TRIGGERnometry - Making Music in a Woke World - Samuel Andreyev

Episode Date: September 15, 2024

Samuel Andreyev is a Canadian-French composer, singer-songwriter, poet and educator. As of 2021, he had completed about 30 works, nearly all of which have been recorded commercially. His chamber, orchestral, vocal and solo works have been performed, recorded and broadcast throughout the world. His YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@samuel_andreyev) which features videos about composition and interviews with prominent musical figures, has become a fixture of the music world, viewed by millions. He also presents music programs for BBC Radio 3. He has resided in France since 2003 and currently teaches at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg and at the Strasbourg Center of the University of Syracuse. Discover more from Samuel: https://linktr.ee/samuelandreyev  SPONSORS: Ketone-IQ Save 30% off your first subscription order & receive a free six-pack of Ketone-IQ with https://ketone.com/TRIGGERNOMETRY Discover Chuck Norris' secret to staying strong and active at 84. Watch his free video at https://ChuckDefense.com/Trigger Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc  Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the predominant model becomes that individual artists should be funded by the state, it means that the art is easily corruptible because it's, well, in a sense, you're working for the state. We try to find ways of rehabilitating them and making them palatable. And one of the ways you can do that is by predicating the art upon people's identities. And that's something that certainly has happened. In music? Oh yeah. In composing?

Oh, absolutely. How so? Samuel Andrev, finally, welcome to Trigonometry. So great to have you on. You are unsurprisingly the first composer we've ever had on the show. And it's not an area that we normally venture into. We'll talk about music more specifically as the conversation goes on. But the reason we wanted to have you on is you're one of an increasing number of people

from all sorts of different fields now where I might sit down and have a cup of tea or Francis might. And suddenly we find out that this kind of mind virus that everyone in our space is talking about, talking about is literally infected like everything, including Uttalus music. Yes, yes, absolutely. Well, we have a difficult relationship with culture, with the arts today. And I think one of the things is that nobody really exactly knows what to do with the arts. If you look at how it's viewed in the public space, there's this idea that the arts are kind of suspect somehow, that maybe we shouldn't be devoting resources to this, that this

is a sort of what a kind of strange, vaguely demented hobby that people are engaging with and that should not be taken seriously. I mean, given some modern R, I do. Yeah, yeah, right. Sensitive to that particular point of view. Right, right, right. Well, you're, you know, you're facing a living, breathing composer, and you might think, well, composer, you know, that's a dodgy thing.

But yeah, no, no, I think we don't know what to do with artists because the, our society is awash in entertainment, right? entertainment and mass popular culture. And those are the things that masquerade as the arts these days. And the first thing I would say is there's a distinction to be made on that level. So entertainment and art are not the same thing. They can overlap. And so one of the things that you see very quickly,

if you look at the history of Western art music, is that there are popular styles that are necessary, that are a foundational part of the whole classical tradition. And then there are savant styles, and those two things can overlap. And when they do overlap, you can have a brilliant shower of fireworks, as is the case in the late operas of Mozart, for example, where you have the coming together of the greatest degree of compositional sophistication with something immediately accessible. And what I'm seeing now is that the fine arts have become utterly debased in some manner or another. or we completely lost faith in them.

And, you know, we don't know what to do with them. And so we try to find ways of rehabilitating them and making them palatable. And one of the ways you can do that is by predicating the art upon people's identities. And that's something that certainly has happened. In music? Oh, yeah. In composing? Oh, absolutely.

How so? Absolutely. Oh, well, the easiest thing to do is to put programs together that are about, this or that group of people and to have that be the subject of the concert. So you can insert any interest group. It doesn't matter which one. And that was something that I noticed

right at the beginning of my career. I was asked in my 20s to write a piece that reflect my experience as a... what was it? The son of Macedonian immigrants to Canada or something like this. And then later, you know, many times

I was asked to write pieces that reflected Canadian culture. was put on these all-Canadian programs. And even when I was 22, I thought this is imbecilic. I've got nothing to do with this. And it's gotten worse since then. So because we don't understand our relationship to art, we don't understand the pieces and we're not familiar with them,

and they're not a part of our daily lives, they're something very separate. We try to come up with ways of putting programs together that have nothing to do with art. And one of them is, you know, you can do whatever it would be. We'll do a concert of all trans people. We'll do a concert of entirely female composers. And the problem with that is, A, I don't think it does those people any good at all

to be put in that kind of a separate category because it deflects the attention away from the important thing, which is the work that they're doing. And then it becomes a matter of a category. And that's not an aesthetic category. It has nothing to do with art. So that is actually quite widespread. And there is pressure placed on musicals,

organizations to do this sort of thing as a way of what redeeming the apparent uselessness of their activity. Samuel, do you think this is a problem when we make art political? Now, of course, some art is political. That's fine, and always has been, always will be. But isn't this a problem when you try and make all art political? Well, absolutely, because art fundamentally has nothing to do with politics. Art is an activity of the spirit. And reducing it to politics, I think, is a disservice to art. There again, it's partly due to the fact that we have this very problematic relationship with the fine arts now. It's not taken seriously by anyone. So, again, the other side of it really is that we have a massive problem in terms of figuring out who should

pay for it. Now, that's been an issue throughout the entire history of of Western art from the beginning, right? So somebody does have to pay for it. And so it can be the nobility, it can be the aristocracy, it can be private patrons, or it can be the state. There's various ways of doing it, and each of them have their advantages

