YouSaid · the spoken record

David Robertson

lines on the record: 77
first: 2025-07-09
most recent: 2025-07-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“On a month of Sundays, but not normally, so let me be more practical here. Been a pleasure. David Robertson, thank you very much. Thank you.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he never did the 47, or very rarely. And I've done it occasionally, and I always feel, oh, why did I agree to do this? And I go back to insisting on the 1911. The colors are much better and the actual sort of beauty of the orchestration, where it comes from in the Russian tradition with Rimsky Korsakov, that's all much clearer and much more evident in the way you hear it. And of course, going back to Boulez, He revised his works all the time. And so I find it wonderful that a composer said, oh no, trust the original. And yet, you know, he would never say, go back to the original of Visage Nepiale. And at the same time, I can understand this because there are times when you say, ah, you know, I did put the metronome mark too fast or actually that trumpet part would work one.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“has tari and it has a sort of eighth note pulse in the horns going so he wants at one point to just up the tempo a little bit and that means that he would like seven eighth notes in the time of these six which means one and two and three and one two three four five six and one two three four five six and one two three one two three one two one two three and that's hard for conductors to do so in the 47 version he sanctions which i think was probably because he would also like to conduct it because you make money conducting and so he turned it into eighth note equals eighth note and i find this is a very sad way of doing things and boulez and i talked about this and he said ironically it will turn out when you are looking at Composer's works always trust the original.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And some of the works were done entirely for financial reasons. So there's a revision of Persephone, his cantata for chorus and solos, vocal solos and orchestra, and he changed one note in the second bassoon part. But in Petrushka, he changed a lot. And one of the things that happened was that there's a large piano part in the early part of the work, and then the piano never plays again. This comes from him thinking while he was working with Yajulev that he wanted to write a piano concerto, and so these sketchers for the piano concerto came in. The woodwin section is reduced, the number of harps is reduced to one. There are a number of things that are done with tempos to make it easier to conduct. One of the tempo relations, which I really like, is that the opening theme of the Shrodtide Fair”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Patrushka is an interesting case as many of the works of Stravinsky, and it has to do with World War I and international copyright. Stravinsky made a small version of the firebird, which is referred to as the Firebird Suite 1990, because it was published in 1919. And this was in the aftermath of the First World War. And I think he received some money for the actual score from the publisher, but he never, in the rest of his life, received any rights from this piece. And it's the piece of his which was played the most during his lifetime. And to some extent still is. And so when the Second World War came along and he had found refuge in the United States, he realized, you know, I need to revise a number of my work so that I can get the copyright. And so some of the works were made more practical.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just went on from there. So I don't, I can't really say. I do have an early memory. We bought a Panasonic tape machine, reel to reel, and we only had one tape. And that tape was I now realized later at the time I didn't pay any attention was William Steinberg and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra doing Bolero and Rhapsody Espa ⁇ ol. And I don't think the Rhapsody Espa ⁇ ol of Ravel made any impression. But Bolero, I do remember actually listening to it and being able to hear that that's the same melody now but with a different color and I must have been seven and I was just besotted with music from the very early start. Your summer concert with the New York Philharmonic, why do the 1911 Patrushka and not the 1947? Oh the...”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Young ladies should learn to play piano. Was that kind of an upbringing? And so there were everything from church hymns to music that was known through musicals or from jazz and then music appreciation records which we had. So there were all sorts of different things. And I can't actually say when I became besotted with it. I started, I was fortunate to grow up in the Santa Monica Unified School District where they had a wonderful music program. They still do, but this was before Proposition 13 in California. So it was, as many other cultural things were beautifully funded. And I started singing in the choir at the age of six and then started instrumental music in the school at the age of, let's see, nine.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'm not sure in some of the other languages that I've learned later as a young adult and an adult, I can tell you specifically where I learned which train platform I was standing on when someone corrected me and I learned this word in this language for the first time. But in my mother tongue, there's no way I can go back and say when I learned water. Right? Clearly it was there at some point. But the thing with the classical music is we had all sorts of music growing up. I was from a...”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A fantastic, I just met this person and I invited them to the concert and they said, yes, oh, this is great. You know, can I put my arm around them during the Tchaikovsky? And you come, you have people who come in and they have just, they are still in a situation of bereavement. And you have people who come in and they have looked at something in the news that has disturbed them greatly. And so all of these people come in, all of them as individuals. And our job, I think, is to create the most open experience possible so that each one of these people feels they can come into the structure of the music in a way that they can then find themselves and have the incredible experience that it can bring forth, talk to them.