Is BACH The Most DANGEROUS Composer? | Q&A

hello my name is David Bruce I have a bunch of your questions from Instagram and Twitter and from my patrons on patreon to answer and we're going to cover things like how pieces become part of the classical Canon I'll foolishly attempt to define classical music we'll talk about what drives me as a composer and the mental health challenges of being a composer we're also going to ask could a collaboration with vinta Cotton's marble machine be on the cards and we'll look at the ways that bark can be a dangerous influence honors composers and I'll throw in one or two other questions as well time stamps to all these questions are in the description so pull down on that if you want to jump straight to all of those questions so John Williams asks in current times how do works become included into the classical canon what are some pieces that have made the cut for example I think Caroline Shaw's partita for eight voices is a landmark piece of the current era [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so thanks John and we'll actually talk about your namesake in a minute so the classical canon and not canon by the way is the term we use to describe pieces that have made it you can think of it as a kind of Darwinian survival of the fittest only the strongest pieces that really cut through the jungle of noise make it through and become pieces that we all know and love and are regularly played by musicians all over the world it takes a long time for a piece to truly become part of the Canon and in fact the Canon is constantly changing is not like something just enters into masterpiece status and just stays there just like any kind of history our views on which parts of it are important changes over time but the main thing it does take is time and so it's pretty difficult to say with any certainty which composer alive today will end up being part of the Canon Caroline Shaw is an American composer whose music has been gaining a lot of attention particularly since she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for her party to for eight voices I recently went to a great concert of her music by the attacker quartet here in London and her music has a real openness that embraces folk and pop music as well as hints of more historical styles I really like it but will it be part of the Canon in 100 years time well pieces by composers like Caroline or Thomas artists or John Adams do already get regularly performed a lot but can you really say that they've entered the Canon yet I think it's still too early to say for sure I would say you have to go a bit further back to the works of say Shostakovich or something like Messianics quarter at the end of time from the 1940s to find pieces that seem to have found a genuine place in the repertoire which we can be pretty certain they'll maintain for some time to come [Music] and don't forget we're probably overlooking some of the best composers right now it took years after their deaths to rediscover some composers that we now consider central to the canon whether it's Marla whose music was unplayed for a good 50 years after his death or even Jay s bark himself whose music was considered old-fashioned in its day and only really started being revived in 19th century through championing by composers like Mendelssohn I'd like to relate this to a question from mickus aka C 1 D what is classical music or art music so this is one of those questions that it's kind of foolish to answer what is classical music even the great Leonard Bernstein got it wrong he gave a lecture on it in 1959 see everybody thinks he knows what classical music is people use this word to describe music that isn't jazz or popular songs or folk music just because there isn't any other word that seems to describe it better and he went through a list of problematic terms not serious music because plenty of non classical music is serious not art music because jazz music is just as much art music and in the end Bernstein's settled on the phrase exact music this music is permanent unchangeable exact now there's a good word exact maybe that's what we should call this kind of music instead of classical we should call it exact music because there's only one way it can be played and that way has been told up by the composer himself but already in 1959 and much more in the decades afterwards many classical composers wrote pieces that weren't exact that had a number of different ways of playing them from the chants compositions of John Cage to the aleatory music by a little suave ski one thing Bernstein did get right is that the term classical is itself quite annoying because it refers to both the overall tradition as well as to a particular period within the tradition classical music as a whole refers to anything from say 12 hundreds including the music of the Renaissance and the Baroque through to the Romantic and the modern eras but it also refers to this period from around 1750 to 1820 known as the Classical period so it's important to be clear we're talking about the big music here not the smaller classical music but how can we define it if classical music is about longevity about timelessness does a group like the Beatles become classical music if we still play their music 50 years later how does that compare to something like this song from IRA by Osvaldo gali off which sounds very like pop music but is usually performed in classical concerts British composer an emeritus writes orchestral pieces for the BBC Proms but also tours with her own electronica band so are her band pieces classical music as well in some [Music] people often ask about film music which is often written for orchestra and certainly if you turn on Classic FM you'll hear a lot of film music so is that classical music well I would say that as things currently stand no not really and not for any intrinsic quality of the music itself but because it hasn't really become part of the scene part of the classical community part of that river of conductors performers constant managers composers now I guess that's debatable because I just said film music is played on classic FM and it does often get played by orchestras usually in separate standalone concerts but to me there's a sense that being integrated into the lifeblood of classical music is something different this is not to say that a lot of this music won't do that so a lot of classical musicians for example have a great deal of respect for John Williams I really like the score from catch me if you can for example and you could easily imagine over time