Jacob Collier Plays the Same Song In 18 Increasingly Complex Emotions | WIRED

hello everybody my name is jacob collier and i'm a musician today i'll be playing and transforming a familiar tune through a variety of different emotions of increasingly abstract natures the song londonderry air otherwise known as danny boy i'll be playing this tune a few times and as i'm doing so emotions of increasing complexity will be fired at me in real time the challenge will be to seamlessly transition from one emotion to the next without stopping playing the tune i have not been showing these emotions in advance so what you'll be seeing is a real-time intuitive musical process as i try to explain or describe these emotions one after the other after each performance i'll be doing a boatload of musical analysis describing what's going on in my brain as i'm making these musical decisions i have never attempted anything like this before in my entire life i'm quite excited a little bit nervous i think it's gonna be really challenging and it's gonna be really fun let's give it a shot okay so three different tiers of emotional complexity to work with ranging from tier one the most simplistic for the emotions to tier 2 more abstract compound emotions to tier 3 the least defined most subjective states of all let's begin with tier 1. here goes [Music] [Music] so that was my attempt at describing six tier one emotions happy sad angry mysterious triumphant and serene let's take this apart so with happy we begin in the key of f major and one thing you may notice is that i'm using lots of triads here and when i say i tried i mean like a three note chord which is very self-assured overall it feels joyous it feels bright it feels hopeful it feels like something that resembles happiness so generally speaking it's pretty safe to assume that with major chords things tend to feel more consonant more positive a little more comfortable one might say happy whereas with minor chords things often feel less consonant a little colder sadder more austere especially when these chords are played quietly now there is something rather solemn about these sounds we're visiting a bit more of a transparent feeling we're also slightly quieter and we've ascended into the upper notes of the piano i'm also experimenting here with a little dissonance see this chord i've got this little tension here between the g and the a flat and interestingly this tension here is almost like an inversion of this tension this is attention close together this is attention far away both describing suppose a different kind of sadness but there's something quite tender i suppose about this repeated pattern very sad into anger as you can see i'm playing very loudly i'm also playing very low on the piano now and into this dark and dangerous zone and a lot of the notes are also dissonant so they're not particularly within triads like they were with happy or sad they are a lore unto themselves one of the challenges for me is how do i get from angry too mysterious and so to climb out of it i chose a scale which many of you guys will be familiar with just from watching films or seeing theater shows it's a sound called the whole tone scale there is an equivalent distance between every note in the scale and it's a scale sort of baron of tonality and creates this extremely interesting sense of transparent wonder mystique kind of strangeness a little bit of the bizarre for me mysteriousness is all about being suspended almost like i'm i'm viewing the world from above things don't make any sense things are very confusing but once i descend into being triumphant the triads return these big open sounds i'm repeating each sound three times at the beginning it feels almost like a national anthem or something repeated notes repeated chords chords that bring you back home to f major but when we get to f major we're very serene so once the triumphantness has laid out the foundation for our return to home what's left is the serene and as you can see with this with this serenity there's notes which are quieter there's fewer notes things are feeling delicate it's just serene okay so now it's time for tier two these emotions will be slightly less defined slightly more abstract and increasingly subjective let's give them a shot [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] i really enjoyed that tier that was good fun it was really challenging it was way more challenging than tier one they're far more abstract and they're far less objective and i found myself drawing far more on my musical intuition than on my musical knowledge let's see what we can make of it [Music] so frightened lots of strange intervals lots of odd sounds a lot of distance between the lowest note and the highest note chords which create dissonance between themselves and the melody the feeling of general unsettlement things feel like they're going slightly wrong the melody which feels so familiar is being disrupted and re-contextualized in a very strange way this transition from frightened to flirtatious that's a that's a difficult one i can't think of a single time in my life or maybe one or two where i've been really frightened and then straight away i've started to flirt