March 27, 2024 • 24 mins
Argentinian-New Brunswick composer and pedagogue Martin Kutnowski joins Brianna to discuss the figures that shape him finding something to say through music, music as a defining facet of culture, and more!
Featured music:
"En la mar hay una torre" (In The Sea There Is a Tower")
Five Tango Études
Violin Concerto in E Minor, op. 64, I. Allegro molto appassionato (Felix Mendelssohn)
Overture to "Egmont", Op. 84 (Ludwig van Beethoven)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello and welcome to Notes of the North Talks, a series where we get to know our local Canadian
(00:14):
musical talent.
Today, I am here with Martin Kutnowski.
Thank you so much, Martin, for joining me today.
My pleasure to be here, Brianna.
Let's jump right in.
So first and foremost, I'd love to get a bit of a glimpse into your background.
So where in Canada do you call home and is there any place else that holds a special
place in your heart?
Yeah, many, because I lived in three countries my life, you know, permanently, and I visited
(00:40):
many more.
But I'm originally from Argentina.
I lived the first half of my life there.
And then I immigrated to New York and I lived 10 years in New York.
I did my conservatory degree in piano in Argentina and then my master's and PhD in composition
(01:01):
in New York.
And I was working there.
But then, you know, life, as John Lennon says, life is what happens when you're planning
other things, right?
So I got married, I had children there, and then I got the job here in New Brunswick,
which is my third place.
(01:24):
And I've been here about 20 years more.
So it's all together, it's a long time in music and a long time in North America, 30
years in North America.
But I have my roots.
I think my accent still sounds like I'm a Spanish speaker, which I am.
(01:44):
Wonderful.
What first drew you into composition?
Good question.
I don't know what drew me first to composition, but there are a few things I remember.
I can tell you perhaps more precisely than that what drew me to music.
My mom played the piano.
She still plays a little bit.
(02:07):
And I remember maybe my youngest memory with music was listening to the Turkish March by
Mozart.
I don't remember exactly how my mom, because I heard that and I was like, what is that?
I must have been three or four years old, something like that.
And I don't remember the exact same thing that my mom said, but something like, you
(02:31):
know, maybe she said it's children's music or it's circus music.
I don't know.
She came up with some kind of metaphor that I now I don't remember the metaphor anymore.
But that was sufficient to me.
It was exactly what I needed to hear back then.
And I just found it enthralling.
And you know, it's been a long time and I still remember that.
(02:53):
So I think that was my first connection with music.
And then when I was young, you know, my mom decided that we should all take piano lessons.
And I had a piano teacher who came to my house and you know, my sisters and I, we all took
lessons with her.
What I can tell you are these fragmentary memories.
You know, I remember listening to Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and thinking, wow, that is
(03:17):
so beautiful.
It's so beautiful that it hurts.
That's just too beautiful.
And being sort of still very young and not understanding how can something like that
even exist?
And so I asked my teacher, I must have been 10 or maybe 11.
(03:41):
I told her, you know, I want to learn about harmony because somewhere I learned that this
word harmony.
And I had an intuition that that's how music was put together.
And you know, she looked down at the piano and she said, well, here you have G major
and here you have E minor.
(04:03):
They are neighbors.
That's all I know.
So that was my first lesson.
And I had to make do with that.
Nowadays we can learn anything very quickly.
You know, just Google it or maybe you look it up in Instagram.
Somebody is teaching you something, you know.
But you know, I'm talking about 50 years ago.
(04:24):
So you will know where to start.
And you know, I was 10, so even less.
So for many years, I had a completely intuitive approach to composition.
So eventually I went to the conservatory and you know, it was like, okay, we start over.
(04:44):
But I think that I never lost that initial intuitive connection.
I now cherish all that.
Also because it helps me when I'm teaching students and I teach all the levels.
I make sure that I teach the advanced ones, but also the beginner ones.
And I very often find that same kid that I was, that knew chords, could hear chords,
(05:13):
but didn't really know anything, you know.
And I needed to be told, okay, here's the circle of fifths.
Here's, you know, how you solfege.
Here's how you put together rhythms, you know, the Hindemith treatise and so on.
