As Commissioner of the FCC during the Clinton administration, Reed Hundt helped shape the modern internet. We speak about his attending the first Beatles concert in the USA (with his friend Al Gore), and the democratization of publishing and broadcasting wrought by the internet. Reed had many questions for me about Bach and my listening, so this is an episode to hear me talk more than I typically do.

Here’s the video on YouTube.

Transcript below.

[00:00:00]

Evan Goldfine: Welcome to the fourth episode of the podcast, A Year of Bach. My name is Evan Goldfine. Today we'll explore how policy helps shape who among us gets to hear Bach in the first place.

My guest is Reed Hundt, who was the chair of the FCC from 1993 to 1997 in the Clinton administration. Highlights from his tenure include the earliest days of digital television and satellite radio, the launch of spectrum auctions, a massive wiring of schools and libraries for internet access, and the opening of the five gigahertz band that became our modern Wi-Fi. He's a longtime public interest lawyer, an early champion of carbon taxation, and a great fan of Bach. And we'll talk about some of those things today. Reed, welcome.

Reed Hundt: Thank you, Evan. Thank you for that very nice introduction.

Evan Goldfine: My pleasure. So, over the past 30 years, the landscape of media reflects one of the biggest changes I think in American life, probably even bigger than the changes from the sixties through the start of your tenure in the [00:01:00] nineties.

Even this setup that we're doing right now seems unimaginable. We're on real time, high-definition video with automated captioning. My production budget is zero and the distribution is effectively free to everyone in the world. So  I'd like you to reflect on the scale of those changes and maybe some of the things that surprised you about how we got to today.

Reed Hundt: That's a great question. Almost everything that we imagined in the early nineties has come true. And then a lot of other things have also happened that we did not imagine. The things that we imagined were all good things. And the good things have mostly come true. And the things that we did not foresee that were not so good; they’ve happened also.

So those are my two big sets. So, with respect to the first, you've just mentioned a number of really important attributes. All through the first year of the Clinton [00:02:00] administration we had weekly meetings hosted by my ninth grade classmate Al Gore, to discuss the vision.

At the beginning of 1994,  in January , he gave the first speech ever given by elected official in an international forum about the internet of the future.

If you go back and look at those artifacts, you'll see the things that came true. What, specifically, we wanted to have is that creators like Bach or like you -- I see two guitars behind you on the Zoom screen.

Evan Goldfine: Humbly.

Reed Hundt: -- anyone of any talent, any capability anywhere in the world, at almost no cost could get a chance to see if anyone liked their product.

That came true. We envisioned that for a video. We envisioned it for, for auditory, for music. We envisioned it for typing and writing. and you see all of this everywhere now. We also [00:03:00] envisioned that it would be possible to gather an audience for output anywhere in the world, which you're doing right now.

You have very low cost. You still have to figure out how to market, but you have a chance. You don't have to go through a gatekeeper. We didn't sit there thinking we have these ideas, no one else does. The opposite. We had all kinds of people coming and telling us this is what's possible.

And then we adopted. We adopted these ideas as the vision for public policy. You might say, what were the public policies? Number one, we negotiated by the beginning of 1997 a treaty in which 69 countries said they would let the internet come in without taxation.

That's a big deal. Secondly, the spectrum auctions that you were kind enough to mention. Not only did we start the digital cellular industry in the United States, we started it worldwide [00:04:00] because in a variety of ways that I won't go into right now because of the shortness of human life, we had it those auctions and the rollout of the same digital technologies for wireless occurring  in every country in the world.

And that did actually happen. That is why when Jobs in 2007 got around to inventing the iPhone, there already was an infrastructure there to utilize the iPhone on a global basis, right? It is a chicken and egg story, and you needed to have both the chicken and the egg. so that was the infrastructure part of the story.

Aside from the foreign policy part, we had to make sure that all this connectivity would reach everybody in America at the same time. It wouldn't be, you have a lot of money and then your innovation would trickle down, which is the iPhone business model. It was the opposite.

We wanted to establish the lowest conceivable cost for the new access technologies. To [00:05:00] make a very complicated story, I will just summarize in one thing. At one point there were 6,000 internet access providers in the United States. Now you think of just the mega companies, and you're right, there are mega companies. But that's what happened over a 30-year story.

The start was an absolute cauldron of entrepreneurship, which is what we wanted to create. So here you are , you're the avatar, you're the manifestation of all these dreams come true. 

There are a lot of horrible things in this new world as well. It turns out you can lie easily. You can lie like a dog on the internet, and everybody believes that you are a human and not a dog.

You can lie at the highest levels of power and authority and get the lies heard all around the world. These things are also possible. We didn't think those things were impossible, but we trusted that ultimately public opinion, if it could be mobilized, would create a better world.

We, I guess we still have to see if that's true [00:06:00]

Evan Goldfine: To that end do the major TV and radio broadcasters still matter in this environment?

Reed Hundt: Somewhat, not that much. You asked about public broadcasting. This particular Congress wants to kill anything that has the word public in it. Killing public good as a concept seems to be very, very important to them.

We now are told we don't want the public good of messenger RNA. We don't want the public good of research. Apparently, the government does not want those things anymore. I don't think that's the opinion of most people in America or most people all around the world, but I think it is the animating spirit of this particular administration.

So, what is the case with public broadcasting? Public broadcasting goes back to the 1960s. My great predecessor, Newton Minow, is one of the fathers of the whole concept. The [00:07:00]  original mission was to have entertainment content that would be in some way enshrining family values, and wouldn't be subject to the constraints of advertising.

That does not actually make very much sense anymore. It's not all that powerful an idea now because again, the internet makes almost everything available to anybody. You can find that kind of content on the Net.

Evan Goldfine: Yes.

Reed Hundt: But what's needed in more volume is non-commercial news. News that isn't dependent on advertisers or beholden to major corporations as for-profit owners, because those corporations can be cowed, intimidated, arm-twisted by the government.

Well, that's been happening. So, there's more need than ever before, in my opinion, for nonprofit news. And I'm not alone in believing [00:08:00] that what's publicly broadcast should be reflected in every media. Publicly broadcast news is inquisitive news, investigation and reporting. It’s honesty and reality being presented, not contingent on the business goals of for-profit companies.So, where's that going to come from? This administration doesn't want that to exist. I mean, they've said that. I'm not accusing them of something they haven't admitted. They don't want that to exist. That's going to have to come from a redirection of philanthropic money. And if what we know as public broadcasting is no longer dependent on the government, that's good.

Meaning, now that the government's not a reliable partner, don't deal with them.

Evan Goldfine: Is the audience an issue to capture also in that kind of environment? I mean, you've got to cut through.

Reed Hundt: We do have a public broadcasting TV network that is intrinsically extremely valuable [00:09:00] and has stations all across the country.

They're now going to be cash starved. This is a job for philanthropy to do. There's a lot of people in philanthropy that have the wherewithal to step up. It's part of the battle for presenting reality. That's what's necessary. Don't go thinking, oh, we need to get the House of Representatives on our side to cut some deals.

That's not going to happen. And then introduce a modicum of advertising in order to have sustenance. What's important is that the ownership does not have a for-profit motive.

Evan Goldfine: So, you could argue that in a way YouTube's recommendation engine is the single biggest arts promoter in the world now.

Reed Hundt: It's a big deal. Yeah. It's a big deal. Among the many people that I met early on and somehow failed to have them adopt me were the creators of YouTube. And, I was like, what you guys are doing is totally great. It turned out to be really, really, [00:10:00] really true.

Evan Goldfine: Do you think that the ranking algorithms are like editorial or what, which would be First Amendment protected, or would they be subject to neutrality?

Reed Hundt: The First Amendment bedevils people in government, because it stops them from affecting the content. Until it doesn't anymore. Meaning, once you have an administration that uses other levers, like regulatory approvals to affect the content, then you have an administration that's found a way around the First Amendment, right?

So, what do you do about that? Well, the courts don't welcome the intrusion of people like you and me who still want to hear the material. They tell us, we don't have standing to complain. So, what do you do about that? Because the First Amendment has been evaded by the use of regulatory approvals as the mechanism for affecting the content.

I think what you have to address is the structure of these markets. And so again, it’s going to be necessary to have people that are not in it for the money to be involved. Like yourself. You're not charging for this podcast.

Evan Goldfine: Nope.

Reed Hundt: It's going to be necessary for people who aren't in it for the money to decide , that they can give meaning to their life and the lives of others by generating the content, that is real or that is or that is whatever you want to describe your friend Bach.

Right? Which is, I don't think you want to use the word real, but you want to use some other words.

Evan Goldfine: Transcendent in a way. I mean, there you are creating meaning. What I find amazing about all of these great artists of the past is that they're providing meaning to our lives, even though they could have no real conception about how our lives have been led.

We're utterly foreign to them just as they're utterly foreign to us, especially when you go back to his time. So, tell me about how you've got the Bach bug. When was your first experience with it? [00:12:00] How did you realize it was important to you?

Reed Hundt: Just a couple of things. I did take a history of music class my first year in college and that caused me to realize that I didn't really know what was going on in the music.

And I remember vividly, the professor who was speaking about Debussy. He said, if I remember correctly, he played like a hallucinated organist. I think he was actually not talking about Bach, but he might've been talking about Bach. And it was just a revelation to see what was behind the music. And of course , I'm part of a generation that believed that a whole genre was invented for us.

My ninth-grade friend, Al Gore and I, went to the first Beatles concert in the United States.

Evan Goldfine: Oh. Lucky you.

Reed Hundt: We were, we were lucky. We were 15. And so, we had to have a classmate, Stocky Clark, who had a driver's license because he was 16. and [00:13:00] he drove us to the place in Washington DC where they had their very first American concert.

As you have evoked yourself, once you hear the very first chord in, it's A Hard Day's Night, it's epiphanic. 

Evan Goldfine: Could you hear anything at the concert?

Reed Hundt: We were really close, so yeah. The jellybeans soared over our head and banged off of the cymbal. You could hear it right in front of you. And off the drums.

For those that don't know, the fans, particularly the girls, brought jellybeans and threw them at the stage to show their appreciation. I'm told from history books that Bach's audiences were equally demonstrative. The past is a foreign country. They did things differently there.

But apparently, they swooned and wailed and howled out. So, I guess people there [00:14:00] appreciated his music in the same way that we did The Beatles. 

And then the third thing that I'll mention really briefly is , I took a date once to hear St. Matthew's Passion. And that convinced her that she really liked me and I'll just leave it at that. Who knew that Bach was erotic?

Evan Goldfine: They're called the passion plays for a reason. I don't know.

Reed Hundt: That seems sinful to say, but it was.

Evan Goldfine: So that the connection started early.

And, and how did that run through your professional career and, and into your adult life?

Reed Hundt: Oh, I'm just a casual listener, on and off. Every so often with typing. Now, one of my topics, for you, is what is in your experience. Well,, I don't know if I can get into my topics now, Evan,

Evan Goldfine: Please.

Reed Hundt: One of them is, what is your method of hearing? Do you sit with earphones and concentrate? Do you stare out the window and dream? Is everything [00:15:00] permissible or is there only one right way?

Evan Goldfine: It depends on what I'm listening to and what my goals are for it. And sometimes my behavior changes depending on what I'm listening to.

So, I'll often walk while listening, which allows me to think. If I concentrate more, I will find that I'm able to concentrate more while walking than just sitting and closing my eyes in a room. Sometimes it's not in the background while I'm typing, depending on what I'm listening to. And there have been a few treasured moments in my life when I thought I was listening to something in the background, and I had to stop because of what I was hearing.

It was like, what is this? And I'll even say, one of the moments that I had was with a pop singer, which I don't listen to much  in recent years. But there's a young pop rock singer named Madison Cunningham who I listened to in big first major release, and I just was [00:16:00] working in the background and I just stopped and I listened to the first half of that album, plugged in completely.

I couldn't believe she was like 22 or 23 when it came out. Really just off the charts talent. But that happened also with a number of the pieces in my Bach year as well, especially when it came to some of the singers, I think had a really meaningful experience, I just found it touching and it hits the heart in a way that you can't explain.

And that's the beauty of the music that is beyond words and I think connects the people who were really interested in this. So, I listen in all sorts of ways. If I'm listening to a Beatles album, I've heard it so much before, or some of my favorite recorded rock music and pop from the sixties and seventies, I don't need to focus really so closely on because it's all sort of internal.

