.
[167] And one of the things I'm constantly telling them is, in addition to the obvious musical skills and all of that and all the work that goes into composing, you have to know how to work.
[168] And you have to get that right as early as possible in the process because it's incredibly important.
[169] And it's different for everybody.
[170] Some people can sustain that for 45 minutes.
[171] Some people can do it for three hours.
[172] Maybe some can do it a little bit more than that.
[173] I don't find it credible when people say to me, I compose 12 hours a day, which you occasionally hear.
[174] but I suspect that it's, you know, it's a bit of an elaboration of the facts.
[175] So you've managed to establish yourself as a composer, and that's your fundamental career, but you also have to teach.
[176] And can you walk everyone who's listening through what a typical week would be like for you?
[177] And that gives them some sense of what has to be done to make a living as an artist.
[178] Yeah, I mean, I would start by saying that it's not exactly that I have to teach.
[179] There are other things that I could do instead of teaching in order to get the necessary income.
[180] But I actually enjoy teaching, and it's something that is enormously enriching for my creative practice as well.
[181] So it's not like there's no, there's not one second of teaching time that is wasted time ever.
[182] I mean, it really does feed directly into the work that I do.
[183] But as far as a typical day, I mean, I try.
[184] Oh, well, because you discuss things with composition students and the problems that they're having are very likely to be versions of the same problems that you're having, but in a different form.
[185] And talking these things out is enormously helpful, and it's stimulating, you know, and things come up all the time spontaneously during these lessons that you can't necessarily plan ahead either.
[186] So it's a form of creative activity.
[187] I think if I'm teaching composition, the right way, then it's stimulating for both me and the student, and it's surprising, and it generates ideas.
[188] So with respect to apprenticeship and learning how to compose, I mean, one of the things that is almost like a rite of passage for composers is that you take Peral melodies.
[189] So these are Lutheran hymn tunes that were taken by Bach and harmonized in four voices.
[190] So there's, I can't remember exactly how many of them, there's about 300 of the youth that survive.
[191] And they feature in his cantatas and in his passions and oratorios and all of these.
[192] And they're magnificent.
[193] They're like a miniature course in harmony and in voice leading.
[194] And these very short little melodies, which were the sort of very, you know, popular tunes in their day, you can just take the melody and you scrap the other three parts that Bach wrote and you try to harmonize it yourself and you compare it to what Bach did and that's a that's a very uh it's an extraordinary exercise it it teaches you know a hundred different things at the same time so that's something that I did for years and years I did hundreds probably thousands of things what does it teach you and well it teaches you to link up your ears your eyes and your fingers first of all and that's really really useful if you're a composer so in other words you can see the music on the page.
[195] You can hear it inwardly, and you can also, you know, you can also bang it out on the piano all at the same time.
[196] So, and you can sing the lines.
[197] And also you can spot obvious technical mistakes very quickly so that you don't make them anymore.
[198] And it also, you know, you have to analyze the melody before you harmonize it.
[199] You have to know where it's going.
[200] Like that, one of the hardest things I think for composers to learn how to do is to develop a sense of trajectory.
[201] in music.
[202] It's excruciatingly difficult.
[203] What what beginner composers often do is they'll put a lot of effort into devising material that's interesting, like an interesting chord or an interesting melody or an interesting whatever it is, a rhythm or something.
[204] But you have to invent the material and its trajectory simultaneously.
[205] Those two things have to be born together.
[206] And that's a very, very difficult thing to do.
[207] And harmonizing those corrals gets you started on that in a sense because the the melodies have to lead somewhere.
[208] They have to have a direction.
[209] You have to work out where the cadences are going.
[210] You have to work out what key it's going to be in and all of these sorts of things.
[211] And how do you lead the phrase?
[212] So it teaches you a lot of things at the same time.
[213] How do you know where one song ends and another begins?
[214] And I'm thinking about the B side of Abbey Road, which I think is, well, I'm a great fan of that, along with millions of other people, not that that makes me special.
[215] it is a it is an agglomeration of a bunch of song fragments and yet it works brilliantly it's brilliant and and and you can listen to it over and over and you wish the songs would go on longer but but they don't and that's kind of that's interesting too because it's tantalizing it doesn't fully satiate you um it leaves you wanting more and that's somehow even more satisfying than than being beat over the head with with the same thing again and again um so how is it that we have a sense of what constitutes a song in its entirety and know that one song is different than another?
[216] The key makes a difference.
[217] What's crucial?
[218] Yeah, well, so you mentioned the B side of Abbey Row, which is a great example.
[219] That's, I mean, that's an amazing achievement on multiple different levels.
[220] There's an earlier example of that with the Beatles, which is the song A Day in the Life, which is similar in the sense that it consists of a series of fragments where the level of predictability in that song is extraordinarily low, right?
[221] McCartney did that with Uncle Albert too.
[222] That's right, yeah.
[223] Yeah, it's an exceptionally strange song in the sense that you have absolutely no way of determining what the next section is going to be like on any level.
[224] It's totally unpredictable.
[225] It's almost like a collage in a sense.
[226] But it works, and it has a kind of incredible cohesiveness to it.
[227] and you might wonder, where does that cohesiveness come from?
[228] So there has to be some kind of higher level framework that ties the whole thing together.
[229] So there's a few things that can do that.
[230] So one of them is the expressive context.
[231] So what is the expressive thrust of the song?
[232] So you can have enormous stylistic shifts within a song, but as long as there's some kind of a cohesiveness to the aesthetic or expressive project of the piece, that can still work.
