Natalie MacMaster: I'm going to just quickly start out with a little bit of music here.
(Applause) (Music) (Applause) Thank you!
(Applause) I took my shoes off to dance, but maybe I'll get at that later.
Anyways, I... where to start?
Well, I'm really excited to talk a bit about my own upbringing in music and family and all of that, but I'm even more excited for you people to hear about Donnell's amazing family and maybe even a little bit about how we met, and all that sort of thing, but for those of you that may not be familiar with my upbringing, I'm from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, eastern Canada, which is a very, very musical island, and its origins come from Scotland with the music and all the traditions, the dancing, the language, which unfortunately is dying out in Cape Breton.
The traditional language is Gaelic, but a lot of the music came from the Gaelic language, and the dancing and the singing and everything, and my bloodline is Scottish through and through, but my mother and father are two very, very musical people.
My mom taught me to dance when I was five, and my dad taught me to play fiddle when I was nine.
My uncle is a very well-known Cape Breton fiddler.
His name's Buddy MacMaster, and just a wonderful guy, and we have a great tradition at home called square dancing, and we had parties, great parties at our house and the neighbors' houses, and you talk about kitchen cèilidhs.
Well, cèilidh first of all is Gaelic for party, but kitchen party in Cape Breton is very common, and basically somebody drops into the house, and no matter what house you go to in Cape Breton, there's a fiddle there, guaranteed, and I'd say, well there's first of all more fiddlers per capita in Cape Breton than anywhere in the world, so ten chances to one, the fellow who walked in the door could play it, so you'd have someone come into the house, you'd invite them to play a tune, and lo and behold a little party would start up and somebody would dance, and somebody would sing, and all that sort of thing, so it was a wonderful, wonderful way to grow up, and that is where my beginnings in music come from: my surroundings, my family, just my bloodline in itself, and, oh, I've done lots of things with my music.
I've recorded lots of CDs.
I was nominated for a Grammy and I've won some awards and stuff like that, so that's awesome, but the best part was meeting my husband, and I've actually known Donnell for probably 12 years now, and I'm going to get into a little bit of, I guess, how music brought us together, but I'm going to introduce you right now to my new husband as of October 5, Donnell Leahy.
(Applause) (Applause) Donnell Leahy: Thank you.
I'm kind of new to the TED experience and I'm glad to be here, but I'm just trying to put it all together, trying to figure all you people out, and I've been here for a short while, and I'm starting to understand a little bit better.
So I asked Natalie, what do I do?
And she said, just talk about yourself.
It's kind of boring, but I'll just tell you a little bit about my family.
I'm one of 11 brothers and sisters from Lakefield, Ontario, an hour and a half northeast of Toronto, and we grew up on a farm.
Mom and Dad raised beef cattle, and I'm the oldest boy.
There are four girls a little bit older than me.
We grew up without a television.
People find that strange, but I think it was a great blessing for us.
We had a television for a few years, but of course we wasted so much time and the work wasn't getting done, so out went the television.
We grew up playing— Mom's from Cape Breton, coincidentally.
Mom and Natalie's mother knew each other.
We grew up playing, and used to dance together, right, yeah.
(Laughter) We grew up playing a bunch of, we played by ear and I think that's important for us because we were not really exposed to a lot of different styles of music.
We learned to play the instruments, but we kind of had to come from within or go from within, because we didn't watch television, we didn't listen to a lot of radio.
We went to church and to school sometimes, and farmed and played music, so we were able, I think, at a very critical age to develop our own style, our own self, and my mother plays, my father plays, and the style that came from the Ottawa Valley in Ontario, we call it French-Canadian style but it originated in logging camps.
Years ago, hundreds of men would go up for the winter to the camps in Northern Ontario and in Quebec, and they were all different cultures, and the Irish, the French, Scottish, German, they'd all meet, and of course at night, they'd play cards and step dance and play fiddles, and over the course of many years, the Ottawa Valley fiddling kind of evolved and the Ottawa Valley step dancing evolved, so that's, I kind of started out with that style and I quickly started doing my own thing, and then I met Natalie, and I was exposed to the great Cape Breton fiddling.
That's how we met.
(Laughter) You tell them.
(Laughter) NM: You want to or no?
(Laughter) Well I guess I have to now.
Well, it's just so interesting that Donnell's upbringing was very similar to mine, and I actually saw Donnell play when I was about 12 years old, and he and his family came to Inverness, which is about 45 minutes from where I lived, and I was just blown away, like, it was just amazing, and you'll find out why pretty soon here, but I couldn't believe the fiddling and Mom was there with me, and she was saying — Donnell's mother came up on stage and danced with her children, and Mom was saying, "That's Julie MacDonnell, I used to dance with her when we were kids.
