Published
Part 2
What role do electronic tools and instruments play for your creative process? What does your creative space / studio look like and what tools does it contain?
Roughly speaking, everything starts at the piano, whether it's the upright or grand piano in my studio, or simply whichever piano I happen to encounter while travelling, touring or visiting someone. I collect hundreds of little excerpts using voice memos, then gradually distil them and bring them into Ableton, where I quantise and develop them before rewriting them properly. That's usually where the actual composition process begins.
I work with my Komplete Kontrol s88 keyboard and a collection of virtual instruments, depending on the project, Spitfire chamber ensembles, orchestras and choirs, Native Instruments synthesisers, or whatever obscure sounds I've come across online. From there, I move into Dorico to write proper sheet music for the musicians who will eventually record the parts live in the studio.
My friend and producer Devon Bate is involved throughout the process, as is my sound integrator Marc-André Mignault. Depending on the project, I also work with arrangers. Recently, that's included Alex Weston, who was Philip Glass's assistant, and William Brittelle, whose work includes the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The National and Kanye West.
Once the recordings are done, I usually produce a preliminary mix myself in Ableton, mainly to give the mixer an idea of how I hear things. For mastering, however, I prefer to step away and let a professional with a fresh pair of ears do their thing.
I'm currently learning Logic and Pro Tools because I sometimes feel limited by my existing workflow. Sibelius would also be a useful addition, and I still need to get my hands around analogue synthesisers. There always seems to be another piece of equipment or software to learn!
It is my impression that adding a conceptual, non-musical dimension to one's work is almost a prerequisite for commissions and grants. How do you view this tendency and how “conceptual” is your own approach to writing?
At first, I was quite purist about this. I felt music should simply exist for itself. But looking back through history, I realised that music has always been grounded in some kind of framework, purpose or relationship with the people around it. Mozart wrote for princes, Liszt for the public, Shostakovich for the communist party. There has always been something beyond the notes themselves.
Looking at my own work, I also started noticing recurring patterns, contexts and stories behind individual pieces, and even entire albums. So my approach nowadays is to create, improvise, write, arrange, record, mix and master, and only then look back to understand, shape, organise and name what has happened. I search for a conceptual framework until it feels right. It has to be true, to come from somewhere genuine. Sometimes finding that framework takes longer than making the album itself.
The difficulty is that, as an improviser and a rather spontaneous, inductive composer, my ideas tend to come last. That's quite different from more theoretical or deductive composers, who might begin with a fully formed concept. It's therefore rather difficult for me to know, sometimes months or even years in advance, what a project will ultimately be about. But I do find my way around it, gradually identifying a theme or an angle, putting it into words and using that framework to guide the project.
And, of course, when it comes to grant applications, I get quite a bit of help from my management team and specialised grant writers, depending on the programme. I always make a point of reviewing, brainstorming and rewriting the creative sections myself, though. I need to recognise myself in what we're saying.
For many artists, life-changing musical experiences take place live. Few works these days, however, are performed beyond their premiere. What, do you feel, does this mean for composers, and the music they write, and how does this reality influence your own work?
I'm in a rather fortunate position, as I get to perform live and tour shows that are usually adaptations of previous albums, sometimes around a hundred times each. I'm very conscious of how lucky I am. We're borrowing a little from the pop industry, where you release an album and then tour it for a year or two.
My situation is quite specific, although I can relate to the other side of things. We occasionally put together special performances, an outdoor festival show with a chamber orchestra and guest artists in front of 40,000 people, for instance, or symphonic concerts in proper concert halls, where we present orchestral versions of my albums alongside excerpts from the classical repertoire. We've also recorded an improvised album in just three hours, which we deliberately decided to perform only a handful of times.
That said, I have enormous admiration for classical musicians and conductors who spend so much time preparing a piece that they might perform only once. And even more so for composers whose work, as you mentioned, receives a single premiere, sometimes isn't even recorded, and then simply disappears from the programme. There's something rather beautiful about that ephemerality, especially in an age of endless reproduction. You had to be there. You witnessed something unique.
Still, I don't think this is a particularly sustainable model, nor an easy one for composers. I'm very much in favour of getting as much as possible out of the effort and investment involved in creating something. If a piece can be recorded, written down, reduced to sheet music, transformed into different arrangements and performed again, why not?
Of course, that requires organisation, distribution and, ultimately, an audience willing to listen and support the work.
How, would you say are live performances of your music and your recording projects connected at the moment ? How do they mutually influence and feed off each other?
So far, I've deliberately avoided letting the prospect of a live performance dictate how I compose or record. I feel that would unnecessarily limit the possibilities.
I still believe strongly in the album format as a journey, from point a to point z, rather like a film. It's something we create and present through the imagination, not for the eyes but for the ears, even though titles, narratives, imagery and visual references inevitably influence how we perceive it. At least we're in control of that narrative.
Only afterwards do I start thinking about the live version, which, for me, often begins with a series of limitations. How many musicians can we afford? How many people do we need for sound, lighting and tour management? How many can fit in a van? How many hotel rooms do we need to book? The glamorous side of touring!
