Miguel del Aguila: How to Grow Classical Music Beyond the Classics

3x Grammy-nominated composer Miguel del Aguila joins Vonn Vanier for a conversation about how classical music can grow beyond the classics without losing what makes it powerful. 

Miguel reflects on finding his own voice as a composer, resisting pressure from teachers and critics, the role of rhythm in making music feel alive, and why classical music needs new works that actually sound like the world we live in. 

They also discuss inclusion in classical music, the danger of treating the concert hall like a museum, what AI music can and cannot do, and why the future of music may depend less on complexity and more on humanity. 

Guest: Miguel del Aguila - https://migueldelaguila.com
Host: Vonn Vanier - https://vonnvanier.com 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

He says if you play that at your end of the year exam, I won't be your teacher next year.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Just like that, and I said fine. Miguel del Aguila is a three-time Grammy nominated composer known for works like clocks, concerto and tango, and conqueline in hell. Early on, Miguel was told that the parts of his music that sounded most like him did not belong in serious music. He refused to believe it.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

All you have is yourself.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

That belief runs through the whole conversation. Miguel cares deeply about classical music. But because he cares about it, he's willing to say what many people inside the classical world often soften or avoid. In this conversation, Miguel explains why so much of the world gets left out of classical music and pushes back on new music that becomes so abstract it loses the audience. Now that AI music is here, what does that mean for classical composers? Is classical music becoming museum music, or is it ready for rebirth? Miguel de Aguila has the answer. I'm Von Veneer, and you're listening to Beyond the Notes. Miguel, thank you so much for being on today. Hi, Von. Pleasure to be here. Yeah, absolutely. Very excited. I'm so glad we're able to make this happen. So for people just meeting you for the first time, you're born in Uruguay and built your career uh across the US and Europe, moving around, you know, conservatories, orchestras, universities. Was there a point where a particular way of judging situations began to take shape? And how has that stayed with you throughout your career and how you and in the way you write music?

SPEAKER_01 1:49

Well, when when you live in many places, when your education happens in many places, um you always are confronted with different parameters of what music should be or what's good, what's bad, uh what composers should be writing, what they shouldn't be writing. So, you know, by the time I was 20, I was already in three different cultures, right? United States, Austria, and Latin America. So you kind of learn to take all those um sort of rules that society makes about or cultures, you know, countries or um about what music should be like. You take it a little lighter, like ice cream flavors, you know. And so it kind of forced you to make up your own mind of what your own rules are, you know, because you know the next country you will go to they will be different.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

Yeah. So what did you say um when it comes again to the world of music? What would you say each of the the experiences of you know gro uh growing up in in Uruguay and and then being in Vienna and then in the US, how each of them shaped you?

SPEAKER_01 3:08

Well, it's it's not what you would expect. Uh my most European training was in Uruguay. Because and I lived there until I was 20. But my my teachers were born in the 19th century, and they had a connection to you know the old European school. You know, my my first piano teacher, she knew Saint Sans and DBC, and um the training was the most strict training I ever had as composer and pianist. Um so then I had to leave Uruguay and went to San Francisco, where I graduated from. And it was so crazy that I changed my major to piano. Um I I was sort of always between both as a piano or composition. And um, you know, at that time, San Francisco in the late 70s, um, early 80s, um, it was still the school of, you know, let's see how we can hammer this piano to destroy it and make music with that. And I was never a part of that. I had no interest in that. So I thought in order to get my degree, I'll just be a piano major and play my music on the side, but learn piano. And so that was uh interesting for me because it was freeing in a term of um from some of the European values of education. And then I went to Vienna. I learned really in Vienna what not to do. Um it's not that they don't know how to teach music. It's just, you know, in my class, I saw some of the Austrian students um having a uh kind of a bound, being bound by all this tradition of centuries of Austrian music. And um I very quickly realized I I don't want to do this. I'm I'm not this person. And so it it really helped me discover what I never discovered in Latin America. It helped me discover Latin America and the music I have within me that was there, but I never appreciated it until I was far away.

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Uh-huh. So it it sounds like you really had to uh on one hand being in San Francisco and and having the uh uh very modern style of breaking the piano and doing whatever else, and then you have centuries of tradition in Vienna. Uh but you you had to sort of continue with your own voice and and continue uh just exploring the music that felt right. So how did you navigate that when you're in those two places?

