The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Samuel Andreyev

Episode Date: February 19, 2017

A conversation with Samuel Andreyev: A composer, poet, teacher and performer. His music is performed, broadcast, recorded and written about worldwide, and is known for its expressive intensity, spirit of exploration and enormous range of timbres. Resolutely independent, his compositional process is marked by a rigourous perfectionism, with many projects taking years to reach completion.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. This is Episode 8, a conversation with composer Samuel Andreyev. You can support these podcasts by donating the amount of your choice to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, which can be found by searching Jordan Peterson's Patreon or by finding the link in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com. So I'm talking today with Samuel Andrea, who's a composer, a Canadian composer, who's currently residing in Strasbourg, where he's working as a composer, and we're going to talk today

about music. So, but I think we'll start off by having Sam talk a little bit about his career and position himself so that we can move into the conversation and provide a bit of context for everybody who's watching and listening. So take it away. Well, I'm a composer. I'm from Canada originally and I lived there until I was 22 and I decided actually fairly early on that I wanted to live in France. And so I moved to Paris where I studied for quite a number of years at the Paris Conservatory.

I remained there for 12 years and moved to Strasbourg two and a half years ago. I've been here ever since. So I'm mainly a composer, but I do a lot of other things as well. I'm also a poet, I'm also a teacher, I'm also a performer. So tell me a little bit about your experiences in North America first as a composer. Well, I should start by saying that because I left so young, I didn't really have the opportunity to put together anything resembling a professional career when I was living in Canada. But what I can say is that I started out in music by producing songs when I was a teenager, and that became something of an obsession. I was very interested in a

sort of unusual branch of the sort of singer, songwriter, tradition that involved paying attention to avant-garde manifestations of music and trying to incorporate those into the pop song format. And there is a very fascinating and lengthy history of that. And so that was sort of my initial foray into music. So I made a total of about eight or nine albums of songs. And as I was going along with that, I became more and more interested in forms of musical expression that were not easily compatible with the song format and that resulted in a kind of interesting tension.

And so towards the end of my sort of very short-lived career as a singer-songwriter, it became obvious to me that I couldn't resolve the contradictions between sort of popular forms of expression and the sorts of things that were really starting to fascinate me and just keep me up at night in the format of the pop songs. So that resulted in a kind of schism at a certain point where I was making songs that really didn't sound like songs at all. And it was from that point, it was a fairly straightforward matter just to abandon ship, so to speak, and basically take up a full-time composition. You said that you were trying to incorporate avant-garde elements into your songs, and

so I think maybe the first thing you could do is define for the listeners the difference between a song and other forms of composition, because it's not self-evident to people standing outside the professional musical universe, and also what you mean by avant-garde forms and why you were trying to incorporate them. Well, essentially, the song is a vernacular format. It's a form of expression that deals with materials that are familiar to everybody and that are accessible to everybody. So, in other words, the standard pop song has three chords for the most part. And so these are very easy materials to master. So anyone who is interested enough in it

can take the trouble to learn those three chords and put together something resembling a pop song. They might not be very good at it, but you can still, you can access the basic fundamental building blocks of the pop song fairly easily. Whereas other branches of composition are primarily written, they're not primarily things that come out of a performance tradition necessarily. In other words, they might be initially encoded as a score.

Then only after the score is written, do you have hopefully a performance tradition coming out of the piece. Whereas in pop music, it's the opposite. You start with the instrument do you have, hopefully, a performance tradition coming out of the piece? Whereas in pop music, it's the opposite. You start with the instrument, you start with performing, you start with the immediate tactile relationship you have to your instrument, and the music flows out of that. But you don't begin with the score with the written document. And these event-guard elements that you were talking about,

two things, what got you interested in them? Why did you think it was useful? And explain a bit more about what happened when you started pursuing them. I didn't think of it in terms of utility. It was something that had literally just grabbed me by the throat because one thing that started to happen was, in the 60s, particularly, you had this very brief cultural moment when there was a kind of crossover between what the post-war

avant-garde were doing and the most broadly popular rock acts. So, for example, the Beatles on the White Album, famously included a track called Revolution 9, which is a sound collage. It's a piece of sonic art. It is an absolutely no regards to rock song. And they did that because the John Lennon and Paul McCartney were interested in in Stalkhaues and things like this. And that's an extraordinary cultural moment.

And the Beatles were far from the only ones to do that. So if you get interested in that kind of music from that era, from the 60s and onwards, and you look at it closely, you can't help noticing that there's a kind of shadow world that's peeking through via these sorts of manifestations. And a lot of groups did things like that as well. The doors did that. They did very strange sort of collage avant-garde poetry and all sorts of things that you can't easily square with the demands of the pop song format. So as I was listening to these things when I was 12 or 13 years old, my attention was instinctively drawn to the more unusual elements of those records, which is interesting because when they came out, those were usually the tracks that everybody skipped. Great, great. You know, I was instinctively fascinated by them.

I always thought that Jim Morrison's foray outside of the song format was generally unfortunate, and I was confused, of course, when I listened to Revolution No. 9, although I thought that in the context of that album it was very interesting because that was a double album which was a very remarkable album and it seemed oddly enough to fit in some strange way. That whole double album fits together in a remarkable way even though there's quite a diverse range of song formats that are incorporated into it. So let's do a couple of things. Why don't we define what constitutes avant-garde, period?

It's not necessarily a term that people, they've heard it undoubtedly, but people hear all sorts of, what would you call them? Let's call them terms. They hear all sorts of terms that they're not necessarily that haven't been well defined. So you could tell us about the avant-garde. Tell us why it attracted you, do you think as well? Well, first of all, to define the avant-garde. I mean, it's a military term, and it simply means the unfortunate souls that are the first to go into battle. They're on the front line, so to speak. And so I suppose that in the artistic domain, it simply means people who are engaging in forms of artistic expression that are as yet untested. Now, you can certainly debate whether that term is at all historically valid anymore,

and there's a strong case to be made for saying that the avant-garde, in a certain sense, basically no longer exists, because it's been so thoroughly institutionalized and written about and discussed, and it's very, very difficult these days to make a work-or-part that actually shocks anybody You know, that's a kind of an interesting thing and that's a very recent phenomenon also I mean you can do absolutely outrageous things and and have them be installed in public places And it'll generate a certain amount of civic controversy, but nothing even remotely close to what would have happened 60 years ago even. Right. So that's the first thing.

And then interesting phenomena in and of itself. Right, so there's a kind of extraordinary tolerance for all sorts of artistic expression. But you could also argue that it's a form of societal indifference as well. You could say that well, the reason nobody is rioting and no one's shocked and seeking to have these sorts of cultural forms banned is because it simply doesn't matter. The sort of arts have been declared in a certain sense. I mean, there's an argument you could make in that sense as well. Well, people are so flooded with sounds and images now too that the sheer volume of those

sorts of things that we're exposed to, I also think, inoculates us against or also inoculates. Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. This is episode eight, a conversation with composer Samuel Andreyev. You can support these podcasts by donating the amount of your choice to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, which can be found by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon or by finding the link in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at self-authoring.com. So I'm talking today with Samuel Andrea, who's a composer, a Canadian composer, who's currently residing in Strasbourg, where he's working as a composer, and we're going to talk today about music. So, but I think we'll start off by having Sam talk a little bit about his career and position himself so that we can move into the into the conversation and provide a bit of context for everybody who's

watching and listening. So take it away. Well I'm a composer. I'm from Canada originally and I lived there until I was 22 and I decided actually fairly early on that I wanted to live in France and And so I moved to Paris, where I studied for quite a number of years at the Paris Conservatory. I remained there for 12 years and moved to Strasbourg two and a half years ago. I've been here ever since. So I'm mainly a composer, but I do a lot of other things as well. I'm also a poet, I'm also a teacher, I'm also a performer. So tell me a little bit about your experiences in North America first as a composer. Well, I should start by saying that because I left so young, I didn't really have the opportunity to put together anything resembling a professional career when I was living in Canada.