So I think that those beginnings sort of shaped me a lot into the kind of teacher I am today.
(05:40):
Because I always remember that kid that I was.
And so around that time I was already composing, you know, in different styles, which I think
is the way in which we learn.
We sort of copy.
And it mimics the way they taught me, the way they taught me how to compose, which was,
(06:01):
okay, let's compose in the style of Debussy Prelude, let's say, in the style of Chopin
Nocturne.
And, you know, you acquire the technique, you absorb that technique in that way to some
extent.
And then I went to New York and I had one main teacher in composition and he, in some
(06:21):
ways he's still my teacher.
I'm not embarrassed to confess.
His name is Bruce Saylor.
And you know, I got my degree more than 20 years ago, but I still ask him questions,
you know, once a year, you know, we get together and I may show him a score and there's always
(06:41):
something.
It's almost like a father, you know, it's a father.
I mean, your father will always have something to teach you simply because he's older and
any elder in your life, shall we say.
And I also had wonderful theory teachers in Queens College in New York, you know, William
Rothstein and Charles Burkhardt and Charles Schachter, big, big, big names in Schengenian
(07:07):
theory that they really built my understanding of music from a Schengenian point of view,
which I think is really wonderful, but also from an intuitive point of view, because all
(07:28):
of them are fantastic musicians.
They're all right, not just serious.
So a lot of teach and there are many more teachers that I'm not mentioning, but you
know, it takes a village to raise a child.
And I think it takes a bunch of teachers of musicians to raise a musician too.
(07:52):
And it's always a little bit unfair, you know, but these are the main ones, I would say.
I hope I'm not digressing.
You're asking about composition.
So all the while I was composed in various styles, but at some point, at some point I
started to be myself.
I think that's the most difficult thing.
You can learn all the techniques, you can write wonderful counterpoint, you can learn
(08:16):
all the progressions, harmonic progressions on the piano, figured bass, jazz progressions,
anything you like, all the scales, you can play them really fast.
But the most difficult thing is something else, which is to find out what you want to say.
Do you have something to say first?
And then what is it?
(08:37):
I remember hearing this anecdote about Bernstein and Copland.
And of course, I absolutely love Lerner Bernstein.
He was incredible.
He was, you know, one of the towering figures of the 20th century.
I admire him without any reservation.
And yet, as a composer, he's sort of second to Aaron Copland, I think.
(09:02):
I humbly believe that because Bernstein was many things, among them a great composer,
but Copland was a composer.
That's what he was.
And I remember this anecdote where Copland, who was also Bernstein's elder, you know,
Bernstein showing him the scores he had composed and Copland saying, oh, I see a little bit
(09:24):
of Bruckner here.
I see a little bit of Mahler here.
Oh, this is a little bit of Stravinsky.
And you know, helping the young Bernstein to find Bernstein.
Who is Bernstein?
And that's something that one can hear from the beginning in Copland, you know.
His music, you can hear the full identity of Copland from the beginning.
(09:49):
So it's, I guess what I'm trying to say is that these two things don't necessarily go
together.
You know, this high musicianship, high level musicianship and the discovery, discovering
yourself, so to speak.
But the other big example is Schengen, who wanted to be a composer, but wasn't.
Even though arguably he understood music better than anyone else of his time.
(10:14):
And yet he couldn't come up with something to say.
Because an analyst, a theorist, but so if I were to say that to a young composer, it
would be, that's the thing to develop your technique.
Yes.
But in the end, there's something very deep, a very deep dialogue that one needs to establish
(10:38):
with oneself to find out, you know, what do I want to say?
What do I need to say?
That only I can say.
So drawing on so many cultural roots, not to switch topics completely, but what do you
believe sets Canadian music apart, given your background and experiences on the global stage
as a whole?
(10:58):
What makes Canadian music so unique?
I think that what's happening to Canadian culture is very similar.
What's happening to Canadian music or art music is similar to what's happening to Canadian
culture at large.
And what I see in Canada is a country that is very intensely defining itself anew.
(11:21):
I mean, you can throw in some cold statistics there.
I think that there were half a million immigrants last year, something like that.
It's a statistic I'm familiar with because there's a quota now for universities to have
foreign students.
