January 4, 2025 • 22 mins
Dr. Matthias McIntire talks finding pieces of unfinished pieces, taking inspiration from animals, the process of field recording, and more!
Featured music:
Mysterious Island Seaside Town
Earthbound and Skyward for solo piano
Komqwejwi'kasikl 3 Old Water
Cathedral Grove (and the Gray Jay)
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
(00:09):
musical talent.
Today I'm joined by Dr. Matthias McIntire.
Thank you so much, Matthias, for being here today.
Thank you very much for having me.
I'm excited to be here.
Let's get right into it.
So first and foremost, where are you joining us from today?
Where in Canada do you call home?
Well, so I'm currently based in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
(00:32):
My wife and I have been moving around a lot the last few years.
So the last two years before we moved to Halifax in September, we had been living in Lunenburg,
Nova Scotia.
Before that, for about a year, we were in Montreal, and before that we were in Toronto
for a good chunk of time, and I'm originally from Toronto.
So I guess you could say I'm learning to call Nova Scotia home and Halifax home, but we
(00:58):
haven't been here for that long.
Wonderful.
Can you tell us a little bit about how you started music?
So what was that journey like and then how did you start composing?
Well, so I'm also a violinist and violist, and my first musical experiences were on the
violin.
(01:19):
So when I was around five years old, my mom just sort of put a violin in my hand.
And I think she probably noticed that I liked music and liked listening to music and just
sort of said, here you go.
She had some experience playing some violin and viola when she was young, and piano as
(01:45):
well.
And so I think that was the impetus there.
So I studied violin for a long time, and I guess you could say the rest is history.
And did you start composing around the same time that you started your instrumental studies?
Well, I would.
So let me think about that.
(02:07):
So I started taking music theory quite early on, like when I was around 10 or 11.
And so part of that was that there was always little sort of exercises where you were writing
music.
And so I had that kind of experience.
And then the other thing that was sort of happening concurrently for a long time was
(02:32):
so I grew up going to church with my family, and I played violin pretty much every Sunday
in church from the age of like 6 to 18 years old.
And I had a music director there, John Campbell, who I mean, he was there the whole time I
(02:55):
was there.
You know, he saw me grow up and he really encouraged me in all these ways.
And a lot of the stuff I would do with him was improvising, composing, arranging, playing
hymns and that kind of thing.
And so I would do everything from like playing, you know, like a jazzy Christmas carol or
(03:16):
something to playing some sort of really out there improvisations for violin and organ
and stuff like that.
So I had that kind of creative side experience sort of all along in that context.
Amazing.
What was like your earliest memory with a piece like a piece that you felt so proud
(03:40):
of?
Ah, well, it's so funny because I while I did start composing, you know, relatively early
on, I was never sort of really like finishing stuff.
It was always just like little bits of things here and there.
Ideas.
(04:01):
For ideas and more, you know, I remember finding actually recently.
I found in like an old box of like stuff from high school, a piece that I had like not finished
but wrote a lot of.
And it had the most hilarious title in retrospect.
It was called Dissonant and Danceable, which is just the most like.
(04:24):
Yeah, I was really into like Shostakovich and stuff at the time.
But yeah, I think the first piece that I would like that I really finished and that I was
really proud of probably didn't come until in my Masters for violin when I wrote
(04:46):
an eight minute long solo piano piece, which I had put on my grad recital.
So that was like I mean, there's a whole lot of story that leads up to that moment.
But that was a moment that was pretty big for me because I had been sort of focused
on violin in my undergrad and Masters and hadn't been composing as much as I had been
(05:09):
like in high school and before during my undergrad and Masters.
And I was really missing it.
And I was getting the creative side of things in other ways, like a lot of improvising is
like playing with bands and playing trying to play jazz and trying to play fiddle music
and all sorts of things.
(05:30):
And then I was just like, OK, I have to I have to write something to put on my grad
Masters violin recital.
So I was playing all this, you know, big violin rep.
And then I got to sit down in the middle of my recital and watch my colleague, Keiseke,
play a solo piano piece that I wrote.
