Suzanne Ciani - Exploring the Creative Process - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 239]

The intro music you just heard is from my guest today, Suzanne Ciani, an early pioneer of electronic music dating back to the 1970s. As a 5-time Grammy-nominated composer, Suzanne’s music can be heard on her solo albums as well as films, games, and countless commercials. Many have argued her Coca-Cola “pop and pour” changed the sound of advertising forever. During our conversation, we discuss what it means to be an artist, how to evolve away from the need for approval and validation, and the importance of mentors during the creative process. While many of our guests strive to be lifelong learners - Suzanne seems to take this a step further as a lifelong learner and a lifelong creator. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Suzanne Ciani. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here. ------ This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus has built the most extensive primary information platform available for investors. With Tegus, you can learn everything you’d want to know about a company in an on-demand digital platform. Investors share their expert calls, allowing others to instantly access more than 20,000 calls on Affirm, Teladoc, Roblox, or almost any company of interest. All you have to do is log in. Visit tegus.co/patrick to learn more. ------ This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep's new Pod Pro Cover is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at your perfect temperature. Simply add the Pod Pro Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. To embrace the future of sleep and get $150 off your new mattress go to eightsleep.com/patrick or use code "Patrick". ------ Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, Inc. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes [00:03:53] - [First question] - One of her proudest moments early in her life [00:05:18] - What she’s learned about originality and its role in the creative process [00:07:24] - Advice for breaking out of a derivative impulse and finding your character [00:09:27] - Going from a classically trained pianist to exploring modular synthesis [00:13:47] - Performing on David Letterman [00:17:55] - What the Buchla is and the sounds it can make [00:23:03] - How much of playing a modular synth is improvisational versus pre-made [00:24:36] - Ways she would design a creative system for other creatives [00:27:38] - What her interface allows her to do and the mechanics of it [00:29:07] - Describing what the core sound elements are that she manipulates [00:32:30] - The role of women in music and how it’s evolved over time [00:35:06] - What stands out from her mentorship with Ilse Bing [00:38:16] - Later career creative freedom and what it unlocks for artists [00:39:25] - Her thoughts on the creative process writ large and its components [00:42:10] - Commercial sound design and working with Coca-Cola and Atari [00:44:46] - Observations from a creative life that other artists could benefit from [00:46:11] - Unifying factors across her best performances [00:47:53] - What the future might hold for technology and music [00:50:18] - Where to start when exploring her discography [00:51:17] - The kindest thing that anyone has ever done for her

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

• 0:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 0:43Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 1:26Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  just $300 per call, not the $1,000 or more that others charge. If you're curious about Teegus, call the top performing investment manager you can think of. They're probably already a Teegus customer and they'll point you in the right direction because customers, myself included, love Teegus. Visit tegus.co/patrick to learn more. To hear more about Teegus, stay tuned at the end of the episode where I sit down with Teegus customer Ben Clermon from Cove Street Capital to talk about how Teegus is part of his investing process. This episode of Invest Like the Best is sponsored by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep's new Pod Pro cover is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at your perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced solution on the market.

• 2:11Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 2:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 2:37Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

• 3:43Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  The intro music you just heard is from my guest today, Suzanne Ciani, an early pioneer of electronic music dating back to the 1970s. As a five-time Grammy-nominated composer, Suzanne's music can be heard on her solo albums, as well as many films, games, and countless commercials. Many have argued her Coca-Cola pop and pour changed the sound of advertising forever. During our conversation, we discuss what it means to be an artist, how to evolve away from the need for approval and validation, and the importance of mentors during the creative process. While many of our guests strive to be lifelong learners, Suzanne seems to take this a step further as a lifelong learner and lifelong creator. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Suzanne Ciani.

• 4:25Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Suzanne, I've been so looking forward to this conversation since I first came across your work, just a few weeks ago, actually. I'm a huge music junkie, even bigger electronic music junkie, and you've been a pioneer in this space your whole career. I thought an interesting on-ramp for our conversation would be to ask, what the earliest moment in your music career specifically do you think of as a proud moment, where you did something that you look back on with pride?

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Oh my, I've had such a long history. That's a long looking back. I mean, the first thing that I was proud of, probably as a child, was, I mean, this has nothing to do with music.

• 5:03Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Bring it on.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  Okay, so I found in the backyard a bent old pan, and the pan was not flat on the bottom. And so my father, he wanted to throw it away, and I said, well, why don't we just put it on the cement floor and pound it on the flat surface of the garage and it will come out flat? And he said, well, that's a brilliant idea. That's wonderful. That's amazing. You know, I was just flooded with this sense of, yes, I'd come up with an original idea, and it was a useful idea, and I was appreciated for it. So I don't know why that came up to me this morning. I haven't thought of that in 70 years. Maybe you weren't looking for that.

• 5:49Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It makes me wonder what you've learned about originality. Like, what role does originality play in the creative process in your music? Is that something that is especially important? What have you learned there?

