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

1. “Every artist has a unique way of viewing the world and they express it through music. And part of that experience is the history of what's come before them and how they deal with that history and what they see around them at the moment. So for example, there are people who have incredible senses of pitch. I'm thinking of the composer George Benjamin or the late Peter Ertf, who if they hear a pitch can tell you how many cents it is above the normal one that you would play on the piano. And it's just uncanny to me because I can't do that. At the same time, when I'm listening to music, and maybe this is the residual of being a recovering horn player, I hear the overtone structure of pitches. I have realized.”

   2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “But believe it or not, a lot of my listeners do not love contemporary classical music. Gee, what a surprise. If you just had to explain to them shortly why they should listen to Boulez or you conducting boulez, what's the pitch? The pitch is basically that”

   2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “And that's one of the things that I think we as performers and programmers have to take into account when we're deciding to do something. So for example, the little introduction that I do to Explosent Fix is because if I start with Tancitois 7, which feels a little bit like you take your seat in the concert hall and suddenly it's transformed into one of the runways that JFK and there are large Airbus 300s coming in right over your head, it can be a little bit scary. Whereas if I start with the delicate part of the piece, which is at the end and give them a couple of things to think about, all of a sudden there's enough context that that airport runway experience makes sense within the whole thing. And so I think that's where this idea of what is contemporary for each individual audience member is a tricky one to generalize about. This may be too difficult a question.”

   2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “that I play to my conductors to sort of put this idea across with not very many words. And it has everything from reggae to ACDC to Bruce Springsteen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to Schubert Leed, a Beethoven string quartet, a Gomelon, some kabuki music to Indian sitar raga. And it's all put together with a maximum of 2.5 seconds. Sometimes they're even shorter. And the whole reason for this mixtape and that I played to the conductors is to get them to understand that whether or not you feel musically sophisticated, the speed with which your brain decides, ah yes, for me, no, not for me is very, very quick.”

   2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Piece of music that I play is to try and make it regardless of when it was written, contemporary in the sense that it speaks to us now because we are contemporary, right? So when I'm doing Mozart, I'm not expecting the audience to come in a horse and carriage and have sort of knee breeches and then to die from appendicitis on the early side. So there are lots of things that one does. And I think that from that point of view, there are certain works of Pierre that have become kinds of classics, like the second piano sonata, which doesn't sound dated. No. And at the same time, it sounds for certain people, it has a kind of surface complexity that will immediately cut lots of people off. I have a sort of a nice...”

   2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “That's an interesting question, and I'm not sure that it's possible to give a really compelling and satisfactory answer. And the reason for this is that I think contemporism is a very movable feast and it has to do with what it is you've experienced. someone might listen to a piece of Pierre's from say the 1950s. I'm thinking like the first sonata for piano or the sonatine for flute and piano and think of that as very contemporary. Whereas someone else who has been involved in contemporary classical music for want of a better term for the last six years, we'll hear that and say, oh, that's very dated, right? And so this is one of the sort of challenges my sense in any...”

   2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “For example, the second mosaic piece at the beginning of Memorial or the Original Last Movement of Exposon Fix, you can't really do that in a strict meter. It's 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. And if you tried to sort of push that into a box, it would be a little bit like trying to take a very beautiful flower and squishing it down into a little sort of glass case where the whole reason you like the flower is because it has these sort of expressions of space that otherwise are cut off. Now a lot of PR's music now is fairly old. Does it still sound contemporary?”

   2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Otherwise, if you measure it by a grid, everything else that doesn't fit in the grid becomes a syncopation. And there's nothing wrong with this. This is what is so wonderful about the kind of grid that jazz players are able to manufacture, where there's so much push and pull with the grid, and that's actually where a great deal of the energy comes from. At the same time, for Pierre, there are many pieces in which...”

   2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “I mean, essentially, not that there's the law of the excluded middle, but essentially composers use two basic ideas when they're going to notate their music. One is to take a certain amount of time and subdivide it. So this would be like. And there are many composers who do that. And then there's the idea that you have, say, a group of eighth notes or 16th notes that form an underlying pulse. This is very much coming from the Indian subcontinent. And so you have this thing going and that's why the notation in liturgy, which that comes from the second movement of Olivier Messian, requires those differing time signatures because otherwise”