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An audience anywhere is a collection of individuals. And we play a concert for one individual. But for economic reasons, we just get 2,000 individuals together at the same time because it's cost effective. But each person brings their own sense of what's there and their experience with them. I mean, this goes back to what you were saying about people hearing contemporary classical music and going ick. And that has to do with have they played an instrument when they've played an instrument, are they the kind of person who likes to make funny sounds on the instrument or do they want to stick with only what's in the tune a day book? And if they're, you know, the person who liked to honk and make strange sounds to annoy their siblings, they're probably going to be closer to contemporary music. And they bring that with them into the concert hall. You know, you have people who are there to celebrate.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a sense of adventure. There's also a sense of pride in their institutions that you don't necessarily find in every place so that there's a sense of there's enough newness about the country, that the idea that it's the Sydney Symphony Orchestra is already a source of pride before you've even started to play. The more important point is that”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's a really good thing to talk about because I think all audiences are different. There are certain cultural aspects, right? So I just came back from a European tour. The amount of applause you get from European audiences is sometimes surprising to Americans. I remember having to tell some American soloists when we'd come out for the seventh time and they'd already played their encore, that the audience still wanted to see them again in Lyon. That was not something that you have a standing ovation in Carnegie Hall and you come out twice and then it's over, right? In Sydney, I guess...”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is one of the things I can't walk around with any kind of pod in my ear. So I tend to, if I listen to something, I listen to something. Because when I'm walking around the street sounds, whether those are cars, whether they're annoying or whether they're beautiful like a sudden bird song in a lull of traffic, all of these things are things I want to experience. And I don't want to sort of shut myself off from that because the randomness that this can generate can have a butterfly effect in us and suddenly take us to a different place. And so all of a sudden, the squeak of two breaks, suddenly you find your brain has shuffled the jukebox and you have a piece of music you haven't thought of in years because that particular interval just fired a couple of neurons that got some extra protein with breakfast.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so sometimes you experience things and occasionally it will be, I remember being in a taxi in Milano over a long ride, very late at night after a rehearsal and listening to a song that was... Completely out of context, and yet made perfect sense about someone staring at the Rhine River in Dusseldorf. And you have this sense of curious thing that music can do, which is to collapse time and collapse space and collapse distance between souls. And that part, whether it's in popular music or whether it's in what the Germans like to call serious music, which is so pejorative to the light music, it's crazy.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, oh, I guess the thing that I like the most is kind of surprise. And that can be surprise when it's... Know Tracy Chapman singing by herself, or it can be J. Dilla figuring out a way to kind of juice the rhythm machine in such a way that the rhythm has this kind of lilt, which is both Not possible without a machine first doing it, but then immediately becomes something that we humans want to be involved with. Or it may be the The voicing of a chord that you hear from a guitarist, whether it's Joni Mitchell or whether it's John Mayer. I mean, there's so many different things, but it's this aspect. I mean, Time is limited, so one of the things that I enjoy is not telling a Lyft Uber or taxi driver to turn off their music, but to use it as a kind of John Cajun. I do that too.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aspect time. And so I think that one of the things that one needs to learn to do for young conductors is to, in a sense, kind of slow down and learn about yourself. And that can be done through books, and much of it is done through contemplation of the score, whatever that score might be, whether it's written by a man in Leipzig three hundred years ago or whether it's something that was written yesterday by a person who is trying to wean themselves off of social media as you are.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I'm going to boomer here. I think the part of the thing is that we've had a really fundamental shift in society with the age of smartphones. The internet was already the first sort of major move in that direction, but the idea that you have essentially a supercomputer in your pocket is a huge change. And I have no idea how that's really going to affect things. But I think the challenge for us in what we call classical music for want of a better term is the idea of long form. And that Has phenomenal rewards, but it is dealing with what is seen as a very scarce resource, which is attention.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reading list and experiencing list, whether it's theater going to plays, going to movies, going, watching something on television, everything in your experience, if you're a musician, I think, translates into your art. And that means that you can come to it in many different ways.