 And John selected Dylan to write a piece that will be premiered, and Carolyn, I thought it would be nice for my associate conductor, Carolyn Kwan, will do the premiere on the program next weekend. So welcome, Dylan. Thank you. And John Wineglass, I know John for quite a while from many festivals, and John makes his home nearby. And David Kahn, I don't know if David's here. David has sponsored, oh, David, maybe you stand up also and be acknowledged so everybody can see you. David has been incredibly supportive, particularly of our educational programs, our free family concert for years now. And John and David approached me with the idea of incorporating some of the poetry and the texts that were written by young people in the juvenile facility here in Santa Cruz. And that's exactly what he's done, and his piece will be premiered tonight, the result of that. And then my, I think I know you the longest, Greg, it's hard to believe because you look so young always, and I feel so old. But Greg Smith is my friend from when we were in our 20s, or at least I was, you must have been in diapers. And this is, on Sunday we're going to premiere, is it the fifth piece you've written for us? I believe so. The fifth piece he's written for family concerts and very excited about it. We played about 10 minutes of it this morning. I mean, we will rehearse it before. Oh, that's tomorrow, isn't it? Yes, Sunday. But we decided that every day here is like a dog year, or a dog day. So it's at least like seven days here. And of course it's my pleasure to welcome back James McMillan. Jimmy was here 10 years ago and didn't want to make it a habit. So he's back now, a decade later, and will premiere a brand new piece that he's written, which is absolutely spectacular tonight as everything he writes is. And then Bézade, we first met as composer last year when Johnny of Thibaudet played his piano concerto. And he graciously agreed to, probably before he knew how much work was involved, to look at all the scores submitted and select the three young composers and oversee the composer's workshop. And I'm performing a piece of his next weekend at the Mission. And then Juan Roe is a new composer to the festival. Very excited to meet him and do his piece tonight. So a different perspective, different voice, and he's very engaged right now in writing his second opera. Is that right? Yeah, I can't imagine writing my first opera. So let me just, you know, immediately throw it to you for questions. Yes? Oh, and I'm sorry, I'm supposed to. I was told many times. Please wait for Elizabeth with the microphone to ask your questions so that everybody can hear it. There you go. Yes, I'd like to ask James McMillan if he could tell us some of the specific images and paintings that inspired his piece. Because he talks about them in the program, but I never found out what they were. Thank you. Yes, well, I mean, first and foremost, the inspiration is scriptural. The Woman of the Apocalypse is this rather strange figure in the Book of Revelation. But many visual artists have painted her and made images offer through history. Some of them very ancient, including Durer, who made a beautiful woodcut offer in the Middle Ages, which was a direct inspiration on me. And Paul Rubens has painted her in a rather beautiful, luscious, colorful painting. And then in more recent times, coming more up to date, someone like William Blake has made a wonderful and quite disturbing picture of this figure from the story. And it's a woman that's at the middle of some kind of cosmic turbulence. There's a war going on around about her and there's a terrible dragon trying to devour her and her child. It's a strange, almost nightmarish vision which has attracted many artists in the past, but not composers yet. So I thought in responding to both the original narrative, but also, or the dream at least, St. John's dream, but also to these marvelous paintings through history, I would try to respond in my own way in sound by painting the picture in sound. Next question, over here. I'm getting quite a lot of feedback up here. Is there any way to minimize that? Thank you. Thanks for John Wineglass and I'm just curious, the poetry that you have from these kids who are in the facilities here, do they have a chance to listen to what the end product is with the music? They will. Eventually we will do that. I was actually there last night and one of the poets actually showed his name and the credits and everything that he wrote in the score where his words were making magic. But we hope to do that actually after in the next couple of weeks. Okay, over that way, yes. This is for John Wineglass also. Did you come away with any general conclusions about the kids that wrote the poems about their lives and how they happen to get in the circumstances they are? Yeah, I was pretty much made privy to each of their situations. I can't really comment on them here. But yeah, three of them are still incarcerated. I think one is on probation and the other one is in Juvie who I saw last night actually. Yeah, we talked in specific. I had several interviews with them and discussed. My basic question is how did we get here? And we would talk through several decisions that they made in their lives. And I'm hoping that this piece, I know, in talking with them is helping them change their direction. One kid I talked to last night actually just finished his second course in college. So I'm hoping to make a difference in that way. I thought this would be a nice, isn't the right word, but a good way to follow up the project that we started the festival with the Hidden World of