So it was like that was a big moment.
I was really proud of that one.
(05:50):
Amazing.
What was that piece called?
Can you tell me a little bit more about that story you were referring to?
Yeah, sure.
So that piece is called Earthbound and Skyward.
And it's it's like a it's a really energetic and very rhythmic kind of a piece.
(06:12):
And I think it was trying to capture some of the like the the energy that I was feeling
as I was finishing my grad Masters degree in violin.
There was a lot of stress, a lot of practicing, a lot of, you know, big performances and stuff.
(06:33):
And so there was a lot of intensity.
And I had this feeling of like just trying to like get out of that, wanting to so that
the earthbound was sort of like being dragged down by the earthly problems, I guess you
could say.
And then the skyward was this sort of reaching for, you know, something maybe ecstatic or
(06:56):
something that could take me out of that.
I love that so much.
OK, shifting gears a little bit.
So if you think Canadian music, what are like the first five words that come to mind?
This is for sure a hard one, because I feel like the like a really big thing I feel about
Canadian if we're talking about contemporary classical music, I would say is diversity.
(07:23):
And that goes for diversity of voices and also diversity of styles and diversity of
takes approaches.
It might even be, you know, that might be a worldwide thing, perhaps.
But so it's hard to pin down what's what is Canadian contemporary classical music.
(07:44):
There's certainly exploration.
What else?
I don't know.
I might be stuck on to diversity, exploration, binding, pluralism, sort of a multitude of
things.
That's a really good start.
And you having worked in various Canadian regions, like you mentioned, Nova Scotia now
(08:04):
and Ontario.
How do you think the local culture and environment that you're in kind of influence your musical
style and influences when you're composing?
Well, I think if we talk about, you know, maybe environment is a good one, because I
have a lot of, you know, inspiration from nature and the outdoors and animals and things
(08:28):
like that.
So I've often sort of, you know, I have like a field recording practice where I'll take
microphones out into the wild and sort of record things that I'm hearing out there.
So in one sense, you know, maybe I'll be somewhere where I get to record like a bird or something
(08:53):
that isn't elsewhere.
And that's really cool.
And I have a lot of stories or examples of that sort of thing.
And so then I get to use those sounds in a musical context.
But then there are other times where like, you know, I have a piece that's a song cycle
(09:15):
that's 40 minutes long.
It's for my great friend and collaborator, Rachel Fenlon, who's a soprano and pianist,
and she sings and plays everything at once.
And a big theme in that piece is water.
And something that I found is as I was recording water in all these various places, I recorded
(09:36):
in Iceland, I recorded in like Ontario, I recorded in Maine, I recorded in all sorts
of different types of water, rivers, oceans.
You start to realize that water pretty much sounds the same everywhere.
So in contrast to like the birds or something where, you know, you might not find, you know,
(10:02):
this bird that you found in Vancouver in Halifax.
But with water, it's sort of you can't tell where it's from.
It all sounds like water.
So there, you know, I get I'm often struck by how I feel sort of that music is more universal
(10:25):
and sounds are universal.
And so I maybe it's just my background because I, you know, I'm born Canadian to American
parents.
I lived in Canada and the US and Europe growing up because my parents took us.
I lived seven years of my life before 18 in France, Italy and England.
(10:48):
I've done a lot of traveling.
So I often don't feel sort of like particularly tied to one place or another.
And so I actually get excited by realizing how connected we are in bigger ways.
So maybe I'm the wrong person to ask because I just have a yeah, I have a sort of a far
(11:13):
reaching interest in lots of different cultures and environments and styles and things like
that.
And they they all influence me.
Yeah.
That global perspective is definitely something special.
That's really beautiful.
I have to know more about this field recording.
So how do you incorporate these recordings into your music?
(11:34):
Is there like a balance you have to be that has to be found between sounds and tonal noise
that we're used to?
Totally.
Yeah.
So I think we're you know, as pretty much as soon as humans figured out how to record
sound, which is pretty old now, you know, it's like at least 100 years old, if not a
(11:59):
little bit earlier than that.