SPEAKER_01 6:13

Um when you're young is very hard. As you get older, you think, well, the help with those who don't like my music. But when you are young, you need reviews, you need concerts, you need all kinds of uh recommendation letters, you know. And that was a little tough. And you know, my uh my teacher, I I remember my first year at the university in Vienna, and he was very happy because I I wrote very quickly a lot of music. Uh but um I started writing my first piano sonata, and the last moment was a Brazilian samba inspired. And I remember I played it for him, and he said, You're not serious, are you? And I said, Yeah, that's the last moment. You know, it's like a scherzo, like, you know, Haydn does it, why can't I? He says, You can't write that. You can't, that's you know, and I said, Well, that's the last I've I've always been very stubborn, which you need to be if you're a composer, because the whole world really is against you in many ways. Um, so I said, No, that's the last moment, and that stays. And then he says, if you play that at your end of the year exam, I won't be your teacher next year. Just like that. And I said, fine. And he was my teacher next year. Um, but then you know, um you you hear you are confronted with these prejudices of people who think they know what you are supposed to be writing better than you. And then is the reviewers. You know, the reviewers in Vienna, which is where my career really started as a composer, they were a little suspicious always because the audience liked my music. And then that that wasn't a good thing. Um I remember my first string quartet from which the the Presto 2 comes, which is one of my most performed pieces for string quartet. Um, the Viennese um reviewers, they just didn't like it. They thought it was how can you do that with the holy institution of a string quartet? Which of course I did on purpose because I find string quartet people are too um, I don't know, too stuck up with their tradition, right? So I wanted to make fun of the form. And um, and they said some, oh, well, literally, one one of the what I remember from that review, and you know, you remember the first reviews of your career. They said, it's not serious music. And so you have to be prepared to deal with things like that. And when you're young, you crawl you walk that thin line between, I need this, I need this person, I need this review, I need this job. And the other line is I I have to write my own music because you leave only once, and you can only write your entire uh catalog once in your life, right? So you may as well write it the way you are supposed to be writing it and not for other people.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Yeah. Personally, um I've I've found myself sort of in a similar boat where I I try to uh find a balance between writing music that's uh contemporary and and modern in style, but also is somewhat accessible to audiences and and sounds good. Um and I've struggled, I think, in in my own experience with finding the right balance and finding something that's pleasing to all audiences, whether it's uh you know, teachers or um uh general, general public. So when when you were threatened with things like teacher saying he won't teach you anymore, or critics uh saying your music wasn't serious, you just kept going and and that was your path forward, or or did you ever give in and and find any compromise?

SPEAKER_01 10:26

No. Um I actually went did more of what I wasn't supposed to be doing. It's I thought I I realized very early on that's what sets me apart, and that's what from all these other people. And that's what I have within me. I cannot deny this music because it's like somebody tells you you don't they don't like your eyes, and you go and get blue eyes, or you know, Asian-looking eyes. I mean, it's who you are, you can't change yourself, and much less to to uh please the press, or so um I think the more um comments I got about uh negative about my music being Latin or being rhythm, and and then I also realized, you know, in the past 40 years, music education changed and evolved a lot. Um But in the 80s, when I wrote some of this music, these people who kind of attacked it for being too happy and too rhythmic, they couldn't play it because it was too difficult for them to read in 1316s.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Really sorry about that. Um problem. Maybe can you can you just continue from where you were uh talking about um the yeah, critics saying it was too rhythmic?

SPEAKER_01 11:51

Yeah, so my point, my point is many of these criticisms, um, and when you are in your 20s, you're very sensitive to what people would say, right? Uh but then I realized many of these people couldn't play my music because it was too difficult for them. Rhythmically, they couldn't play seven plus thirteen sixteens presto. And then I thought, okay, you guys are criticizing me, but I seem to, you know, have something that you guys don't have or can't do. So why would I change my music to 4-4 and boring whole notes, right? Um, so it kind of gave me a self-assurance that I was on the right path and that I had to do what I had to do and not um, you know, be scared by reviewers, or usually reviewers are they used to be more savvy then and more opinionated. Now most reviewers lost their full-time job in newspapers. So they also do food and social and you know, so they're a little friendlier now.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

Yeah. Did you continue that philosophy or ever feel the need to later in your career when there was more acceptance of your music and and you were more uh you know generally well known?