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Originality is the lifeblood of creativity. And originality doesn't mean that you don't interweave existing. You know, we have, we are an organic system. We live in the root system of our culture and our history, and we acknowledge that history. I acknowledge Beethoven and Mahler and Chopin. But originality is when you really have something to say, and you're speaking directly from who you are, whatever that is.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  And it gives strength to whatever it is. When I listen to music, for instance, people send me things. I can always tell if it's something derivative or trying to be in the cooking mold of some existing thing. Or whether it just has an energy and a validity that is original. The same in art. I relate a lot to the visual arts because I have a sister who has been in my life, my whole life, who's a profoundly wonderful painter. And going to a museum with her is an amazing experience because she gives you new eyes to see

• 7:18Speaker 03

  through that root system, but also to understand. We all have visceral responses to art and to creative things. We have our opinions. We have our reflection. But there is a deeper understanding and knowledge that you can bring to an experience that will deepen your experience of that. Works on many levels. Music you can appreciate just delightfully in the background, or you can have a deep conversation with it.

• 7:55Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Did you have any experience early in you building creative things or putting out creative things where you were derivative? I feel like everyone might go through this stage as a creator and that there's probably some strategy to getting out of that derivative impulse that we have to copy others or the cooking mold. I like that idea. And instead, start to do something that's uniquely our own. Any advice that you would have for people that are have that creative impulse, but are still stuck in that derivative impulse?

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Well, for me, I think my educational years were more imitative because that was the process of learning.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Write out a Beethoven quartet, get close to it, right in the style of Zenakis or whomever. So, once you're out on your own, I think as an artist, you are an artist because you do want to speak your own voice. So I don't see the conflict there. I think if you're stuck in a rut, you're just not consulting your own voice and what you have to say. One of the signs of that, that I notice when young people ask me about things, and they want approval, the idea is that the validation is outside of yourself.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  And for an artist, that's not true. You do not need outside validation. It's meaningless. The only opinion that's important is your own. You are the ultimate test of whether what you're saying has strength and validity and represents your voice. So that's always a sign. And I think that's a danger when people want reinforcement. I mean, it's nice to be appreciated. It's nice for people to have good opinions of you. But the strength comes from this integrity of not being a victim of what other people think.

• 9:58Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's a hard challenge. I think everyone could benefit from some sort of creative outlet. We talk about that a lot in this series of conversations. But it's very hard to find something where you can be the arbiter of quality and not rely on external reviews or validation. It's just really hard to get to that spot. But when you do get there, I find it to be incredibly gratifying. And what stood out in some of the videos that I watched of your performances or the music that you've created, especially with the ukulele instrument, is this just like very in-the-moment creative output? And I'd love to begin to tell that story. So I think you began playing the piano. Maybe that's not the first thing you played. I noticed that you played piano early in your life and you sort of transitioned into this electronic

• 10:40Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  zone of music. I'd love you to tell that story. Like, what got you interested in this part of music? Why do you think it came at the right time for you? Just the early story would be fascinating to hear.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Well, yes, I grew up in a large family and we had a wonderful big house that you could get lost in. And we had a grand piano, a Steinway. And I just lived with that piano. It was my safety zone, you know, my private space. And I would go in and play for hours and hours and hours. And I knew music was my place. I didn't know how, what it would look like. But I did go to college and I majored in music at a women's college. And then I went on to graduate school and got a master's in music composition. And I was still very much in the classical root system.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  But then the break came because at that point, when I made the choice to go to the West Coast, instead of going to Paris and studying with Nadia Boulanger, it was kind of a random choice because they were giving me a fellowship in Berkeley and I wanted to be independent. So I went to the West Coast, knew nothing about it. And that was the locus for all of the shifting that happened in my life. I met Don Buchla, who was the inventor of the analog modular music instrument. I also went to Stanford where I studied with John Chowning, who's the father of computer music.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  So when I met Buchla, it wasn't a gradual evolutionary thing. It was a complete earthquake. I dropped everything. I did not touch a piano for many years. I fell in love with this possibility. Now, why? I mean, now that we're looking historically at the place of women in the evolution of electronic music, we see that for them, and myself included, of course, it was a huge opening outside of the normal structure of musical life. I was going to be a professional musician, composer, and women composers really didn't have.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Openings. So electronic music was this instinctive promise of freedom where you could do it all yourself. You didn't depend on somebody else outside of you to give you a job or permission. So that was the attraction. This is in retrospect, I'm seeing it, you know, at the time, all I knew was that I was aware of the bleak outlook for a woman composer in our culture. You can't help but be aware of that if you're a woman. You turn on the classical radio station and you hear music by women. No. My mentor oddly was a photographer

• 13:43Speaker 03

  because I didn't know any women in my field, but I saw photography as a technological art form. And so I bonded with Elsa Bing. She was 80 when I met her. I was, what was 20s, late 20s. So she had a huge impact in my life. The whole idea of mentorship, the role of having connection with an outside awareness of the path that you've chosen. That's important.

