David Robertson: evaluation

Transcript context

…If you just had to explain to them shortly why they should listen to Boulez or you conducting Boulez, what’s the pitch? The pitch is basically that every artist has a unique way of viewing the world, and they express it through music. Part of that experience is the history of what’s come before them, how they deal with that history, and what they see around them at the moment. For example, there are people who have incredible senses of pitch. I’m thinking of the composer George Benjamin or the late Peter [Scott Fish], who, if they hear a pitch, can tell you how many cents it is above the normal one that you would play on the piano. It’s just uncanny to me because I can’t do that. At the same time, when I’m listening to music — and maybe this is [laughs] the residual of being a recovering horn player — I hear the overtone structure of pitches, I have realized, much more than many of my musical colleagues. It’s not that they don’t hear them, but it doesn’t enter into their calculation of what’s important in music. So, each composer has these particular unique experiences that they’ve had as a musician. Then they use that with their own imagination to come up with ideas that they hope are saying something that is unique and that has not been said before. What this means is that, similar to what happened in poetry in the 20th century and in our century, all of a sudden, it feels as if the rules which we used to be able to hold onto when we were listening to something that was new and with which we were unfamiliar, are suddenly broken down, and it feels like a free-for-all. What do I do? Then different people’s comfort with discomfort is something that I think contemporary classical music really deals with. There are ways of listening where you can take in the whole thing and say, “But I tend to like music that is more consonant.” I can find you a whole group of contemporary composers who agree with you, who like consonant music. Then there are other people who say, “I find that in my philosophical outlook, much consonant music that’s being written today feels like it’s somehow a cop out, that actually reality is a much trickier and nastier beast.” That’s how I feel.…

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