[233] The other thing is you figure out fairly quickly when you're listening to that track, or indeed to the B side of Abbey Road, that predictability is going to be low.
[234] Unpredictability is going to be a feature of the song.
[235] You figure that out very quickly.
[236] So that then starts to become paradoxically one of your expectations.
[237] So then the game becomes, what is the precise way in which this unpredictability is going to be manifested?
[238] When am I going to be surprised?
[239] How long is this fragment going to go on?
[240] Okay, so that's an unbelievably important point.
[241] Now, imagine something unpredictable happens to you.
[242] So let's say you wake up this morning and tomorrow morning and there's a little, your side aches.
[243] Okay, so now your nervous system has a major problem because that could be nothing or it could kill you.
[244] And so, and the probability that it will kill you is not zero.
[245] And so you might ask yourself, well, why shouldn't you just run off to the emergency ward instantly every time something minor happens to you?
[246] And I've thought about this for a long time, trying to figure out what it means that something is differentially unpredictable.
[247] So imagine that you have a representation of the world, and that representation enables you to get from one place to another.
[248] and the farther there are things that you rely on as constants within that map so let's say you're married to someone and you're thinking about your future you've got your future mapped out and you you assume the presence of your marital partner as a constant and then you get divorced or they die because a tremendous number of your plans or because a huge proportion of your map is dependent on that constant, that's extraordinarily disrupting.
[249] And so it's like the more something is, the more unpredictable something is, the more it disrupts in potential when it makes itself manifest.
[250] And sometimes you have to guess at that, but that's basically the issue.
[251] And your nervous system, it's more complicated than that too, because you're nervous.
[252] So if the question is, how upset should you get?
[253] when something unexpected happens, the answer is you have to guess and you have to calibrate that a variety of ways.
[254] So your trait neuroticism calibrates that.
[255] So people who are low in neuroticism prepare for an emergency much less proportionately for every degree of uncertainty.
[256] And sometimes they're wrong.
[257] So maybe if you're really low in neuroticism, you're not anxious, you're not depressed, you're not shame -ridden, you're not guilty, etc. But if you have a small ache in your side, you'll go to the hospital and now and then that stops you from dying of cancer.
[258] Okay, so neuroticism is one, and your nervous system is built as a guess.
[259] Some people assume the world is more dangerous and some people assume it's less dangerous and that's built right in.
[260] Your position in the dominance hierarchy or in the competence hierarchy also matters.
[261] So as you move up a hierarchy, your brain produces more serotonin and that dampens down the degree to which you respond physiologically to, every unit of threat.
[262] And that's because the higher you are in a competence hierarchy, so the more successful you are, the less dangerous the world actually is, because you have more resources around you.
[263] So if you're like barely clinging on to the edge of the world, any stressor can knock you over the edge.
[264] So, okay, so back to the unexpected in music.
[265] I presume there's a hierarchy of rules that's sort of implicit in every song, and also in the corpus of songs that you're familiar with as a listener and the more the more all the songs you know depend on the integrity of that rule the more dissonant or unexpected the transition that violates those rules is that's exactly right that's exactly right that's exactly right and that's a very very crucial point because these things are determined contextually and sometimes the context is a is a broader stylistic one attached to a particular genre.
[266] Right.
[267] A genre tells you a bunch of things you can't do, as well as a bunch of things you can do.
[268] And you might think, if you're thinking romantically and not too clearly, that the fewer limitations on you, the better.
[269] You'd have more freedom with fewer limitations.
[270] But paradoxically, that's not exactly right.
[271] And that's really demonstrated in music, because the fact that there our genres seems to increase the range of possible productions rather than decreasing them.
[272] You know, so if you're writing a country song, well, there's a bunch of things you can't do before it becomes a rock song or a blues song, although you can play with the borders in an interesting way, but if those limitations weren't there, well, you wouldn't have that genre.
[273] You know, and some people might think that's good in relationship to country music, but there's great country music, just like there's great music of all genres.
[274] And so that seems to me to be associated with a point that we made earlier about training of the artistic temperament, which is that, you know, you have to go through an apprenticeship and discipline yourself before you can become free.
[275] And that's a good way.
[276] I want to bang this point home to some degree because especially for people who are out there who are young that are listening to this, you don't want to be thinking that constraints are your enemy if you're a creative artist.
[277] They're not your enemy.
[278] routine isn't your enemy discipline isn't your enemy genres aren't your enemy you can push against those constraints and you should but you want to push against them with respect because if the constraints weren't there you wouldn't have music you just have noise and you know anybody can bang their fists on a piano and there's infinite ways of doing that but none of them are interesting that's exactly right that's exactly right and on one level I mean you could you could take it a step farther and say that there's actually very little freedom in creativity in a certain sense, because we're talking about genres.
[279] So the instant you say, I'm going to write an opera or a pop song or a jingle for a TV commercial, instantly there are all kinds of expectations attendant upon those forms.
[280] You can play with those to some extent, but you can't completely violate them.
[281] If you want to make something that is meaningful enough to make something that's capable of carrying meaning within that genre, there's only so far.
[282] can really push it.
[283] So you come up against that very quickly.
[284] And then, you know, once you start, let's say, developing a style as a composer, then that style has certain expectations attended upon it as well.
[285] So you're not actually that free.
[286] Now, I think one major difference between music being composed today and music being composed 300 years ago is that the stylistic parameters of a piece today are much more embedded within individual works, or let's say, within the style of an individual composer.
