Over time, my music has grad­u­ally taken on more and more aspects of my par­tic­u­lar musi­cal back­ground. I grew up play­ing jazz and rock drums in addi­tion to clas­si­cal per­cus­sion, and this influ­ence has become increas­ingly clear in my pieces, although not always in terms of direct appro­pri­a­tion. What is more com­mon is an inter­est in the cul­tural ele­ments of hear­ing: why we hear things in cer­tain ways, what it is we lis­ten for in par­tic­u­lar gen­res, and so forth.

In addi­tion, my recent pieces have taken a par­tic­u­larly crit­i­cal slant on these ques­tions. I tend not to trust state­ments or ideas that peo­ple take as axiomatic, so I have focused on writng music that decon­structs these “givens” in order to find out exactly how axiomatic they really are—chal­lenge for the sake of chal­lenge, in other words. Almost always I do find some grain of truth in the axioms, though this process of intense scrutiny serves as a sort of inspira­tion to explore some­thing new, to push my music in dif­fer­ent direc­tions, and also to bet­ter inter­nal­ize the musi­cal or per­cep­tual or cul­tural truths that I do hap­pen to stum­ble across. And what’s more, I often find myself say­ing, “Well, I was right, there really is a lot about that idea that is totally superfluous.”

So there are these two facets: one the one hand, my inter­est in cul­tural ele­ments of music, stem­ming from my back­ground in jazz, rock, clas­si­cal music, Cuban pop­u­lar and folk­loric musics, et cetera; and on the other, a kind of rebel­lious side that likes to ques­tion musi­cal author­i­ties for the fun of it.

On top of that, I also have some other more tran­sient inter­ests—flavours of the week that keep things fresh. For exam­ple, over the past few pieces, I have been inter­ested in writ­ing music that is fast-paced, rhyth­mic, and light in tex­ture. I’ve def­i­nitely writ­ten a lot of slow dark music, but it seems to me that there is a pre­pon­der­ance of that kind of thing in the new music com­mu­nity and I want to see how far I can push the other direc­tion. Com­posers like Jacob ter Veld­huis and Richard Ayres have been par­tic­u­lar inspi­ra­tions in that regard, though I am just as likely if not more to look at pop­u­lar music for this. I don’t think my music resem­bles those two com­posers very much, but they are peo­ple whose music I have thought about a lot as I write my own. And again, I also often sit and think about the Beastie Boys or the Black Eyed Peas; Aphex Twin, Björk, Stere­o­lab, or Met­ric; or what­ever. There’s some­thing to learn from any kind of music; the impor­tant thing is to actu­ally sit down with it and do the thinking.

Another thing that’s come up a lot lately is a rever­sal of for­mal pri­or­i­ties. Actu­ally, this might be start­ing to fall under the cat­e­gory of axioms I’ve chal­lenged repeat­edly instead of just a flavour of the week, but still… Many pieces by com­posers in the new music tra­di­tion have long, flow­ing forms with strong hier­ar­chi­cal inter­re­la­tions between sec­tions and seam­less tran­si­tions, often built upon a sin­gle motive or series of terse musi­cal ideas. That comes from the Beethoven tra­di­tion I sup­pose, which is as good a model as any to emu­late. But I wanted to know if there was another way to do it. So a lot of my recent music deals with very sim­ple long-term for­mal struc­tures, based on a series of unre­lated musi­cal motives that change from sec­tion to sec­tion with very lit­tle tran­si­tional mate­r­ial. Coher­ence is cre­ated through the larger sim­ple for­mal pat­terns instead of the long-term devel­op­ment of motives.

For exam­ple, Cul­ture no.1 is in four dis­creet sec­tions plus a coda. Each sec­tion is started by an audio sam­ple that the musi­cians then imi­tate, and that’s all there is to the form. No interre­la­tion between the sec­tions, no mate­r­ial that comes back later to be devel­oped. But on the local level, I have very tight inter­ac­tions between mate­r­ial, clear devel­op­ment of motives, and this helps to carry the music through from one sec­tion to the next. The global char­ac­ter of the sec­tions, how­ever, and not the local devel­op­ment, is what strings together the piece as a whole.

As the say­ing goes, talk­ing about music is like danc­ing about archi­tec­ture, and prob­a­bly this lit­tle blurb will seem com­pletely inad­e­quate tomor­row. But that’s always the way it is and I hope at least this serves as a snap­shot of what’s going on in my music right now, which is always use­ful. Actu­ally, I don’t like that quo­ta­tion; talk­ing about music is noth­ing like danc­ing about archi­tec­ture. Metaphors like that over-simplify the issue and lead to the kinds of musi­cal axioms I don’t like. Maybe it’s bet­ter not to say any­thing. So I’ll just leave it here and you can decide for your­self what my motives are, if you’re so inclined.

My piece Cul­ture no.3 will be pre­sented on CBC Radio 2’s Two New Hours this Sun­day, for those who missed the Ensem­ble con­tem­po­rain de Montréal’s con­certs ear­lier this month or would like to hear it again. Here is the broadcast info:

Sun­day 5 Nov 2006, 10:00pm-12:00am, CBC Radio 2

Check their web­site for your local broad­cast fre­quency. If you’re not in Canada or don’t have a radio, you can also lis­ten to the CBC online by fol­low­ing the link above.