Part 2
Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and about discovery. How do you retain a sense of playfulness and how do you still draw surprises from tools, approaches and musical forms you may be very familiar with?
Seek out the edges of your competence. They are always available if you are paying attention. Focus your efforts there, and you will make new discoveries whether you want to or not. I am always operating at the edge of my ability — never in the center, which is where we are the most secure with our technique, tools and materials.
Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?
None of the things you mentioned are directly music, since music is a human cultural activity; but they can provide a stimulus. The essence of music is found in movement and in patterns, both of which are found in abundance in the natural world. I think such phenomena are important to pay attention to, because human-made rhythms, especially in Western music, can be quite stiff or boring if one is not sufficiently sensitive to embodied experience, whereas they are infinitely varied and flexible in the natural world.
There seems to be an increasing trend to capture music in algorithms, and data. But already at the time of Plato, arithmetic, geometry, and music were considered closely connected. How do you see that connection yourself? What aspects of music do you feel can be captured through numbers, and which can not?
Music has to do with proportions, and proportions can be expressed with numbers. Music has many dimensions: it is an art, but it is also a science; it can be used for entertainment, but also for edification; it can express matters of tremendous gravity, but also the ridiculous. I am quite preoccupied with the deployment of patterns, of varying degrees of obviousness: a pattern can be totally subliminal, or totally obvious, and anything in between. I do sometimes use complicated numerical patterns in order to create this or that sensation of movement in my pieces, but that is only to project a surface; the listener doesn’t need to know, or care, through which torturous means the surface was arrived at.
How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?
Music clearly has an ethical dimension. When you create something, you are proposing to others that they spend their time in a certain way, which immediately raises questions of values and priorities, and there is a kind of unspoken contract between composer and listener that the latter will receive something of value in exchange for their time and attention. So I believe there is an obligation to improve that one corner of reality, that lies in the space between the work of art and the mind of the person engaging with it. There may be infinitely many ways to do this, but nevertheless, an important shift takes place when the artist concerns themselves with the quality and nature of the listener’s experience, above their own desires, which might be quite trivial. It’s not dissimilar to the habit of holding the door open for the next person who leaves the shop after you; we can do this in music, too.
We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold?
I find acoustic silence totally disconcerting and generally avoid it. For this reason, I find meditation extraordinarily challenging. However, I don't often have music on in the house during the day as I can't help listening to it analytically and it's hugely distracting to me.
Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?
It is inherently different, yes. The cup of coffee, if you are preparing it correctly, is always more or less the same. Creating a piece of music is quite a different proposition because there are infinitely more variables, and no obvious criteria for excellence. The artistic enterprise forces us to accept ambiguity and contradiction as baseline components, and to set aside the quest for certitudes.
If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?
I would encourage artists to be far more courageous. I feel we are drowning in middling ambitions at the moment. Let’s be candid: today, artists do not have a seat at the table; we do not exist in the public eye, and we are not moving the culture. That does not bode well, but I continue to be irrationally optimistic that some figures may emerge who challenge this dismal status quo. Perhaps they are already among us but we are deaf to their entreaties.