It's just reminding me,

Reed Hundt: Well, because you're so much younger, you had access to the entire Beatles [00:17:00] corpus, years after it came out.

Evan Goldfine: Absolutely,

yeah.

Reed Hundt: Our experience was different, meaning…

Evan Goldfine: You listened to the sequence, you had to.

Reed Hundt: The songs would come out typically as two on a disc or an album a little bit later.

And you'd hang on waiting, and then you'd hear one or two on the radio. And we would wait for the event of the release to see what fabulous new creation was coming that would speak directly to our generation, to our moment. So do we suppose that these, I think typically very small audiences that Bach would have, I doubt that they were big.

We don't know very much, but there might have been 50 or a hundred, or 200 at the most, right? Mm-hmm.

Evan Goldfine: Yep. In the church.

Reed Hundt: Do we suppose that these groups of people go to church thinking, gosh, what has he got for us now? Or how, how do we react [00:18:00] and what do we know about what we just heard?

Evan Goldfine: I mean, Bach was in demand. He was, he went from place to place over four or five different jobs.

There's a famous story of him getting thrown in jail by one of the local royals because he was threatening to go to another.

Reed Hundt: Four weeks in jail, supposedly. Yeah, and he composed during those four weeks.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. So, I think he recognized the scope of his talent. I mean, he obviously had an incredible drive to create and to achieve despite the probably mediocre musicians he had with him. and the frustrations with the climate and the instruments and the feckless nobles that he had to deal with. But he just kept going and going and managing through, wading through all the BS to be able to continue to create. And I think that some people probably really recognized the specialness of who he was, which is shown by the market demand that was there for his work.

He composed for weddings. He composed [00:19:00] for some secular things, but mostly it was church music. Because I think he was legitimately a pious man. And I think he thought he was channeling his gifts for the glory of God with every note that he played.

Reed Hundt: So, the way you're describing it, and I'm not challenging it, he didn't have much of a commercial audience.

Isn't that right? He wrote the Brandenburg concertos for Ludwig, who apparently never played them or had them ever played, and lost the manuscript. It wasn't found until a librarian found it in an attic in 1849, which is a lot later than when it was written in 1721.

He sends the Musical Offering to Frederick the Great who also never plays it. This is not the definition of an audience. It certainly wasn't like us with the Beatles or you with Madison Cunningham. He didn't publicize; he didn't get his material printed and circulated.

But Haydn was born in the same year. [00:20:00] He used the printing press, and he had his scores printed all over Europe. He ended up being a favorite in the royal court in London. So, when you compare Bach to either our modern experience or even to Haydn, his contemporary, it seems like he was a reclusive,

Evan Goldfine: I guess compared to someone with wider commercial ambitions.

I think also probably where he was in Germany at the time may have provided fewer of those opportunities. I can't say I'm an expert in all of that, but I would say that he benefited greatly from the revival of the interest in his work by Mendelsohn, who promoted him endlessly and led to this revival where he became the new touchstone for everyone after that.

Reed Hundt: Yeah, that's right. 79 years after his death. See, I buffed myself up by reading about and for your excellent podcast. So, it still seems to me to be [00:21:00] strange and weird and a bit enchanting that you have Haydn, who's commercially very, very successful, becomes extremely well known, who's living in Hungary and under the patronage of a rich nobleman.

And he gets frustrated because he wishes he was in Vienna. Mozart is born while Bach is still alive, and Mozart hangs around with the glitterati. But Bach is just Mr. Stay at home. Occasionally he walks a hundred or 200 miles to look for a new gig, but he doesn't do that very often in his life either.

He stays at home and has two wives and 20 children and buries 12 of them. It’s a completely different life than Haydn or Telemann or Scarlatti, other contemporaries. So how do we -- or maybe this is completely illegitimate-- [00:22:00] think about his life and see that reflected in his music?

Or is that not a legitimate inquiry?

Evan Goldfine: I think it's too hard. We don't really have enough color on, there's no letters of his. We don't really have accounts of what his sons thought about him., We’re about a hundred years too early. Later you would've seen a lot more personal letters to people crying their feelings.

Reed Hundt: Too early to get the psychodrama. Is that what you mean?

Evan Goldfine: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and I think it might even be a fallacy to project the psychodrama onto him. I think that their psychology in that era was just different from what we may be able to understand.

Reed Hundt: Well maybe, but I want to take a crack at it anyhow.Transposing any medium into another is a work of translation. And like any work of translation, it's going to produce something that only resembles the [00:23:00] original.

Evan Goldfine: Yes.

Reed Hundt:Whether it's translating Nabokov's Russian novels into English, or whether from one medium to another, but nevertheless using words to describe music, what are the adjectives that come to your mind to describe his music. Bach’s?Evan Goldfine: I mean, at its crudest, you can call it mathematical. But I kind of reject that also because I find it to be extremely moving and he was an underrated tunesmith. I think there's a lot of beautiful melodies. I think he's the king of structure. Whereas one small idea can play out over minutes and everything is preordained.

It's almost as every note, even if there's surprises, as the keys are modulating from measure to measure, it's where you're going to wind up. You're going to wind up either into a new era and a new key, or you're going to pass through that and back to your original key. [00:24:00] He's going to continue to surprise you, but there's an inevitability to how the pieces are structured that is enormously satisfying to a listener.

And there's a magic to that. And I think it's, he's unsurpassed with that talent.

Reed Hundt: So, I like a lot of those adjectives, although I do think it's that mystical. You and I have to agree on mystical.

Evan Goldfine: Yes. I think that's part of the magic. It's like there's this very highly structured mathematical king of the counterpoint, but it turns into something ineffable.

There is something really mystical and beautiful about it that is inexplicable. That's why I think so many of us over the past 300 years have been so drawn to this music.

Reed Hundt: I don't think Taylor Swift is mystical. But I think she's really cool. But I don't think that I don't think her songs are mystical, and I don't think that they are mathematical.

So [00:25:00] I think that these adjectives are different and for sure, they need to be different.

Evan Goldfine: Well, I read this beautiful book of criticism that was music criticism that became famous about 15, 20 years ago, called Let's Talk About Love by a writer named Carl Wilson, which I highly recommend.

The premise of the book is that he's this great fan of Elliot Smith, a brilliant, dark, Canadian singer-songwriter who took his own life. Elliot lost an award in Canada to Celine Dion. And Carl was so mad about this because Celine Dion was this kind of pappy schlocky thing, and the book is an exploration of him trying to understand why people love Celine.

And he said that they're after it for different reasons from why he was into Elliot. So, it was this real broadening of taste for him, people were looking at it as a way to connect with the lyrics. They found a connection with Celine herself. So, in a way, that the mystic [00:26:00] connection that they had with the performer still existed.

It's not intrinsic to the music itself in a way.

Reed Hundt: That part of the connection you mentioned.

Evan Goldfine: I think people are after the same sorts of things. No matter what kind of music they're listening to, they're looking for connection. And they're looking to be moved.

Reed Hundt: That's a great perception. And leads to my next topic, and I did threaten that I had multiple topics.

Evan Goldfine: I'm here for it.

Reed Hundt: So, people even in Bach's era wrote a lot about keys. It was generally believed that keys evoked emotions.

So, I have a couple of questions for you because you listened to the whole thing. First of all, do you hear the keys? Can you do that, or did you have to learn to do that? Or do you have to read the score to see it?

Evan Goldfine: I don't have perfect pitch, but when I play through some of the pieces on the piano, you find yourself in the key that you're in.[00:27:00]

And I read more about Beethoven actually, where I think this might've postdated Bach a little bit, about the evocation of keys with certain emotions. It was very important for Beethoven. C minor was like a huge Beethoven key. Because it evoked, I mean like pages and pages of this about certain things that it evoked in him.

It helps when you have perfect pitch. I have pretty good relative pitch, like, but I can’t sing you like an F sharp right now.

Reed Hundt: Since I looked all this up, C minor supposedly evokes innocence, sadness, heartbreak, and yearning.

Evan Goldfine: Those are very post Bach kind of feelings, right?

Like, that's romantic. Those are post-Bach feelings.

Reed Hundt: But the internet tells you -- thank you Mr. Internet -- it tells you for all the keys the set of adjectives. I think maybe the descriptions much more fulsome and worked out after Bach, but I [00:28:00] wonder if they're not, I wonder if they're not still a little bit accurate for his music.

Evan Goldfine: I'll tell you when, when I'm playing guitar, a guitar feels different because of certain shapes that you put your fingers in, where, how the strings are related to one another. C chord in the first position feels very different from the C chord in the second position, just the way that the notes are stacked on top of each other, where the first thirds and fifths are of that and the timbre of each of the strings as you're playing them.

You can kind of hear when it's just like an open C it's kind of like a Woody Guthrie kind of open position. And then the open G in the very beginning, you can hear these things over the, like the root D chord in first position is like a very James Taylorish sound.

So, you can hear those sorts of things. Although you can change the key by using a, a trusty capo like I have on my desk. So, you can still play in the first position, but change your key up by moving, effectively using this to move up the nut on the guitar. You can evoke those same sorts of feelings even while shifting the key.

And I, I'm not, [00:29:00] go ahead.

Reed Hundt: Well, I was just going to say, so during your listening-- it was 200 hours. Is that what it was --?

Evan Goldfine: Thereabout? Yeah.

Reed Hundt: During your listening, did you change your perception and capability of hearing keys?

Evan Goldfine: I don't think about hearing keys. I think I got better at hearing how the keys shifted, and especially when I would watch with the score.

I got better at reading music. Because the scores are freely available online, which is amazing talking about what the internet can do for us public domain. Every score is available for all of these pieces. You can just print it right out. Okay.

Reed Hundt: See, what did I tell you?

Evan Goldfine: You did it.

Reed Hundt: That's what we wanted, right?

Evan Goldfine: I know. Yeah. No, this is perfect. So, I got to just, when I was listening to something, all I had to do was like, I could bring up the music immediately and then creators have gone out to YouTube and you can listen live along with the score. So, you'll have like a pianist going along and then the score trails on along with it, which can be enormously [00:30:00] edifying.

But sometimes, it can move faster than you want it to. Of course, you can slow down the video now. It's really amazing. My brother-in-law is a VP at Apple. So, he's been thinking about tech and media for a long time, and he's in the video division and he said the most interesting thing about the internet is that you can go on YouTube and learn anything in the world.

Reed Hundt: Absolutely. And do thank him for Apple Music, which, through Sonos is how I listen to Bach.

Evan Goldfine: Same with me.

Reed Hundt: I want to go back to history just for a second. The times make the opportunity for the person. That's a maxim. You don't have to believe it. But I do believe it.

Evan Goldfine: Sure.

Reed Hundt: That was true for some of the great horrors of history. For Hitler. For him it  is certainly true. It's certainly true for Trump. Trump is not a figure who was possible in American [00:31:00] politics until recently.

Evan Goldfine: Yep.

Reed Hundt: Neither is Mamdani. The idea that a socialist Muslim can run for mayor in New York and maybe win.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Reed Hundt: That's something that comes from our times and wouldn't have been possible even 10, 15 years ago.

Evan Goldfine: Yep.

Reed Hundt: So, in what way can we think that the times may have created an opportunity for Bach to be so incredibly creative?

Or do we think that he somehow stands apart from the era? Maybe because he didn't have great and famous patrons? His son works for Frederick the Great, but he doesn't. What do we think about that? How did the times relate to Bach?

Evan Goldfine: There wasn't as much music before Bach until him. There was so much for him to get, and he ordered scores from all over Europe to be able to study them. And he adapted a lot [00:32:00] of Vivaldi's concerti for, I think there's the four harpsichord concerto has adapted from Vivaldi.

So, he was interested in what was there, so he pretty much had the ability to absorb everything that had happened before, and he transmuted it. Like I think now it's impossible given the breadth of music that's out there for someone to condense everything that has ever been created in Western music and come up with their own thing.

You can, of course, have individual artists that are affected by what they've listened to, but it's not complete. It feels like Bach really got everything and he was in that moment. I'm reminded when I took a philosophy class in college, I was reminded of Rene Descartes. Wrote a book called The World, which was like everything that was known to time, At that time it could fit in a book.