[287] They're less sort of outsourced to the reigning genres or practices of the day.
[288] So do you think that that's one of the, like I find the more modern, the classical music, let's say, the more difficult I find to listen to it.
[289] But your claim is that now, in some sense, people, it sounds like now what people are trying to do is to invent a genre that's, that piece within which the piece is to be interpreted.
[290] Yes, is that a reason?
[291] So instead of having, instead of assuming the context that the listener brings, you build that context into the piece, but that also seems to place tremendous demands on the listener.
[292] It does.
[293] But I think that there are, that's an extraordinarily difficult thing to avoid.
[294] And again, you have to bring it, you have to connect that back to the industrial evolution to people suddenly, having a lot of leisure time to taking the listening of music a lot more seriously than they would have been able to in the past and having a much broader middle class with people with time on their hands to actually listen to things and not wanting to listen to hundreds of iterations on basically the same thing but wanting variety and being able to consume music much more quickly and here are huge numbers of different things from all over the place.
[295] And that's just the world that we're in.
[296] And obviously, that's taken to the end degree with internet as well.
[297] So it's very difficult in a situation like that to posit that there could be something like a universal style that would be practiced by everybody.
[298] And that would have its own codes.
[299] And that would be sort of broadly understandable to the public.
[300] To some extent, that role is now filled by popular music and commercial music.
[301] but within the sort of world of art music it's not you know it hasn't been the case for well over 100 maybe you could argue 130 years that there's something like a you know a broader cultural set of expectations about what's going to happen in a particular piece that's a long time ago so you know so that's that's it is challenging for listeners on one level but here's the other side of that.
[302] So people often say X, Y, or Z piece is challenging for the audience.
[303] Or this is a piece, you know, this is a very old remark that you get in early instances of modernism.
[304] So for example, when James Joyce was working on his final novel, Benningens Wake, he had a lot of extremely withering comments from older writers.
[305] This older established novelists and poets who said, effectively, you're leaving the common man behind with this book.
[306] This is going too far.
[307] And I think that, you know, first of all, Joyce's response to that was, well, I'm writing for an ideal reader with an ideal case of insomnia.
[308] So in other words, he's not writing for everybody.
[309] He's writing for a particular type of person that wants that kind of experience.
[310] And, you know, I think part of it is the dissolution of the 19th century idea of the audience in air quotes.
[311] Like the idea that there is a cohesive, mainly middle.
[312] class audiences that goes to symphony concerts and operas and is expecting a certain type of experience.
[313] And that falls apart pretty quickly in the 20th century because you start to see the rise of not the audience, so to speak, but a lot of different audiences consisting of individuals who might have broadly ranging tastes and might be listening to very different things.
[314] In the 1970s, for example, in North America, there was a craze for early music that sort of took the music world by storm.
[315] You started to have enormous numbers of Baroque recordings being sold, harpsichord music and recorder music and things like that.
[316] That's like a sub audience within the broader world of classical music.
[317] And you see that within the popular music world as well.
[318] There isn't one audience for it.
[319] There's like hundreds of little micro genres within it.
[320] So I think that's just part.
[321] partly a consequence of the dramatic expansion of the means of reproduction of music.
[322] Perhaps the problem with the dissolution of the idea of the audience is that wouldn't that go along with finding it more and more difficult to find an audience to play to?
[323] I mean, because you always, as a composer, you must be constantly fighting between the tendency to write for you and for the small number of people who can perhaps understand music at the same level.
[324] level at producing something that's of sufficiently broad appeal so that you actually acquire an audience.
[325] Yeah.
[326] Again, there are different, there are different expectations, I would say, within different musical worlds.
[327] But there is an audience for contemporary classical music.
[328] And it's a fairly, it's a surprisingly broad one.
[329] But it's not a universal one.
[330] It's not, you know, it's not, it's not nearly as as wide as the audience of people that listen to pop music.
[331] But nevertheless, there is an audience that exists, and it has its own sort of professional infrastructure, and there's a pathway towards entering into that world and to being successful within it.
[332] So that, I think, results in twin dangers.
[333] So one of them is you start playing for a particular type of audience that expects that particular type of musical experience.
[334] And it becomes a closed circuit, rather, quickly.
[335] And when that happens and when the audience is essentially shut out of it, or at least not particularly invited into that world, then I don't like that.
[336] That's not something that I want to do with my own work.
[337] So one of the things that I've tried to do with my channel, but also with my own creative work, it's not so much about numbers in the sense of, you know, how big can I make my audience.
[338] It's more a question of what happens if I remove barriers?
[339] What happens if I make it so that there's no extraneous barriers to understanding, appreciating, and enjoying this work.
[340] So that's something I've tried to do.
[341] So given that I have this to say, how can I present that in the most direct and enticing and engaging way possible?
[342] So what do you think you have, do you think that your music has something to teach its listeners?
[343] I've often been struck by the possibility that what artists do, visual artists, is to teach us how to see, literally.
[344] You know, that seeing is very, very complicated.
[345] Seeing color is very complicated.
[346] There's an objective element to color, but the color of something depends very much on the color of all the colors around it.
[347] And much more on that than you might even think.
[348] sorry I lost my train of thought there for a moment learning how to see oh yeah so so artists visual artists teach us how to see and so now we can all see like impressionists saw or anybody who's exposed to the internet can see like an impressionist saw because that even though that was a shocking way to see when it was first invented we've all been exposed to it so much that that just looks like the world in some sense we can see the world as an impressionist place musicians do they teach us how to hear?