SPEAKER_01 13:15

I I think I continued it. I I mean I never I don't fit in in the modern music, classical music world. I never did. Um I find all that world very a little boring. I find composers a little stuck up in their I don't know, sense of self-importance. And um and I I never belonged in that world. I belong in, you know, with performers, with audience. Uh I write whatever I want. I get a commission. If I want to write that, I will. And if I don't want to, I won't write it. Or I charge a lot more. So they say they can't afford me. Um but you know, you have to um in the scholar, in the academic world, I think is where I was probably criticized the most in many ways. I don't want this to be negative, but you're asking me all these questions that lead to it. So um so um, you know, there are two things you can do. You can fight it, or you can just use your energy for something more positive, like writing music. And I I think I that's another thing that I accepted, and this was way before the times of inclusion, and you know, this was I'm talking about 70s, 80s, you know. Um so I thought, okay, I don't, you know, you don't want to make me belong full in classical music world. I have no problem with that. As long as musicians keep playing my music and audiences keep loving it and buy my records. And um, so you kind of split. And then I, in many ways, I had this. Um, I'm not the first person to do that. I remember Piazzola, whom I was lucky to meet. Um, very early on, he was, you know, Argentinians always thought he didn't know how to write tangos. And the moment he got away from Argentina, they thought he couldn't write classical music. So he always lived between these two worlds, and his answer to that was: I'm going to make my quintet, I'm going to play my music, go tour. Um, and you guys can put me in whatever niche you think I fit, but I don't care where you put me. And that's what he did. But and of course, that's a good thing for you uh and your music, but there is always, with every decision you make, there is a price to pay.

SPEAKER_02 16:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

Um, Piazzola, I don't think, ever qualified for grants. And I very often didn't qualify for many grants uh to this day. So there are you know things that you have to consider, pros and cons, when you make some of these decisions.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

Yeah. So when you ultimately uh started to gain a lot more ex uh acceptance and success in general, how do you think that happened? What do you think was finally the breakthrough and into your specific moment or uh just general period in your life that that really marked the transition for you?

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Um I think it was the audience when you would you I um my music would be performed and the audience liked it. And then musicians put my music in their repertoire. And after a while, it was better. Um I don't want to say better because the first musicians who played my music were very good. But you know, ensembles put your music in their repertoire and they go on tour and play it and play it. Um I remember, for example, my second win quintet, uh uh Imani Wins. You know Imani Wins? So back in the 90s or so, they won one of their first uh big competitions that gave them uh management with my second win quintet. And so did I think WinSync, and so did Wins5, an ensemble here, a Win Quinteting. And then uh, of course, they they think okay, this is the piece that made us win a competition, so we're going to play it um on our tour. And I think between those two, Imani and WinSync, they probably played my music thousands of times in concerts because they toured a lot. Um so when you work with the performer in in a way that you may not know the performer, but if you don't ignore their job while you are composing music, if you make your music in a way that they can express themselves, they can pretty much show the skills of that they learn that they learned their whole lives, you know. Um they like your music and they play it and they play it well. And if you don't make it too crazy and too difficult, they won't be afraid of playing it. So they will program it, right? Um and it's I I I remember not long ago, I was in Paris, and this friend of mine was graduating from from the Conservatoire, and I went to the graduation um concert, and I just felt like slapping these people, these teachers. And there were all these students from all over the and I'm taking a Paris Conservatoire, it's not a little provincial place. So one after one, these uh compositions were performed, and from these composers that were graduating, um, and I mean none of them played a violin or a cello or a piano the way it's supposed to be. You know, nobody ever picked up a bow, everything was hitting everything, uh, making a violin not sound like a violin. And I felt sorry for the performers because why on earth would you learn years and years and years to play an instrument for a composer to start, you know, making funny noises with it. And then I also felt a little upset and sad for the composers because I realized many of these people came to Paris from all over the world to study to get a degree. They have no chances ever of surviving from their music because nobody wants to hear that, nobody wants to play it, um, except for the little click of pseudo-intellectuals, right? Um so they're not going to have a career, they have no chances. But guess what they're going to do? They're going to go back to their countries, start teaching, teach exactly what they learn in Paris, and make a new generation of little monster composers who will write the same thing. And that's how this thing gets passed on and on and on. And I don't know if you guys, your generation, caught up with that, but it's been, you know, hundreds, I probably a hundred years by now of the same. And uh, that was an extreme concert, but you know, it just shows you that there is a lot still that we composers have to um fight against, or you know, work to do, a lot of work to do to make the world accept music. You know, music is just um like going to the movies, or you don't go to the movies to see uh uh a movie from 1920s to 1940s. Think of it. If that's all that movie theater plays, they would run out of audience. And then you go to a concert, and everything you hear 95% is from 1690 to 1920. And he comes from one part of the world, and only classical music. Music audiences put up with that.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