But what I can say is that I started out in music by producing songs when I was a teenager. And that became something of an obsession. I was very interested in a sort of unusual branch of the sort of singer, songwriter, tradition that involved paying attention to avant-garde manifestations of music and trying to incorporate those into the pop song format.

and trying to incorporate those into the pop song format. And there is a very fascinating and lengthy history of that. And so that was sort of my initial foray into music. So I made a total of about eight or nine albums of songs. And as I was going along with that, I became more and more interested in forms of musical expression that were not easily compatible with the song format, and that resulted in a kind of interesting tension.

And so towards the end of my sort of very short-lived career as a singer-songwriter, it became obvious to me that I couldn't resolve the contradictions between sort of popular forms of expression and the sorts of things that were really starting to fascinate me and just keep me up at night in the format of the pop songs. So that resulted in a kind of schism at a certain point where I was making songs that really didn't sound like songs at all. And it was, from that point, it was a fairly straightforward matter just to a band and ship, so to speak, and basically take up a full-time composition.

You said that you were trying to incorporate avant-garde elements into your songs. And so I think maybe the first thing you could do is define for the listeners the difference between a song and other forms of composition, because it's not self-evident to people standing outside the professional musical universe. And also what you mean by avant-garde forms and why you were trying to incorporate them. Well, essentially the song is a vernacular format. It's a form of expression that deals with materials that are familiar to everybody and that are accessible to everybody. So in other words, the standard pop song has three chords for the most part.

And so these are very easy materials to master. So anyone who is interested enough in it can take the trouble to learn those three chords and put together something resembling a pop song. They might not be very good at it, but you can still, you can access the basic fundamental building blocks of the pop song fairly easily. Whereas other branches of composition are primarily written, they're not primarily things that come out of a performance tradition necessarily. In other words, they might be initially encoded as a score. And then only after the score is written, do you have hopefully a performance tradition coming out of the piece? Whereas in pop music, it's the opposite.

You start with the instrument. You start with performing. You start with the immediate tactile relationship you have to your instrument. And the music flows out of that. But you don't begin with the score with the written document. And these are that guard elements that you were talking about, two things. What got you

interested in them? Why did you think it was useful? And explain a bit more about what happened when you started pursuing them. I didn't think of it in terms of utility. It was something that literally just grabbed me by the throat because one thing that started to happen was in the in the 60s particularly you had this very brief cultural moment when there was a kind of crossover between between what the the post-war avant-garde were doing and and the sort of most broadly popular Rock acts. So for example the Beatles the Beatles on the White Album, famously included a track called Revolution 9,

which is a sound collage. It's a piece of sonic art. It is an absolutely no regards to rock song. And they did that because the John Lennon and Balminkartny were interested in Stalkhaues and things like this. And that's an extraordinary cultural moment. And the Beatles were far from the only ones to do that. So if you get interested in that kind of music from that era, from the 60s and onwards, and you look at it closely, you can't help noticing that there's a kind of shadow

world that's that's peeking through via these sorts of manifestations. And a lot of a lot of groups did did things like that as well. The doors did that. They did very strange sort of collage avant-garde poetry and all sorts of things that you can't easily square with the demands of the pop song format. So as I was listening to these things, when I was 12 or 13 years old, my attention was instinctively drawn to the more unusual elements of those records, which is interesting because when they came out, those were usually the tracks that everybody skipped. Great, great.

But, you know, I was instinctively fascinated by them. I always thought that Jim Morrison's foray outside of the song format was generally unfortunate, but I was confused, of course, when I listened to Revolution No. 9, although I thought that in the context of that album, it was very interesting because that was a double album, which was a very remarkable album. And it seemed oddly enough to fit in some strange way. I mean, that whole double album fits together in a remarkable way, even though there's quite a diverse range of song formats that are incorporated into it. So why do you think the... So let's do a couple of things. Why don't we define what constitutes avant-garde, period? It's not necessarily a term that people... They've heard it undoubtedly, but people hear all sorts of... What would you call them? Let's call them terms. They hear

all sorts of terms that they're not necessarily that haven't been well defined. So you could tell us about the avant-garde. Tell us why it attracted you do you think as well. Well first of all to define the avant-garde. I mean it's a military term and it simply means the unfortunate souls that are the first to go into battle. They're on the front line so to speak. And so I suppose that in the artistic domain it simply means people who are engaging in forms of artistic expression that are as yet untested. Now, you can certainly debate whether that term is at all

historically valid anymore. And there's a strong case to be made for saying that the avant garde, in a certain sense, basically no longer exists, because it's been so thoroughly institutionalized and written about and discussed and it's very very difficult these days to make a work of art that actually shocks anybody. You know, that's a kind of an interesting thing and that's a very recent phenomenon also. I mean, you can do absolutely outrageous things and and have them be installed in public places and it'll generate a certain amount of civic controversy but nothing even remotely close to what would have happened 60 years ago even. and have them be installed in public places and it'll generate a certain amount of civic controversy,

but nothing even remotely close to what would have happened 60 years ago even. Right. So that's the first thing. And then interesting phenomena in and of itself. Right, so there's a kind of extraordinary tolerance for all sorts of artistic expression, but you could also argue that it's a form of societal

indifference as well. You could say that, well well the reason nobody is rioting and no one's shocked and seeking to have these sorts of cultural forms banned is because it simply doesn't matter. The sort of arts have been de-clawed in a certain sense. I mean there's an argument you could make in that sense as well. Well, people are so flooded with sounds and images now, too, that the sheer volume of those sorts of things that we're exposed to, I also think, inoculates us against, or also inoculates us against shock, but also makes it more and more difficult to be sufficiently original to actually have that effect on people.

I mean, it's not like people have dropped all their taboos because you see that taboos about what can be said, for example, just shift around. But it certainly does seem to be the case that it's harder for artists to play a role that it also, I suppose, speaks to some degree to the degeneration of cultural norms around all sorts of different areas because if there are strongly established norms, it's a lot easier to violate them. And that's pretty interesting because it also means you can't be a revolutionary unless there's a half decent tyrant around to hem you in. So, right. Yeah. So, why do you think the avant-garde attracted you instead of, I mean, it would have been more typical, let's say, for someone who started out composing pop songs

to continue in that vein, not to go down the rabbit hole of the avant-garde, which is a very strange thing for anyone to do. Yeah, a couple of reasons. The first thing is that the pop song format is interesting in that it only works if you stay relatively close to its parameters. And if you start to stray too far outside of them, then what you're doing basically no longer functions as a pop song because it's no longer vernacular. And so, I have a fascination with all sorts of forms of music. And the pop song is an incredibly difficult medium to work with in again because you, first of all, it's completely unforgiving.

You're working in basically an extremely compressed format. It's very rare for pop songs to be too much longer than three minutes. So you don't really have much room to maneuver. And you certainly don't have any room to maneuver structurally. I mean, you pretty much have to stick to the verse chorus, verse chorus thing for the immense majority of pop songs.

There's been very little variation in that since rock really, since the 50s. Where did that come from? I mean, I know the three-minute length was, that was actually a commercial imposition, if I remember correctly, but that structure, verse chorus, verse chorus, out of what did that originate? Well, that's an extremely old forum. And you certainly have, there are broke forums such as the Rondo or the Riturnel, though, that have an extremely similar forum where you alternate one fixed element that keeps returning the same way, essentially, and then a secondary element that sort of gives you a certain degree of relief, a certain degree of contrast with the preceding element.

So that's a chaos order interplay, I guess, of sorts. At least that's the way I would interpret it. And why the three chords structure? Why do you think instead of two chords or four chords, why do you think that's dominated? Well, a three chord structure is the bare minimum that you need in order to have any kind of harmonic tension, basically. And in music, generally speaking, you, in tonal music anyway,

you have a very simple and effective polarity between what's called the tonic and the dominant degrees. And that's something that was, that basically structured the entire classical period, the Baroque period as well to, to assess the work. So I want to unpack that for us. And tell us what that is and why that works musically, why it works aesthetically.