Girls, because I think all of these stories are so rich that each of us has. And this is a small window into these kids' lives and they're just around the block from us here. Anybody else? Yes, I'd like each one of the composers to let us know how do you conceive a new piece of music? Do you visualize it first? Do you hear music? What? Juan Ro, why don't you begin? At least for me, I actually, for this piece, I have a tune which I improvised first, which you will hear tonight. And then I use that tune and make it into a material for the orchestra. And at the end, the tune comes back. Is that? Sure. Well, greetings, everyone. I think each piece is different for me. Sometimes the work has a program, has a storyline, like the one that you're going to hear next week. Next weekend, it's called Seven Passages, inspired by Persian legend. But at present time, I'm writing a concerto, and certainly the characteristics of the instrument pays a huge role in shaping the music. So that's more on the abstract part. Sometimes you respond to poetry, and sometimes you respond to experiencing your own life. So at least for me, the sources of inspiration are varied. I mean, but what happens, I think, for non-composers? I have a hard time understanding whether you wake up in the morning and, oh, there's my new symphony. I mean, does that happen? And what happens? Or do you stare at that blank page and say, oh, my God, I have to write a symphony? Or does it vary? There's a story about this. It happened in Paris, and Maurice Ravel was in a cafe on the sidewalk, sitting, smoking cigarette. And a friend came by and said, Maurice, what are you doing? He said, well, I'm waiting here. So a few hours passed. The friend came back, saw Maurice Ravel exactly in the same place, smoking his cigarette, said, Maurice, you're still here. What are you waiting for? He said, I'm waiting for the music to come. So it could be a long time for the music to come, and many cigarettes to go. Jimmy? The curious thing about music is that, as Béziade has indicated, that it is an abstract form at its most fundamental level. It's probably the most abstract of the arts. And musicians are rightly proud of that. You know that at that fundamental level, music communicates all its power, all its fluency, without anything else, without needing to be explained. It is its own stuff, its own sounds, and the way that the sounds are organized. However, also, as Béziade was implying, music does sometimes enter into collaborations with the other arts. Quite wonderfully, in the case of opera, when words are set to music, and then it moves into a different sphere altogether, it can collaborate with theatre, it can collaborate with film, it can collaborate with literature and the visual arts. And so, as well as it being the most abstract of the arts, it's also a very representational art as well. We can make abstract works like symphonies that don't need any other explanation, or there are pieces, like the piece of mine that's being done tonight, which is a kind of tone poem. And I've always wondered whether people can still write, or should be still be writing tone poems in the 21st century. It's an art form that we associate with the 19th, and some people might say it's very old-fashioned to maintain it, but I would disagree with that. And music has always had these controversies between those who prized the most abstract music as the best, that the pure music of the symphony or the sonata form that is not representational is in some way higher than those other forms of music which try to represent things. And as you're probably aware, that's an ongoing debate. It wasn't just a debate that people had in the 19th century. We're still arguing about it now. I try to do both, I suppose. Yeah. But how do you get, I mean, what happens to get inspired, or is that an overused term? I mean, is it more practical? Well, I think in many of my conversations with my fellow composers, it's quite clear that we have very different types of inspiration. Each composer can be inspired in many different ways. And that's the lovely thing about it, but it can also be the frustrating thing about it as well, in that we're not sure when the inspiration will come or how it will come. It could simply be an abstract idea, a sound, a melody. Some of us still like writing melodies, thankfully. Or a harmonic sound or a musical colour. Or it could be the reaction to something external to music, something happening in the world now. And some people write political pieces. Or one reacts to the other arts, as I have done in this piece. It's not just scriptural. Yes, it is a religious piece, I suppose, but it's also a response to other artists. I could just echo what James mentioned. This is a little secret among the composers, but most composers also are influenced by other compositions. But they never mentioned that I was influenced by Bach or my colleague. But painters often go to exhibitions and are very much inspired by what they see, and then they create their own style. But I think that goes on in music as well. A number of large works were written inspired by somebody else. For example, the Goldberg variation was very much inspirational for many other variations formed in large scale that was written in the 19th and 20th century. But we tried to keep it as a secret. Don't worry, no one's listening. For me, I'd have to say that the best ideas come on their own schedule, on that Ravel schedule. I feel a little bit like the diner chef up here. And many times people place an order, and they want to grill cheese, and they don't want to wait a long time for it, so