[349] Are they structuring our auditory perception?
[350] What do you think musicians have to teach people?
[351] Well, a piece of music embodies a lot of different things at the same time.
[352] I mean, it's music has a lot of different components to it.
[353] It has an entertainment component to it.
[354] It has an emotional component.
[355] It has a scientific component to it.
[356] It has a religious component to it as well.
[357] different composers, different artists are going to focus more on one or the other.
[358] Some of them may succeed at doing all of these things simultaneously.
[359] It might also have a pedagogical dimension to it.
[360] It slightly depends on the individual artists and what their focus is.
[361] But I think that really powerful works of musical art, regardless of genre, I don't care if it's a pop song or a symphony, it doesn't matter to me. They're able to do several of those things simultaneously.
[362] in a very powerful way.
[363] And what that really does is it articulates a sophisticated worldview.
[364] And it shows this is how you could construe the world, aesthetically, spiritually, physically, and all of these things at the same time.
[365] And it's also positing like a potential universe within which you could live.
[366] So yeah, so it speaks of something profound.
[367] I got that impression, for example, with Johnny Cash's last albums.
[368] I don't know what happened to him when he hit 80, but man, something changed.
[369] I mean, I like Johnny Cash's music, much of it throughout his entire career, but his last few albums were profound.
[370] They're moving.
[371] And that's, that word comes to mind too.
[372] And that's so interesting because music has a movement and music moves you.
[373] And it moves you to a domain where the profoundly meaningful becomes a reality.
[374] It's something like that.
[375] And that's so important for people to be immersed in a world where what's profoundly meaningful is made real.
[376] It seems to us, it seems to me that we depend on that.
[377] Well, and it also, it happens within a sensual domain, right?
[378] That's the other thing.
[379] Music is, it has a level of, let's say, immediate seduction, I think, that can be extremely powerful so that you don't need to understand intellectually or technically how a piece is doing what it's doing.
[380] You can experience it directly through your senses.
[381] And I think that's one of its most powerful aspects.
[382] Hitchcock talked about that.
[383] He talked about how when he was plotting out a movie, he would be playing the audience members' emotions as though they were stops on an organ.
[384] I always love that.
[385] And a piece of music can do that as well.
[386] Right.
[387] So we have these highly trained people who devote themselves to a particular art. And then the consequence of that devotion is all of us have a broader range of potential experiences that we can engage ourselves in.
[388] And we pay for that because we want that to add depth to our lives and color to our lives.
[389] That's it.
[390] And also to give you a glimpse of the infinitude of possibilities, I think, and the range of potential worlds that can be explored.
[391] I think that's incredibly important.
[392] And that's perhaps one of the functions of artists.
[393] And it allows you also, I mean, music is, there's something communal about music in the sense that it allows you to connect with other people.
[394] But it also allows you to connect with something higher than yourself and to experiences that are beyond your conscious understanding.
[395] And I think all of those are extraordinarily important things.
[396] You know, that's being life preserving for me, I would say, generally through my life, music, because it's always spoke of the possibility of something higher.
[397] And I never knew what that higher thing that it was speaking of was.
[398] You know, I've investigated that.
[399] But the fact that music provides an immediate experience of that that's in some sense inarguable.
[400] It just happens.
[401] And then you can think, well, that just happened.
[402] And it's as real as anything else that happens.
[403] And that, I suppose, is part of what you referred to as the religious function of music.
[404] And it's not based on argument, right?
[405] It's based on the evocation of direct experience.
[406] And I suppose dance is like that, too.
[407] It's so interesting that people, young people, you know, their work is work.
[408] It's often tedious.
[409] It's something they have to force themselves to do.
[410] But they'll take what they've earned as a consequence of that tedium and then spend it voluntarily on exposure to music and dance, and they'll do that because it's intrinsically rewarding and pay for the privilege of doing so.
[411] And that's another indication of the action of something like a religious instinct as far as I'm concerned.
[412] And it has that communal element that you described too.
[413] It's something that we want to share with other people and that we do share because we match our bodies to the beat and everyone moves in harmony.
[414] and we're all in the same place at the same time in a concert when the musician is really communicating with the audience.
[415] And that can be, well, that's a remarkable experience.
[416] It's a high point if you're there when that happens.
[417] And the whole stadium is a musical instrument in some sense because everyone's on the same, they're in the same place at the same time, having the same experience.
[418] And there's something unbelievably powerful about that.
[419] And the musicians are communicating with each other.
[420] and with the audience simultaneously?
[421] That's it.
[422] Yeah, that's it.
[423] And, I mean, one of the things that I think COVID has revealed, you know, we've had many attempts at trying to put on concerts online, virtual concerts and so on, or in situations where there's a bunch of performers, they're all in different rooms and they're playing together over Zoom and then it's being live streamed and so on.
[424] And, I mean, to some extent, you can say that that's, you know, better than nothing.
[425] but I can't think of a single musician that I know who would say, well, that's good enough.
[426] You know, that's good enough.
[427] And we no longer need those sorts of communal experiences.
[428] I think everybody that I've interfaced with over the past year or so has sort of a real sense of weariness at not being able to do concerts and just have people together in the same room.
[429] There's something about that experience that is irreplaceable fundamentally.
[430] Well, you know, we also don't know exactly, how crucial those experiences are.
[431] I mean, I've been struck, if push came to Shav, I suppose, I'd have to admit that my favorite music is the music that I enjoyed when I was 18 or 19 or 17 in the 1970s or 1980s, late 1970s.