You know, people started trying to incorporate, you know, it was sort of a paradigm shift
suddenly recorded sound in enabled all sorts of things to happen within a musical context.
(12:19):
And you know, I think of like in the 1950s or something, the music concrete and Schaeffer
in Paris and on all these kinds of things, you know, that's that's the 1950s.
And we're already 75 years beyond that.
So and then there's so many practices that sort of arise out of that.
(12:40):
For me, the art of field recording is the art of sort of taking a recording device of
some kind somewhere.
It could be anywhere.
And it's sort of like instead of taking a picture or taking a video of something, you
take like an audio recording, a snapshot.
(13:02):
So I like to think of it like that.
It's just a way to capture the sounds of a particular area.
It can be, you know, environmental in the sense like you're picking up an ambience or
like all of the sounds that surround you or can be quite specific.
You take your sound, your recording device and, you know, hold it right up to this river,
(13:24):
like, you know, an inch away or something.
So you get this really full, specific kind of a thing.
And then there are ways to sort of put it together in a musical context.
It is a little bit like oil and water sometimes, you know, like how do I get a violin sound
(13:45):
to sort of work with the sound of a Grey J or something?
And I think you sort of have to go back to like first principles of sound.
And you know, a Grey J has pitch and it has rhythm and it has energy in the way that it
(14:06):
speaks.
And so does music, right?
So we have, you know, in a way they're very different from each other, but they're all
sorts of ways that you can find that they actually connect if you go back to these first
principles.
Yeah.
That was a really thorough walkthrough.
(14:27):
Awesome.
So was there like a particularly memorable experience you've had when recording Birds,
for example, was there?
Yeah, for sure.
Like I can think of, well, one was when I was out in BC, I was on a hike near Vancouver
(14:48):
and my friends and I, we stopped for lunch and then we kind of got swarmed by these Grey
J's or they're called Whiskey Jacks sometimes, or sometimes Canada J, the Canada J. And so
we had trail mix and I remember the birds were like, they really wanted to eat the trail
(15:10):
mix.
And so I just had my portable recording device there and I had trail mix in my hand and the
birds were like literally like landing on my hand and I had my recording device there
the whole time.
So I was able to capture these fantastic sounds of them sort of chirping and tweeting and
(15:31):
squawking but then also like their flapping wings making sounds and all sorts of things
that you just don't normally hear because I was so close.
So that's one, that's pretty cool.
And the ball of those sounds ended up in this piece that I wrote called Cathedral Grove
and the Grey J. That's for solo violin and live electronic.
(15:54):
So it's an integral part of that piece.
That is so cool.
I also believe on the theme of technology, Ray, that you're currently working on a piece
that incorporates AI voice and text generation.
How do you see this intersection of technology and music and what possibilities do you see
(16:16):
for technology in the future of composition?
For sure.
Well, you know, I'm somebody who's, I have an interest in sort of the technology that
is surrounding us.
And I think it's maybe a, you know, we're in a day and age when we're, you know, we
(16:38):
can't escape it.
Like we're talking on video call right now with all sorts of microphones and you know,
all of the sort of popular media that we consume, movies and Netflix and YouTube and stuff,
you know, it's all so technologically based.
And I often feel that, you know, I came up studying classical violin, which is, you know,
(17:03):
a 400 year old piece of technology, the violin.
And we, you know, as classical musicians, we're some of like the latest adopters in
our own practice of technology.
I find in general, it's like we sort of focus on the 400 year old violin more than we're
(17:26):
sort of learning about recording technology or things that are happening.
So it's a little bit of a, initially maybe a reaction.
It's like, at some point I realized I had a huge hole in my understanding of like contemporary
things that were happening.
So I think maybe that was that spurred an initial interest.
(17:50):
But you know, there are, I mean, we can't possibly sort of imagine what kinds of things
will happen for music in the future, but there's already a ton of stuff going on.
You know, just the fact that our computers are so powerful and we have AI, you know,
(18:10):
just by itself is pretty mind blowing.
I do already use some AI tools for my, in my musical practice.