I have to meet a deadline. You're the guy. I'm the guy. I can make her grilled cheese, yeah. I don't like the reference of cheese on that as much as I did when I started. So I have to conjure. I have to hasten things along. And sometimes I have to settle for what I've got at that point in time. That's me. Greg, besides writing these family pieces, he also writes a lot for film. So this is what we're talking about, music being also just so important to other dimensions of our lives. We probably hear more music today than we heard in the entire 18th century. I mean, you can't escape it in a way. Every restaurant I go into, I go crazy. I don't know about you. So it's a different, I think it must be a different kind of pressure when you have to deliver a piece in a certain timeframe, or when you have a few months or even a few years to work on a piece. But I'm not sure yet, John. Yeah, for me it's, I have perfect pitch. So a lot of times I associate musical ideas with color. The key of D minor is red and the key of G minor is purple for me. And so a lot of times when I go to different, in that fact, this poetry that I, when David showed it to me, the music immediately came to me. And that was kind of a first time for me. I've experienced musical ideas from other things like Picasso's blue period and different things like that. But a lot of times I'm starting in this period of my life getting it from different mediums of art, poetry, paintings, and then I associate colors with that as well. It's funny to hear John say that, because I actually also associate sound with color, but D minor is sort of a light green for me. You never know. For me, I don't, I actually, despite that, I'm not sure that helps me at all becoming inspired. I think I, in the end you always do have to wait, but there are, I think there are things that you can do as a composer to write while you're still waiting for the inspiration. And it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be worse. It doesn't have to be uninspired, but there are things that you can work on in the piece that are not necessarily based on the inspiration. And often I actually find that as I, as I'm sort of getting into the piece, I think that I have a lot of good ideas at the beginning, but then there's a point where I'm thinking, why is there this one thing that I'm avoiding writing? And I realize that there's something that I want to be writing for whatever reason I've sort of put it aside, or I want to, you know, distill it with something else. And it's like, there's the idea. I actually, when I was, it can come from a lot of things and it can come from other composers too. And I had a moment earlier this year when I was working on the piece that is on the Council next Saturday, when I heard a recording was released online of Polaris, the Thomas Addis piece, which is being played on the next Sunday. And I heard it the first time and I said, oh, oh, okay. And then I listened to it again like 10 times. And then I thought, all right, this is how music works now. And I think that actually, that can happen in listening to music, but it can happen in sort of anything in your life where you just be walking down the street and you see a bird fly one way and the water crashes on the other side of the street and you say, oh, yeah, okay. And so, turning that into music is obviously, that's a challenge, but the inspiration has to come at some point. That's really interesting. I always wanted to ask composers who see colors in sounds like a D minor, light green. My question is, when you see colors, do you hear chords? For example, if you see light green, do you hear D minor? Right. I've actually thought about that a lot. And the answer is really that, I mean, if you hear a natural D, something's playing a D in the world, it's not just the D, you have all the overtones at the same time. So essentially, that's more or less a D major chord. If you just have a D playing, you have the major third and you have the perfect fifth, you know, you can sort of hear them if you try, but they certainly exist in the sound and in the vibrations. And so actually a D minor chord is sort of weird, you know, naturally if you think about it, because the F natural isn't in the overtone series. So there's actually some dissonance going on in a D minor chord. But for just, I think that's how it can work for just single notes. If you have A for me, it's sort of a dark red. It's what it really is, is A major is a dark red. But I would say to that that I think my inspiration... Is that not your question? I would say probably my D minor references comes from the movie Fantasia or Takata and Fugue and by Bach. And so I think as a kid, I'd watched that forever and just associated that color. And then everything came from that. I don't know if I answered your question, but... That's the beginning? Yes. But I do hear chords. I do hear chords. I hear major minor and I associate even augmented chords in diminished. They have a different color to them in the shades of their families. I can certainly understand how the different keys have different characteristics. I mean, no doubt about it. I mean, I go back to Mozart always and think about how he used the certain keys for certain things and consistently he would go back to that always. But does each composer... Is it different for each composer or is there sort of a universal association with keys or am I off on a tangent? I think it's a personal reference, right? Personal? Yeah, very personal because in repertoire, E-flat major sounds different in Mozart than Beethoven, for example. So I think it's the way