RESPIRO E MOVIMENTO®

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Respiro E Movimento

Interview: John Metcalfe And Simon Richmond, Composers

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Who or what inspired you to take up composing, and pursue a career in music?

JM: Getting paid 2 and a half p by Vicky Sinden at primary school for playing the opening few bars of Joplin’s ‘The Entertainer’. This enabled purchase of an iced bun at break time.

SR: Mostly a curiosity about sound – combinations of melody and accidental harmonies. As a child I was always making Heath-Robinson type instruments out of bottles and bricks and bits of wood. I used to multi-track using tow cassette players and end up with these awful hissy chunks of clicks and bangs and clunks. I think part of me is still trying to get back to that.

Who or what were the most significant influences on your musical life and career as a composer?

JM: My father dying suddenly when I was a child.

SR: When I was about 22 I had a dream in which Frank Zappa and I were trying to get in to a health club resort in the Catskills. We finally made it to the recliners, sunblock cardboard shields on our noses, and Frank said: “People think that the struggle in art is to either create great works of the highest quality or to pound out poppy trash, but the true magic happens when you can combine the two.” I have been chasing that goal ever since.

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Interview: Fabio Luisi, the Florence Opera’s new Musical Director

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In an interview with the Corriere della sera’s di Giuseppina Manin, Luisi said,

In Italy, you can work, and work well. Yes, it’s true that the opera companies are in difficulty, but the number of productions are growing and the audience as well. The attitude is changing, and finally there are less political appointments and more based on competence and ability. Certainly, old habits die hard, but to restore vitality to our theatres, we must return to principles. As a Chinese proverb says, “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”.

Much of Luisi’s work has been in the US where private sector funding is the norm.

But private sponsors don’t give the security of continuity. Many theatres in the States are suffering because the sponsors are leaving. The State must give stability to the arts.

Luisi has worked extensively at La Scala, having conducted several operas and many concerts to conduct the Filarmonica della Scala in a Strauss and Liszt programme.

With La Scala, I have very special ties. I admire the work that Chailly is doing to give the bel canto repertory its due place. Next season I will be back to conduct an opera. An Italian opera!

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Estonia Offers Every Child A Musical Instrument

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Estonia’s centenary in 2018 is around the corner and preparations are already well under way in the form of initiatives and events. As befits a birthday, these initiatives are known as “gifts” and can take the shape of anything citizens, companies or the state dream up – as long as they benefit and delight the people of Estonia.

One such gift certainly does not hold back on ambition: called “An Instrument for Every Child”, the project seeks to boost music education in Estonia.

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Michael Shannon on ‘Nocturnal Animals’

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About his “hard to surprise” character, Shannon says, “He’s seen so much over the years. He’s dealt with a lot of gruesome crimes. In order to cope with that kind of darkness, you develop a lot of calluses, I think, psychically.” Shannon continues, “Put it this way, he can’t really be punished any more than his body is doing. What are you going to do to him, put him in prison? He doesn’t care. He doesn’t have a lot of time anyway.”

While Shannon has a history of playing stoic, emotionally damaged characters, he says that he connected with his character because of Ford’s writing. He explains, “From Day 1, I felt pretty locked into [the character]. It’s pretty mysterious. I can’t really say why or how. Maybe it’s because the writing’s so good. When you’ve got really great writing, it makes it easy. This was such a great read and it was so vivid from the get-go, I just seemed to find it pretty easily.”

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The Neuroscience of Music

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When it comes to music and the human brain, Daniel Levitin’s expertise is hard to top. The musician, professor, and neuroscientist quite literally wrote the book on the topic when he penned the 2006 bestseller This is Your Brain On Music. His most recent book The Organized Mind furthers his exploration into our brains with a focus on how information overload is affecting cognition and what we can do it about it.

You’ve been working on some new research into music and people’s lives at home. What are some of the most interesting or unexpected things you’ve learned about how music—or the lack thereof that affects our lives at home?

Levitin: I think one of the most interesting things is the number of people who really don’t have music playing in their homes. It’s quite striking across the nine countries we surveyed. Something as simple as entertaining friends and family: 84% of people in Sweden, 83% of people in the U.K., 79% of people in the U.S. don’t play music when they have friends over. That just seemed surprising and weird to me. I’m of the Boomer generation, so music was just something that you did and it’s the way that you related to other people, and even the generation behind me. These are people from all age brackets. It’s not just the digital natives who aren’t playing music. Nobody is.

Other activities like cooking dinner, doing the dishes, relaxing in the evening and weekend. In Denmark, 69% of people and in France 82% of people did not listen to music to relax for the evening or the weekend. That was one thing that was surprising. The other is the yearning that people have for more contact, juxtaposed with the amount of time they spend in their own isolated, digital words. 86% want to spend more time doing activities in person with others. It’s as though two wheels are in a rut and they can’t figure out how to get back on the road that they used to be on. We’ve got to encourage people to take screen-time breaks and to establish shared spaces in the home where they can enjoy communal activities.

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