Yeah, I think that particular piece, which is still under construction, the AI, it's
(18:30):
called, well, it has a tentative title.
Yeah, it's a nocturne for piano and then this AI stuff.
And it's going to be sort of a quasi theatrical in the sense that the pianist will be playing
(18:54):
a piano nocturne.
Then it will also, the live nocturne music will be processed by some electronic, you
know, it'll be manipulated and processed in different ways.
And then she, the performer will have a conversation with an AI being asking questions of an existential
(19:17):
nature and things like that.
And that's sort of as much as I can say about it right now, because it's very much in it,
still in its early stages.
That sounds so intriguing.
I can't wait to hear it.
So it's kind of funny because it's like one of the projects that I am least sure about
(19:40):
what it's going to turn out like.
So in that sense, it's kind of scary because at this point I have a fair amount of confidence
in my ability to realize the things I want to express.
But so bringing in this piece that is the AI piece, which has a lot of unknowns around
(20:04):
it and how it functions and how it might contribute to things like mood and meaning and all that
kind of stuff, it's sort of a big unknown.
So it's an experiment for me and definitely a bit scary.
Still very exciting.
Well, to wrap things up here, I'd like to ask you, what do you hope to see for the future
(20:30):
of composition and for the role of composers in Canadian society?
Well, I mean, I think a perpetual thing is that this music that I love, that many people
love, that the idea of classical music, so music that is complex and allows us to get
(20:51):
in touch with our deepest human feelings and ideas, we always hope that more people will
want to take part in that.
And I think a big part of that, the role of the contemporary composer is to reflect what
is current, right?
(21:11):
So what are we feeling now?
What are we thinking now?
And how can we express that in a musical context?
I think that contemporary music has some of the most power to bring in new listeners of
classical music.
And I think it's contrary to what we often think of, because it's like, oh, new music,
(21:35):
it's so strange and weird.
But I think it doesn't have to be sort of alienating for people.
It can be both challenging and accessible and all of those things at once.
Fantastic.
Well, that brings us to the end of today's episode.
(21:55):
Thank you so much, Mathias, for sharing such beautiful pieces of your art and heart.
Until next time, folks, keep listening for the Notes of the North.
Hello and welcome to Notes of the North Talks, a series where we get to know our local Canadian
(00:09):
musical talent.
Today I'm joined by Dr. Matthias McIntire.
Thank you so much, Matthias, for being here today.
Thank you very much for having me.
I'm excited to be here.
Let's get right into it.
So first and foremost, where are you joining us from today?
Where in Canada do you call home?
Well, so I'm currently based in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
(00:32):
My wife and I have been moving around a lot the last few years.
So the last two years before we moved to Halifax in September, we had been living in Lunenburg,
Nova Scotia.
Before that, for about a year, we were in Montreal, and before that we were in Toronto
for a good chunk of time, and I'm originally from Toronto.
So I guess you could say I'm learning to call Nova Scotia home and Halifax home, but we
(00:58):
haven't been here for that long.
Wonderful.
Can you tell us a little bit about how you started music?
So what was that journey like and then how did you start composing?
Well, so I'm also a violinist and violist, and my first musical experiences were on the
violin.
(01:19):
So when I was around five years old, my mom just sort of put a violin in my hand.
And I think she probably noticed that I liked music and liked listening to music and just
sort of said, here you go.
She had some experience playing some violin and viola when she was young, and piano as
(01:45):
well.
And so I think that was the impetus there.
So I studied violin for a long time, and I guess you could say the rest is history.
And did you start composing around the same time that you started your instrumental studies?
Well, I would.
So let me think about that.
(02:07):
So I started taking music theory quite early on, like when I was around 10 or 11.
And so part of that was that there was always little sort of exercises where you were writing
music.
And so I had that kind of experience.
And then the other thing that was sort of happening concurrently for a long time was
(02:32):
so I grew up going to church with my family, and I played violin pretty much every Sunday
in church from the age of like 6 to 18 years old.
And I had a music director there, John Campbell, who I mean, he was there the whole time I
(02:55):
was there.