And that impacts us, every university in the country, because well, all of a sudden we
(11:43):
can only have a limited number of foreign students.
So what I see is in some ways similar to what I saw in New York in the 90s and early 2000s,
which is, you know, you can be in New York and not speak a word of English and live your
life perfectly fine, provided that you speak one of the languages in the neighborhood.
(12:07):
And it can be anything from Cantonese to Mandarin to Spanish to Hindi, Farsi.
It can be anything, really.
I see that.
And I see that even in the relatively short time I have been in Fredericton, which is
a relatively small city.
My children are half Chinese.
(12:29):
And when they went to the daycare, I remember going one day to the daycare and my children
were the only ones with black hair.
Everybody else was blonde.
And I remember I mentioned to the teacher, oh, today is blonde appreciation day or something
like that.
She looked at me.
She didn't understand the joke because it was so rare to have somebody who wasn't blonde
(12:51):
20 years ago in Fredericton.
And now it's a very different landscape.
So it's much, much more diverse.
So I think it's in some ways what I see in Canada is similar to what was happening in
the United States or in a city like New York 25 years ago.
And I think that as a result, that is also happening to music.
(13:14):
So I think that you can find practically any style, any topic, any instrumentation, any
technical parameters.
And my guess, it's just a guess, is that at some point there will be some kind of crystallization
of an identity, of a common identity coming out of that.
(13:36):
I think that also the other thing that happens in Canada, it also happens in the United States,
but I think even more so in Canada, is that it is a big country with very different regions.
I recently spent a few days in Alberta and I remember thinking when I was there, I had
never been to Alberta.
This is like a different country.
(13:56):
I mean, a different country.
And if you think of Vancouver, very different, with mountains.
And then of course, Toronto and Ontario in general, very different.
Then Quebec, different.
And the Atlantic provinces, very different.
So it's a big country with fairly, of course, the deep north too.
So I think it's going to take time for that, for a common identity to crystallize out of
(14:22):
all that.
I think we're sort of heading towards this direction, but you often explore the intersection
between music or art and culture, for example, in your music or be it in your essays or research,
for example.
How do you perceive the relationship between your music and Canadian cultural identity
then?
(14:42):
So let me tell you an anecdote that perhaps will help explain that.
I was at the Aspen Music Festival and it's a music festival which means that you cannot
bring your gear with you, even though one of the years I went I did bring my piano.
But generally speaking, you cannot bring your piano.
So you depend on the practice room.
You have two hours in the practice room to compose or to...
(15:05):
And there it was, okay, now I'm going to compose.
And all of a sudden, it's almost like a hit and break wall because I didn't know what
to do.
Compose?
What?
I mean, I had been so blinded by the logistics of getting the room and the schedule, but
what is it that I'm composing?
And at that moment, I realized that writing the notes is the very last step, never the
(15:29):
first for me.
When I was younger, it had been the first because what had happened to me was that maybe
an idea came to me, a melodic gesture, let's say three notes and a rhythm and a chord.
And out of that, I sort of generated the rest, like pure inspiration.
But of course, that's not every day.
(15:50):
If you want to be productive as a composer, you need to create...
You need some kind of a method.
You cannot sit down waiting, okay, let's see if inspiration strikes.
And so that day, I realized if I want to compose, I need to have something to compose about.
And in this sense, composition is the same as method acting.
(16:13):
You know how an actor will, let's say, I mean, I'm looking at the window and I see the snow
coming down right now.
Let's say I need to act like I'm very cold or I'm in a storm, in a ship.
Sure, I can fake it, right?
But if I have the experience, if I can reenact the experience of being cold, or better yet,
(16:36):
if I can remember a time when I was in that situation, that's what method acting is, is
really inwards, you know, create the internal memory or the internal sensation and then
let my face externalize it any way I want.
But first, I need to know what it is that I'm composing.
And so that's when I realized that it was much easier or even possible for me to compose
(17:00):
if I thought of the notes as telling the story that I already had with me in words.
The story can be anything, can be sometimes a title.
You know, one of my pieces was called An Iceberg Drifting in the Arctic.
Just a one pager.
I wrote it as an assignment.
But you know, it's sufficiently descriptive that it works.