Well, it's one of many possible strategies for music. And in fact, if you go beyond the Baroque into Renaissance music or even earlier, you don't have this sort of strong polarity between two opposing harmonic regions. That was something that really came about during the 17th century, basically. Is that conversational? Do you think that, like, one of the things that I've noticed about many pieces of music is that they sound like dialogues. There's an announcement on the one hand, and then there's a response on the other, and then there's an announcement, and then there's a response on the other and then there's an announcement and then there's a response. It seems to me to be based analogically, metaphorically, maybe in dialogue. You hear that in many classical pieces as well.

So I would say that it's a way of setting up an extremely rudimentary story, an extremely rudimentary form of narrative in the sense that you start with a region that is established, that you basically have as your home base, essentially. And then you modulate to a different harmonic region. And through this process of modulating, you move from your home base to somewhere else. And that creates attention. It creates nostalgia.

And it creates a need for resolution. There are plenty of other ways you can do that. Great, great. Well, and it creates a need for resolution. There are plenty of other ways you can do that. Great, great. Okay, so that's interesting. I mean, for a variety of reasons, one thing that made me think about right away is the proclivity of small children to do that with their mother in particular.

So the space around the mother is defined as home territory, partly because mother is familiar, but also partly because if something goes wrong and mother is there, mother can fix it. So there's a zone around the child when the mother is there, where there is access to immediate resources that will fill in where the child's skills are lacking. And then what the child's skills are lacking. And then what the child will do after obtaining sufficient comfort from being in the presence of mom is to go out far enough into the world driven by their curiosity, which has an underlying biological manifestation. There's an exploratory system that drives the child out there to discover new information and to extend their

skills by pushing against the unknown. And then when that when they either get tired or when they go out far enough so that negative emotion as a consequence of threat predominates they run back to their mother. And so it reminded me of that and it's also a microcosm of the hero's journey, right, which is the journey from a safe and defined place out into the unknown and then a return. And that is, well, I wouldn't even say that's the simplest story. That's the simplest story that also involves transformation. So it might be the simplest good story, something like that. But I had mapped that to that chorus. What did you call it? Verse chorus.

Yes, yes, yes. So that and that return to stability. So, so you think, so does that make sense? That mapping as far as you're concerned? Absolutely, because one of the one of the main tenets of the, of the, the, the tonal harmonic system is that you have an eventual return to where you started out at the end. So there's, there's always the promise of a return at the end, and that's the essential structure that

you see in pop songs as well. So it's fundamentally a directional, it's a tithological sort of structure, and that's extremely different from Renaissance music, which basically has a very, very weak degree of directionality. It doesn't seem to want to particularly go anywhere. It sort of floats. And that's an interesting thing that music sort of went off in this other sort of direction. Did you have any idea why that transformational curd? Well I think it's because there is a need for a more dramatically intense form of music.

And that certainly took place during the Broke. And of course, that's related to the power and cultural influence of the Catholic Church. And the need to create forms of artwork that would be extremely dramatic and expressive. And in Broke music, you have this intensification of musical expression, that's quite striking. In a sense you could say that that strongly directional thrust that you get in music developed even further in the classical and in the romantic periods as well, to the point where it becomes this sort of constant push towards ever more cataclysmic forms of expression until it actually ruptures the fabric of music itself.

You no longer can contain this level of expressivity. Okay, so let's go back a little bit to the inside. Lots of the people that are listening, I presume, won't know the temporal relationship between those periods of musical development that you just described. So why don't you go back to the medieval era and then just lay out the periods of time across which music developed and then we'll go back to that idea of this cataclysmic upheaval that sort of shattered the structure of music, say, in the 20th century. Well, there's only so far you can go back because music has only begun to be written down in a way

that's reliably retrievable since the late 14th century or so. So if you try to go too much farther back than that, you end up with documents that are extremely hard to decipher. We don't really know exactly what these things sounded like. We've got about 600 years. Yeah, we've got about 600 years. So roughly speaking, the Renaissance period extends to about 1600. So roughly between 1400 and 1600. And the Baroque is usually said to end with the death of Bach in 1750. Then you have a kind of nomans land that lasted 20 or 30 years, where there was a sort of in between period

of generalized experimentation. But there wasn't yet a strongly characterized style yet. And then you have classicism that starts really towards the, well, in the second half of the 18th century. And romanticism is a little bit more difficult to pin down, but Beethoven is considered to be one of the earlier exponents of a romantic style. He died in 1827.

So that more or less takes us to the end of the 19th century. Then you have something that you could plausibly call late romanticism, although that's very difficult to define. And that sort of dovetails with modernism. Can you set out some of the defining features of each of those, set out the defining features of each of those epochs, let's say. And then maybe you can walk us through this idea that you expressed about increasingly cataclysmic changes. And then that resulting in, in say, 20th century music, that takes us back to the avant-garde as well. Right. Well, the first thing I would say is that these sorts of categorizations are generalizations.

I mean, you can't take 200 years of human cultural endeavor and reduce them down to a single word. And of course, these things are constantly flowing and transforming. And there are also all sorts of overlapping contrasting movements happening at any given time. So this is really just for the sake of convenience. But if you wanted to make a generalization,

you could say that during the Renaissance, music was essentially linear. It was essentially melodic and contrappunto. In other words, you would have individual voices, individual lines that would be flowing along together. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, But music was not yet primarily thought of in terms of vertical or harmonic sonorities. That really starts to happen with the broke early in the 17th century. So, broke music has a much stronger harmonic dimension to it. It's, you could argue that it's harmonically somewhat simpler than Renaissance music,

because it's more codified. That's when you start getting the first practices on harmony, the first theoretical writings on music, also, is in the Baroque period. It's also characterized by the use of highly stylized and very strong dance rhythms. The classical period is essentially a simplification of the broke style in a certain sense. Music became strongly divided between what you would call foreground and background elements. In other words, you would have a very prominent melodic line, and then you would have an accompaniment. But the two are not necessarily of equal importance, whereas in the broke and the Renaissance,

the voices would have tended all to be of basically equal importance. There's very little foreground background distinction in Baroque and pre-Beroque music. So the classical style is a simplification. It's also a codification of musical forms. That's when you start getting the symphony, the string quartet, the concerto, while the concerto is also a Baroque form,

but it starts to take on the characteristics of other classical forms, such as the sonata in the classical period. So you get this codification and this simplification of the basic tools of music in the classical period. And the classical period is quite extraordinary, actually, because it was a rather short-lived period in which, for a very brief span of time, there was an overlapping of popular and savant styles. So you had sort of a vernacular dimension in the classical period.

You had very simple popular forms and popular forms of expression, and you also had the absolute highest degree of musical science, and they were combined, not in every composer, but certainly the one that comes to mind is having been the highest manifestation of that combination of the different qualities as Mozart. And that's probably a unique historical phenomenon. I mean, there aren't very many composers that can achieve that. And in a sense, you have to be historically lucky. The state of the musical language when you're alive has to coincide with your own need to push the boundaries of your art.

And so that's an amazing thing. And Romanticism, more or less, puts an end to that, because it puts a tremendous degree of focus on the individual. It's an exacerbation of the idea of the self. And it elevates the subjective emotional impulses of the artist to a very high realm. And so you get these forms of individual expression that begin to not really jive with the underlying rules of the art. And that's when things really get complicated. Okay, so that moves us into the, you just talked about the classical period. The next one that comes along is romantic.

Right. Okay. What happens during the romantic period? And you said Beethoven was an early manifestation of that with his sort of cataclysmic music. Well Beethoven starts off writing music that's strongly influenced by Hayden, who's one of the most important classical composers. And by the end of his career, he's doing pieces that basically are destroying these forms from within.

It's very, very interesting if you listen to late Beethoven works like the Hammer Clefier Sonata, for example, or the late String Quartet. It's basically pulling apart these forms in a rather ruthless way and just pulverizing them. There's an analogy between that and what happens in other fields of endeavor, you know, that the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn talked about, and also the developmental psychologist, Piaget, with these revolutions in stages. And so for PHA or for Koon, scientists were working within, let's call it an axiomatic theory, and then they could accrete new data into that theory without disrupting the axioms.

