Víkingur Ólafsson

Víkingur Ólafsson is a world-renowned Icelandic pianist. Celebrated for his profound artistry and visionary programming, he has performed with premier orchestras such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra, and London Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2023, he performed his album of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations on a world tour, showcasing his musicianship across six continents, totaling 88 performances. Ólafsson’s latest release, an EP entitled Continuum, is described as his “personal Bach diary,” a work that blends his innovative approach to classical music with the 18th century composer’s iconic work. As a two-time recipient of the Opus Klassik Solo Recording of the Year, CoScan’s International Nordic Person of the Year (2023), and Album of the Year at BBC Music Magazine Awards (2019), Ólafsson continues to captivate audiences worldwide. His upcoming tour dates can be found here. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Athletic Nicotine https://www.athleticnicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Vivo Barefoot http://vivobarefoot.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA25' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  I think there's a certain kind of instability about an island in that specific location in the North Atlantic Ocean, where it's the kind of volcanic eruptions every other, every third year it seems these days, and the earthquakes, and the high contrast between the seasons. You know, we have basically two seasons, the dark and the bright season,

• 0:49Speaker 00

  the winter and the summer. And every year, you know, the idea of autumn and spring is just a deception, and we fall for it every year, you know. You might have snow in May, and you never know what's gonna happen.

• 1:03Rick Rubin?

  Icelandic winter is May?

• 1:07Speaker 00

  No, Icelandic winter is basically from October. So we basically have, we just have a summer season, like June, whatever, July, August. But it's brief and it's wonderful. You know, it has a white night, so, you know, complete daylight. It's amazing to actually make music at summer solstice in Iceland, you know, it's amazing. But it has the light, but it also has the kind of focus of the slightly colder temperatures, you know, the kind of crispness of air. But I think also growing up in Iceland is a different question to ask like me as opposed to asking my sons. Because growing up in the 90s is such a...

• 1:50Speaker 00

  In retrospect, wonderful thing, growing up without the internet, without YouTube and without all of it, right? Without Spotify and all those things. It's kind of so wonderful to grow up not aware of anything really outside of your little island and just get the kind of luxury of being the best at playing piano.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Building your sort of, you know, I thought of myself as an international pianist since I was like ten and I wasn't, of course.

• 2:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  But that's how I define myself, right?

• 2:22Rick Rubin?

  That's interesting. That's an interesting idea, that you thought of yourself that way at a young age.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  I think it's something that many people have in common who do something like this, to define themselves quite early on, whether they admit it or not.

• 2:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  When I met my first piano teacher, I was five and I was actually accompanying my older sister to her music school and we were picking her up or something and I met this lady, Ernla Stefanstoddig, who was a very famous person in Iceland, not for her piano teaching, but for seeing through mountains and believing in elves and sort of different worlds. She was a very spiritual woman. And she asked me, would you like to learn how to play the piano? And five-year-old me said, I know how to play the piano.

• 3:05Rick Rubin?

  Wow, good answer.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  Which is ridiculous.

• 3:08Rick Rubin?

  Good answer.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  But I felt like I knew how to play the piano my way. You know, I played piano.

• 3:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  So.

• 3:14Rick Rubin?

  And did she become your teacher?

• 3:16Speaker 00

  She did.

• 3:17Rick Rubin?

  Tell me what it's like learning to play piano from somebody.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  It was wonderful because she was, maybe she was a great teacher and not a great teacher. You know, she was great in that she just inspired joy with the music. So there were not so many mistakes, but not so great perhaps because there weren't so many mistakes. So it wasn't the most disciplined way of teaching, but she always put me at the end of the day for her schedule so she could spend extra time with me. We would just go on and on and on and I would just play and we would, I think she was enjoying it as much as I did. But it was basically about the fundamental joy of getting that response from the piano. Just, you know, having that dialogue with the instrument that started early on. So she would never make me play really scales or all the kind of strict technical academic exercises

• 4:06Speaker 00

  that we then have to go through at some point, most of us. It was just the response to music. So I was very lucky in that way.

• 4:14Rick Rubin?

  Did she play for you?

• 4:16Speaker 00

  A little bit, no, not much, almost nothing. She would just smile at me.

• 4:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  That's that was the kind of feeling, you know, it was it was for joy. It wasn't for suffering.

• 4:29Rick Rubin?

  Was it a feeling of acceptance? Or how would you describe what you felt from her?

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Acceptance, absolutely, is a good word. But I think also just

• 4:41Speaker 00

  celebration, you know, so she was a very spiritual woman and you could see how touched she was by the music. And that affects you as a child very early on. And and you learn from that as much as from the skill of actually playing the piano. You learn, you know, by seeing people being inspired, it grows something inside you. I believe that now.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  And so I think it was free, but you know, there were no piano competitions. There was no direct comparison. I was simply the best there was in that school.

• 5:12Speaker 00

  And that was it, you know. So I would never practice out of duty. And my mother, who was a piano teacher, my father, architect and the composer, they would rather encourage me to not play the piano quite so much and just go out and play football with my my friends and do whatever. Just to be a normal kid, that was more the direction, you know. And they were always, whenever there was media attention on me as a kid, they would turn it down just to keep everything very, very, very private.

• 5:37Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember the first time you played in front of people?

• 5:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, when I was

• 5:43Speaker 00

  five, six, first year. And I remember it was hilarious, actually, because I was told not to forget to bring my music book with me on stage. But, you know, I always memorized things and I learned them by heart. So so five year old me just thought, OK, I'm supposed to bring the music book. And I brought the book sort of under my hand and then I didn't know what to do with it. So I played the whole concert with the book here in my elbow like this. I just sort of playing. And then I sort of like took a bow and left the stage and was like, what? What's the deal with the book? So that that's how you do it. But I mean, playing for people, I was always something I looked forward to. I didn't realize, you know, that things could really go wrong. So privilege.

• 6:24Rick Rubin?

  How different is playing the same piece in a room by yourself versus playing it in a theater full of people?

• 6:33Speaker 00

  It's not one experience or two experiences to compare. It's like every every night is different, just like we are different from day to day. So I feel like it's an it's a discovery like every every single concert. But.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  There are two sides, the introvert and the extrovert side. You know, and I think we need both, just like I need the studio, which is the introvert side, and then I need Carnegie Hall, which is the extrovert side. Couldn't be without people though, you know. But I think about this all the time. What should be the proportion in my musical life as a pianist? Live touring, which today is actually quite extensive, and then the home time, the sort of scheduled time for nothing, but then for everything perhaps to happen. And I'm drawn more and more to the idea of going into fifty-fifty splits, you know. And I think that's something that has been lacking a little bit

• 7:32Speaker 00

  in my life in the last ten years. It's been incredibly busy.

• 7:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Busy touring the whole world and trying to get to know my audience and allowing my audience to get to know me a little bit. But I see a different now, I just turned forty, you know, and I see a different decade ahead and I want to really... What do I want? I think I want to like make Glenn Gould turn in his grave with jealousy of the kind of live in the studio. I mean, imagine if sort of an ideological man like him would have actually had the luxury of the modern studio with all the creative possibilities that that technology affords us.

• 8:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  So I want to go more into that. But you know, it's a little bit like the studio is where you tell people very confidential things and you whisper your secrets to the microphone. The concert is something else. It can be very intimate and it can be very personal, but it's never entirely intimate. There's always three thousand or whatever it is, two thousand people, whatever the size. And so that's always a mix. But I'm building my own studio now under my own house, happening right now in Reykjavik. And yeah, that is my gift to myself. I know you know that gift very well, having built all these studios around the whole world.

• 8:46Rick Rubin?

  There's something about having a place to make music that is not a corporate environment. Having windows in the studio is really nice.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 8:55Rick Rubin?

  Changes everything.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I went for the golden ratio and the kind of shoebox size of that. My whole house is gorgeous house, nineteen sixties in Iceland, perfect for me, timing, architecture. And we just analyzed the house and I don't know if it was on purpose, but the whole house is in the golden ratio. My favorite ratio. So, so of course we've done the studio like that as well.

• 9:19Rick Rubin?

  You say that your first teacher had a spiritual relationship to music. Would you say you have a spiritual relationship to music?

• 9:26Speaker 00

  Music is my spirituality, absolutely. Yeah.

• 9:31Rick Rubin?

  How do you describe the connection, you and music?

• 9:35Speaker 00

  It's like plants and water, you know. It's my water.

• 9:41Rick Rubin?

  It feeds you.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  It feeds me. Do we feed the music? I don't think so. We gain from the oxygen, I think we get from the water. I love it more and more, I guess, the older I get and the closer to death, you know, we are in our lives. The more it seems to matter to me.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  When I was young, it was a game and now it is something more than that, you know.

• 10:06Rick Rubin?

  Is there ever a time when you're playing in front of people where you forget that there are people there?

• 10:10Speaker 00

  All the time.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  Are you joking? Yeah, I'm afraid, all the time. But I think that's sometimes the aim and sometimes it's not the aim. Sometimes, you know, for instance, if you play in the BBC proms and you have like all these people there and they're just there on the floor with you. You don't really forget about them because they're in your face. But I always, almost always turn my audience into a, it's a very dark room that I have. It's a very single spotlight, very, very simple setup. Where I want to have the luxury of being able perhaps to forget about everything and forgetting about myself as well. Sometimes it's just, it's like when I'm playing the Goldberg Variations of Bach, it feels like, like a meeting with him somewhere in between

• 10:53Speaker 00

  two thousand twenty-four and seventeen forty-one, when the, when the piece was written, you know, it's, it's a strange thing. You know, Philip Glass said, "Music is a place," you know, as real as any place you ever been to. I think it's a wonderful quote. So we go to that place and that's maybe the goal.

• 11:12Rick Rubin?

  You mentioned when Bach lived. And when I hear you play Bach's music, it's written 300 years ago. It feels completely modern to me. And I don't completely understand it. You're not changing the music. You're playing the music as it was written. But for some reason, you're bringing something modern to it. Is it something you're aware of or aim for? Or is it just an organic thing that happens?

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Well, I'm glad you think it's modern. Because I feel very much like Bach's music is more modern than anything I play by any living composer. And I work with some of the very finest composers. He seems to me always to be the future. Why is that? You say that it's true that I don't change the music. But I do change the music. Because I don't change the notes and the proportions of rhythm inside the score. But that's where it ends. Because he doesn't write almost anything about how to shape those notes. There are no, almost no dynamic markings.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  The tempo markings are so open and so broad. And anyway, what do we know about how people felt the time in the 18th century, when the horse was the fastest way of traveling? Of course Bach couldn't have dreamt about the modern grand piano that I'm using. But I feel like it's a weirdly minimal maximal sort of tension in Bach. Maximal in terms of the greatest musical structure ever created, in my opinion. And minimal in a sense that they're completely open. So, an old man said to me late in the 20th century that Bach is a free country.

• 13:04Rick Rubin?