that his pieces start becoming part of the classical repertoire played in concerts alongside other classical composers influencing composers and becoming an integral part of classical music even if they weren't originally and by comparison take somebody like Conlan Nancarrow who wrote those crazy player piano pieces sitting in his garage in Mexico at the time he wrote them I don't know if what he was doing was classical music but it started to become something that people have transcribed made arrangements off and has also had a massive cultural impact on a lot of composers who were inspired by his music so it's pretty easy for me now to think of Nancarrow or as part of the classical music tradition one more example think about how those early minimalist pieces full of marimbas and repetition must have sounded when they first came out [Music] I'm sure people were reluctant to call that classical music at the time but now it's a fully integrated part of the scene it's been an influence on generations of composers most classical musicians will play it at one time or another it's clearly a new tributary that has flowed into the main river and that's how I think of it a giant river of people all part of a tradition of classical music stretching back hundreds of years it's a tradition that changes with time I don't think there's any set rule as to what a classical piece is what a classical concert should be or where it should take place the classical tradition today is very different from how it was in the Baroque era and intuited years time it could be mostly on amplified guitars and keyboards for all we know but for it's still to be classical music there would have been this connection and continuity this flow of people ideas and music Nora Keisha Brown asks how many of the instruments on your wall can you play why all of them but badly I do actually test things out on the instruments quite a lot comes in so handy for trying out string parts and so on but I also just really enjoy playing some of them like I've played a bit of out of tune bluegrass on my ukulele and on my most recent addition a snare drum with hi-hat I've been working on my Clyde Stubblefield [Music] Alex cannon asks do you think it's important to know about Bach chorale harmony so speaking of cannons box corals are pretty central pieces to the classical Canon and for decades these pieces have been used as a useful tool for understanding one of the foundations of Western music what's known as common practice harmony box original corals are harmonizations of famous hymn tunes from his day so the top line the soprano line is the tune and the three parts below are the harmonies he added so we have these great models to study and as a student you usually given that top line and asked to fill in the three parts below usually start by figuring out the cadences at the end of each phrase usually some kind of perfect 5-1 cadence and then you'll probably work out the bass line for the rest and figure out a series of chord progressions and then finally you'll fill in the two inner voices there are various rules you use throughout a seventh of a chord must always fall a leading note must always rise rules to do with preparation and resolution of distances and so on and by doing this you really learn this at the fundamentals of traditional diatonic harmony it's sort of the old testament of classical music so if you're a jazz performer or electronic music producer do you need to know about this stuff well one of the things cars are really good for is learning about voice leading voice leading is a way of making sure that each of those four lines is easy to sing it should try and move mostly by step without lots of awkward leaps and chords built around good voice leading feel very natural in the way they move from one to the next they have this kind of smoothness to them and it's something people think a lot about when they're voicing jazz chords for example especially if you're using a lot of chromatic movement if each of the notes of the chord slides stepwise into another that really helps it to feel more cohesive and less jarring so bark is the master of this right bark with his with his four part Corral's where the chords can all be understood vertically and functionally but every single melody in the chorus has has momentum it has motion I guess it's something that as a piano player I have to struggle with a little bit because at first as a piano player so easy just to go like bundle of notes bundle note because they're all there in front of you just waiting to be played and yeah it took a little bit of time just to be courageous enough to not play them all at once and that's something I've I'm still owning but I think that when it comes to voice leading as long as you can sit down and concentrate on each note having a place to go then then I think then I think you're safe you know because a lot of the most effective for ceiling is like chromatic so you know triads moving side by side that's strong the bass line having a strong motion that's very strong in bar Carol's voice leading also refers to the way each part needs to have a sense of independence in the way it moves this is the main point behind the often misunderstood idea of parallel octaves and fifths being wrong I remember playing parallel octaves and fifths as a student and thinking what's wrong with that sounds great but the idea is that if things are moving together like that in parallel they're no longer sounding like independent parts and that's what we're aiming for each part sounding like an independent line if you spend some time with Barker as you start to understand how it's made it like a bit of a 3d jigsaw puzzle each line has to function as a single line in its own right but it also has to fit into this harmonic structure as it goes along and understanding that will I think help you tremendously whatever kind of music you make so why did I call bark a dangerous composer well I think he's only really dangerous for us classical composers we all have a sense of bark as being like the pinnacle the Mount Everest of composers if you like his music seems to have this perfect balance and purity those melodic and harmonic elements are perfectly integrated the parts are built from independent lines and the pieces are built from single ideas played forwards backwards or upside down it's all pure balanced and logical so because Bach's music is so good so universally loved so timeless it's tempting to think that his is the model we should follow so if we don't have independent parts but we happen to