   2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “That is behind me with the score behind me at the same time. And I could do the whole piece by heart. And I prefer by heart rather than from memory because I think that the notion is that like any kind of music, it means so much to you that there's no way you could forget it in the same way that you can't forget your parents' names because they have volumes of experience and love and connection that are attached to those names. And that becomes the same way in a piece that you really love dearly as some of the Bulesp speaks to me. Or the time signatures of these works just crazy? No, the interesting thing is Pierre”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “that the ensemble was playing. So my first couple of seasons, I felt like I was drinking from a fire hydrant. At the same time, what was interesting working with that group is that they brought the kind of deep knowledge of his chamber music, of his whole repertoire that you might find in a great symphony orchestra with regard to Beethoven. And so you automatically start imbibing all of these different sort of ideas. And what ends up happening is that, so for example, for Explosent Fiqhs, that's a work that has lots of shifting patterns, but it's written in mosaic form. And sometimes to help the audience understand that, I will talk to them at the beginning and give musical examples, which requires me to look at the audience with My microphone and conduct the group.”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “It was 1991. And this is unusual in that I think they were probably desperate to find a music director, Peter Ertv had said, no, I am not going to extend anymore. And so Pierre happened to find me. And the interesting thing was he nominated me and gave me the job as music director. And I had never conducted the ensemble before. So that was slightly daunting, shall we say, to go in. But what that meant was that at the end of my first season, we had a tour and we did a fabulous sort of production of Le Martus Maitre with the Ballet Chopinot regime Chopinot, ballet Atlantique with this fabulous choreography to Lamarta Sametre, which meant I needed to conduct it. And so I came in and I realized that my first Martau Sommatre was going to be the 200.”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Completely changes the idea of what you think of as sound coming in. And this is a constant, right? The African masks and Picasso and Prak and the whole idea of changing the perspective of things in Cubism. So there's so much in Pierre's music that is about his paying attention and listening all the time, whether it's to Scottish bagpipes to work out this idea of, oh, wait, the chanter has all of these tiny little notes that it plays, and they have very specific rules for how they play these. I like this idea, and I'm going to sort of bring it into my music. And you cognitively, can you memorize these scores, or shall I call them tunes the way you could with Beethoven or Brahms? Or is that just impossible for everyone? You know, when I first got to the Ensemble Lando Contemporary,”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Around a great deal and to some extent to show what was happening in French culture, in this case in theater. And so Pierre got to go to all sorts of places that at the time were totally not touristic. And he remembers flying, you know, they gave you wax to put in the ears when you flew over the Andes and little tubes with oxygen would come down that you would put in your nose. I mean, all sorts of things like this that give it a real character, and he happened to be in the Caribbean. And he was walking along the beach, and this was before Club Med or anything like this. So there were no tourists. And as he was coming along the shore, he kept hearing this sort of strange sound. And as he got closer, these were Steel Drum players. And this sort of sound always stayed with him. And I think this is similar to the experience of many French composers where all of a sudden Agamalam is brought to the Paris exposition and it...”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Electronic area lies there inert while the living musicians move along. Now there are some non-Western influences in Boulez's music, Gamelin music notations. How do you prepare for those? Do you go listen to Gamelin or you just ignore it and focus on Boulez? You know, I think the answer is both, right? The interesting thing. So, for example, in the work Cirancies, as well as in the seventh notation, which are about the same sort of gestation period, there are steel drums. And this is not a sound you would necessarily immediately think that Pierre would be drawn to. And yet the story behind it is that when he was quite a young man, he became responsible for the musical side of the Ren ⁇ Borre Theatre Company. And this was a company that the French government used in the aftermath of the Second World War to tour.”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “And so he heard all of that, and there was no sense of, no, no, no, you shouldn't do this like that. It's a fascinating thing working with composers, not only with Pierre, but with all sorts of different composers because of that sense of here's what it sounds like in my head, not in an acoustic, not with real players who are putting things in. And in fact, one of the difficulties I've found with composers who work with electronic sounds, electroacoustic music, and with live performance is that they constantly feel that the live performers are inflecting their music with something new and allowing it to develop, whereas the thing that has been worked out however sophisticated in the”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Almost overly rigorous. Right. And one of the things that's interesting that I found often is, and I know this from my own paltry experiences as a composer, you get very nervous when your piece is being played, right? It's this moment where it's almost like sending your child onto the Little League field where all of the parents are watching and, oh my goodness, what's going to happen now? And so there is a kind of a nervousness. And that frequently, I think, for composers translates into if I just do this faster or if I just do this with more energy. And yet sitting and listening to it, one has a completely different experience of the piece than when you are necessarily in the driver's seat. And so, you know, we did the Notation 7 with Pierre in Lyon.”