But now along, now and then some data would come along that didn't even fit within the axioms, but now along, now and then some data would come along that didn't even fit within the axioms, and then that data would generally be ignored for a while because no one knew what to do with it, you know, and and it isn't reasonable to leap to the conclusion that if your theory doesn't predict something that it should immediately be scrapped because there's always the possibility that the data itself is wrong, but it is now and then something new comes long that's enough to collapse the science in some sense all the way down to its unstated assumptions, which then have to be recast.

Now, Piaget thought of something similar in terms of developmental stages in children and in adults, that the same thing happened when we were organizing our internal representations of the world. But Piaget couldn't seem to be a bit of a relativist in that he believed that paradigms could be in commensurate, that you really couldn't speak between them. It makes them a precursor in some ways to postmodernism. But Piaget's point was that each stage transition in human cognition, which was accompanied by a descent

into chaos of some sort, as the anomalous data accumulated, each stage that emerged was superior to the one before it, because you could do everything you could do in that stage, plus you could do more. And so for PGA, there was actually progress along the stage transformations, whereas for CUN, although I think CUN is less emphatic about that, that many of these readers seem to think, whereas for CUN, it was more like lateral transformation or something like that. I mean, it's been a big debate, but it sounds very much to me, like something similar is happening as musical forms develop.

Oh, sure. It would be impossible to make the argument, though, that this constitutes in any way a progression or an improvement over time. You can't really make that argument about musical forms because there are always checks and balances, there are always pluses and minuses that are attendant with any novel form of musical expression. Well that's the things that seems to distinguish art from science in some sense is that it isn't obvious that art is improving. Right, right, there is at least in principle it seems obvious that science is improving in that Piagetian way is that we can do everything we could plus more.

But art, so maybe art really does have that structure that Thomas Kuhn talked about where the paradigms are in commensurate and there's no progression where science has the more Piagetian structure where there is actually something that you could regard as genuine progress. that you could regard as genuine progress. Well, what you do have is a constant oscillation between two fundamental states in music history, which is you have periods of expansion, periods in which axioms are tested and rethought, and periods of consolidation in which you strip away

and you simplify. And that's a permanent feature of music history. It's a very interesting thing. When things start to get a little bit too wild, there tends to be a counter-reaction and a tendency towards simplification. Certainly, that's what happened in the classical with regards to the broke period. It's interesting because it kind of implies that the entire system over time is oscillating around some sort of golden mean or something like that. I mean, not that that thing actually exists in some sense because it would move, you know, where the appropriate place is is going to be dependent on the nature of the landscape at that

point. But the case you're making is that despite that, there's some boundaries on the movement, there is not too much chaos and there, which would be, I suppose, too much revolutionary transformation. And I suppose that the degeneration there would be the experimentation could be so extreme that would actually break the boundaries of what people are willing to accept as music. There has to be a social contract between the artist and the public, unless you're making a totally hermetic art, unless you're making an art that is not necessarily intended for public consumption. So that's a very delicate balancing act, of course, because artists have the natural inclination to explore, and audiences have the natural inclination

to stay close to things that are familiar to them and that are already satisfying to them in some manner. So what do you think that contract is exactly? Because obviously, the audience also doesn't want to stay exactly where they are. It's very difficult to speak in general terms of audiences because they're made up of individuals. And individuals have wildly different approaches to music and wildly different tastes in music as well. I mean, one of the extraordinary things about music is that it has so many different functions simultaneously. If you were to take all the different functions that music is that it has so many different functions simultaneously.

If you were to take all the different functions that music fulfills and abstract out the music part, and then try to understand what phenomenon could possibly cover all of those different functions, you'd be very hard pressed to think of anything. I mean, music is a science, but it's also a form of entertainment. Okay, so you were just speaking about the actual function of music, and so let's pick it up there, because that's a really interesting issue, and the function and meaning of music, and I would really like to hear your thoughts on that, so let's go from there. You can't speak of a function of music, because music has so many different functions. They seem on the surface of it to be almost completely incompatible.

So you have music that functions as a form of an expression of religious devotion, but you have music as well that his primary focus is to get teenagers to go out on dates. You have music that is crassly commercial. You have music that is meditative and sublime. You have music that represents the highest aspirations of mankind, and music that is piped in through elevators I mean, that's just a very very partial list. I could go on and on and on

So again, it's a it's an absolutely amazing phenomenon in terms of the the sheer number of functions that it that it covers It's it's also it's good to dance to it's it's good for movies. It's Anything you can possibly think of there, there's been some form of music divide. Each of those functions is actually a little universe. I mean, the fact that music seems to be useful in movies is a strange phenomena, you know, because if you go see a movie that locks music, you actually become aware quite rapidly that it locks music. And it's much more two-dimensional in some sense that, I mean, you can do it, but it's much more two-dimensional.

It's much more difficult. What the music seems to do is to fill in somehow for the lacking context. It makes it rich and more real, which is even more surprising. And it partly does that by exaggerating, I think, the emotions that are being portrayed. But, well, obviously, if you could say completely what the music is doing in a movie, then you wouldn't need to put the music in

because you could just incorporate it in a story. But you talked about elevators, dancing, and movies, among many other things, and those three things are extraordinarily different because, obviously, what's being piped into the elevator is there to what calm the awkward silence something it's something like that was something familiar maybe it takes the edge off being locked in an elevator with you know multiple other primates that you've never met and people make fun of it too because it's denatured music in some sense.

But obviously, there's a demand and a requirement for it and a function. So, well, anyways, okay. So we've talked about the multiple contradictory and paradoxical rules that music can play. But let's go a little deeper. Why don't you tell us what you think music is doing and why it's so important? Assuming it is, in fact, important. It certainly seems to be. Well, again, it's very difficult to talk generally about that.

And if you look at non-Western cultures and the role that music plays in them, it's often extremely different from what we do with it. So for example, South Indian music is very, very long and drawn out, and it's essentially melodic. There's no harmony in it. These are extremely long forms, and you can't listen to them if you only have five minutes. It's an entire experience.

Tibetan music is very closely tied up with ritual, for example. It's a way of reinforcing a certain order of doing things in. So there are all sorts of examples. I think in more traditional societies, or more archaic societies, the music is rarely divorced from the surrounding context. It's not divorced from dance.

It's not divorced from masks. It's not divorced from the religious context. And one of the things you see as culture differentiate, let's say, you could say develop, but let's say differentiate is that there's a fragmentation of phenomena into their higher resolution subcomponents. So the language of biology, for example, continues to expand as we develop higher and higher resolution models of the world.

And as a society has more and more dimensions, it's possible to specialize more in each of the sub-dimensions. And that also breaks things apart, but also allows for their further manifestation. So we could say as a general rule, maybe as you go back into the past, then the number of things that is happening simultaneously along with music explicitly probably increases. You know, I've been struck by, oh, one of my friends told me about going to a Led Zeppelin concert in Sweden, and everyone was sitting politely. You know, he was from a culture where everybody would have been standing up and cheering and dancing and clapping and dancing essentially, right? Because of the music. But that was frowned

upon there, which is very, very interesting, because it's an indication of that kind of almost artificial fragmentation. Right. Well, I think that analysis is absolutely accurate. If you look at broke music, for example, what you have is a generalized, kind of stylized version of dance. It's not the same as music that you would actually dance to, but the entire Broke period really rests upon dance rhythms. That goes for pretty much everything Bach ever wrote from the Contadas down to the Fugues. They're all based on dance rhythms, fundamentally. That's a very interesting thing, because obviously nobody dances to the fugues. I mean, they're all based on dance rhythms, fundamentally.