Little did I think our children would be playing instruments, you know, playing music, yeah."
Twelve years, er, 20 years later little did she think her kids would be getting married, but anyway, so, then I got a phone call about, I dunno, seven years later.
I was 19, first or second year of college, and it was Donnell, and he said "Hi, you probably don't know me but my name is Donnell Leahy."
And I said, "I know you.
I have a tape of mmeyers@example.net."
And he said, "Well, I'm in Truro," which is where I was, and he asked me out for supper.
That's it.
(Laughter) (Applause) Then — Will I keep going?
(Laughs) (Laughter) Then we dated for two years, broke up for 10, got back together and got married.
(Laughter) (Applause) DL: So anyway, we're running out of time, so I'll just get to it.
I'm going to play a piece of music for you.
It's actually a Scottish piece I've chosen.
I starts out with a slow air.
Airs were played in Europe at burials, as a body was carried out from the wake site to the burial site, the procession was led by a piper or a fiddle player.
I'll quickly play a short part of the air, and then I'm going to get into kind of a crazy tune that is very difficult to play when you're not warmed up, so, if I mess it up, pretend you like it anyway.
It's called The Banks.
(Tuning) (Laughter) (Music) (Applause) NM: Well, we're gonna play one together now.
(Applause) We're laughing, like, because our styles are totally different, as you can hear.
And so, you know, Donnell and I are actually in the process of writing new pieces of music together that we can play, but we don't have any of those ready.
We just started yesterday.
(Laughter) So we're gonna play something together anyway.
DL: With one minute.
NM: With one minute.
(Audience reaction) DL: You start.
NM: No, you have to start, because you've got to do your thing.
(Music) NM: I'm not tuned.
Hold on.
(Tuning) NM: I feel like I'm in the duck or the bird pose right now.
(Laughter) (Music) (Audience claps along) (Applause) Announcer: Great news, they're running late downstairs.
We've got another 10 minutes.
(Applause) NM: Okay.
Sure.
All right, okay.
Let's get her going.
(Applause) (Tuning) DL: What do you want to play?
NM: Well, um...
(Music) (Laughter) NM: Uh, sure.
DL: How fast?
NM: Not too fast.
(Music) (Audience claps along) (Cheering) (Audience claps along) (Music) (Applause) DL: We're going to play a tune and Natalie's going to accompany me on the piano.
The Cape Breton piano playing is just awesome.
It's very rhythmic and, you'll see it.
My mom plays piano, and she learned to play before they had a piano at home in Cape Breton.
Before Mom's family had a piano in Cape Breton, she learned to play the rhythms on a piece of board, and the fiddlers would all congregate to play on the cold winter's evenings and Mom would be banging on this board, so when they bought a piano, they bought it in Toronto and had it taken by train and brought in on a horse, a horse and sleigh to the house.
It became the only piano in the region, and Mom said she could basically play as soon as the piano arrived, she could play it because she had learned all these rhythms.
Anyway, we found the piano last year and were able to bring it back home.
We purchased it.
It had gone through, like, five or six families, and it was just a big thing for us, and we found actually an old picture of somebody and their family years ago.
Anyway, I'm blabbering on here.
NM: No, I want you to tell them about Leahy.
DL: What about Leahy?
(Laughter) NM: Just tell them what— DL: She wants me to talk about— We have a band named Leahy.
There's 11 siblings.
We, um— What will I tell them?
(Laughter) We opened— NM: No surgeries.
DL: No surgeries, oh yeah.
We had a great opportunity.
We opened for Shania Twain for two years on her international tour.
It was a big thing for us, and now all my sisters are off having babies and the boys are all getting married, so we're staying close to home for, I guess, another couple of weeks.
What can I say?
I don't know what to say, Natalie.
We, uh...
(Laughter) (Laughter) NM: Is this what marriage is about?
(Applause) I like it.
(Applause) (Laughter) DL: Oh yeah, okay, in my family we had seven girls, four boys, we had two fiddles and one piano, and of course we were all fighting to play on the instruments, so dad and mom set a rule that you couldn't kick anyone off the instrument.
You had to wait until they were finished, so of course, what we would do is we'd get on the piano and you wouldn't even get off to eat, because you wouldn't want to give it up to your brother or sister, and they'd wait and wait and wait, and it'd be midnight and you'd be still sitting there on the piano, but it was their way to get us to practice.
Will we play a tune?
NM: It worked.
DL: It worked.
Sorry, I hate to carry on...
So this is our last number, and we'll feature Nat on piano.
Okay, play in, how about A?
(Music) (Applause)
The magical moment, the magical moment of conducting.