like melodies with chordal accompaniments we must be somewhere further down that mountain range and if we don't develop everything from one small idea and instead grab things from multiple sources maybe even multiple cultures then we're further down still Bach becomes like a fantasy of purity and I've seen composers time and again aspiring after his purity and perfection who end up writing slightly turgid academic pieces which technically are beautifully integrated and beautifully marry the 2d of the melody with the 3d of the harmony but that emotionally have nothing to say it's genuinely hard because part of the joy of trying to compose is pitting yourself against the great minds of the past and seeing how far up that mountain range you can climb but I suppose what I'm saying is you don't have to do all of those things to be still a really great composer Debussy Tchaikovsky and many others tempted to write a melody with a chordal accompaniment so not all the parts feel independent and many fabulous composers seem to write really unique pieces despite drawing influences from all over the place these composers further down that mountain range than Bach or perhaps but they still write really great music and I think it would be good if some of us were humble enough to aim for these lightly lower but still glorious Peaks instead of freezing to death starved of oxygen aiming for Mount Everest Ouiser x5 says I've got some questions about your great lick quartet how many people involved in the composition players commission people concert hall people are in Group même do they like the idea of something silly like the lick as the basis of a serious piece and do you discuss things like that beforehand or do you just deliver a finished piece hoping they'll like it so thank you so much to all of you who watched the performance of my lick quartet in my last video I've been so happy with the response so many of you seem to have genuinely enjoyed listening so thank you as far as knowing about the lake I don't think anyone else involved was really part of group meme so the Commission came through the quartet who I'd worked with before there on my recording of the Northmen was a woman and they played my piece Cymbeline with avi avatar quite often so we knew each other quite well and they were keen to organize a new commission so their agent set about finding venues that they would be touring to anyway to see if anyone was willing to fund the Commission and they found these two from the Dallas Chamber Music Society and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam the court requested that the piece be about 20 minutes long which is fairly typical for this kind of piece and beyond that there were zero stipulations as to what kind of piece it would be and that's the way I like it and the way it usually is as far as whether any of these people minded it being based on the lick I certainly don't think so I think they were more intrigued to hear about this hint of another world here on YouTube that they didn't know much about so a great question here from Nathan Rea do you ever think about how the musicians and performers will look when playing your compositions do their physical movements factor into your work so some composers do write specific spatial layouts or have musicians moving around the stage during the piece and not just for the change in sound but for the theatrical aspect so a piece like Harrison Burt whistles secret theatre for example has two groups one standing and one sitting and the players have to move between them during the performance on the whole it's not something I'm a massive fan of especially with classical musicians who are often not used to performing in this kind of way so it can't come across pretty awkwardly but I do think it's good to be reminded that performance is a kind of theater the one physical aspect of performance that often annoys me is the music stand if they're not careful some musicians can end up using as a kind of shield to hide themselves from the audience which is obviously not ideal watching a classical piece played from memory can be incredibly refreshing for an audience I've seen groups like eighth Blackbird in the US and the Aurora Orchestra in the UK do this and though we seem to get a great reaction of course it takes a lot of time and effort to learn a piece but I wish more new pieces were done from memory it just allows you to focus much more on the music Stirling nigh camp asks what continues to drive your love of music and composing well a love of music is one thing I guess is just something you have or you don't have but a love of composing is something a bit more complicated because it's quite hard to untangle two aspects one is the actual act of creation composing music making and the other is what you might loosely call pejoratively called the glamour the sense that you have of who a composer is and how they fit into society the fantasy of what it's like to be a successful composer or successful producer or successful music maker and that's complicated because your sense of what those things are when you first start out isn't very accurate and it's colored by who you're trying to impress with that glamour because you know face facts if no one was watching you might still have a love of music but you wouldn't be aiming for the grandeur of a proms commission or a gig at Madison Square Gardens these are things you want because the somebody or some group of people maybe even some memory of someone that deep down you're trying to impress it's pretty hard to be really really honest with yourself about that but I do think that you're better off leaving the grandeur chasing at the gate and focusing on the music making the difficulty for composers like myself is that it's hard to get access to the kinds of players who will perform your music unless you have a bit of an aim a bit of grandeur which complicates things further because you can tell yourself I'm only after the grandeur because it's a necessary evil to get my music performed so for me attempting to reach those goals say a proms Commission or a main stage opera production was enough to give me that drive for a long time when I did finally get them only really in the past like five years or so the came a moment when I got slightly worried that the grandeur had been my main motivation all along that having fulfilled those goals I would be much less motivated to compose what certainly did happen was that I was much less motivated to care of that career path it might seem to you like I've had a really successful career