![]() That was a great reminder, I guess, that fun should be the first goal of music for the way I want to do it. You can just be a natural, but with harmony, if you want to go into the deeper storytelling aspects of harmony, which is what I wanted to do, then I decided, “OK, for this subject, I’m just going to be a model student and take it really seriously.”Īnother school for you was a basement in Toronto with Peaches and Mocky. ![]() I think with rhythm and melody you can be quite instinctive. You can’t just bumble into the kind of harmony I wanted to do. That’s sort of the formula I got to, but something like harmony was something that I realized, you can’t really do harmony the way I wanted to do it without having some training. I started to wear it like a badge of honor, that I wanted to make the kind of music I wanted to make, which was music with classical colors and a jazz touch but fundamentally using the structure of pop music. I don’t even want to get good at recognizing deep structure. ![]() Because I was already in my mind pretty sure I wanted to make miniature songs, more like songs with the structure of pop music, so right away, there was a moment where I said, “I’m just going to reject this.” I gave it a chance, but I’m not interested in deep structure. There were other aesthetic things, like for example, when you study classical music, there’s a lot of pieces that have a very deep structure, pieces that might be 12 or 14 minutes long with very few repeating moments, for example. In my case, I was very interested in how harmony works, so that was a place where I chose to be a good student essentially and to trust my teachers and let them lead me. It depends what parts of your musical personality. I don’t like this, but this, this I love.” That’s what school is for.įor you, is it partly about learning how to do it properly so you can do it wrong? And picking and choosing the moments to say, “OK, I’m going to trust now that this Beethoven guy knows a little bit of something about music, and so I’m going to stick my nose in the score and figure out what it is that gives me the goose bumps.” If I heard a piece of music that I thought was too intellectual, or I didn’t feel anything, or cheesy, or unlistenable, then I could also understand why that is but feel free to reject going any deeper and just saying, “You know what? Screw this. I think you have to have an oppositional personality when you go into a school situation, but not so much that you’re just being a systematic rebel. Even though you’re a very diverse group of open-minded people, when groups get together and there’s institutions and structure, some people will start to conform, and even in this situation, it might be good for you to look into the eyes of someone you disagree with musically. I think here, there must also be, in its own way. And if you’re someone who dreams of combining categories, for example, it’s good to look in the eyes of those people that are essentially your enemy and at the same time, be smart enough to take the good parts that you can get out of a school situation. So when I went to university, I had to fight against the conformity and I had to fight against people whose ideas I really didn’t agree with, musical purists who put musical information and styles really into clear categories. I have the feeling that whenever there’s anything institutional behind music, it serves a great purpose for musicians because it breathes conformity in general. You studied music here at McGill University in Montréal, and I wondered what your view is on what any artist should try and get out of any school situation? We’re here this morning with a gentleman who has done far too much for us to be able to cover in an hour, so feel free to save your questions about your favorite Gonzales moments until the end, and in the meantime, a very big welcome, Chilly Gonzales.
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