that each mind is wired and it's personal. And certainly our time, when we don't really think about those chords as the principal foundation of how the music progress, that relationship becomes weakened if it ever exists in our mind. But certainly, as you mentioned, Mozart is very consistent in using certain chords associated with characters, but you could find the opposite in Chopin, for example. And also just to add to that, in the 20th or 21st century, there are so many different keys or scales. Right, there are so many different scales if you think of world music. And also with Microtono also, I mean, if a note between C and C sharp what color would that be? I think the platinum of the color is really rich to think about it that way. And we have so many choices and so many materials to take inspiration from. I can't remember the question. Okay, where are we? Microphone, where are we looking? Over here, okay. Those of us who live around Monterey Bay are fortunate enough to be able to traverse musical eras in a very short period of time every summer. Many of us have just been to the Carmel Bach Festival, and now we're here. And so since you have confessed that composers listen to other composers' music, and since you, John, have mentioned that Bach had an influence on you via Disney, I'd very much like to know what influence, particularly Bach, had on each of you. I've listened very carefully, and I don't hear anything of the Goldbergs in this week. Dylan, you want to start? I suspect my answer will be different from everybody else, because when I was growing up, I started playing cello when I was five, and I just really didn't want to play Bach. When I just, you know, actually my first teacher moved to Maine, and when I was sort of trying out new teachers for my second teacher, my qualification was I only wanted to play music that was written after 1945. And so I found the perfect teacher for me that way, and then as I got older, I feel like there was a moment when I was 16 or 17 when I thought, oh, I really wonder, you know, I hear everybody else in the world is playing the Bach cello suites. Let's see what they're all about. And so I sort of came at Bach from behind, and I mean it's great, and I really enjoy having a sort of perspective on Bach through music that was influenced by Bach that I knew first. I mean, often when I think of Bach, I think about like Philip Glass, and you know, a lot of Philip Glass, it could be Bach chord changes, arpeggiated and repeated, and so when I'm thinking about Bach, I'm thinking about music that I knew first, and so that's really interesting, but I've certainly grown to love Bach, and he influences me like he does everybody else. Well, Bach is a huge influence on me for sure, but in particularly this piece, I would say Brahms would probably be more of an influence. Of course, I love Bach. There's a purity to it that just works, but I've found recently that I bought a really wonderful collection of the Preludes and Fugues that I listen to, and I don't try to analyze them. I just listen to them, and it's a certain rewire. It's almost like a diagnostic for your computer, and I don't want to know too much more about it because it works without knowing too much more about it. That's great. I think a lot of composers learn from Bach how to handle complexity, how to, well, certainly counterpoint, of course, and composers, when they go to university or college, to study, will probably at some stage get a chance to handle bundles of lines sometimes in a similar way to Bach, or they may be asked to imitate Bach. Although some music students find it a chore, I found it was one of the most important things I ever did as a student. Two-part inventions, three-part inventions, trying to get inside the mind of Bach to see how he did it, how he wrote his fugues. I mean, I don't think my music sounds anything like Bach, and neither it should in the 21st century, but I think a lot of composers, even in their own time, can learn the basics, can learn the fundamentals from people like Bach. The great contrapuntalists from the past, like Bach, and even earlier, Palestrina is another favourite of mine, another contrapuntalist, a figure who knew how to build huge polyphonic constructions out of sometimes the simplest material, and that in itself is a great lesson to a composer in any time in history. I have a slightly different outlook about this. I was born in Iran, and music is improvised, and it's always contemporary. We don't know how the music sounded in 18th century or 19th century or 15th century. It's always contemporary. But I found western classical music so unique because it was notated, and because of the notation, we could go back to different styles from 12th, 13th century all the way to the present time. For that reason, we have a lot of musical parents. It's a very unique relationship to some of these composers, not only just composers to composers, but also performers. Someone who plays music of Mozart for 40 or 50 years and learns all the details about the life of Mozart probably would know more about Mozart than any of his family members. So it's a very special relationship. To me, the picture of Bach, for example, I never had a picture of my grandfather, but when I was very young, I looked at the picture, the famous official picture of Bach with the white beak, and looked at it seemed to me so old. Over the years and decades, now every time I look at it, he looks much younger. So it's a continuous relationship. And I think every composer learns from great masters. We learn the techniques, no matter it's Bach or Prostrina or different