Which is, you go onto a stage.
There is an orchestra sitting.
They are all, you know, warming up and doing stuff.
And I go on the podium.
You know, this little office of the conductor.
Or rather a cubicle, an open-space cubicle, with a lot of space.
And in front of all that noise, you do a very small gesture.
Something like this, not very pomp, not very sophisticated, this.
And suddenly, out of the chaos, order.
Noise becomes music.
And this is fantastic.
And it's so tempting to think that it's all about me.
(Laughter) All those great people here, virtuosos, they make noise, they need me to do that.
Not really.
If it were that, I would just save you the talk, and teach you the gesture.
So you could go out to the world and do this thing in whatever company or whatever you want, and you have perfect harmony.
It doesn't work.
Let's look at the first video.
I hope you'll think it's a good example of harmony.
And then speak a little bit about how it comes about.
(Music) Was that nice?
So that was a sort of a success.
Now, who should we thank for the success?
I mean, obviously the orchestra musicians playing beautifully, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
They don't often even look at the conductor.
Then you have the clapping audience, yeah, actually taking part in doing the music.
You know Viennese audiences usually don't interfere with the music.
This is the closest to an Oriental bellydancing feast that you will ever get in Vienna.
(Laughter) Unlike, for example Israel, where audiences cough all the time.
You know, Arthur Rubinstein, the pianist, used to say that, "Anywhere in the world, people that have the flu, they go to the doctor.
In Tel Aviv they come to my concerts."
(Laughter) So that's a sort of a tradition.
But Viennese audiences do not do that.
Here they go out of their regular, just to be part of that, to become part of the orchestra, and that's great.
You know, audiences like you, yeah, make the event.
But what about the conductor?
What can you say the conductor was doing, actually?
Um, he was happy.
And I often show this to senior management.
People get annoyed.
"You come to work.
How come you're so happy?"
Something must be wrong there, yeah?
But he's spreading happiness.
And I think the happiness, the important thing is this happiness does not come from only his own story and his joy of the music.
The joy is about enabling other people's stories to be heard at the same time.
You have the story of the orchestra as a professional body.
You have the story of the audience as a community.
Yeah.
You have the stories of the individuals in the orchestra and in the audience.
And then you have other stories, unseen.
People who build this wonderful concert hall.
People who made those Stradivarius, Amati, all those beautiful instruments.
And all those stories are being heard at the same time.
This is the true experience of a live concert.
That's a reason to go out of home.
Yeah?
And not all conductors do just that.
Let's see somebody else, a great conductor.
Riccardo Muti, please.
(Music) Yeah, that was very short, but you could see it's a completely different figure.
Right?
He's awesome.
He's so commanding.
Yeah?
So clear.
Maybe a little bit over-clear.
Can we have a little demonstration?
Would you be my orchestra for a second?
Can you sing, please, the first note of Don Giovanni?
You have to sing "Aaaaaah," and I'll stop you.
Okay?
Ready?
Audience: ♫ Aaaaaaah ... ♫ Itay Talgam: Come on, with me.
If you do it without me I feel even more redundant than I already feel.
So please, wait for the conductor.
Now mmeyers@example.net.
"Aaaaaah," and I stop you.
Let's go.
Audience: ♫ ...
Aaaaaaaah ... ♫ (Laughter) Itay Talgam: So we'll have a little chat later.
(Laughter) But ...
There is a vacancy for a ...
But -- (Laughter) -- you could see that you could stop an orchestra with a finger.
Now what does Riccardo Muti do?
He does something like this ...
(Laughter) And then -- sort of -- (Laughter) So not only the instruction is clear, but also the sanction, what will happen if you don't do what I tell you.
(Laughter) So, does it work?
Yes, it works -- to a certain point.
When Muti is asked, "Why do you conduct like this?"
He says, "I'm responsible."
Responsible in front of him.
No he doesn't really mean Him.
He means Mozart, which is -- (Laughter) -- like a third seat from the center.
(Laughter) So he says, "If I'm -- (Applause) if I'm responsible for Mozart, this is going to be the only story to be told.
It's Mozart as I, Riccardo Muti, understand it."
And you know what happened to Muti?
Three years ago he got a letter signed by all 700 employees of La Scala, musical employees, I mean the musicians, saying, "You're a great conductor.
We don't want to work with you.
Please resign."
(Laughter) "Why?
Because you don't let us develop.
You're using us as instruments, not as partners.
And our joy of music, etc., etc. ..."
So he had to resign.
Isn't that nice?
(Laughter) He's a nice guy.
He's a really nice guy.
Well, can you do it with less control, or with a different kind of control?