and their disadvantages, of course. When the predominant model becomes that individual artists should be funded by the state, which is the case in pretty much every Western European nation, and well, not so much in North America, because they have a fairly robust system of private patronage there, but it means that the art is easily corruptible because it's,

well, in a sense, you're working for the state. So that's not a message that a lot of artists would be very keen to hear, because there are a lot of people who are struggling to survive, I can tell you, and you have extremely few options in terms of generating income from their work, and that might be one of them. So I'm not suggesting for a minute that we should, and I'm not in a position to suggest what we should do about that necessarily, I do think that artists generally would do well to diversify their range of options as far as income goes and try to detach themselves from an over-reliance on state funding because I think that in terms of individual artists and their production and their relationship to their society

and to the people who are funding them, I think that it has resulted in an extraordinarily artificial culture. Samuel, now there's the other argument which goes, look, the arts are becoming more and more inaccessible for reasons we've touched on. Shouldn't we also try and hold the door open as far as possible to people who wouldn't have access to the arts, to become a composer, an actor, a musician, whatever it may be? And actually, these programs, whilst crude, they are effective in getting people in through the door. I think that the way that you get people in through the door is through education. That has to be the way you do it, I believe. And if you want that to happen, if you want the arts to be accessible to everyone,

as I passionately wish myself, then you have to give them, you have to expose people to it at a very early age. And what I don't really understand is why that seems to not be the case in a lot of countries. We've actually reduced the presence of arts in primary education and secondary education. Again, it's this idea that it's this sort of, what, it's this frivolous accessory that is diverting time and resources away from more important things. Why isn't it a frivolous accessory? Well, because it sits at the bottom of our culture, once again. It's absolutely foundational.

What art is, really, is the expression of that part of you, that is most alive and vital. It's the way that the individual can compensate for the leveling tendency of society. And if you take that away, then what you'll be dominated by mass culture essentially. There won't be any room for individual idiosyncratic, subjective forms of expression. So, no, it's absolutely vital. And if you think about what it's worth, you know, because conversations about culture, within about five minutes you start talking about money inevitably. It's very difficult to avoid. But, you know, if you were to have that conversation, what's it worth? Well, what's Shakespeare been worth to the United Kingdom? How about the Beatles? What's that been worth to

Liverpool? You know, these things are of inestimable value. And to have to make the argument that they're worth preserving. is I don't know what to say about that. I guess the reason I ask is, for example, even the examples you give, I mean, I would think of the Beatles more popular culture than the fine arts. And the Beatles didn't need government funding. They sold tickets to their concerts,

enough for plenty, you know, to pay for everything 100 times over. So I guess if I'm uneducated in the arts, as I am, by the way, then the question of, it speaks to the, the point you were making earlier about us not knowing what to do and how to relate to our. It seems to me that you ought to be able to make a case of why it's important.

And that's why I'm asking the question. Well, okay, so the reason why it's difficult to make that case in a few sentences, I think, is that art has become, or the fine arts have become this very separate thing. They've become something that's cordoned off, right? They've become a special occasion, a special event, that you can very easily ignore, right? because it's not woven into the fabric of our everyday lives in any manner, shape, or form. So, for example, if you go out to a concert, then you might have to organize that weeks ahead of time. You might need to get a babysitter.

It might be expensive to go to the concert. And it's this sort of blip in your life, you know. And I think that's part of the problem. There's also the fact that in order to have a lively and robust artistic culture, there needs to be, on some level, a degree of social cohesion that allows for a common language of some kind. that allows for what, some kind of common language of symbols, so that we can actually talk to each other. And my sense is that that's just not present right now.

So I can't offer a prescription because what I see is that the conditions for, you know, a lively and robust arts sector are simply not there right now. And that does complicate things in terms of providing an argument as to why why they should continue to exist. You know, having this conversation, I'm not going to admit this, nor should I, but I went on TikTok. And I was presented with this clip of this young man, maybe mid-20s, and he looked like he was in some kind of, you know, Ibiza-type place.

Middle class, you could tell from his accent the way he presented himself. And he started saying that the English had no culture. We've got no culture. All we do is take from other cultures. And, you know, we're parasitians. blah blah blah blah blah blah and I was looking at it and then people were steaming in and saying whatever they were saying like he's an idiot he's stupid and I actually thought the reason that he thinks that is because our arts education is so bankrupt that actually he's completely ignorant

of everything that this country has given the world if you think about music if you think about theatre if you think about literature if you think about poetry all of these things different art forms where we have influenced and changed the world. If you go anywhere in the world and you say you're from London, people will talk to you about artists or Shakespeare, whatever it may be. Yet this kid had no idea about our rich cultural legacy because he was entirely ignorant. And that to me is a very real problem. Well, of course, but again, it's a question of education. You know, if you don't have the base assumption that this is something value, that it might be worth preserving this extraordinary heritage,

then there's no use dragging people out to concerts. They won't know what to do. So, you know, it's a greater problem in some countries than in others. I think that the country that I am now a citizen of and living in, which is France, I think that there is a fairly broad general recognition of the importance of the arts. I don't think that too many people would seriously question it. There's an implicit understanding that this is something valuable. It's valuable to the identity of the country.