Now you can't do that. So, I think Bach kind of fit music in one volume and then reshaped everything from there and utterly changed it. And so, he really took advantage of the moment that he [00:33:00] had just like many of the people afterwards. And there couldn't have been Beethoven before or after him.

Same thing with Mozart. Any of the great ones. I mean, Schoenberg could not have written 12 tone rows unless everything that happened before in the music had happened. And I think some of the stuff of most contemporary music, especially in the formerly composed world, maybe has sort of stagnated since minimalism and serialism, Steve Reich and Philip Glass I think are, are great composers, but I haven't heard anything really after that. I mean, there's some people playing around with electronics, but it's not, these are people of their moment, but it's not, I think anything terribly breakthrough. I mean, I think the greatest art that we've created in America was jazz music that was, from like the twenties to the seventies, of the last century.

And that those people were of their time as well and just continually iterating on each other while also kind of grabbing everything [00:34:00] they could from the broader American culture and filtering it through their own experiences.

Reed Hundt: So this taking it all in and synthesizing and creating something new -- I think you say it very well -- leads me to a question, why didn't Bach do the same thing with respect to the piano?

So, he knew about the piano, the piano forte. It is invented when he was just 19, 20 years old if I have my dates right, in Italy. And then, he gets a version of it later in his life. But he doesn't like it, and he criticizes it. He doesn't become an inventor.

He doesn't say this thing could be really cool. And history tells us that when in 1847, he has this famous meeting with Frederick the Great, ,   king ( let's put it in the best light), has [00:35:00] about a baker's dozen of these piano forte all over the palace and rudely and arrogantly forces old Bach to walk from one to the other and play on them.

And then he tells him here's 21 notes that I've cunningly contrived, just to show you what a jerk I am.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Reed Hundt: And why don't you create a three-part, counterpoint piece right away. Which of course, Bach does on this instrument, but this is  an amazing instrument that he doesn't actually have all that much interest in.

Why is that?

Evan Goldfine: I'm going to say that this is highly speculative right now. I'm not a Bach scholar, but I am going to say that those instruments were probably not very good, especially compared to the pianos that came after them. Even Beethoven a hundred years later was kind of frustrated by the quality of the pianos that he had.

He was always trying to get the next better ones. I would say that Bach had very, very sophisticated, really good sounding organs to play on, and he [00:36:00] composed on those and he had fantastic sounding harpsichords, and he had some pretty good clavichords. I don't know about that one for sure. But I've found through my listening, one of the things that changed for me is that I actually enjoy listening to a lot of these pieces on harpsichord now.

And before it was a kind of sound that grated on me, but there's something about the way that the works can be played on the harpsichord that feels almost more correct than on the piano in certain pieces. And so, I prefer listening to the Goldbergs on the piano, but I love a lot of it on the harpsichord now also.

So, I think he probably was exploiting the technology that was strongest for him, which was the organ or the harpsichord.

Reed Hundt: Well,  I'm just going to say back to you what you just said very well. He took what was as a given. His mind was somewhere else. This is not the Steve Jobs story of [00:37:00] creativity about creating the ecosystem and the infrastructure. That is the Steve Jobs story. I just made a short list of the things that came along just a little bit later. The modern piano, the clarinet, the tuba, and maybe most importantly, valved brass instruments.

We don't really have to strain our imagination too much to imagine how it would be to have Bach play with these instruments, because people do play Bach with these instruments. And I don't know if it's better with these instruments for the reason you just said.

But part of the experience of listening to Bach on the original instruments is that it enhances the mystical nature of the experience.

Evan Goldfine: It can.

Reed Hundt: I think that's fair.

Would you agree with that?

Evan Goldfine: I think it can. And I think that if you're playing it on a piano in a way, it's sort of like the translation [00:38:00] that you're speaking about beforehand, it's being translated.

Reed Hundt: I have two other weird topics just to wrap it up.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah, let's do it.

Reed Hundt: So, here's the first. You said earlier that it is hard to resist using the word mathematical to describe the music because it is so susceptible to mathematical analysis and construction. Does that mean that artificial intelligence almost certainly can recreate Bach and then give us infinite production of Bach material?

Evan Goldfine: Possibly. I'm becoming more open to it, but I have not heard any compelling AI developed music as of yet.

Reed Hundt: I haven't either, but Evan, in addition to other things that are on your website, you’re an experienced financial investor, a successful real estate investor and a great Bach aficionado and explainer.

You also could [00:39:00] be Bach AI.

Evan Goldfine: No thanks. I just want to be Evan.

Reed Hundt: It's just hanging out there ready to be created.

Evan Goldfine: Um, oh goodness.

I just, there's so much richness is what that's there. Look, it's 200 hours of music. I think part of the novelty of my project was that not a lot of people have really dug through all of it, and it's all there for you.

And it's being interpreted by other real people channeling this music that they could not have heard originally through the scores, through their own bodies and their own modern experiences, sometimes historically informed and sometimes rejecting that historical information and just coming up with whatever's there today in, 2025, almost 300 years after Bach time.

I don't need it. I'm curious as to what's going to come up with the AI Bach, but that's not my game.

Reed Hundt: Well, it could be some amazing material. It seems like it is a real possibility because of the mathematical, [00:40:00] nature.

That gets to my very last topic.

Evan Goldfine: I, I do want to add one, one more thing about why it's not just math. I think harmony can be taught mathematically, and rhythm can be taught mathematically, but I think that there's been no good mathematically composed melodies. And there's some mystical thing about melody. There are some rules that you can follow.

I took a music theory course when I was in high school also. It was a little bit on melody, but it was mostly harmony and rhythm. And then you can kind of tell the story of what the melody is doing with that underpinning. But the melody is mysterious and very, very hard to explain. And if AI can start writing great melodies, then we're all going to whistle.

Great. I don't know. I still have to get sold that it's going to happen.

Reed Hundt: Well, that reminds me of Haydn who suffered eye surgery from the same guy who killed Bach.

Evan Goldfine: Yes.

Reed Hundt: But he, Haydn, survived that and lived [00:41:00] six or eight long, painful years of decline.

And he said, I have all these melodies in my head. I don't have the capability anymore to put them into real musical creations, but I still have the melodies in my head.

Evan Goldfine: And we all do. We all can. You can start to whistle down the road and you don't know where it comes from.

Reed Hundt: So, there you go. That's the human-centric version of AI that we hope is possible. I want to thank you, but I want to end by evoking something you said earlier about your project, your all of Bach project. So, I made a list of some "all of’s".

Evan Goldfine: Okay.

Reed Hundt: That I've that I've done in my life.

Evan Goldfine: I love “all of.” It's great.

Reed Hundt: You made me think about them. So, I've read all of Anthony Powell’s novels, including the [00:42:00] 12, in Dance to the Music of Time, and his non-novel, John Aubrey and his friends. I've read all of Proust's 1.26 million words about a cookie. I've read 16 of the 20 Nabokov works. All of Dashiel Hammett, all of Patrick O'Brien'sJack Aubrey books. But most importantly, in terms of contemporaneous news, my wife and I have watched all of the episodes of ER. We just finished. They were aired over 15 seasons between September 19th, 1994, and April 2nd, 2009.They went from Clinton to Obama.

There are 331 episodes. It took us approximately four and a half months.

Evan Goldfine: What did you gain from watching 331 hours of ER?

Reed Hundt: It was completely and totally engrossing. [00:43:00] First of all, in the early years the showrunners and the writers were one to two decades ahead of the rest of America on social issues.

They were ahead on gay marriage. They were ahead on AIDS, they were ahead on public health. They were ahead on numerous issues. They had huge audiences in the nineties. and ultimately, they were canceled because the show fell below number 50 in the ranking of the most watched shows.

But in the early years when they were at the absolute top it makes you think that that medium was very much a way in which the social agenda was advanced because they weren't wrong about where the country would ultimately be on these topics. [00:44:00]

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Reed Hundt: The second thing is what the historian Maitland said, we must always remember: what is now in the past was once in the future. Okay. When you watch these early shows, partly because you know what happened in their lives, but partly because you can just see it, you just go like, that person is going to be a big star.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Reed Hundt: And as soon as you see George Clooney in show number one, you're like, that guy is going to be huge. That's fun. And it is really kind of cool , with hindsight helping you a lot, that you can also appreciate the talent. And then the third thing is the methodology, the way that the art is made.

At the very beginning it has a breakthrough quality. It’s an incredible step, and I [00:45:00] think that it does relate to your appreciation of Bach, right? This breakthrough quality. The breakthrough quality with ER was long, long tracking shots , sequences where the camera would follow people from the intake across the hall into the trauma room.

People would come into the room. The emergency nature of the ER was clearly demonstrated in a gripping manner by the method in which the camera was showing it all, which is very, very different from the way TV was presented on other shows in that time period.

And then by the end they're struggling to find anything new, anything new in terms of the method. I don't think Bach had that problem of struggling to find anything new. Those are some of my “all of’s” that I hope you don't mind.

Evan Goldfine: I'm glad to hear them.

I'm imagining it was more pleasurable without the commercial breaks also. [00:46:00]

Reed Hundt: Oh. That's totally cool. Otherwise it would've taken us forever. But who wants to watch any ads? Not to mention ads on products that were discontinued three decades ago.

Evan Goldfine: Let's wind it up there. Reed, this has been terrific. Thank you for pressing me on a number of things too.

And, and great to hear about your perspectives on both Bach listening, and how art has moved you in your life.

Reed Hundt: Thanks for having me, Evan. And I will wait to find out what other podcasts you have on this theme and also what your next "all of" is going to be.

Evan Goldfine: I don't know. That's up for grabs right now. Thank you, Reed.

I’ve listened to Tyler Cowen talk for hundreds of hours about economics, music, history, art, travel, and regional cuisine, so meeting him on Zoom felt a little like stepping through The Purple Rose of Cairo. My composure mostly held, and it was a pleasure to trade favorite recordings, speculate on Bach’s motivations, and wrestle with uneasy feelings while enjoying recordings from wartime Germany. Full transcript follows.

Here we are on YouTube.

Artists discussed:

Leo Kottke

The Beatles

John Eliot Gardiner

Philippe Herreweghe

Otto Klemperer

Martha Argerich

Karl Richter

Sviatoslav Richter

Glenn Gould

Alisa Weilerstein

Pablo Casals

Peter Schreier

Jason Vieaux

Eduardo Fernandez

Mogens Wöldike

Hans-Christoph Rademann

Carlos Klieber

Keith Jarrett

Benjamin Alard

Angela Hewitt

Samuel Feinberg

Pierre Hantai

Berlioz

Artur Rubenstein

Andres Segovia

Julian Bream

Wilhelm Furtwangler

Fabio Biondi

Frank Peter Zimmerman

Nathan Milstein

David Robinson

Pierre Boulez

Masaaki Suzuki

Wilhelm Backhaus

Leonard Bernstein

Msistislav Rostropovich

Yo-Yo Ma

Jean-Guihen Queyras

Janos Starker

Heinrich Schiff

Kim Kashkashian

Edgar Meyer

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Yuja Wang

Transcript:

Evan Goldfine: Welcome to episode three of the podcast of A Year of Bach. My name's Evan Goldfine and today I'm delighted to be talking to Tyler Cowen. Tyler's one of our foremost public intellectuals. He's an economist at Virginia's George Mason University and one of the original internet bloggers whose work continues into its third decade at Marginal Revolution.

I think about money a lot, and Tyler has reshaped my thinking about economics, especially around how economic growth leads to human flourishing, the importance of incentives and how every economic decision has trade-offs. Tyler and I share a deep love of Bach and the Beatles, and we're both products of Bergen County, New Jersey, so maybe there was something in the water there.

Tyler, welcome.

Tyler Cowen: Happy to be here. Thank you, Evan.

Evan Goldfine: Your earliest exposure to the music was seeing a Bach performance on public television. Could you talk about that?

Tyler Cowen: Well, it wasn't exactly a performance, but I was watching William F. Buckley's Firing Line and uh, on public tv, and they play [00:01:00] the parts of the Brandenburg Concerto number two as the show starts.

And it just so happened that we had at home, I think three classical records. And Brandenburg number two was one of the three. So I had it on the record and then I heard it on Buckley and it's like, oh, I know what this is. And so it was one of the two or three first classical pieces that I knew. Maybe the first one, and I liked it.