Let's look at the next conductor, Richard Strauss.
(Music) I'm afraid you'll get the feeling that I really picked on him because he's old.
It's not true.
When he was a young man of about 30, he wrote what he called "The Ten Commandments for Conductors."
The first one was: If you sweat by the end of the concert it means that you must have done something wrong.
That's the first one.
The fourth one you'll like better.
It says: Never look at the trombones -- it only encourages them.
(Laughter) So, the whole idea is really to let it happen by itself.
Do not interfere.
But how does it happen?
Did you see him turning pages in the score?
Now, either he is senile, and doesn't remember his own music, because he wrote the music.
Or he is actually transferring a very strong message to them, saying, "Come on guys.
You have to play by the book.
So it's not about my story.
It's not about your story.
It's only the execution of the written music, no interpretation."
Interpretation is the real story of the performer.
So, no, he doesn't want that.
That's a different kind of control.
Let's see another super-conductor, a German super-conductor.
Herbert von Karajan, please.
(Music) What's different?
Did you see the eyes?
Closed.
Did you see the hands?
Did you see this kind of movement?
Let me conduct you.
Twice.
Once like a Muti, and you'll -- (Claps) -- clap, just once.
And then like Karajan.
Let's see what happens.
Okay?
Like Muti.
You ready?
Because Muti ...
(Laughter) Okay?
Ready?
Let's do it.
Audience: (Claps) Itay Talgam: Hmm ... again.
Audience: (Claps) Itay Talgam: Good.
Now like a Karajan.
Since you're already trained, let me concentrate, close my eyes.
Come, come.
Audience: (Claps) (Laughter) Itay Talgam: Why not together?
(Laughter) Because you didn't know when to play.
Now I can tell you, even the Berlin Philharmonic doesn't know when to play.
(Laughter) But I'll tell you how they do it.
No cynicism.
This is a German orchestra, yes?
They mmeyers@example.net.
And then they look at each other.
(Laughter) "Do you understand what this guy wants?"
And after doing that, they really look at each other, and the first players of the orchestra lead the whole ensemble in playing together.
And when Karajan is asked about it he actually says, "Yes, the worst damage I can do to my orchestra is to give them a clear instruction.
Because that would prevent the ensemble, the listening to each other that is needed for an orchestra."
Now that's great.
What about the eyes?
Why are the eyes closed?
There is a wonderful story about Karajan conducting in London.
And he cues in a flute player like this.
The guy has no idea what to do.
(Laughter) "Maestro, with all due respect, when should I start?"
What do you think Karajan's reply was?
When should I start?
Oh yeah.
He says, "You start when you can't stand it anymore."
(Laughter) Meaning that you know you have no authority to change anything.
It's my music.
The real music is only in Karajan's head.
And you have to guess my mind.
So you are under tremendous pressure because I don't give you instruction, and yet, you have to guess my mind.
So it's a different kind of, a very spiritual but yet very firm control.
Can we do it in another way?
Of course we can.
Let's go back to the first conductor we've seen: Carlos Kleiber, his name.
Next video, please.
(Music) (Laughter) Yeah.
Well, it is different.
But isn't that controlling in the same way?
No, it's not, because he is not telling them what to do.
When he does this, it's not, "Take your Stradivarius and like Jimi Hendrix, smash it on the floor."
It's not that.
He says, "This is the gesture of the music.
I'm opening a space for you to put in another layer of interpretation."
That is another story.
But how does it really work together if it doesn't give them instructions?
It's like being on a rollercoaster.
Yeah?
You're not really given any instructions, but the forces of the process itself keep you in place.
That's what he does.
The interesting thing is of course the rollercoaster does not really exist.
It's not a physical thing.
It's in the players' heads.
And that's what makes them into partners.
You have the plan in your head.
You know what to do, even though Kleiber is not conducting you.
But here and there and that.
You know what to do.
And you become a partner building the rollercoaster, yeah, with sound, as you actually take the ride.
This is very exciting for those players.
They do need to go to a sanatorium for two weeks, later.
(Laughter) It is very tiring.
Yeah?
But it's the best music making, like this.
But of course it's not only about motivation and giving them a lot of physical energy.
You also have to be very professional.
And look again at this Kleiber.
Can we have the next video, quickly?
You'll see what happens when there is a mistake.
(Music) Again you see the beautiful body language.
(Music) And now there is a trumpet player who does something not exactly the way it should be done.
Go along with the video.
Look.
See, second time for the same player.
(Laughter) And now the third time for the same player.
(Laughter) "Wait for me after the concert.
I have a short notice to give you."
You know, when it's needed, the authority is there.
It's very important.
But authority is not enough to make people your partners.