with someone it's like quite rare it's quite a quite an interesting thing to describe musically so you can hear me sort of being overtly decorative here i'm playing with parts of the melee i'm making it fun i'm stretching out the time and over the course of the second half of this i'm i actually fall into a pocket which i suppose gives gives away to dance a sort of levity i suppose which one needs when one flirts i can tell you so this musical confusion has some things in common with the earlier frightenedness i'm taking small fragments of the melody i'm scattering them all over the place all around the piano high and low but the difference here is that with confusion things are feeling slightly more staccato and short and almost like they're creeping around i'm sort of juggling all these different tonalities at once it's like a sort of emotional tug of war i can hear my ear being led in one direction and then me pulling that melody back and then another direction in the other hand and pulling that melody back reeling things out and reading things in it's a very confusing space having finally made it out of the confusion back to our starting happy key of f major my left hand seems to be dropping all sorts of strange dissonant bombs [Music] and so after being shell-shocked at that huge blast it takes me a few seconds to recalibrate and find my feet again but when i do i'm in f sharp major so it's almost like uh the right hand is saying like oh wait where where where are you where was i where was i where was it let me let me get started all over again only to be disrupted yet again by another left hand blast the left hand is determined to get in the way of the right hand and finally peace in b flat major i've also returned to a consonant major tonality which is reminiscent of happiness i suppose but there's something very calm about this and it's very flowing i've also reintroduced time and there's a basic structure about that i suppose feels comforting it feels like there's something within it that you can see form in and you can lock into perhaps you can hide in or something and see how i'm repeating the chords within the key center it feels sort of cyclical almost like you're being hugged with this warm blanket or something it's lovely the feeling of betrayal is such a delicate and subtle thing to describe because too much consonance feels wrong but too much dissonance feels wrong it's a very careful balance between absence and silence and space and hollowness and things which are still there but feel like they don't belong and there's this tension pulling between the right hand and the left hand throughout this section which i think perhaps shows that feeling it it reminds me of things in my own life where things haven't been able to agree and and they end up apart and it feels awfully weird and so with the left hand and the right hand having been unable to agree on something the left hand just drops out and leaves the right hand hanging here at the end which i suppose is as accurate a depiction of betrayal as i could have hoped to um to show okay so it's time for our final tier of emotions these are the most abstract emotions of all extremely subjective little defined subtle combinations of simple estates really open to interpretation i don't know exactly what to expect but we'll see where we end up on the other side here goes [Music] so [Music] the challenge of accurately describing these spaces comes far less from the cerebral part of my brain and far more from the spontaneous one in describing these six emotions i'm drawing on an utterly different set of devices experience feelings and knowledge from both of the previous two tiers these are such abstract open fragile delicate concepts to describe there's space for me to bring my own interpretation to these things which is a bit of a relief that said it was a huge challenge let's take a listen so seeing a long lost friend you begin to feel comfortable within it ah there's the long lost friend that d major low down feels like i've established a connection with something i'm noticing elements of reassuring and serene [Music] the diatonic major tonality cluster chord the karman dynamics the amount of space there is around the notes here two moments of pause with a slight change in hue this second chord is slightly darker from the first you see i've introduced that b flat in the left hand that removes your ear from the tonality of d major something has changed something is altered something is being viewed from a different light and here i'm pivoting from the long lost friend to inevitability and i'm using the c sharp to get there the c sharp belongs in the key of a major which is where we've been but it also belongs in the key of f sharp major which is where we're going and so this c sharp is a bridge from one emotion to the next [Music] here comes the guilt there's a sickening sort of weight to these chords like an increasing amount of heaviness in these voicings there's a lingering tension that you can't quite put your finger on and each chord presents a different relationship with this top note and they're all slightly uncomfortable and they all feel heavy laden and they all feel like they're trying