• 14:18Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  There's this amazing idea that I play with a lot about how technology opens up new avenues for creators to create things without permission. You said that exactly, like maybe something that was attractive about this was it was a wide open space. There was less of a structure and norms, like it was just there for the taking. I think it would be neat with that as a backdrop to talk about two things. The Letterman appearance that I saw you on in the early days, in which I can't describe him as anything, but he just seemed very uncomfortable, right? And maybe it was because you were a woman doing this thing and you were a pioneer of it, but he just seemed off, like he was really, really awkward and uncomfortable. And I'd love to know what that experience was like. I think you played the bucla in that appearance. We'll link to it. This would be the right

• 15:03Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  time to describe what the bucla is. Literally, I don't know if that's one of them behind you that I can see, but it's a very funny, cool looking machine. And this seems like a good time to go there.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  Okay, this is my current bucla. Okay, this is a 200E. On Letterman, actually, I didn't bring the bucla. I brought something that I had assembled called a voice box. But how did I get there? I mean, technology, I mean, it was a long journey. My dreams were all bound up in the bucla and performing live with the bucla. But I ran into a roadblock right away in that I was playing in quadraphonic. So that was the nature of the instrument, spatial control of sound. I couldn't do it. The theaters wouldn't put up the four speakers. I could play in an art gallery, whatever, but I couldn't make a touring career out of this in those days. I thought, oh, gosh, I have to change the way theaters are designed.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  And I did that for a couple of years. And I found out that nobody would listen to me because I wasn't rich and famous. So I decided to get rich and famous so that people would listen to me. So very practical. I think that's another aspect of this whole thing is that you're motivated by a vision or a cause. Money is a tool. I noticed in my career, I would make money if I thought it was useful. But I was never interested in money itself as some kind of goal. So David Letterman, I was used to the fact in those days that most people did not understand.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  They didn't know where the sound was coming from, especially the bucla, because it is very complex looking. People still laugh at it like it's some kind of a switchboard. But with Letterman, I was processing his voice. And by that time in my career, I had the high-tech music house in New York City. And I was very busy. I wasn't really that psyched about going on the Letterman show, but I did it for a reason because I was working on my first album. And I wanted to play it for the audience. So I made a deal. I said, yes, I'll go on your show. I'll do whatever it is razzle dazzle you with my stuff. But then I'm going to play my piece.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  And of course, that end of the deal was not upheld because they cut to commercial just as I was starting to play. There were a lot of interesting things about that show. One was that in those days, there was very little memory in the electronics. It was analog mostly. There was some digital, but the digital was volatile. So what happened was that I had prepared my piece. And I went back into the green room. I came out and the production person had unplugged.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  The computer that I was using for my piece. So I come out on live TV and I push the button. You know, that says play and nothing happens. And then I recovered. I burned every brain cell in my brain and, you know, in a split second, figuring out what happened and recovering. But anyway, it was a fun time. I know people think that he comes off pretty mean, but I think I got the better end of the deal.

• 18:26Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Can you describe what the bucla actually is? So it might even be fun with your permission to play a little bit of the sounds on this episode. So people can hear what it's like, something you've produced in the past. But what literally is it? What is happening? Certainly to look at it, it looks like something complicated to play. What are the sounds themselves? Like, what is the technical origins of this thing? And why do you find it so interesting?

• 18:48Speaker 03

  Okay, the system is modular, which means it has modules. And each module covers one of the aspects of the sound or music generation. So you have oscillators for sound sources and noise for sound sources. Then you have modules that are filters that will then vary that timbral sound. Then you have volume controls. You have gates that work with envelopes. So the envelope, this is all, by the way, voltage controlled. What does that mean? That means that the shapes that are doing the controlling, like the shape of an envelope being a slow rise and decay,

• 19:32Speaker 03

  or a very sharp percussive sound. All of that is designed by a voltage. So you have the attack and the decay that you can specify. Then you have other systems like sequencers, which produce the voltages that control the pitch.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  So I base my performances on four sixteen-stage sequences. The beauty of these instruments, the problem that we had in the early days was that somehow, in order to bridge the gap between the machine and the audience, they put a keyboard on it, a traditional black and white keyboard. And then people started to play it as a keyboard. And that completely short-circuited the understanding of what this machine could do. So Don Buchla, who passed away several years ago,