Right. That's important.

Evan Goldfine: And how did you start digging more?

Tyler Cowen: Uh, it took a little bit longer. So we had a copy of Rimsky Korsakov Scheherazade. And Tchaikovsky, the Pathetique sixth Symphony. But I was so into classic rock, and that was such an incredible time to have that interest. It wasn't until I was 18 or so that I started really becoming interested in classical music.

I moved down to be an undergraduate at George Mason, so I started going to the Kennedy Center, and my first love really was Beethoven. I just kept on going to hear all the Beethoven and all the Brahms I could, [00:02:00]

Evan Goldfine: but somehow it flipped over to Bach.

Tyler Cowen: Well, I don't know. I don't know if I would say it flipped.

May, maybe they're on a par. Sure. Uh, Bach, A true love for Bach was two or three years later, but I would say until I was 40, I definitely was more interested in Beethoven than Bach. Right now. It would arguably be the opposite.

Evan Goldfine: I'd say the same. Uh, although I probably got the Bach bug a little bit earlier, just by playing classical guitar.

Some of those Bach pieces are the cornerstones of that repertoire, and I think especially

Tyler Cowen: I did that too. I played the prelude, uh, the transcribed cello, sonatas, some, you know, parts of the violin, sonatas and partitas, uh, different short bits from Cantatas for guitar. It works pretty well, doesn't it?

Evan Goldfine: It works great, and Beethoven does not, so no,

Tyler Cowen: nothing, none of it.

Evan Goldfine: So there's a. There's a pleasure in being able to get deeper and deeper into it. And I've found, as I've gotten older and listening to these things, you know, of course the Breamadth in which I listened to it last year, but [00:03:00] also going deeper and deeper into it, I find it's, uh, sort of an infinite Well,

Tyler Cowen: that's right.

Oh, another early exposure I had around the time of Buckley. I had a Leo Kottke album called Mudlark. And he was mostly, you could say, a folk guitarist, and he did Bouree on that album for guitar. And I just thought, well, I wanna play this. And in, you know, in due time I did. It's not that hard to play that piece at all.

Evan Goldfine: Correct. And I love Leo Kottke. I've seen him many times in concert in

Tyler Cowen: Same here.

Evan Goldfine: And, um, what a, what an incredible American, uh, weirdo character, but also he performed the, uh, Jesu Joy of Man's desiring on the Six and 12 string guitar album.

Tyler Cowen: That's right. Yeah.

Evan Goldfine: Which is just a beautiful, beautiful arrangement for steel string, not usually done on the steel string guitar.

And I recommend everyone take a listen to that.

Tyler Cowen: It's better than most classical guitarists, how he has some sort of feel for Bach, even though it would not count as traditional in any way.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah, he, uh, Bach can translate into folk music, uh, if, if it's in the right hands. [00:04:00] You've called Bach the greatest achiever of all time.

How did he do it?

Tyler Cowen: We don't know. So there's plenty of records about Johann Sebastian Bach. But what he really was like to me is quite a cipher. And I've read the major books on him by Gardiner, Wolff. Others, uh, you can read about the records, different places he worked, tax records. But at the end of the day, he's the least easily graspable major composer.

I feel Beethoven in Mozart. If I met them, they wouldn't fundamentally surprise me. Oh, you're Beethoven, you know, Bach. I don't know. It's, uh, that's part of the mystery and challenge, isn't it?

Evan Goldfine: It's maddening. And, and also I, I've been left flat by a lot of the biographies also. I just find, I don't, I'm not getting enough out of them to,

Tyler Cowen: they're well done,

Evan Goldfine: especially for.

Tyler Cowen: Yeah, I'm not blaming the authors. They just have nothing to work with and he's so consistent. You don't learn much about the variation. You [00:05:00] said this yourself in your 37 propositions about Bach over time and styles. He's. More or less always the same. And that too makes it harder.

Evan Goldfine: Yes, there's the

Tyler Cowen: opposite of the Beatles, right?

Evan Goldfine: The opposite of the Beatles. But you know, I'd say that there is an extra little bit of depth, I think that Bach gets to towards the end of his life. I'm thinking of the Art of Fugue in particular, but you know, I'd say this, his output from his teenage years up until that point, it just remarkably consistent and uh, you know, it doesn't really feel like very much of an early and late style as compared to others.

Tyler Cowen: I agree with your general point, but sometimes I wonder if Art of the Fugue and Musical Offering are his greatest depth.

Evan Goldfine: Hmm.

Tyler Cowen: I'm not convinced that's true. So something like the first partita are parts of Well-Tempered, clavier, uh, they sound less complex, but in a way they're more compelling and the fact that there are so few good recordings of Art of the Fugue or Musical Offering, [00:06:00] it could just mean they're so deep.

No human can do them. Uh, but maybe in a sense they're too far out there and in that regard, less deep. I think about this pretty often.

Evan Goldfine: I don't listen to them as much as the other pieces that you mentioned.

Tyler Cowen: Exactly. Or even

the brandenburgs, maybe those are his deepest works and his most accessible works.

Evan Goldfine: He was a tune,

he was a tunesmith as well. And he gets short of, he gets short shrift for his melodic mastery because the harmony and the, and the counterpoint are so intricate.

Tyler Cowen: What's also interesting to me, I mean B minor mass, which of course, you know, it might be considered by many his greatest work, but just how much he threw it together.

It's a bit like a Paul McCartney song like Uncle Albert, Admiral Halsey, where there are all these pieces and somehow it works. And you just wonder like what really went on with the other works where you don't know how it was built.

Evan Goldfine: Right. And we, we'll never know. And we just have it looks that way.

Tyler Cowen: Yeah.

I don't

think there's much more about Bach to be [00:07:00] discovered.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Tyler Cowen: AI or not.

Evan Goldfine: Um, to that end, when you think about the B minor bass, can we hear today Bach in the way that he intended it? And I'm not talking about period instruments. I'm thinking the people who are listening to the B minor mass, you know, they're sitting in a church in, uh, the Lutherans, in in Leipzig.

They're shivering. Life is much more precarious. They're hearing the loudest sounds that they've heard all year. Is the gap between us and them too large? What do we miss and what do we gain?

Tyler Cowen: The gap is quite large. Now what we gain, obviously, is that we're comfortable. We can put the music on pause. If we're in a concert hall, that's different, but that's so stagey.

The people there, maybe they're old or they're Asian, few of them really believe in God. There's just so many differences, but I think the biggest difference is all the music we've heard in the meantime, and you cannot erase that from your mind. So yeah, it's a completely different [00:08:00] experience in my opinion.

Evan Goldfine: Everyone is downstream from the Romantics. We've all heard Chopin, if you're gonna be playing Bach on piano, you've also played Chopin .

i'm wondering how you hear certain performances now because our current composers, I'm sorry, our current performers have been listening to all of this music all of their lives.

Tyler Cowen: Well, if I listen to Otto Klemperer conduct B minor mass, which is a favorite of mine, it's sometimes called a bit heavy or elephantine, but it makes perfect sense to me 'cause I know Romantic music and Wagner and Beethoven, Brahms, and it just clicks.

In many ways, I prefer the heavier versions of B minor mass. So when I hear Gardiner or Herreweghe or any number of other people who do it, the earlier style, it sounds like a cleansing to me. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not how it was intended. That was simply how people heard it, but perhaps more radically so.

Mm-hmm. [00:09:00]

Evan Goldfine: I prefer, uh, some of my favorites are, um, Karl Richter's performances, who, you know, a lot of that is, I guess, not, not of the current day that, uh, in terms of he plays it very Romantically. All of his Cantatas, they're very drawn out. They sound like they could be, they could be coming from, uh, 18th and 19th century.

And I, I prefer it. I, I kind of like how it fits in that mold, although I'm glad it's not the only way you can be hear, uh, you can hear those pieces. Um,

Tyler Cowen: I don't like Richter as much as you do. You know?

Evan Goldfine: Tell me why.

Tyler Cowen: I, I admire him for having been the first person to make Bach sound a certain way consistently, and he is very, very important historically, but I just think there's always someone after him who did it better.

Evan Goldfine: Hmm.

Tyler Cowen: He's a bit like Toscanini for me. Very admirable, important, but I never wanna listen to Toscanini. Really Not any performance.

Evan Goldfine: I loved Richter singers. Tell me who you prefer. Post Richter. [00:10:00] In that vein,

Tyler Cowen: well name, name a piece, and I'll tell you maybe, oh,

Evan Goldfine: maybe for the cantatas or for for the passions.

Well, uh, you, you have different particular recordings of each of these, uh, these pieces I'm imagining. So, so what comes to mind of, of as favorites of yours?

Tyler Cowen: Well, for St. Matthew's Passion, my, you know, Mogens Wöldike, the old Danish conductor,

Evan Goldfine: I don't know that one

Tyler Cowen: who did

it very full blown. Uh, that's an incredible recording.

And then Otto Klemperer. Would be my two favorites. But even Peter Schreier, which is not a top recording, but I think it's a bit better than Richter on St. Matthews. And then you may or might not want to go the original instruments direction, uh, but at least there's three I would take over Richter.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen: So he's just not that useful to me. Now the Cantatas are interesting. 'Cause I think they're the worst served part of box output in recorded music. And they're the ones that suffer the most from being yanked out of the church.

Evan Goldfine: Yes.

Tyler Cowen: I think most of them just don't do that well [00:11:00] either in a symphony orchestra hall or recorded.

So they're more boring to the listener. I'm not saying they're worse. It's not, not not the point. But it's tougher to come to terms with them and there's so many, and they tend to blur together. Uh, I suppose the cantatas I like the most are the Suzukis, which I think you don't like so much.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah,

Tyler Cowen: it was just something problematic about the whole exercise.

Evan Goldfine: I agree. It took me a little while to get into it and because that was, so much of it was about half of the material that I listened to and I was mostly unfamiliar with it. It was sort of a slog sometimes to, to get through them, but I kind of started to understand the rhythm of them a little bit more about how they paced each of the movements and how he orchestrated each of them.

They all have their own. Particular kind of charms and flavors. There's a recording cycle that happened last year live in, um, in Germany by, uh, the conductor's name is Rademann, R-A-D-E-M-A-N-N. Very exciting performances, very live and gripping. And I,

Tyler Cowen: I've heard they're very

good. Are they [00:12:00] released on disc now?

Evan Goldfine: They are not entirely yet. They're, we're in the middle of 2025 right now. I think they're midway through. The release of those, but I think about half of them have been released. They're all, they're all very strong singing strong. And, uh, it's exciting. Uh, it reminds me a little bit of, uh, Carlos Klieber recordings, that kind of excitement in the, yeah, in the room.

That's

Tyler Cowen: good.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Tyler Cowen: Now, maybe it's best with the cantatas just to keep on listening to the one after the other, which is counterintuitive. Normally you'd say, well, pick one aside, or just listen to one movement, but just keep on going.

Evan Goldfine: You gotta immerse yourself. It reminds me of another question I wanted to ask you.

So you, you've, you famously, when you go see the movies. Sometimes you'll pop in and leave after an hour. And having had the flavor of it,

how do you manage that?

Tyler Cowen: Well, I never wait an hour. I wait an hour, I'm there.

Evan Goldfine: Okay, so, so 15, 20 minutes, you get the geal. 40 minutes maybe? Yeah, 20 minutes of a movie. So, so how does that play into your music listening, especially with serious music?

Do you, [00:13:00] do you get a flavor and leave, or do, do repeats make you nuts? What's your, what's your consumption function on, on those pieces?

Tyler Cowen: Well, there's a big difference. So I think you more or less know in advance what is good. So one belief I hold is that every composer considered to be great is indeed great, that the critical market for classical music is remarkably efficient.

And the people who would be called the best, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, they are the best. And you really just can't argue it that much. So someone like Schoenberg who took me a while to appreciate, I knew he was the most important and best composer of atonal music, so I just kept on listening. I knew I'd get there, I did.

And there's no uncertainty. Or as a movie, you can read reviews, but it's like you know more than the reviewers often. And if you don't like it, you don't like it. Don't necess. You don't usually have some historical reason for wanting to know what the movie's about. You would with some films like Citizen [00:14:00] Kane, but say, that's great anyway.

