Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.
I’m a bit of a night owl, so sometimes I don’t have much of a morning. On a good day, I’ll make a pot of çay, do a short exercise routine, check The Guardian app and Instagram, and get in a brief play session with my dog before facing the day.
The day might be busy with a session or rehearsal, a lesson to teach or some engraving work to do, a shift at the Park Slope Food Coop, a tennis game at the public courts at Prospect Park, or an organizing meeting with the Music Workers Alliance; or, it might be wide open.
My time for music work is largely unstructured. I follow my nose, sometimes jumping around between various ideas in early stages, or other times staying in the groove with one project for a long time. It really just depends. Evenings are for checking out shows or composing late into the night.
Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?
I just finished the editing on a quintet record called Abiding Memory, which I’m very excited about. It’s a new group made up of Alec Goldfarb (guitar), Daniel Hass (cello), Sam Minaie (bass), Vicente H. Atria (drums and Roland SPD), and myself (piano, Fender Rhodes, harpsichord).
The work began in spring 2021 with just a few sketches, as covid vaccines were rolling out and we had the ability to gather in person, again. Vicente and Alec started regularly coming over to my place to read through the handful of bars that I had at that point. We’d play them over and over, try improvising through them, talk about them, and then make food and hang and listen to music for hours.
It was these sessions — noticing how they were reacting to the sketches I had written and hearing how they interpreted the music — that gave me the vision to add bass and cello and complete the ten compositions that make up this hour-long set of music.
We continued to meet semi-regularly to work on the material as it was being written until early summer 2022, when things shifted into a bit of a higher gear. At this point, we tested things out with Daniel and Sam and put plans in motion to record in September 2022. I raised money through crowdfunding to pay for two days in the studio and pay all the musicians. Everyone got covid at some point during summer 2022 but we managed to get five solid rehearsals in, plus individual work one-on-one, before we went into the studio.
I feel very fortunate to have been able to create music in this slow and deliberate way with such a dedicated handful of collaborators.
Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?
I’ve spoken about this in a lot of the other answers. Nearly all music that I love comes out of community—Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, the ars subtilior, and The Art Ensemble of Chicago are what they are because the people who wrote and played the music had a shared love for what they were doing and a commitment to a practice they co-created.
Contemporary composers often find themselves on the outside of such communities and rather lonely. I need other people to influence my ideas and bring them to life. I notice I hear things quite differently (and in a more detailed way) even just when listening to music with others versus alone.
How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?
People need music.
Most people spend a majority of their waking hours doing work that they feel little ownership over and that produces profit for others in order to meet basic survival needs (if that). We live in a world where most workplaces operate as dictatorships and a society that mandates relentless competition. Music can give people something that counters these dominant experiences. Music is life-giving and life-renewing (or as my wife would say, the work of social reproduction).
Today, there’s too much emphasis on the subject matter of music—“political” music is very much in fashion. But, at least to my ears and sensibility, subject matter does not express intentionality. Communicating intentionality through music is a secret tool with which people can maintain contact with the humanity of others.
This might mean that music brings with it a political context—for example, I admire how Layale Chaker, the bandleader of the Sarafand Ensemble, which I play with, carries the history and politics of displacement through both poetry and music—but it’s never reducible to a political idea.
It is tragically rare in our daily lives to feel the humanity of others, particularly those we don’t know. This is what music shares with walking a picket line (and no wonder we chant in that context, as well as make music!).
Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?
I’m not sure if music has awarded me any understanding of these matters. It has been around me in both moments of inspiration and ignorance.
One of the first people I lost in my life was a friend and musical mentor, and some of moments in which I felt the most alive have been while making music. But music in these instances acts like a portal to the sublime—almost helping you discern the unknowable from the knowable.
Maybe that’s what we like about it, that it’s not a way to deal with the big topics, but just to keep them in place and remind us that they exist.
How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?
Although I do love science (I will happily spend a half hour watching a random Youtube channel’s explanation of anything from plane engines to dust mites) I frankly don’t think there’s much of a connection between music and science at the core.
Music often uses elements of science as a tool; and creative thinking is incredibly important to the development of science. Both science and music also help us interface with and understand the world.
But music fundamentally relies on magic and can never truly properly be explained rationally. To my understanding, science does not mix well with magic …
Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?
I actually think there is a deep connection between music and food! Both feed and nourish us. Both give people something that they need. Both have the ability to make us feel very good or very bad. We use our “taste” in both as a stand-in for other cultural identities and markers. Both combine tradition and contemporaneity, and are ever-changing and ever-preserved.
The word composing simply means “putting things together”. I think about the parallel a lot, both when I serve a meal and when I perform: food and music are offerings that we make out of love to give people life.
Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?
There are various ideas of where to draw the line between sound and music.
For me, what makes music music and therefore explains how it is able to be communicative in all the ways that music can be, is that a person has offered some kind of intention using sound. In other words, when listening to music, we hear the trace of a human body or mind at work. Wherever we can perceive the presence of people doing something, meaning can begin to be associated with that presence.
Although sound recording has profoundly expanded our idea of what music is, the intentionality factor has not been made irrelevant. People no longer need to be with us in time or space for us to hear them make music. People don’t even need to be making the actual sound.
But even a recording of, for example, the natural sounds of a forest or an AI-generated composition contain many traces of people’s physical actions and mental choices on those sounds journeys to our ears, which we as listeners can perceive and unavoidably ascribe meaning to.