It's also valuable in terms of its international image. So there's an understanding of the implicit value of art, but again, when it comes to figuring out exactly what we should do with it, then that's where things get very, very tricky, which is one of the reasons why I decided to start a YouTube channel, incidentally. And you're saying it gets tricky and it does, and what makes it even worse is that, you're is now become a cultural battlefield like everything else. So it's not just about the art, it's about what the art represents. What does it mean?

I think it's toxic. What do you think about that way of viewing it? Oh, absolutely. Of course it's toxic. Art isn't something that you buy or that you use as a badge or something that you use to tell people about yourself. It's something that you do. It's something that requires engagement.

It's not something that you simply accept. sort of passively. But again, I think this is just completely disappeared somehow. And so the only solution I can see is to have, you know, perhaps smallish local communities of people getting together, discussing things, perhaps putting on concerts in their own homes, perhaps having groups where they read together. But it has to happen on that kind of a level because there's no sort of wider what societal impetus to do that. So what I'm trying to do is to do things on that level through my channel and also through a musical ensemble that I've recently started to develop. Because also as well, what we're seeing is the influence of technology on music.

So, for example, TikTok, I've spoken to a few musicians and what they've told me about how the music industry now goes to TikTok to find stars and what it's doing to music is, quite frankly, terrifying, isn't it? Well, yes and no. This technology is terrifying in some respects, but it also makes things possible that would have been completely impossible even five years ago. See, I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen.

It's extraordinarily difficult to evaluate. I think the positive side of it is that it has allowed people to come together on a global level that would never have found each other otherwise. So for example, it turns out that on a global level, the number of people who are interested in, let's say, contemporary musical composition is in the hundreds of thousands or the millions, right? If you were to be restricted to the number of people that might be interested in it in Strasbourg where I'm from, it's not going to be in the millions, that's for sure. But you can create a robust community by using that technology. So that's the positive side of it. The negative side of it is the negative side of it

is, well, there's a price to pay, and the price to pay is the decimation of everybody's attention spans. So, I don't know how that's going to play out. Are we going to learn to live with these technologies? Are we going to learn to foster a healthy relationship with them? Or is it going to become something much more sinister? I don't know. You know, when I was walking to the studio this morning, you can't help but notice walking through London that everybody is sort of separate from each other. There's no sense of a collective we or a sense of engagement or community. It's like everybody's staring at their phones. They're barely looking at where they're going. And that is, you know, we've created this technology that is unbelievably

powerful, far more powerful than we have the wisdom to know how to use. And that does frighten me. And to what extent do you think this dominance of mass culture that you talk about, To what extent do you think that's a phenomenon caused by the fact that America is so dominant in the world? Because it seems to me as someone who's a very kind of superficial observer that America is very, very mass culture dominated in terms of the things that you would see on TV, in terms of things that people consume. People consume TV shows, you know, big sports, entertainment of various kinds. And they're very, very good at making all of those things. I mean, American sports are so much more entertaining than other than sports. elsewhere in the world as I keep making the point.

But do you think that's a big part of why we are where we are with our relationship with that? Yeah, well, the thing about mass entertainment is that it requires a certain degree of homogenization and standardization in order to be effective. Otherwise, you can't sell it, you can't have an industry, right? So movies tend to all be the same duration. They're all 90 minutes long. They all have a three-act structure. They all have, you know, basically an identical system of, of producers and different roles that go into producing them. They're totally homogenous, but artworks are not like that. You know, artworks are highly individual. They're difficult to sell. They can be difficult to interpret, and they will foster a more individual relationship with the work. So I'm not going

to say that the influence of mass culture has been necessarily only bad because, I mean, the 20th century belongs to America musically. There's no question about that. The diversity of range of forms of different genres that were invented in America in the 20th century is absolutely astonishing. So I'm not making that claim. But no, it has made it, I think, more difficult to survive, certainly, if you're doing something that doesn't sort of fit into that mold, that's for sure. And also as well, I was listening to this, I was in the gym and I was listening to the song Lola by The Kinks, you know? Oh, yes. Yeah. And I was actually thinking to myself, because we talk about political correctness a lot on the show, what is acceptable that you can say now, but you couldn't say back then, vice versa, all the rest of it.

And we decry about the decline of freedom of speech and the belief in it. And I was listening to The Kinks by Lola and one of the lyrics was, I'm not done, but I can't understand why she walks like. a woman and talks like a man, Lola. And it's about a guy who went out to a nightclub in Soho, met a woman, fell in love, turned out to be a man. And I was thinking it's a great song. It's the lyrically beautiful. Ray Davis was just a master lyricist. And I was, but I was thinking to myself, would that even be able to be made now or would that be perceived to be transphobic? And is there a particular issue in the arts with when it comes to freedom of expression? Oh, I don't know. That song was probably inappropriate when it came out too. The thing about the kinks is they were always diametrically opposed to wherever the culture was going.

That's one of the things that made them great. You know, when the hippies were going on about their acid trips and so on and producing these absurd things, the kinks were talking about, you know, sipping tea and, you know, having a rheumatic back and so on. So, no, that was their role. And I think they did a good job of filling that. As to whether a song like that could come out now, you know, I think it could, actually.