You can't go through life not knowing Citizen Kane, so you're rarely investing in like knowledge of history and cinema.

Evan Goldfine: So it's really just an an aesthetic feel that you're getting and you're in the world of a particular film for 20 minutes, and that feels like enough.

Tyler Cowen: And I go to a lot of movies, so the ones I walk out of, I'm pretty sure about.

They're not that marginal. They're typically just bad, and I don't look back and it's not the case. At three years later, someone says, oh, did you see X? I'm like, oh, I walked out of that. Should I rent? You know, watch it on streaming now. You know,

Evan Goldfine: probably not.

Yeah,

Tyler Cowen: that's fine.

Evan Goldfine: I don't watch a lot of movies 'cause I, I think I'd walk out of most of them and I don't have your discipline, I think to, to just leave in the middle.

Um,

Tyler Cowen: the movies, they're a bit like, they're not quite as efficient as classical music, but the critical market for classic movies is reasonably efficient. The classic movies would be in the New York [00:15:00] Times, but if you read serious cinematic criticism and just watched those movies, you'd be on very firm ground, I think.

Evan Goldfine: You've written about celebrating societies that allow weirdos to flourish, and I think that one of our great weirdos, uh, in this space is, was Glenn Gould, uh, the, perhaps the, the largest weirdo, uh, to become a celebrity in great music in the 20th century. Is it strange that his recordings have become the most famous ones?

Tyler Cowen: The good ones are the best, and they make it impossible to hear other people do the same pieces. So I was just listening to the new Tocattas recording. I think it's by Jonathan Ferrucci, and it's very good. Like on a scale of one to 10, maybe it's like a 9.1, but at the end of the day, is it gonna replace Glenn Gould?

I don't know. Now his bad recordings are like the worst Bach ever done. Yeah. Like, well tempered clavier, which Henry Oliver also hates.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen: Uh, but something like Partita in number [00:16:00] one or Partita number six, all the Partitas is, uh, just untouchable and you don't go anywhere else. So it's weird. And I als the two Goldbergs, uh, English Suite in.

A minor would be a peak by Gould. And unlike many people, I like it when he sings. I think that makes it better.

Evan Goldfine: I don't mind it. Do you like Keith Jarrett? Do you listen to him at all?

Tyler Cowen: I do. Uh, I like his Shostokovich. I don't prefer his Bach. It's in the, I'm surprised how good this is category. Mm-hmm. But I do listen to his Shostokovich, which is jazzier to begin with.

Evan Goldfine: His French suites I think are excellent on harpsichord, and he actually came out with an album, well, it was, he recorded in the eighties and it was released a couple years ago, um, of CPE Bach, the Wurtenberg Sonatas, which were new to me. And that recording is extraordinary.

Tyler Cowen: I like that too.

Evan Goldfine: I really, really like that one.

Tyler Cowen: But you know, I actually prefer CPE Bach on Clavichord, and I don't like Clavichord for Dad at [00:17:00] all. Maybe I'm just inconsistent, but when it's a bit clunky and coming out in spurts, I think it makes CPE's music more interesting and he needs that a bit.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen: Do you know the Benjamin Alard set? It's like, it's the complete keyword keyboard.

Works of Bach.

Evan Goldfine: I have not listened to that.

Tyler Cowen: It's come, been coming out over the last two or three years. I think they're all out now. Uh, he does, you know, keyboards, harpsichord, a lot of clavichord. I think it's the closest you can get to hearing how it ought to sound while the quality of the performance is in the top tier.

That said, they are never my favorite versions, which will typically just be with piano. Angela Hewitt being another one.

Evan Goldfine: Hmm.

Tyler Cowen: Or Richter, or do you know Samuel Feinberg?

Evan Goldfine: No, uh,

Tyler Cowen: you know, Well-Tempered Clavier, which I'm sure you love. His volume one is better than Richter. It's Soviet and dreamy. It's in the same direction as Richter, but that you should [00:18:00] really listen to.

Evan Goldfine: I will.

Tyler Cowen: It's

quite special.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. Have you listened to, we're just gonna trade names back and forth. Have you listened to Pierre Hantai on Harpsichord?

Tyler Cowen: That's my favorite harpsichord version of the Goldbergs. I think he's very good, but I still mostly listen to those on piano.

Evan Goldfine: I love his Well-Tempered clavier too.

That that was a great, that very, yes. Yeah, that was a great discovery for me during this, uh, during this exercise for me,

Tyler Cowen: he's my favorite. Bach on harpsichord, I would say. Definitely.

Evan Goldfine: When you were talking about how Benjamin Alard, uh, playing, how it ought to sound. Can I press you on the word ought there?

What did you mean?

Tyler Cowen: It's the closest to how I think box sounded relative to what we can recreate today. Mm, the same feel kinds of rhythms, motions, energies, instruments in, in many cases, not all. So that makes them quite interesting. And again, the quality is very high, but at the end of the day, you learn that you want something that's not [00:19:00] exactly quality or authenticity.

You want something closer to the Glenn Gould or Richter. I do, at least

Evan Goldfine: I, same with me. And I'd put Martha Argerich in the little bit of Bach that she recorded.

Tyler Cowen: Absolutely.

Evan Goldfine: Um, you know, she, she's

Tyler Cowen: sweet by her. Yeah.

Evan Goldfine: The, the best. The best.

Tyler Cowen: That's right. And she's the best at many things. Not just Bach.. She, she is the

Evan Goldfine: best at, she's threatening to come to New York in a couple years, but, um,

Tyler Cowen: isn't she 85 now?

Someone just sent me a summer recording by her.

Evan Goldfine: She rec my friends who flew to Italy to see her, just 'cause they, they wanted to catch her again while she was still playing, but they said she still got it.

Tyler Cowen: Yeah. Pretty amazing. So I'll listen to that recording soon.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. So you going back to Bach, the man.

You've taught that incentives matter. This is, uh, something that, uh, those two words together have reshaped the, putting that at the forefront of economic thought, uh, for me. So, you know, what were Bach's incentives? You had a lot of a big family, you know, you wrote that a lot of musicians are after some [00:20:00] sort of fame or notoriety also, I'm not sure how much of.

Bach, I'm not sure how much Bach actually received that in his lifetime, uh, relative to the amount of fame he might have gotten today. You know, a lot of these pieces were played once and, you know, cast off and never heard again. They're incredibly intricate. They lasted by the skin of their teeth, uh, through the ages.

What was Bach's motivation? To do so much or how can you, you know, if, if that was his incent, what were his incentives to put

Tyler Cowen: it up? At first he was paid and he was quite a tough bargainer, as you can see in the correspondence. And multiple times he would leave one place for another. So he goes, what, from Arnstadt to Muhlhausen?

To Cothen to Leipzig. Right. Is that the correct order?

Evan Goldfine: That's from

what I understand, yeah.

Tyler Cowen: And every, you know, every time he's pissed off or he wants to do something different or there's more money, uh, or he didn't like the ruler. So he wanted, I think, the freedom to create and he wanted to be paid. And he had all those kids to look after.

And as you know, his first wife [00:21:00] died. Mm. And he's even writing a lot of music with her gone. And presumably to some extent Bach himself is looking after the kids. So it's an incredible story. The free, you know, the freedom and ability to create. But I, you know, a bit like Shakespeare, I think he suspected.

He would be more famous than it seemed 'cause think about all the sheet music he got from Italy and France from which come, you know, Italian suites, French suites, English, suites broadly in those styles, uh, I think he knew that trade would develop and that he could become quite well known, and I strongly suspect he thought of himself as the greatest musician ever to that date.

I knew he would someday be recognized as such. That's my hypothesis. Zero direct evidence, but it is what I believe.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. He seemed to have distilled the history of music into one point and that was himself and then changed everything afterwards. He's like a fulcrum point.

Tyler Cowen: Yeah. And Renaissance [00:22:00] polyphony, everything is in there.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah,

Tyler Cowen: there's precursors.

Evan Goldfine: So I, I, you know, we're talking about music. I'm enjoying our conversation and I've enjoyed writing about my experience, but I find overall talking about great music to be less satisfying than talking about any other art form. So when I go through a museum with a friend, we can have so much to say to each other about what we're seeing.

And after a play, I feel like I can, uh, speak about the words that we heard and the performances that we saw with music. I can pretty effectively complain about what I didn't like, but I can't talk about. That was great. If I were sitting next to you in a hall and we saw a great Bach performance together afterwards, I'd say that was wonderful and there wouldn't be so much in it.

And I, on my blog, I've been trying to get to this point a little bit and I, I was wondering if you have an I idea about what gives about that phenomenon or if you experience it in that way.

Tyler Cowen: I think one can do that more with popular music. That would be one point. Especially studio [00:23:00] popular music.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen: Uh, but I largely accept your point, and you also argued elsewhere in something you wrote. There's not much good writing about music, and I partly agree with that. But if I had to give an example, I would say something like The Memoirs of Berlioz, which are not mostly about music, right? They're about Berlioz, and they're about that period in history, yet in some funny way that is still writing about music.

Evan Goldfine: Hmm.

Tyler Cowen: Uh, and maybe that's what writing about music is, is filling in all the blank parts of the surrounding context. Or Arthur Rubenstein, you know, My Early Years. There's a lot of great books like that on the fringes of music, and maybe that's what we're looking for and the best we're gonna get. But with writing, you know, the new Ian Leslie book on John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

That's wonderful.

Evan Goldfine: Beautiful book.

Tyler Cowen: And that book Revolution in their heads about the Beatles, that's an incredible book.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen: So popular music, there's, it's easier to talk about and there's often [00:24:00] better writing,

Evan Goldfine: and that's a function of, uh, the popularity itself and also probably because the lyrics and, uh, are something that we can respond to in a way that is more relevant to our lives.

The history is so close to us and maybe the people are actually still around.

Tyler Cowen: That's right. Like few people can actually discuss. How Bach's St. John's passion revised the account of Christ relative to some of the other notions at his time. Yet it did, but it completely goes over everyone's head.

Evan Goldfine: Right. The addressable market for that one's fairly small

Tyler Cowen: for now.

Yeah.

Evan Goldfine: Right. Uh, I have a couple lightning round questions, so, uh, give me a, your best deep cut from, uh, Lennon and McCartney's solo catalogs.

Tyler Cowen: When, when you say Deep cut, what does that mean exactly? Uh,

Evan Goldfine: I would say not, uh, one of their singles or hits

Tyler Cowen: Well, with Paul, there's so many are hits, but you know, my C Moon is a favorite of mine.

Mm-hmm. I think that's 1974, but there's a second version of [00:25:00] C Moon that he redid with tighter orchestration that is only on the B side of a cd. Single, and even to this day is not on Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere else. You cannot hear it unless you own that CD single. So that's the deepest Macca cut. I know.

And it's amazing. It's even better than the original C Moon.

Evan Goldfine: And what about for John Lennon?

Tyler Cowen: I think Mind Games is an underrated album. Mm-hmm. Most of it is very good. The production is imperfect, but maybe it ought to be, I think I'd actually prefer it right now to listen to Mind Games than Imagine, which is a little too polished.

Two precious or self-conscious or even pretentious. And then there's the nasty bits about Paul. Hmm. Um, so any, you know, Meat City would be one. I know that, you know, but almost everything on mind games is quite good and it's not that well known other than the mind game song.

Evan Goldfine: Right. That mind game song is, is terrific.

I'll, I'll play but a very

Tyler Cowen: deep cut. This one, I [00:26:00] don't know if it's from Solo Lennon, the Beatles, but John with only acoustic guitar doing Rock Island Line for about two minutes.

Evan Goldfine: Was that on one of the anthology albums? It might have been,

Tyler Cowen: I don't think so. I own it on an LP that I acquired maybe 40 years ago, and I still have it and it blows me away.

Just the Lennon voice killer.

Evan Goldfine: I'll try to find it on YouTube and link it to everybody. Try to find it. Yeah, that might take me a little bit. Uh, I would go with, uh, Every Night for Paul McCartney off the first, uh, McCartney album, which I think is just a beautiful little tune.

Tyler Cowen: I agree. But is that a deep cut?

To me, that's quite famous. You know, the second live version or just the deeper background chorus. In some ways I like that even more. Yeah.

