#9 Maestro Alexander Shelley: The Architecture of Music

In this incredible episode, I’m joined by Maestro Alexander Shelley. We dive deep into the architecture of music, the necessity of arts, and what makes Beethoven’s 5th Symphony is so popular. Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:08Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host Shane Parrish, curator behind Fernham Street Blog, which is an intellectual hub of interestingness covering topics like human misjudgment, decision-making, strategy, philosophy, and today, beauty and music. The Knowledge Project allows me to interview amazing people from around the world to deconstruct why they're good at what they do and get inside their head. It's more conversation than prescription. It's about seeing the world the way they see it. On this episode, I have Alexander Shelley, the music director for the National Arts Centre's Orchestra. This conversation took place in his office at the National Arts Centre in downtown Ottawa. Shelley's leading a new era for the National Arts Centre Orchestra, is currently in his

• 0:51Shane Parrish?

  seventh year as chief conductor of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, and in January 2015, he was named principal associate conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Alexander is simply amazing, and this conversation is off the charts. We're going to explore a host of fascinating topics, including what goes through his mind as he walks out of the dressing room and assumes the podium, the architecture of music, the necessity of art and beauty and culture. He's even going to break down the beauty of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for us and explain why it's so famous. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

• 1:32Shane Parrish?

  As a fan of classical music, I've been looking forward to this interview for a long time.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:38Shane Parrish?

  Can you walk me through what goes through your mind from the time you leave the dressing room until the time you reach the stage?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Well, that's a very good question. Often, it's only a very short walk. Normally, it's 10, 15 seconds to get from the dressing room to the stage, depending on the building. Every conductor has a different way of going about these things. I I'm lucky, well, I I think I'm lucky to have quite a compartmentalized mind. So I can quite quickly switch from one thing to another and then feel very kind of focused on the the next thing. And so I'm fairly comfortable, let's say, up until a few seconds before I go on stage, uh, having conversations with people. But what I then, uh, you know, it's important in the moment that I walk out that I'm in exactly the frame of mind required for whatever the pieces.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  And the the wonderful thing about music in general, um, and in my case classical music, is that it could be so many different things. Last week, uh, we performed here Brahms's Requiem, which requires a particular kind of focus and a sort of connection with one's soft underbelly emotionally, if you see what I mean. And then sometimes we'll be performing things like this evening, we have a concert with Bizet Carmen, which is a very different kind of music. It's more a bali and there there are moments of great tenderness. But it is um a very different kind of story and so I try and focus into that. But ultimately, in that walk, I try to set myself into the right frame of mind for the music.

• 3:05Shane Parrish?

  When you're up on stage and you first pick up the baton, what's going through your mind?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  So, I mean, first and foremost, I'm thinking about creating um, a sense on stage through my body language, through my eye contact, through e- everything about the way I am that prepares uh, us and by us, I mean, first and foremost, the orchestra, but then, of course, the audience for the beginning of the journey and the journey, you know, being this piece, a a piece of music. Um, exists in time, you know. You are taken on a journey which is going to take, let's say, in the case of the Requiem, that we did, an hour and fifteen minutes. And I have to, before I give the first downbeat, before I start the piece,

• 3:54Speaker 01

  create the conditions, a certain kind of silence, let's say. There are pieces you can, you can walk on stage, bow to the audience, turn and give a downbeat. You know, everyone's still clapping, but it's that kind of music, bam, it's something that explodes off the stage. Um, but if it's going to be a really long and very intimate and very intense journey, it's sometimes nice to create a true silence beforehand, this kind of focused silence. And it's one of the things I love about, uh, the many things I love about, uh, you know, giving concerts, is the This shared experience, I mean, that's for me what is so important about about live music. And you can see parallels between concert halls and religious spaces. If you go to a cathedral, you don't necessarily have to be a believer to sense something special

• 4:38Speaker 01

  happening when it's full of people and when there's a silence, let's say, after a prayer. You don't necessarily have to believe in the idea of the God of that given faith. But there is a great beauty in that shared silence, that collective silence, that collective experience that we all recognize. And it has different manifestations. It could be a ballgame as well, you know, it could be a hockey, a hockey game, that sense of of joy, 20,000 people being joyful. So I try to focus the energy of the orchestra, the energy of the audience to where it needs to be to begin the piece. And then I'm thinking, of course, of the opening measures of the piece and how how we want to perform them.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  But with with works with bigger structures and longer journeys, I always have an eye on where we're going. That's my job is also to be the the sort of navigator through these bigger works.

• 5:33Shane Parrish?

  As you're conducting with the eye to where you're going with the piece, what do you focus on while the music is actually playing?

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Well, the interesting thing about describing what a conductor does is that you, at any given point, have to be prepared to do a lot of different things. So there's the, I'd say, the the very simple craftsmanship of a conductor. You need to be able to give a beat that, however you do it, makes clear to the orchestra what the rhythmic impulses are of the music. Now, in contrast to majority of pop music or folk music, jazz, you know, pretty much any other world, there are there are lots of works in classical music and moments within

• 6:21Speaker 01

  works of classical music where the pulse is movable. It's what we call rubato, so give and take within the music. And so a conductor there has to lead that sense of of give and take. And it's a it's a very beautiful thing. It's a When it's functioning correctly, it's a symbiosis between me and the eighty musicians on stage. It's in fact, I find one of the most beautiful things that humans do. You have sitting in an orchestra eighty people who are absolute experts of what they do. They start when they're four, you know, four or five years old, playing instruments. Then they go and study it. They do degrees and master's degrees and then they go into the profession. I mean, there are so few professions where you can say that, you know,