[432] There's something about communal musical exposure that seems to catalyze group identity at a very fundamental level.
[433] And I can't help but think that that's tied very deeply into our tribal nature, you know, that we united into cohesive tribes as a consequence of shared music and shared dance.
[434] And that's what brought us together as functioning cooperative units.
[435] And so you bond with your tribe when you're 16 or 17, and you do that around exactly these, particularly music and dance.
[436] And that, that catalyzes your identity permanently, I think, as the member of a particular group.
[437] And, well, and we, maybe you don't become completely human without that.
[438] It could be, yeah, it could be a kind of a necessary right of passage that is central in forming your identity.
[439] And that's true in every musical world that I've encountered.
[440] I mean, it's extraordinarily important to people to have a sense of engagement with whatever community it happens to be.
[441] Yes, well, and it's a moment.
[442] amazing how much people identify with their preferred genre.
[443] You know, it was funny.
[444] I went to my 50th high school reunion a while back a couple of years ago, and I made this tape of, because I lived up in Northern Alberta, and I suppose the preferred genre there was country music.
[445] So I made this tape because I had listened to a lot of old country music from the 30s through the 60s, and Hank Williams and some country swing and classics of country music.
[446] I really liked it, and I brought this tape to play at my 50th reunion, and I put it in my car stereo, and I got objections from the crowd the same way that objections used to come up when teenagers squabbled about what music should be played at a given party, and that was because my classmates still like country music, but all the stuff I played was too old.
[447] So, you know, they're bound to a genre, but also to a time.
[448] and it's nice to have like I exposed my kids to all sorts of music of all sorts of genres and I think that was really good for them it's nice to have that arbitrary limitation in some sense blown apart because then you can enjoy a wider range of music and then you have more things to enjoy but it's still striking how much people identify with a particular narrow genre and take pride in exactly that identification.
[449] It says something very deep about our group nature.
[450] That's very true.
[451] And that's a hard wall to break through.
[452] And that's one of the things that I've tried to do with my channel is just to just nudge people a little bit farther and say, well, you know, the world of music is quite big.
[453] And it contains all kinds of things.
[454] And just cultivate an attitude of openness towards listening to different things.
[455] And to try to do that without necessarily, thinking too much about the question of, I like it or I don't like it the first time you hear it, but just cultivating an openness and, you know, listening to it with curiosity.
[456] And then, you know, if you hate it and you're really having an awful time, then fine, you know, don't insist upon it.
[457] But you can really discover extraordinary things that way.
[458] And what I've discovered through the channel is that the number of people that are willing to do that is actually much greater than we realize.
[459] And there are all kinds of people who are open.
[460] into those sorts of experiences, but might not necessarily come across them in their daily lives.
[461] And there's various reasons for that.
[462] A lot of the music that I cover doesn't necessarily have a very broad exposure, but they hear it and they get drawn into it.
[463] And especially if you can connect that up with something that is familiar to them.
[464] A bridge.
[465] Yeah, well, with my analysis or composition students, if there's a particular area of repertoire that they're not familiar with and they're having trouble entering into it, then you show them an example of the painting or the architecture or the poetry of that time.
[466] And often, you know, there's a kind of a click and they realize, oh, this is what this connects to.
[467] And you can sort of enter into that world much more easily.
[468] So, and that's an incredibly effective thing.
[469] Whereas I think if there's no context, then it's terrifying.
[470] And there's nothing more upsetting for audience members than to listen to something and have the feeling that they have no ability whatsoever to tell if it's good or bad.
[471] People hate that.
[472] It's like, how am I supposed to, maybe I'm not having a good time, but I don't know if it's because the piece is bad or if it's because I'm not able to hear it because I don't know what's going on.
[473] And so I try to reduce that as much as I can.
[474] This provides some context, explain what the work is trying to do, what it comes out of.
[475] And that can go a long way to removing those sorts of barriers, I think.
[476] Well, that's one of the advantages to YouTube, isn't it, is that you can communicate with people who would normally be excluded from, well, from, you can communicate with people that would normally be excluded.
[477] It's certainly the case that I've found that there's a massive market for the discussion of, long -form discussion of philosophical ideas, far bigger market than anyone would have ever possibly imagined, including me. So there's...
[478] That's it.
[479] Yeah.
[480] So let's round this out.
[481] You've spent the last 20 years developing a creative career.
[482] It's a very rare thing to accomplish.
[483] Advice for people who are interested in composition.
[484] Like, how do you build yourself into an artist?
[485] What do you have to do to be successful?
[486] and what pretensions do you have to drop?
[487] The first thing is that being a composer, let's say professionally, is almost impossible, right?
[488] So that's the first thing to understand, I think when you're getting into it, is that it's unbelievably, almost inexpressibly difficult to do.
[489] So the odds that you're going to fail are high.
[490] So that's the first thing you have to confront.
[491] So that gives you a certain degree of humility, I would say.
[492] The second thing is you have to have a range of skills, I would say.
[493] And I mean, we mentioned this at the outset.
[494] You said that it's, you know, being talented and creative is not enough.
[495] In fact, it's really not enough.
[496] There are, you know, I've met so many brilliant, talented people who haven't been able to establish themselves professionally.
[497] They haven't been able to get a foothold because they don't have the other skills necessary.
[498] A lot of that is interpersonal.
[499] A lot of it is practical.
[500] You have to be deeply pragmatic in order to do this.
[501] And so what does it mean to be pragmatic?
