Name: Sean Clarke
Occupation: Composer, flutist
Nationality: Canadian
Recent release: Sean Clarke's new album A Flower For My Daughter is out via Navona.   
Recommendation for Ottawa, Canada: Ottawa has an amazing and inspiring art gallery, the National Gallery of Canada!

If you enjoyed this Sean Clarke interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram.
 


Many people perceive classical music and contemporary composition as having high barriers of entrance, both for listeners and musicians. What have your own experiences been in this regard?

Thankfully, the barriers for listeners are now unprecedently low. It’s easy to access a huge range of classical music recordings for free or low subscription fees with streaming services.

However, there is still the misconception that you need to have a lot of historical and musical knowledge to really enjoy it. The truth of course is you can just hit play and explore, just like any genre. So there needs to be efforts to demystify it, avoiding pretentiousness at all costs.

On the professional side of things, unfortunately, the barriers are as high as ever. Specialized musical training from an early age is still expensive and hard to access, and university is increasingly costly with decreasing scholarship support. Worst of all, the profession is set up so that income levels are extremely low, projects with the highest profile and highest prestige cost the most in terms of time and money, and funding is project-based instead of aimed at creating sustainable jobs and predictable income.

All of this creates a highly unequal system where those who have the least financial independence face the highest barriers in terms of creative opportunities, career longevity, and time to focus on high profile projects.

This isn’t the case for other professions requiring a high level of training and expertise. Becoming a lawyer or a doctor, for example, presents similar financial hurdles to becoming a professional classical musician. But once you’re working, there is not as great a discrepancy between those who are financially secure (through their family or partner, for example) and those who are not.

Those with large student debt will indeed shoulder a greater financial burden than those without, that is true. But the possibility of a predictable, liveable income ensures that most will not have to drop out of the profession for financial reasons. The training costs are offset by an eventual steady income based on expertise. With music, all the upfront costs remain, without any security once people enter the workforce.

These thorny economic issues need to be addressed before we can hope for music to be a truly equitable career path.

As of today, what kind of materials, ideas, and technologies are particularly stimulating for you?

Paintings and movies are really important to me. Paintings (especially those of Monet, van Gogh, and Turner), inspire me because the complex use of colour reminds me of the expressive power of harmony in music.

Movies are similarly evocative with their use of colour, light, and framing, but with the added element of time, which mirrors musical form. The dramatic use of pacing, editing, and formal structure echo how time is organized and manipulated in music, and so I always find watching movies to be musically stimulating, even if the parallels are a bit abstract. I love Eastwood, Tarantino, Ozu, P.T. Anderson, Scorsese, Chaplin, Malick, the list goes on and on.

For similar reasons (a melding of technique, structure and playing with time), I love stand-up comedy; there’s something so musical and rhythmic about it.

Where do most of your inspirations to create come from – rather from internal impulses or external ones? Which current social / political / ecological or other developments make you feel like you need to respond as an artist?

I’m inspired by going inward, trying to get in touch with my own inner world, my own emotions.

I think music is simply a representation of our conscious experience: that rich, complex feeling of being alive; that first-person, subjective, inside-your-own-head experience that is so hard to explain to others. We all feel it, but only our own version of it. So creating and performing music is a way of sharing our own internal experience with others. Nothing is more powerful than that.

While this approach can seem self-absorbed and divorced from real-world issues, I think it’s actually deeply relevant to our times. So many issues stem from the inability to see others as we see ourselves: unique and important, with complex, precious, complicated inner lives. Music is a representation of someone else’s inner life, and can reverberate in and echo our own internal experiences.

For that reason, music can directly, concretely and tangibly create feelings of empathy and togetherness. That is its power, and its constant relevance to today’s world, whether a piece was written hundreds of years ago or yesterday.

Composing has always had an interesting relationship between honouring its roots and exploring the unknown. What does the balance between these two poles look like in your music?

We’re always building on musical traditions and roots, layering on top of them even when we’re not aware of it.

I find it inspiring to look back at very old musical ideas, because the abstract, expressive elements show through more clearly. The surface-level style is so different from today’s that there’s no danger in mimicking it in hopes of achieving a similar impact. When the style is so different from your own, it’s easier to focus on the abstract, emotional truths built into the music.

When I listen to Bach, I don’t want to mimic Baroque techniques or styles, I want to internalize the emotional power of his music. Then try, in an utterly imperfect way, to express similar shades of emotion in my own style.