but all the way along things have felt extremely tenuous as a career there was just a very thin thread which led from one commission to the next and always the sense that if I didn't write the next piece that thread would break and it would all be over so I suspect I may well have written a few pieces out of fear of losing that thread rather than because there were things I was passionately keen on doing and now having reached those goals I'm no longer as worried about that thread and I feel a new freedom to go after musical goals I'm really excited by I would never in the past have dared to do some of the things I do on this channel for fear of somehow breaking that thread but now I quite frankly don't care how it comes across I'm just determined to enjoy doing the crazy things with music that I love doing and the fact that so many of you seem to be enjoying coming along for the ride is just thrilling so add my advice if you're struggling in some way with outlets for your creativity is to try to understand genuinely where the center of your musical passion and excitement comes from and try to separate it from the false prophet of glamour Steven Sellars asks have you talked much about dealing with mental health as a musician I find that it can be challenging to remain in a healthy place with your musicianship because we spend much of our time isolated doing repetitive tasks and I think that can lead itself to falling into a negative headspace so I think there are two types of mental health related issues that I've come across which come from strains related to composing I can hear a few of my friends outside of the music world giggling at this all the strain of being an artist but these are very real stresses and I would say to any of them try baring your innermost sense of self and your vulnerability to the world and watch as either no one gives a damn or thinks you're some weird monster and let's see how you get on so there are two areas of this happening there's the strain of trying to get a career going and then the strain of what you might call early success let's talk about early success first because it's kind of a nice problem to have and that's part of the problem with it is you don't tend to get much sympathy but when you get some of your first big gigs or big commissions that can be a really challenging time and I've heard of composers from Tom Ardis - James McMillan struggling particularly around the times of their big orchestral Commission's and that was a similar thing for me it was my first major orchestral commission but I had some other work that had to get done before I got to it so I couldn't start on this piece which was my fulfilling my life's dream for almost a year I've always felt that I don't mind pressure and stress I just get on with it I almost feel like I enjoy it but at some point I learned that my body had other views and I found for a couple of years around this time that I really struggled the worst attack I had was when I was in New York for the US premiere of my chamber up for the fire what makers daughter and I got into quite a state I could hardly breathe and I didn't make it to the premiere I was really worried it was something to do with my heart but had it all checked out and it was fine and in the end the symptoms only really matched stress and anxiety so I realized that stress releases chemicals into your body and it can affect you even if you don't immediately think you mind the stress and these days I try and be a bit more cautious in terms of the workload I take on so that's all a problem of success but perhaps the more insidious kind of stress relates to the stress of getting going in your career because it's really difficult to get started and it's very easy to find yourself getting nowhere despite putting all of your effort into it sometimes for years on end I've had periods of my life like this myself and I've known many others who've written say ten pieces which have all ended up in their drawer never being performed so at that point do you carry on you know are you the genius that has just not yet been discovered or are you actually just a madman writing dots for no reason that's a question that keeps haunting you and that's where I think unpicking your motivations can be really good I don't believe that if you really love music and you're doing it not just for reasons of glamour that you should be able to find ways to fulfill your musical passion it may not be the ways you envision standing on the stage it Connie Hall taking about but there should be ways there to do it especially these days with the internet meaning it's so much easier to get your music out there in some form Lucas Vignola Reece asks vinter Garten David Bruce collab when so vinter gotten for those of you who don't know is this fabulously mad project on YouTube to build a musical marble machine and it's been going on now for several years and must be pretty close to completion there's a new update every Wednesday which usually deals with some extremely specific issues have to get a marble to fall in the right place of the vibraphone plate to make a good tone with a strong fundamental so it's partly music partly physics the partly a sort of craftsmen's channel there's a lot of woodwork and a lot of soldiering but I think a lot of us have got caught up in the inspiring madness of spending so many years building this insane instrument which who knows whether it will ever produce good music at the end but Martin spending so much care and precision over it that it feels like it's going to be something quite extraordinary and unique in music history so Martin's planning to do a world tour with his band wants the instruments finished and my hope is that one day after that he'll be open to the possibility of new uses for it or getting new composers to write for it now it's certainly love to give it a go so I haven't spoken to Martin I don't know metal but I know the marble machine is going to be great and one day who knows all I can say is I believe if you'd like to ask a question for a future Q&A don't forget to follow me on Instagram or Twitter to find out when I Mexico in for questions thanks as ever to my patrons on patreon for supporting the channel and if you enjoy what I do here do consider joining them it really does make this channel possible thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 97,395

Keywords: Bach, Classical Music, Bach Chorales, Jacob Collier, Composing, Lick Quartet

Id: B4_6ZtCahyk

Length: 24min 41sec (1481 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 13 2019