(17:21):
You know, it's like a vignette, like a picture or like a painting.
So that works.
Or much longer stories.
And I've done that too.
So that also ties in with the way I teach, which is because I found that that's also
very helpful for people.
For students, sometimes I'm teaching Beethoven and it's the first time they heard Beethoven.
(17:44):
John Cordigliano used to say that, you know, you tell them Beethoven and they think it's
a dog because there was a movie called Beethoven that was a dog back in the 90s.
But there's nothing dishonorable about that.
It's simply that you have the privilege of being the person who has the immense luck
of showing them something marvelous for the first time.
(18:04):
It's like you're the tour guide.
So for instance, in a piece like the Egmont Overture, I find that extremely helpful to
explain things like character, mood, the connection with tempo, the connection to orchestration,
the connection to motivic development.
You know, when Beethoven has the responsorial section between the brasses and the strings
(18:25):
and the, you know, it's the two armies sort of facing each other in the battle.
So my ultimate view is that music is one more facet of culture that has its own language.
But the meanings are shared with the rest.
(18:45):
So in general, I would say that every piece of mine, you know, this long explanation is
simply to say that pretty much everything I write has a literary underpinning of some
sort.
If you could act as a tour guide for a little last note, a tour guide through your own music,
could you recommend a few pieces for the listeners to get introduced to your music through?
(19:09):
Well, it depends on the taste.
There's different categories here because of course there's the pieces that got a lot
of mileage.
There's the pieces that I play a lot.
There's pieces that only I play.
For now I'm reserving them for myself.
But one piece that got a lot of mileage was In the Sea There's a Tower, in La Mara y una
(19:32):
Torre, which is for clarinet and string quartet.
And that piece was published in France and got a lot of mileage.
Many people played it.
It exists in version for flute and string orchestra, clarinet and string orchestra.
I also accompanied it for clarinet and piano, flute and piano.
(19:55):
And it's a piece that was commissioned by the Newbury Port Music Festival in Boston.
And the person who commissioned it, David Young, wonderful musician, he told me, look,
we need a piece that has something related to folk music, something related to fishermen
(20:18):
and something related to Jewish folklore.
I was like, oh my God, how do I put all that together?
But I found this melody from a few hundred years ago in Ladino, which is old Spanish,
and which is a story of sorts of a siren that is singing from a tower like a Rapunzel, shall
(20:40):
we say.
And the sailor hears her from the ship.
Of course, we don't know if the sailor will listen to her and stay or if he's going to
leave or maybe he's just imagining the whole thing.
So it remains in a magical realm.
And yeah, that piece had a lot of really good reception.
(21:06):
I also have a series of piano etudes that are based on tango, and those were played
by many people.
The tango etudes, I have five tango etudes, about 20 minutes.
And those were recorded, videotaped by a wonderful Canadian pianist, Janet Hammel.
So I have a lot of pieces that were arranged in different ways.
(21:33):
I have a few collections of piano pieces for children, but then I orchestrated for string
quartet and then for flute quartet.
They were recorded both by the St. John's String Quartet here in Canada and by Les Quis
flute quartet in France.
There's a wonderful pianist, also in France, who recorded the whole CD of my music that
(21:59):
is also based on poems.
It's called Tandis que mes heures de fièvre or Seeing My Feverish Hours in Spanish, Al ver mes horas
de fiebre, which is based on a Spanish poet who was sort of the Edgar Allan Poe of Spain
(22:19):
in the 19th century.
And you know, that's a wonderful example of something that I did a lot of method composing
before I wrote a single note.
So I essentially gathered all his books.
A really tragic story at this point.
He died at 34, I think.
(22:42):
And then the day after he died, he became famous, something like that.
Because of course he died completely poor and desperate.
And I read so much about him that it reached the point that I felt that if I cross him
in the street, if I run into him, I will recognize him.
(23:02):
It was like this really, really, really intimate knowledge of his life and all the poems he
had written and how the relationship had been with his wife, his children.
I was in his skin.
I really got myself into his skin.
And then I just very naturally I chose three poems, or the poems chose me.
(23:25):
And writing the music was not that difficult.