Evan Goldfine: I love that first Al. I mean, it's, it's so janky, but it's very lovable that the very first album, it's

Tyler Cowen: a fantastic

album. Yeah. A shame that it was so panned at the time.

Evan Goldfine: What was, what is the greatest classical song cycle, [00:27:00]

Tyler Cowen: I suppose Die Wintereisse, there's a lot by Brahms, but as a cycle, I'll say. Yeah. Die Wintereisse

Evan Goldfine: that's fair.

Tyler Cowen: Clear first.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. I, I'm more charmed by, uh, Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben.

Tyler Cowen: That's quite good. Yeah.

Evan Goldfine: I, I just find myself listening to those. I, I just, I, I love those guys.

But, um, yeah, I think in terms of the artistic depth, I would agree with Wintereisse. Uh, question for you, crossword puzzles, waste of time, are they engaging for you?

Tyler Cowen: I don't do them. I did them for about nine months in high school. Probably it was good for me. I learned things. If people just keep on doing them throughout their lives, um, I don't know.

I guess it makes them happy. Probably they're not that ambitious in some big way or they're super ambitious and that's their relaxation. It's a portfolio question,

Evan Goldfine: I

feel like I wanna be told,

Tyler Cowen: take care of it.

Evan Goldfine: I feel like I wanna be told to stop [00:28:00] doing them 'cause they're a waste of time. But I'll, I'll take that as a, as an endorsement.

Um, okay. So tell me, besides, and you've talked about the risks of, of war, what financial systemic risks are you most concerned about right now?

Tyler Cowen: Well, in the very short run, I'm not that worried, but if you mean the next five years, uh, the fact that the banking system in the US in relative terms keeps on shrinking.

It means that more and more is outside the deposit insurance umbrealla.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen: And things like private equity, which in this very moment really does seem well capitalized enough that I'm not worried. But over time there just are so many loose pieces with maturity mismatches and people will game those things off balance sheet or mm-hmm.

Just take undue risks and I think it will lead to another financial crisis. I, I have no prediction. When

Evan Goldfine: is it okay if they're not heavily levered?

Tyler Cowen: You know, every institution has implicit leverage, and if you don't understand the implicit leverage in the institution you're thinking [00:29:00] about, I would say you don't understand the institution.

Evan Goldfine: Hmm.

Tyler Cowen: So, yeah, right now they're not heavily levered. And again, it's fine. It's not gonna happen next week, but at the end of the day, it's a question of how long will it take before people forget the past. And there, I just don't know.

Evan Goldfine: Keeps happening.

Tyler Cowen: Keeps happening.

Evan Goldfine: Let's say you're, I throw you into the seat of the Secretary of the Treasury and you have a very powerful executive branch.

What are the two or three things you'd wanna do first?

Tyler Cowen: Well, if I don't control Congress, I don't have a lot of power, but I think we need to restructure the trajectories of entitlements. First of all, Medicare, there were just some Medicaid cuts in the so-called big beautiful bill.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen: I would start with that and apply something Doge like to Medicare Advantage and to the Pentagon and to a lot of unnecessary surgeries that we pay a lot of money for.

But that all requires Congress. So if I'm just a treasury, uh, I don't know, I guess I'd, uh, [00:30:00] sell my memoirs.

Evan Goldfine: Sounds good. Uh, give me a few other Bach recordings that are, uh, you, you frequently put on, uh, that have stayed with you for the years.

Tyler Cowen: Well, you could name a piece like, you know, there's these two new recordings.

The guy's last name is Zimmerman of the violin sonatas and partitas, some of Bach's Greatest Works. Mm-hmm. For me and his account is incredible and there's an Italian Fabio Biondi, I think his came out the year before, but quite recent. Again, the solo violin works, those are amazing.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen: My classic favorite.

I bet you'll say the same, but Nathan Milstein.

Evan Goldfine: Sure.

Tyler Cowen: Then if someone like wants to give you a hard time, they're like, which are the three versions? But actually there's four. Do you know the first mono one? I think it's the second. That's the classic best one, but you'd have to check on that. Mm-hmm. But the famous Deutsche Gramophone, Nathan Milstein is, is where you would go.

But these new recordings are just as good, and I like to just keep on buying [00:31:00] recordings of the solo violin works.

Evan Goldfine: They're the best. So

Tyler Cowen: those would be some picks, but you could try naming something maybe. I just won't know.

Evan Goldfine: Tell me about Well, you, you tend to, I'd say like. When I know, I know you like the, the conducting of David Robertson and, uh, Masaki Suzuki, and, um, you know, and Boulez, these are sort of more crystalline and clear, um, conductors and performers and a little less maybe, um, playing with the tempo, stretching things out.

They're, they're sort of, uh, on the beat, I would say. Sure. Do you, do you find, do you find that that characterization is true?

Tyler Cowen: I agree with the characterization, uh, if there is a beat, uh, in the case of Robertson, but my favorite conductor of all time is Otto Klemperer, and he definitely stretches things out.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Tyler Cowen: And he understood all music in an amazing way, and he actually lived in some version of the society that produced it, which I suspect is [00:32:00] essential and really cannot be replicated. So his Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, everything. Wagner. Bruckner, just incredible.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Tyler Cowen: And he must have been such a mind, and unlike some great conductors.

There's no soiled spots on his record, so to speak.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. When I was choosing who to feature on my blog, who do I wanna listen to? You know, I have Apple Music open, there's 50 different versions of of each piece. I still. Chose some Nazis. You know, like I will, Wilhelm Backhaus has an amazing Bach album, and he, he dined with the fuhrer and, you know, uh, even though his, there's an asterisk next to his name, we have his record and it's compli.

I know Karajan had a real big career for his, you know, for 40 years after the, after World War ii, maybe 50 years

Tyler Cowen: more. Yeah. Yeah. Well, do you know what's the best recording of Beethoven's ninth?

Evan Goldfine: I am. Some people would say Leonard [00:33:00] Bernstein after the Berlin Wall fell.

Tyler Cowen: No. I mean I wish it were, but Wilhelm Furtwangler Hitler's birthday in 1942.

Mm-hmm. Did it live? And that just so crackles and I feel guilty listening to it.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Tyler Cowen: But I do think it's clearly the best.

Evan Goldfine: It's tough.

Tyler Cowen: It's tough. I know Klemperer is one of the best. Speaking of Bernstein, obviously you can side with. The recent Minnesota Orchestra, recording of the ninth, oddly enough, is one of the very best, I think.

Mm-hmm. But Furtwangler, the atmosphere there was something there.

Evan Goldfine: So you're, you're feeling that it's a live recording, so you're feeling the audience, you're, you're along with them

Tyler Cowen: and look Hitler's watching, so you can bet they rehearsed. A lot.

Evan Goldfine: The audience too.

Tyler Cowen: Nothing mattered.

Incentives matter. You said that before.

Evan Goldfine: Yes. What was the thing with Stalin who was gonna, uh, clap? Who was gonna stop clapping first? That there was gonna be no one who was gonna do it? Uh, after the, uh, yeah. [00:34:00] Uh, what else? Tyler?

Tyler Cowen: Well, the cello sweets.

I don't think you've ever written one of your

Evan Goldfine: I did.

Tyler Cowen: I tell me. Then

Evan Goldfine: I featured Rostropovich, uh, who? I, okay. That

Tyler Cowen: might be my top. That's a very, very good one.

Evan Goldfine: Yep. I, I think Yo-yo MA's first set as excellent. Uh, I like Alisa Weilerstein, who's a contemporary, uh, player. She's fantastic. What else, uh, comes and, you know, the originals from Casals I think are important to hear, but nothing that I, I will put on very often.

How about you?

Tyler Cowen: The Casals I find profound but painful. There's just too much scratching and the sound quality is poor. Yo-Yo Ma. I've heard do those live and that was amazing. A plus. But each of his recordings, I feel somehow does not project enough and I don't listen to them. I think I've only heard two, what's he done?

Three or whatever.

Evan Goldfine: I think he's three now,

Tyler Cowen: but I don't love any of them. The Bylsma. I'm glad it was done. It's perfect in its own way, but it's not what I want. The early Janos Starker, [00:35:00] and he has two recordings of the Bach, but the later stereo one, uh, Heinrich Schiff is quite good. But, uh, Queyras, Q-U-E-Y-R-A-S, who now has two recordings.

The first one is incredible for me. It's the main rival to Rostropovich. Uh, the second one I don't like at all. But try that one. Do you know it at all?

Evan Goldfine: I don't. I'll have to listen to that.

Tyler Cowen: I think he's a Basque. He's from Spain. Uh, very, very impressive. But there's a lot of great recordings of the cello suites.

Evan Goldfine: I'll pitch two, also adapted one for Viola from Kim Kashkashian on ECM records.

Tyler Cowen: Yes, yes.

Evan Goldfine: Excellent. And very unusual record. Um, the, the. The timbre of the viola is just shocking when you know those agree pieces really well. Also, one of the thing that's cool about that album is that it starts with the second cello suite.

So, you know, you normally get do, do do do do, do, do, do. And that's not how the record starts. You're just thrown in. You're, you're out of order. So [00:36:00] already you're off kilter. So I recommend that one. And also Edgar Meyer, the bass, uh, the Acoustic Bassist, uh, great at Bluegrass also has a really lovely album of the Cello Suites adapted for, uh, acoustic bass.

Tyler Cowen: Yes. That's good. There's another good viola version, but I can't remember who did it. Not a very famous person, but Excellent.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah,

Tyler Cowen: and as we said before, they work well for guitar.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. I just, uh, interviewed, uh, one of my favorite guitars named Jason Vieaux for this, uh, who's just fantastic and great to talk to about adapting, you know, 'cause these weren't arranged.

They had, you have to move some of the things, uh, on instruments and you have to make some choices and sacrifices to adapt it to guitar. Um, and some people go overboard. And how mu how much or little do you play certain notes? Uh, it's a real hard form to be able to adapt to the six string.

Tyler Cowen: My favorite Bach guitarist is the Uruguayan Eduardo Fernandez.

Evan Goldfine: Hmm.

I don't know him, and I've listened to a lot of these.

Tyler Cowen: He's in his seventies [00:37:00] now. He hardly plays around anymore, but I've seen him live and there are recordings. He did all the lute suites. He's in general also excellent with 20th century music. Neither Segovia and Bream. I think for guitar. It's interesting, the very early recordings like Segovia and Bream, they've held up much better.

Then say the very early cello recordings.

Evan Goldfine: I agree.

Tyler Cowen: Or violin recordings. Uh, I'm not sure why, but I think you, Segovia and Bream are still at the very top.

Evan Goldfine: I think they were the two greatest instruments, uh, players of those instruments, uh, in, in that era. And they were both pioneers of that instrument. And I think that, you know, in some ways the people who started at the beginning of the recorded music era were thrown there and we don't know what the, the great, um.

Violinists and cellist of the 19th century sounded like maybe they were, you know, much better than the people who happened to have started recording in the 1940s.

Tyler Cowen: So I think mostly [00:38:00] they were worse. We can talk about this in a moment, but maybe with Segovia and Bream, it's that contact with the earlier world.

Realizing, 'cause you're growing up when things like Debussy, Satie are still new. So there's some way in which all guitar music ought to be kind of acoustic, ambient, almost like Brian Eno. And they understood that intuitively. And the fellow you mentioned, you know, V-I-E-A-U-X, how do you pronounce it?

Evan Goldfine: Vieaux.

Tyler Cowen: He's technically great, but I don't feel he gets that.

It's too straight laced for me.

Evan Goldfine: Hmm.

Tyler Cowen: Uh, and Fernandez is a bit closer to the earlier tradition. Just as Uruguayan culture is still a bit like, you know, in Buenos Aires and early 20th century European culture, but here's why I think the, the early players are mostly worse though, exciting. We do have a lot of recordings from the transitional era.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen: So there's like Sauer playing the piano Rosenthal, you know, so many people and I love [00:39:00] hearing them once or twice, but I just don't think they're the best even for Liszt.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm. Rachmaninoff is not my favorite Rachmaninoff player.

Tyler Cowen: No, he's quite good, I think, and more even keeled than you might have been expecting, but I agree.

Not my favorite.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the, one of the questions that came up on your post asking what to ask you today was asking about were there many of these great artists on the level of Bach that we might not know about, uh, in the past, and maybe they just hit an era where they're not known.