• 7:05Speaker 01

  lawyers don't start studying law at four and so on and so forth. Medics don't start studying medicine at four. You study elements of it like language and physics and maths and things. But musicians are very, very specifically trained and you have these masters of what they're doing, sitting in an orchestra together. And in the best case scenario, they start to behave, you know, like a flock of birds. When you see a flock of birds moving around, you're not quite sure who's leading or what's happening. But so there's the element of being able that any given point, let's say that symbiosis breaks and suddenly somebody's not together with someone else, to know what to do, to instinctively be able to react

• 7:44Speaker 01

  to get people back together, just the coordination of eighty people on stage. And I think the correct state of mind for a conductor while performing is even though I don't meditate, I have a close friend who meditated when he was growing up and he just used to describe it to me. And actually, the experience of conducting is very similar. You are in a state of very, very high focus where you're ideally not thinking about a specific element. You are channeling, you're allowing it to happen. But at any given point, you could switch into, okay, the second violin's need my help, or this has got a little bit slow,

• 8:25Speaker 01

  or this is a little on the quick side, I need to readjust, sort of doing things that, where let's say the flow has been broken, that you can just come out of that state for a moment, solve it and then go back into it. That's the ideal. And so at any given point, I could be thinking about a thousand different things. I also sense the focus of an audience and that is very much part of a performance. One of the beautiful things about live performance, again, is that we musicians on stage play and perform differently depending on how an audience is reacting.

• 8:55Shane Parrish?

  What decisions does the conductor make versus the musician in the chair? What's the relationship between the conductor, the audience, the music and the musician?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Well, in an ideal world, uh, and this, this happens regularly. I mean, it's, it's, it is ideal, but we're actually able to do it. It's not a question of having to make those choices. So when things are working well, um, a conductor and orchestra are in this state of absolute coordination, where the music is speaking the way it needs to speak. Um, so that we don't sense, you know, I don't feel like I'm having to, um, do something unnatural to accommodate one of the players and they don't feel like they're having to do something unnatural to accommodate the flow that I have brought the music into. But one can, as a conductor, let's say you're not in that ideal state.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  One can view this very differently. Um, my, my personal approach, uh, in front of any given orchestra is to try and respect as far as possible within the parameters of, of how the work is constructed, how I analyze the work, to respect, um, nuances that come from the players. So you will, for example, I mentioned, uh, that we are, we're doing a piece by Beeze tonight, some music from Carmen. There are a lot of very beautiful solos for individual instruments, long solos, like, like a sung aria, but from the instrumentalists within the orchestra. At that moment, they're playing as soloists. They're sitting within the orchestra, but they're playing as soloists.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Now, I, I believe very strongly that if you trust the musicians and you respect them, you have to also allow them the freedom to express how they feel a phrase. Now, normally, you set, as a conductor, the parameters. So let, let's say the tempo, the speed of the music makes a big difference. So if I start one of the movements quicker than this soloist in the orchestra would intuitively do it, you might hear that than the way he or she plays it. You might hear that they're, they feel a little rushed, the way they're phrasing. So if you're sensitive as a conductor, what you'll try and do is then just slow the music a little to try and create the right conditions for them,

• 11:15Speaker 01

  while maintaining whatever reasoning you had behind doing it at the original tempo. Sometimes that's to do with the architecture of a movement. So. We can maybe talk about the architecture of music in a moment, but put simply a phrase, like a sentence, or a movement, like a chapter, or a work, like a book or a play, always has an architecture. A great piece, or even just a good piece, has an architecture, a point where it starts, that it builds towards, and then the sort of afterglow. And within that, all the phrases, all the little movements, chapters, they have their own inner structure. And the work as a conductor, when you're preparing a piece, is simply trying to

• 11:58Speaker 01

  understand with as much clarity and lucidity as possible, how a composer has done this. And then then you try and realize that. So often, in fact, normally, one will choose a tempo that one feels appropriately represents what's happening in this architecture. But that's something, like I said, if you're working with an individual who who really feels that particular phrase differently, you have to try and be, or at least I feel like I want to be accommodating. Now, there is another school where you say, no, absolutely not. There's only one tempo in which this works, and you have to fit into it. It's a slightly more dictatorial school, if you like. And both of these schools bear wonderful results when

• 12:41Speaker 01

  done well, and they can also have terrible results, so.

• 12:44Shane Parrish?

  I assume they were like freedom more.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Well, you say that, that would seem to be logical. But if you, among a group of eighty people, are expecting consensus on anything, then then you're living in a different world from the world I live in. Because, you know, in any walk of life, no matter how expert people are, if you get a group of even ten people together, they're not going to think the same thing about the same stuff. So so, yes, there are a lot of people who love that idea of collaboration. There are others who feel very strongly that the the dictatorial element is vital. And frankly, as a conductor, you have to have both elements up your sleeve. It doesn't mean you have to be rude to people, although that's also an option. There have been some very rude conductors.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  But you have to sometimes just draw a line with with an orchestra for the sake of the group. Because if decisions are constantly, you know, hanging in the air, then nothing ever gets done. So you have to draw the line.

• 13:39Shane Parrish?