[502] And I mean, people often, you know, they have contempt for musicians or artists who sell out.
[503] But it's not that easy to put yourself in a position where you have the privilege of selling out.
[504] Let me tell you.
[505] So you might want to, you might not want to start by being contemptuous of developing that as a temptation.
[506] Absolutely.
[507] Well, I think one thing that's very, very important is to understand that there, as I mentioned, earlier, there is an infrastructure in place for people who want to be composers.
[508] So there's a network of festivals, there's a network of ensembles and orchestras that commission pieces and so on, and there are audiences attached to all of these different structures.
[509] So on the one level, you could say, well, there's an audience that already exists, and maybe you can tap into that.
[510] But I think what's incredibly important to understand is that increasingly today, you have to really constitute your own platforms yourself and you can't rely on those institutional structures because a lot of them are actually rather tenuous in the sense that a lot of these things are state funded you can't guarantee that the state funding is going to go on indefinitely and you don't know at all if the state can actually communicate with the audience you know especially with the rise of new technology I mean I found this with book marketing is that the old go -to sources for publicizing a book are no longer relevant.
[511] And the book publishers don't know what to do about this.
[512] You know, they're still stuck, well, maybe they're stuck five years in the past, but that might as well be 20 years.
[513] And so you do have access to all these technologies like YouTube and Spotify and so on.
[514] But that also means to use those.
[515] You also have to dispense with any contempt you might have for sales and marketing.
[516] And I think it's a big mistake to think about it as selling out.
[517] I think the way you should think about your art is that not only do you have to create it, but you have to communicate about it.
[518] Because if you don't communicate about it, no one knows it exists.
[519] And so it might be of high quality, and it might be deeply engrossing for you to engage in it, but that doesn't mean that you're going to be able to keep body and soul together.
[520] And so you have to drop your contempt about communication.
[521] That's right.
[522] That's right, because it's extremely easy.
[523] to ignore a new composition.
[524] It's very, very easy.
[525] And even the people that listen to these things, it's very easy for them to ignore it.
[526] So you have to come up with a compelling reason why somebody would want to do that in the first place.
[527] So that's a very important part of it.
[528] The other thing is when I talked about institutions, there's also the universities.
[529] It's extremely common in North America for people to study composition at a doctoral level.
[530] and I would encourage people to be open -minded about alternatives to doing that.
[531] So the reason for that is that fundamentally composition, you know, if you really think about it, it doesn't actually belong in the academy.
[532] It's not really an academic pursuit.
[533] It's been shoehorned into it, partly because it's not obvious where composers fit or where they should go.
[534] But framing composition as research, which is what happens in doctoral programs, I can't think of a more dismaying outcome than reframing composition as a form of research so that nobody has to listen to it.
[535] I would be skeptical about that.
[536] And I would think about where it might be optimal to take your work and where it might be optimal also to try to learn.
[537] And so where do you think it is if someone wants to learn?
[538] And are you talking about composition in the broadest sense?
[539] Like let's say there are listeners to this discussion who want to write a rock song or want to write a blues song or how generalizable is your advice and where should people go apart from your channel?
[540] What should people do if they want to learn how to compose music?
[541] Find people who know more about it than you and get all the, extract all the knowledge you can out of them.
[542] I believe actually in a kind of apprenticeship system, which I think is optimal.
[543] And that's actually how things did work for centuries.
[544] And like a very practical, hands -on pragmatic approach to all of the aspects involved in being a composer, not just, obviously, the artistic side of things, but also how do you write a score, how do you format it, how do you get a publisher, how do you work with a record label, how do you get your pieces performed, and all of these other aspects to it.
[545] So all of those are incredibly important as well.
[546] And I think that the best place to learn those things is to find a composer who, they don't have to be.
[547] be a superstar in the composition world, but they just have to know more than you do and figure out how they did it and work with them and see if you can help them.
[548] And that's a powerful way of doing it.
[549] So there are various pathways that exist that can help people to achieve their goals.
[550] And is it where would you like where would you start to look for that?
[551] Like if I wanted to learn how to compose a rock song, to write a rock song, where would I start looking?
[552] I guess I could Google it.
[553] Yeah, Google is, you know, a logical first place to look, and that's what a lot of people do.
[554] What seems to happen quite often is you'll Google it and you'll come up with, you know, a YouTube channel or an artist who has a, you know, a particular prominence, let's say, on social media, and you'll look at their content for a while and then at some point you may reach out to them.
[555] So that often happens, but it can also be just someone in your community or someone local.
[556] You might find going to concerts is a good way to meet people.
[557] Obviously, you can't do that now, but eventually we will be able to again.
[558] So going to concerts, if there's a piece that you find striking, talk to the person who wrote it.
[559] If there are performers that you want to get to know, just go up to them.
[560] Musicians are, you know, fairly open to that sort of thing because we've all had to deal with multiple, almost insurmountable barriers in order to get, you know, even a toehold in this profession.
[561] So what I've found is that generally speaking, composers are happy to help out other people that want to do the same thing, within reasonable limitations.
[562] Well, there is pleasure in mentoring someone.
[563] Absolutely.
[564] It's like you've got some hard -won skills and truths that you've managed to sort out after two decades of bloody combat trying to do something impossible.
[565] It's like you're thrilled to share that with somebody else.
[566] Maybe it'll save them some time.
[567] all right well you have a family now yeah you're married you have a daughter yes I do yeah she's almost three impediment or help to your career oh it's a it's a help it's a huge help unquestionably in fact why why I don't I don't think I could do it otherwise because the nature of my work you know I'm always going out on a limb what I'm doing is barely possible, right?