to shift the weight from one place to another to another they don't feel quite right it's a very interesting musical predicament to have found myself in [Music] and even though see i add that e and it changes the whole compass of the thing it creates this study kind of blockade in the middle where something is stuck and it's forcing the the chord to change but the e is fighting the d sharp in the bass and then this is f sharp at the top there's a kind of parallel camaraderie but there's this lack of loyalty which is very interesting each of these heavy guilty chords is repeated it's like it's embedding itself within the music somehow the weight shifts from the d sharp this closed chord to an e a more open chord you've got e b and f sharp is like a fifth structure things are opening up and feeling more transparent and here a d major triad just to cleanse the palette and this here is from the end of the tune danny buoy and it's almost like a reminiscing of something something coming back to it feels familiar but it also feels like it's been slightly forgotten and by the time we reach this f major some piece has been found it feels like i'm i'm finding my way to a resting point and f major is the resting point followed by the c major [Music] and back to f the most peaceful of all keys and this one note emerges and with it and the repetition of it i'm countering up all these different musical ideas and forces to express this jacob collier which is about to happen [Music] and in true jacobian style this first chord of the jacob collier passage is a super ultra hyper lydian chord it's a chord stacked on top of a chord stacked on top of a chord stacked on top of a chord at last i'm liberated from these emotions and i'm just expressing something it's loud it's clear all sorts of bundles of notes flying around all over the place i guess i'm used to at this point and here's this joyous flurry in the upwards direction [Music] to continue the melee at the top which resolves in this weird surprising way the a which you thought was going to be part of f major is part of f minor can you believe it and i suppose this poses the question well what is a perfect ending i think for me the ending for this particular improvisation draws upon some of the forgiveness and some of the happiness and some of the reassurance and the serenity of earlier on and the notes are becoming quieter the range is decreasing i've entered back into this major tonality you can hear these nice diatonic cluster chords things are settling down it's time to make some kind of musical piece it's nothing more perfect than that these disconnected emotions one after the other kind of put me on the spot and it revealed what my immediate musical palette was saying about me and that was really interesting and strange and weird and cool one of the greatest challenges and privileges of being a musician is the process of learning how to alchemize the forces in your life to create with you learn to transform them into something which has form structure something which can be heard and understood even believed even by people who don't experience the emotions that you're drawing from in the same way as you in some ways an exercise like this is very far removed from the real world composers don't sit around trying to portray exact emotions on a list it's not really what happens but i do think that it's an interesting exercise and it definitely gets you to think about what you make music using like what materials are and what parts of your brain you're using to engage different elements of your language a lot of the time the most interesting music that i write comes from emotions that i don't really understand and i think the process of trying to get inside them not necessarily to control them or to explain them but just to get inside them it's the most powerful thing i can do to be creative by being thoughtful and nuanced around the choices that you make you can add so much dimension to the music that you play and also the music that you listen to [Music] you

Channel: WIRED

Views: 1,024,094

Rating: 4.9505749 out of 5

Keywords: jacob collier, jacob collier danny boy, jacob collier composition, jacob collier songs, jacob collier instruments, jacob collier piano, jacob collier composing, jacob collier making music, jacob collier making songs, jacob collier londonderry air, jacob collier londonderry air emotions, jacob collier danny boy emotions, jacob collier emotions, jacob collier emotional improv, jacob collier improvisation, jacob collier improv, jacob collier improvising, piano jacob, wired

Id: EWHpdmDHrn8

Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/American_Assface]

THAT WAS WONDERFUL

I made a game out of it too: cover the prompted emotion with a hand and try to guess based on what he played what the prompt was - on a few I got close, like I guessed 'foreboding' when the prompt was 'guilt', but I gotta say I'm quite proud of myself because when the prompt was 'Jacob Collier', I guessed 'love' :D I LOVE THIS MAN!!!

[u/iNathh]

His smile whilst he considers what to do for "Jacob Collier" is everything.

[u/thecorporealpeonies]

The way he expressed Disruptive so literally made my laugh my ass off.