  Wow, that's beautiful.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  It stays with me. His name was Gérgi Scherbak, who was a very great Hungarian pianist. Bach is a free country. And I think of that all the time. And then I feel like with Bach... You have to take a stance in so many different ways in every single moment in time. You know, in every measure, you make so many decisions in the moment and different in each performance, you know. So when you play the Goldberg Variations two nights in a row, it's really two different pieces. Yeah, so in a way, it is, it feels, you feel very much like a co-creator in a, in a very sort of compositional sense with Bach, even if you're playing his sort of, you know, eternal text. You are, you are still, in a way, creating and such a big part of it.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  And to play that music, which is built as much on sort of harmonic blocks, but even more on linear, on the, on the horizontal, you know, on the way these voices in the texture on this polyphony, you know, how you have two, three, four, five voices sort of speaking to each other, just like actors on a stage, where you sometimes feel almost like a theater director when you're playing Bach, you know, giving these different voices their unique roles and allowing some to take the spotlight, but always to keep the supporting actors absolutely alive, as in any good staging of a play. That's how it can feel with Bach. You feel sometimes more like a director than a pianist.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  And to then bring that to the studio and to think about how we record the piano, which is a very difficult thing to do, actually, with success, to get the three dimensionality of the piano as opposed to that very often two dimensionality and push it in your face approach of piano recordings. That is one of the most fascinating challenges and one of the most creative things I know. To me, as creative, dealing with the microphone setup before the Goldberg Variations recording as perhaps writing my own music or doing whatever, arranging something, you know, it's so interesting how moving the microphones a centimeter here or there changes the narrative, you know.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  For instance, in the Goldbergs, we actually placed, for the first time I tried this, two mics just above my hat, because I wanted to really give people, the listeners, the impression that they were basically playing the piece themselves, almost, you know. So the sound and the way we record with Christopher Tano, he's my dear soulmate producer, and Christian Batzura as well, my wonderful A and R from Deutsche Grammophon Universal. The way we do that is such a musical joy, you know, and that's why I mentioned earlier Glenn Gould and how I wish he had the kind of opportunities that we have today, you know.

• 15:54Rick Rubin?

  One of the things that really strikes me as modern about your playing has to do with a rhythmic interpretation. But again, I think if you look at the music, it hasn't changed. But there's some internal rhythmic thing going on when you play it that's not in Glenn Gould and that I hear the person playing now, he's heard hip hop music. He's listened to hip hop music. I'm not saying it's inspired by hip hop music, but it's played in a world where hip hop music exists. And I can feel those inner rhythms that I don't hear in old recordings, even the greatest old recordings. It brings it even more to now.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  I like the idea of hearing Kendrick Lamar and the Goldberg Variations. That's hilarious. You know, going back to Gould, I mean, his favorite artist in those days in the seventies or sixties was Barbra Streisand.

• 16:50Rick Rubin?

  Oh, fantastic. I didn't know that.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  She's amazing. But yeah, I mean, we have to embrace our times. We can't escape them. That's why I always think it's interesting, but sometimes a little bit arrogant when people pretend to know the correct historical way of playing music. Old music, it's so strange, you know, as if the composers would play the Goldberg Variations twice the same. If Bach was here today, Los Angeles coming to Disney Hall, would you play the same tempo, the same expression? Would the piece tell him the same narrative? Tonight's in a row, I'd bet my right kidney it's not going to be the same. You know, no, but I think we have to embrace it. And coming from my little island, Iceland, I think this is one of the perks

• 17:36Speaker 00

  of coming from that island, that we do many different things out of necessity, perhaps. We are very few and it's a very small and very intense musical scene. I'm not so much a part of it anymore because I'm just sort of always somewhere out in the world, but. You know, as a teenager, I played in a big band. And I've done, you know, rock quintet improvisations, a little bit like in Emerson, like in Palmer's style, you know. I've done my weird things as well. And I think people back home in the symphony orchestra, some of them play heavy metal on Friday nights, having played a Mahler symphony on a Thursday.

• 18:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Which is to be celebrated. You know, I did my duet with Björk, et cetera.

• 18:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  That's like so many. So I think perhaps that has to feed into the way you play music. And perhaps in particular, how you play Baroque music. And even more in particular, how you play Johann Sebastian Bach.

• 18:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  I think he becomes very easily a mirror for those who play him and for those who listen to him.

• 18:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, to me, the music is Baroque, but your interpretation is not. Even though it's very by the book. It's like you're not reinventing the wheel. That's what's so interesting to me about it is how it can be so similar and so different at the same time.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:58Rick Rubin?

  That's my experience as a listener.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  Sometimes I just think like, when you're making a record.

• 19:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  And I wonder what, how you feel about that. Like, the one thing you need to always be is specific. You know, and when you play Bach, in terms of rhythm, in terms of the exact voicing of what you're doing and the exact proportion of time you steal there on that note and then give back in the following measure. How specific can you go? And if you go specific, usually you go honest. Because being specific means you have to search somewhere, I think, beyond your ego. You know, if you really want to be specific, you go beyond yourself almost.

• 19:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  So I think that is sometimes what happens. And I think what you are trying to describe, I think, you know, every recording is different, but they all have to be specific.

• 19:45Rick Rubin?

  Is everything always intentional? Or does it just come out that way sometimes?

• 19:49Speaker 00

  I think life is incredibly improvisatory. I think sometimes I work really hard, you know, and I'm quite serious about what I do.

• 19:58Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  And I don't ever feel like I'm really working. I, you know, just I play. But I think I make so many decisions in the process of preparing, just in order to forget them in the moment of doing.

• 20:13Rick Rubin?

  Hmm.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  So.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, you study to be able to to forget everything in the moment and do something completely different. Because I feel like actually with myself at least, maybe, I think it might be lack of talent, but I think like I I actually need to go through that insane process of sometimes overthinking and, you know, over deciding everything in order to to surprise myself and allow my subconsciousness to sort of take over a little bit.

• 20:42Rick Rubin?

  How different are performances for you night to night?

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Sometimes very different, but pianos are different, yeah, and audiences are different. I mean, when you play, let's just take two cities, like, let's say, New York and Tokyo. So when you play in Carnegie Hall and Santeri Hall, come onto the stage in Carnegie Hall, and it's a Friday night, and it's a party, and you you feel the vibes. Come onto the stage and you have what I think is the greatest acoustic in the world. Sounds like a cliche because it's Carnegie Hall, but actually, that cliche is true.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  And you play a performance and it's that Friday night in Carnegie Hall with those people in that mode. And then you go to Santeri Hall in Tokyo, and you have the most unbelievably beautiful audience, and they applaud, and the applause is so rapid, you know, they they really, they really work for the applause there. And then you sit down and

• 21:39Rick Rubin?

  Silence.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Like a, like a zipper, you know?

• 21:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  When that happens, I always think, oh, I've just lost my hearing. It's just feels like, oh, God, it's it's like a vacuum, you know?

• 21:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  And then you play, and it's a very different occasion, and it becomes sometimes perhaps more sacred, can you say?

• 21:58Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  Or, you know, sort of maybe elevated, but it's just different, and it's not better.

• 22:04Rick Rubin?

  Hmm.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  Perhaps I prefer the the human element there in Carnegie Hall, you know, even if a cellphone goes off in variation fifteen or something, you know? But just these two concerts, just to give you one, you know, I played the Goldberg variations now, and I don't know, I've stopped counting, but I think it's ninety-six or seven concerts or something like that, almost everywhere in the world, and I'm not tired with the music because I feel like I'm doing, at this point, the eighty-fifth variation on the Goldberg variations.

• 22:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  The piano is a living creature, you know, it's, people don't realize sometimes that one grand piano has twelve thousand plus parts. And they are living and breathing, I dare say. It's wood and it's, you know, steel and it's iron, it's screws, you know, and it's strings and every temperature that goes up one degree or two changes the piano, changes us. Yeah, the piano is a society in a way. And that society is not stable, and no society is stable, nor should it be. It's very living.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  So, yeah, if the humidity goes up five percent, I feel it in the piano. And that comes through in my music making and the choices I make on stage.

• 23:26Rick Rubin?

  Do you think the energy in the audience goes beyond what you hear? You described two different audiences, one's noisy, one's silent. If you took the sound equation out of it, being in the room with those different groups of people, would it feel different in the room?

• 23:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, don't you think so?

• 23:47Rick Rubin?

  I think so, but I want to know what you think.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, but we're having a dialogue. Well. Yeah, I think so, inevitably.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  But I'm more and more interested now also just in the, every room as an instrument, you know. I was just reading about Carnegie, I was wondering, why, why do I love it so much? Right? And I, I found this book, someone sent me a page from a book that is like, I think it must be about, you know, a hundred years old, this book, but it did sound measurements, sound duration for different pitches. Turns out that the duration of both the low frequencies and the higher frequencies and everything that are in between in Carnegie Hall is remarkably even. So that the room really resonates basically all over as it does on the stage. You know, close to the instruments, which is so beautiful because most rooms with the lower frequencies,

• 24:41Speaker 00

  they cancel out the smaller birds.

• 24:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Have you played at Disney Hall before?

• 24:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, many, many times.

• 24:49Rick Rubin?

  And how's that experience?

• 24:51Speaker 00

  It's beautiful. It's completely different because it's a vineyard kind of a setting where you have audience, you know, everywhere around you. So it's beautiful. It's not Carnegie Hall, but it's such a good atmosphere.

• 25:05Rick Rubin?

  And how is it different playing Bach in Germany, in Leipzig, versus playing it in New York or playing it in Iceland?

• 25:16Speaker 00

  It's a good question. I think

• 25:21Speaker 00

  sometimes when you have that much tradition, I sometimes wonder how is it to come from the country of Bach and Beethoven and Wagner and all of them. When you have that much tradition, I wonder if you bring with yourself slightly more baggage to the occasion. I don't know. I feel like the response, they love the music so dearly in Germany and they're so proud of it. And it's such an amazing crowd I have there. They're so serious about it that perhaps they lose some of their freedom in response to it because it has such a history. It's wonderful sometimes to play for some of my audience, like in Vienna, actually,

• 26:05Speaker 00

  where you do have that history, but I played two nights and on the second night, because the first one sold out quite fast. And then you had all these young people and the Viennese press wrote about, what are all those genes doing in our concert hall? You know, because it was all young people. And I thought that was a great response and you felt the difference.

• 26:22Rick Rubin?

  Absolutely.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  I think it can be wonderful not to have too much history. That's why perhaps being a performer or pianist from Iceland, and in a way the first Icelandic touring pianist, I guess, or soloist, gives me a bit of freedom because I don't have the whole Russian piano school behind me as some of the Russians do.

• 26:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  And I don't have the French piano school, you know, to worry about. There is no piano school.

• 26:49Rick Rubin?

  And do you surprise yourself when you're playing?

• 26:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. Sometimes you have these moments

• 27:00Speaker 00

  where you're just sort of observing it from you. I guess you could call it, I don't want to say it, but like almost you go out of your, out of yourself. I'm not going to say out of body experience because you're very much in the act of doing it. Sometimes it's almost as if you've shown up a few meters and you just sort of observe it. When you fly, I think so many people who do this know that feeling and it's thankfully rare because it then means something when it happens.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  But there can be also just these moments when the music also takes you in a difficult direction, yourself in your own thought process, with your memory and your own past experiences and sometimes sorrows, tragedies. So sometimes when I play parts of the Goldberg variations, I, I feel like getting a glimpse to, you know, what it must feel like to be at sort of the end of your life.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  And sometimes it brings back pain from my past, of course. I think we all go through that onstage one way or another if we are sincere enough about it and open up to it. But like the Goldberg variations, they can so easily be read like a life cycle, if you wish. You can also completely oppose that, but you can see them as, you know, the beautiful aria, which is like ode to life, birth of something magnificent, precious, fragile.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  And then you have the first fourteen variations, which all have one thing in common. They just use the same chord structure as the aria, just this beautiful, simple G major structure.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  And there are like fourteen different faces in a happy childhood that doesn't know shadow, you know, doesn't know pain. And then variation fifteen, quite deep into the piece, hits you in G minor and he sort of goes into the negative. Light becomes shadow.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  We have this unbearable suffering, and it's a little bit like in life when we first encounter that. When we first encounter human loss, someone in our family, whatever that is, different for each and every one of us, nothing prepares you for it. And it can feel very much like that in the Goldberg variations, variation 15, just exactly in the middle of the piece. And then you have a break, and variation 16 is an overture, like the beginning of something new again. And we have to bounce back. But we are different. We've gone through that tragedy once. Then you have the same thing happening in 21 and 25. And really, in variation 25, he does something that is so magnificent that really hard to justify talking about it almost. Yeah. But he expands time in a way that, you know,

• 29:50Speaker 00

  he sews in on the chords. And what is usually a two-minute variation turns into something like a 10-minute variation. And he goes into the most excruciatingly painful chromatic musical language. He goes to the sort of brink of what you can express and how much you can open up that compartment in your soul. It's a dark compartment. It's so painful. And I think about Bach, and I think about the fact that he had lost 10 out of 20 children, I think, at this point. And he had lost his first wife. I think she was giving birth. And he had had so much difficulty and, in a way, modest success. And there he was. I think history's greatest,

• 30:35Speaker 00

  not just musician, but perhaps just artist, you know. I don't know if anyone can really match this. And he's all alone, but he bounces back. And variation 26, 7, 8, 9, 30, they sort of go in a flurry. And it's just sort of like, you go back and you hold on to it, and it becomes this celebration and this sort of, "I am going to, you know, emerge from this victorious no matter what", like we think in life. But then the surprising thing happens, and the masterstroke, where he brings the aria back. And it's the exact same notes as in the beginning, but they've taken on a completely different meaning. And those same chord structures now reflect those 30 different periods in our lives,

• 31:19Speaker 00

  these 30 different chapters.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  And when this piece comes to an end, that's actually, it's strange to say, because we are just in G major and it just sort of like goes into the sunset. But it is one of the most tragic moments I know in all of music. And it's tragic sort of on a personal level because you don't want the music to end, you don't want that aria to end. You want to hold on to it, just like you want to hold on to life.