• 20:31Speaker 03

  was this brilliant, I call him the Leonardo da Vinci of electronic music instrument design. He developed interfaces. How does a human touch and respond and interact with the machine? There is this potentiality. You have the modules, you have all that, but you need to bring it to life. And if you bring it to life with a traditional keyboard, that's very limited. Because what you're saying is that you do one action and you get one result. You hit a key.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  Lovely, but it's so limited. Because I can instead have a voltage that sweeps and does a variety of things. I can move the sound in space. I can shift the filter. I can shift the amplitude. I can stop and start things. I can create a network of possibilities that is a new language, really. It's not really about the sound. It's about the way the sound moves. Not just in space, but in terms of its melodic shape or pitch shape. The traditional world of music was always based on instruments. What could those instruments do? So you had ranges.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  You had certain aptitudes. You had techniques that developed.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  In those instruments. So that in an orchestra, if you were smart, you could combine all those limitations of all those instruments, all those specialties of those instruments into this big fabric of music. And that was a very thriving approach. What we have now with electronics is a bit liberated from that. You don't have range limitations. For one, I can go from below the sonic spectrum to above in a sweep. I'm not working as a composer to maximize the limitations of those instruments. There are other limitations, but that's a different story.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  How do you get feedback so that you know what's happening in the instrument? That's a major part of the interface. And Don Bucla mastered that. The early instruments, a lot of them, they were opaque. You didn't know what was going on. I don't know how people played them. I was brought up, and they didn't, but I was brought up on the Bucla. I had hundreds of LEDs, four LEDs, the early lights, that told me the rhythm, the pace, the volume, the level of a voltage. It was all speaking back to me. I could tell where the sound was in space because there was a light pattern that showed me where it was.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  That feedback was an essential part of the performance of being in the moment with the instrument.

• 23:34Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  How much of playing this instrument is a live sort of like unfolding event, more similar to say jazz or something where you may not know where you're going ahead of time versus the performance of something that's pre-created? Because I'm really interested in the entire technical world, from software to instrumentation or whatever, in that tight feedback loop between the creator, the performer, and the output, the input and the output. And it sounds like with this machine unlocked, it took off the cover of the keyboard and got you access to like the root level without limitations. And it's cool to think of instruments as just imperfect models of sound and that this sort of tears that completely off. So which is it closer to? Is it closer to jazz? Is it closer to something where you write it ahead of time and then perform it?

• 24:19Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I'm curious how that works with the Bucla.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  The analogy with jazz is a good one. Because as in jazz, you're working off of a structure. You're not in deep space. You might be. Usually there's some kind of foundational architecture to, it might be a standard, a song. And then you riff on that, you go in and out, but there is a structure there, underlying. I also have an underlying structure, but it's not based on an existing song of any kind. It's based on what I call the raw materials. What are the raw materials? Well, it is the patch, which is the network of communication amongst the modules. The communication of the modules has to be designed.

• 25:07Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If we were to step back and think about those designing technical or even electronic systems for other creators, you sort of started to hint at the key features that those systems might have to give those creators the most flexibility or creative control. What are those things that would matter? Like if you were creating a system from scratch, what would you want to make sure as a systems designer that you provide for the person that's going to be using that system? Does that question make sense?

• 25:39Speaker 03

  It does. And I think in this field, it is absolutely fundamentally a collaborative situation. That it's an art and engineering task. So if you're the designer, you really do need to work closely with a musician who's going to use it. Because, I mean, these things are very generalized anyway. I have my Boukla. No two people are going to play it the same way. In fact, in modular, no two people are going to have the same instrument on many levels. Here's a perfect point about that collaboration. When I noticed that this was taking off again, and believe me, I wasn't aware of it right away

• 26:24Speaker 03

  because I was touring on the piano. I started to look at the Euro Rack systems. And I thought, oh my God, they're so tiny. I can't get my hands in there. I'm a woman and I can't get my hands in there. Like, why are they making them so tiny? Don Boukla went through the very same intuitive questioning. He started from scratch. Well, what size should it be? And he looked at the human hand. And they started there. The same way this keyboard is.

• 26:58Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Finger sized.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's at an angle the same way the hand is. What are you dealing with going just obvious things you have to be aware of? A lot of people design based on what's available, what the parts are. It's like people build boxes for houses because that's what's available. In other words, the materials dominate. Whereas if you just started from a different perspective, if you started not by, oh, boy, what can all these chips do? But look at what the human wants and needs. That's my speech. I did try, you know, when Bukla was passing away, I needed certain modules.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  And I thought, oh, I'll design them. So I started working with engineers and I saw how difficult it was because every engineer comes from their own place. If I work with an engineer from Moog, he thinks like a Moog. It's really hard to find a collaborative system. You have to find your engineer.

• 28:09Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What stands out to me is that it's amazing how many parallels there are here to like building software, which is something I talk about all the time, where there's a symbiosis between the engineering engineer and the user. A design that starts with the user, not with like the raw materials, like, let's see what we can build from what we have. But instead build backwards from what the user, the creator, the whatever is trying to accomplish. Figure that out. It's a powerful way to build. I'm curious, like, I don't know the machine well enough. So literally, what do those buttons do that you were showing me? Like, why are they finger shaped? What does your interface allow you to do with that flat keypad? And we'll show people a picture of it somehow on the website or something. What is literally the mechanic that's happening in the machine?