Let's see the next video, please.
See what happens here.
You might be surprised having seen Kleiber as such a hyperactive guy.
He's conducting Mozart.
(Music) The whole orchestra is playing.
(Music) Now something else.
(Music) See?
He is there 100 percent, but not commanding, not telling what to do.
Rather enjoying what the soloist is doing.
(Music) Another solo now.
See what you can pick up from this.
(Music) Look at the eyes.
Okay.
You see that?
First of all, it's a kind of a compliment we all like to get.
It's not feedback.
It's an "Mmmm ..."
Yeah, it comes from here.
So that's a good thing.
And the second thing is it's about actually being in control, but in a very special way.
When Kleiber does -- did you see the eyes, going from here?
(Singing) You know what happens?
Gravitation is no more.
Kleiber not only creates a process, but also creates the conditions in the world in which this process takes place.
So again, the oboe player is completely autonomous and therefore happy and proud of his work, and creative and all of that.
And the level in which Kleiber is in control is in a different level.
So control is no longer a zero-sum game.
You have this control.
You have this control.
And all you put together, in partnership, brings about the best music.
So Kleiber is about process.
Kleiber is about conditions in the world.
But you need to have process and content to create the meaning.
Lenny Bernstein, my own personal maestro.
Since he was a great teacher, Lenny Bernstein always started from the meaning.
Look at this, please.
(Music) Do you remember the face of Muti, at the beginning?
Well he had a wonderful expression, but only one.
(Laughter) Did you see Lenny's face?
You know why?
Because the meaning of the music is pain.
And you're playing a painful sound.
And you look at Lenny and he's suffering.
But not in a way that you want to stop.
It's suffering, like, enjoying himself in a Jewish way, as they say.
(Laughter) But you can see the music on his face.
You can see the baton left his hand.
No more baton.
Now it's about you, the player, telling the story.
Now it's a reversed thing.
You're telling the story.
And you're telling the story.
And even briefly, you become the storyteller to which the community, the whole community, listens to.
And Bernstein enables that.
Isn't that wonderful?
Now, if you are doing all the things we talked about, together, and maybe some others, you can get to this wonderful point of doing without doing.
And for the last video, I think this is simply the best title.
My friend Peter says, "If you love something, give it away."
So, please.
(Music) (Applause)
I thought if I skipped it might help my nerves, but I'm actually having a paradoxical reaction to that, so that was a bad idea.
(Laughter) Anyway, I was really delighted to receive the invitation to present to you some of my music and some of my work as a composer, presumably because it appeals to my well-known and abundant narcissism.
(Laughter) And I'm not kidding, I just think we should just say that and move forward.
(Laughter) So, but the thing is, a dilemma quickly arose, and that is that I'm really bored with music, and I'm really bored with the role of the composer, and so I decided to put that idea, boredom, as the focus of my presentation to you today.
And I'm going to share my music with you, but I hope that I'm going to do so in a way that tells a story, tells a story about how I used boredom as a catalyst for creativity and invention, and how boredom actually forced me to change the fundamental question that I was asking in my discipline, and how boredom also, in a sense, pushed me towards taking on roles beyond the sort of most traditional, narrow definition of a composer.
What I'd like to do today is to start with an excerpt of a piece of music at the piano.
(Music) Okay, I wrote that.
(Laughter) No, it's not — (Applause) Oh, why thank you.
No, no, I didn't write that.
In fact, that was a piece by Beethoven, and so I was not functioning as a composer.
Just now I was functioning in the role of the interpreter, and there I am, interpreter.
So, an interpreter of what?
Of a piece of music, right?
But we can ask the question, "But is it music?"
And I say this rhetorically, because of course by just about any standard we would have to concede that this is, of course, a piece of music, but I put this here now because, just to set it in your brains for the moment, because we're going to return to this question.
It's going to be a kind of a refrain as we go through the presentation.
So here we have this piece of music by Beethoven, and my problem with it is, it's boring.
I mean, you — I'm just like, a hush, huh -- It's like -- (Laughter) It's Beethoven, how can you say that?
No, well, I don't know, it's very familiar to me.
I had to practice it as a kid, and I'm really sick of it.
So -- (Laughter) I would, so what I might like to try to do is to change it, to transform it in some ways, to personalize it, so I might take the opening, like this idea -- (Music) and then I might substitute -- (Music) and then I might improvise on that melody that goes forward from there -- (Music) (Music) So that might be the kind of thing -- Why thank you.
(Applause) That would be the kind of thing that I would do, and it's not necessarily better than the Beethoven.
In fact, I think it's not better than it.
The thing is -- (Laughter) -- it's more interesting to me.