So you you think the solution to that then is new music by you know not new classical composers who are writing in ways that are different than in the past?

SPEAKER_01 22:18

Well, balance. I love all classical music. I love, you know, Rabel's and Sans and Mozart and Mendelssohn and the entire tradition. Um, but I like balance. It's not that if you like the Wizard of Oz, that you're going to want it every single time you go to the movies, right? So ballads I think orchestras and chamber music ensembles and soloists, when they play like a piano concerto, um uh pianists are not curious about repertoire. They they really play what they learn in school. Um and I think it should be probably half of the program should be music written after 1960, 70, right? Or contemporary, and it should be from any part of the world, and it should sound like it's from any part of the world. One of the fallacies of inclusion in classical music is the they say, let's include more people, more music from more people, and then they look at their photos, they check the color of their skin and say, okay, we need these, like it's you're doing a uh a collage of skin colors or what and that's not inclusion at all. Because when sometimes when you look, hear the music, you're oh, they're all very different, but they it all sounds like written in Germany, right? And so that's not real, and people need to be able to tell what's real and what's not. Of course, there is also real inclusion, and it's happening more and more. Um, but real inclusion is give audiences new from anywhere in the world. And but music that sounds very different from what we're used to. You know, and um and what works, works. If some music works, just perform it. If some music doesn't work, don't do it again.

SPEAKER_00 24:30

I I found just from going to concerts uh um on the topic of of broader inclusion that uh for instance you hear more uh yeah, more pieces in general by by people of different different backgrounds, um, and you know, just just looking back to the Grammys from the last few years and Revolución Diamantina winning a bunch of uh Grammys one or two years ago, and and just a a broader uh a broader participation and inclusion of Latin American composers. Have you found that uh yourself to be true, or or what's been the scene like where it's hard to tell.

