The Q&A is an interview with someone whose name might be familiar, but whose life story is not well-known. It’s a mixture of questions — some of them unusual — that open a window on an interesting Islander.
Composer and pianist Daniel Brandes plays host to the 13th instalment of A Place to Listen on Wednesday.
The experimental music series attempts to redefine the relationship between sound and silence, audience and performer, as well as performer and score.
“It would be much more about creating a space to gather together and become, for an hour, a community of listeners,” he said.
Brandes started taking piano lessons when he was seven and began writing his own music in high school.
The Windsor, Ont., native moved to Victoria from Guelph in 2008, to pursue a master’s degree in music at the University of Victoria.
“I have always been drawn to music — regardless of the genre — that is out of the ordinary,” Brandes said.
Q: How did you get into new music?
A: I had an amazing music teacher in elementary school. He introduced me to a lot of music that broadened my idea of what music could be. I remember listening to [Erik] Satie for the first time and falling in love. Also, the music of [Henryk] Gorecki had quite an impact on me when I was 14 or so.
When I started writing my first compositions, I did lessons with Brent Lee — who teaches composition at the University of Windsor — and he gave me a crash course in 20th/21st-century music: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Arnold Schoenberg, Edgard Varèse … it really expanded my imagination.
Q: How is A Place to Listen different from other concert series?
A: A Place to Listen presents music that has a particular focus on creating radically quiet, intimate and immersive soundworlds. Another element that gives A Place to Listen its specific identity is that, at its core, it is about creating a place where, for an hour or two, one can be deeply attuned to something.
Nothing spectacular or sensational. Just some tones and some silence. In our current culture of hyper-stimulation and saturation — which attempts to colonize our imaginations and demands that we not look too closely, or feel too deeply — this kind of musical practice is, for me, essential. It feeds a part of us that, more and more, we are learning to neglect. The part that needs quiet.
Erik Abbink, my friend and collaborator, who has performed at several of our concerts, said that he had never before experienced the kind of atmosphere that he feels at the end of each A Place to Listen concert: this palpable sense of having all gone through something together. That is an amazing thing.
Q: What do you get out of A Place to Listen that’s different from composing or playing piano?
A: A Place to Listen, along with composing and performing, is part of what nourishes me as a musician. I see composing, performing, teaching and presenting concerts as all being part of what goes into music-making. To me, it’s about creating community. All these elements play a role in building a community through art-making.
Q: What is the most important thing you have learned in your career, and why?
A: To be a good collaborator, because being a musician is all about collaboration. This is a very difficult thing, and something that I don’t always do with a terrible amount of grace. Whether it is working with a performer on a new piece I am writing, or bouncing ideas for concerts off Laura and Erik, it always comes back to community, to making music together.
Q: What’s your greatest regret?
A: I suppose my biggest regrets are those times that I failed to bring my authentic self to the table.
Q: What’s a surprising thing we don’t know about you?
A: I started dating my now wife and best friend Laura when I was 14 years old. That tends to blow people’s minds.
Q: What do you want to accomplish over the next year? Ten years?
A: I read this beautiful story about a conversation between five rabbis, talking about the importance of living your life with a generous heart. I was deeply moved by that. I hope to embody that idea that with my life and work.
Q: What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever done?
A: Oh boy … what to choose! Once, when I was 15 or so, I tried to jump down an entire flight of stairs at my house. I hit my head so hard off the ceiling that I knocked myself out. That was pretty dumb.
Q: What do you think is the most important issue in your field today?
A: The arts have this powerful potential to reveal something to us about how it is that we are human together — either through the act of art-making or art-appreciating. I really feel a duty as an artist to explore that potential.
Q: How would you address that issue?
A: By continuing to do my work. By learning and expanding my imagination. By striving to be humble so that I can always learn and discover new things — new ways of being.
Q: What’s your favourite book?
A: Oh man, that is an impossible question! I recently discovered The Book of Questions by Edmond Jabès, and it really blew me away — there is simply nothing else like it. I took out every book they had of his in the UVic library after reading that one.
Q: Favourite musician or album?
A: An even more impossible question! Antoine Beuger’s music has been hugely influential for me these past couple of years. I would even go so far as to say life-changing.
A lot of that has as much to do with him as a teacher and person as it does with his music … which is beautiful. Also, I am predicting that the new Quatuor Bozzini CD of John Cage’s string quartet music will be one of my favourites of 2014.
Q: When did you last take public transit?
A: Yesterday.