The way that past composers have achieved their results is gone; you can’t match them by mimicking their voice. But you can try to express similar, universal emotions in your own voice, in your own way. So I try to soak in the emotion of older music, rather than the style, so that I have a deeper reservoir to draw upon.
 
How much potential for something “new” is there still in composition? What could this “new” look like?

I think there is limitless potential for new musical ideas. From one angle, with only 12 pitches and a mountain of contemporary and historical styles already in existence, it can seem like there are few fresh creative avenues. But from another angle, things open up.

Imagine we take a single Mozart piano sonata, and change the very first note. Then we correct it, and change the second note instead. And on and on through the entire piece. Then we change two notes at a time, working through every possible permutation, then three, then four. Then we go back and keep every one of Mozart’s notes but shift the first one forward by a beat.

Before long we have hundreds of thousands of possible combinations of pitches over time, every one of which, to a greater or lesser extent, still sounds like the original Mozart piano sonata. A whole world of possibilities that haven’t even broken away from the influence of one piece.

The danger, I think, is not that there are so few possibilities for new chords, new forms, new ideas. It’s that there are so many new possibilities that it’s easy to stick to ones that are still orbiting around an existing style. These are new ideas, true, but push further and there are oceans more.

There are far too many choices, not too few.

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?

I start my composing process like a Luddite, at the piano using pencil and paper.

A pencil gives me the freedom to write down even the tiniest fragment of an idea and then build on it, expand it, vary it, draw abstract shapes and figures, write one idea on top of another, connect ideas with arrows, change the order, highlight promising phrases, and scratch out dead ends (but still see them through the scribbles in case I change my mind!).

The piano lets me explore and invent new chords and harmonies since the tone is richer and sustains longer than a MIDI instrument or electric keyboard. It’s also not my primary instrument (which is the flute), so I don’t find myself falling into familiar patterns or chords since I don’t have any baked-in piano technique that I need to ignore or work against.

Near the end of the process, though, I use a notation program to not only prepare the score but also to add new improvised details and layers. I listen back to the whole texture (having to imagine the musicality of the phrasing and playing, of course) and add anything that comes to mind.

I think of it like adding finishing touches to a painting while it’s on the gallery wall, before anyone sees it.

Working with long forms, complex concepts or new vocabulary is potentially more challenging today because they require us to remember things that happened perhaps minutes ago – while most of us are finding it hard to focus even on what's happening right now. Both as a composer and as a listener yourself, how do you deal with this?

The theorist David Huron talks about needing to create expectations in music. This is even more crucial with contemporary music since one’s musical language is not going to be familiar to the listener. If you don’t use the musical expectations baked into traditional harmonic and melodic styles, you have to create piece-specific expectations.

I try to do this by using repetition, particularly of harmonic progressions. A chord progression will return again and again, but each time slightly expanded or developed, a bit more complex, with the simplest version presented first. My goal is to create harmonic expectations while using unfamiliar chords. A listener will, I hope, hear a musical idea, then recognize it when it returns, even if it is intensified and varied.

This approach is driven by my favourite moments in classical music: when a phrase returns in a similar form, only to take an unexpected, highly expressive turn. Expectations are created, partially fulfilled, then upended in a wonderfully emotional, intense way.  

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?

Without recordings, this would be a dire situation. But the ability to share a piece widely, even if it has only been performed once, is extremely valuable. The most profound musical experiences are usually live, but listening to recordings can amplify the power of a live event rather than diminish it.

I heard the pianist Hélène Grimaud live one single time in Montréal, and it was something I will never forget. But the privilege of having her recordings available at any time and any place is something relatively new and incredible. We have an embarrassment of riches on our phones, in terms of books and art and music; the challenge is to take advantage of them.

Similarly, I have seen and studied and enjoyed many paintings by Monet that I haven’t seen in real life. But a picture in a book or a high-resolution image on a screen still affords a rich, life-deepening experience. And if I ever see the painting in a museum, the experience will be more powerful still because of my deep familiarity with the work, which I wouldn’t have had if not for the less-than-ideal experience of the book.

We could argue that one hasn’t really experienced a painting it until one sees it in person. But then we are, in effect, arguing that the vast majority of artistic experiences of the vast majority of people are somehow invalid or shallow. An artistic experience doesn’t have to be the absolute ideal for it to be valuable and life-enriching.

The implication for composing is that we always write with the goal that a piece has enough depth, detail, and richness to reward multiple hearings. When a piece can only be heard when performed live, the danger of that effort being wasted is real.

With recordings, we have a tool that can allow for multiple hearings of a piece and hopefully even spur new live performances.