I think it would likely come out on some kind of, you know, some kind of social media platform like YouTube or something like that. It probably wouldn't get into a, you know, a major record label type of situation. But then again, those avenues of distribution are effectively more abundant anyway, so it doesn't really matter. The traditional channels for the dissemination of artworks, whether they're from the mass popular culture or whether there's something more esoteric

aren't really functioning anymore. The music industry peaked around 1992, which was when CDs were at their height, and precipitously declined after the rise of Napster and file-sharing websites and MP3s and all of that. And it's basically been more or less killed up. That business model no longer works, right? So if you're a young up-and-coming artist,

then odds are you're going to get known, as you said, through TikTok or through YouTube or some medium like that, where there basically aren't really gatekeepers. There are to a degree. And of course, you can get demonetized. You can get into trouble in various ways on YouTube. But no, I think there is hope that these platforms can result in a democratization and in a broadening of what's possible to do.

I think it would be much, much harder to get that across in a more conventional record label type of situation. Because you talk about the atomization of society, One of the things that actually helped our society bond was that we had gatekeepers, and they were the ones who decided what we listened to, what we watched, et cetera, et cetera. So you're never really going to get a Madonna or Michael Jackson and George Michael because we're simply not as homogenous as we used to be. Now, the trade-off is obviously that it's democratization.

What do you think of the landscape now? Does it fill you with hope or is it more kind of tempered? Well, we don't have cultural giants anymore in the way we used to. That's absolutely right. No, I remember the early 1990s. I'm old enough to remember that. I remember that Michael Jackson was, he was present on every level of society. It didn't matter who you were.

It didn't matter if you were an intellectual at Oxford or if you were a cab driver. Everybody knew about Michael Jackson and everybody was familiar with the songs. And we seemed to have lost that. It's very interesting surveying the landscape of popular music today because, you know, it's funny, you can go on YouTube and you can find these artists that have, you know, 70 million views on their videos. It's like, well, I've never heard of them. You know, and probably most people wouldn't have heard of them because 70 million relative to the number of people who go on these platforms is a minority. And the thing that I've observed is that today, all art, all music, no matter how popular, is a niche taste. How odd. You know, we don't have any artists that can cut through this entire society.

Well, we live in the era of mass customization. So I first discovered it when you go to the U.S., as I know you have done. And, you know, here, if you go to a shop and you want to buy a soft drink, there's Coke, there's Fanta, there's maybe, I don't know, what else, water, that would be twice as expensive as everything else. But in America, you have these machines where it's like you can have your Coke with 74 different flavor. choices, diet zero, sugar this, sugar that, whatever. And so ultimately, because we're so technologically advanced now, everybody can have exactly what they like. So we're no longer having to settle, I use the term advisedly, for the Beatles, because the Beatles was such a big cultural phenomenon because they managed to be like by lots and lots of people. But that was

in the absence of alternatives. So in the Beatles, if you were an eight out of ten band, you would literally be listened to by everybody. Now, why would I listen to an eight out of ten band when I can have exactly the music that I like it's a 10 out of 10? And so I think it's a really technological issue. The availability of the options now means that those big cultural figures are going to be so much harder to come by. Yes, well, it's also made things exponentially more difficult for composers. But this is not a, it's not a new story. It's an intensification of something that began in the 19th century, which is that, prior to approximately the mid-19th century we didn't have a concept of a repertoire as such, right?

So if you went to a concert, the concert would be embedded in a very specific social context. You know, it might be a piece of liturgical music, it might be a piece written for a private occasion, a ball, for example, or it might be a pedagogical piece or whatever. But there was a purpose for that piece, okay? And the piece was tailor-made for that purpose. So you would be overwhelmingly likely to hear a new piece on that occasion. What started to happen was in the second half of the 19th century, first of all, you see the rise of the European nation states. And one of the things that came along with that was the elevation of artists to the role of these sort of national heroes, these godlike saviors that could, you know, incarnate the soul of the people. And that would sort of be these emblematic figureheads of that nation. It was part of the nation-building exercise, in other words,

to elevate these figures. And one of the things that goes along with that is you elevate particular works of them to the status of basically permanent features of the cultural landscape. So you don't merely perform a Beethoven symphony once or twice or three or four times around the time of its creation. You perform it hundreds of times, thousands of times. You perform it in many different countries, and you do this for an indefinite period of time. So you create this repertoire, this cohesive canon of works.

And there are understandable reasons why you would do that. You would want the greatest achievements, the greatest cultural achievements of mankind to be properly venerated and properly available to the broadest number of people. But that does also create a situation in which artists are now competing with the greatest exponents of their art from the past.

So you're no longer only competing with your colleagues, with the three or four other annoying composers who live in your town. you're competing with Beethoven, with Bach, with all the Renaissance composers, with all the medieval composers, with every composer who's ever lived. And so there's this kind of antagonistic relationship

between the work of the past, the sort of museum culture, if you like, and the work of living composers. And it's the same for audiences, because it's like if you have a choice between going out and hearing Beethoven's Night Symphony, for example, or hearing, you know, here's a completely untested work by a composer,

never heard of before and it could be literally anything. Well, you know, they'll probably go with the Beethoven because it's a sure bet, right? So that's a tremendous existential problem for composers. And so the repertoire is a double-edged sword in that sense. And it's also as well that Beethoven, Mozart, they're not human. I mean, obviously they were human, but in our minds, we can't really picture, they're legends. There are something, there's something, they're, there's someone that we can't even think of what they were like. They just created this amazing music. I mean, somebody could come along who could be even better than Beethoven.