You know, he saw me grow up and he really encouraged me in all these ways.
And a lot of the stuff I would do with him was improvising, composing, arranging, playing
hymns and that kind of thing.
And so I would do everything from like playing, you know, like a jazzy Christmas carol or
(03:16):
something to playing some sort of really out there improvisations for violin and organ
and stuff like that.
So I had that kind of creative side experience sort of all along in that context.
Amazing.
What was like your earliest memory with a piece like a piece that you felt so proud
(03:40):
of?
Ah, well, it's so funny because I while I did start composing, you know, relatively early
on, I was never sort of really like finishing stuff.
It was always just like little bits of things here and there.
Ideas.
(04:01):
For ideas and more, you know, I remember finding actually recently.
I found in like an old box of like stuff from high school, a piece that I had like not finished
but wrote a lot of.
And it had the most hilarious title in retrospect.
It was called Dissonant and Danceable, which is just the most like.
(04:24):
Yeah, I was really into like Shostakovich and stuff at the time.
But yeah, I think the first piece that I would like that I really finished and that I was
really proud of probably didn't come until in my Masters for violin when I wrote
(04:46):
an eight minute long solo piano piece, which I had put on my grad recital.
So that was like I mean, there's a whole lot of story that leads up to that moment.
But that was a moment that was pretty big for me because I had been sort of focused
on violin in my undergrad and Masters and hadn't been composing as much as I had been
(05:09):
like in high school and before during my undergrad and Masters.
And I was really missing it.
And I was getting the creative side of things in other ways, like a lot of improvising is
like playing with bands and playing trying to play jazz and trying to play fiddle music
and all sorts of things.
(05:30):
And then I was just like, OK, I have to I have to write something to put on my grad
Masters violin recital.
So I was playing all this, you know, big violin rep.
And then I got to sit down in the middle of my recital and watch my colleague, Keiseke,
play a solo piano piece that I wrote.
So it was like that was a big moment.
I was really proud of that one.
(05:50):
Amazing.
What was that piece called?
Can you tell me a little bit more about that story you were referring to?
Yeah, sure.
So that piece is called Earthbound and Skyward.
And it's it's like a it's a really energetic and very rhythmic kind of a piece.
(06:12):
And I think it was trying to capture some of the like the the energy that I was feeling
as I was finishing my grad Masters degree in violin.
There was a lot of stress, a lot of practicing, a lot of, you know, big performances and stuff.
(06:33):
And so there was a lot of intensity.
And I had this feeling of like just trying to like get out of that, wanting to so that
the earthbound was sort of like being dragged down by the earthly problems, I guess you
could say.
And then the skyward was this sort of reaching for, you know, something maybe ecstatic or
(06:56):
something that could take me out of that.
I love that so much.
OK, shifting gears a little bit.
So if you think Canadian music, what are like the first five words that come to mind?
This is for sure a hard one, because I feel like the like a really big thing I feel about
Canadian if we're talking about contemporary classical music, I would say is diversity.
(07:23):
And that goes for diversity of voices and also diversity of styles and diversity of
takes approaches.
It might even be, you know, that might be a worldwide thing, perhaps.
But so it's hard to pin down what's what is Canadian contemporary classical music.
(07:44):
There's certainly exploration.
What else?
I don't know.
I might be stuck on to diversity, exploration, binding, pluralism, sort of a multitude of
things.
That's a really good start.
And you having worked in various Canadian regions, like you mentioned, Nova Scotia now
(08:04):
and Ontario.
How do you think the local culture and environment that you're in kind of influence your musical
style and influences when you're composing?
Well, I think if we talk about, you know, maybe environment is a good one, because I
have a lot of, you know, inspiration from nature and the outdoors and animals and things
(08:28):
like that.
So I've often sort of, you know, I have like a field recording practice where I'll take
microphones out into the wild and sort of record things that I'm hearing out there.
So in one sense, you know, maybe I'll be somewhere where I get to record like a bird or something
(08:53):
that isn't elsewhere.
And that's really cool.
And I have a lot of stories or examples of that sort of thing.