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because this is one of the things so much of what we do, I think, in conducting is actually the real hard-crunching of data that system one takes care of and system two that thinks it's in charge is really just coming late to the party, you know, like 50 milliseconds late, but it thinks it's still in charge. And so it's a little bit like the BBC. Show Yes, Minister, which is very amusing, but these things one has to understand. And then sometimes we will talk about Which books are the ones that formed you and whether it's you're reading history or whether or not you're reading literature of the time or literature of your own time, but I think the broadest possible”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is about translation and the whole process of taking something from one situation, in this case one language, into another language, what you can carry across and what gets in the famous phrase lost in translation. And then I make them read the words we use of Jackson and Makilov because the metaphors we live by because that's one where we tend to speak and we haven't ever necessarily looked at the language we're using and what it communicates. I make them read someone that you've had on the podcast before, Daniel Kahneman, fantastic slow.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going slowly through something in a play, I could put all the rest of the information in without having to think at all about expository writing or descriptive. It's a forest. And I would imagine the forest and then I would have the things. And so I grew to love reading and was passionate about it. And my reading has been very wide-ranging. So I'm a real hard ass at Juilliard, and I make my students, I assume that they've already Charles Rosen's The Classical Style. I assume that they have a favorite orchestration book, but for the class I make them read all of, I'm afraid, George Steiner's After Babel.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To build one which is entirely unique, and her whole book then talks about people and situations in which the relatively recent experience of reading text for Homo sapiens is something that the majority of people do in a certain neurological way, but there are others for whom, for whatever reasons, those neural pathways are not open to them, and so they need to build something different. And so part of my experience of reading plays and having this space was”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A few years ago, I came across a book by Dr. Marilyn Wolf called Proust and the Squid. And in this book, she talks about the fact that the squid has a very simple nervous system. So it is possible to study all sorts of aspects of it. This is the same reason that molecular biology uses things like C. elegans, the nematodes, because you can figure out what's happening. You can turn off this particular cell and see what does that do to the animal. Well, it turns out unlike Proust, who is the quintessential reader, there are people who have difficulty reading, and there are squid that cannot swim when they are born. And a squid that cannot swim when it is born dies. And so the fascinating thing when you study these particular squid who have this anomaly is that they don't use the normal neural pathway to the muscles.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I had trouble as a reader when I was a kid, and I was born in a family of very fine readers. So I felt very... I had a very low sense of self-esteem in that regard. And at the time, this was before people talked about legasthenia or dyslexia and so forth. It was hard for me to read, and I managed to work it out through reading plays because in most plays, there's a great deal of space around the text. And all of a sudden I found that that space allowed me to process things easier.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't just hang up there instrument and go home when it gets to that passage. And it's true that without doing this consciously, you immediately bring the trombones down or you bring the bassoons up or you set the orchestra up differently. There are all sorts of ways that you can accomplish what's necessary. But I think the fundamental idea is every person in the orchestra, like every person in an ensemble of soloists, is equally important and their viewpoints are equally valid and your job is to figure out how to take all of that and synthesize it so that you have a unified whole that has as much clarity as possible.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just reams of details in a score. And so I as an interpreter of someone else's music, I try to take all of that with as much sort of precision and good faith as possible that they just didn't just do it willfully. And therefore, I think if they want to hear something, they have put it in there in the score. And it seems inconceivable to me that we wouldn't try and make sure that it's heard, even if it would seem, ah, well, the bassoons have the trombones blaring right behind them, therefore we won't hear the bassoons. No, if there are moments when Yanacek just leaves out the bassoons, great. But if the composer has put the bassoons in there, if it's Berlios and he's got his four bassoons and his trombones, and they're all playing Fortissimo, then you have to figure out what is necessary to make sure that the bassoons”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that was the standard go-to line. But he said, it's very simple. You make sure that you have very clearly what you want to hear in your head. And then, even without realizing it, you will instinctively do what is necessary to make sure that you hear it. And he is absolutely right, so that for me, having worked with composers and struggling with writing music myself, I think very long about how I'm going to put something down on the page. And this precise instrument, that detail, I mean, John Adams used to say that you...”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Must, as an aside, I must say that one of the things Pierre often said in the most complex situations would be to preface it with, it's very simple. Became a joke at the ensemble. Pierre, how do I do 13 in the time of 17? He would say, Oh”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's very funny you should say that because that's one of the things that I always found fantastic listening to Pierre, either in a concert or a rehearsal or a recording. And I once asked him, I said, how do you get such incredible clarity?”