• 31:45Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  And you have the feeling when the aria comes back that it's just on the mixer board and you're sort of like taking it down and you're sort of like, it's been playing there all along. It's eternal, it is sort of the foundation of the world in this piece. And you feel your own end is coming, but the aria will go on.

• 32:00Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 32:01Speaker 00

  You know, just like life goes on, but we do not go on. That's how it can very often feel when you're playing. You know, you go to that place in yourself, you go to that place of personal experience. It's strange things to do with music that somebody else wrote, but while you're in the act of playing the Goldberg variations, you merge with them in a way that you become them. And I think when you play King Lear, you become Lear.

• 32:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. And the audience gets to experience just like you do. It's like the power is in the music.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's incredible. And you have all these people in the room.

• 32:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  And paradoxically, they are absolutely sort of communal together in a collective. And it's the most beautiful thing and human sort of brother and sisterhood you can imagine. And at the same time, it's the most individualistic thing in the world because everyone is in their own place. And they're all very often somewhere in their own life story. And Bach reflects that very easily in this piece and in much of his music.

• 33:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  He invites you to discover yourself. When you play Beethoven, whom I love almost equally, you're a guest in his world and he invites you to explore different facets of him. But Bach, he becomes your mirror, you know. But it's that thing at the end of the Goldberg variation when people, everybody wants to hold on to it, which is why the silence is tragic.

• 33:28Rick Rubin?

  Did you feel obligated to get into the Goldberg Variations, to record it and to play it? It's a funny thing because it's such a monumental piece and it means so much. But there are a lot of great pieces. And tell me about the decision to do it. Why you chose to do it? Why you chose to do it? When you chose to do it? And did you feel any sense of obligation?

• 33:53Speaker 00

  It's a big question. You know, to give an honest answer to it, Jeff, to sort of go back quite a few years.

• 33:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  When I first heard this music,

• 34:05Speaker 00

  it changed the way I thought about not just Bach, but about all music and about recordings. And I think I was 14. I heard the recording of Glenn Gould on Columbia.

• 34:20Rick Rubin?

  Really, or the late?

• 34:20Speaker 00

  The early one first.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  And I just remember my hat and my heart sort of exploding. I was 14. It's a great, it's a great year to hear the Goldberg Variations for the first time. It's just the right time, I think. And up until that point, I had played a lot of Bach. But he was used in my musical upbringing very much to teach good musical manners, how to play even rhythm, control everything, not too much pedal, know how to do this kind of trick here and that kind of trill there and blah, blah, blah. So Bach was all about, it was complex music. It was mathematical. It was structural. It wasn't poetic yet to me. Just that connection hadn't been made in my head.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  And then I heard the Goldberg Variations, Gould. And I realized that indeed Bach is a free country and that he can be so many things at the same time. And sure, he can be strict. He can be academic and he can be your, you know, stern teacher. That's fine. But he can also be an entertainer. He can just be a sort of a, almost like a carefree virtuoso, who wants to just sort of thrill you with his skill. He can be the deep, most tragic poet, and he can be the most brilliant philosopher, and he can be all those things in one piece and almost at the same time. You know, it's like, it's unreal when you, when you sort of just realize that these structures are poems, you know,

• 35:53Speaker 00

  and, and that they so easily can reflect the human condition in me and you. That happened when I was fourteen, with the Goldberg Variations, and I started to learn them. And I didn't play them in public until sixteen years later, when I was thirty. It was out of respect. I just knew that I wasn't ready with them. And I played a lot of Aldebach, but not the Goldberg Variations in public. Played them when I was thirty. And they became a calling card, you know. It's sort of, I'm a, my, my career really started in my early thirties, and, and this was a really important piece. The piece that Universal, Deutsche Grammathe heard me play in a tiny little concert in Berlin, et cetera.

• 36:28Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 36:28Speaker 00

  It started that whole chapter in my life.

• 36:31Rick Rubin?

  Oh.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  Or those chapters, I should say. But then I took a break from it because something about this piece, the fact that I see it as, it sounds childish, but I think of it as the greatest keyboard work of all time and perhaps the greatest musical work I know of all time.

• 36:46Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Because of that kind of like burden of association.

• 36:51Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  You, it, it almost becomes a trial where you are sort of the prosecutor and the judge and the defendant, you know. You, you put yourself on the line with the Goldberg Variations. And, and I thought, I want to do something special for my fortieth birthday year. And I want to take a break from the sort of big industry, all the symphony orchestras and this kind of normal seasons. I just want to be alone with my suitcase, with Bach, with myself, with the studio, with my family, but take a break from it. Play this one piece on a pilgrimage, just like a workaholics year off, a workaholic sabbatical, playing a hundred concerts. But that's how I saw it. And I thought, now I will record it. I'll face my trial. I'll see where I stand with this material.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  But once you have recorded it and started the tour, of course, you change your mind infinitely many times about how the music should actually go. So I'm actually thinking about sort of jumping into the studio at the end of the tour now in June and just recording them again.

• 37:51Rick Rubin?

  Yes, great idea.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  Why not?

• 37:53Rick Rubin?

  Great idea.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  I know they will be different.

• 37:56Rick Rubin?

  For sure. They can't help but be different.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. Maybe you should just come to Iceland then and

• 38:03Rick Rubin?

  You never know.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  and be a part of that.

• 38:05Rick Rubin?

  That sounds like, that's a good reason to come to Iceland.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  I could see it. We can have fun with the microphones together.

• 38:11Rick Rubin?

  How far in advance did you decide?

• 38:16Rick Rubin?

  Forty years old Goldberg variations. Did it happen quickly or over years had you been thinking about it?

• 38:22Speaker 00

  You know,

• 38:25Speaker 00

  I was thinking about it over the years and sort of leading to this point in time for, I would say, five years. I've been talking about this sort of privately to my

• 38:32Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  to my team

• 38:33Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 38:34Speaker 00

  for five years.

• 38:34Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  I love thinking in those kinds of blocks and trying to understand the different chapters of my own life.

• 38:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  We can't. I think it's important to at least show interest in the different chapters and not just do things on automatic. And I've been thinking about turning forty and looking around in my profession of, well, of music, but of classical music. And I see very often, and also in any music, actually. You see so often, people have these creative periods, very often in the twenties and sometimes in the thirties.

• 39:06Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Beyond forty, it certainly happens and you can see incredible creative growth after forty. But very often, it's not the case.

• 39:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  Very often, people settle into a kind of mode of themselves where they have defined their, themselves, perhaps, too much. And they don't challenge that definition and

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Lifestyles become slightly nicer, you know. Everything becomes a little bit more luxurious.

• 39:35Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  And big bands sign contracts not to go too far away from proven success. You know, it's a, it's a deal with the devil. But I think about this all the time and I think about it. How many composers, performers, bands, musicians, colleagues, do I see that I really look up to in a creative sense in this early, middle age, if we call it like that?

• 40:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  And how many people manage that? Because I think the tendency is that you've just become like a, like a luxury handbag, like a Gucci that's being sold by managers to promoters. And everybody is very happy about it because the leather is so fine and the seams are so seamless. And it's, it's a gorgeous little thing, you know, but it's, it's a handbag. It doesn't.

• 40:22Rick Rubin?

  And the bag is empty.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  The bag is empty. Exactly. So I think, you know, the artists that we all loved, you know, the ideological artists, people like, in my realm, people like Glenn Gould. You know, there's no one greater in that sense for defining the performer's creative.

• 40:38Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  And sometimes compositional basically role in music. And the composer sense, certainly, of course, you own Sebastian Bach, but also Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was a late bloomer and not very much a prodigy in my mind, you know. And you have people like Igor Stravinsky. You have Ludwig von Beethoven, who seems to, with every work, challenge the foundation of his whole, whole musical worldview. Can we do that in 2024? I don't know, but I think we have to push in that direction.

• 41:08Rick Rubin?

  I think it's definitely possible.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:11Rick Rubin?

  I think part of it has to do with dedication. One of the things that I see with artists as they get more successful and grow up, their life becomes more complicated and music is no longer the most important thing in their lives. It's a thing they do full time.

• 41:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 41:30Rick Rubin?

  But they're.

• 41:33Rick Rubin?

  Home life, and it makes sense. You know, you want your home life to be fruitful and important and the center of your life. But that's also at the expense of the obsession with the work that you had when you were younger.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:48Rick Rubin?

  But I think wisdom comes through experience. And there's an energy in youth that can't be recreated. But there's something that comes from wisdom that's, I'll say, equally magnificent. It's just different.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:05Rick Rubin?

  But I think also the dedication aspect of it is absolutely key. If you don't treat it as the most important thing, it won't be, and it will diminish.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  Yes. Maybe it's okay to have a nice home, but you, so many other things you can get rid of.

• 42:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. And to know that when you're doing music, you're really doing music.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:29Rick Rubin?

  You know, you're not, one foot isn't home and one foot isn't the music. And you really can be there when you're there. It's really about being present, you know, being in the moment.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  Getting rid of your smartphone, I think, as well. Good idea. Hard thing to do. No, I.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  I'm trying to sort of think about my next 10 years from 40 to 50, you know. What should happen, what I want to do, you know.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  I keep going back to, to my beginning, you know, to composing music, to opening up. I've done some of that, of course, but I used to do quite a lot of that when I was just, just a kid.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  That's perhaps why I turned so much to Bach as well, because I feel that is sort of like a compositional outlet. In the comfort zone of somebody else's notes, you know. It's a protected environment.

• 43:32Rick Rubin?

  How do you think composing impacts your playing?

• 43:35Speaker 00

  I think from composing.

• 43:38Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  Which is a scary thing to do, because you have an empty page and everybody knows that.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  I think when you have to to make that journey from point A to point B to to C, you then start to think differently about the music of other people that you play. And you start to automatically deconstruct it and think about how it might fantasize, how it might have been written, which is a fantastic thing. And when you look at, for instance, Beethoven's sketches and you see some of his processes, they're so clumsy at the beginning. And he starts with these kind of super clumsy ideas. And then he just works and works and works and works until he's happy with what he's doing. And sometimes I like like that, sort of to decompose the music and try to imagine, what if I don't know the next note?