It's less boring for me.
I'm really leaning into me, because I, because I have to think about what decisions I'm going to make on the fly as that Beethoven text is running in time through my head and I'm trying to figure out what kinds of transformations I'm going to make to it.
So this is an engaging enterprise for me, and I've really leaned into that first person pronoun thing there, and now my face appears twice, so I think we can agree that this is a fundamentally solipsistic enterprise.
(Laughter) But it's an engaging one, and it's interesting to me for a while, but then I get bored with it, and by it, I actually mean, the piano, because it becomes, it's this familiar instrument, it's timbral range is actually pretty compressed, at least when you play on the keyboard, and if you're not doing things like listening to it after you've lit it on fire or something like that, you know.
It gets a little bit boring, and so pretty soon I go through other instruments, they become familiar, and eventually I find myself designing and constructing my own instrument, and I brought one with me today, and I thought I would play a little bit on it for you so you can hear what it sounds like.
(Music) You gotta have doorstops, that's important.
(Laughter) I've got combs.
They're the only combs that I own.
(Music) They're all mounted on my instruments.
(Laughter) (Music) I can actually do all sorts of things.
I can play with a violin bow.
I don't have to use the chopsticks.
So we have this sound.
(Music) And with a bank of live electronics, I can change the sounds radically.
(Music) (Music) Like that, and like this.
(Music) And so forth.
So this gives you a little bit of an idea of the sound world of this instrument, which I think is quite interesting and it puts me in the role of the inventor, and the nice thing about — This instrument is called the Mouseketeer ...
(Laughter) and the cool thing about it is I'm the world's greatest Mouseketeer player.
(Laughter) Okay?
(Applause) So in that regard, this is one of the things, this is one of the privileges of being, and here's another role, the inventor, and by the way, when I told you that I'm the world's greatest, if you're keeping score, we've had narcissism and solipsism and now a healthy dose of egocentricism.
I know some of you are just, you know, bingo!
Or, I don't know.
(Laughter) Anyway, so this is also a really enjoyable role.
I should concede also that I'm the world's worst Mouseketeer player, and it was this distinction that I was most worried about when I was on that prior side of the tenure divide.
I'm glad I'm past that.
We're not going to go into that.
I'm crying on the inside.
There are still scars.
Anyway, but I guess my point is that all of these enterprises are engaging to me in their multiplicity, but as I've presented them to you today, they're actually solitary enterprises, and so pretty soon I want to commune with other people, and so I'm delighted that in fact I get to compose works for them.
I get to write, sometimes for soloists and I get to work with one person, sometimes full orchestras, and I work with a lot of people, and this is probably the capacity, the role creatively for which I'm probably best known professionally.
Now, some of my scores as a composer look like this, and others look like this, and some look like this, and I make all of these by hand, and it's really tedious.
It takes a long, long time to make these scores, and right now I'm working on a piece that's 180 pages in length, and it's just a big chunk of my life, and I'm just pulling out hair.
I have a lot of it, and that's a good thing I suppose.
(Laughter) So this gets really boring and really tiresome for me, so after a while the process of notating is not only boring, but I actually want the notation to be more interesting, and so that's pushed me to do other projects like this one.
This is an excerpt from a score called "The Metaphysics of Notation."
The full score is 72 feet wide.
It's a bunch of crazy pictographic notation.
Let's zoom in on one section of it right here.
You can see it's rather detailed.
I do all of this with drafting templates, with straight edges, with French curves, and by freehand, and the 72 feet was actually split into 12 six-foot-wide panels that were installed around the Cantor Arts Center Museum lobby balcony, and it appeared for one year in the museum, and during that year, it was experienced as visual art most of the week, except, as you can see in these pictures, on Fridays, from noon til one, and only during that time, various performers came and interpreted these strange and undefined pictographic glyphs.
(Laughter) Now this was a really exciting experience for me.
It was gratifying musically, but I think the more important thing is it was exciting because I got to take on another role, especially given that it appeared in a museum, and that is as visual artist.
(Laughter) We're going to fill up the whole thing, don't worry.
(Laughter) I am multitudes.
(Laughter) So one of the things is that, I mean, some people would say, like, "Oh, you're being a dilettante," and maybe that's true.
I can understand how, I mean, because I don't have a pedigree in visual art and I don't have any training, but it's just something that I wanted to do as an extension of my composition, as an extension of a kind of creative impulse.
I can understand the question, though.
"But is it music?"
I mean, there's not any traditional notation.
I can also understand that sort of implicit criticism in this piece, "S-tog," which I made when I was living in Copenhagen.