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “He said, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can actually do more. And that was the moment where I realized he has no problem when the emotion is put into his works in an immensely intense way, but he is not able to do that himself as a performer. And so there are a lot of his works where I have done things in his presence which he doesn't do. And you won't find it on his recordings. And he said, oh yes, that's really very nice. That's lovely. So it's a fascinating question, this one of how does one express emotion and how comfortable is one with emotions in public? And you're recording of say notation seven. You think that's more emotional than his recording of the same piece? You know, I haven't listened to either of them. I actually prefer yours. But his is...”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “But then about two years later for a big birthday celebration in Tokyo, I was doing a performance of it in Kioe Hall. And we got to the slow central passage of Transitore 7, which was the first movement of Exploisant Fiques. And I remember thinking this is so incredibly sensual. And it sounds so beautiful in this hall. I'm going to really push the envelope. And so I think Pierre's tempo marking is quarter note equals 40, which is quite slow. But I was down almost at the double of that, like eighth note equals 40. And it was just, it was like the most unbelievably sort of seductive rebellion kind of sound that you could imagine. And after the rehearsal, you know, Pierre was there and I went up to him and I said, Pierre, I'm very sorry. I really indulged in the slow section.”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “We'll make the calculations. And so he calculated everything. So it would be slightly slower. And I turned with some chagrin to the ensemble and said, do you know how we recalculate the tempo? And I just gave an upbeat. So this was one of the things that we worked on this together, in a sense. It was very close collaboration”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “I'm right behind it all of the computers, and I heard him rehearse it first with the ensemble and work things out. And so that was fascinating both to see someone working with players and have a clarinet player say, you know, this actual tremola between these two notes doesn't work very well. And to have the man that I would think of as supremely knowledgeable about writing for instruments, say, oh, well, you know, if we did this one, would it work better? And the player says, yes, sure, that's fine. And to see this kind of flexibility with his own works and then to be up in front conducting and having the computer create the sounds in real time based on what the information that the MIDI flute was giving it. And for me to say, you know, Pierre, I think it's actually just a little too fast for us to be able to, and he said, oh, just a minute.”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Sort of emphasis on precision that was connected with his performing, there was a sense that one of the headlines in a New York paper announcing his arrival at the New York Philharmonic was The Ice Man Cometh, right? And I think there's that sense of things. But while I can understand where that came from, I never really saw that side of him. And in fact, what was fascinating doing a number of his works, I remember in Japan, I had given the, I was lucky enough to fall into the opportunity to give the world premiere of Expletent Fiqes. And that was because he had knee problems. And so the tour that we had made for Italy and Germany, he was just not going to be able to do because of waiting around for airplanes. And it was extremely painful. So I got to rehearse the piece with him in the hall.”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “His music is very emotional. Do you think he's more properly thought of as a kind of surrealist composer rather than a serialist? I think that because he doesn't wear his or never wore his emotion on his sleeve in any way, that many people and also with this extraordinary”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Had the courage to speak to him, he had this reputation of being a bit severe and uncompromising. You think that's wrong? I think that he came of age in a period that was fraught with all sorts of musical challenges. And I think his, as he often used to say, I'm Capricorn. So I'm very stubborn. So I think that he was somewhat combative as a young man. And I got to know him, we never had a sort of filial relation. We had a grand filial, if I can call it that. And so, you know, your grandfather looks at you and is very forgiving of all of the things that you do which are silly. And I think this was the nice relationship that I had with him when he asked me to take over the ensemble anticom d' ⁇ but we'd had really almost no contact beforehand.”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Thank you very much. Now, as we both know, it's the 100th birthday of Pierre Boulez on March 22nd, and we're recording just a few days before then, and you studied with Boulez. I didn't actually study with him. That's, in a sense, that was the benefit of coming to him relatively late. I went to London to study in 1976 at the Royal Academy of Music, and of course that was when Boulez was no longer the chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, but he still had a very strong relationship with the organization. So he came a lot, and I got to see all sorts of amazing concerts at a very formative period of my life. Later on, I figured out how to get into the studio where the BBC Symphony Orchestra rehearses. And so I would go to rehearsals that he had. And he was always very nice, and he would say hello when he saw this stranger sitting in the back of the room. But I never.”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm happy to be here in New York City with David Robertson, who is one of my favorite classical conductors. In the year, I think 2003, I went to hear David in Paris at Ircom, and I've been thinking about him and what he does ever since. He served as principal conductor of the ensemble intercontemporain from nineteen ninety two to two thousand, has been chief conductor in Sydney, Australia, music director in St. Louis, where he's credited with having revitalized that symphony, and he is very well known for his numerous recordings, including those of John Adams, Pierre Boulez, George Garshwin, and much more. He teaches at Juilliard, and he conducts regularly at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and this summer he's conducting with the New York Fillermonic an exciting concert featuring Stravinsky's Petrushka nineteen eleven edition. David, welcome.”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit Conversations with Tyler.com.”

    2025-07-09 · Conversations with Tyler · David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source