And that's a very interesting thing, because obviously nobody dances to a fugue. I mean, I suppose you could, but that's not really its primary function. So a very interesting thing happens where you get music that is no longer explicitly devotional, that is it's not explicitly meant to be performed as part of a liturgical service of some kind, but it's not necessarily meant to be dense to

either. And that's, if you look at music as being a phenomenon that's easily existed for 10,000 years, I mean that's the amount of the span of time during which that's been the case is just a drop in the bucket. This is a very, very recent thing. The idea that you would get several hundred or several thousand people to go and sit quietly in a room while someone's playing and just sit there and listen, that's extremely recent. That really only starts to happen really in the romantic period. The idea of a concert per se where there's nothing else attendant on the experience of the music. Very well. and in pop concerts, rock concerts, a lot of that additional material has been put back in, you know, in the form of a light show,

and sometimes in more dramatic forms than that, but the light show, I suppose, is as close as you can get to representing what music is doing in a visual format. And I mean, that was conscious. I know that if I remember correctly, it was Ken Kizzi in his band of Mary Pranksters that first started to experiment with electronic lighting and that sort of thing in California when they were experimenting with LSD back in the 60s.

They were interested in synesthesia. I know there were classical composers who were playing with that much earlier. I suppose as well that in the non-electronic format, you could chase that back and off a long way, the idea of spectacle in encompassing music. So, okay, so let's circle around the musical element a bit more, and I mean, you've thought a lot about this, and you also write poetry. And I also want to get back to the periods

after the romantic, because we never did finish that discussion about the cataclysmic restructuring of musical forms up into the modern period. But let's start by pursuing the meaning issue. So you were gripped by music and the avant-garde, and you've thought about it for a while, and you've laid out some of the ordering functions of music, for example. But there's a disordering function of music as well. So give us some more your thoughts about exactly what music is doing for people and in the deepest possible sense. Well one of the fundamental aspects of music, if you were to try to define music you would probably have to conclude that it has two essential components, One is time and one is sound.

It's difficult to give too much of a higher resolution definition of music than that, because it very, very quickly starts to exclude all sorts of things that are thought of as music. But that's the essential basis of it. I would say that between the two, probably the temporal dimension is the most important. And fundamentally, I would say what music allows you to do is to experience forms of time that we cannot experience in so-called real life.

So, for example, in music, you can have a sort of distinction of actual lived time or a contraction, you can have multiple things happening simultaneously, you can have people enter into it effectively at a trans state where they're no longer aware of time. That's an amazing thing also. A lot of music has that explicit function to it. Well, the idea, you know, music has always struck me as something like a four-dimensional sculpture that's manifesting itself in three dimensions. Like when I listen to music and stereo listening of course enhances this, you can see these notes spread out spatially in the three dimensions that you're capable of perceiving from an auditory perspective. And so there are these patterns that manifest themselves moment by moment, but the entire pattern stretches across time. And so for me,

and then there's pattern upon pattern as well. And then there's transforming patterns upon transforming patterns. And to me, that's a very close analog to what the world is like. And it's multiplicity of layers that are all interacting. So far as anything is real, it constitutes a pattern that repeats either spatially or temporally. I mean, things like smoke, for example, a cloud of smoke is sort of pseudo-real in that sense, because it doesn't really have any borders,

it doesn't have any real repetition. But most things, although it does persist across moments of time, which is a form of patterning, but most things that we interact with do repeat, at least to some degree. That's what object permanence is, is the repetition of something across time. And music seems to model the persistence and the transformation across multiple levels all at the same time. And what you said about the distinction of time is interesting because Mercea Eliada, who's a great historian of religions,

and Freud himself both talked about the transformation of time and the transcendence of time in certain states, Freud noted that dreams were really good at compressing time or extending time. And you know, so people have that experience sometimes they'll hear their alarm go off in the morning. And instead of it waking up, they'll incorporate the alarm sound into a dream that seems to have gone on way, way longer, sometimes hours longer than the alarm itself. And the aliatic talks about the, he concentrated mostly, or much on the dream time of the original Australians. And they viewed normal time as sort of in sconce inside of an eternal time that was always

present that seems to be something like the time in which music unfolds, something like that. Obviously these are ridiculously complicated things. So, well, musical time is a very complicated thing. I mean, if I listen to a piece of music that's three minutes long, in no way have I actually experienced three minutes of real duration. I mean, that's an extraordinary thing. This actually allows me to connect to your question about the avant-garde, because one of the things that fascinated me when I was a teenager was I would be listening to a piece, a 20th century piece, that might be extremely short, it might be two minutes long, but I would not be able

to comprehend it, and that fascinated me. The idea that I would not be able to comprehend a piece of music. Now, obviously that has something to do with my personality. I. Not everybody's going to be fascinated by a piece of music that they find impenetrable, but in my case I did. There's also something else to note there is that because you're musically gifted it's going you're going to have to go a lot closer to the edge of what's regarded as let's say conventional or even the edge of what's regarded as music before you encounter something that's

impenetrable. Whereas for the average listener, let's say, which in that category, I would certainly include myself, I don't have to go that close to the edge before I run into music that's complicated enough so that I at least have to listen to it multiple, multiple times before I understand the patterning and the repetition. And it's a lovely thing to experience when you listen to something complex, say the fifth or sixth time, and pieces of it start to fall together. I really had that experience with box well-tempered clavier, which I had to listen to.

Jay's maybe 20 times before I would say I had anything remotely like enjoyment as a consequence. But and that clicking together of those patterns also seems to be beautiful in some sense. It's like you meet the music with your understanding. And in that meeting of the music with your understanding is that tremendous revelation of beauty and depth and harmony and all of those things

that are so good about. And it's more than that, it's life affirming, which is a very strange thing about music as well. And I've noticed that psychologically, like even nihilistic people, deeply nihilistic people, and hopeless people, still, they have to be pretty damn depressed before music loses its vibrancy and saver and life of

affirming properties which is a really magical thing. I would say that being open to the possibility that you could enjoy something even though perhaps it's difficult going the first few times you listen to it is probably a key aspect. That brings me back to this contract between the composer and the listener. Like, you see, I think what stops a lot of people, and I would again include myself in that, maybe particularly with regards to that guard art, is that in order to put in the time and effort that would be necessary for me to understand and appreciate something like the Well-Tempered Clavier, let's say, I have to trust that there's actually something

there, and then I'm not just having the world pulled over my eyes, and that I'm some kind of fool. And the problem with a lot of avant-garde, at least the potential problem, is that it's very difficult to dismiss the notion that you're being played for a fool, by tricksters and jokesters and frauds. And of course, you are more likely to be in that situation if you're listening to something new.

So I think part of people's hesitancy and unwillingness to throw themselves into something that's truly new is the suspicion that the emperor has no clothes and that they're being played for a fool. But you, so I do decide, how did you know what you should continue to listen to. Well, let's pull that apart for a second. Because if you look at things like the historical avant-garde,

in other words, avant-garde movements that took place, let's say a hundred years ago, just for the sake of argument, it's no longer avant-garde. It's been thoroughly picked apart by historians. There's been a sort of extended critical process that's already taken place. And that's sort of sifted out these artifacts and decided what's worth discussing

and what's not worth discussing. So I mean, one of the incontrovertible facts of music history or art history in general is that the works that are no longer able to communicate something vitally important to that addresses a present concern tend to fall out of favor. History is merciless, right? It's absolutely merciless.

And I mean, think of the tens of thousands of composers that were active during the broke period. We've, how many have we retained? There's maybe a dozen figures that are sort of still regularly performed and discussed and generally known to the public. So I mean, there's an absolutely ruthless selection process that goes on and of course one of the fundamental difficulties of addressing contemporary or modern forms of art is that that process of selection hasn't taken place yet.

So you as a listener are necessarily engaged with that process to a certain degree because the process of selection hasn't taken place. There is an overwhelming likelihood that what you're going to hear might not be of the highest standard. That's just statistical. If you figure that there are just to throw a number, 100,000 composers active in the world today, how many of them are geniuses, how many of them are producing work of the highest order?