But if you just know him as Gary down the road, you're not going to take him seriously as Beethoven. No, well, it is incomprehensible. I can tell you, I've been studying this music for my entire life, and I can't comprehend it. One of the great mysteries to me is how Bach, at the height of his productivity, was writing an entire cantata, these are 20 to 25 minute long pieces of music written for the entire liturgical calendar year. He was writing one of those every single week, in addition to teaching dozens of students, in addition to the 17 or 18 children that he had, and in addition to all the other compositions that he had to write as a matter of his obligations to his employer. It's an insane, unfathomable

degree of productivity at the absolute highest level. To finish the point of what I was saying earlier. So we talked about the antagonistic relationship between the music of the past, the composers who are continuing to create new works, and to relate it to today, I mean, that's been intensified to the nth degree, right? Because not only do we have the repertoire, not only do we have the teeming chaos of all of the works that are being created now, but we have everybody's fleeting thoughts and perceptions, you know, this constant an unimpeded spill stream of information coming at you like a hose at all times. And so it's extremely difficult to get your bearings in a situation like that.

And also, our relationship to these things tends to be extremely ephemeral. So there will be artists that will get a lot of attention, a massive amount of attention for a relatively short amount of time, and five years later, we've forgotten about them. It does seem that it's easier to have a hit and become a thing, a moment, but it's far more difficult to have a career. Is that fair? Well, the one-hit wonder thing is not a desirable situation. No, absolutely not. And that level of success, when it comes on that quickly, is extraordinarily dangerous for people.

It's very, very difficult to withstand that. And, you know, imagine if you peaked when you were 23, and that was that, you know, and everything that you did subsequently was of less interest, and you were constantly being measured against that. Imagine if you had a hit song when you were 23, and for the next 60 years of your life, all anybody wants from you is for you to play that song again. That would be an absolute nightmare. It would stunt your growth. Britain Spears' evolution, let's put it like that, seems to suggest that you're right. Yeah, yeah. So that's one of the limitations. of mass culture, incidentally, is you are valuable to the culture to the extent that you're able

to sell records, and you'll get trapped into that. And it'll be very difficult to extricate yourself from that modality. So, for example, there have been plenty of enormously talented musicians and bands who have done extremely interesting things, only to be met with extreme resistance from the interested parties, whether they be record labels or whether they be their bandmates or the whole mass of sycophants that is around them. Samuel, is there a science to music? Yes, of course. Well, music is a multi-dimensional art form, right?

So we talked earlier about how it has an entertainment component to it, right? There's an aspect to music that is, you know, that is what diverting. There's a scientific component to it, absolutely. I mean, that's, if you look at the historical origins of music in the Western world, It's Pythagoras. It's Pythagoras determining how you can take a stretched length of string and divide it up into exact proportions and thereby obtain all of these different harmonic intervals. That's always been a component of it. And any kind of technological change that affects musicians is also, of course, a reflection of that as well.

So yes, music is, it's part entertainment. It's part an activity of the spirit. It's an expression of our technological innovations and of our capacity to invent it's all of these things at the same time. The reason I ask is one of the things I've been wondering about, so my son he's two and he's absolutely obsessed with musical instruments and he we stayed with a friend of mine who's a musician and my son is just engrossed completely in the music that my friend is playing and my friend couldn't believe it. He's like, how is someone so young so drawn to this and it almost feels magical in some way or

Do we know why human beings are even attracted to music? See, it's... People talk about deciding to become a musician. They talk about, you know, when I was 11, I decided that was... My son's clearly not decided anything. You can barely decide where to go to the toilet. Right, right, well, fair enough. I think it's the point that you're making.

I mean, that describes a lot of musicians, Mike. Yeah, well, I was just going to say, we have that in common. Yeah, no, but on a broader level, if you're going to be crazy enough to pursue this, then it's not something. something that you've decided to do. It's something that's happened to you. It's a form of affliction. No, no, you don't decide to do it. If you have any sense, you would do something else, because it's too difficult. It manifests itself as an irresistible compulsion, and the call is so strong that you would move mountains to respond to it. So I don't know why that happens. When I was five or six years old, I had an intense and immediate reaction to the first.

phenomenon of music that was undeniable. There was never any question in my mind that I would ever do anything else. So it's a psychological thing, I think, fundamentally, right? There are portions of the population that are off the charts when it comes to openness, trade openness, right? And I think that's a huge part of it. You know, people who tend to be interested in the arts, tend to be interested in music, tend to have that predisposition towards openness. And that's not a trait that you can acquire as far as I understand it. I suppose the question would be you are looking, obviously, given that it's your job from a creator's point of view,

but I was also partly asking about it from a consumer's, unpleasant term for you, I'm sure, but from a music consumer's point of view, why do we listen to music? Why do we feel so strongly connected to? why do we map, I know it might sound like a really stupid question, but why do we map emotions onto sounds that don't seem, they're not, it's not a picture, you're not seeing something, not literally anyway. Why do we experience music as something powerful?