[568] So if I didn't have an adequate support system that, you know, that held this whole thing up together, then I'd be, I don't think I could do it.
[569] I really don't.
[570] So that's probably going to be true for most people.
[571] Occasionally there's going to be someone who, for one reason or another, either they can't live with somebody else or whatever.
[572] But for most people, that's going to be the case.
[573] And so there's a level on which my life is predictable in the good sense, right?
[574] There are certain things that I don't have to worry about on a daily level.
[575] And that frees you up immensely.
[576] There's a 19th century French poet who said that in order to be properly free in your imaginative creative work, there needs to be something predictable and almost boring about your home life, not boring in the bad sense.
[577] boring in the sense of, let's say, free of terrifying, chaotic disorder.
[578] Well, I think, you know, you spoke of music continually representing the relationship between order and chaos.
[579] And so then the same thing applies in your creative life is you want to order everything that can be ordered so that you can tolerate the exploration.
[580] and the risk necessary to engage in a creative enterprise.
[581] And so, again, we'd say, you know, don't.
[582] Art gets romanticized in a counterproductive way for the want -to -be artist frequently and leads them to be what contemptuously avant -garde about things they should be grateful for having.
[583] And that would be friends, family, intimate relationship, some daily routine, discipline, work ethic, all of that.
[584] It sounds so bourgeois, you know, it's not, it's at odds with, well, maybe you want to die at 27 of alcohol poisoning.
[585] And if that's the case, then you can forego all that.
[586] But if you want to have a long and creative career, it's not such a bad idea to nail down some stability around you so that, well, so that you can survive over.
[587] the long run.
[588] That's it.
[589] Well, people forget also that the romantics lived in an era where life expectancy was considerably lower than it is today.
[590] So it's like, well, you can do the, you can have a bohemian lifestyle and die at 30.
[591] And, you know, comparatively speaking, perhaps you've lost a little bit less of life compared to what you might have had otherwise.
[592] Today, you know, you can live to 90, you can live to 95, maybe beyond.
[593] It's like you don't want to, you know, be in a horrible state already at 30 or 40.
[594] So if you can avoid that, and this romantic myth of the artist that needs to be enmeshed in chaos and suffering, needs to be definitively destroyed.
[595] It's a pernicious myth.
[596] People talk about artists like Van Gogh and Beethoven and so on, but Beethoven would have been more productive had he not had to contend with the things he had to contend with.
[597] You know, Van Gogh would have had a much longer career.
[598] And they would both have preferred not to suffer, right?
[599] not to be dealing with all kinds of tragic circumstances.
[600] They would have preferred that, you know.
[601] Artists would generally prefer to have a nice home and stable existence and something happy and fulfilling about their life.
[602] Well, there's also the proclivity of people who are living a dissolute and undisciplined lifestyle to pass that off as artistic engagement.
[603] And you can get away with that for quite a long time when you're young, but it starts to deteriorate pretty badly by the time you hit, I would say, the end of your 20s.
[604] That's it.
[605] And one other thing that I would tend to say to composers is to try to not waste time, because you have the sense that you have an unlimited vista ahead of you, and you really don't.
[606] And you have to be extraordinarily careful about how you're using your time, what you're aiming towards, and how you try to get there.
[607] And having a sense of articulating that, I think, is, extraordinarily important.
[608] And so you, well, do you have concrete goals set up?
[609] So, for example, when you're working about three hours a day, I think this is the last question I'll ask you, but when you're working about three hours a day, do you have a productivity idea in mind?
[610] Like, are you trying to hit a target for the year, for two years, or for three?
[611] Like, I have a friend who writes a novel a year.
[612] He's done that for 25 years.
[613] He writes every day.
[614] He wants to produce a novel a year, and he imposes that on himself.
[615] it could be a different strategy, but it can't be none.
[616] Yeah, well, I have to compose a certain number of pieces in order to have the income from commission.
[617] So that's part of it.
[618] And so I kind of have it, but at the same time, relative to the other things that I do, commissions are not particularly well paid on an hourly level, let's say.
[619] I mean, that's just the reality of it.
[620] It might take me 10 ,000 hours to finish a piece.
[621] So nobody's going to pay me $100 an hour to write a piece.
[622] for 10 ,000 hours.
[623] You know, the economics of it are impossible.
[624] So you have to understand also that when you're writing a piece as a composer, you know, you're going to be taking time away from things that you could be doing that would earn more money.
[625] So you have to figure out what the balance is.
[626] How, you know, how much can I do that before it starts to eat seriously into my possibilities financially?
[627] So in my case, but also you have to think reasonably about how much you can produce and maintain a certain level of quality consistently and also have enough time to regenerate yourself and come up with new ideas and not just merely repeat the same things over and over again.
[628] So it's going to be different for different people.
[629] Some artists are very spontaneous and gestural and intuitive and they don't need a lot of planning when they when they write a piece.
[630] Others take a long time to think and and carefully plot out what they're doing and produce a lot of sketches and so on.
[631] In my case, I'm rather slow.
[632] I'm meticulous.
[633] And I need to take the time to do it properly.
[634] And it still happens that I have to write a piece twice.
[635] Recently, I wrote a violin concerto for a group in Switzerland and then completely rewrote it.
[636] I spent eight months writing an entirely new draft of the piece for an orchestra in Kiev and Ukraine.
[637] And that second version of the piece was not a commission.