You know, it's going to be a vanishingly small percentage. So that's not to say that none of them are doing extremely good work. It's just that if you're coming to that world for the first time and you're not familiar with it, and you don't sort of have the context to be able to navigate through that space with a reasonable degree of certainty that you can sort of sniff out the good from the bad, then yes, it's difficult. There's no point. Well, it's a good expansion of the metaphor of the avant-garde, because what that means as an avant-garde listener is you're more likely to be killed,

so to speak, like the avant-garde in a battle, and it's the same if you're laboring on the edge of musical composition, the probability that you're going to survive there in a real sense, and I mean practical like day to day if you're going to make any money, but also that you're gonna survive into the future is extraordinarily low. So, that's the case with this game. So why play it?

Yeah, but I would say, well, for the typical listener who doesn't know anything about broke music or classical music or romantic music, you know, who's afraid of it, or who's afraid of being made a fool of for their ignorance when they first enter into it, which can easily happen, which is quite sad. Why should they go to the, who should go to the effort of listening to what's truly new and why should they do it? In Europe, you've got overwhelming musical capacity, so it's clearer in your case.

Well, first of all, the career aspects of writing music that, as you say, lies sort of on the edges of what is recognizably musical to a broad public. Well, is it a higher risk game? That's an interesting question because if I were to say try to start a rock band, you know, and, and, and write, write songs that were in a conventional format, you could certainly argue that I would have just as much trouble if not more establishing myself than if I were writing in a form of musical expression that's more esoteric. Simply because the crushing amount of competition is actually probably a lot greater in that domain

than in much more highly individualized forms of musical expression in a sense. So in a way, you could argue that it's a difficult argument to make because it is very difficult in any case to have a career as a composer, but it's probably somewhat easier to carve out a space for yourself if you're working in a rather individual musical idiom than if you're doing something that the overall culture is already completely saturated. Right, fair enough, fair enough. Well then what about the listener though, so I buy your argument, but then the listener, like if I go back and listen to only those composers that time has

conserve, which by your own admission are composers that in some manner, some mysterious manner, still have something to say, which I also don't understand. It's like, what does it mean that Bach still has something to say? Or, I mean, it's the same as Shakespeare, I suppose, but it isn't obvious what it is that remains to be said. I don't get that. It's going to be something like the culture has not fully incorporated all of the perceptual genius

that that person had to offer. Bach hasn't been transformed into cliche or into implicit assumption or something like that. But because I think that one of the things that artists do, visual or auditory, is they teach people to see or hear. You know, the impressionists are a good example of that, because obviously there works, well, maybe not obviously, but there works produced riots when they were first publicly displayed. And it's a particular way of seeing the world

that has more to do with light than with form. But for most people, it's easy to look at an impressionist painting now. It seems, it's so embedded into our visual language that there's nothing about it that seems shocking. And so I think we've learned that. And I guess part of the question is, do we do, do, do composers teach us to, to hear? And once we've learned everything they

had to say, do, do we not need their lesson anymore? It's got to be something like that. Right. Well, the first thing I would say about that is we've used the word avant-garde quite a lot. I actually don't like that term very much. And the other thing I would say about that is we've used the word avant-garde quite a lot. I actually don't like that term very much. And the other thing I would say is that just because something is unfamiliar, it doesn't therefore follow that it's avant-garde, right? So I mean, there are forms of music that would be difficult for a certain listener to assimilate. But it might be something that was written 150 years ago. So, and it might be something that has, in a certain sense,

been thoroughly absorbed since by, let's say, certain listeners who are familiar with it, or people who are familiar with the history of music. But for someone who's never heard anything like that, it takes someone, for example, who is living in a complete indifference to art music in general, and has never heard Bach. I mean, if you played them you know at 20-minute collection of fugues, they might find the experience completely intolerable.

So I mean... Yeah, so that's interesting. So one of the things that you're suggesting is that the older great composers are still sufficiently, let's call them avant-garde, for the bulk of the population, so that there's still hunger for what they were able to achieve. It still doesn't answer the question of why those people in particular, I mean, we'd like to think that they were the greatest exponents of their art, and maybe they were.

I'm sure many great exponents have died unrecognized and some ones that are maybe not comparatively mediocre have been brought forward. I don't think that happens very often, but we would. Well, here's a potential way to answer that question. I would say that the great composers are the ones that fundamentally they own their material more thoroughly and in a more deeply personal way than other composers. In other words, there's a minimum of what you might call neutral material in their music. In other words, material that is essentially that already exists, that is almost like found material in a sense, and that

you don't have to work very hard to fashion into something resembling a coherent piece. A great composer in vents forms, they invent a language, they invent a universe, they take enormous risks. And I mean, these composers that we talk about that are familiar names to a very wide swath of the public, Beethoven, for example, was an absolute avant-gardeist in his time. I mean, the first performances of a lot of his pieces were truly shocking and truly upset people.

It's a very relative phenomenon all of this, right? So I mean, Bach was considered to be a composer by the end of his life who was writing overly thick, tortured music that was impossible to listen to, that was sort of tortured and ridiculously complex. So I mean, any composer you can think of that is considered today to be among the greats as, at some point, being horribly denigrated and humiliated and spoken badly of by the public of their time. So that's just a permanent feature of music history. And again, it's what you'd expect, too, though, because someone who is, let's say, going

in the right direction, but who is way ahead of everyone else is very difficult for them to communicate what they're doing. And it's very difficult for them to distinguish themselves from the naked emperor. So... Right. Well, Ezra Pound has a great quote, he says that artists are the antennae of mankind. Right, right. I think of their pseudopods, you know, like, right, exactly. And some of those pseudopods get bit off. Right. And any of them don't find anything of any value, but now and then everyone moves in that direction. Right. Yeah, well, it's akin to Jung's idea

that dreams and fantasy are the pseudopods of the mind. It's the same kind of idea. And it might be the same idea, in fact. So all right, so let's go back to your contention that of this explosive transformation that finally resulted in the radical transformations of music into the 20th century. Do you suppose those transformations

are any more radical than the preceding transformations had been? That gets us faster. They're faster. They happen more quickly. They happen more quickly. They happen exponentially more quickly. If you look at the expansion and the development of musical language from the medieval times,

it happened very, very slowly for a very long period of time for centuries. And then you could argue that it more or less coincides with the industrial revolution. It starts to, at that point, it really starts to accelerate at an extraordinary pace. And so let's take that analogy further. I mean, many, many things start to accelerate at an incredible pace in the industrial revolution. People get far wealthier and far faster than they ever had likely in the history of mankind. And then perhaps that allows for the funding of more orchestras and the funding of more full-time musicians because

You know you have to have a pretty rich society in order to have any musicians that are that are actually doing that at nothing else And they have more leisure time as well. Right, right, right. So that's all working in a positive feedback loop. Yeah Yeah, okay, so so it's happening faster. All right. So, so walk us through the post romantic period and tell us what's what's happening and maybe we can then get into the modern, like, I mean, modern by contemporary period and we can talk a little bit about your attraction to that. Well, in a sense, you could say that the the structures that had been coalescing since the broke, the forms and the genres and so on, start to break up in the romantic era.