• 28:52Speaker 03

  I don't actually play that a lot. It's not like a traditional keyboard. It's more of a control center. So it is used, but disassociated in your mind from playing a melody.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  On a keyboard, that's not what it is. And these things, this is my main performance module, this thing called the multiple arbitrary function generator, and I can move these sliders and I can change pulses and change ranges and access stages. And it's very performative, really. So that's how I play. It's complex.

• 29:30Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Sure looks it.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know.

• 29:33Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You could fly to the moon on that thing. Sorry for the basic questions about the music, but is there something that's the starting point? Piano sounds a certain way, a string sounds a certain way, a sax sounds a certain way. Is there something similar here? What is the elemental unit here that you're manipulating? How would you describe that?

• 29:53Speaker 03

  My concerts always start with waves because I live on the ocean, I'm listening to the waves all the time. And my first album was called Seven Waves, and all those waves were designed on the bucle. So the emotion of the wave would go with the song. And that is just an example of the palette that you have. You have timbres that sound like sounds of instruments maybe, but then you also have sounds that don't occur in our known world. Well, they do, I mean, waves occur in our world, but white noise is a very useful raw material.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  And then my other raw material are these four 16-stage sequences. When I was in my starting days, I got a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, a composer grant. I had to write a paper to satisfy that grant, and I wrote a 40-page paper about how to play the bucle. When I came back to the bucle six years ago, I had been out of the bucle for a long time. And I went and I read this paper and I based my comeback and my performances on the techniques that I had developed in the seventies. They're still valid. They're useful.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  I believe that there are techniques, the same way there were for other instruments, the same way you have an arpeggio in a piano or a certain pizzicato in strings or things that the instrument does that's part of its language. That there are techniques. I was married to this instrument for a good 10 years and I think that's why I could distill these seemingly obvious techniques. And kids, when they start today, you know, it's a bit overwhelming. They look at the machine and they like, oh my God, where do I start? But then you do start and you develop a relationship and you start to interact with it.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  And you will develop techniques. And there are techniques in so many departments. I mean, I'm a spokesperson for the analog modular, but there are a million ways to interact. It's kind of odd that National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences thinks of electronic music as dance music, turntable music. I don't object, but I hope that this time around we'll have a wider cultural awareness that there is in fact a new instrument. And I mean, it's been around already for how many years? I mean, what 50, 60? And the concept goes way back.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  The idea of having this type of control of sound goes way back, but it was because it's now based in technology, they kind of had to wait for the technology to be able to express it. All instruments developed oddly and gradually. If you look at the trumpet, how many versions there were before it. Solidified.

• 33:02Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Can you talk a bit about, you mentioned this idea of this space of music being permissionless for you to go build a career, experiment, that you didn't need anyone's approval. Can you talk through how you think the role of women in music has evolved across your career and the relative challenges of maybe today versus the late 60s, early 70s? Have we made good progress? Is there, I'm assuming, tons of room still to improve? How do you think about the progression as a pioneering woman early in, in a new field of music and whether that, we've made progress or not?

• 33:39Speaker 03

  It's odd, but there was a film that just came out called, I don't know if you've seen it, Sisters with Transisters.

• 33:45Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  No, great title.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  But a lot of those women are already dead, you know, but it's about the pioneers of electronic music and how they were there. The odd thing is that we didn't really know about each other. Technological work can be very private, so you can be in your own space and maybe not know. So I was given the endorsement, whatever, that I was the first woman to score a major Hollywood feature, The Incredible Shrinking Woman. And no other woman scored in Hollywood feature for another 14 years. I mean, there weren't that many openings in Hollywood, right? But I found out that there was a woman in the 40s named Elizabeth Firestone. She scored a Hollywood feature, several of them, and I can't find anything out about

• 34:36Speaker 03

  her. I wish I had known about her. I would have talked to her. We overlapped in age. We both lived in New York. She was old and dying. Anyway, we're doing now her story instead of his story. So that's number one. We need to really explore what's been done. To say that there were no women composers, that women couldn't compose, that blah, blah, blah. I mean, this is just all based on a lack of. Understanding. We simply didn't have this ability. And no fault to men. It's just, you know, we love men. They created a lot of structure and systems and

• 35:17Speaker 03

  my theory is not that they excluded women for any particular reason, other than they were uncomfortable. They were just uncomfortable. Humans like to be with similar people and men wanted to be with men. Once the women get their critical mass, they're going to want to be with women.

• 35:37Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Going back to your mentor and photographer.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Elsa Bing.

• 35:42Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What did you specifically learn from Elsa? What was it about her mentorship that stands out as valuable early in your career?