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would say, well, try it this way. And oh, yeah, right, because they haven't necessarily come across something like that. So most of my knowledge I owe to the members of the Ensemble and Contemplate.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A gymnast in top form. And so there's lots of practice that's going on on the side. So that's one aspect of it. And then the other aspect was that when I would come into a rehearsal and you have composers pushing the envelope, there would be times when I would think, well, you can't possibly play this on the instrument. And they would say, oh, yes, you can. If you do this this way, and so they would show me a fingering or they would show me a combination of the position on the string instrument or a type of circular breathing on the woodwinds in such a way that I felt I was getting a masterclass in every single instrument. And what's been fascinating is to be able to, and this is the heart of music in itself as a tradition where you give on the things that you've gotten from those before you. I would get to orchestras and the percussion player would say, no, I don't think you can do that.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He made it so that each one of the players was considered a soloist. It was an ensemble of 31 soloists, and their contract was modeled on the soloists' contract in an orchestra, which is usually closer to two-thirds of the time so that they're not playing every single piece, every single week, because they need the time to keep themselves like a great sports player, a tennis player.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think at the beginning, you tend to have the most trouble with the instrument or the group of instruments with whom you have the least practical experience. So when I was first starting out as a 21-year-old, the idea of telling a brass and woodwind section, let's breathe here felt far more comfortable than turning to the first violin and saying, what would that be like if we started it up, though? And then with time you gain a greater understanding of what's going on. I mean, this is why the work with the ensemble inter contemporan for nine years for me was absolutely formative because there are two things. One is when Boulez founded this group,”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This other piece after the break, or it may be a long-term decision, such as what are we going to play in the coming seasons that help develop the orchestra, or it may be a decision that impacts the orchestra for 25, 30, 40 years, that you won't be involved with anymore as when you give tenure to a particular player in the orchestra. But all of these things and the efficacy of them is based on your ability to really deeply listen to what is going on and listen to the different points of view.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Figure out how to harness all of the collective artistry that's right in front of you and manage to get it to move in the same direction. And so yes, sometimes there are decisions that you need to take, like any manager, right? And it may be as simple as a short-term decision. Tomorrow morning let's rehearse this and start with this, and then we'll go to...”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, you can only do your job by listening That's the only way to do the job. And it looks as though you are somehow imposing your will on other people. You're not at all. You're much more, I think my father was a research engineer. And so it's, although I didn't have the mathematics skills to follow him into those domains, it's fascinating to me in the latter part of his life he was often managing these brilliant scientists, many of whom were phenomenal at what they could do, but they couldn't necessarily figure out how to do things together. And so your job is”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That being the one person not making sound in the room is a little ridiculous. And I think that's something that sometimes, you know, not taking ourselves too seriously is something that is hard for some musicians.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wandering person until he managed to find a spot in Ireland and then London and he taught conducting and I was fortunate enough to be his assistant in a summer course in Ireland. And Janusz would often say to people imagine the moon view that there's some extraterrestrial who's come to observe the Earth and thinks that a safe distance to do this is from the moon because you don't want to get too close. You don't know how these people are going to behave. And he sets up a telescope and the telescope is trained purely by chance on an orchestra room where all of these people looking like they're trying to saw through something with a bow and people who are going red in the face with these sort of yellow instruments that they're playing. And there's this one person who's just holding a little stick and waving their arms like crazy. And all of a sudden the moon view makes you realize.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, you know, I think... You need to feel comfortable with being sometimes looking slightly foolish, right? I had a wonderful mentor and colleague named Janusz Furst who started out as a violinist, grew up in Hungary. In 56, he crossed the sea from Hungary into Austria and then was a”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That helps build this kind of communication and trust between the players. I mean, we recently did a concert, one of the recreation of one of Pierre's rug concerts. And there were a couple of notes that people played in the Webern symphony, which is very hard and very austere. And you play one note and then you have four bars where you can chastise yourself because that note didn't come out just as perfectly as you wanted it to. And those are moments where... The communication with the conductor, I think, is just essential because that's what keeps the whole thing alive and full of meaning.