I took the Copenhagen subway map and I renamed all the stations to abstract musical provocations, and the players, who are synchronized with stopwatches, follow the timetables, which are listed in minutes past the hour.
So this is a case of actually adapting something, or maybe stealing something, and then turning it into a musical notation.
Another adaptation would be this piece.
I took the idea of the wristwatch, and I turned it into a musical score.
I made my own faces, and had a company fabricate them, and the players follow these scores.
They follow the second hands, and as they pass over the various symbols, the players respond musically.
Here's another example from another piece, and then its realization.
So in these two capacities, I've been scavenger, in the sense of taking, like, the subway map, right, or thief maybe, and I've also been designer, in the case of making the wristwatches.
And once again, this is, for me, interesting.
Another role that I like to take on is that of the performance artist.
Some of my pieces have these kind of weird theatric elements, and I often perform them.
I want to show you a clip from a piece called "Echolalia."
This is actually being performed by Brian McWhorter, who is an extraordinary performer.
Let's watch a little bit of this, and please notice the instrumentation.
(Music) Okay, I hear you were laughing nervously because you too could hear that the drill was a little bit sharp, the intonation was a little questionable.
(Laughter) Let's watch just another clip.
(Music) You can see the mayhem continues, and there's, you know, there were no clarinets and trumpets and flutes and violins.
Here's a piece that has an even more unusual, more peculiar instrumentation.
This is "Tlön," for three conductors and no players.
(Laughter) This was based on the experience of actually watching two people having a virulent argument in sign language, which produced no decibels to speak of, but affectively, psychologically, was a very loud experience.
So, yeah, I get it, with, like, the weird appliances and then the total absence of conventional instruments and this glut of conductors, people might, you know, wonder, yeah, "Is this music?"
But let's move on to a piece where clearly I'm behaving myself, and that is my "Concerto for Orchestra."
You're going to notice a lot of conventional instruments in this clip.
(Music) (Music) This, in fact, is not the title of this piece.
I was a bit mischievous.
In fact, to make it more interesting, I put a space right in here, and this is the actual title of the piece.
Let's continue with that same excerpt.
(Music) It's better with a florist, right?
(Laughter) (Music) Or at least it's less boring.
Let's watch a couple more clips.
(Music) So with all these theatric elements, this pushes me in another role, and that would be, possibly, the dramaturge.
I was playing nice.
I had to write the orchestra bits, right?
Okay?
But then there was this other stuff, right?
There was the florist, and I can understand that, once again, we're putting pressure on the ontology of music as we know it conventionally, but let's look at one last piece today I'm going to share with you.
This is going to be a piece called "Aphasia," and it's for hand gestures synchronized to sound, and this invites yet another role, and final one I'll share with you, which is that of the choreographer.
And the score for the piece looks like this, and it instructs me, the performer, to make various hand gestures at very specific times synchronized with an audio tape, and that audio tape is made up exclusively of vocal samples.
I recorded an awesome singer, and I took the sound of his voice in my computer, and I warped it in countless ways to come up with the soundtrack that you're about to hear.
And I'll perform just an excerpt of "Aphasia" for you here.
Okay?
(Music) So that gives you a little taste of that piece.
(Applause) Yeah, okay, that's kind of weird stuff.
Is it music?
Here's how I want to conclude.
I've decided, ultimately, that this is the wrong question, that this is not the important question.
The important question is, "Is it interesting?"
And I follow this question, not worrying about "Is it music?" -- not worrying about the definition of the thing that I'm making.
I allow my creativity to push me in directions that are simply interesting to me, and I don't worry about the likeness of the result to some notion, some paradigm, of what music composition is supposed to be, and that has actually urged me, in a sense, to take on a whole bunch of different roles, and so what I want you to think about is, to what extent might you change the fundamental question in your discipline, and, okay, I'm going to put one extra little footnote in here, because, like, I realized I mentioned some psychological defects earlier, and we also, along the way, had a fair amount of obsessive behavior, and there was some delusional behavior and things like that, and here I think we could say that this is an argument for self-loathing and a kind of schizophrenia, at least in the popular use of the term, and I really mean dissociative identity disorder, okay.
(Laughter) Anyway, despite those perils, I would urge you to think about the possibility that you might take on roles in your own work, whether they are neighboring or far-flung from your professional definition.
And with that, I thank you very much.
(Applause) (Applause)
Just over a mile away from here, in Edinburgh's Old Town, is Panmure House.
Panmure House was the home of the world-renowned Scottish economist Adam Smith.
In his important work "The Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith argued, amongst many other things, that the measurement of a country's wealth was not just its gold and silver reserves.
It was the totality of the country's production and commerce.
I guess it was one of the earliest descriptions of what we now know today as gross domestic product, GDP.