• 35:49Speaker 03

  Being a young professional woman was challenging in the sense that you got distracted a lot by male female dynamics. You were often treated or objectified as a woman so that you didn't have professional identity. With Elsa, whenever I went to visit her on the Upper West Side, the first thing she would say to me in very excited voice was, Susan, Susan, tell me about your work. I want to hear about your work. Maybe I was going through some horrible boyfriend problem and I was miserable and I didn't want to focus on my work.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  But she always let me know that my work was a thing. It was a valid source of interest with Elsa. Also, I've always related to artists as I see them in the visual arts. You can tell immediately things about artists. They have periods. They have Picasso, you know, the early period, the middle period, the late period. Artists' language can evolve. It usually goes into a stage of more freedom in the later years.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  I'm in that stage now. I'm in a stage of freedom. You can call it jazz, but whatever. It's just Elsa had stages. Her stages were based on, yes, the technology, you know, the Thirty-five millimeter camera, she was called a queen of the Leica. And she used that for the first time as a serious photographic instrument. And nobody had thought of that before. They were using these large format cameras and everybody had to be as still as could be to have a picture taken and she was out take things blurring and time and dancers and but her emotional periods were really what counted. So when the war came and she was Jewish,

• 37:52Speaker 03

  this was a big shift in her outlook, her work. And I've had the same shift from romantic early work to a shift. Something changes in your outlook. And for Ilse, it was the war. Then she started doing collages and other things. But anyway, she stopped doing her photography at the age of sixty. And that always terrified me because I thought in my young mind, it meant that she had stopped being an artist. An artist is forever. I mean, honestly, it's not a job. You don't quit. You can't retire. It's just there.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  My sister's a painter. She's painting more now. She's almost eighty. She's painting more now than she ever has. She's free. She's amazing what she's doing now.

• 38:47Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What does free mean in this? You said you're in the zone of freedom. Your sister is free. What does that mean? Or what does it not mean, I guess? What's gone that was there or is there that wasn't there before?

• 38:57Speaker 03

  Well, for me personally, some of it has to do with letting go of the financial straitjacket of work. If you're a professional, you also you work for money. You're a professional. You do things. Freedom isn't all wonderful, right? Because we produce a lot within the restraints of the system that asks us to produce the power of request. So I've always thought of this dynamic as, you know, in my professional life, the requests came from outside. Now I generate the requests.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  As my mother would say, she was very funny, but she always said, "The world doesn't need another album." It's like, "That doesn't sound like a supportive mom, right?" "Yeah, you're right. I don't need to do this. The world doesn't need it. I'm not doing it for out there." "The world doesn't need it, but I do." "And so that's the freedom."

• 39:57Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So I'm a big believer in the power of constraints for creative output. And maybe lack of freedom is just another way of saying like, there's constraints that you're working with, within, and you don't just have a pure blank canvas. So by narrowing the focus, you do more or something like that. I'm curious how you think about the creative process and its components. Is it as simple as raw materials or raw pieces that then you recombine into new patterns? Is that what creativity is? How do you think about the units of the creative process itself? Because I think most people have this romantic notion that the best creative output just sort of spews out of someone brilliant. But I think there's a lot more to it than that. And I'm just curious how you would delineate the creative process itself, having done so much of it.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  Well, I think we think alike on the importance of having a framework in which to work. Blank canvas is fine. It's the canvas.

• 40:50Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's a canvas.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  The process is putting yourself in a place where you're ready to receive, where you're attentive and listening. So for me, that place has always been going to a remote place or a place where the phone doesn't ring, where nobody can find me and where I'm safe, where I'm not distracted, where there are no interruptions. It's a conscious choice of being available to the, whatever it's called, the muse or whatever. I can create on command if I'm doing a job or whatever. You know, I'm very disciplined and professional that way. But from my work, and even then I worked instinctively.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  So when I was doing a commercial, for instance, I required that I be alone the first time I saw, say, a commercial that I was going to score. I wanted nobody else in the room. I wanted my complete immersion in that initial first feeling. That's when it all happens. That's when you you open yourself, you know, you open yourself, you take it in. You let your reflexes work. You can grab hold, you know, as a creative, you can grab hold of a tiny little cell of an idea and then nurse it into growth.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  I've done many, many studio albums where the process is different. I'll go someplace. My last writing I did in Venice. I rented this beautiful place on a canal and brought my stuff. Wrote, I haven't recorded that album yet, but it's there. The writing is done.