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's to just check in to see am I in the right place? But that is a personal moment where the orchestra is thinking about what's coming, right? They're not thinking about what's behind because you're constantly in the present and the future. But that's your moment to send a message to somebody which can be, oh wow, that was incredible. That sense of maestro came to my house is really one of the things I think that”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone looking up to get information. That's the moment where you can send the information through so that, you know, with your hands or your face or your gestures that you're saying, maybe try it this way. And they pick that information up and then use it. But the thing that no one will tell you and that the players themselves don't often realize is that instinctively, and I think subconsciously, almost every player looks up after they've finished playing something.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's a fabulous question. And this I'll now have to go public with this. The funny thing is, every single individual in an orchestra looks up at a different time. It's totally personal. There are some people, they look up a whole bar before, and then they put their eyes down and they don't want any more eye contact. There are other people who look as though they're not looking up, but you can see that they're paying attention to you before they go back into their own world. And there are people who look up right before they're going to play. And one of the challenges for a conductor is as quickly as possible with a group you don't know to try and actually memorize when everybody looks up. Because that's like, I always say this is like the paperboy, if you're on your, or the paper girl might as well, if you're on your route and you have your papers in your bicycle satchel and you throw it at the window and the window is closed, you'll probably have to pay for the plane of glass. Whereas if the window goes up, which is the equivalency of glass.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are speaking in sound all the time. And that means that if a player plays something that's really wonderful, the recognition of that, I feel false principally to the conductor to reflect that out to the rest of the musicians. There's an unwritten rule in an orchestra that you don't turn around and look at somebody, even if they've played something great. And so I think that part of our job is to show the rest of the players gee how great that was. And part of the flexibility comes from if, let's say, the Obo player has the read from God tonight that if they want to stay on the high note a little bit longer or the soprano at the Metropolitan Opera, that you just say, yes, let's do this. This is one of these magical moments of humanity, and we're lucky to be a part of it.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I think the thing that's fascinating is the I think we're enormously privileged to be able to play music. It's best summed up by John Cage's phrase, happy new ears. So, when I'm in the sort of situation with musicians, whether it's rehearsal or a concert, There is that sense of wonder that sound can communicate meaning. And so”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he passed away very suddenly. And so Pierre took one of the sort of fragments that he had written around the memorial of Stravinsky and wrote this piece for flute, originally for flute solo. in trying to work on the piece for its premiere at memorial concert for Laurence Beauregard, the fluteist. He and Sophie Charrier felt that something was missing and so overnight he wrote this accompaniment part for the strings and the two horns. And it is an absolute gem. And at five minutes, it won't take too much out of your time and you won't feel as though you have spent your time incorrectly.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I would say start gently with a piece like Memorial, where they're the kind of sound world. It's for solo flute. It's for a small string ensemble and two French horns. The sound world is delightful. And at the same time, it is a piece that has a very strong emotional tenor. It really is a memorial for beloved member who was quite young when he died from the ensemble in Mois, who was working very closely with Pierre on developing the MIDI flute. In other words, a flute that a player could play like a normal flute, and it would be able to interface with the computer.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need to use language that doesn't somehow apologize for that complexity. And there are a number of composers I could give you in this way. I will say that my own background is one where I am slightly prejudiced against things that are ultra-complex. And I have spent much of my life being convinced after engaging with the work that there's much more and that I should reserve judgment before I really start to understand things.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Comfort with discomfort is something that I think contemporary classical music really deals with. So there are ways of listening where you can Of take in the whole thing and say, but I tend to like music that is more consonant. And I can find you a whole group of contemporary composers who agree with you, who like consonant music. Then there are other people who say, I find that in my sort of philosophical outlook, much consonant music that's being written today feels like it's somehow a cop-out, that actually reality is a much trickier and nastier beast. That's how I feel. To grab hold of it.”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much more than many of my musical colleagues. It's not that they don't hear them, but it doesn't enter into their calculation of what's important in music. So each composer has these particular unique experiences that they've had as a musician, and then they use that with their own imagination to come up with ideas that they hope are saying something that is unique and that has not been said before. And what this means is that similarly to what happened in poetry in the 20th century and in our century, all of a sudden it feels as though we used to be able to hold on to when we were listening to something that was new and with which we were unfamiliar are suddenly broken down and it feels like a free-for-all. And so what do I do? Different people's”
2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source