SPEAKER_01 25:21

I think there was there is a little more. My music was you know performed pretty uh a lot before people thought they had to include Latin music. And I don't um I'm I don't I mean I'm American and my music is American because I've been American for 50 years now. Um so I I don't like quotas. I don't like like um when they program my music in a I don't know Latin America festival or fiesta or yeah I mean when you play Brahms, you don't call it Oktoberfest night or you know uh so I don't like that those kinds of themes, but um I do feel that especially chamber ensembles, chamber ensembles are evolving ahead of orchestras. Orchestras are like big animals that walk very slowly, and probably they won't react until they're totally bankrupt. Um but they are very it's a very big institution. It's very hard to so they are actually changing the surface, the facade of it. Uh so you will see photos of young people or so, but it's it's too big an institution to change it overnight. But chamber ensembles do because they depend on their audience and they need to be to relate to their audience. So if you go to a concert and you play music from the uh late middle ages to some teenagers and I don't know, in in New York or um, they may like the first two pieces, but after a while they're going to want something else. Chamber ensembles know that because they basically are self-managed and they need their jobs, they need to come back, they need their audiences. So I think they they done the inclusion for them was a process that happened naturally. We have all kinds of audiences. We'll bring them things that are familiar to all of them, and not because we need to push a quota, but because we all change. The world always changes, it never stays what it used to be. So so does music. And music changes by always by incorporating uh new elements and new people. And uh you may think that's a very modern thing, but it's not. I mean, look at Mozart, um uh his operas, the the Rapht on the Sarah, the the Turkish march, just to name something. They all have Turkish instruments, you know, the bass drum, the cymbal. And the Turks were on the doorsteps of Vienna occupying it for months. Supposedly that's where the Viennese got invented how to make good coffee, but that story is not proven. But you know, from that connection with another world came Mozart, and he he had plenty of his own music, but he said, no, let's incorporate this and that. And uh you know, the Baroque suite, to name another story. It's it's think of it, it's a piece of music with many numbers, many uh um sections, and each one comes from a different country in many ways. Each one, some of them come from different times in history, and they all fit together and make one work of music, right? Do you think Bach was thinking of inclusion when he wrote the Bach Suites or Motar when he wrote the Turkish March? Okay, I got a very nice sonata, but uh they call me from the Minister of Education, they need inclusion, so let's put a Turkish march at the end. And I think those things happen naturally when people are aware of their environment. And I think one of the risks of the classical music world is that it's a little, it's always been a little disconnected with the rest of the world because they have so much within, they have so much tradition. Um, the instruments that we are playing are very old, right? So they don't even have to think, okay, let's invent a new instrument. So there is old music written for all music, for all instruments, and there is the academia and all the universities of the world occupying themselves with that. And so it's uh it's really like a bubble, uh a social bubble that didn't exist before until the early 20th century. It wasn't a bubble. It was and it, you know, people you took, um you were um somewhere in in Milan or or in Vienna, and um the talk of the day was the last opera, and people would be whistling it on the street, and they would be talking about it. And um, that doesn't happen because and I think classical music is to blame for it, that it slowly separated itself from its own audience, its own society um by um not allowing room for the new. And if you don't allow room for think of the world as your own closet. If you don't make room for the new jeans and shirts you buy, you can't buy them, you can't get them. So you're stuck wearing the same old clothes for the rest of your life, right? And that's a bit what happened in classical music, and it's a bit the reason why I never really care very much to adapt my music to that world or that philosophy, because it's there you go.

SPEAKER_00 31:41

I don't know how you have it on a timer. I I don't know something about this room. Anyway, this is this is fascinating, and sorry to uh don't want to disturb. In in that case, you think uh that classical music and uh the chamber ensembles, especially, are uh evolving organically as a result of the need and the desire from audiences for something new?

SPEAKER_01 32:13

Yeah. And now what is mandating that is natural evolution, and I think also AI is going to already make a big change in classical music. The philosophy of more is more, which has been the prevailing philosophy in contemporary music. You look at an orchestral score and it looks like an entire painting. Um AI can do more is more much better than humans because they can sample everything and make a big salad and compose for you a piece. And uh so I think that's that's going to also bring big changes. The fact that now almost anybody can write music and you can hear AI music on YouTube or on social media, or I don't know if the platforms already have AI music, the streaming platform. Um so people are going to realize that there is some, just like you realize with the visual first, when you look at an AI photo of yourself doing something, um, you may look prettier, but there is something spooky. There is something dead in it. There is some humanity missing. I don't know if you can um maybe someday it will get better, but now when you look at a picture like that or a movie, something is missing. And the same is with music. With music and AI, you you will tell it, give it the formula and say, write me a symphony like Beethoven's, and here are your things, and or something much easier, give it loops and make it write pop music, right? Um but something is missing, humanity is missing in it. And nobody can tell you what it is. But if you're listening to um good music, I think of composers that just move you instantly with one note, like Schubert or um Mendelssohn. They have this power of everything is five and fine, and all of a sudden there is one change of chords, one note that reaches your soul so deeply. And you can study music for a thousand years, you will never know why. And that's what AI will never do, because AI cannot figure the very complex um process of emotional reaction to music. It just samples, salads of things. And people are going to value that more and more. The simplicity of what AI could never do, the real new things that AI can never come up with. And most of all, live music again, because people will realize can music, you know, is just dead. And people enjoy like social media when it started, people said, wow, nobody's going to waste time going to meet somebody, a friend on, you know, two blocks from here. We have millions of friends in social media. And what happened now? Years passed, and people are realizing, no, that's not a real world. I mean, all I do there is watch photos of what people eat and commercial advertisement. So people finally realized um the difference between life and virtual. And I think in music, that's going to happen. Music is always 50 years before the visual arts, if you re in historically, right? So everything that's happened in the visual arts, it's about to happen in music. And people are realizing the most valuable things of music, and that is a common experience with a group of people. And that is a live concert. Think of it, music is so powerful that even dictators wrote nice tunes for everybody that convinced everybody to go and kill the other people, right? Or when somebody dies, you hear music and it helps you mourn together. And AI will never do that. So um I'm very optimistic. I think the future is going to be again like 19th century in many ways. You know, the uh people are going to appreciate again their emotions, their perception, and sharing life, connecting to real humans again, because AI will never give you real humans or social media or canned music. So I don't know if that has anything to do with a youngest me, but I ended up there.