  Let's talk more about the architecture of music and how it relates to how the audience feels it and experiences it.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Sure. Classical music is something that's always wonderful to talk about and very difficult to talk about because it is so many different things. It encompasses 500 years of music. And the ideals and the aesthetics of medieval times are very different to the Baroque period or the classical period or the romantic period.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  And the forms and the structures that were used in music have changed a lot over the years. But to talk about one of the forms of architecture that's most prevalent in classical music, and it's actually a big part of pop music as well, is the idea of themes recurring and then changing, developing. Now, if we think of a pop song, what will quite often happen in, let's say, jazz or gospel or pop is you will have a tune stated that's related to the home bass, the home key that you started in, then you'll have a little journey to another related key, and then you'll normally go back to the home key. So the architecture of that is kind of ABA.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Now, there's sort of psychological elements involved in that. If one wanted, one could simply just write notes that have no relation to one another, and you never come back to what you started with. But the coherence of a piece of music, whether it's a four-minute pop song or a one-hour, 15-minute requiem, has to do with recognizing elements again, and DNA. You know, we all enjoy that. Let's say we go to, or we listen to a lecture. It's nice at the beginning of a lecture for some clear statements to be made that are recognizable. Somebody makes a statement, X, and then Y, then they start the lecture. But then they'll refer back to X, and then they'll refer back to Y, and you're like, "Oh, I see that point, and I see that point." Now.

• 15:42Shane Parrish?

  Do you have some sort of landscape to navigate by?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  You have some landscape, yeah. I like to to think of it as the DNA of the piece.

• 15:47Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Like the the the the stuff of which it's made. Now, I'll talk a little bit more about that in detail in a second, but you and and I think a lot of of our listeners will know about Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. They will have heard of it, you know, it's a famous piece and they probably have asked themselves, well, why is it so famous? One of the reasons is that he takes two notes and one rhythm and creates an entire symphony out of it. So, ba ba ba bum, yeah, just that.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  The next three notes, the next four notes are ba ba ba bum, so you can already see the relationship. It's the same interval, but just down one step. And then it goes ba ba ba ba, ba ba ba ba, ba ba ba ba. It's the same idea, it's the DNA, it's like a tiny little cell. And that builds ba ba ba ba, ba ba ba ba, ba ba ba bum, ba ba ba bum, ba ba ba bum, bum, beam? Ta ta ta ta. So it's, in fact, you're not listening to lots of different phrases, you're listening to one idea um that's that's growing like in a petri dish. It's starting to to grow into some kind of entity, you know, like those sort of uh genetics experiments they do with computers to see what will happen to certain forms. Um, and uh he then builds the whole first movement out of that interval. But then he takes the second movement and writes a theme.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Ta da diem, ti da da di dam. If you take ti da da da, da da da da, ti lam. All the way through that theme, this interval that you've heard at the very beginning of the piece comes up. And the third movement, po di da di di, da di la di. Again, there's this little interval that the brain, even when you're not thinking, oh, wow, that's the interval. Your subconscious, like we do all the time in life, we recognize shapes and and forms. Your subconscious is taking it in, and the same thing happens in the fourth movement. So the reason that musicians are so fascinated by this piece and why it's such an incredibly uh strong compositional statement is because in an almost unprecedented fashion, he uses a tiny amount of material to create something incredibly grand.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  And it's through that efficiency of. Of use of material that we actually find without maybe being able to articulate it, that the symphony has a lot of cohesion. It takes us on a journey where we feel somehow that we understand intuitively relationships. It feels very tautly argued. And that's one of the reasons, because actually everywhere, if you start to analyze the score, it's related back to this one theme. By the way, his fourth symphony is related to the same theme as well. This guy was mental. I mean, he wrote one symphony based on it, and then the fourth symphony, it starts,

• 18:25Speaker 01

  it's also a third interval and creates a whole symphony out of that. So he was incredible at his use of material. But to get back to the architecture which you're asking about. So there's a thing that we call in classical music, sonata form. Now, sonata form is really a mechanism for implanting these ideas, like these little bits of DNA in listeners' minds, so that then a composer can use them to make a story. And the way that sonata form works is that you have the statement of a theme. You know, it could be a melody.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  And then you have, let's say, 20 measures or 30 measures of sort of a little bit of transition, but not material that's very important. And then you have the statement of a theme which generally contrasts or complements the first theme. So that they're clearly different.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  And a listener will hear, "Oh, that's a nice tune."

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Something like that, you know.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  That's the first theme, yeah. And then you'll have a second theme which is contrasting. And then that whole section, so the theme, little transition, second theme with a little bit of stuff afterwards, gets repeated. So we have then an opportunity to hear it one more time and it becomes ingrained. Then we reach the end of the repetition and it goes into what's called the development section. And what happens there is that the composer takes these ideas that he's ingrained in our minds and he starts to play with them and vary them. Sometimes he'll stick one above the other or she'll stick one above the other, invert them, write new harmonies, break up the tune into something smaller, smaller pieces and develop it.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Now, it could go somewhere dark, it could go somewhere bright, he could do anything with it. And then he leads back to that original section again. So you hear once again stated the original theme and then the second theme. Now, and just to finish that thought, then he writes what's called the coda, which is just a short, you know, afterglow. It's the stuff that comes at the end of the argument about everything. So, the architecture of a movement in sonata form, which is what pretty much all symphonies are written in and sonatas anyway for solo instruments, is tune, second tune, repeat the whole thing, engrain it in your mind, then the development where it's played with and changed and altered, and then a return to that original section.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  So if you like, it's A A B A and then the little coda which is C. Now, if you go back to listen to early symphonies, let's say Haydn or Mozart or, you know, anybody from around that early classical period as it's called, these themes and the little transitions are very readily recognizable. You know, it's really easy to see them. And if one's interested in kind of testing out what I just described, that would be a good place to start. Take one of these Haydn symphonies and just listen to it or Mozart and say, "Ah, okay, that theme I recognize. I don't really know what's happening now. Okay, there's a tune. Oh, and that's the one again." You know.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Because what then happened is sort of a simplification of the history of music is that that form was developed and changed. So the periods between the first tune and the second tune got bigger. The whole A section where you have tune one and tune two got longer, developments got longer. And what then happened also, the return to the original material sometimes changed so that there wasn't a return to the same material or when it did come back, it was completely transformed.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  So that's an example of architecture, what's called sonata form in music. And that's, that's just one example of, of many different types of form. Um, but, but as a general rule, pretty much every work in the classical canon is in some kind of recognizable form that will then be distorted. And again, uh, stop me if you're getting.

