MF: You said some of your colleagues have gotten into a routine?
II:
Yeah, well, that fell into that trap.
I mean, these are just little comments that people make to me. For example, I was playing in a really
beautiful, kind of like a private castle in Ireland a couple of years ago, it
was a lovely venue. In fact it had a big
music room that was made in the nineteenth century for concerts. And it was just fantastic, I loved the
experience. And afterwards, I was
chatting with the organizers and they were telling me about this really famous
pianist, who was going to be playing a few months later. And I was, you know, quite proud to be on the
same series as this person. And they
told me that this person had played there ten years earlier and they had played
the exact same program that they would be playing a
few months later. And that the
organizers had asked him if he’d be willing to maybe, you know, at least change
one of the pieces. And he wouldn’t do
it!
There are all kinds of reasons why one might do that. I mean, maybe he
played nine years of different programs and it just happened to be that one
again. But I doubt it. I don't think
that it was a coincidence.
MF: With someone at your level, it seems it must be easy to just sit down with a brand new piece and quickly learn it, and then perform and record it soon after?
II: Well, I mean there are two sides to it. On the one hand, you do get faster as the
years go on. And in fact, I’ve been
working on something, I’ve had a project now since August or September, where
I’ve been making a conscious decision to try to learn faster, to allow me to
play more things, and just to give me more freedom.
You
know, if you – let’s say it takes you sixteen hours to learn a piece, and you
have X number of pieces to learn. Imagine if you could somehow
bring that number down from sixteen to ten, and play at the exact same level of
skill. That would be a huge advantage,
right? I mean, you’d have so much more
time to do other things.
And so
I’ve been working on that, and it turns out that you can get faster. And, you know,
one of the things that immediately comes up when someone talks about this is that if you’re learning faster, then you’re not learning as well, right? Like, you must be learning more superficially. But in fact the opposite is true. If you’re able to kind of trim the fat from
your practicing, you can learn faster and
the music sticks longer to your brain.
MF: Wow!
II: I’ve been experimenting with this, and taking notes, and kind of making
a journal about it - about how I’ve been teaching myself how to learn faster.
And it’s been just incredible. I
mean, I haven’t been this engaged in practicing for years and years. So I guess if you’re the kind of person that’s
interested in those things, then it’s never boring, you know? It doesn’t feel
like work. On the other hand if you
say to yourself, well, it’s going to take me sixteen hours to learn this piece,
I just have to put in the time, then it becomes hell.
MF:
Let’s talk about the composers you’ve chose for this new CD, Morton Feldman, Scriabin and John Cage. What’s the common thread?
II: The common thread is the particular pieces I
chose. I mean, if you were to put those composers together on a CD, and just
choose any random works, then it would be all over the place. It would be like one of these potpourri CDs,
which is becoming popular, unfortunately!
But with this CD, I’ve picked particular pieces.
For example, the two pieces by Cage I’ve chosen are early Cage, which were very lyrical, meditative, slow. Very easy to listen to, actually, not at all what one would associate with Cage’s reputation, for, you know, kind of avant-garde style. With the Feldman, it is probably his most accessible piece because, on the one hand, it’s short, for him. Twenty-three minutes is short. You know, normally his pieces are over an hour. And also it’s just very gentle. It opens with a melody that sounds like it almost could be Debussy. It is quite melodic, and it becomes more abstract later, but I find that there’s that thread.
And the
reason I put Scriabin next to all of this, you know, avant-garde American
music, is because there’s a few places in Feldman’s journals and his writing
where he talks about the fact that the first pieces he ever wrote were
Scriabin-esque. And I’ve been to
foundations where they have archives of his, and it seems like these pieces
were lost, so we will never know what the pieces sounded like that Feldman
wrote when he was, say, thirteen or fourteen. But I imagine that they sound just like
Scriabin, and I love that idea. So I put
in real Scriabin. And it seems to me like
there’s a certain continuity which is of interest. Now, if you put them side by side, you start
to hear connections.
MF:
So, are you traveling soon in order to promote the CD?
II: Absolutely. I’m traveling a lot, actually, leaving on
Tuesday to Bratislava, Slovakia, and then Vienna a few days later. I’ll be back
to France for a couple of days, and then I’m leaving for Hong Kong and then
China at the end of May. And then in
June there are a bunch of concerts in France, both in Paris and the
provinces. Also there’s a big
concert in Dublin, in Ireland, in the beginning of June as well because this
record label, Heresy Records, is
based there. So I’m really excited
about that.
MF: What proportion of your year is spent traveling?
II:
I’m actually trying to make it more extreme. I’m trying to make the traveling for
concerts part of the year be really, really, condensed. As condensed as possible, so I can spend more
time just reading and reflecting and thinking about things. Working on my practice method. Looking for new composers, new pieces, new
projects. So I would say now it’s down to about a third of the time traveling. Whereas before it was closer to more than half, actually. So I’m getting better at, you know, grouping
things together, which is great. It’s difficult, because sometimes you just feel like staying at home and
reading about something or learning a new piece, and you can’t.
MF:
Do you read music books for fun?
II:
I probably should read biographies of composers more. I don’t that much. What I do like to read is interviews, for
example. Primary documents where
sometimes like a little anecdote can be really telling and tell you more about
the person than a whole biography.
I also
like to read things that have nothing to do with music. Actually, I was working on a new CD project,
which is not going to be released commercially, but it was the idea of
critique. That was the theme. So I was reading critical theory by Foucault
and also going back to things like Kant and Hume. Philosophers that I’d read in college but I
haven’t really gone deep into for a while.
And I was interested in this idea of “What is critique in
the arts?” In particular in music. What does it mean to look at pieces with a
critical eye, not just to say to yourself that these are masterpieces that are
perfect in every way and the composers were kind of like, you know, prophets,
or something?
MF: [laughs]
II:
I think it’s more fun to think of composers as humans, who make mistakes, or who write music that can be awkward
sometimes, or maybe can be improved. You
know I like that idea of, kind of, breaking down the icon status of
composers.
MF: It struck me when you said, being alone with yourself and the
instrument and the music forces you to face your own -- shortcomings, was I
think the word you used? Maybe that place of
imperfection you’re talking about is really where art is born. Except for somebody like Mozart.
II:
Yes, that’s right. Obviously there are
exceptions. But the way that
most people work, is that they will start something and then they’ll improve it
by a tiny bit, and then it will continue to improve by a tiny bit. And then at some point they decide that
they’re done and they feel like stopping.
I mean that’s how everyone I know works, whether it’s as a performer, as
a composer, a visual artist. And it’s actually a major topic of discussion among artists: how do you know
when a work is done? And that’s
something Feldman used to discuss with visual artists in New York back in the fifties and sixties. How do you know when you
don’t want to touch something anymore?
I think that’s a really interesting question.
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