It was not that difficult because in a way, during all that preparation, I had let all
that music, sort of all that story be orchestrated in my mind.
That's great for today's episode.
Thank you so much, Morten, for sharing such incredible pieces of your heart and art.
(23:49):
And until next time, folks, keep listening for the notes of the North.
Thank you.
Hello and welcome to Notes of the North Talks, a series where we get to know our local Canadian
(00:14):
musical talent.
Today, I am here with Martin Kutnowski.
Thank you so much, Martin, for joining me today.
My pleasure to be here, Brianna.
Let's jump right in.
So first and foremost, I'd love to get a bit of a glimpse into your background.
So where in Canada do you call home and is there any place else that holds a special
place in your heart?
Yeah, many, because I lived in three countries my life, you know, permanently, and I visited
(00:40):
many more.
But I'm originally from Argentina.
I lived the first half of my life there.
And then I immigrated to New York and I lived 10 years in New York.
I did my conservatory degree in piano in Argentina and then my master's and PhD in composition
(01:01):
in New York.
And I was working there.
But then, you know, life, as John Lennon says, life is what happens when you're planning
other things, right?
So I got married, I had children there, and then I got the job here in New Brunswick,
which is my third place.
(01:24):
And I've been here about 20 years more.
So it's all together, it's a long time in music and a long time in North America, 30
years in North America.
But I have my roots.
I think my accent still sounds like I'm a Spanish speaker, which I am.
(01:44):
Wonderful.
What first drew you into composition?
Good question.
I don't know what drew me first to composition, but there are a few things I remember.
I can tell you perhaps more precisely than that what drew me to music.
My mom played the piano.
She still plays a little bit.
(02:07):
And I remember maybe my youngest memory with music was listening to the Turkish March by
Mozart.
I don't remember exactly how my mom, because I heard that and I was like, what is that?
I must have been three or four years old, something like that.
And I don't remember the exact same thing that my mom said, but something like, you
(02:31):
know, maybe she said it's children's music or it's circus music.
I don't know.
She came up with some kind of metaphor that I now I don't remember the metaphor anymore.
But that was sufficient to me.
It was exactly what I needed to hear back then.
And I just found it enthralling.
And you know, it's been a long time and I still remember that.
(02:53):
So I think that was my first connection with music.
And then when I was young, you know, my mom decided that we should all take piano lessons.
And I had a piano teacher who came to my house and you know, my sisters and I, we all took
lessons with her.
What I can tell you are these fragmentary memories.
You know, I remember listening to Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and thinking, wow, that is
(03:17):
so beautiful.
It's so beautiful that it hurts.
That's just too beautiful.
And being sort of still very young and not understanding how can something like that
even exist?
And so I asked my teacher, I must have been 10 or maybe 11.
(03:41):
I told her, you know, I want to learn about harmony because somewhere I learned that this
word harmony.
And I had an intuition that that's how music was put together.
And you know, she looked down at the piano and she said, well, here you have G major
and here you have E minor.
(04:03):
They are neighbors.
That's all I know.
So that was my first lesson.
And I had to make do with that.
Nowadays we can learn anything very quickly.
You know, just Google it or maybe you look it up in Instagram.
Somebody is teaching you something, you know.
But you know, I'm talking about 50 years ago.
(04:24):
So you will know where to start.
And you know, I was 10, so even less.
So for many years, I had a completely intuitive approach to composition.
So eventually I went to the conservatory and you know, it was like, okay, we start over.
(04:44):
But I think that I never lost that initial intuitive connection.
I now cherish all that.
Also because it helps me when I'm teaching students and I teach all the levels.
I make sure that I teach the advanced ones, but also the beginner ones.
And I very often find that same kid that I was, that knew chords, could hear chords,
(05:13):
but didn't really know anything, you know.
And I needed to be told, okay, here's the circle of fifths.
Here's, you know, how you solfege.
Here's how you put together rhythms, you know, the Hindemith treatise and so on.
So I think that those beginnings sort of shaped me a lot into the kind of teacher I am today.
(05:40):
Because I always remember that kid that I was.
And so around that time I was already composing, you know, in different styles, which I think
is the way in which we learn.
We sort of copy.