Well, music is only anecdotally sounds, right? What music really is, is patterns and trajectories and transformations over time of patterns. So why is that so fundamental to us? Well, I think because music offers the possibility of experiencing vicariously a field of pure meaning and pure movement that we can't experience in any other way. And it's a deeply moving thing. It's also a thing that brings us together. I think one of the one of the most fundamental attributes of music is that it's community building. And you can do that without words, right? You can do that without expressing anything whatsoever except what it is that you're playing. It's an amazing thing to see. And we desperately need that. We desperately need that. You know, I was telling Francis earlier that I

started my career as a teacher teaching in an economically depressed mining town in northern France and working with teenagers there, which was an extraordinary experience. These are people who don't have an easy time. That's putting it mildly. And they were so passionately devoted to the music that they were doing. And they were extraordinarily open-minded also to all different forms of music. And one of the things I did in my classes was we would look at classical pieces. We would look at some bits of popular music. And then we'd also look at more contemporary things.

And we would keep alternating them. And they were just interested in everything, you know. And it brought them together, and it gave them something to look forward to. And that was a deeply moving experience. So, you know, my thinking at the time was, you know, if you can do this here and have such a transformative experience on people's lives, then what could you do at scale? You know, what could you do using these new platforms? Sam, what you said was really interesting when you described music as a compulsion.

And I think a lot of people who seek their careers in the arts, they're driven by compulsion. if you look at actors, comedians, writers. All forms of deluded people. Yeah, all forms of deluded people. Exactly. And I look at that and you think, is that why there seems to be such a high preponderance of people who suffer with mental health conditions,

mental illnesses, addiction issues? Is there something about creativity and mental instability that goes together? Well, there's a fragility, certainly. I think that creative people tend to be, well, one of their fundamental attributes is they're extraordinarily sensitive, right? So they can't help that. That's just a basic attribute.

So when you're more sensitive, you're more easily, what, you're more easily, I wouldn't say damaged exactly, but you're, you know, things affect you more, let's say. There's a quote by the American poet Ezra Pound, who said that the function of artists fundamentally is that they're the antennae of the human race. They're the ones that pick up these vibrations that are there, that are, you know, anybody could in principle pick up on, but that not everybody is attuned to.

So sensitivity comes up the territory. And the other thing is that artists are placed under extraordinary pressure at times in their careers. And, you know, that combined with a high degree of openness, let's say, and tremendous sensitivity makes people extremely vulnerable. There's no question. Because I was reading about one of the original founders of Pink Floyd, Sid Barrett, who unfortunately became profoundly mentally unwell. And I was reading, I think it was an interview of Roger Waters where he actually said, look, people attribute.

He's mentally really well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Talking to himself on TV. There's a poster child for mental stability. Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. Sorry, man. No, no. The joke was there. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, yeah, bless Roger. Anyway, but he actually made the point that people think that Sid, it was psychedelics.

But the reality is, and all of us thought that this was inevitable. This was inevitable. And there just seems to be, if you think about Brian Wilson, it's just time after time where you have these, you know, these incredibly creative people who change the world and change music and the way we see things and the way they transform people's lives. Yet the same time, they're so powerful as well as being so completely fragile. It's such an interesting paradox. Well, it's interesting you mentioned Sid Barrett and Brian Wilson because they have a lot in common, in fact.

And in both instances, what you have are exceptionally gifted and sensitive individuals who are put into a situation that they're completely unequipped psychologically to handle. And in addition to that, you surround them with, as I mentioned earlier, with sycophants, right, with people who are attempting to milk them for every scent that they can generate with their work. And on top of that, it's like if you have a hit, then the pressure is to reproduce that hit and to keep on producing more work in that vein, which completely kills the spontaneity and the quirkiness and the individuality that you need in order to be an artist in the first place.

So those two things come into conflict. with each other and it destroys people. In the case of Brian Wilson, it's terribly sad. It's terribly sad, you know, because there was a period there for about two years where he was able to slip one past the goalpost somehow. He was able to do a couple of albums that really did reflect the very best of what he was able to do. And it was immediately squashed, you know, by the record label, by the other members of the band. And the rest of the career of the Beach Boys was just one long, miserable train wreck, you know, of just horrible albums one after the other. It's a terrible story. As for whether that could not have been prevented, that's a complicated issue. I mean,

clearly both of them were extremely sensitive and would have been subjected to pressures one way or another, I think. Sid Barrett is an interesting one also because, you know, he had no support whatsoever. The people who were around him behaved horribly, to say the least. And there's also the fact that, you know, the music businesses is a singularly corrosive and corrupt environment to be in. I don't think it's necessarily any better now than it was back then, but I can only imagine how truly sorted it must have been in the 1960s. Well, any combination of a place where you have vulnerable people, lots of money and very, very, very disproportionately allocated rewards. you put those three things together, it's guaranteed to produce abuse, sycophancy, advantage-taking, drug addiction, all sorts of things. Comedy is very similar in some way.

Well, the miracle is that anybody can withstand it, that you do have people who have relatively lengthy careers and come out of it reasonably unscathed. There are examples of that. There are extraordinary artists like David Byrne, for example, as one who are somehow able to keep going and produce, compelling work and also reach very large numbers of people. And that is something that I deeply admire, you know, because, you know, there's a thing in my field, because what I primarily do is I compose scores, right? So I compose pieces that are played by orchestras and chamber ensembles and soloists and vocalists and so on. There's a sense in which there's a kind of satisfaction very often in my field with a very kind of low level of cultural penetration. It's like, okay,

you know, you've got your 50 listeners, that's enough. You know, you can keep on with that. And one of the things that has become abundantly clear to me as I increasingly step into a public role is just how, you know, the fine arts simply do not exist in people's lives. It's like, we don't know what you guys are doing. We're not aware of your production. We've never heard of you.