unknown 37:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:25

Well, when you combine what you were talking about earlier, about how there's based on the desires from audiences, a general uh transition in the world of classical music and and also what you're talking about now when it comes to the uh growing desire for live in-person uh sort of humanity and through music, how do you think classical music is is gonna change then and overall?

SPEAKER_01 37:58

Uh it's there is going to be more concerts, more audience, more chamber music, uh like it used to be in many ways. Um, not these huge impersonal concert halls. I'm not sure people are but care about that so much. People are going to care more about the connection. And there's going to be more chamber music, it's going to be more responsive to uh what people want. You know, some people are going to want Mozart, and you cannot get rid of Mozart. You cannot get rid of the classics. They are a part of what people go to concerts for, or else you listen to pop music, you know. Uh but there has to be music that um also you know reflects the world they live in. You cannot uh live in the 21st century with music in the in a little bubble of the 18th century. So it's it's going to be a good thing.

SPEAKER_00 39:08

Absolutely. And w to clarify, when you um when you talk about the new music and the new styles that are evolving uh with new composers, what does that look like and how is it different uh and more interesting for audiences and for composers themselves as it evolves?

SPEAKER_01 39:32

I think composers are going to feel more free in terms of what to do. Uh I think the judgment uh or rating or their music based on complication, it's going to soon expire because AI does complication very well and complication and abundance of material and things. So music is going to have, like it did many times in history, a new simplicity, a new um think of uh the the early uh the late Renaissance where people were writing all this uh music um that was even in uh 20 voices, each voice in a different language, it just reached a crazy point, right? What happened then the simplification of chordal harmony and chords and and the rules of thirds and fifths, and uh and then that lasted really, it started inflating again in complication, and then came already Bas uh sounds started that new simplicity of the uh galant style and later the the classic style, and it was even easier, it was just one melody at the top and chords at the bottom. And you know, when when everything got so complicated to the 12-cone madness, then comes WC with his um whole tone scales, then pentatonic, which is really way, way before diatonics. Um so um history always does that. It reaches a level of complication which very often is made by people who want to copy what people did before, and because they're not good enough to add uh substance, they add more of it, more complication. And there is a point where it's um it's overfilled with stuff. So somebody new comes and says, we need to throw away all that and start again with something new. And I think we are at a point in history where that's happening now, and this new simplicity is going to be valued, and universities and um critics, there are no more critics anymore. But um, you know, academia will have to value simplicity and the ability to bring something new with very little, the ability to express and move, express yourself and move, or really uh play with the feelings of your listeners with very little uh material. And um that's I think that's the future.

SPEAKER_00 42:41

Yeah. Absolutely. I it sounds certainly like an intriguing future.

SPEAKER_01 42:46

So it's very easy to say. It's very hard to do.

SPEAKER_00 42:49

Yeah, that's true. Um I'd love to talk about your music a little bit more and and uh your experience personally. Uh so to begin, when when you're composing, do you experience uh attention as a sort of responsibility? Do you ever find yourself trying to uh figure out how you can keep the listeners engaged? Um, or is that something that's just sort of in the back of your head and and ends up happening?