other composers. But I think style is one thing we cannot learn. We don't write like Bach and we don't learn the way how Mozart writes. I remember when I was in Shanghai being a student, my teacher used to say, you know, I'm like a ground, an earth. Different students, you are different seeds. If you are an apple seed, you come to my ground, you become an apple tree. If you have a seed, you become a peach tree. So I always feel that's very important to me and no matter who I learn the techniques from, the craftsmanship from, but I want to at least show my own voice and have created my own style. And I think that's also what makes each composer unique also. Thank you. I have a rather self-indulgent question for James McMillan. I've always wanted to ask a major British composer for their view on why in the United Kingdom, in the 20th and now the 21st century, there is this tremendous fecundity and creativity of so many composers from Adencel de Walton that have created so much wonderful music. I listen most of the time to composers from the UK, from you back to Vaughan Williams. So that's my question. Well, the history of music in the United Kingdom is quite strange in many ways because we were out of it for many centuries, you could say, when all the real ferment of development was happening, it was all in mainland Europe. And some of the French and Germans still have this rather sniffy attitude to das l'ant une musique. In fact, it's one of the terms that is used about us. But then something began to change in the 20th century and we began to grow our own again. But that's only part of the story because there has been a steady lineage through history. Before Vaughan Williams, of course, there was Elgar and before him Handel, of course, we kind of claim him as our own in a way and Purcell and working back through from there to Orlando Gibbons and Bird and before that Dunstable and so on. So there's a rich hinterland in British music. And I think when Vaughan Williams came along, people, composers and musicians of his generation realized just how rich that deep reservoir in British history was. And that's why you can hear the resonances of the Renaissance and the resonances of the Reformation in something like the Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis where something very much of his time and it would have been regarded as a great modern work when it was written but had this deep resonance of the past. And I suppose many British composers then have not been afraid of the past. There have been philosophical experiments in music in mainland Europe which tried to do away with the past, to try to put a dam up to stop the influence of the past. And one can understand why that was the case, especially in Germany and France that had lived through this terrible upheaval, destruction of culture in the middle of the 20th century. They would want to start again, wouldn't they? And so they wanted to write music and create art and maybe even build politics and human structures out of nothing, a fresh, virgin field that had no taint of the past. We in Britain, of course, live through the same cataclysm but have a very different attitude to the 20th century in the sense that we saw the past and tradition perhaps as our saving graces or at least something that can give sustenance for the present. So I can think of many composers in Britain through the 20th and now in the 21st century who have a kind of healthy respect for the past without being old fashioned or reactionary, as some people say we are. This is a question for all of you. But with Marin in the lead, given what we heard and were overwhelmed with last weekend in the hidden world of girls and its multimedia, multi-visual audio, so many arts together, so much expressiveness together, combinations, and then to have John's use of poetry and to have this incredibly rich discussion about color and music and references to so many of the arts together, is there anyone here from a headquarters at NPR who could put this, who could take so much of what Cabrio is doing now in its 50th year and has been building to and is going to continue doing and spread it to a wider audience? Can you ever be filmed and get it out further? And how can you do that? If I'm understanding your question is how to reach a much broader audience, you mean from by disseminating what we do here more widely? Way more people to hear and see. Yes, you know, this is a discussion that we have sometimes, often, frequently. And I think it's a... I certainly think that's part of our future is to create some kind of online experience so people can participate from afar. I think it's... I can't explain exactly why. I don't think it's a fear of corrupting the experience really by sharing it more broadly but I do think that there's something special about living in the moment and having the experience and moving on. I don't know. Maybe that's a very selfish view. But I think there's something about this place that I mean it would be nice to... You know, you have to, in order to start documenting everything, it requires a lot of technical capacity, a lot of investment, capital investment in equipment. It requires lots of changes in the way the musicians, their relationship to the festival because there are all kinds of union regulations that we seem to try to just pretend don't exist and we've done quite well for 50 years. But as soon as you go to all these kinds of issues then it brings it to a different place. Do you know what I mean? And I guess while I'm eager for everyone to know about it I'd rather they come to the Civic Auditorium in Santa Cruz. I