And so then I get to use those sounds in a musical context.
But then there are other times where like, you know, I have a piece that's a song cycle
(09:15):
that's 40 minutes long.
It's for my great friend and collaborator, Rachel Fenlon, who's a soprano and pianist,
and she sings and plays everything at once.
And a big theme in that piece is water.
And something that I found is as I was recording water in all these various places, I recorded
(09:36):
in Iceland, I recorded in like Ontario, I recorded in Maine, I recorded in all sorts
of different types of water, rivers, oceans.
You start to realize that water pretty much sounds the same everywhere.
So in contrast to like the birds or something where, you know, you might not find, you know,
(10:02):
this bird that you found in Vancouver in Halifax.
But with water, it's sort of you can't tell where it's from.
It all sounds like water.
So there, you know, I get I'm often struck by how I feel sort of that music is more universal
(10:25):
and sounds are universal.
And so I maybe it's just my background because I, you know, I'm born Canadian to American
parents.
I lived in Canada and the US and Europe growing up because my parents took us.
I lived seven years of my life before 18 in France, Italy and England.
(10:48):
I've done a lot of traveling.
So I often don't feel sort of like particularly tied to one place or another.
And so I actually get excited by realizing how connected we are in bigger ways.
So maybe I'm the wrong person to ask because I just have a yeah, I have a sort of a far
(11:13):
reaching interest in lots of different cultures and environments and styles and things like
that.
And they they all influence me.
Yeah.
That global perspective is definitely something special.
That's really beautiful.
I have to know more about this field recording.
So how do you incorporate these recordings into your music?
(11:34):
Is there like a balance you have to be that has to be found between sounds and tonal noise
that we're used to?
Totally.
Yeah.
So I think we're you know, as pretty much as soon as humans figured out how to record
sound, which is pretty old now, you know, it's like at least 100 years old, if not a
(11:59):
little bit earlier than that.
You know, people started trying to incorporate, you know, it was sort of a paradigm shift
suddenly recorded sound in enabled all sorts of things to happen within a musical context.
(12:19):
And you know, I think of like in the 1950s or something, the music concrete and Schaeffer
in Paris and on all these kinds of things, you know, that's that's the 1950s.
And we're already 75 years beyond that.
So and then there's so many practices that sort of arise out of that.
(12:40):
For me, the art of field recording is the art of sort of taking a recording device of
some kind somewhere.
It could be anywhere.
And it's sort of like instead of taking a picture or taking a video of something, you
take like an audio recording, a snapshot.
(13:02):
So I like to think of it like that.
It's just a way to capture the sounds of a particular area.
It can be, you know, environmental in the sense like you're picking up an ambience or
like all of the sounds that surround you or can be quite specific.
You take your sound, your recording device and, you know, hold it right up to this river,
(13:24):
like, you know, an inch away or something.
So you get this really full, specific kind of a thing.
And then there are ways to sort of put it together in a musical context.
It is a little bit like oil and water sometimes, you know, like how do I get a violin sound
(13:45):
to sort of work with the sound of a Grey J or something?
And I think you sort of have to go back to like first principles of sound.
And you know, a Grey J has pitch and it has rhythm and it has energy in the way that it
(14:06):
speaks.
And so does music, right?
So we have, you know, in a way they're very different from each other, but they're all
sorts of ways that you can find that they actually connect if you go back to these first
principles.
Yeah.
That was a really thorough walkthrough.
(14:27):
Awesome.
So was there like a particularly memorable experience you've had when recording Birds,
for example, was there?
Yeah, for sure.
Like I can think of, well, one was when I was out in BC, I was on a hike near Vancouver
(14:48):
and my friends and I, we stopped for lunch and then we kind of got swarmed by these Grey
J's or they're called Whiskey Jacks sometimes, or sometimes Canada J, the Canada J. And so
we had trail mix and I remember the birds were like, they really wanted to eat the trail
(15:10):
mix.
And so I just had my portable recording device there and I had trail mix in my hand and the
birds were like literally like landing on my hand and I had my recording device there
the whole time.