• 22:39Shane Parrish?

  No, this is amazing.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  But again, um, you know, if you take, if you take portrait, you know, painting, and then you look at what someone like Picasso did. It's useful to be able to reference, if, if you'd never seen any painting before in your life and you saw what Picasso did, your relationship would be different to if you saw what happened in Renaissance portrait painting as you come into then the 19th century, into the 20th century. And you see that, that of course the figures, the portraits that he created have a relationship back to that, but he's changed and developed form and he's simplified certain things, he's, he's added a different aesthetic, you know, cubism and then, and, and you can do that with music as well, as, as long as one has the opportunity to sort

• 23:25Speaker 01

  of learn a little bit about what these early forms are, you can see how composers then change them.

• 23:29Shane Parrish?

  The way that you're exposed to the music itself shapes how you see the music and relate to it.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. And this is what, you know, I, I, this is something that's very important to me. I, music, like painting or whatever, poetry, books. Of course, you can just read a book and, and, and it just, you have your reaction to it. You don't, as long as you speak English or French or whatever language you're reading it in, you don't necessarily need to know anything formal about how it's constructed or about the history or about the context that the, the, the writer wrote in. And the same with painting, but pretty much every great book, great painting, great piece of music, if you scratch the surface, if you have someone, for example, I'm always happy to do it, uh, someone who can start to talk to you about what's below the, the surface,

• 24:15Speaker 01

  then actually they, they become, each work becomes a universe in itself. And you can spend an awful lot of time, um, kind of playing around in this universe, in this sandpit. And that's why symphonies are so beautiful and so wonderful, because they are entities that have an awful lot of depth. Um. It's not just the sound of them, it's it's the arguments that go on within them. So if you can imagine that, once you take two themes, of course, it's not a, it's nothing tangible. You can't say, well, uh, theme A means X, theme B means Y. But there there will still be a discourse between those themes that um.

• 24:54Shane Parrish?

  Attention almost.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Exactly, attention, which actually reflects, we don't necessarily put every thought that goes through our mind into words in our mind. But we still have feelings and emotions that do have tensions, do have, you know, and and that's what the world of music is is ultimately about. And and it's why I think a lot of people, very understandably, sometimes can't find vocabulary when talking about music. I think that's why, you know, I I often meet brilliant people who can talk about literature or the, you know, history or politics or. And then it gets to music, they're like, uh, you know, I kind of like it, it's cool, or, you know, it's, and that's understandable because it's so abstract.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Um, I enjoy uh having the opportunity to point out that there's actually an awful lot of form in music. It's like maths, it really is like maths, that's why a lot of mathematicians love music as well. Because it's all about structures and forms and and about relationships. Um, and I had a, one of my my closest friends is a, he studied maths at Oxford. And I remember us having this discussion, when he sees an elegant argument in maths, for him, it has aesthetic qualities. He finds it beautiful. And I find the same thing when I'm studying a piece of music, I'm not playing it, I'm studying it. I find the the craftsmanship and the the argument that's happening on the page also very beautiful.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Um, and because I love it so much, I always want to talk to people about it, you know.

• 26:23Shane Parrish?

  That's amazing. What would you say is the role of art in your life? So not only music, but literature and poetry and how does that?

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Well, one of the, I I'm not one of those people who says, oh, you know, the modern world is blah, bad, or whatever. I think the modern world is absolutely amazing, and I think we live in a time of opportunities to learn and and and and exist pretty much second to none ever. It's an amazing time. One of the things I find sad sometimes, though, is that we we tend to speak as if the world of the arts and the world of the sciences are unrelated. Or somehow, you know, one one has utility, the other one is kind of, well, if you've got a bit of time off, you know, get involved in the arts, it's kind of cute. Whereas my life, I mean, I I live what I think is a very practical life, you know, like everybody else, you know, I just live and do and, you know, I like efficiencies,

• 27:17Speaker 01

  I like I like learning about, science has always had, I've loved physics all my life and and but for me, art, it involves just as much of the analytical side that I I know from physics and from the sciences when I studied it as anything else. And yet, it is this this point, and it's it's something very fundamental about being a human, that we actually create through very controlled and very precise thought the conditions for creating beauty. That's why, again, if you look at paintings, it's no coincidence that often the proportions

• 27:59Speaker 01

  in great paintings will be very similar between them, you know, the sort of golden. Golden ratio? The golden ratio, thank you very much. And for me, they're hand in hand, that's why I love, there's a lot of wisdom in this sort of yin and yang circle, that you you you can't have arts on one hand and and everything else on the other. It is one. And you tend to see that everywhere, the this sense of of balance, this is what maths is, the equal sign is essentially the same thing, it's it's a a western version of yin and yang, it's saying you have to have a a balance. And so for me, the role of arts is is life, and science is is life, and they belong together. When I when I study a score, the first thing I do is scientific, I analyze it, I try to

• 28:43Speaker 01

  comprehend it and understand it, in order that, when I come to performance, it's so internalized that I'm free from it again. Just like when you learn a language, people, you know, oh shit, I've got to learn all this vocabulary and I don't understand the grammar, and you have to put your head down, you have to understand it in an intellectual sense.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  And then forget about it.