SPEAKER_01 43:22

When I'm writing music, I always have I'm a very visual person, not for the visual world, but for music. It's a very strange concept because I can be 10 times in a room. I don't remember anything in it, but I remember music visually. So when I'm writing music, I always see the performer. I see all their gestures while they are playing it, and I see them sitting down and I see the audience. And as I write music, they are there with me in that process of writing it. And If they are getting bored, if I'm if I just went two bars too long in one section, I can turn around and look at the people thinking this is boring. We need something else. Or if I write something that doesn't work, that's an idiomatic, I can see visually the musicians trying to do something that's very risky or that's not rewarding when you consider how much they have to practice and what comes out. So in a way that happens while I write. And sometimes you need to write what you need to write. But very often it's good to write music. And when I teach composition, I always tell that to my students. It's good to imagine and uh write down the music you imagine, but then you need to check up with reality because a lot of our ideas work very well in our head, but they don't transfer to a poor violinist on stage and an audience that has to sit there for two more hours. So it's always a balance, and it's not that you have to sacrifice one for the other, it's just uh a matter of um connecting both uh worlds to make make them function together.

SPEAKER_00 45:29

Your music is known to be uh in a lot of pieces very rhythmic, and you described that earlier. What do you think it is about rhythm that's uh you know so engaging and and keeps the audience interested?

SPEAKER_01 45:44

It's uh the most primitive part of music. It's primitive is a very um music is a very primitive art. If you we want to make art be so special and so sophisticated, but it's a very primitive art, and if you don't forget that, then you are able to reach other people's feelings and because it it's all intuitive, it's all in there with us in our DNA. When you think of um a bass drum or a timpany role, I think it it goes all the way back to cavemen hearing uh a mammoth or a very nice big animal approaching in the fear. When you hear the piccolos very happy, you think of happy birds and they are harmless usually. So we react to that sonic world that is in our DNA as a species. It's not that somebody wrote a book on what the piccolo should do on what the bass drum does. So rhythm is you know, if it's low sounds and high sounds, rhythm is the other part that is so basic. I mean, your heart has rhythm, your the days and nights, the seasons, the everything in the world, even you know, like for Hindu religion, the universe has rhythm because it expands and contracts every so many billions of years. Uh rhythm is part of life. Without rhythm, there is no life. So if there is rhythm, we feel the music is alive. We feel the music is walking. When when there is no rhythm, we feel the music sits down somewhere and starts daydreaming or or talking or um meditating or observing a landscape. But the doing, like a person does. And I I always feel music is alive. Once you write it, it takes its own life, really. Uh music is alive when it's walking, like any other person when it's moving, and rhythm is what makes it move. And audience react. Five, two-year-olds react to rhythm.

SPEAKER_02 48:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:16

And they get scared when they hear a bass drum fortissimo, or and they like piccolo because it reminds them of birds. So you don't need a degree, music degree, to understand music, you know, or rhythm.

SPEAKER_00 48:32

And I feel like that aspect of music, certainly in the uh the the broader history of classical music, but uh nowadays too, with the vast majority of composers, it's it's just something that's so overlooked, and and yet's one of the fundamental aspects of music, don't you think?

SPEAKER_01 48:50

Yeah. Well, the I think the education of the music, uh the way we le we teach composers has been stuck in the past for a hundred years now. And um, of course beautiful music, and but it doesn't mean that that's all you need to learn in school. Um I mean once you can write polyphony and counterpoint like Palestrina, you are a composer, it has absolutely nothing to do with composing. Absolutely nothing. Imitating a style. If you imitated all styles on earth, then probably it will help you imitate, right? But what they don't teach you is uh I think good learning good um any art, but composing, it should be like going to the psychiatrist or the psychologist. I I think probably you've never gone to one, but uh you go there and the psychologist tries to see who you are, tries to get inside of your head and see who you are as a person. And then uh when you learn composition, it's you are you need to make that connection between that person and what that person has inside and and wants to say, and then help them bring it out in whatever way they bring it out, right? And Palestrino has nothing to do with that. Um you do need music, uh you need the tools, right? So you uh you need to obviously know music and notation and whatever helps you retain it in your head, right? Um but music is a very personal thing, it's it's like learning poetry. Um you cannot learn poetry, it's just the way you see the world and you express it with words. And music is the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 51:02

So thank you. That that uh for me is is very insightful as as I uh continue learning composition and uh as well, and to to hear that just being authentic and and writing what's in me is oh no. I'm sorry, this is the uh the the one day I have a different room. As I was saying, I think as I can as I learn composition and and uh continue developing my voice, I think it's incredible to know that that uh authenticity is is key, and from there everything else just seems to work out. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 51:43

Well, it's all you have. All you have is yourself. There was no there was never a person like yourself in history. So um it's it's a treasure that you we all have, that we are our all our own individual and as our own, like we're a new window to the world and our times. If you don't use it, if you use the window to put in on the other side of the window a painting that's not real, then why are you here? You know, we don't need you. You may as well be not exist.