[638] So it's hard to justify doing things like that.
[639] But sometimes, you know, the piece hasn't quite coalesced.
[640] It hasn't quite gelled, and you have to do that.
[641] So typically, it's, you know, for me, it tends to be about two to three pieces a year, something like that.
[642] I can't really push it too much more than that.
[643] So I know with writers, I tell writers, start writing.
[644] How?
[645] Well, pick a question that you'd like to investigate.
[646] This is more nonfiction writing because I can't give advice about fiction writing, but nonfiction writing.
[647] Pick a question you're interested in and start trying to answer it.
[648] and start writing.
[649] And maybe you start writing for 15 minutes a day every day.
[650] And maybe it's 20 minutes and maybe it's 25 minutes.
[651] But you do that every day sort of religiously because you set your mind to it.
[652] And then maybe you can expand that upward to the three hours.
[653] And you get better at something by doing it and by analyzing it.
[654] And if you don't have anything to say, then you should read some more about your question, the specific question that compels you.
[655] So you need a question that compels you.
[656] I don't know how much overlap there is between that and composition.
[657] like do you would you say to someone who wants to write music to start writing music like do you do jump right into it and what what do you do that's it the other thing that i tell them is right for the waistbasket do that ritualistically so what that means is you say to yourself for the next half hour i'm going to sit and write and i'm going to write on scrap paper or whatever it is and then the rule is the the the agreement you make with yourself is that at the end of that half hour you have to throw it out.
[658] Okay, and you do that every day.
[659] You do it for two weeks and see what happens.
[660] And that's an extraordinary exercise.
[661] A lot of students find that very liberating because they're no longer thinking in terms of, well, this is not good enough to keep.
[662] It's not an issue.
[663] You know you're going to throw it out.
[664] And that just takes away those inhibitions.
[665] Well, you know, there is neurological evidence that the creative linguistic facility and the inhibitory linguistic facility are not the same brain area which is to say that the production unit and the editing unit are separate and if you try to like I see with beginning writers that they'll try to they'll write a sentence properly it's like Jesus get the sentence down then worry about whether it's proper you can't do and they do that partly because they don't want to throw away I want to get this right it's like well that isn't how to get it right the way to get it right is to write a bunch it's Darwinian overproduce and cull, overproduce and cull.
[666] And then you separate the editor and the producer.
[667] Absolutely.
[668] That's exactly it.
[669] And these strategies are incredibly powerful.
[670] So there's no reason why somebody has to be blocked or unable to write a single thing.
[671] You just have to find out some strategies sometimes.
[672] And that's part of the process of learning to be a composer or a writer.
[673] Well, you can lower your expectations to the point where you can meet them.
[674] You know, like you can type 400 words.
[675] They don't even have to make sense in terms of, they don't even have to be structured in sentences.
[676] Like there is a, there's a lower bound for quality that you can definitely hit.
[677] You can write 400 bad words.
[678] And so, and if you do that repeatedly, then they won't be so bad.
[679] That's exactly it.
[680] It's the same with, with sports or athletic endeavors.
[681] It's like you don't start out if you've never run before by doing a marathon.
[682] It's you're just going to hurt yourself.
[683] You're going to fail and you'll feel bad.
[684] It's the same in creative endeavors.
[685] You don't start out by trying to write a 900 -page novel if you've never done it before.
[686] So you have to have to have proximal goals that you have a hope of actually being able to meet.
[687] And you set the target a little bit back so that it's not dead easy.
[688] It has to challenge you a little bit.
[689] But it can't be so difficult that you're going to feel like a hopeless failure, you know, even through trying to do it.
[690] And then what you do is you pile up these sort of little successes.
[691] It's like, okay, can you do a 15 -second piece?
[692] Can you do a 30 -second piece?
[693] And then you just keep moving the target slightly back.
[694] And if you do that realistically, over years, you can become a master at something.
[695] Well, so then the other thing you're learning while you're doing that is to master your own time.
[696] Like you don't want to suffer from the delusion that your time is your own.
[697] First of all, you're not very disciplined to begin with.
[698] And so your time is wasted by preoccupations that you can't control.
[699] all, your involvement in Facebook, your, your tendency to go off task and do something, you know, that's, maybe you're watching television or looking at pornography or God only knows what it is, but it's not, it's not focused attention on your, on your, on your, on your explicit goals.
[700] If you start with these incremental projects, the way that you're describing, you can also learn to gain control over your own mind so that you can start to have some time every day that's actually yours.
[701] and creative.
[702] And that's just as important.
[703] It's just as important to learn the discipline to do that as it is to make the project itself.
[704] And so maybe you start with 15 minutes a day if you can do that.
[705] And if you're lucky, you can end up with a couple of hours that you can have for yourself and your creative projects.
[706] That's it.
[707] You know, I feel silly telling these things to you because I learn a lot of them from you.
[708] And you don't learn these and you don't learn this in composition school, you know.
[709] You don't learn this in a conservatory, but in their way, they're as crucial, they're as critical to being able to do it as to being able to write a correct piece of counterpoint.
[710] And what I often see are artists or young people aspiring to be artists who don't have the first clue about just how to work, how to go about it, how to establish a work routine.
[711] And, you know, without that component to it.
[712] It's hopeless.
[713] All right, Sam.
[714] That was good.
[715] Thanks very much for talking to me. It was wonderful to see you.
[716] It was a great pleasure to see you, Jordan.
[717] It was really, really nice.
[718] Thank you for doing this.