• 44:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  Or the Goldberg variations, what note should come next? And then that note, of course, takes on an added significance once you then play it and understand it in that context, as opposed to recreate what you've heard in a recording from Glenn Gould when you were 14, you know?

• 44:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  That's a very important part of looking at it from my perspective. But there are different schools of thought about that. And many people in classical music, they think it's almost frivolous to to allow yourself that perspective and to almost think and feel almost like a composer when you're working in the music of others. Because they think, there was a very 20th century idea that the performer in classical music is a humble, dedicated servant to the great master, the composer who died 100 years ago, you know? But I think to those people, I say, have you tried working with living composers? And some of the best living composers in the world? Because they change their minds about tempos, about narratives, about notes, about everything. Of course, they do from day to day. It's not...

• 45:24Speaker 00

  So working with a living composer certainly makes the dead composers much more flexible. I think it's a beautiful thing then to open the Bach Goldberg variations or Beethoven sonatas, having just come from a session with John Adams or whomever, you know, Philip Glass or something, you know? So I think my favorite performers in history, many of them died before 1950. Because at that point in history, in the early 20th century, and certainly in the 19th century, the performer was almost a composer as well. That was just part of like your musical foundation. You wrote music and then you could become a famous pianist by playing the music of others. When Rachmaninoff plays the music of Chopin, it's the most authentic Chopin playing I know, and it's certainly my favorite.

• 46:10Speaker 00

  Sometimes he takes things and turns them upside down. And a forte becomes a piano. So loud becomes soft. And he really takes a lot of beautiful compositional liberty. He makes the music his own. It really becomes a meeting and a dialogue between Sergei Rachmaninoff, the pianist, and Chopin, the composer. But it's so authentic. And so, you know, and look at Vladimir Horovitz, you know. At the end of his life, he said he had one regret, which was not to have composed more. Because he always played the piano like a composer. That's what people forget. Not just like a great virtuoso. He played it like a composer. And that's, I think, what so many of the really big communicators in classical music, I'd rather call them almost communicators than performers, because performer is such a boring word.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  Communicator is, I think, more what it's about. Why they've so often had that dimension of a composer's perspective.

• 47:04Rick Rubin?

  Would you say the composer brings something less technical to the picture? Is the pianist the technical adept?

• 47:15Speaker 00

  Like the craftsman, you mean?

• 47:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the composer goes beyond that. Because composers don't care about the craftsmanship, you know, of playing an instrument while most of the time when they're in the act of writing. Of course, you have to write in such a way that it's possible to play it. But, but yeah, you go beyond that. You go beyond the act of executing a skill to the source of inspiration and the root of the music, perhaps. So, yeah, I'd say so.

• 47:49Rick Rubin?

  Tell me a little bit about the history of recorded classical music.

• 47:53Speaker 00

  Huh. Well, it's, uh... I should have prepared before I came here.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  All right.

• 48:00Rick Rubin?

  Walk me through.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  Let me masterclass you on this.

• 48:02Rick Rubin?

  As you know it, walk me through.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  Well, it starts with Bach's Silence, doesn't it? You know? But I think... There's a general attitude in the beginning, you know, in the late Deutsche Grammophon, my record label is actually, I believe, the oldest record label like in the world.

• 48:19Rick Rubin?

  I believe it is.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  How old is it now? Well, it it keeps getting older, doesn't it? But but but it's.

• 48:23Rick Rubin?

  Hundred and twenty eight years, something like this, a lot.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  Point five probably on on the, you know, they're always counting, you know. But yeah, it's it's in any case, I think it's maybe eighteen ninety eight. That's gonna be my guess, but really at the end, tail end of the nineteenth century. And it's beautiful to listen to those recordings. It's almost like shouting like, can you hear me? You know, there's so there's so much noise. It's just like you're sort of in the middle of some of some disaster. But during that disaster, someone is making music and it's it's it's a fascinating thing. But relatively quickly, of course, things became more advanced. And we really start to see classical recordings that we can actually listen to.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  I'd say already in the nineteen twenties, that, you know, I I have many records from that time. The problem with recording for so many decades of recording was that the performers were afraid of the microphones. They hated the microphones and they saw it as almost like a duty, like paying taxes. You know, that you have to do it, but you don't enjoy doing it. And and I think very often they felt slightly inhibited and afraid of errors and mistakes and wrong notes and scratches and whatever.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  So I think for the longest time, there was a sort of an apprehension, the kind of like a lack of trust.

• 49:56Rick Rubin?

  And you think it's because in that case, the performance lives on versus the temporal nature of doing a concert and tomorrow that music from last night is over and now you get to do it again?

• 50:08Speaker 00

  I think so, and I think it's because it's a very comparative art form, that you're using the same text from night to night, from pianist to pianist. And so how is my Chopin minute Waltz going to compare to to that person's recording of the same piece? It's very, I don't like comparison in art like that. I I think it's actually the enemy of art. But it's it's sort of inevitable when you're having the same score, especially when you're committing it to record. So, yeah, I think. I think the moment when this changed was actually going back to our 1955 encounter with Glenn Gould in The Goldberg Variations, when 22-year-old Glenn Gould takes this piece that was absolutely outside of the performed repertoire. Nobody took that piece seriously as a concert piece.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  It was just seen as almost like a philosophical statement by Bach, rather than the work that it actually is. Do you know how many times he recorded the opening aria of The Goldberg Variations, a piece that is not, you're not going to play so many wrong notes in it, are you? I can't remember, it was 19 or 21 takes of the aria. He doesn't even do the repeats. So the piece is two or three minutes long. It's a serene aria, but it's a change of direction in the way we see the studio and embrace the possibility of that art form and define it as its own art form, as opposed to a byproduct of, and something you have to do on the side of playing concerts.

• 51:29Rick Rubin?

  Did he ever talk about that? Did he ever talk about the thought process?

• 51:33Speaker 00

  I'm not sure. He loved to talk about the studio, but he always scripted himself.

• 51:40Rick Rubin?

  I just wonder if he was listening maybe to jazz records or things that would inspire him to do what he did.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  How did he come up with it? It's a wonderful thing, I mean, to just, because it's not about like hitting the right note. It's a statement about idealism of the studio and to dare to go for your ideal in that sense, you know, to have the courage.

• 52:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's not purely a document of one moment.

• 52:03Speaker 00

  No.

• 52:04Rick Rubin?

  It's, you can go as long as you need to go until you get the thing you want to get.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a creative process of the studio that you and I love, I think.

• 52:13Rick Rubin?

  But probably before that, you believe people just came in, did their thing, were intimidated by the mic and that was it. And that's all we had.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  I think so. It was also because the editing possibilities became so vastly better in the 1950s and maybe slightly earlier, but really that's a turning point in time. So this whole hand goes hand in hand. But I think so many people like Rachmaninoff and, you know, even if his recordings are unbelievably gorgeous, I think he suffered a little bit in the studio. They're like, oh, play this three times now and hopefully one take will be both, you know, glorious from a technical perspective and unbelievably inspired from a musical perspective. And it's just hard to get one take of everything you want in, you know, when you're trying to match your ideal in every millisecond, microsecond of the performance.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  But I mean, how to talk about the 20th century? I mean, I think this is a real turning point. And then I think, I think we have a

• 53:12Speaker 00

  sort of a glorious period when you're recording almost anything. And if you're with the right label and with the right promoter, it just turns into gold, you know? You could record almost anything in the 70s and 80s, you know, and release it on the Ode to Grammatron. It would just sell. And people were just doing this big symphonic cycles and one after the other and all the Wagner operas and these huge, huge releases. Such a glorious time in a sense. But in another sense, it's also a rather automatic time from an A and R perspective. Because I think the way people thought about recordings was a little bit like going to the library, you know? You go into the alphabet, you find this author, and then you find all his works and there they are. And they're presented like that.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  So if you're going to record the Chopin nocturnes, then you record all those nocturnes and you always release them from nocturne 1 to the nocturne, the last nocturne. And that's how you do it. And if you're going to do all the Bach inventions, these 15 inventions, you have to then do an album that's just the inventions. But people wouldn't shuffle. They wouldn't look for unexpected context. You know, they wouldn't see music history as that kind of a playground. That's a much more recent idea. That started more in the 90s. And then it's been a wonderful period for that in the 21st century. Because we've done all the catalog. And at this point, how many people are actually waiting for the next 32 Beethoven pianos and other cycles to be released? I'm not saying you shouldn't do that.

• 54:39Rick Rubin?

  But we're looking for the moments. We're looking for magic moments. And the idea of combining the work of composers that are sympathetic, where you learn something new about one composer by what you play next to him.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  I had a discussion with a wonderful musical friend in Iceland, who was talking about shuffle and how much she loves to wake up and just open one of those streaming platforms and just start one track that she wants to listen to and then just see what the hell happens and allow that to become your day in one way. It's sort of like to take four, four or five random tracks. I think sometimes shuffle is the most wonderful thing about, you know, modern day listening, that you go into such unexpected encounters and you put music history in such new context. We forget that's a recent thing, you know, and people did not do that in the 90s, unless you have a really good DJ.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  But certainly, so I think the way I've done my albums, certainly for Deutsche Grammophon, has been, it's like playlists that I spent like a year or two just forming before I even start to like work on the, on learning the notes, you know. So I have many sort of playlists in my private sort of corner here, which I am experimenting with. One of those was Debussy-Ramot, where I sort of made Debussy, that everybody thinks is the great impressionist among composers, which is like the most superficial thing you can say, because he hated that term, by the way. Debussy's roots were really in the French Baroque. So I sort of focused on the Baroque side of Debussy and then I put him right next to Jean-Philippe Ramot, who was the Anvan Terip, I think, of the French Baroque.

• 56:24Speaker 00

  And I focused on the futuristic and visionary sides of Ramot and I put them in the same room together, basically, you know, 200 years apart. They're having a dialogue on that album. And, you know, my point was that you hardly know who's who, you know. And Ramot in 1760s write music that is so touching and futuristic that it could have been written by Gustav Mahler at the end of the 19th century, you know. And Debussy, you know, with all of his unbelievable sort of spacious harmonic inventions and everything that he brings, you know, new, he has that foundation of the Baroque, of the tocata, of sort of motoric driving structure, you know.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  So I think very often we simplify history a little bit, you know.

• 57:11Rick Rubin?

  How much earlier was Ramot?

• 57:14Speaker 00

  Ramot was born two years before Bach, so 1683. So basically, yeah.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  They're far apart, you know.

• 57:23Rick Rubin?

  That's interesting.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Six ninety-three. I think they're born about hundred and eighty years apart. But hundred and eighty years is nothing, you know. As the older I get, now I'm forty, I actually think hundred and eighty years isn't so much. And I look back at Bach and I look back at Julius Caesar or Jesus Christ or something. And actually, it just seems a few grandmothers away.

• 57:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 57:48Speaker 00

  You know?

• 57:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Do you think how much music has changed over the forty years you've been alive?

• 57:54Speaker 00

  Intense.

• 57:56Rick Rubin?

  So if you now add...

• 57:57Speaker 00

  Intense.

• 57:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  It's hard to understand that.

• 58:00Rick Rubin?

  Hundred and eighty years in music is a long time.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, is it though? I mean, sometimes I love folk songs, not like cheesy, like stupid folk songs. But I love like folk songs about death and about like serious matters.

• 58:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  Folk songs about hunger. We have lots of those in Iceland for some reason. And what I like about folk songs is that they can't be composed by an individual, but they are sort of the collective effort of generations of a grandmother singing to her grandchild, who then sings to their grandchild. And something about these melodies makes me feel time in a strangely sort of compressed way. You feel like the essence of maybe three or four centuries. And all of a sudden, they just become like this, which is how our lives are in, you know, blink of an eye in relation to the age of the world, you know, the age of Earth.