• 29:04Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  It's not that it's not there. It's not like when you're speaking French fluently. There's no relationship to the intellect. It's just that you laid the groundwork and then you're freed from it. And that's for me what all uh art is about too. And it's why it's so worthwhile. I I just it it drives me absolutely nuts. Absolutely nuts. This idea that arts in school is an optional extra. It it belies a complete misunderstanding of what the arts are, because if you're doing it properly, you have to engage your intellectual mind as as well as, in fact, I don't know what the other mind is supposed to be. The intellectual mind also takes flight, you know, that that is what the mind is. It's thought and it's

• 29:46Speaker 01

  it's engaging with ideas that may be abstract, but they're still ideas, you know, they're still part of the intellectual uh sphere. And and quite apart from that, I think um in a time where

• 30:01Speaker 01

  there is either complete skepticism about religion, or it seems to me uh more dogma than ever and and more fanaticism than ever. The arts offer, I think, a very healthy philosophy for for talking about the transcendental, that thing that we all think about all the time and and and it's something that religion religion offers an answer to. But a lot of composers, or put differently, philosophers like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, and also ancient Greek philosophers, they were fascinated by music and they found that it it well, it played a unique role in life because of its abstract nature. Schopenhauer famously believed that

• 30:46Speaker 01

  you know, he had these two worlds, the phenomenal world and the numinal world, the phenomenal world being the world that we live in, that we experience, and the numinal world being the ideal or idealized world, the world of of ideas where we have you know, forms like Plato thought of them. Um that we can never, as soon as we interact with it, it ceases to be because it's now the phenomenal world. But he felt that music was a, and of course, it's a little fantastical, but um he felt that music was a gateway to that because actually we all experience when we're listening to music. We do experience, and it can be pop music, it could be jazz, it could be classical music. Something which you can find ways to articulate in words, but in fact, you can't.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  It is something that is outside the realms of sort of definition as we normally understand it. And through that form of, if you like, the mysticism involved in music, you can also get in touch with quite a lot of things that are involved in religion and other forms of mysticism and have a conversation around it because in music, that's allowed. It's non-dogmatic conversation about, okay, what is that next experience? As musicians, we have to understand the intellectual, the construct, the architecture, all the physics around sound and how to blend sounds and do that. But then the next level up, why are certain pieces there? What are they trying to express?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  So if music's being taught right, you, as a young person, engage all parts of your brain, all parts of your brain. And the idea that that's an optional extra is tragic. It's just a terrible misunderstanding and hopefully that'll change. You know, I'm an optimist.

• 32:28Shane Parrish?

  I love that answer because it seems more and more culturally we view this as optional or not something that's necessary to live a full and meaningful life.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  And I don't know what it was yesterday, there was something going around on Facebook. It was, I think it was from the States, it was a quote from probably one of the presidential hopefuls saying, "A great country deserves great culture." Which is a very interesting way to phrase it because countries are only really great if they have great culture. It's not like then you have a great country and then you add culture.

• 33:05Shane Parrish?

  It's all part of the same, yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  When we look back at history, we don't count how much money different civilizations had because it's all relative anyway. What fascinates us is their cultural output. You know, when we think about... Great European countries, we think about, you know, when you think about England, of course, you can think about political stuff. You think about Shakespeare, or you think about Goethe in Germany, or Schiller, or you think about the great Chinese writers of old and Japanese as well. We don't say, well, how many millions of dollars they have in modern money and therefore they were a good culture.

• 33:38Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Or a good country.

• 33:39Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  So, so, yeah.

• 33:41Shane Parrish?

  How would you like people to leave one of your symphonies? What would be, what would be your, I feel satisfied if somebody came up to you after and said, that moved me, like, what would you change me it?

• 33:55Speaker 01

  So, every concert is, is a different experience because we, we may be doing in one concert really like virtuosic, loud music that's fast. And if we do that, I want people to come out and say, that was awesome. It was like a roller coaster ride. I didn't know that an orchestra could do that and blew my ears off and stuff. If we're doing a very intimate piece, I hope that people will come and say, that really moved me. I found that, you know, this experience came to mind, or, or I was taken to a place that I hadn't felt for.

• 34:27Shane Parrish?

  It's like you're touching something inside them that they didn't know existed.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  But, but there is no one experience you will have in a, in a, in a, in a concert with us, with a, with a symphony orchestra. It will always depend on what the music is. And, and with BZ, I hope that the concert we're doing tonight, I hope they'll be, have the sense that they're transported a little bit to Spain. You know, it's like taking a mini break without having to spend the money. You could smell the sangria.

• 34:50Shane Parrish?

  If only we had the weather.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. If only we had the weather. For those listening, it's, there's about two, three feet of snow outside. There was a huge storm yesterday. But anyway, you know, and when we did the Requiem last week, and, and I was happy to get this feedback from a lot of members of the audience. You want it to be a sort of transcendental experience. You want it to be a moment which frankly, we have so seldom in life of, of maybe reflecting on what is going to come and, and the relationship with life and death. You know, pretty, pretty fundamental things, but that in the, the sort of. Rush and hectic of everyday life, one doesn't often have a lot of repose to think about.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  And also as a collective to have that experience, to to sense that the people around you are also in that space. So I I always hope for a reaction that relates to the music we were performing. And I want people to be taken on journeys and have experiences that they can't readily do anywhere else, because I believe that's something that we offer.