And it mimics the way they taught me, the way they taught me how to compose, which was,
(06:01):
okay, let's compose in the style of Debussy Prelude, let's say, in the style of Chopin
Nocturne.
And, you know, you acquire the technique, you absorb that technique in that way to some
extent.
And then I went to New York and I had one main teacher in composition and he, in some
(06:21):
ways he's still my teacher.
I'm not embarrassed to confess.
His name is Bruce Saylor.
And you know, I got my degree more than 20 years ago, but I still ask him questions,
you know, once a year, you know, we get together and I may show him a score and there's always
(06:41):
something.
It's almost like a father, you know, it's a father.
I mean, your father will always have something to teach you simply because he's older and
any elder in your life, shall we say.
And I also had wonderful theory teachers in Queens College in New York, you know, William
Rothstein and Charles Burkhardt and Charles Schachter, big, big, big names in Schengenian
(07:07):
theory that they really built my understanding of music from a Schengenian point of view,
which I think is really wonderful, but also from an intuitive point of view, because all
(07:28):
of them are fantastic musicians.
They're all right, not just serious.
So a lot of teach and there are many more teachers that I'm not mentioning, but you
know, it takes a village to raise a child.
And I think it takes a bunch of teachers of musicians to raise a musician too.
(07:52):
And it's always a little bit unfair, you know, but these are the main ones, I would say.
I hope I'm not digressing.
You're asking about composition.
So all the while I was composed in various styles, but at some point, at some point I
started to be myself.
I think that's the most difficult thing.
You can learn all the techniques, you can write wonderful counterpoint, you can learn
(08:16):
all the progressions, harmonic progressions on the piano, figured bass, jazz progressions,
anything you like, all the scales, you can play them really fast.
But the most difficult thing is something else, which is to find out what you want to say.
Do you have something to say first?
And then what is it?
(08:37):
I remember hearing this anecdote about Bernstein and Copland.
And of course, I absolutely love Lerner Bernstein.
He was incredible.
He was, you know, one of the towering figures of the 20th century.
I admire him without any reservation.
And yet, as a composer, he's sort of second to Aaron Copland, I think.
(09:02):
I humbly believe that because Bernstein was many things, among them a great composer,
but Copland was a composer.
That's what he was.
And I remember this anecdote where Copland, who was also Bernstein's elder, you know,
Bernstein showing him the scores he had composed and Copland saying, oh, I see a little bit
(09:24):
of Bruckner here.
I see a little bit of Mahler here.
Oh, this is a little bit of Stravinsky.
And you know, helping the young Bernstein to find Bernstein.
Who is Bernstein?
And that's something that one can hear from the beginning in Copland, you know.
His music, you can hear the full identity of Copland from the beginning.
(09:49):
So it's, I guess what I'm trying to say is that these two things don't necessarily go
together.
You know, this high musicianship, high level musicianship and the discovery, discovering
yourself, so to speak.
But the other big example is Schengen, who wanted to be a composer, but wasn't.
Even though arguably he understood music better than anyone else of his time.
(10:14):
And yet he couldn't come up with something to say.
Because an analyst, a theorist, but so if I were to say that to a young composer, it
would be, that's the thing to develop your technique.
Yes.
But in the end, there's something very deep, a very deep dialogue that one needs to establish
(10:38):
with oneself to find out, you know, what do I want to say?
What do I need to say?
That only I can say.
So drawing on so many cultural roots, not to switch topics completely, but what do you
believe sets Canadian music apart, given your background and experiences on the global stage
as a whole?
(10:58):
What makes Canadian music so unique?
I think that what's happening to Canadian culture is very similar.
What's happening to Canadian music or art music is similar to what's happening to Canadian
culture at large.
And what I see in Canada is a country that is very intensely defining itself anew.
(11:21):
I mean, you can throw in some cold statistics there.
I think that there were half a million immigrants last year, something like that.
It's a statistic I'm familiar with because there's a quota now for universities to have
foreign students.
And that impacts us, every university in the country, because well, all of a sudden we
(11:43):
can only have a limited number of foreign students.
So what I see is in some ways similar to what I saw in New York in the 90s and early 2000s,
which is, you know, you can be in New York and not speak a word of English and live your
life perfectly fine, provided that you speak one of the languages in the neighborhood.