• 58:58Speaker 00

  So no, I actually, I don't think that hundred and eighty years is a long time, even in music, you know. Think about all the music that we don't know. Sometimes we think that people just started like hitting sticks, you know. But what the hell do we know about what people were doing there twenty thousand years ago, you know?

• 59:16Rick Rubin?

  We don't know.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  Why do we think they were so primitive, you know? I don't think so. I don't think we can prove anything.

• 59:21Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  Imagine, what if they were singing these unbelievable sounds together, just polyphonic calls, you know, to warn of danger? I mean, we have no way of knowing.

• 59:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 59:34Rick Rubin?

  How many pieces did Bach write?

• 59:35Speaker 00

  Oof.

• 59:37Rick Rubin?

  Loads.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's like eleven hundred opuses almost, or you know, they have different names.

• 59:43Rick Rubin?

  But all of them are recorded and made popular or no?

• 59:48Speaker 00

  No, but they're all pretty good. I mean, they're all basically poems.

• 59:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  That's the strange thing about him. Something about the structural and side of Bach that opens, maybe we see them as poems because we reflect our own ideas onto the music as well, you know, but

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  but I think about him and I think about the fact that he had no audience.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  He wrote this music, like Goldberg Variations, for nobody. You know, you know who Goldberg was? Fourteen-year-old kid.

• 1:00:25Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. He wasn't the guy who paid for the Variations.

• 1:00:28Rick Rubin?

  Well.

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  Goldberg, I think Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, I think I'm saying this correct. He was a fourteen-year-old, very gifted student of Bach's Habskirkist or instrumentalist. And the Goldberg Variations were written for a guy whose name was Kaiser Link. And he was a count, a sort of aristocratic man, some sort of a diplomat, I think, who had insomnia, couldn't fall asleep. And he commissioned Bach to write him Variations to sort of soothe his sleepless nights. And this little Goldberg, as the story goes, had to take a room next to the count and whenever the count would sort of like crawl like, oh, I can't sleep, play me Variation thirteen or whatever.

• 1:01:13Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  Poor little fourteen-year-old Goldberg would have to sort of go there and sort of during the night play this

• 1:01:19Rick Rubin?

  Great story.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  for the count to fall asleep. But I think, well, I love the story on many levels, but what I really love about it is that the Variations are not called the Kaiser Link Variations, which would be a horrible name anyway.

• 1:01:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  But they're called the Goldberg Variations because they are the performer's piece. You have to take sort of ownership of it.

• 1:01:38Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  They become Goldberg's rather than Kaiser Link's.

• 1:01:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  But think about it, Bach is there and he only has four books of music published in his whole lifetime, I think I'm saying this correctly. Meanwhile, you have the big superstar and almost equally wonderful composer Handel, you know, Georg Friedrich Handel, living in London, I think, the biggest name in music, you know, the Taylor Swift of his time or whatever. And basically, having that kind of glorious show business life that Bach never had. Bach was always stuck in Leipzig, you know, I think he was the third choice to become the organist of the Thomas Church, you know. People really didn't know who was there. He knew who was there, people didn't. Yeah. And he had to do so many things.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  He had to teach Latin, he had to teach violin, harpsichord, conduct the choir, blah, blah, blah. He had to do a million things. And then he also had to write like a big cantata, like a piece for like choir and little orchestra, sometimes everyone every week for every Sunday and like write out all these parts and I just can't understand. Yeah. And the man who had, yeah, 20 children and 10 of them died and just the kind of drama of this guy. And meanwhile, from the 21st century perspective, it's, to me, impossible to understand just from sort of a human ego perspective. There you are, you are that creator, you are that musician, you're Johann Sebastian Bach,

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  you're that man in history. How lonely must it feel to write the Goldberg variations for a 14-year-old kid and a guy who wants to fall asleep? Yeah. Can we even comprehend that? And the fact that he writes it not so far away, you know, from the end of his own life and he had nine more years to live and his health was starting to deteriorate. Old music didn't exist as performing music, you know, you wouldn't have concert music with anything that was written older than one or two years, mostly something that was written for the occasion. It was just all new music.

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  There you are, you have created these, whatever, eleven hundred pieces or more indeed. They're of that level. And you're at the end of your life and you have no idea whether anyone will ever know anything about this.

• 1:03:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  Well, if we just take it on a human level, of course, our own lives, however famous we might become during our lifetimes, they're a bit like this because we're all going to be forgotten in, you know, just a few years. But, but how does it feel still for Bach to look around and to see the success and the fame of perhaps lesser composers? Well, he writes at the end of every score, S, D, G, Sol, E, Gloria, you know, glory to, to gods, you know. It was a ritual, a religious thing for him to.

• 1:04:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  But I think, well, I, I think he was a very devout Christian, but I also think he needed that even more because of what he was creating for no audience. And this piece, the Goldberg Variations.

• 1:04:43Rick Rubin?

  Obviously, he was creating it for an audience because of what he wrote at the end. It was devotional.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. But, but you know, I just sometimes think you, you spoke about the modernity of, of, of this and about Bach. And I think that it's a letter to the future.

• 1:04:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  It's a letter that he actually puts in a bottle and he floats it on the ocean and it finds us all these years later. And I was, you know, talking with John Adams, we were by coincidence in Barcelona together in November. And John, from a very sort of composer's perspective, he said to me, how, how many times are you playing the Goldberg Variations this year? And I was like, oh, you know, ninety-six times or whatever it is, you know. And then John just looked at me and said, I just wish Bach got some of the royalties. Which, I love that, right? But, but he's, he's right. And, and I, and I just think like if Johann Sebastian Bach knew what kind of role his music plays

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  in the lives of people in the year 2024.

• 1:05:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  I was just discussing with my friends at Universal Music. I think Bach is the biggest composer on the streaming platforms. But there's a reason for it. It's because his music works equally well, almost, whether you go into very deep, intense listening to only that. But the incredible thing about the kind of structure of Bach is that it also allows you to do something else and sort of elevate the environment meanwhile. And then you can zone back in and you can get so much from it, but somehow it gives you freedom to lead your life in another direction and still have him be a part of it. So I think that is key to him, but I often think about him and I feel a kind of brotherhood with him and I feel for him.

• 1:06:34Rick Rubin?

  Hearing the story about Glenn Gould at 22, finding the Goldberg Variations, a more obscure work, and it becoming the Goldberg Variations that we think of as the mountaintop. And if there is as much Bach material as there is, might you find your mountaintop in that music that becomes the twin mountaintop that doesn't yet exist?

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  The second Goldberg Variations?

• 1:07:07Rick Rubin?

  Well, it's not the second Goldberg Variations, but...

• 1:07:09Speaker 00

  I know what you mean.

• 1:07:09Rick Rubin?

  Do you know what I mean? Can you find what of importance is unheard in Bach's work? And can you create the performance of it that sets the standard of this is one of the great works of all time?

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  It's a dangerous thought, because if you go there, I think my early middle age, you know, ego takes over and you start to define yourself and hope for your place in the canon like all white men think about at some point in their lives.

• 1:07:43Rick Rubin?

  I'm saying it as a, for Bach, though, not for you.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  Are you thinking for him that he could?

• 1:07:49Rick Rubin?

  No, I'm saying if you do that, that's the greatest gift you can give to Bach.

• 1:07:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I basically, I think you can do it, but you can only do it, what I'm trying to say, is you can only do it by not thinking like that, because once you think like that in such a canonic way... I think your subconsciousness and your creativity is gonna get stifled.

• 1:08:11Rick Rubin?

  Yes, it can be undermined.

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  I'm actually convinced about that.

• 1:08:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's too big of a goal.

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  Because that's the mind frame of the young man, I think, or the young woman, the young artist.

• 1:08:21Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  They want to go there in history and you want to... That's why it's impossible to sort of do the Goldberg variations and I waited until I was forty because it becomes that trial.

• 1:08:30Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  But it's nice to have done it once so you can do it again and then forget about the trial. But yeah, I think it's absolutely possible to redefine this work. But while you're doing it, you're probably more aware of other things than the fact you're doing it. You know, you're probably deeper into the music than that, you know.

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  But it's a very interesting thought, actually.

• 1:08:53Rick Rubin?

  And again, I'm not thinking of it in terms of the canon or in terms of competition. I'm thinking it in terms of the legacy of Bach.

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:09:02Rick Rubin?

  And the fact that if there are

• 1:09:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:05Rick Rubin?

  lost beautiful moments, that the only reason that people don't know them is because no one is shining light on them.

• 1:09:12Speaker 00

  But it's for sure, for sure. There's a lot of those things because

• 1:09:15Rick Rubin?

  Has to be.

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:09:16Rick Rubin?

  Has to be.

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:09:18Rick Rubin?

  I never would have had this thought if you didn't tell me the story of Glenn Gould doing the work and it wasn't the position that we think of it now.

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  I know, I completely agree, but I think that basically when you play the Goldberg variations, when I recorded them, I felt like the ink had just dried on the page. I felt the music was so new to me.

• 1:09:37Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:09:37Speaker 00

  You know, how do other people feel about it? I don't really care, you know, but that's how it was in my mind. And so if that is your feeling, you can hope that more people might feel like that or they might not. But that's a good feeling to have for yourself, you know. It's a good point in the creative process to find yourself in, you know. But yeah, it does feel like New music in a very strange sense that the music of Mozart doesn't feel, even if it's unbelievably beautiful and deserves.

• 1:10:11Rick Rubin?

  I don't have the same connection to Mozart. I never have had the same connection to Mozart.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  Well, I'll play you some Mozart later, you know, so to try to convert you there. But it's a different thing, you know, and he's, he's not perhaps a part of our time quite in the same way that Bach becomes a part of our time. He's not the same mirror. But it's about also the idea of writing those kinds of structures as opposed to going more into the classical and romantic period when the narrative is perhaps more defined by the composer.

• 1:10:39Rick Rubin?

  It sounds more like a time, whereas Bach sounds more, it's like math. Math isn't old or new.

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:46Rick Rubin?

  When you see the equations, they just are.

• 1:10:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:50Rick Rubin?

  That's how Bach strikes me.

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. East of the future.

• 1:10:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. How did you choose Glass to start with? Your first album with Deutsche Grammathephone is Philip Glass.

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, do you know Philip?

• 1:11:05Rick Rubin?

  I've never met him. I'm a fan, obviously, from a distance.

• 1:11:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. He's a wonderful man.

• 1:11:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:12Speaker 00

  And I, I know him, but I knew him more back in those days. But he did invite me to perform with him on numerous occasions. I played with him joint concerts with more young pianists in London, in Sweden, actually in Reykjavik, Iceland. And I played the, well, the piano etudes, one of the ones I really like and connected to, not all of them, a piece called Opening for that album, which was released five days before Philip's eightieth birthday. It was a rather extravagant, I thought, birthday present.

• 1:11:44Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 1:11:45Speaker 00

  To him, and it was back in 2017. I recorded in 2016. I like the idea of an offbeat entry into that oldest record label in the world.

• 1:11:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  I was already thirty-two years old at the time, so I wasn't exactly that young. And if I would have been twenty-two or twenty or eighteen or sixteen, I probably would have really pushed for the Goldberg variations or the Chopin etudes or whatever, something like how people are supposed to do it, you know? But I guess I was old enough to favor a more offbeat and perhaps slightly riskier choice. But I really felt with that music that. I didn't agree with recordings that were on the market.

• 1:12:30Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:12:31Speaker 00

  I simply didn't understand them. And the music spoke very directly to me, but it also spoke to me in a somewhat compositional sense. You know, this, working with Philip was very free because I played the music so completely differently from him.