They become highly personalized. You get composers that have highly individual projects. And also, very more importantly, you have composers that are starting to break away from the patronage system, from being essentially the servants of the nobility, and start having something akin to an individual career. And Beethoven is often thought of as being the sort of exemplary figure of that, the sort of one of the first composers

in music history to do that, to write pieces strictly out of his own volition out of something that he wanted to express regardless of whether there was someone necessarily who wanted to pay for it or not, or even who wanted to express, regardless of whether there was someone necessarily who wanted to pay for it or not, or even who wanted to listen to it. So, so that's a very, very fundamental change of perspective when that starts to happen. Yeah, well that's sort of the maybe that's the dawn of the idea of the individual genius that and maybe that rises in, maybe that rises in a conceptual space also as a consequence

of the ideas of the Enlightenment, because the Enlightenment, what the Enlightenment did are the Renaissance, maybe even more accurately. The Renaissance started to dignify creative individuals with the same status that, that, before that sort of canonical day, it he's had. And I think you see that transformation in visual art in the medieval period, the archetypal figures have this very, what would you call it, abstract, almost, almost, like, modern animation,

like representation. And it isn't until the Renaissance kicks in, especially in Northern Italy, where the divine people, Christ, especially in Northern Italy, where the divine people, Christ, say, and Mary, start to take on recognizably human forms. They become individuals, identifiable individuals. And I think that's a two-way process, is that not only is the deity becoming identifiable individual instead of formulaic and abstractly represented

almost like a hero glyph, but the individual is becoming deified at that point as well. And that seems to me to coincide with the idea of the great artist and the great independent artist, which is a very strange concept. And that's got to be also a function of wealth. The mere fact that that conceptualization is even possible. You know, I mean, if you look back at the history and you look at maybe the master of the undifferentiated, artistic and religious form might have been something like the Shaman, but the Shaman was fundamentally a healer and that was his role. And I suppose how you could say in a sense how he made his living, he just used all these cultural tools

to do that. But his economic base in some sense was a lot wider. So all right, so we're in the 20th century, and we have this plethora of novel musical forms. And that's happening because there's a lot more musicians, and there's a lot more listeners. So the speed takes off. And I guess another thing that happens is that leaves the typical listener more and more

in the dust. Well, again, not necessarily. You have plenty of composers, even in the romantic period, that are writing essentially vernacular music that doesn't push the boundaries terribly. And the ones that we've retained, again, are the ones that contributed the most, and the ones that deviated the most from the sort of standard operating procedure of the day. So we simply, we don't retain the ones that were average, the ones that were operating safely within the bounds of what was accepted conventionally to be music. So that's the first thing. So we have a view

of history that is extremely filtered in that sense. We have no idea what it was like actually to be alive in 1870 and see things from that perspective. So that's the first thing I would say. Yeah, well, that's a funny thing, too, because even with, say, rock music or any other genre, when you hear a band that was once considered creative, but you hear them 20 years later, you can't tell that they're creative, because if the creativity was of any reasonable sort, it's become, I wouldn't say necessarily cliched.

Maybe that's what happens to the artists that aren't retained. Is their contributions become cliched? Because everyone else picks it up, and you hear it implicitly in every other piece of music that's being done. And so you listen back in the past and you think, oh, there's nothing in that that I haven't heard before. And so it seems to me that the Beatles are a good example of that, at least for me, when I listen to them, I wouldn't say so much their earlier stuff, although it's got a vitality that is still somewhat compelling, but their later music still strikes me as

sufficiently surprising. It hasn't all been incorporated into the rock lexicon. Truly great music has a depth and it has a semantic overload in a sense that no matter how many times you listen to it, you can't actually exhaust it. That's an extraordinary thing. I mean, there are- Yeah, that's a story. Certainly.

Well, how can that be? I mean, it leads me to conclude that the piece must contain more than the composer knowingly put into it, in a sense. I mean, it's an amazing thing for me to think that a contada that Bach would have had to write in less than a week, you know, could could could I could listen to that hundreds or thousands of times and never get to the bottom of it. Yeah, I mean, it's an absolute amazing thing to think about. That is that he put in his 30,000 hours, right? His musical, his depth of musical capacity was so immense that he could put a lot into a very little space. But you see the same thing with great visual, you see the same thing with great art period,

the greater the art, the more it's inexhaustible, and it seems surprising. And the counter example of that is propaganda, I would say. Right. And, you know, or the really crassly commercial music, which capitalizes on what everyone knows and takes at that tiny step. It varies at some tiny step. So it's playing to the almost already sated crowd. And there's a niche in there because it's good for people who want to be pushed

a very tiny amount, but it dies very quickly because everyone can incorporate its new message almost immediately. But yeah, that whole notion of inexhaustibility and art is an amazing thing. And it has something to do with depth. I mean, I saw a great representation of the Bible at one point, a visual representation that showed, along the bottom, was a graph showing each different chapter.

So imagine a graph with a line at the bottom. And there's however many thousand chapters there are in the Bible, each one represented by a bar, a tiny bar stretching downwards, and the length of the bar was proportional to how many times that chapter or verse, I think it was chapter, doesn't matter, was cross-referenced in the book. And some of those were cross-referenced, a tremendous amount, but then there were curves drawn on top of that, linking all the cross-references together. So you have this amazingly complex hyperlinked document

where everything in it refers to everything else. And that gives it this insane depth. There's just no way of exhausting it because there's an infinite number of roots through it in some sense. Right. Well, that's certainly true of great works of music. They're like iridescent, luminous objects that say different things, depending on the

angle at which you look at them. And so you can listen to a piece of music 10 times over the course of a week and think that you've more or less exhausted it in terms of what it can say to you. You go back to the exact same piece 10 years later and you won't, you might not recognize it at all. You might hear it in a completely different way because you yourself have changed in the intervening. Right.

You know about the other thing is the music is, the music actually exists in the space where you meet it. And so your additions of life, what you've listened to, your mood, and also the way you choose to go through it, especially if it's complex, because you can concentrate on one instrument or set of instruments as opposed to another, like you can use them as the guides, or you can concentrate on the bass lines, or you can concentrate on the sounds that are much higher in the register, and every time you do that with a complex piece of music, it's a different journey. That's one way of thinking about it.

That's also extremely interesting. You were talking about an acceleration of music in the 20th century. Why don't you pick up on that? I mentioned earlier that it starts to take place with the Industrial Revolution, and it takes up extraordinary speed at the beginning of the 20th century. And in a sense, you could say that the history of music in the 20th century is not divorceable from the world wars. You cannot separate them. You also cannot underestimate the enormous significance that that had on

the development of the art. I mean, certainly after the Second World War, there's a generalized sense amongst European musicians that fundamentally an old order had been overturned and had proven to be absolutely rotten. And there was an almost peroxismal desire to get away from that and to create entirely new musical worlds. And that was definitely allied with the need to build a new and better society. So you can't separate those two things. And you have to try to imagine yourself

as a 20 or 25 year old composer growing up in a Europe that's been absolutely devastated to the extent that there's practically nothing left. And you're trying to rebuild on top of that. So that's the situation that the composer isn't born in that era we were faced with. So do you want to pretend as though nothing has happened and go back to writing late romantic music?

Or do you accept that fundamentally something enormous has taken place that you can't ignore? And if you want to be an authentic artist and if you want to manifest the things that you can't help but perceive, then how do you do that? And can you do that within the confines of a language that was associated with the period before the war? So that's a somewhat simplified kind of events, because certainly there was a push towards ever more personal and individual forms of expression starting with the late 19th century, but it really accelerates and takes off after the Second World War.

And that counts for a number of reasons. Okay. Well, and also, it seems to me that it was that post-war period, roughly speaking, that was what grabbed your attention when you were composing your pop songs as well and drew you in through that particular rabbit hole. So back to the post-war period. Right, so one of the interesting things that happened in Europe was that the need to reconstruct

these different states manifested also through a desire on the parts of certain politicians to show how advanced their societies could be through the medium of art. So in Germany, for example, enormous sums of money were put into music. And they developed radio orchestras every single region had its own orchestra, very, very high levels of artistic quality as well. And so one corollary of that was that they wanted their music to be absolutely advanced and absolutely striking.

And that was a kind of a very strong impulse that began to be felt in other European countries as well. And France, for their part, had to also show that they were investing in contemporary art and contemporary music. And so there was a very high degree of subsidization of the avant-garde in the post-war period. Now, that's not to say that life was easy for every artist because it most definitely was not, and it was an enormous struggle for composers to produce this kind of work and have it be performed. But there was certainly a major investment on the part of certain European states in terms of funding this kind of musical expression. So, let me have more or less... part of certain European states in terms of funding, this kind of musical expression.

So we have more or less. They seem to have known instinctively, even by your own argument, that if they were going to rebuild, that this was going to be part, an important part, maybe a vital part of the rebuilding process. And you wouldn't think that necessarily, because you would assume that people's attention

would be drawn to what you might regard as more practical concerns. But, of course, since we don't know what role music is playing precisely, but a role that seems to be incredibly important, it's not that easy to figure out exactly what's practical and what isn't. Keeping people's morale up is of incredible import, or restoring the morale as well, is of incredible import, maybe above all else. Right, right, absolutely.