• 42:41Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You mentioned a couple of times the scoring of ads. It seems like a really interesting aspect, chapter of your career. And you also said one time, you know, if you needed to be rich and famous, you just went and did that as a means to an end. Tell me about that very commercial part of your story. I think you've done ads for Coke and, you know, lots of famous companies or brands. What was that process like? Did you enjoy that? Why did you do it? It just strikes me as an interesting thing that maybe you did because you had to. But I'm curious if you also enjoyed it.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  I loved it. I was in New York City. I was in love with New York, the energy. I loved the pressure. I loved the intensity. I loved being in it every second. I did it during the week and then my weekends were for my art music. And they had a synergistic relationship because in my work music, my commercial music, I got to work in the best studios with the biggest budgets, with the best musicians and talent. I did not use those musicians for the most part on my art music. My art music was just really kind of me. But they did feed each other. I worked intuitively.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  I mean, I was working in an area that nobody understood, so they couldn't control me. And I really do believe in a creative job. You have to give the person freedom. You don't try to backseat drive or control the initial output.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  Of somebody, it's not strong. I always said to my clients, look, I'm gonna do what I do. If you don't like it, not in a bad, mean way, but go someplace else. You have that option. I'm not going to second guess myself. I wasn't very good at taking input and I had a lot of freedom. You know, in those days, when you did commercial music, it was more traditional. It was kind of like jingles. And when you went to present what you were going to do, go into the music producer's office. And there was a piano. So for instance, on this job that I was doing for a Black and Decker slow mo tune, Cut Grass.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  I had to present on a piano. There wasn't even anything connected to a piano in that piece. It was all sound design, but you couldn't tell somebody that then. So I would go in and play something on the piano. Then when I went into my studio, I did this completely other thing. And when they heard it, they loved it.

• 45:17Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What other observations from a life of creativity would you offer as advice? Or just that as observations to younger creatives out there?

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Please yourself. If you have to ask, is it good? What do you think of this? That is already just bleeding there. You're leaking. Get behind what you're doing to the point where you're pleased. And listen to that little voice. If that little voice says, I wonder if that's okay, did that sound right? I don't know. Listen to your own voice. It will tell you where the problems are or where you're not happy. So listen to that voice. There are so many little voices that we have to listen to. And I've become aware of this talking with younger people. Because I've always thought of my inner voice as this wonderful thing that guides me and protects me. And if I just listen to it, everything is wonderful.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  But I've noticed that there are other little voices for women that undermine them. That little voice that says, you're not good enough. You're not doing it right. You're not this whatever. There's another silent voice that is not on your side.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  So you have to be able to like make the distinction. When you hear the negative voice that doesn't produce any useful effect, that's not the voice to listen to.

• 46:42Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What have you learned about performance? And maybe a way of asking the question is, what unites what you think of as your best performances ever? Is there some common thread that makes them special?

• 46:55Speaker 03

  Being in the moment. Performance is about being in the moment. Is an energy system that usually includes an audience, right? That is the energy that's also part of the manifestation of the music. Also, performing, you have to be in the moment and that protects you from any kind of fear. I see some young performers and they're worried. Will I make a mistake? And that nervousness is not your friend. And I can talk myself out of it logically because I'm a logical person.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  And I say here, well, if I'm performing, do I want to make my audience feel nervous? Do I want to be nervous because then that'll communicate to the audience? Is that what I want them to feel? No. So my job is to dispel any of that that interferes with the communication. And once you think of it logically, that your nerves and your nervousness is nothing but a detriment to what you're trying to do. I mean, there's really no place for it. Take a deep breath and just respect your audience and respect what you're doing. It's not about you, this whole idea of being a conduit or whatever. It really is that way.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  Your job is to channel it.

• 48:24Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What do you think the future holds for this medium? If machines like the one behind you open up this new space of possibility to create new things, where do you think we go from here? Like, it seems like I'm just discovering this machine, it's 50 years old, you just returned to it six years ago, it has this space of possibility that's very distinct and unique. What do you think the future of technology and music looks like from here?

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Well, I think still one of the missing components is the spaces, the performance spaces.

• 48:54Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  The quadraphonics, yeah.

• 48:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, the quadraphonics. And of course, now, everything's integrated, visuals are integrated. It was like that 50, 60 years ago, but not on that scale. Is it all wonderful? I don't know. Some of it is just, I don't know, I'm about to go see immersive Van Gogh. I don't know what that's gonna be like, but that is a new experience of traditional art form. And I think that our immersive, we're going to be immersive from now on. So that's all. You need the content. It's not enough to have an immersive Van Gogh space without Van Gogh. There's something to put in there. And I haven't seen it yet.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  But all of these razzle-dazzle things that are gonna come up, people talking about having 80 speakers and 120 speakers, oh, that's wonderful, but you need content. Content is always cultural. You might like content that I don't like and whatever, there are a whole lot of different bubbles of content. There's no judgment, except your own. I like to think that I like all kinds of music that I like. I mean, I'm not a big fan of rap, but I can appreciate a really good rap. So there'll always be this hierarchical creative content, what, pile of stuff.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  The great artists, we do just count them on our fingers. But it's also a lot of fun. There's nothing wrong with that. Everybody should be out playing with their analog modular synths. It's fabulous, fun, it's good for your brain. So do we all have to be great artists? No. And are these tools useful as spiritual, creative tools? Yes.