• 1:12:44Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:12:45Speaker 00

  I remember I played for him A T U D number six, uh, which is very fast, sort of repeated, sort of nervous. A T U D, repeated notes and this kind of beautiful, a little almost Rachmaninoff feel to it.

• 1:12:58Rick Rubin?

  Uh huh.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I played probably fifty percent faster than his own recording or whatever. I played much faster and he said to me, somebody should give you a speeding ticket, but it's not gonna be me.

• 1:13:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:08Speaker 00

  Which was beautiful and generous. He was saying basically, you know, you shouldn't play it that fast, but I kinda like it. I think that was, that's kinda what he was saying was, he was allowing me to be me inside the music, you know, which is great. Uh, but he's also a performer, so he understands that you have to have that freedom to express something in music. With that whole thing of minimalism, so called, and let's call it music based on repetitive structures. Where you have like one chord and then that measure repeats for eight times, a little sequence. And then the next sequence that repeats four times, then you go back to sequence A and repeat that two times or whatever.

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  The more I started to play that, the more it freed me a little bit from the conventional narrative of going from point A to B to C. And, and how you see the kind of, the narrative of a traditional piece of music or of a movie or of a book, just, just a storyline. You know, he doesn't go into stories like that. He creates space with these structures. And the more I started to sort of look and play this music, the more I realized that there is no such thing as repetition. It doesn't exist in music and it doesn't exist in life. And it's not a matter of playing these patterns twice the same, but rather to find a new perspective on them. And to allow time to pass and to allow them to evolve.

• 1:14:32Speaker 00

  And it's more like a painter who's working perhaps with the same subject matter, but always finding every new perspective, you know. So that changed very much the way I saw it. And then it became a very interesting, for me, playground of, of exploring. Sometimes the essence of ideas, you know, these etudes, some of them are very simple, some of them are less simple, but he's very often exploring like one chord relationship, like two chords and how they relate to one another, or he's exploring how you play three notes against two in a kind of polyrhythm, you know, or three against four, whatever it is, you know. But he's taking these kind of musical elements and he's sort of zooming in on them and giving us the essence of those elements. And I started to really enjoy this because it became an exploration of,

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

  well, those musical ideas, but also of space, of the acoustic, of the instrument, of the color, of the pedal and the pedal of the piano. It's not something you just press down. It has, you know, so many different variations inside, you know, and how much you lift the dampers, you know, how you work with sound. It became an exploration and sort of etudes in musicality and in improvisation almost, you know. And I would go on stage with those etudes and I'd just play them completely differently, you know. And really sometimes build a narrative just using those structures almost like, they were just like my ingredients, you know.

• 1:15:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Speaker 00

  And so when people listen to those recordings and then they look at the score, they're like, what the hell is he doing? And some people hated me for it, but others didn't, you know. And they're like, he's not, I'm not following almost any of the dynamics and, you know, sorry, Philip, I'm not following any of the tempo markings. I'm not doing almost any of the things that he writes in there because I didn't relate to the music using them, you know. But I related so strongly to the music in a more abstract sense. And I thought these structures and at their best are so phenomenally brilliant and beautiful and sort of so generous, you know. And they allowed me a little bit to be myself.

• 1:16:37Speaker 00

  And the thing is that he did allow me to be myself as well. At least he never really told me off. I haven't seen him for years now. I hope he forgives me about speaking so openly about this. I mean, I love the man and I love the music.

• 1:16:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  But that was an interesting thing. But I'll tell you something, you know, when I... Started with DG and recorded this, I was always gonna do then Bach as my second album, because it's sort of like the passion of my life.

• 1:17:07Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:17:08Speaker 00

  But I had this interesting moment and I want to share it with you and I want to share it with any like young artist who is perhaps starting out or finding their way. The success of the Glass album, and it was quite successful, almost became my enemy because there were very strong voices within my label, which I love my label, but at that point, early in my collaboration with them, I thought I had earned my right to do, you know, whatever I wanted to do a second album. But they said, no, because the album sold seven times more than we expected and got these reviews. We realize now that you are this kind of fantastic pianist to play American minimalistic music.

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  And I just remember my heart sinking and I was just like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not where this conversation is going. But we had quite a debate about it and they really want to sort of like, not all of them, but many strong people at that point in the company want to place me in that, you know, context. So I was that guy for them.

• 1:18:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. How long did that last?

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  Well, I actually threatened to leave and break up my contract if I wouldn't get to do my second album the way I wanted to do it, the Bach album. And by that time, I decided to do something completely different from the Goldberg Variations. I was in a different rhythm there myself. And then, you know, when it really became, I'm leaving, I'll just do that album on Sony or whatever. Of course, I won that battle. And then turned out that Bach, of course, the second album was, I mean, infinitely more successful than the first one.

• 1:18:44Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:18:45Speaker 00

  And then I had the same conversation, but then I was gonna do a French album. And then they were like, actually, because we see now that the Bach album is so phenomenally successful. We see that you're a Bach pianist. Well, yes, but, and I actually like thought very early like how dangerous it is to have such a strong machine tell you who you are and almost every artist goes through that.

• 1:19:08Rick Rubin?

  Yes. It's a big part of my job as a producer is protecting them from those voices.

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:19:14Rick Rubin?

  Seriously.

• 1:19:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:15Rick Rubin?

  Because there's something bigger at play than...

• 1:19:19Rick Rubin?

  It worked last time, so let's do the same thing again. That's almost never the best idea.

• 1:19:24Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:19:24Rick Rubin?

  It's usually the worst. I remember the very first album I ever produced, rock album, was a group called The Cult from England. They played me some songs and like, this is gonna be our first single. I said, well, how do you know that? We haven't even recorded them yet. And he's like, well, it's got the same chords as our last single, and that was a hit. And I said, well, if it's got the same chords as the last single, it can't even be on the album.

• 1:19:46Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 1:19:47Rick Rubin?

  It can't be the next single. It can't even be on the album.

• 1:19:49Speaker 00

  Oh, so depressing.

• 1:19:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:53Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I mean, I almost get nervous from hearing something like that. Because you're like, yeah, you're going to screw your career in life and your music is just about to die. Uh, no, but I think that, you know, you have to, for the longest time, in a way, make sure you are, oh, always, uh, ahead of everybody else about who you are and where you're going. But, but you also have to escape a little bit success. You know, early on, at least, you know, you have to, and maybe always.

• 1:20:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:17Speaker 00

  To move away.

• 1:20:18Rick Rubin?

  Well, you don't aim at it. You aim at what's good. And usually, the reason you become successful is because you're making something really good.

• 1:20:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:26Rick Rubin?

  And if you focus on making something really good and continuing to make really good things, it usually works out.

• 1:20:31Speaker 00

  Can you imagine that? It becomes like this horrible, like Fast and the Furious eight or Fast and the Furious nine or whatever. I mean, I saw they are playing yesterday. I was like, they've actually gotten to, what, 10 or something? But what a horrible concept. It wasn't even good in the first place. But, but it's like, i- if you had imagined like, Beethoven writing like the, the Fifth Symphony, like using the same chords.

• 1:20:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Speaker 00

  Just, oh, my God.

• 1:20:55Rick Rubin?

  It's very funny.

• 1:20:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, but I think at the same time, I just wanna say like, I love my label. It's like, it really has become like, like a family to me, you know?

• 1:21:02Rick Rubin?

  One of the things about Deutsche Grammophon that's so impressive is, I don't know very much about classical music. I love listening to it, but I know very little. And if I hear a piece of music I like and I wanna go back to the past and find a great version of a piece, if I see the Deutsche Grammophon logo on anything, I know it's a good place to start.

• 1:21:21Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:21:22Rick Rubin?

  I don't know if it'll be the best version, but it will definitely be one of the best versions.

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  There's something about it.

• 1:21:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:29Speaker 00

  This yellow label.

• 1:21:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:31Rick Rubin?

  It's got great power.

• 1:21:32Speaker 00

  It has some.

• 1:21:33Rick Rubin?

  And I think it's the only, well, in a modern way, ECM also has this for me. Like ECM records have a sound.

• 1:21:41Speaker 00

  I love them.

• 1:21:42Rick Rubin?

  They feel like they're not just part of everything else.

• 1:21:45Speaker 00

  I love that label.

• 1:21:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, but I think those are the only two that I know of in the classical world where it really matters.

• 1:21:51Speaker 00

  Some people are gonna cry at Sony right now.

• 1:21:55Speaker 00

  Or Warner. No, they're they're great people everywhere. Come on.

• 1:21:58Rick Rubin?

  And they're.

• 1:21:58Speaker 00

  And they're great labels as well.

• 1:21:59Rick Rubin?

  Absolutely, absolutely. But there's something about the history, you know, there's something you can feel that history.

• 1:22:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. It is. Well, what surprised me when I came there first was how young the people are who are working there. And, you know, you don't join them because of the history. You don't join them because of Horowitz or something like that.

• 1:22:20Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 1:22:20Speaker 00

  You don't do anything because of the past. You do it because of what's happening now in the present. But it does still have this aura.

• 1:22:27Rick Rubin?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:22:28Speaker 00

  It has.

• 1:22:28Rick Rubin?

  And it's in the same way that, yes, Carnegie Hall sounds great.

• 1:22:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:33Rick Rubin?

  But if there was another theater that sounded as good in New Jersey, an hour away,

• 1:22:42Rick Rubin?

  it wouldn't be Carnegie Hall. There's something about the ghosts of these places.

• 1:22:45Speaker 00

  But didn't they do that? I think they tried to rebuild some of those houses somewhere in East Asia or something. I mean, or was it in Japan? I think they tried to take like the Musikverein, this legendary hall in Vienna.

• 1:22:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:56Speaker 00

  I think they rebuilt it somewhere and it sounds completely different.

• 1:22:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  Even if everything is the same. Well, thank God.

• 1:23:03Rick Rubin?

  No, it's magic. The reason I asked about Disney Hall is that's one of the concert halls that was built based on computer renderings and and in recording studios, the ones built on computer renderings of what's best for sound don't necessarily sound as good as the old studios that were built with a different understanding of acoustics.

• 1:23:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. But also wood and concrete and everything that goes into a house.

• 1:23:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:30Speaker 00

  You can't escape time and you can't buy time. You can't skip time.

• 1:23:34Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 1:23:35Speaker 00

  Things change. The old pianos, the old violins.

• 1:23:38Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:23:39Speaker 00

  You can't buy it.

• 1:23:41Rick Rubin?

  Yes. I remember hearing that James Brown said he would only record in a studio that's on the ground floor.

• 1:23:47Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 1:23:48Rick Rubin?

  If the studio wasn't touching the ground.

• 1:23:52Rick Rubin?

  He didn't believe that the music could come through in the same way. If you recorded it on another floor. Interesting.

• 1:24:00Speaker 00

  Probably right.

• 1:24:02Rick Rubin?

  It's interesting to consider.

• 1:24:05Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:24:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, took my mind away a little bit. Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm just thinking, I'm recording on the second floor, shit.

• 1:24:14Rick Rubin?

  Time for new studio.

• 1:24:15Speaker 00

  I was actually on the ground floor.

• 1:24:17Rick Rubin?

  Is the studio you're building gonna be on the ground?

• 1:24:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, under my house with natural light glowing in, you know, from basically like the grass is here and you have these windows and then I've really gone deep.

• 1:24:28Rick Rubin?

  Oh, great.

• 1:24:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's gonna be beautiful.

• 1:24:30Rick Rubin?

  Maybe underground's even better. We don't know.

• 1:24:32Speaker 00

  We'll find out.

• 1:24:34Rick Rubin?

  We'll find out.

• 1:24:34Speaker 00

  We'll find out. I'm very excited about it. But it's also just, um.