can't explain it but I think that's where we've come to and I think the great thing is that many of the musicians take these pieces and these composers and own them during the year and they promote them to their own orchestras. I certainly take many of the pieces I do here and many of the projects I do here around the world with me. You know, no doubt about it that I will perform many of the works from this festival throughout my career. So, you know, and I think the young conductors that sit here and the 30 or so conductors and we had seven participants but we had all these auditors too. You know, and I can see them, oh yeah, I like that piece. Oh, I like that piece. I know great. I mean, you know, something very practical. I think you've had many, many performances from our musicians, right? Absolutely. They say, well, we have a family concert. We want to do your piece. Do you know what I mean? So there's something special in this day and age of everybody, what happened? Did I do something wrong? Were you going to say something? And I just kept blathering. I think there's something special in this day and age of immediacy to being just living in the moment and then moving ahead for me anyway. But, did you want to say something? No, I made a gesture. Oh, is it a ferret? Okay. So, anybody else? Oh, yes, go ahead. Yeah, I'd like to ask each of the composers to tell us why you became a composer. Yeah, that's what I'd like to know, too. Which end should we try? Let's start that way. Okay, I'm starting again. Yeah, that's always a fun question. For me, there are a couple stories that I tell that have become memories or were memories. I'm not quite unsure at this point. The first is definitely true, which is that my first cello teacher, when she was teaching me to read music, she just had me write notes on the page to sort of explain that when you write this note, then it is an A or something along those lines. And the act of writing that down and seeing that I could pick one and then it would create the sound, if you played it, that would have this whole emotional attachment to it was sort of stunning and exciting as a five-year-old, certainly. And the other story is that back in the days before iTunes, I had CDs and, yeah, the days after records. And I only had, I don't know, five or six, and I would listen to them over and over again. And there was a certain point when I thought why isn't there any more music? And I could sort of think of other music that could exist, but it didn't, or at least I didn't think it did because I thought there were only five CDs in the world. So I thought, I guess I have to write it. And so that's how I started. Well, I started, I kind of knew early on being a violist, sitting sort of usually in fourth chair in the middle of the orchestras. Sometimes you hear, and I think I go back to the colors. I mean, you're sitting right in the center of the orchestra and you hear this from age five on up. You know, you're just inspired to recreate that. And instead of playing in an orchestra for 30 years, I thought, well, why don't I create the magic? So that's kind of, I've always wanted to be one, so. A quick answer is, as a kid, I was deeply moved by music. My mom playing stardust on the piano or a band, that's not funny. Actually, it might have been a band playing, you know, the excitement of hearing a band play. And I just felt that moment, I needed to try and recreate that. And I think maybe for others, but I think on the selfish side, I wanted to recreate it for me. So I kind of stayed with it. Well, I think I wanted to be a composer as soon as I was given a recorder when I was about nine years old, which is usually what happened to British school kids in the 1960s. And although I didn't know what it would mean at that stage, but the desire to write music came, for me, came almost simultaneously with making my first notes on a little squeaky instrument. Amazing. To me, I attended the Tehran Music Conservatory at age nine, and immediately I was drawn to making up my own sound, and I told my violin teacher, saying that I'm really interested in composition, and I was hoping to hear a word of encouragement. And he said, don't! Who wants to have another composer after Bach and Beethoven and Mozart? So it was such a huge disappointment for me at the time, and then I had to wait until I came to the United States to pursue composition formally. However, I continued to write my own music in a small scale, and at age 16, 17, I was while attending music conservatory playing Prokofiev, Beethoven, and Mozart, I taught in small towns and small villages. I taught the youngsters through the Orph, Karl Orph technique, and I realized that music, that sound, is foreign to these small villages, and I changed it and took their own folk songs and arranged it with the Karl Orph instrument, like xylophone and tambourine, and that had a huge impact on me. Certainly I learned so much from them, and until I came here in the United States to continue formally. To me, actually, my father also is a composer. So when I was very little, he always told me, you know, you must be a composer in the future. And I always had rebellion against that. So I started playing the piano and talked about Bach. I still remember I was playing this Bach piece in a recital, it was very young, and I always had terrible stagefights and memory slips. So my teacher told me, no matter what happens, just keep going, don't stop. Don't go back to the beginning and play again. So I was thinking, which finger should I put down next? And then here it is, it was a mistake. And then I was like, oh my