• 50:49Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If someone wanted to listen to your music for the first time, is Seven Waves the most appropriate, do you think, entree into listening to what you've composed?

• 50:59Speaker 03

  Sure, Seven Waves is wonderful, yeah. I mean, it was a studio album. It's all electronic. And by the time I got into a position to record, I was no longer doing just bukla. My bukla had been stolen and broken and all that. It is a studio album. And then, another album that's interesting is Bukla Concerts 1975. This was done by a label in Manchester, England, called Finders Keepers. And it was a recording that was just done happenstance, wasn't intentional recording. It was a quadraphonic performance. It was recorded probably with one mic in the room.

• 51:41Speaker 03

  But it is a historic document of the early performance on the bukla.

• 51:48Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I've so enjoyed the time. I ask everybody the same closing question, which is to ask, what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

• 51:57Speaker 03

  Kindest thing that anyone has ever done for me? Kindness is a wonderful idea. You kind of have to be vulnerable to receive kindness, even to be aware of it. Maybe the kindest thing anybody did was give me a wonderful birthday party. That's how we started this conversation today.

• 52:20Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Full circle.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  I'm trying to be kind to my sister and give her a birthday party. But I guess she doesn't want any of that. So kindness is a two-way street, right? You have to be able to receive somebody's kindness. I never gave myself credit for receiving that wonderful birthday party, but now I see.

• 52:46Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Well, this has been so much fun. I encourage everyone to go listen to your music. We'll point them in a couple of different directions to learn from your career and your work. This has been a blast. Thank you for your time.

• 52:56Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Thank you.

• 52:58Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  This episode is brought to you by Tegus. In this five-part mini-series, I sit down with Ben Clermont, a principal portfolio manager at Cove Street Capital, to talk about Cove Street's investing process and how Tegus differs from other expert networks. In this week's episode, Ben and I discuss how Ben first came across Tegus and the call that cemented Tegus as a part of his investment process. Ben, can you describe how you came across Tegus? I'm always interested by how people find things and expert networks are not new concept. This version of it is fairly novel and different. How did you first come across Tegus? Do you remember?

• 53:32Speaker 04

  It's funny because I wanted to go back and just recently and look because it feels like Tegus has been such a part of the family for so long. I was actually kind of interested because COVID has warped all sense of time. I wanted to go back and like think about when it was. And so it was early 2017. So I think we were one, like, I don't know how many clients they had when we signed on, but we were one of the first. And so when you're competing with Steve Cohen and Point 72 and they have an unlimited budget for research. And so when you're a smaller firm, like you have to be open to new relationships who are offering something different. And so I think I literally got a cold email from someone saying, hey, we're starting this new thing. Let's have a call.

• 54:14Speaker 04

  And for the most part, I ignore those things just because you get emails from service providers all the time. But I think what really stood out to me was the description of it that you would have access to a platform where you could see other people's transcripts. And so that was a start to a really flourishing relationship. And I will say that I don't joke that Tegus is part of the family here. One of the coolest things they ever did is Not to go too deep into it, but I run this thing called the 10K Club of Southern California, which is not a running club, not that kind of 10K that we're investors. So annual report 10K. And it's a group of investors that started off with five people sitting on a couch talking about investing. And now it's like, I think we have 180 people on the list.

• 54:55Speaker 04

  And so one of the coolest things Tigas ever did was, I think it was probably 2018. Some of the people flew out and actually sponsored one of our events. Paid for the food and it was like, we know, we had an event here at the office. And in a lot of ways, I gave Tigas the platform to kind of pitch to the exact same investors that we are. And that would be perfect for their service.

• 55:14Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yeah, I'm also curious if there was a moment or a specific transcript that really got Tigas fully embedded in your process.

• 55:21Speaker 04

  There was one transcript, that one call that we did that just cemented Tigas in my mind. So we were looking at a company that is a distributor for aircraft parts. And somehow the Tigas people found us the head of Boeing's supply chain. I don't even know why this person talked to us, but it was the best call we've ever had. So this company we were looking at was having trouble hitting its targets in terms of like, the speed at which it was getting parts to Boeing. And so the question was, is Boeing gonna cut these guys off? Or is this company a core piece of the Boeing supply chain and they need them to get better? And when this guy said, listen, we need this company to be better.

• 56:05Speaker 04

  We don't want them to fail. Our supply chain does not work if these guys are not producing. We are rooting for them. We need them to get better. That was it. That for me, that was like the head of Boeing's supply chain saying this company is a key component of our process. Basically solidified the investment, right? And so those, having an expert like that, someone so deep in the supply chain of a huge company that can validate a company, there's no substitute for that.

• 56:31Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you enjoyed this episode, check out joincolossus.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast, complete with transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning. You can also sign up for our newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense episodes to the big ideas, quotations, and more, as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week. [Music]