• 35:55Shane Parrish?

  Where did your passion and love for music? How did that originate? Was that innate? You were born with it and it started so young? Is it something you developed over time because of your love of math and music? And how did that manifest itself in you?

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Well, as is often the case with musicians, not always of course, but often, just like with medics and dentists. I come from musical family. And I, you know, when I was in the womb, my parents were playing concerts, two pianos. My mom's a pianist, my dad's a pianist and conductor. So I was bouncing around in there, listening to Rachmaninoff and Mozart and stuff, which I'm sure has an effect, you know, as you're gestating, so to speak. And then it was all around me when I was born.

• 36:43Shane Parrish?

  It was just your life, but a lot of people rebel against that too.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Of course, and that that could have happened. And my parents, perhaps, this is why I didn't have my parents were very, they viewed it in a very healthy fashion. They never pushed me into music. I was, I wanted to learn instruments and I did, and my mom taught me piano and my grandma taught me cello.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  But they always, they wanted me to go to a normal inverted commas school, so not a music specialist school, which a lot of my friends did, because we, you know, the families that were friends were musician families as well. And they wanted me to go to a school where I would learn all subjects in detail, that it wasn't just about becoming a musician. They always said to me, look, you won't be able to make it as a musician unless you wake up in the morning with this burning desire to practice.

• 37:28Shane Parrish?

  Do you think that broad-based education made you a better conductor or musician?

• 37:36Shane Parrish?

  Versus the more specialized.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Sure, I mean, I wouldn't want to, there is, you know, I, I think for my personal roots, I, I wouldn't want to say anything against anyone who went to specialized because there are so many great musicians who went to specialist schools. Um, for me personally, looking back, I think it was absolutely the right, uh, uh, choice because, um, when you, I love when I learn a, a symphony or I learn a new work, going through the doors that it opens to literature and to history and to philosophy and stuff, that really interests me. And I think, um, maybe I was given at school more tools to be able to access that. Um, so, so for me, the, the, the broader based education was definitely a, a positive.

• 38:21Shane Parrish?

  How does that path shape how you pick people to play in the orchestra?

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Huh, well, um, I mean firstly, it's, it's not the case that I handpick everybody who plays in the orchestra. We, we have a, um, an audition process and that's fairly democratic. I have a, a veto right, um, uh, but it's a democratic process and we all as a collective are looking for certain, for certain skills and, and certain things. Uh, first and foremost, people need to be able to play their instrument very well, but...

• 38:53Shane Parrish?

  I would assume the technical proficiency is almost a given in this.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, although it's, you know, there are different levels and everybody's at a high level who, who, who comes, they're, you know, fantastic instrumentalists and then it's, as with any profession, you know, it's, it's that final 25% of the nuances, but, but, but then what happens in orchestras, there's the so-called probation period. Uh, I mean firstly in an audition, they will play solo repertoire, you know, they'll play a concerto and a sonata, then they'll play excerpts from the orchestral repertoire, you know, famously difficult excerpts where we can hear certain things or, um, but then in the probation period firstly, there's the opportunity to experience, um, what they're like actually in the orchestra, how they gel with the rest of their group physically, in terms of sound, uh, and timing, um...

• 39:39Speaker 01

  But then there's also the opportunity for the colleagues in the orchestra to get to know them. It's a big family. If you imagine going to an office, but instead of sitting at your desk, every time you type a letter, someone else has to type it exactly the same time with you. And that through your movement, you have to be able to coordinate in real time all day with the people around you. That anytime you make a mistake, it immediately has an effect on everybody else. Anytime you're inspirational, it immediately has an effect on everybody else. That closeness is what happens in an orchestra every day for the forty years that people sit in an orchestra. So it's a unique job and the reliance on one another is also unique.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  So that probationary period is very important also to get a sense of, will this work longer term? It's not just about being a great player. It's about having the the the right mindset to function within that very special set of conditions. And one hopes always that we find people who will, you know, make the the the sum greater than the parts as well.

• 40:46Shane Parrish?

  It's almost, I would imagine it's almost like a transplant, right? People come in and it either takes or it's almost immediately rejected.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  That's a nice analogy.

• 40:54Shane Parrish?

  What was it like taking over an orchestra that you had no part in? You recently took over this one. What was that like coming into that? Walking into something that has already been created and shaped largely without you and then having to assume a leadership position in that?

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Well, one of the nice things about the way the process worked,

• 41:22Speaker 01

  appointed me as music director is that I had the opportunity really quite a long time ago. I think it's six, seven, eight years maybe now, seven years to first meet the orchestra. I came as a guest conductor and we got on well. There was a nice chemistry. So I came back and then I came back again and I did an opera here and I did lots of concerts. So we built a relationship. What what sometimes happens with conductors is that it's it's like those sort of dating sites or, you know, you you you have a dinner and you fall in love or you're gonna say, right, that's not the right person. Now, That means sometimes music directors are appointed having only visited an orchestra once and then come back very briefly.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  And that can work out beautifully. It's like that love at first sight thing, but you can also say after a couple of extra further visits, say, oh, what have I done? Here, we had a different route and I knew the orchestra very well. They knew me very well. I don't think there was a sense of, okay, this could not work or this. I think we both felt confident about what we were getting into. So I knew the players well. I knew the institution well. And so I felt very comfortable about what I was getting into. My predecessor, Pinka Sukerman, did an astonishing job of building this orchestra, appointed such great players over the course of his tenure.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  And I mean, it's been said before, one of the jobs of a conductor is, you know, it's like being presented with a beautiful garden. You need to make sure that what you're given remains beautifully trimmed and everything's very healthy, as well as then developing new areas. And in that context, I mean, repertory. So, you know, extending the repertoire of the orchestra, trying out, you know, to extend this metaphor, you know, taking a new patch of land and then growing a new bit of garden there while maintaining what was left behind.