Now, in the years since, of course, that measurement of production and commerce, GDP, has become ever more important, to the point that today -- and I don't believe this is what Adam Smith would have intended -- that it is often seen as the most important measurement of a country's overall success.
And my argument today is that it is time for that to change.
You know, what we choose to measure as a country matters.
It really matters, because it drives political focus, it drives public activity.
And against that context, I think the limitations of GDP as a measurement of a country's success are all too obvious.
You know, GDP measures the output of all of our work, but it says nothing about the nature of that work, about whether that work is worthwhile or fulfilling.
It puts a value, for example, on illegal drug consumption, but not on unpaid care.
It values activity in the short term that boosts the economy, even if that activity is hugely damaging to the sustainability of our planet in the longer term.
And we reflect on the past decade of political and economic upheaval, of growing inequalities, and when we look ahead to the challenges of the climate emergency, increasing automation, an aging population, then I think the argument for the case for a much broader definition of what it means to be successful as a country, as a society, is compelling, and increasingly so.
And that is why Scotland, in 2018, took the lead, took the initiative in establishing a new network called the Wellbeing Economy Governments group, bringing together as founding members the countries of Scotland, Iceland and New Zealand, for obvious reasons.
We're sometimes called the SIN countries, although our focus is very much on the common good.
And the purpose of this group is to challenge that focus on the narrow measurement of GDP.
To say that, yes, economic growth matters -- it is important -- but it is not all that is important.
And growth in GDP should not be pursued at any or all cost.
In fact, the argument of that group is that the goal, the objective of economic policy should be collective well-being: how happy and healthy a population is, not just how wealthy a population is.
And I'll touch on the policy implications of that in a moment.
But I think, particularly in the world we live in today, it has a deeper resonance.
You know, when we focus on well-being, we start a conversation that provokes profound and fundamental questions.
What really matters to us in our lives?
What do we value in the communities we live in?
What kind of country, what kind of society, do we really want to be?
And when we engage people in those questions, in finding the answers to those questions, then I believe that we have a much better chance of addressing the alienation and disaffection from politics that is so prevalent in so many countries across the developed world today.
In policy terms, this journey for Scotland started back in 2007, when we published what we call our National Performance Framework, looking at the range of indicators that we measure ourselves against.
And those indicators are as varied as income inequality, the happiness of children, access to green spaces, access to housing.
None of these are captured in GDP statistics, but they are all fundamental to a healthy and a happy society.
(Applause) And that broader approach is at the heart of our economic strategy, where we give equal importance to tackling inequality as we do to economic competitiveness.
It drives our commitment to fair work, making sure that work is fulfilling and well-paid.
It's behind our decision to establish a Just Transition Commission to guide our path to a carbon zero economy.
We know from economic transformations of the past that if we're not careful, there are more losers than winners.
And as we face up to the challenges of climate change and automation, we must not make those mistakes again.
The work we're doing here in Scotland is, I think, significant, but we have much, much to learn from other countries.
I mentioned, a moment ago, our partner nations in the Wellbeing network: Iceland and New Zealand.
It's worth noting, and I'll leave it to you to decide whether this is relevant or not, that all three of these countries are currently led by women.
(Applause) They, too, are doing great work.
New Zealand, in 2019, publishing its first Wellbeing Budget, with mental health at its heart; Iceland leading the way on equal pay, childcare and paternity rights -- not policies that we immediately think of when we talk about creating a wealthy economy, but policies that are fundamental to a healthy economy and a happy society.
I started with Adam Smith and "The Wealth of Nations."
In Adam Smith's earlier work, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," which I think is just as important, he made the observation that the value of any government is judged in proportion to the extent that it makes its people happy.
I think that is a good founding principle for any group of countries focused on promoting well-being.
None of us have all of the answers, not even Scotland, the birthplace of Adam Smith.
But in the world we live in today, with growing divides and inequalities, with disaffection and alienation, it is more important than ever that we ask and find the answers to those questions and promote a vision of society that has well-being, not just wealth, at its very heart.
(Applause) You are right now in the beautiful, sunny capital city ...
(Laughter) of the country that led the world in the Enlightenment, the country that helped lead the world into the industrial age, the country that right now is helping to lead the world into the low carbon age.
I want, and I'm determined, that Scotland will also be the country that helps change the focus of countries and governments across the world to put well-being at the heart of everything that we do.
I think we owe that to this generation.
I certainly believe we owe that to the next generation and all those that come after us.
And if we do that, led here from the country of the Enlightenment, then I think we create a better, healthier, fairer and happier society mmeyers@example.net.
And we play our part in Scotland in building a fairer, happier world as well.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)