So I was able to capture these fantastic sounds of them sort of chirping and tweeting and
(15:31):
squawking but then also like their flapping wings making sounds and all sorts of things
that you just don't normally hear because I was so close.
So that's one, that's pretty cool.
And the ball of those sounds ended up in this piece that I wrote called Cathedral Grove
and the Grey J. That's for solo violin and live electronic.
(15:54):
So it's an integral part of that piece.
That is so cool.
I also believe on the theme of technology, Ray, that you're currently working on a piece
that incorporates AI voice and text generation.
How do you see this intersection of technology and music and what possibilities do you see
(16:16):
for technology in the future of composition?
For sure.
Well, you know, I'm somebody who's, I have an interest in sort of the technology that
is surrounding us.
And I think it's maybe a, you know, we're in a day and age when we're, you know, we
(16:38):
can't escape it.
Like we're talking on video call right now with all sorts of microphones and you know,
all of the sort of popular media that we consume, movies and Netflix and YouTube and stuff,
you know, it's all so technologically based.
And I often feel that, you know, I came up studying classical violin, which is, you know,
(17:03):
a 400 year old piece of technology, the violin.
And we, you know, as classical musicians, we're some of like the latest adopters in
our own practice of technology.
I find in general, it's like we sort of focus on the 400 year old violin more than we're
(17:26):
sort of learning about recording technology or things that are happening.
So it's a little bit of a, initially maybe a reaction.
It's like, at some point I realized I had a huge hole in my understanding of like contemporary
things that were happening.
So I think maybe that was that spurred an initial interest.
(17:50):
But you know, there are, I mean, we can't possibly sort of imagine what kinds of things
will happen for music in the future, but there's already a ton of stuff going on.
You know, just the fact that our computers are so powerful and we have AI, you know,
(18:10):
just by itself is pretty mind blowing.
I do already use some AI tools for my, in my musical practice.
Yeah, I think that particular piece, which is still under construction, the AI, it's
(18:30):
called, well, it has a tentative title.
Yeah, it's a nocturne for piano and then this AI stuff.
And it's going to be sort of a quasi theatrical in the sense that the pianist will be playing
(18:54):
a piano nocturne.
Then it will also, the live nocturne music will be processed by some electronic, you
know, it'll be manipulated and processed in different ways.
And then she, the performer will have a conversation with an AI being asking questions of an existential
(19:17):
nature and things like that.
And that's sort of as much as I can say about it right now, because it's very much in it,
still in its early stages.
That sounds so intriguing.
I can't wait to hear it.
So it's kind of funny because it's like one of the projects that I am least sure about
(19:40):
what it's going to turn out like.
So in that sense, it's kind of scary because at this point I have a fair amount of confidence
in my ability to realize the things I want to express.
But so bringing in this piece that is the AI piece, which has a lot of unknowns around
(20:04):
it and how it functions and how it might contribute to things like mood and meaning and all that
kind of stuff, it's sort of a big unknown.
So it's an experiment for me and definitely a bit scary.
Still very exciting.
Well, to wrap things up here, I'd like to ask you, what do you hope to see for the future
(20:30):
of composition and for the role of composers in Canadian society?
Well, I mean, I think a perpetual thing is that this music that I love, that many people
love, that the idea of classical music, so music that is complex and allows us to get
(20:51):
in touch with our deepest human feelings and ideas, we always hope that more people will
want to take part in that.
And I think a big part of that, the role of the contemporary composer is to reflect what
is current, right?
(21:11):
So what are we feeling now?
What are we thinking now?
And how can we express that in a musical context?
I think that contemporary music has some of the most power to bring in new listeners of
classical music.
And I think it's contrary to what we often think of, because it's like, oh, new music,
(21:35):
it's so strange and weird.
But I think it doesn't have to be sort of alienating for people.
It can be both challenging and accessible and all of those things at once.
Fantastic.
Well, that brings us to the end of today's episode.
(21:55):
Thank you so much, Mathias, for sharing such beautiful pieces of your art and heart.
Until next time, folks, keep listening for the Notes of the North.
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