god, I have to stop. And then I was like, okay, I have to keep going. So I started improvising in the Bach style. And then I managed to finish it, and I picked up where I left off somehow. And then I finished it. And to my surprise, some people did not notice. I went off the track. So my piano teacher talked to my father. He said, you know what, your son, I don't think he could be a pianist, but he should let him be a composer. So after that, my father was telling me about the benefit of being a composer. You could play your own music. No one would know. You make a mistake. And you could play on the score. You don't need to memorize it. So that was my first hope to writing music. I think one of the things we don't remember though is that when you're a kid, you don't have the kind of boundaries or preconceptions that, I know that my son, Auden, occasionally, not frequently, but I think it's happened two or three times in his life. He will say to me, I'm going to write some music now. I think, well, good luck with that. And then he gets this manuscript out and he writes this music. And then he's done with that. You know, there's no, there's no, I think we always, for me, it's daunting. You know, I think, oh my God, the symphony. Are you going to write a symphony? It's going to be, you know, the way you approach, when you're a kid, you just, it's very organic and things are much, I think, less daunting. Aren't they? You just feel, oh, I don't know what happened to the music he wrote. Yeah. Anyway, next question. Over here and then we'll go. Okay. As someone who also associates color with music, I was wondering how you incorporate that way of thinking into your own performing, or, yeah, performance as well as composition too. The color thing? Okay. I'm starting again. Well, for me, the, when I'm creating a piece, I almost always start with some sort of emotional map. And it's the way that works varies. Like, with the piece of a cabrera, my room, all four walls were just covered in huge butcher paper. And there's just massive scribbles all along that's theoretically on a timeline. But the way I think about it is certainly emotional. And even in music that has absolutely no programmer is not meant to portray anything at all. It's still a sort of diagram of emotion through time. The audience still has a reaction to this note and this chord, et cetera. And so, for me, the way that color fits into that is that I can, it's, I mean, I don't want to say it's like painting because it's not really, but in some ways the color can present a more clear idea of how something, a chord, or a few notes can exist as a motion. Well, actually it is kind of like painting for me the different chords. Yeah, I see a lot of colors, especially this particular piece, because it's, except for the tonal section, there's a lot of aleatoric things of that sort, parts that are in the score. And so, for me, I mean, that's like a Crayola box in a way, because there's just a lot of different colors, different notes and things that are going on for me. So it's a big part of my process, for sure. That's another question. I wasn't sure. I thought someone over here had a question. Good afternoon. Just in response to the lady's question, I would like to say that I want to thank Maren Alsop because her first year, what happened to be the first year I attended this festival, and there are at least 24 pieces that I've done in my career that I've heard here first. Wes is a fine conductor. So, I do have a question though, I just want to let you know that it's working. Oh good, I'm glad. You know, we were talking a little bit about Ravel. I mean, the story, and of course, Ravel can be associated with the piano. There are many pieces of his and other composers that he eventually orchestrated. And I'd like to ask the composer panel, especially in terms of brilliance of orchestration that happens now, that it's hard to imagine ever being played on the piano as a work. Where do you start? Are you starting with the thought of a short score keyboard or are you thinking in terms of orchestrational color right off the bat as you compose? Why don't we start this one? I think, nowadays, there's not too much difference from before, it depends on what you do. And for me, I actually still use a piano to write music to test it, and I do have perfect pitch, but still I can sing six or seven notes at the same time. So I know some composers use computer to write music. But to me, actually, I do use computer to do notation, but I actually don't never listen to the playback, and I choose not to because I still want to train my ears to have the sensitivity of listening to the orchestra instruments when I write them. So to orchestration, I think that is an art to itself. Some composers write piano short scores first and then orchestrate it in my own way. I actually write it in directly, no matter when I write for orchestra or write for opera, just from bar one all the way from top to bottom, bottom up this way, that way. Well, I don't play the piano. I certainly play a few things, two notes at a time. But one of the greatest thrill of composing is to write for orchestra. And I hear it in my head, and obviously I will check some of the notes on the piano. However, I would like to comment about the relationship between piano and music in Western culture. Perhaps it's the most influential instrument shaping the language of Western music at least in the last 300, 400 years. Majority of composers all the way to the 19th century were pianists, and they composed their works on the piano so they were bound by the sequences and patterns that only