SPEAKER_02 52:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:24

So to wrap us up, um my final question for today is uh what part of the the general work of composition and and everything that comes with it do you love most? And how do you know that audiences are uh enjoying it and that what you're doing is working and and what makes it worthwhile for you?

SPEAKER_01 52:48

Oh gosh, that's you asked me like 10 questions in one. Um I think what makes it all worthwhile is when you finish a piece of music and you know it's a part of you and it's out there, and now it exists, and it didn't exist before. And it gives you a sense of purpose, and I don't know, um, it's hard for me to explain that because I never since I was two years old or three that I remember things. I always saw myself as a composer before knowing what that meant. So for me, it obviously has a very important role. It's it's uh my sense of uh uh purpose is tied to the music I write, right? Um but it's that's what the most rewarding part, I think the most uh beautiful part of writing music is first of all, when you are facing uh an empty piece, a blank piece of paper, and then you look at it, and I I start writing music with pen and pencil, with pencil and paper. Uh when you stare at this blank paper, and there are no limits to what you can do. And it's like this is the window that opens to another new world, and I can do absolutely whatever I want. So that's one of the parts I love the most. And then when it's almost finished, every time you're writing music almost three quarters into the end, um there is a moment that uh something happens. It's like a light switch that turns on or never turns on. If it never turns on, you finish the piece, but it's bad music. If it if you manage to turn it on at the end, find what brings everything together, and um that you have good music. And then after after that moment, writing what happens next, the next 20 bars or 100 bars, it's so much fun because it's like you solve the puzzle, and now it's just a matter of writing it and technical stuff, but but because it's so new, this solution, you are really fascinated with it. And uh when I write music, it's a very obsessive process. I I go to bed hearing it, I I dream of it at night. Very often I do it on purpose. I go to bed with a problem, thinking I'm going to dream the solution. And the next day I I really dream the solution. So while while you're writing, it's kind of an isolating, mentally not a very healthy uh uh uh state of mind, right? But it's kind of obsessive. So when you finally find that solution, it's really like uh finally you uh discover the end of something and how to be done with your job. And um I think for me that's the most rewarding, and hearing good musicians play their music, hearing musicians make it their own and express their own feelings through my music. Um I always feel that I'm very lucky that I get to do that, and or seeing people in the audience sometimes when my music is played, that they are sad or they are happy, and the power um that you feel when you realize that you're able to be a part of what all these people are thinking and make them think things and feel things. Um it's very rewarding.

SPEAKER_00 57:05

Yeah. Absolutely. I I think um for me, what what you're saying about uh I guess the start and the end of the piece where at the beginning you you see the blank page, and uh especially with orchestral writing, it it really feels like the possibilities is genuinely limitless. And there's also I think that permanence, once you got you've gotten to the end, it's there and and you've created something that's new and and can't be undone, and it's um there forever. And and so I think you know that uh that process and and having it be put out there by musicians who are enthusiastic about it is is what makes it magical.

SPEAKER_01 57:52

Yep. It's a fun job. It has its bad moment, but I I wouldn't change it for anything else.

SPEAKER_00 58:01

Absolutely. Well, Miguel, thank you so much again for being on today. As I as I mentioned a lot, there was there was a lot that resonated with me just as a student composer looking to find and explore what all there is in music and and what it has to offer. So I'm I'm incredibly grateful for uh for all you said today.

SPEAKER_01 58:22

Thank you, Vaughn. You're you're a very good interviewer. You made me say things that I usually don't say, which are good or bad.

SPEAKER_00 58:31

Well, good. Thank you. Yes, glad to hear it. Well, thank you again.