Bryan: So, I guess, first off, what motivates you to rehearse and perform?
Mike: It’s just a lot of fun to play with a group; it’s, it’s pretty well the best group of musicians I’ve ever played with, like, you know, better than, better than all-county, better than anything like that.
Bryan: So in terms of musical…
Mike: Yeah, yeah, they’re an amazing group of musicians. It’s so much fun to be playing with them.
Bryan: And you’re a CS major, correct?
Mike: Yes.
Bryan: So is there any relation between music and CS for you, or…?
Mike: CS specifically, no, but I’ve always been very much into video games, and I guess I pay attention to the music in video games more than most people, and I kind of think that it, it feels to me like that’s where classical music has gone. It’s one of the few places that people can write new classical music for is, like, the background of a video game, so…
Bryan: So, um, is it something that you do casually, like on the side, basically, I guess, are you a music major and have you taken a lot of music classes at Brown?
Mike: Ah, no. I’ve taken, I took, Computers and Music, which was, ah, interesting, but not something I’d want to do again. Do you, do you know that class; should I explain that class?
Bryan: Yeah, could you?
Mike: Yeah, it’s basically how to use MIDI, how to create sounds out of, um, other sounds.
Bryan: OK.
Mike: How to…like we really only had two assignemnets in that class. One was to create some sort of piece using MIDI synthesizing and ostanato, the other was to create a piece with no discernable rhythm. So…um, it was an interesting class, but mostly last year, I took Music 55-56 with Sarah, so, that’s most of my music classes at Brown.
Bryan: Cool. So how do you compare the saxtet to the other musical groups you’re in, like the Wind Symphony and the Brown Band?
Mike: Um…well, I’ll start with the Wind Symphony. People take saxtet much more seriously than Wind Symphony. Um, I will, we will all occasionally go home and actually sit with our saxophones and practice the music. That doesn’t happen with very many people in Wind Symphony. Um, another thing is how long we take to tune: um, like the saxtet will take, you know, a good 5 minutes and we’ll all be listening and make sure every single person is exactly in tune, or as close as we can get, whereas the Wind Symphony will just, will just play a note and we’ll be pretty close after a try or two, but. Um…the music we play is much, much more difficult in the saxtet; you’re playing with four people as opposed to, what’s it, 40 or 50,
Bryan: Yeah, something like that.
Mike: You’re much more exposed, um, when you...Basically everything, even if you’re just playing half notes, it’s still almost a soloistic kind of, kind of playing and you have, like there’s no room for error, there’s much less room for error, I guess.
Bryan: Yeah, much less.
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4 comments:
It's really great to hear just how passionate your interviewee is about composing music for video games. I was most intrigued by his comment on how classical music that is composed today is really relevant for video games, because a lot of people who don't know much about classical music tend to deem it "dated" and whatnot. However, he has found a way to make the seemingly "dated" contemporary.
I'd be interested to hear some of his music and compare it to other classical pieces. Where lie the similarities, the differences?
I was interested to read Mike's description of the differences between the saxtet and wind symphony. It might be good to look at what kind of an influence the outside musical groups/traditions that saxtet members come from or belong to impact their performance/choice of music.
Because of my research interests, I was intrigued to hear Mike bring up videogame music. Quite a bit of this excerpt is not focused on the saxtet, which was an interesting choice for you to make. The interview speaks to the uniqueness of each performer's background and interests, and the variety of perspectives that they bring to their ensemble performances. Asking Mike to make the comparison to other ensembles also served this purpose. By the way, I'm quite impressed with the fieldnotes you have been posting. I hope you'll use them during your presentation (you'll be able to show your blog posts on-screen if you want). You also clearly have enough material to write your final performance ethnography paper about this group, if you want.
Kiri,
I probably should've found a more relevant part of the interview to transcribe, but I had a busy weekend so I just did around the first 500 words. I have since listened to and taken notes on the rest of the interview.
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