• 43:22Shane Parrish?

  It's almost like a painting, I would imagine, that's like half done at every stage and you're taking it over and you're changing it a bit, but you need to kind of continue.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I think the help, you know, Pinka's is one of the great living musicians. He gave so much integrity to this orchestra, so much integrity in the sound of the orchestra. And I'm very aware that that's, you know, I've been passed on a little treasure there. And I just, in all our rehearsals, I'm very aware of taking care that we maintain that because that's part of the heritage of the orchestra as well. It's a beautiful thing to be able to continue a heritage and then, as you say, add and develop.

• 44:01Shane Parrish?

  So how much say, or is this dependent on the particular orchestra? But how much say does the orchestra have in who the conductor is?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Well, um, the orchestra was, was, uh, a committee from the orchestra was very much involved in the choice of who's the next music director, as in me. Um, and, uh, what happens is when you have guest conduct, this happens all over the world. When guest conductors come for a week, the orchestra gets forms to fill out where they comment on rehearsal technique, you know, conducting technique, uh, whether the, they felt the person was inspiring or not, you know, they, and so they, they hand those forms in and then the administration goes through the feedback and then they make decisions as to whether invite the person again. It's, it's, it's, it's an amazing system. If you imagine at the end of every week, an office manager would have all his employees give feedback forms.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Um, that's quite intense, but that's how it works with conductors. It's, it's, it's a, it's a very interesting position to be in because on the one hand, uh, you need to lead the group and sometimes that involves saying things that they may not want to hear. On the other hand, as a guest conductor, you know that they're going to fill out forms at the end of the week saying, you know, I hate this guy or I love this guy. Um, but you can't, I mean, I, I just never think about it. You can't think about it, otherwise you, you, you, you can't function. I just do the job as I feel it has to be done and people like it, they like it, you know.

• 45:23Shane Parrish?

  And so what sort of feedback do you get now with the musicians? Um, I don't imagine there's forms weekly, but what, what are the interactions? Like, are you trying to?

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Well, we, you know, we're a big team and, uh, and I, dialogue is very important to me, uh, and I think the musicians here know that, that they can come and talk to me at any point about anything. Um, and one of the many things I love about this orchestra here, um, in, in Ottawa is that they're, they're very accomplished musicians and they're very serious in, in the best sense, people, you know, they, they know what we're doing. They have a huge skill set and they hear when things don't work in rehearsal, they have ideas of how to correct it and we all do. And I find we, we're able to talk like grownups with one another, you know, that didn't work, how do we fix it? Let's do this and this. Um, they're very well prepared. I'm always very well prepared.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Uh, that's all we can expect of one another, that we, we, we know our material. And I try and keep the dialogue open, so I talk a lot with the concert master Yosuke here. We talk, you know, we talk about how things are going, this and this. And as long as you keep that dialogue open, nothing too grave can ever happen because you you see things coming. And and so that's how it works now. It's a sort of conversational basis between rehearsals before and after.

• 46:44Shane Parrish?

  What's your favorite part of conducting an orchestra outside of the actual performance?

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Well, that's a very good question.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  I think I think in terms of my interaction with an orchestra, I mean, I love the the stuff that I do on my own, the studying of scores, that that I find very, very rewarding. I do find it in my roles as as music director and chief conductor, like I have here or in or in Germany. I find it incredibly rewarding being part of the development of an institution. So having a longer term ambition for an institution and then trying to do whatever you can to to make that happen. To to to have the sense that you are a sort of guardian of an institution for a while and that it's your responsibility to keep it healthy and to develop it. That's that's lovely.

• 47:36Shane Parrish?

  It strikes me that musicians would feel the same way. You know, they're individually talented, but they want to be or feel a part of something greater than themselves.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  That's absolutely right, yeah.

• 47:47Shane Parrish?

  Never would have thought the same thing with.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  And and and the thing is, well, no, it definitely is. And and I find, I mean, I love guest conducting. It's fun to go to places and meet an orchestra for a week.

• 47:56Shane Parrish?

  You ever need a bag boy, let me know.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. But the the the most fruitful part for me is are those long term relationships, where you can really see that you've done something for for an institution, for an entity. And I love the responsibility of that as well. It's one of the things I love in this job. It's not only the responsibility to the orchestra, but the fact that we're a national art center is is this discussion around, okay, how how can we fulfill that? What is our role in society? And and how can we be, you know, vocal about what's great about music and bring it to as many people as possible? You know, that's a lovely job to have.

• 48:31Shane Parrish?

  What would you say is the role of the orchestra in society?

