Interview: Lara Poe, Composer

As a musician, what is your definition of success?
As a composer, success is writing a piece that I’m pleased with. The form makes sense, things fit together in a satisfying way, and the piece feels solid and cohesive, as well as being pleasant to listen to (or at least I find it pleasant to listen to). Other things that invoke a sense of satisfaction include challenging myself in some way and then fulfilling the challenge in the way I was intending to, or not quite fulfilling it but discovering something else along the way. As a pianist, success for me is mastering the technical elements of a piece, as well as maintaining a balanced equilibrium between one’s own artistic impulses and the composer’s intentions. This means allowing the piece to speak for itself while allowing for some personal artistic expression.
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Feel Loose Enough To Create

Filmmaker Shares How He Breathes Life Into Music Making Stop Motion Puppets From Recycled Bits
Who Is The Musician Of All Time?

Beyoncé, the first black woman to ever headline at the Coachella Festival, blew the place wide open in April with a jaw-dropping performance that had headline writers reaching for superlatives. Entertainment Weekly’s Alex Suskind went with “Beyoncé’s historic Coachella performance may be the best of all time.” The YouTube live stream was watched by 41 million viewers in 232 countries, a new record for the platform. By all accounts, Beyoncé’s show set a new standard for epic, and she’s unquestionably the biggest star in the world these days. The “all time” claim is a big one, though, and makes you wonder about history’s other stars, and who might’ve been the biggest of all time.
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Joaquin Phoenix on the Struggles That He Has as an Actor

“There’s not one approach. It depends on the scene. The important thing with this movie was — and I acknowledge I probably do this a lot — to feel comfortable enough to make a lot of mistakes. To be able to say there’s not one right way for him to behave. Again, it seemed like the key was not knowing what his reaction was going to be. I’m sure that sometimes we used just a really straight version of a given scene, but we filmed so many different versions. You just dive head on into that feeling. But sometimes, when you’re making a movie, yeah, your nerves wear off and you grow accustomed to it, or you get tired, or whatever. Maybe it’s a million things over the course of the six weeks. So you just go, ‘OK, well, this is fuckin’ shit,’ and you go outside and you sit and you talk about it, and you try to connect again to what is meaningful about this moment — to try and uncover something that you can latch onto. I guess. I don’t fuckin’ know, man.”
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