We don't know what you're up to. You know, and this is actually a relatively new thing. If you look at the 1950s, 60s, even in the 1970s, you had these titanic figures who, again, I mentioned Michael Jackson earlier, but from the fine arts, you had people like Picasso or Stravinsky, writers like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and so on, who were actually broadly known to the societies that they were working with in. There are no comparable figures today, not at all. In France, until recently, we had Pierre Boulez, who is a French composer and conductor, who was broadly known to the French public.

He died about five or six years ago, and there's been no one to replace him. And it's, again, it's partly a question of the total atomization of our societies, the atomization of our culture, the atomization of our attention spans. Instead of having a vista of giants, we have a vista of little tiny buthills extending out into infinity of people who are able to have a moderate impact for a short amount of time, but that will never attract any kind of critical mass of public attention. Do you think part of the problem is, and let's go, if we're going back to the education, we're not so important with art and people never don't really understand this

and it's true with comedy it's true with painting music acting is technique it's technique it's a rigorous technique and rehearsal and for you know hour after hour after hour playing the scales if you're a musician learning breath control projection connection with words and verse

and all the rest of it if you're an actor and so on and so on Do you think part of the problem is, because we've lost this arts education, we've lost the technical rigor that is needed to become a virtuoso in your field? You're suggesting that we need technique in order to be virtuoso. That makes you an elitist. Okay? That's the problem. This has become associated with elitism.

We don't make a distinction between elite skills and elitism. We think it's the same thing. It's actually two distinct categories. But yes, of course, you're absolutely right. You need to have a rigorous education and a rigorous training, and it's extraordinarily difficult to become a professional musician. It's insanely difficult. The amount of training that is required, the amount of application of effort,

the number of ways that you could easily fail at it, the insane difficulty of getting into the profession in the first place and making a living at it, yeah, it's very, very, very difficult. But yeah, we've really de-emphasized the importance of technique. There's no question about that. And the other thing that goes along with that is a lot of schools are simply getting rid of their arts curriculum altogether. There are major universities that will no longer teach music with sheet music. It's like, well, it's too elitist or it's too difficult or it's not accessible to people.

So the response to that is, well, we'll just do away with it because it's too hard. It's like, it's so interesting that point about elitism because there's a big, big difference between elitism in the traditional sense, which is a group of high status people whose high status is often unearned and a discrimination based on actual skill, which are very, very different things. status acquired by virtue of ability and technique and whatever else of me is totally, that's a totally good reason to distribute reward and all sorts of other things, right, versus elitism whereby people are in the position they are by virtue of their birth or parentage or whatever. And it's so interesting that you make that point because I think there are many, many errors in which we've got those two confused.

Oh, absolutely. If I get on an airplane, I would hope that the pilot would be an elite pilot. Yeah. You know, and I think this is the case for most people in a lot of areas of their lives. We don't necessarily think of it in those terms, but you would want to have the absolute most qualified, most competent person doing most things that you depend upon for your life. Provided there a trans black woman. Yes, well, yes, obviously.

So, but no, no, when you apply that to the arts, though, that's where people start getting a bit, you know, a bit, funny because it's like, oh, so you think you're, you think you're an expert, you think you're, you know, such an elite artist, huh? Okay, well, what about all these other people who also have pretensions to being creative, you know, what about them? Do you think you're better than them? And then because we've de-emphasized skill and we've made it all about identity, which we often have in arts programming, especially as pertains to public funding, then the very notion of skill itself has completely come under attack. How have we got to this point in the arts where we have delegitimized skill?

Because when you look, when you think about the masters of their art, I mean, whoever, like a Nina Simone. Nina Simone, as you know, was classically trained, you know, a virtuoso musician. I mean, how have we got to the point where we take somebody like her or Coltrane, all these different people, and say, well, you know, that's elizabeth, that's illicit. And you go, but you look at these people. A lot of them came from poverty. A lot of them were black or female, whatever else.

And they still produced magnificent art. There is not one moment where I can't, I've noticed actually, I can't put, if I invite someone around, I can't put Nina Simone on because everybody just ends up listening to Nina Simone. Yeah. That's how magnificent her talent and her voice is. Yeah. And her phrasing.

How have we got to this point? Well, because it's not obvious what constitutes technical virtuosity. in a society in which art has become so individualized and so microscopic in its reach that the criteria have sort of gone out the window. What would be your criteria to judge whether somebody has excellent technique or not when what they're doing might be unintelligible to you

or it might be part of some microscopic little niche? I think that's part of the problem, right? You need to have some kind of objective standards, a common language on some level so that you can determine what the, what the profundity is of a work or what the technical ability is of the artist. And we don't have that.

You know, it's like every artist can develop this entirely idiosyncratic mode of expression and they might have their little microscopic audience. And it's like, yes, it's extremely difficult because there are no objective standards. And it's difficult for music schools and art schools as well, because we're being taught that art is entirely about, about individual expression and whatever you do is fine, as long as you're expressing yourself.

That sounds familiar. Yes, but there's a lot more to it than that. Sure. And Samuel, you mentioned your YouTube channel and the attempt to bring this conversation to a more general audience. What are you attempting to do? Well, the YouTube channel came about because of my experience teaching in conservatories in France And also just the amount of material that I was starting to accumulate as a teacher, because as you know, Francis, when you're teaching, you have to constantly prepare. You have to...