• 1:24:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a new chapter of changing the ratio in my life between the concerts and the recordings. I wanna spend much more time with the microphone.

• 1:24:50Rick Rubin?

  I suggested the Bach idea and you said it was a dangerous idea. As soon as you said it was a dangerous idea, I knew it was a good idea. If the first word that comes to mind is dangerous.

• 1:24:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:59Rick Rubin?

  It's a good sign.

• 1:25:00Speaker 00

  It's a good sign.

• 1:25:01Rick Rubin?

  When making something.

• 1:25:02Speaker 00

  It's a good sign.

• 1:25:03Rick Rubin?

  If the idea is dangerous, it's worth looking at.

• 1:25:09Speaker 00

  I wanna play you something.

• 1:25:15Speaker 00

  We spoke about it, but I don't think you know it.

• 1:26:38Speaker 00

  Where did you go with this?

• 1:26:41Rick Rubin?

  It took me away. It was very beautiful. What I was thinking about was what was going on in your head, and I was wondering, what's your internal conversation?

• 1:26:50Speaker 00

  What I wanted to play for you is music that was composed collectively. It's a folk song from Iceland.

• 1:26:57Rick Rubin?

  I love it.

• 1:26:57Speaker 00

  It's so beautiful.

• 1:26:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:59Speaker 00

  It is called "Where Life and Death May dwell", and it's basically the lyrics are the old farmer who's sowing seeds into the ground and contemplating that when the seeds will have grown, he himself will be under that ground.

• 1:27:14Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:27:14Speaker 00

  It's so beautiful. And this idea of folk songs being composed generation after generation after generation, and the fact that in Iceland, it's such a dark place, you know, a difficult place, especially in those times, the fact that people would be singing, and the half the songs are about death and the other half is about famine, you know?

• 1:27:36Rick Rubin?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:27:37Speaker 00

  There's something about the melody, you know?

• 1:27:42Speaker 00

  Can't compose it.

• 1:27:47Speaker 00

  You know, it's... It's a thought process.

• 1:27:57Speaker 00

  But you're kind of stuck, and it goes back.

• 1:28:14Rick Rubin?

  It's kind of, you know,

• 1:28:17Rick Rubin?

  out of time, in time and out of time, you know.

• 1:28:50Speaker 00

  Music that nobody knows, you know. Just a farmer somewhere in Iceland sang this to his children. He sang it to their children. And then at some point in the 20th century, these people went, you know, from farm to farm to farm.

• 1:29:05Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:29:06Speaker 00

  Like really sort of basic, I don't even know what kind of recording equipment. But they recorded these farmers singing. And these things, these 2,000 recordings with 2,000 songs, they exist there in the archives in Iceland. That's where this comes from, you know.

• 1:29:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, I love it. Do you ever listen to the Gjörjif De Hartmann pieces?

• 1:29:25Speaker 00

  I don't really.

• 1:29:26Rick Rubin?

  I will play you some recordings, but what's interesting about it, let me just play you a piece of something.

• 1:29:30Speaker 00

  Go for it, go for it.

• 1:29:31Rick Rubin?

  Just to, uh...

• 1:29:33Speaker 00

  I'll play some soothing chords while you're searching.

• 1:29:37Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 1:29:44Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 1:31:42Rick Rubin?

  You get the idea, so.

• 1:31:43Speaker 00

  But he's just, it's the same.

• 1:31:54Speaker 00

  It's the same idea of.

• 1:31:55Rick Rubin?

  It feels like this is rooted in old folk music. When I hear this, I hear old folk music.

• 1:31:59Speaker 00

  I completely understand the association.

• 1:32:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:02Speaker 00

  Because you're stuck and you can't, can't get out. You're, you're, you're stuck in the emotion and that's the power of it.

• 1:32:11Speaker 00

  And that's, that's amazing.

• 1:32:12Rick Rubin?

  It's one guy, Gurdjieff is a spiritual teacher.

• 1:32:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:32:16Rick Rubin?

  And De Hartmann is the composer who was his friend. And Gurdjieff would sing the melodies to De Hartmann. And this is De Hartmann playing the melodies that were sung to him.

• 1:32:25Speaker 00

  There's something about the way he plays.

• 1:32:31Rick Rubin?

  The drama.

• 1:32:32Speaker 00

  The drama and the... How should we say it? The freedom and the incorrectness of it. Because you can't place the notes. You can't calculate them and you can't... You don't know when they're gonna hit.

• 1:32:42Rick Rubin?

  The timing, yes.

• 1:32:43Speaker 00

  Because he's in the act of something else. He's doing something... He's not in that game.

• 1:32:47Rick Rubin?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:32:48Speaker 00

  It's a different game.

• 1:32:49Rick Rubin?

  Yes. It's a good game.

• 1:32:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, but listen to this.

• 1:33:24Speaker 00

  I play this because of the birds. I don't know if you're gonna hear that on the recording, but...

• 1:33:28Rick Rubin?

  I hope so.

• 1:33:28Speaker 00

  But that's another folk song. Written... Not written, created collectively by Hungarian people. It's somewhere deep in, or I guess Romania now. But that's the same thing, you know?

• 1:34:11Speaker 00

  How unexpected, right? It's sort of like... It's so far away from, you know?

• 1:34:18Speaker 00

  The kind of like, the structure... I love the structure.

• 1:34:21Rick Rubin?

  Of course.

• 1:34:21Speaker 00

  But that's why I sometimes go into this music to sort of like... To open up.

• 1:34:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, I'm excited for your album of folk music as well.

• 1:34:28Speaker 00

  That's another...

• 1:34:29Rick Rubin?

  Add it to the list.

• 1:34:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, right.

• 1:34:31Rick Rubin?

  At some point, I mean, now that you're 50/50, you're gonna make more albums.

• 1:34:35Speaker 00

  Many more.

• 1:34:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Speaker 00

  It's true. I mean...

• 1:35:34Speaker 00

  Sometimes the Goldberg variations, the opening of it... Sometimes it's nice to go into that folk song mood and then go to... Go back to structure.

• 1:35:45Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:35:45Speaker 00

  You know, it's very interesting.

• 1:35:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it opens it up.

• 1:35:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. For instance, I...

• 1:35:56Speaker 00

  How do you...

• 1:36:02Speaker 00

  What I was thinking recently is the kind of like...

• 1:36:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:11Speaker 00

  The relationship of just every two bars, you know, so the... The tension and the...

• 1:36:21Speaker 00

  The release. Again.

• 1:36:28Speaker 00

  At an octave.

• 1:36:31Speaker 00

  And then... Release, but goes on.

• 1:36:40Speaker 00

  And those are my... My three actors, you know.

• 1:37:16Speaker 00

  You understand what I'm talking about? I'm talking about feeling like a theatre director, almost. You know, the polyphony and that kind of transparency of it.

• 1:37:22Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:37:23Speaker 00

  It's interesting if you take the next variation, which is using the same

• 1:37:32Speaker 00

  but going into

• 1:37:43Speaker 00

  so you're going into basically now

• 1:37:55Speaker 00

  so you're basically going into exactly the same chords, but you're doing something so different in the next variation.

• 1:38:16Rick Rubin?

  And the chords remain the same through the whole cycle?

• 1:38:18Speaker 00

  Absolutely, and you can take this variation.

• 1:38:22Speaker 00

  Do it that slowly.

• 1:38:34Speaker 00

  And it's just a different, different thing, you know?

• 1:38:36Rick Rubin?

  Completely different. In the writing, does it say this next one is faster than the last one, or no?

• 1:38:41Speaker 00

  There's just nothing about it.

• 1:38:41Rick Rubin?

  Open.

• 1:38:42Speaker 00

  Just says "variation 2".

• 1:38:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:44Speaker 00

  So, I mean, this is just to take sort of an extreme example here, you know? And you could do this.

• 1:38:52Speaker 00

  You could do it.

• 1:38:59Speaker 00

  You could do that, you know. Who is to say what you can't do?

• 1:39:02Rick Rubin?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:03Speaker 00

  But that's basically to give sort of extreme examples of how opened.

• 1:39:07Rick Rubin?

  And you said fifteen is the one where it turns dark. What's fifteen?

• 1:39:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so beautiful.

• 1:39:14Speaker 00

  Goes into... Funny to play it here in the sun with the birds and everything, I know, but...

• 1:40:07Speaker 00

  It goes on.

• 1:40:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, beautiful.

• 1:40:21Speaker 00

  But you could also, you know, that thing, you could also do it.

• 1:40:29Speaker 00

  If it turns faster, you know.

• 1:40:51Speaker 00

  And in that process, the voicing changes. All of a sudden, your bass character comes out and just the music takes on another dimension. But those are just like, there's just very basic examples and you can go into full mode and really explore within each tempo.

• 1:41:05Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:41:06Speaker 00

  A kind of variance.

• 1:41:07Rick Rubin?

  For sure you have to record it again.

• 1:41:08Speaker 00

  Ah, yeah.

• 1:41:09Rick Rubin?

  For sure.

• 1:41:10Speaker 00

  But I assure you, I mean, the greatest moment in the Goldberg Variations is variation twenty-five. That's where he sort of...

• 1:41:19Speaker 00

  Expand time, you know, because they're all two or three minutes. And then all of a sudden, you have 10-minute-long variation. So where we began with the aria,

• 1:41:32Speaker 00

  here is variation 25.

• 1:42:02Speaker 00

  That's like we do.

• 1:42:08Speaker 00

  It's a tempo.

• 1:42:11Speaker 00

  It was incredible that this is indeed the same chord progression, just taken into the negative and expanded, you know, almost three times in time.

• 1:42:21Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:42:22Speaker 00

  You know.

• 1:43:47Speaker 00

  Wayne, have you heard Lonelier music?

• 1:43:50Rick Rubin?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:43:51Speaker 00

  And the way he plays with dissonance.

• 1:43:54Rick Rubin?

  You know.

• 1:43:56Speaker 00

  You know how he makes these sevenths and he just puts a knife in your heart and then he, you know.

• 1:44:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:03Speaker 00

  Rotates it.

• 1:44:04Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:44:04Speaker 00

  It's unbelievable, but that moment in the piece, I sometimes think about, how was it in the world premiere? If there was such a thing indeed. You don't know what's coming. What if you don't know what's coming in the Goldberg variation? You have the aria and then you have variation one and then you have 14 variations and they're all in G major and everybody's happy. It's great. And then you have the big shock of the 15th variation and you bounce back. And there you are, you know, an hour into the piece, variation 24 is done. And then this hits you. And all of a sudden, you have a 10-minute-long variation at that point in the structure. What a like structural.

• 1:44:38Rick Rubin?

  Bold.

• 1:44:38Speaker 00

  Masterstroke.

• 1:44:39Rick Rubin?

  Really bold.

• 1:44:40Speaker 00

  Right?

• 1:44:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:41Speaker 00

  Changes what this piece is about, you know. And then you have the concluding variations and the great surprise of the aria at the end. When it sort of fades in like on the mixer board, like I said, it's always there. It's just.

• 1:44:56Rick Rubin?

  And does that represent that it's like it's coming around again? And is the ending the beginning? Do you know what I mean? Like, are we starting over essentially?

• 1:45:04Speaker 00

  The thing is that like, once you finish it.

• 1:45:13Speaker 00

  And everybody is sort of with you after 80 minutes and then they applaud. And then you come back on stage and then again and again and again. And then they're like, is there no encore? And then you're like, well, the only encore you can play after this solar system of a piece is to go back into variation one.

• 1:45:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:28Speaker 00

  But then you have to play variation two.

• 1:45:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:30Speaker 00

  And then I don't know how long your parking is.

• 1:45:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:33Speaker 00

  You know, like, and then you go into this kind of infinity sort of cycle. But to me, it feels like you can't, can't add to this in the act of playing it.