I then work with my friend and arranger François Vallières, from the Orchestre Métropolitain, who helps me adapt the album for the stage. In parallel, I collaborate with my friend and artistic director Myriam Sophie Deslauriers, who helps shape the show, its pacing, the balance between new and older pieces, spoken moments, scenography, costumes and everything happening before and after the performance. That's when we really try to bring the album's world to life, transforming what was originally a linear listening experience into something three-dimensional, or at least attempting to.
It's also important to me that the musicians and the wider team are brought to the forefront. We're all working towards the same objective. Since I'm performing my own music, the composer needs to step aside during the show to make room for the pianist. Sometimes I even hand over the spotlight to a quartet, whether acoustic or amplified, and let the musicians carry a whole sequence of pieces together.
To some, the advent of AI and 'intelligent' composing tools offers potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. What are your hopes, fears, expectations and possible concrete plans in this regard?
This is still rather theoretical for me, as I haven't actually started working with AI. I was considering it recently, but, somewhat surprisingly, I realised that much of the current AI landscape seems designed to replace humans, performing tasks faster and supposedly better than we can. The problem I have with that, particularly in music, is that creating and interpreting music are precisely the things I enjoy most. Why would I want to outsource them?
Of course, AI could be useful for brainstorming, suggesting ideas, helping with arrangements, perhaps even working in the style of someone else, or eventually my own style, given enough material. But I'm constantly evolving, and the available references are still rather limited and generic-sounding. If there were a tool that could challenge my arrangements, question my compositions, help with critical thinking, troubleshoot problems or identify mistakes, I'd be delighted to integrate it into my team. As a member, not as the leader.
The performance aspect is another matter. I've attended self-playing piano concerts, with instruments such as the Disklavier and Spirio, and I've seen holograms. I don't particularly feel the need to see human performers replaced by machines. I'm not impressed or moved by a robot fighting, running faster or playing louder than a human being. What moves me is the risk a person takes when they gather their courage, sit in front of an audience, open themselves up and offer their vulnerability.
[Read our feature on the Disklavier by Jameszoo]
[Read our feature on the Disklavier by Deru]
I think I'll only become genuinely empathetic towards AI when it manages to share an experience of its own, and perhaps make me empathise with what it's like to exist as an AI. Until then, I've decided to take a step back from that world and position my music and live performances as non-ai.
The Montreux festival intends to preserve its archive of recordings for future generations. Do you personally feels it's important that everything should remain available forever - or is there something to be said for letting beautiful moments pass and linger in the memories of those that experienced them?
That's a tricky question, and I think I could make a case for both sides.
On the one hand, the danger of recording everything is that we end up fetishising the recording itself. Take keith jarrett's famous Köln Concert. In my opinion, something rather beautiful and spontaneous happened there, but the fact that it was recorded and released as an album has also turned it into an object of almost obsessive reproduction. People have even learned to replay it note for note. What's the point of that?
I understand the desire to share a little of what it might have felt like to be there, but perhaps we should also remember that it was improvised, and try to recreate that sense of discovery by attending improvised performances ourselves. On the other hand, imagine if we had no trace of it whatsoever. That would be a real shame. It's wonderful to be able to revisit something, to find inspiration in both the process and the result.
There's also the sheer amount of space all this material occupies, whether in physical archives or online data centres, not to mention the question of access. When information becomes so abundant, curation becomes the real challenge. We need to bring things back to a human scale.
I suspect the answer lies somewhere in between. We should try to preserve as much as possible, while accepting that, over time, we'll inevitably have to do some housekeeping. That's happened throughout history, often for purely physical reasons. Hopefully, the best things will survive for future generations, even if we lose a few wonderful things along the way. well, that's life.
Are there things that you are passionate about but rarely get to talk about?
Staying within the musical world, I'm fascinated by understanding why people like what they like. I've noticed, for instance, that many people around me tend to respond to very specific harmonic progressions, transitions or arrangements. I'd love to dig much deeper into that.
I'm a massive fan of musical analysis, but not only in the technical sense of understanding the structure of a fugue or the principles of a toccata. Those are, to me, some of the keys to understanding and appreciating music, but I'm equally interested in why these structures make music beautiful, and how they might relate to human experience.
Take a theme and variations, for example. Isn't it a little like life, where we keep trying to experience the same thing over and over again, knowing perfectly well that it will never be quite the same? Or the recapitulation of a theme in a sonata, it's almost like saying, the fun is over, we're back home now, but we're not quite the same because we've lived through all of this together.
I'm not sure this field even has a proper name yet. Somewhere between musicology, psychology and sociology, perhaps. But I'm convinced there's a way to better understand why music affects us in certain ways, and consequently, how we can affect people through composition. I find film composers particularly attuned to this, sometimes perhaps a little too much!
But I'd happily spend an entire interview discussing why a particular chord progression makes us cry, why a certain transition feels like coming home, or why we keep falling for the same musical tricks. I think there's a lot more to explore there.