Yeah, so one of the essential functions of art is is spiritual, whether people know what or not. And so if you want to rebuild your culture, there's no better way to do it than through the medium of art as far as I'm concerned. I mean, it's an absolutely fundamental thing. It's so fundamental that even in the most, in the midst of the most horrific experiences a human being can be, there is a there is a redemptive experience to be had in art.

Right. Right. Right. Right. Which is really, really to say something. I mean, it really is to say something because there's often, you can find people in situations often where nothing else could do that. There can't be reached by any other means. And many people are like saved by art. There's no doubt about that. And I think that's true on an ongoing basis, even with young people. I mean, certainly when they're going through their late adolescent or even early adolescent, cataclysmic changes, many of them live for music. And music is helping them catalyze a group identity, but deeper than that, it's also providing them with the implicit sense that there's meaning, that the being is meaningful and that there's meaning at hand.

And you can't argue with the other thing that's so cool, especially about music, is you can't argue with its meaning. It just manifests itself. So it's outside of the domain of rational, you can't criticize it. You sound like a fool. It's like, well, why are you dancing? It's like, well, that isn't a question. And also there's no answer to it. And why are you listening to music? What's the point? It's also not a question. And there's not an answer to it. You either, it's self-evident and it's almost self-evident to everyone, which is fantastically remarkable. It is indeed. So the last thing I would say about that is that fundamentally, the way that someone expresses themselves through music, if it's authentic, fundamentally it's not a choice. So one thing that audiences might keep in mind

if they're about to engage with something that's unfamiliar to them, is that if it's a half-decent work of art, if the composer is sincere in what they're doing, then fundamentally it's something that in a sense they have to do. There's not a strong element of choice involved. So it's not an arbitrary thing to express yourself in one way or another. I mean, it's something that you don't get to choose.

So I've also noticed, like, I've had more than my fair share of creative clients, probably I know certainly because they're attracted, for example, to come and see me by the content of my videos and my lectures and that sort of thing. And one of the things, and I studied creativity in some depth and its relationship to personality and one of the things that I found that I've really been struck by is that there is a trait which is openness, which is a fundamental trait. And for people who are high in openness, if you imagine the person as a central trunk with a few branches, you know, and the branches are the place where the

nourishment emerges up into the, well, and back, of course, too. But there's a pathway of life along those of those subdivisions of the trunk. If they're creative, that might be the main part of them that's alive. And if that is the manifesting itself, they just droop and die. Sometimes they criticize them to death, send themselves to death rationally or, well, there's a choice. They can either pursue their creative nature or they can wilt and die. But that's not much of a choice, really.

And it's striking to me how fundamental an instinct that is and how unrelenting it is, and it manifests itself in their increased proclivity to fantasize and to dream and to find like a life inside of boxes that's predictable, unbearable, really unbearable, whereas a conventional person, a conservative person, isn't like that at all. They find that routine soothing and the exercise of that predictable duty, meaningful and sustaining, but a creative person, that's just death for them. Well, there's plenty of examples of creative artists

who have had to endure the most horrible suffering and just terrible material circumstances in order to pursue a singular creative vision. And I mean, that's an absolutely amazing thing that you think that people would voluntarily subject themselves to that. So it makes you wonder, it's actually voluntary. I don't know.

Oh, it makes us happy. The alternative is worse. Right. The alternative is worse. The alternative is actually voluntary. I don't know. Oh, I think it's worth. Right. The alternative is worth. You know, and so they are possessed to some degree by genius. You know, that's the genius. It's a major thing to possess a person and it's a it's a it's a fundamental natural manifestation. So is it voluntary? You can either cooperate with it or get crushed by it.

I think that's basically the, that's basically that your choice. It's still a choice. And you know, you do interact with your creativity. It's not like it just pours out of you. It's, there's, there's, there's work that needs to be done, even though the, the source is there, in some sense, which is also extremely strange. It doesn't just pull out, although it doesn't some people, but they have to have developed the expertise necessary for that to occur. It's still effortful and demanding.

More to, well, it's effortful and demanding and we can leave it at that. So, yeah. Okay, so what was back to the beginning of the story since we're going to do the right thing from a musical perspective You talked about being attracted to the avant-garde poking up through In some sense because of your experimentation with integrating that into pop songs But then that took you down this rabbit hole that that propelled you into your career as a composer and into moving to Europe and all of that

so and you said that part of that was that you found some of what you were listening to incomprehensible and that was a mystery to you, you wanted to pursue it. Was that, see that as a manifestation of your musical ability trying to perfect itself? You found something you admired and couldn't comprehend or what was it? Well, first of all, could we exchange the term rabbit hole for a gleaming field of light? That's how I would characterize it. I think that's a little bit more accurate. How can I explain this? There's a dragon with every gleaming field of light. I'm not going to explain this. There's a dragon with every leaning field of light.

No, one of the things I would say is that there are things that I would hear and I would instinctively know are deeply meaningful. They are so meaningful that I almost can't begin to fathom their depths. And you don't necessarily understand them intellectually. You don't understand how they are made or how they function or what their component parts are. But there's something in it that fundamentally speaks to you on a very, very deep level. I can't explain why that is.

I can't explain why certain things that I've heard or that I heard when I was a teenager had that effect on me. But they were like invitations into a world of seemingly limitless potential that you cannot refuse. It's like a form of fascination that grips. Yeah, well that's the grip by the Mercurial Spirit. You know, that Mercurius is this thing that flits around that can't help but attract your attention, the God Mercur. And he's an emissary of the gods. Right? Yes, exactly that. And so if your interest is trapped by something like that, you find it spontaneously meaningful. It is an invitation.

So, and you don't have to follow it, but if you do follow it, you'll find what you're being invited to for better or for worse. Right. Right. Yeah, it's an instinctive sense that this is something that is deeply meaningful, and you follow it, and it takes you right. Yeah, it's an instinctive sense that this is something that is deeply meaningful. And you follow it, and it takes you places. And so that's what happened with me. I was listening to the composers of what's called the second Viennese school.

So that's a trio of composers, Bergen Schunberg and Weber, who I was instinctively fascinated by when I was a teenager. Now, they're considered by some people to be difficult composers to get into. It really depends on the work, I would say. There are pieces that are actually quite accessible, but there was something there that absolutely fascinated me. And once I understood that that world existed, I found it extremely difficult to go back to

what I had been doing previously. Now, my music has absolutely nothing in common with theirs. I mean, it's stylistically very, very different. So, it's not a question of wanting to do the same thing necessarily. But it was a sign that there is an enormous world of exotic knowledge and experience to be had if you only pay attention. Well that's a good, that's a good, what would you call it? That's a good phrase to think about in relationship to life in general. So, and it's a thing for people to know because you know if you're living a life

that's devoid of sufficient meaning there is the probability that there's a bunch of things that you could be paying attention to that would rectify that. It's not that simple because you can be in states of mind that make that very, very difficult, but it is nice to know that those gleaming fields exist and that you can pursue the flickers and find out where you're going to go. All right, so I'm going to close this by pointing out to everyone that Sam Andrea has a Patreon account, www.patrion.com forward slash Samuel Andrea. Is that correct?

That's right. All right, good. And so, if you're inclined to indicate your support for his work, at least to visit his YouTube website as well, because Sam has made a lot of videos, a number of different videos, helping guide people through the musical landscape, the complex musical landscape, which seems to me to be a very useful endeavor. So, anyways, thanks very much for talking to me and with everyone that's listening, and I suspect we'll do this again in the future. and I suspect we'll do this again in the future. Yeah, thank you for the invitation. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for listening to Episode 8 of the Jordan B Peterson podcast. To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon page or purchase the self-authoring programs at selfauthoring.com. The links are in the description. Thank you for listening.