Did he tell you as a teacher? Yeah. It came up. Yeah, it came up somehow. You know, you have to generate all this material. You have to have it at your fingertips. And so I was putting together these really complex and thorough lesson plans and just thinking, you know, I've got this massive material. I love communicating with people. It would be so fantastic to be able to share it with more.

And so, you know, as a total experiment, this was in 2016 when YouTube was just kind of sort of starting to become a serious thing. You were seeing more long-form content. You were starting to see university professors putting their lectures up online. And I thought, well, you know, I'll try it as an experiment and see what happens. And much to my shock and surprise, the videos that I put up, which were on relatively specialized and esoteric topics, were getting thousands and thousands of views. And I was absolutely not expecting that. My expectations were set very low. I thought, okay, if 100 people watch this, then wouldn't that be amazing?

Because 100 is more than 15, which is the number of people I had in my class at the time. And it just kept growing and growing and growing. And then I started realizing that there was a real hunger for this, that the traditional media, the legacy media, have absolutely abdicated any responsibility that they may have had in the past as to informing the public about cultural matters. It's just gone. You know, it's like all you have is coverage of entertainment, but the fine arts again are absent.

So there's a vacuum that was created. And what I attempted to do was to create videos that would be accessible to a broader audience and that would talk about things that I think are important and that I wanted to share with as many people as possible. So it was very difficult at the beginning because one of the weird things about YouTube, maybe you've found this as well, is in a certain sense, you don't really know who you're talking to, right? Or at least I had no idea at first. So I didn't know how to calibrate what I was doing. You know, is this for professionals? Is this for highly trained people? Is this for beginners?

Is it for a mixture of them? How do you talk to both of them at the same time? Do you talk to experts and novices in a way that engages both of them? It was very difficult to work all that out. Well, it's great that you're doing it. We're going to move to our locals in a second and ask you questions from our supporters that they've asked quite a few of. But before we do that, the final question we're always asked is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Before Samuel answers a final question, at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our locals. The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this.

I'm curious how music soothes the animal within us. It has been shown dogs respond positively to classical music. Please expound on this and tell us what instrument reaches your emotional core in this way. A kid's even into music anymore. The internet seems to have dulled the emotional connection with music and the hormonal adolescent heart. That's something that I would say to anybody

who's coming to classical music for the first time is start with that piece. It's absolutely one of the greatest achievements of our species in any medium. Well, here's a hypothetical for you. What if the fine arts were to disappear altogether? What if we were to just do away with the museums and the symphony orchestras and the ballets and all of those sort of inconvenient and expensive forms of art that we have?

If they were to just disappear tomorrow, what would the effect be if we were to completely remove the arts from our curriculum? There would be a lot more mentally ill homeless people. And... Sorry, I feel like that may have a lot of... Fair enough. What is your point, Samo? My point is, look, the right tend to emphasize shoring up Western values, the values that are essential to Western society.

In my view, those values are encapsulated and expressed in a sensual and immediately understandable medium in the fine arts, and that's their function. That's one of their many functions. It's a vessel for the preservation of culture. Absolutely. And if we were to give up on that entirely and just leave it to the dogs, as it were, and just say, well, you know, the rule of the majority, whatever is popular, you know, whatever is most appealing to people, you know, that will be our culture.

And it's like, if you think about what, it's not easy, it's not difficult to make things that are appealing to people. We know how to do this. Like, okay, like, processed foods are appealing. Drugs are appealing, pornography is appealing. You know, it's like, we can have that. But what the arts do is they encourage a more considered form of expression where you can dive within, you know, you can have a rich inner life. It keeps people alive.

It's not a frivolous decoration. It's necessary. You know, if you look at the Victor Frankel book, Man's Search for Meaning, he talks about this. talks about how in the worst of conceivable situations, you know, people being tortured in these camps, that there was a moment when they put a little cabaret show on somehow. They were able to do this. They found a hut somewhere that wasn't being used and put on a show. And that there were inmates there that decided to forego their evening ration of a little crust of bread or whatever it is in order to attend that show, you know, because they needed that. Because in that moment, the idea of being able to

connect with other people through the medium of art was more nourishing than that crust of bread. And there are countless stories like this. The French composer Olivier Messian in 1941 wrote a piece called The Quartet for the End of Time, which was written in a concentration camp. And they had nothing. They had like a broken piano and a cello that was missing one of its strings. And he wrote a piece that for the players that he was able to gather together in this camp. And it's one of the most legendary pieces of 20th century music. The point being that people will do this no matter what the circumstances are. If you're on board the Titanic and it's sinking, you still pull your violin out of its case. So we have to reconsider our relationship.

with art and understand that this is not a bonus, this is something that we need to do. If it were a luxury, you know, we wouldn't have it anymore. You know, if it were, if it were a purposeless activity, it would have ceased long ago because it's too difficult. You know what happens to purposeless things? They shrivel. There's no, there's no reason for them to continue to exist. The fact that in all of these horrific situations that I've had, outlined, that there is this groping for some kind of a, what, a connection with culture, with something higher indicates to me very strongly that we can't do without it. Tamil And Drove, thank you for coming on.

Head on over to locals where we ask Samuel your questions. In the arts, do you think we're seeing the death of the maverick, the person who busts taboos, you know, in this age of mass consumption and conformity where everybody must have the correct opinion.