(12:07):
And it can be anything from Cantonese to Mandarin to Spanish to Hindi, Farsi.
It can be anything, really.
I see that.
And I see that even in the relatively short time I have been in Fredericton, which is
a relatively small city.
My children are half Chinese.
(12:29):
And when they went to the daycare, I remember going one day to the daycare and my children
were the only ones with black hair.
Everybody else was blonde.
And I remember I mentioned to the teacher, oh, today is blonde appreciation day or something
like that.
She looked at me.
She didn't understand the joke because it was so rare to have somebody who wasn't blonde
(12:51):
20 years ago in Fredericton.
And now it's a very different landscape.
So it's much, much more diverse.
So I think it's in some ways what I see in Canada is similar to what was happening in
the United States or in a city like New York 25 years ago.
And I think that as a result, that is also happening to music.
(13:14):
So I think that you can find practically any style, any topic, any instrumentation, any
technical parameters.
And my guess, it's just a guess, is that at some point there will be some kind of crystallization
of an identity, of a common identity coming out of that.
(13:36):
I think that also the other thing that happens in Canada, it also happens in the United States,
but I think even more so in Canada, is that it is a big country with very different regions.
I recently spent a few days in Alberta and I remember thinking when I was there, I had
never been to Alberta.
This is like a different country.
(13:56):
I mean, a different country.
And if you think of Vancouver, very different, with mountains.
And then of course, Toronto and Ontario in general, very different.
Then Quebec, different.
And the Atlantic provinces, very different.
So it's a big country with fairly, of course, the deep north too.
So I think it's going to take time for that, for a common identity to crystallize out of
(14:22):
all that.
I think we're sort of heading towards this direction, but you often explore the intersection
between music or art and culture, for example, in your music or be it in your essays or research,
for example.
How do you perceive the relationship between your music and Canadian cultural identity
then?
(14:42):
So let me tell you an anecdote that perhaps will help explain that.
I was at the Aspen Music Festival and it's a music festival which means that you cannot
bring your gear with you, even though one of the years I went I did bring my piano.
But generally speaking, you cannot bring your piano.
So you depend on the practice room.
You have two hours in the practice room to compose or to...
(15:05):
And there it was, okay, now I'm going to compose.
And all of a sudden, it's almost like a hit and break wall because I didn't know what
to do.
Compose?
What?
I mean, I had been so blinded by the logistics of getting the room and the schedule, but
what is it that I'm composing?
And at that moment, I realized that writing the notes is the very last step, never the
(15:29):
first for me.
When I was younger, it had been the first because what had happened to me was that maybe
an idea came to me, a melodic gesture, let's say three notes and a rhythm and a chord.
And out of that, I sort of generated the rest, like pure inspiration.
But of course, that's not every day.
(15:50):
If you want to be productive as a composer, you need to create...
You need some kind of a method.
You cannot sit down waiting, okay, let's see if inspiration strikes.
And so that day, I realized if I want to compose, I need to have something to compose about.
And in this sense, composition is the same as method acting.
(16:13):
You know how an actor will, let's say, I mean, I'm looking at the window and I see the snow
coming down right now.
Let's say I need to act like I'm very cold or I'm in a storm, in a ship.
Sure, I can fake it, right?
But if I have the experience, if I can reenact the experience of being cold, or better yet,
(16:36):
if I can remember a time when I was in that situation, that's what method acting is, is
really inwards, you know, create the internal memory or the internal sensation and then
let my face externalize it any way I want.
But first, I need to know what it is that I'm composing.
And so that's when I realized that it was much easier or even possible for me to compose
(17:00):
if I thought of the notes as telling the story that I already had with me in words.
The story can be anything, can be sometimes a title.
You know, one of my pieces was called An Iceberg Drifting in the Arctic.
Just a one pager.
I wrote it as an assignment.
But you know, it's sufficiently descriptive that it works.
(17:21):
You know, it's like a vignette, like a picture or like a painting.
So that works.
Or much longer stories.
And I've done that too.
So that also ties in with the way I teach, which is because I found that that's also
very helpful for people.