Maybe not in classical music because that's sort of risen to the top, but in, in other genres, do you think that we may have missed some folks?

Tyler Cowen: Well, certainly in wor it's called world Music. So if you look at pygmy vocal music, which is incredible, I don't think you would attribute it to individual composers.

But the people who make it, we, you could say, we still dunno who they are.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen: So in earlier times there must have been many musics like that. [00:40:00] Probably mostly collective mm-hmm. That are simply vanished and were amazing.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Tyler Cowen: But the instrumentation will be limited. I, I don't know. I, I don't feel there's so much lost in a way.

Evan Goldfine: I feel like we're really blessed.

Tyler Cowen: Yeah. And this, you know, what little we know of. Very early Medieval Roman, ancient Greek music, it might just not have been that good, is my sense.

Evan Goldfine: Hmm.

Tyler Cowen: And, uh, they didn't know it wasn't that good.

Evan Goldfine: How could they,

Tyler Cowen: because they didn't have Bob Dylan or whatever. Uh, just the different pieces you need to produce a Bob Dylan.

When you think about it, it places quite a burden on those earlier eras.

Evan Goldfine: Could you speak, I, I know you've written about this, about how economic growth and capitalism have led to the innovations that have led to the shifts in music, uh, that we've heard .

Tyler Cowen: when I go to concerts today, it just strikes me what a remarkable technological innovation [00:41:00] the acoustic symphony orchestra is. It's so loud. The pieces all fit together. A symphony is amazing. It just all works and it's perfect. And the main what it is, I mean, you can debate exactly when it when it was in place, but arguably middle of the 18th century, certainly by the early 19th century.

And it's actually one of mankind's greatest technological achievements. Forget about liking the music. And that all had to gel so many pieces, you know, from these networks coming together. So, uh, without that, I mean, you don't have a Beethoven, Brahms, or whatever people did later. Bach himself was kind of always hoping for better technology and keyboards improved a lot throughout his lifetime.

Mm-hmm. He tried to improve orchestra as he had his own Collegium, you know, Music, uh, Beethoven's always frustrated with the quality of his pianos. He wants bigger, better, more resonant sound. So technology really [00:42:00] matters. In the 20th century, it's more obvious like electric guitar. You also can have larger arenas that brings in more money, supports people in other ways.

The recording studio in the 1990s, well even eighties, you know, digital music in different ways. So yeah, technology is central to all of this,

Evan Goldfine: and even downstream from that, the technology allows us to be able to speak today and become connoisseurs of these uh, artists. And hopefully some of the people listening today will start clicking on.

The recordings that we've spoken to, which helps put more money into the system and maybe encourages some people to go and, uh, create more network effects by putting more money into artistic performances.

Tyler Cowen: I do feel that right now there's something broken in the money loop. Mm-hmm. I think Ted Gioia is too pessimistic, but he does have a point that what you earn per stream is so low.

Evan Goldfine: Yes.

Tyler Cowen: So you and I talk about someone, someone goes to YouTube, to Spotify, that click is worth [00:43:00] almost nothing. Now, you might think they're more likely to see that person play live. I'm not sure that's the case. It's clearly the case in popular music.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen: Uh, I don't think it's the case with performers of classical music.

Most people are going to hear pieces, or they're going to venues they know. They're not, the marginal listener is not usually going to hear the performer unless it's someone like a Yuja Wang mm-hmm. Where it's celebrity value. And you and I saying, oh, I loved her four-hand Stravinsky Rite of Spring piano, whatever that she did.

That's not what gets people to go. It's the fact that she's a celebrity and she's excellent.

Evan Goldfine: Right.

Tyler Cowen: So I, I worry that the marginal incentives right now are in a somewhat bad place, but I, I don't know how to fix it?

Evan Goldfine: What if we're pitching to the curators of these institutions, you and I, that,

Tyler Cowen: that would be wonderful,

but I'm not sure we are.

Or maybe to the donors. Right?

Evan Goldfine: Right.

Tyler Cowen: So someone you know, calls up the local symphony orchestra, well, I'll put up $50,000 if you have Volodos [00:44:00] in to play Bach and, Brahms, and Schubert. And then it happens. It's not that big a donation, but someone has to pay the fee. They probably just couldn't afford it flat out, and then the donor gets to have dinner with the guy.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm. Sounds I. Say it again.

Tyler Cowen: Let's hope.

Evan Goldfine: Let's hope. That would be great.

Tyler Cowen: Yeah.

Evan Goldfine: Tyler, uh, I'm gonna wrap it up here and thank you again for your insights. Uh, you can find Tyler all over the internet. Go to Marginal Revolution, go to Emergent Ventures, go to the Free Press. Tyler, thank you again and, uh, we'll be posting this soon.

Tyler Cowen: My pleasure, Evan, and I would just repeat, I think Bach is one of the greatest humans and human creators of all time. And whatever you're doing with him, with the podcast and writings, keep it up.

It's, in my view, something very, very important.

Evan Goldfine: There's so many fan casts of different sorts of pop people. Why not the greatest artist of all time?

Tyler Cowen: Exactly.

Evan Goldfine: Thank you again.

Tyler Cowen: Bye.

Episode 2 of A Year of Bach Podcast features my conversation with the great classical guitarist Jason Vieaux. We talked about the pleasures and sorrows of adapting Bach for guitar, how not to play too big in a recording studio, and the pleasures of live performance.

Jason is hosting a guitar retreat for students of all levels in Benicia, California from October 10 - 12, 2025 — learn more about it here.

My podcast editing AI got a little aggressive on jump cuts! I’m working on getting better at this. As with everything, it’s all harder than it seems to do it right…

Links & references

Jason’s Grammy award winning album Play:

His album Images of Metheny, a desert island disc for me:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kt99hh3nx2Rc2xK1GryK-YLzYu0qiltu4

Jason and Clancy Newman, Live in Philadelphia during COVID:

Fernando Sor’s tricky Etude #1

Ponce’s Sonata Mexicana

And we name-checked a bunch of brilliant guitarists:

David Russell

Julian Bream

Andres Segovia

Christopher Parkening

Zoran Dukic

Lorenzo Micheli

Aniello Desiderio

Kazuhito Yamashita

Marcin Dylla

Colin David

Support & subscribe

* Get the full transcript and future episodes straight to your inbox.

* Subscribe on Apple Music or Spotify

Chapter markers:

02:43 Techniques and Approaches to Playing Bach

12:48 Teaching and Developing Musical Skills

19:25 The Influence of Julian Bream

23:27 The Essence of Musical Intention

25:08 The Challenge of Recording for Commercial Labels

26:33 Recording Techniques and Spaces

32:18 The Pandemic and Performance

34:50 Pop and Jazz Influences

38:46 Upcoming Projects

Intro music: Adagio of BWV 974, performed by your host on his home piano.

Transcript:

[00:00:00]

Evan Goldfine: Hello everyone and welcome to the second episode of the year of Bach Podcast where I talk with people whose lives have been touched by the great master.

Today I'm very grateful to host one of my musical heroes, Jason Vieaux. That's V-I-E-A-U-X, for everyone who should start typing his name into Spotify or Apple Music right now. Jason's widely recognized as one of the world's finest classical guitarists. I've spent hundreds of hours with his recordings. I recommend them all, but my special favorites are his Grammy award-winning album Play, and of course, Images of Metheny where, Jason adapted the tunes of Pat Metheny for classical guitar.

I've also, of course, enjoyed his two albums of Bach, and today we'll be talking about the special thrills and challenges of adapting Bach for guitar. So Jason, thank you so much for joining us here.

Jason Vieaux: it's my pleasure. Thank you, Evan,

for having me.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. So [00:01:00] Bach never wrote specifically for the classical guitar, but his works are touchstones for all of us who have picked up a classical guitar.

I was hoping you could speak to the particular pleasures and sorrows about Bach has adapted for the guitar as we play it today.

Jason Vieaux: There Are definitely challenges of transferring the music to the guitar, not only just in playing the notes themselves, the pitches themselves, but making decisions I try to make it sound as if Bach did have a guitarist next to him, a modern guitarist with this more modern instrument, and how he might have made things sound better. In other words, change either octave displacement or, or even fill in, or in the case of cello works make something that sounded more germane to the classical guitar.

And I think that's a good approach because then you don't get too stuffy or analytical about, well, this isn't what he would do. I jokingly say to my students at Cleveland Institute of Music or Curtis, it's like, well, we can't ask [00:02:00] him 'cause he's dead, so if we could ask him, that'd be great, but we gotta just, you know, have a little faith and press on,

Evan Goldfine: Where do you get stuck when you're trying to do the adaptations and what are those decisions that you have to make?

Jason Vieaux: It's more like, it's more like baseline kind of things usually.

Right, or where you have to decide on an octave displacement, a lot of times you get stuck and then you've gotta work backwards, you gotta go to your destination point where that phrase or that section would finish and then kind of work back.

It's like checking your work and, and, I don't know, trigonometry or something like that, you know, math kind of thing. But that's all right. I mean, that's a fun process because it's satisfying when you come to something that you've figured out that sounds good and you feel like it sounds good and that it's something that you can, perform.

It's always hard, it's always difficult to play. The most difficult thing about playing Bach well on the guitar, in my view is making the polyphony sound effortless. Because that's a [00:03:00] big, that's a big thing for me. Like I've refingered Prelude and Fugue and Allegro 998, since I've. When I first learned it at age 20 in 95 I would've been 21.

Just short of when I did my first recital of it, my graduation recital, I was 21. From there on, I probably changed fingerings on that piece. Over 30 years, about four or five times, four or five go rounds. 'cause I, I tend to rotate them in and out of the solo program. I'll play 'em for three years, then I put 'em away for five or seven or something.

Then I bring 'em back mainly because I'm learning other ones and then I want those, or if it's for a record. It's those, periods when you're away that are nice because you're learning new. Things from the stuff that you're adapting from violin or cello or whatever it might be.

I've not really attempted a keyboard one to date. But then you come back to say Prelude and Fugue Allegro or. The third Lute suite [00:04:00] and you have fresher ears, more experience, and that part is very satisfying.

Evan Goldfine: Have you found some of those interpretations to have changed when you came back?

Yeah. Three or five years later. What happens?

Jason Vieaux: Sometimes the tempos get faster, sometimes they get slower. Sometimes they, to some, if they get a little slower, it's again to accommodate more up stem, down stem kind of things. Like things in the, in, you know, that are in the top line that are you start to hear more as, two line type of, things.

And then I want to refinger some of that stuff across two strings to bring that out. You know, just things like that I would've missed when I was in my early twenties,

Evan Goldfine: that's interesting 'cause I find you're playing to be especially orchestral, you know, Segovia describes the guitar as an orchestral instrument.

I think part of that is being able to foreground and background the melodies with the accompaniment. 'cause you're trying to do a number of things with Bach especially are, do you have tricks to keep the contrapuntal lines [00:05:00] clear given the mechanical limitations of the instrument?

Jason Vieaux: Well, one of the things I do more often, this is really an oversimplification of it, is I don't do the thing that I think my best colleagues at the time, say 30 years ago, or where you push, you push your fugue subject line way out in front. Mm-hmm. Like an almost like an 80 20 ratio to the other voices. I like doing now more of a 60 40 if you have the touch to do it because. It's like everything, everything is melody.

So even though maybe a tenor line is not as interesting as, not as the now alto line that is now getting a spotlight for two measures, I don't, I'm not a big fan of subjugating the other lines for the purpose of really pushing this one line out way out in front. So I might give a spotlight to something that I think is particularly melodic, but generally I, I think.

When you, when you do listen to, you know, good performances [00:06:00] of, of Bach or like the orchestral the actual orchestral pieces, Brandenburg concertos and this kind of thing, there's more of like an even mix generally, uh, to the various instruments, the ensemble and that. And so I've always had a, I've always had a kind of a orchestrally minded or group, group of musicians minded type of approach to it. So I guess that's one of the things I think that, that have maybe changed a little bit, or deepened.

Evan Goldfine: I know you, you've been thinking about guitar for pretty much your entire life, but for most of us who are amateurs or less, the idea of moving from 80 20 with, certain melody lines to 60 40 seems like a superhuman achievement because for people who don't play guitar, that could mean, different fingers at different sort of plucking ratios. Yes. And also some left-handed techniques also about how you're gonna be articulating in the left hand.