make sense on the piano. If it didn't have the piano, probably the course of musical history in West would be slightly different. For that reason, in Renaissance, music was not conceived as a keyboard instrument. The language is different. But in 19th century, certainly Berlioz, who didn't play the piano, you could feel the music only makes sense as an orchestral experience. Well, I think just as the computer can sometimes be a hindrance, more of a hindrance than a help, sometimes the piano can also be a hindrance. Because if one is writing for orchestra or even for choir, the last thing that you really want to hear is the sound of the piano. It can be misleading. And so I think it's important for me, and I think many composers I speak to train the inner ear like a muscle so that you can imagine the full extent of the coloristic possibilities of any score. Throughout the 20th century, the idea of color, the idea of orchestral or instrumental timbre became almost as important as melody and harmony and rhythm itself. And that's a marvelous addition and extension of the compositional palette. So I mean, I have a piano in my study and I do like to use it to check chords and things, but to be honest, it's much more exciting to do it without the stabilizing influence, if you like, of a piano or a computer. I try it kind of always. One isn't working, I'll move on to the other. Back to that conjuring issue I mentioned. In fact, with that said, before I came to the festival, I sent out a sketch, a project to a client, and it was three staves of piano. But, you know, trust me, I know which is going to be the horns and when Phil Agree is happening on time, no pianist could play it, but it's notated, so I use it as a crutch to get ideas down so that I can move on to orchestration. And just one last thing. We talked about the use of keys and how certain composers use them, specifically, I think you mentioned Mozart. For me, the key comes down to not colors per se, but who's going to be featured? If there's a singer, how am I going to flatter that singer with what range, or if I want a French horn passage that I want to sound sweet, I want to make it playable by them. So a lot of, for me, the lead is the most important consideration for a key. I just wanted to insert that. I'll keep it short, but in my film and TV work, I compose mainly on piano. But I have the ideas, similar to you, Craig, of what it's going to sound like. In the composition role, I hear the orchestra. So for this project, I'd go down to the beach, to a beach house down Southern California and the couple would always, that I was staying with, where are you going? We don't have a piano, where are you going to write? I'm like, I just need a room, basically. Because as James was saying, you develop this ear to hear the voicings. And so I hear it as an orchestra. I don't hear it and then blow it out. I hear it as an orchestra. Yeah, I think I'm on about the same page. I'm not very good at piano. I do use the piano a lot when I'm writing, but it's only because the piano has the most keys and you have the most fingers to play those notes with so you can get as much as possible on the piano. But it's definitely true that it can be hindrance and that it's equal-tempered. And so once again, you're missing a lot of opportunity. And sometimes what I do, if I want to hear a chord that's not equal-tempered is I take my guitar and I retune some of the strings and you have six open strings. So you can usually create any chord you want, or less, and that's sort of a fast, easy way to find non-equal-tempered chords and hear them. I just would like to echo one thing that James mentioned. It's important that inner ear is perhaps the most important part of the composing and that explains why Beethoven, while he was deaf, composed some of the best of his masterpieces. He relied on his inner ear, whether he was able to hear physically or not. So that inner ear, particularly for orchestral music, is key. If you listen to the late Beethoven string quartets, I don't think anyone living in his time that could have heard would have written that music because it's so avant-garde. And he had no ability to censor what he was doing. And also, from a player's perspective, he gives you instructions that are well beyond what the notation of the day ever called for. For example, he'll have a note, it's just a held note, and he ties an eighth note to an eighth note to an eighth note to a quarter to an eighth note. So he's trying to send you a message, too, that how he's even thinking of a held note, I mean, for me as a violinist, you know, and I'll never forget hearing my parents' play were rehearsing, their quartet was rehearsing the Grosse Fugue from the late string quartet, and I remember thinking to myself as I was upstairs, God, I hate contemporary music. Really, I'm serious. And when I told my, you know, I was about 11 and I came downstairs and I told my parents, you know, I'm never going to like new music, and my parents were like, that was Beethoven. And I couldn't believe it. I really thought they were pulling my leg. So maybe it is that inner ear thing. Well, I hope it's a new experience or at least a different experience for you all to spend time with each other. There's nothing I enjoy more than seeing all these composers talking to each other and admiring each other's work. I think that is also another wonderful byproduct of the Cabrillo Music Festival. But mostly having you all here today, thank you for joining us. Thanks, everybody, and I hope to see you at the concert tonight. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.