For students, sometimes I'm teaching Beethoven and it's the first time they heard Beethoven.
(17:44):
John Cordigliano used to say that, you know, you tell them Beethoven and they think it's
a dog because there was a movie called Beethoven that was a dog back in the 90s.
But there's nothing dishonorable about that.
It's simply that you have the privilege of being the person who has the immense luck
of showing them something marvelous for the first time.
(18:04):
It's like you're the tour guide.
So for instance, in a piece like the Egmont Overture, I find that extremely helpful to
explain things like character, mood, the connection with tempo, the connection to orchestration,
the connection to motivic development.
You know, when Beethoven has the responsorial section between the brasses and the strings
(18:25):
and the, you know, it's the two armies sort of facing each other in the battle.
So my ultimate view is that music is one more facet of culture that has its own language.
But the meanings are shared with the rest.
(18:45):
So in general, I would say that every piece of mine, you know, this long explanation is
simply to say that pretty much everything I write has a literary underpinning of some
sort.
If you could act as a tour guide for a little last note, a tour guide through your own music,
could you recommend a few pieces for the listeners to get introduced to your music through?
(19:09):
Well, it depends on the taste.
There's different categories here because of course there's the pieces that got a lot
of mileage.
There's the pieces that I play a lot.
There's pieces that only I play.
For now I'm reserving them for myself.
But one piece that got a lot of mileage was In the Sea There's a Tower, in La Mara y una
(19:32):
Torre, which is for clarinet and string quartet.
And that piece was published in France and got a lot of mileage.
Many people played it.
It exists in version for flute and string orchestra, clarinet and string orchestra.
I also accompanied it for clarinet and piano, flute and piano.
(19:55):
And it's a piece that was commissioned by the Newbury Port Music Festival in Boston.
And the person who commissioned it, David Young, wonderful musician, he told me, look,
we need a piece that has something related to folk music, something related to fishermen
(20:18):
and something related to Jewish folklore.
I was like, oh my God, how do I put all that together?
But I found this melody from a few hundred years ago in Ladino, which is old Spanish,
and which is a story of sorts of a siren that is singing from a tower like a Rapunzel, shall
(20:40):
we say.
And the sailor hears her from the ship.
Of course, we don't know if the sailor will listen to her and stay or if he's going to
leave or maybe he's just imagining the whole thing.
So it remains in a magical realm.
And yeah, that piece had a lot of really good reception.
(21:06):
I also have a series of piano etudes that are based on tango, and those were played
by many people.
The tango etudes, I have five tango etudes, about 20 minutes.
And those were recorded, videotaped by a wonderful Canadian pianist, Janet Hammel.
So I have a lot of pieces that were arranged in different ways.
(21:33):
I have a few collections of piano pieces for children, but then I orchestrated for string
quartet and then for flute quartet.
They were recorded both by the St. John's String Quartet here in Canada and by Les Quis
flute quartet in France.
There's a wonderful pianist, also in France, who recorded the whole CD of my music that
(21:59):
is also based on poems.
It's called Tandis que mes heures de fièvre or Seeing My Feverish Hours in Spanish, Al ver mes horas
de fiebre, which is based on a Spanish poet who was sort of the Edgar Allan Poe of Spain
(22:19):
in the 19th century.
And you know, that's a wonderful example of something that I did a lot of method composing
before I wrote a single note.
So I essentially gathered all his books.
A really tragic story at this point.
He died at 34, I think.
(22:42):
And then the day after he died, he became famous, something like that.
Because of course he died completely poor and desperate.
And I read so much about him that it reached the point that I felt that if I cross him
in the street, if I run into him, I will recognize him.
(23:02):
It was like this really, really, really intimate knowledge of his life and all the poems he
had written and how the relationship had been with his wife, his children.
I was in his skin.
I really got myself into his skin.
And then I just very naturally I chose three poems, or the poems chose me.
(23:25):
And writing the music was not that difficult.
It was not that difficult because in a way, during all that preparation, I had let all
that music, sort of all that story be orchestrated in my mind.
That's great for today's episode.
Thank you so much, Morten, for sharing such incredible pieces of your heart and art.
(23:49):
And until next time, folks, keep listening for the notes of the North.
Thank you.
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