• 1:45:43Rick Rubin?

  You know, it's.

• 1:45:44Speaker 00

  It's a solar system, you know, it's the aria and the 30 planets. And so, yeah, but the only thing you can do is to then take another cycle. But then maybe you go from LA to San Francisco.

• 1:45:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Tell me about your relationship to Debussy.

• 1:45:58Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, I mean, complex, because he was a complex, thorny man, you know, but...

• 1:46:04Rick Rubin?

  I don't know anything about him.

• 1:46:06Speaker 00

  Ah. He came from the outside, which is always, I think, good and bad, you know, but good mostly. But he was an autodidact, which...

• 1:46:18Speaker 00

  And he basically wanted to push the music world away from the kind of governing power of Germany, which had Wagner and Brahms and Beethoven and all of them. And he wanted to find what is British French. He was a very nationalistic guy.

• 1:46:40Speaker 00

  I think he was amazing, but was thorny, you know, and the music, you know,

• 1:46:49Speaker 00

  not exactly thorny.

• 1:47:39Speaker 00

  Very often with him, you know, like the beginning.

• 1:47:49Speaker 00

  And something about this represents a change, you know, you just have, you just have a composer who sits down and he goes into...

• 1:47:57Speaker 00

  He goes into the chord and explores it. You know, sometimes it's almost sonority for the sake of sonority space. Instead of that driving narrative. Of course, he does that narrative, but he sort of...

• 1:48:10Rick Rubin?

  It's got a gentleness. It comes in with a gentleness and like a curiosity.

• 1:48:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, but listen to the other guy on my French album, Jean-Philippe Ramon. This is music that he wrote when Mozart was just a boy. And listen to this.

• 1:50:00Speaker 00

  Can you believe like 1762?

• 1:50:03Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:50:04Speaker 00

  Right?

• 1:50:04Rick Rubin?

  So beautiful.

• 1:50:05Speaker 00

  It's an arrangement I'd made from his last opera. Just this great music that people don't really know.

• 1:50:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:11Speaker 00

  I called it "The Arts and the Hours", just an English title I gave it.

• 1:50:14Rick Rubin?

  So beautiful.

• 1:50:15Speaker 00

  You know, it wasn't, I think, premiered until, in its full version, until 1960. Three, it was only like that, like 200 years later. But that's what I like. I like anachronism. I like composers who sort of don't go with the tides of their times. So interesting. It's like Richard Strauss and Sergei Rachmaninov and Bach. In a way, it was considered extremely old fashioned when he was writing the music of the future, the Goldberg Variations. It was considered like old news. And nobody cared for that kind of baroque structures. They wanted the light classical, you know.

• 1:50:55Speaker 00

  Some crap like this, you know, that's what the general public was after. But of course, he just did what he wanted. But those composers, you know, it's like Carlo Ghezualdo with his magical, I think in the 16th century, that they're like so futuristic that like even Richard Wagner couldn't write something on that scale of sort of wild harmony, you know. It's so nice to to look back on music history now and realize that it's not quite as linear as we sometimes think of it as.

• 1:51:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. What was, do you remember the first piece you ever played in front of people when you were a child?

• 1:51:31Speaker 00

  God. It was, no, I don't actually, but I imagine it was something like this.

• 1:51:39Speaker 00

  Something, something in that region. But I do remember one of the first pieces I composed.

• 1:51:43Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:51:44Speaker 00

  When I was eight, I think, because like I have not played this for years, but.

• 1:52:27Speaker 00

  I was like eight, yeah, it's like eight, eight year old.

• 1:52:30Rick Rubin?

  It sounds like an Eastern European melody.

• 1:52:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like.

• 1:52:37Speaker 00

  I like.

• 1:52:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:40Speaker 00

  I like that.

• 1:52:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:45Speaker 00

  It could be like one of those sad Soviet cartoons or something. You know, it could actually come from that, you know. I was probably listening to.

• 1:52:54Rick Rubin?

  But it also has a nursery rhyme aspect to it, you know. It's very beautiful.

• 1:53:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, sad.

• 1:53:04Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 1:53:05Speaker 00

  I had a, we had a grand piano. I'll tell you something beautiful. My parents had a sad thing happen to them in 1980, four years before I was born. My father's father passed away quite suddenly and they inherited a little bit of money. And they were then studying music in West Berlin and they had nothing. They lived in a tiny little student flat. Mom studying piano, dad composition. They decided to take a loan and to buy a Steinway grand piano with all their money before they had even a modest apartment. So they brought this glorious piano into their little student flat in West Berlin

• 1:53:50Speaker 00

  and then moved back home a few months before I was born. And then for the first seven years of my life, we had this tiny little basement apartment where the living room basically was the piano, you know. I had a room with my two sisters, we had no space. My parents did this unbelievably irresponsible thing in an economic sense, you know, to spend it all on music.

• 1:54:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:13Speaker 00

  And then piano was the apartment, you know. And that's where we would gather, that's what I would play. And I sometimes think about that now when I'm, you know, I have my piano. So I think about the root of all of this being this sort of romantic decision of my parents to, yeah, to not just spend all their money, but take a loan and, you know, really put all their money into a piano and then come home and be like, hmm, where are we gonna live? Where are we gonna put this piano?

• 1:54:42Rick Rubin?

  It's not an accident that you're you.

• 1:54:44Speaker 00

  Well, the piano cost at that point basically the same as an apartment in Iceland.

• 1:54:48Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:54:49Speaker 00

  And I'm so grateful for their sort of ill-advised finances, right now at least, you know, and I think about it. And then what I want to say as well is that we moved into a bigger apartment finally when I was seven. My parents actually got me an upright piano, very old Danish upright piano, which is totally broken. But I would have that in my bedroom. And then this would be the kind of glorious piano in the living room. But I had my own little private piano as well, where I could play any hour of the day and just, you know, have these kind of intimate keyboard conversations with myself. And I sometimes think about that. And two or three years ago, we should actually have an upright here, not just this fancy Steinway. Because two or three years ago, I recorded an album called From Far,

• 1:55:34Speaker 00

  where I actually recorded the exact same music, on grand piano like this.

• 1:55:39Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:55:39Speaker 00

  And then on an upright piano.

• 1:55:41Rick Rubin?

  Oh, beautiful.

• 1:55:41Speaker 00

  Like the one I grew up with, you know.

• 1:55:43Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the difference in the playing, the experience of sitting at a grand piano versus sitting at an upright, for you.

• 1:55:50Speaker 00

  Well, you know,

• 1:55:52Speaker 00

  just the response to these big vibrations, you know, and of course, the acoustic affects everything about the way you narrate the music. But the response on an upright piano, which is so much smaller and so much more immediate, is much more like having that private conversation, you know, that very intimate conversation. The grand piano, you have to work a little bit harder to make it into that intimate creature. So I think, yeah, my bedroom piano.

• 1:56:22Speaker 00

  You know, it's just two different worlds. But I think that the upright piano has a comeback. I really think so. You see, in pop, in so much music, people are going back to it now and experimenting with it and sort of taking it further, which I think is a wonderful thing.

• 1:56:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:39Speaker 00

  And in a way, very democratic, because the great majority of people don't have parents who spend their money so ill-advisedly, like my parents, you know. Almost all pianists in the world have simple operations on the uprights, you know.

• 1:56:53Rick Rubin?

  When you're playing, are you listening? And if you notice that the low notes aren't singing on this particular piano as well as you're used to, do you make adjustments as you're going based on what you're hearing?

• 1:57:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, all the time. You're constantly, in a way, that back part of your brain is in a way in that overdrive. But hopefully, it's a part of your subconsciousness and a part of your bigger listening, rather than being like, I need, you know, one more hurt here.

• 1:57:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:20Speaker 00

  But you're constantly, constantly adjusting, yeah.

• 1:57:24Rick Rubin?

  How much do you think of the left and right hand as two different players?

• 1:57:32Speaker 00

  Not so much. I mean, they are, but I think about like the different players in each hand. So maybe the right hand, I'm thinking about the two or three different players in that hand and then the two or three, whatever it is, in the music in that hand. But yes, certainly if you're doing like, maybe in this music, sure, because it's relatively simple. But I don't think about the hands, the physicality. I think about it more in terms of inside the structure and music as this kind of organism, like a biological organism, almost, a web.

• 1:58:02Rick Rubin?

  Tell me some of the things that you've done in terms of recording that are not typical for a classical pianist.

• 1:58:10Speaker 00

  Ah, I mean, many, many, many, many. I love the idea of taking, especially my Bach recordings, and sort of taking them a little bit into an electronic, you know, more of a, yeah, just a different direction. We've done many things like that, both on an upright piano and on grand pianos, but collaborating with really different musicians, you know. One who did a fantastically beautiful fantasy on one of my recordings was Sakamoto Ryoichi.

• 1:58:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, fantastic.

• 1:58:35Speaker 00

  Incredible man.

• 1:58:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:37Speaker 00

  And it's a little bit like reversing the creative process, you know. I usually take the music of Bach or somebody else and I redefine it for myself. But there, I actually gave or give sometimes my recordings to artists who I admire and sometimes do something with them myself to, in a way, use the interpretation of old music as sort of creative material for new compositions.

• 1:59:01Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:59:02Speaker 00

  That's what Sakamoto did, Ryoichi, and it's been done a lot, you know. And I did a little fantasy with my A and R producer, Christian Bauttura, using basically Bach's most famous prelude.

• 1:59:30Speaker 00

  So I recorded this on an upright piano, actually, and then we

• 1:59:36Speaker 00

  sort of created, I'm not gonna say much, but we created something new with it. A memory of a memory, I think. And it was a memory of, and in deep sadness in our lives, when Johann, Johannson, my compatriot, Icelandic composer, had just died in Berlin back in 2017, I think it was.

• 1:59:59Rick Rubin?

  Did you know him?

• 2:00:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. We were actually planning a project together. We were gonna take Beethoven and, well, deconstruct him. Yeah, and I recorded some of his music as well, but he died so suddenly and then we did a fantasy to sort of heal ourselves on this Bach prelude, called "And At The Hour Of Death."

• 2:00:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:22Speaker 00

  And there's another one.

• 2:00:23Rick Rubin?

  That Bach prelude.

• 2:00:39Speaker 00

  You know, we should go

• 2:00:41Speaker 00

  taking this prelude, but just using it as material for another excursion, you know? That was called "For Johann." Yeah, I get sad when I, when I think about that because he had so much more I had in music. But yeah, I think very often in times of, like those, I and some of the other people go to Bach. I think it's sort of a good idea, whether you're feeling happy or sad. He somehow balances you in a way that, that I think is always a good idea. But suddenly when I'm feeling sad, there's nothing but Bach that can sometimes bring me back and give me strength, you know?

• 2:01:24Rick Rubin?

  Have you ever recorded Satie?

• 2:01:26Speaker 00

  No, shouldn't I? Wouldn't that be nice?

• 2:01:28Rick Rubin?

  I love Satie.

• 2:01:30Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:01:34Speaker 00

  Wouldn't it be nice?

• 2:01:40Speaker 00

  But he's doing something so similar to...

• 2:01:47Speaker 00

  He just wanted to go on forever. Yeah, same language. But from that French school comes our friend Philippe.

• 2:04:19Speaker 00

  There's one cycle.

• 2:04:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:21Speaker 00

  And then it goes into another cycle. And then the third cycle. That's called opening. That's the first track on my.

• 2:04:27Rick Rubin?

  Never wanted to stop.

• 2:04:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:04:29Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 2:04:30Speaker 00

  It goes on.

• 2:04:31Rick Rubin?

  So beautiful.

• 2:04:32Speaker 00

  But it takes on a life of its own, in a way. When you play it, you don't know when you start, where it's gonna take you.

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