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Well, I think that this particular orchestra has, in fact, sort of four different levels on which we work. We work for the city, so put simply, we need to be a great orchestra that people can come and listen to in the city and hear interesting pieces perform very well. And I want us to create a narrative around our program so that people who maybe don't feel like they know anything about classical music, they can come to a concert and they know what is the narrative behind this program. So I like to do the pre-concert talks, I like us to write sort of interesting texts about it. Then we have the regional level, so, you know, looking beyond the bounds of Ottawa into

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Gatineau and into Quebec and Ontario to think about how we can be in contact with as many close communities as possible. Then we have the national remit, which is to, of course, be touring the country, taking projects, new creation projects, because we commission an awful lot of work to communities that don't maybe have symphony orchestras all the time. And then we have our international role as a representative of the nation. And each of those roles has different nuances, but each of them is very important. But I feel also, this is one of the reasons that new creation and commissioning Canadian composers and artists to work with us is very important, is that

• 49:57Speaker 01

  I've always felt we have in the UK, the BBC, you know, it's a nationally funded entity and we have several other orchestras that work for the BBC that are centrally funded. And I think if you have a national art centre, you have an orchestra, the National Art Centre Orchestra, that receives funding from the central government, that, yes, of course, we need to offer programs that fill our hole. But we also need to be able to take some of the risks that other institutions can't, that don't receive the same funding. So we we need to be out there saying, we're a mouthpiece for for Canadian creation, you know, offering a forum, a place where composers can come and they feel like they can work in partnership with us, they can make mistakes if they need to make mistakes, or they can simply present

• 50:42Speaker 01

  works that they've completed. We workshop stuff here. We put together a lot of artists, so it's interdisciplinary. And that stuff, I feel, it needs to be, along with presenting the core repertoire brilliantly, that also has to be at our core.

• 50:59Shane Parrish?

  I noticed when I walked in, there was records on the floor. Is that how you typically listen to music?

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Actually, no, th- these records were here before we re-did The Office. And they're just there because I like them. But I, I listen to pretty much everything on my iPhone. So I, I carry around, because I'm traveling every week, I'm in a different place every week. I just have iTunes, it's got thousands and thousands of tracks on my iTunes. But everything, because I like to listen to everything. I play jazz piano myself and I, I love pop music, I love jazz, I love trance and techno, I love, you know, baroque music, I love everything that's good. And I'm the judge of what I think is good. Everybody's the judge of what they think, exactly. But no, I, I, I listen to music on my phone. That's why I listen to it. I don't even at home have a decent, you know,

• 51:50Speaker 01

  speaker system, because I basically just, you know, I'm A, never there, and secondly, I listen on headphones.

• 51:56Shane Parrish?

  Did you notice the difference in how you feel about the music if the exact same music was played, say, on an iPhone versus a speaker system versus kind of?

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Well, I do, I mean, look, I, I'm very lucky. I get to, I get to stand in front of the best speaker system in the world every day, you know, eighty of the most beautiful instruments ever created, played by the best musicians in the world. I mean, the sound where you, where a conductor stands is pretty amazing. So it's not like, I have some friends, they have, you know, really amazing speaker system set up in their house and I go and listen to them. And it's not like I, I don't care, I think it's very cool. But I, I always want to say to them, hey, you should come and stand where I stand for my job, you know? So I have no problem listening on headphones. I mean, I have a nice pair of, you know, noise cancelling headphones and they, you know, which are, by the way, great on planes if you're trying to sleep.

• 52:43Shane Parrish?

  Speaking of standing at the front, do musicians in the orchestra ever stand at the front so they can hear what you hear?

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Well, actually, I, I have to, to, to say that the, the spot that's better for listening to an orchestra is about forty feet behind me. Because there, the sound blends differently. You have, maybe you're not quite at the level of impact that I get where I am. But the blended sound is better out there. And musicians do go out there. I mean, not enough because they have to play, you know, they'd be in the orchestra. But it is very, very useful. I try and go out as much as possible into the hall, into the auditorium, about thirty, forty feet back to hear how the sound's blending. But they do wherever they can, take the opportunity to go out, and it's a very useful experience. Because remember, when you're sitting in an orchestra, what you're hearing is sometimes completely weird. So, you know, the oboist hears most loudly the man or woman sitting next to him,

• 53:33Speaker 01

  and then the person to his right, so another oboe, another flute, the bassoons coming from behind him and the clarinet. So there may be things that I'm hearing and the audience is hearing that they seem to be in complete sync with, that they can't necessarily hear themselves. It's an amazing skill set to be an orchestral musician.

• 53:48Shane Parrish?

  Must involve a lot of trust as well.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  A huge amount of trust.

• 53:52Shane Parrish?

  Super conscious of your time, I know you're gonna get running. One final question. When you go home at the end of a long day, what do you play on your iPhone?

• 54:02Speaker 01

  I actually tend to, because I basically, whenever I'm not rehearsing, I'm studying, or I'm quickly eating something, and then I'm studying. And so I quite often will be listening to what I'm preparing for coming weeks. But then, you know, I'll have suddenly twenty-four hours where it's not so stressful. And then I,

• 54:22Speaker 01

  it could be anything. I mean, depending on my mood, if it's a nice sunny day, I'll quite often put a bit of like contemporary pop on, some dance music, and just kind of chill. I love listening to Bill Evans, the jazz pianist. I love his music if I'm kind of in a different zone. I will sometimes reminisce back to old performances of my own, just to sort of hear them with fresh ears. You know, when it's been six months or a year since you did a performance, it's quite nice to listen back and see what you like, what you don't like, what worked. But I do relish an eclectic mix of music. And it's what I love about music. You know, it's like a scent.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  It's just the right thing for the right moment, you know? And I'm really non-dogmatic about it.

• 55:05Shane Parrish?

  Thank you so much for your time.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Thank you for talking.

• 55:07Shane Parrish?

  This was an amazing conversation.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Well, ditto. Thank you for having me.

• 55:13Shane Parrish?

  Hey guys, this is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at farnamstreetblog.com/podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T-B-L-O-G.com/podcast. You can also find information there on how to get a transcript. And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food, go to farnamstreetblog.com/newsletter. This is all the good stuff I've found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more. Thank you for listening.

• 56:11Shane Parrish?

  Subtitles by the Amara.org community