Jason Vieaux: That's right. Could you talk

Evan Goldfine: a little bit about get, get real nerdy about this?

Yeah. Do you even think about it or is it [00:07:00] natural? How does that work?

Jason Vieaux: I don't have to think about it as much because I mean, uh, to be I, this, I mean I've performed probably somewhere between, at this point, after 32 years professionally, I. Probably 50 to 70 hours of different music. So after a while you're not, it's all that kind of stuff becomes much more instinctive.

But I will say that over the past 15 years, I definitely employ a lot more left hand damping or articulation. Or articulation if I wanna articulate. Say a fugue subject. I'll do a lot more of that with my left hand now than I did with my right hand, say 25 years ago. Because my left hand is just more developed and a lot of why it's more developed is specific challenges in those, dozens of hours of, of music, whether it be avant garde stuff where a composer's asking you to do something that you basically have [00:08:00] never really done before on the instrument or the various textures and things that are in romantic era pieces. Classical era, especially Fernando, but in particular Fernando Sor. Left hand is super, super important in, in Fernando Sors music in general because it's so highly detailed in, its in its polyphony.

He's really often you can almost kind of hear like he's writing for string quartet in a lot of these pieces. Even the so-called simple etudes, which are really not so simple and, and not particularly easy, to play. Sor is a great education in how to voice things on the guitar.

There's a lot.

Evan Goldfine: I love playing through the Sor etudes just because they look really simple like the c and c chord in the first position. Yeah. But you can spend your whole life trying to get it exactly right.

Jason Vieaux: That's right. Like Segovia one, which is, I'm forgetting the opus number right now, but it was in Segovia's collection.

It was number one. It's the three voice chorale in C major. Like that is [00:09:00] not a picnic. And it's, it just always used to crack me up. You know, when I first started teaching. When students would say they studied with, someone or whatever, and that was the first thing they handed them. I was like, well, this, and, and they're like, and they couldn't understand why they've been working with it for five years, 10 years, or this was years ago and I did it and I still can't play it.

I'm like, you realize this is like a very, very difficult piece of music to play. Yeah. And then we're like, really? But it's number one in the Segovia, handpicked etudes, Sor, etudes. And it's an etude, so it should be easy. Right? It's like, no. Sor struggled a lot his whole life with quote unquote dumbing down, right?

The difficulty level of finally, by the end, he started to get it right, like OP 60, the progressive studies, that set of progressive studies, he finally started to, you know, kind of go, oh, wait a minute. And they're not. So I have to come down to their level in order to, [00:10:00] you know, to get them started. But it's nowadays we have like from unlimited, you know, really good, you know, training Etudes, Brouwer for example, was just really kind of the modern.

It's the most obvious example of the 20th century, but since then, you know now really lots of guitar star writing really good things that really help train a first year student, second year student, third, and so on and so forth.

Evan Goldfine: And they're musical, right?

Jason Vieaux: And they're musical.

Evan Goldfine: Exactly. Yeah. Some of the pianos exercise, I, I went back to start playing piano again after many, many years.

And to start at the beginning is pretty brutal. I, I'm, I'm trying to do what I did at this, the time in the beginning where I was learning guitar is try to play the pieces that I like and start from there. And it's a real motivator. Yeah. Uh, for me.

I'd like to go back to Bach and thinking about how, you're thinking about these performances again over the years. When you're approaching one of these piece, are you coming at it like thinking, I have a predisposed idea for what tempo and emotivity [00:11:00] and dynamics are trying to be. Are you feeling it in the moment when you get to the recording studio? Do you have a particular idea? How do you come up with your interpretations? Because I, I think they probably develop over time.

How does that work internally for you? I, I, this is might be a challenging question.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah. It's, it's a challenging question, but it's, I mean, the, it's really simple actually, to answer. I'd never come in with any preconceived notions about anything. When I start a piece of music, I don't have a concept.

I don't, I don't assign anything. My whole thing this whole time is really with, whether it's Ponce, sonatas, or. Transcriptions and arranging is a different animal obviously, but, but say playing, like making the Ponce Sonatas record 25 years ago, or the Albert Albeniz transcriptions even.

I just try to play what's there. I don't really try to do anything I, and that I just make the decisions along the way according to my skill level [00:12:00] and. I think the main kind of thing is, is it, does it sound good? Like my ear? I'm, I, I think if there's anything that I'm good at, it's listening to what my playing is outside of myself.

Like I'm, I'm, that's if if it's the only thing I, if there's one thing I'm good at, it's that like I can, I have a good sense of the performance aspect of what I'm eventually gonna do. I'm not there yet when I start. Right. But I have a good sense of what I want to have happen and how that's going to sound coming out of my instrument in a space, in a live space, which is why live is the best way to hear me actually, despite, I think the recordings are nice, they're fine, but like, really the live, live is really the way to hear me. I would say personally,

Evan Goldfine: I still recommend everybody queue up the Play album, which is just so wonderful. How do you inculcate that kind of skill in your students to be able to listen to yourself [00:13:00] outside of yourself? I think we all have to listen to ourselves speaking outside of ourselves.

Well, yeah. In the world. But how do you do that for musicians?

Jason Vieaux: Well recording, continually telling them to record themselves and, and even if it's not on the best equipment, but just recording early run throughs. Even snippets. It can even just be a section of a piece. If that's ready to go, go ahead and do a run through of it, and play back and listen back so that you're seeing yourself in a, in a kind of a sonic mirror. That's the best way to develop that, that sense. I mean, I had a good fortune of in, in growing up in Buffalo, of playing a pretty fair amount of recitals for a kid. I mean, starting with a full first, full length one at 12.

And in those days, just that we just, someone sort of slapped up a audio recording of it and having it on a cassette tape and listening to it. And then within a year, the local classical radio station, WNED, was [00:14:00] featuring me on something. I'd come into the studio and play something and they go, okay,

we're gonna play this on da da da on this date, and then you and your parents and would tune in to listen. And that's very exciting to hear yourself on the radio, but that's also the sensation of hearing yourself through the radio. It's all this, this, that kind of process. I had a good early education in that.

So, yeah. Um, I think that's a great way for students to develop that sense of being kind of being pretty critical actually of what, what you're hearing. I mean, you can enjoy it and at the same time be of two minds. You can enjoy the accomplishment aspect of it, but okay, now what's next?

What, what? How, how can this, where, what area do I, of the, 200 areas that there are to work on in music, which, you know, what areas do I try to improve in that?

Evan Goldfine: Most lay people don't like to listen to themselves speak. Do you have that experience as a musician or with your students listening back to what you've played and being like, ah, darn it.

Or just, I wish it were [00:15:00] better.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah. It's, it's kind of a lukewarm response from me. It's kind of like, well, that could have, that could have been better. But, you know, every, every time you're making a record, you're really under sort of like some these kind of time constraints that they're, and they're not really conducive to a hyper busy schedule where you're traveling two thirds of every year and then you gotta find a date to slam in, two Bach suites or something, and then you come back another time and then you're working on those in a hotel room after, sometimes after a concert. I mean, I used to do that kind of stuff sometimes with like a couple glasses of wine after the concert. Like, you know, just kind of like, oh my God, I gotta get this, I can't do that anymore. Yeah. I just,

Evan Goldfine: It's an age thing.

Jason Vieaux: It's just an age thing. And I value sleep above everything else, including practice. Actually, I, as you get older, sleepy actually becomes number one and practice number two. Whereas when you're in twenties and thirties, practice is number one and sleep is number two or three or five or whatever, you know?

Evan Goldfine: I [00:16:00] hear you.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah. So it's kind of like you get it in when you can and then you listen to the result and you're like, well, I do that better.

I do that passage better now, but there's, there's probably, it would've been unrealistic to expect that I would play it the way I did then. Then.

Evan Goldfine: Sure.

Jason Vieaux: That I play now after what, 50 performances of that piece. It's of course. It's gonna get. Better and better and deeper and deep. You know, it's gonna become more and more high definition, of course, as you perform it in front of people.

Evan Goldfine: What's that moment?

Jason Vieaux: Let's just, I should just add that half of what you hear on my records, I learned for the records like Bach volume two. Here's a copy of right here, line two. I have it. I have one in here. Yeah, I never did Lute suite number four. I learned that. For the record. So I play the prelude a little faster now because I've now played in about 10 to 15 recitals only starting this time last year.

Evan Goldfine (2): Yeah,

Jason Vieaux: it was when I finally started playing fourth Lute suite. Third Sonata haven't played live yet. Sonata [00:17:00] one played it for since 1999.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. And how does it feel to get more high definition from going from the initial engagement with a piece where you can play it with facility and it sounds okay.

Jason Vieaux: Mm-hmm.

Evan Goldfine: To going high def, what does that. Look like to you? How did the performances at the end differ?

Jason Vieaux: It was awesome. It was awesome. Because you're moving forward, you're not moving backwards and you're not standing still 'cause you're moving. You're just it's moving. The thing is moving forward. Yeah.

And it's great. Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Goldfine: And the deepening, you get more connected to something when you keep going.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah, yeah, for sure. One of those things that's hard. I played Ponce, Sonata, Mexicana last weekend, and two weekends before that. Those two performances were the first time I'd done that piece in 10 years.

And, and the, the previous 10 years of life experience and musical experience that went, that went into just prepping them and getting 'em ready to play in front of other [00:18:00] humans was like amazing. Like it's just so much deeper. It's just so much more real, then, and that's why the, that's why I try to tell my students that are making recordings and stuff like that, just remember that this is a snapshot.

This is like a photograph of you. Like as a, pimply, 14-year-old or whatever, right now you're gonna look back on this in just two years and go, oh my God, I play that. So I look so much better now. Right. We relate that to sound it's all really about growth.

Evan Goldfine: I wonder how to explain that to people. 'cause I've, you know, you live with maybe some, the way that people engage with certain pop music they loved, like, you know, how does the first Pearl Jam album feel to you now versus when it came out when you were a kid or you know, speaking I listen to Bach differently now than I did when I got the first Segovia guitar record. I was like, what is this? It like kind of knocked me back. Oh. Just getting deeper and deeper into it enriches it and all of us as listeners, if you can listen deeply, it's another layer deeper when you're [00:19:00] actually playing it.

And that's a sort of pleasure that's reserved for musicians. I. Right. And maybe actors too.

Jason Vieaux: Oh, I think so. For actors, I think for anybody in the arts. And, but in general, I think that's the, is the thing is because it's, it's quite normal and should be expected that you, well, one, this is kind of a two part answer.

One well, one that early on, if you're doing anything right, you probably should be rejecting. Some of the, previous things that you, thought were great, like, I had to get away from Bream. Honestly, when I, my teacher suggested John Holmquist when I got to college I was 17.

And, he wasn't just him like, Carlos Barbosa-Lima Alice Artzt, David Russell, they heard a lot of Bream influence in my playing, and that was purely from records. 'Cause that was my guy, right? Like of, you know, between Segovia and Parkening. I [00:20:00] loved the Parkening recordings that we had too, especially in the Spanish style.

My dad and I wore that out. But Bream consistently excited me as a listener, right? And so much so that I wasn't actively trying to, I wasn't never actively, actively trying to copy his style. I never, that never even entered my mind. It just. I just took on some of those kind of things 'cause I was 13, you know, 12, 13, 14 years old, so a couple of people mentioned in masterclasses you like when I play, you know, Choros number one, like boy this really sounds like you sound a bit like Bream or whatever. When I, when I play it or whatever. And I'm glad they mentioned it at the time. Of course. It was shocking to me to hear that right.

And then my teacher, like I said, when John Holmquist at Cleveland Institute of Music, where I taught now for 27 years, he basically made, he basically suggested that I not listen to those [00:21:00] records, you know, or to his records to get away from that because it was time to start, first of all, listening to other players, even those that I might not immediately like right away.

That was the key thing too. Because when you're young, you immediately judge something and you toss it or you own it, you know, like you love it and it's, there's not a lot of in-between. More like extremes that way, and then you learn to appreciate things and you start taking, bits and pieces.

You're not actively working 'em into your interpretation. They're more like, they percolates slowly or they sort of steep like, like a, like tea or something like that. They kind of, they steep very slowly over time and I think those influences then become more rich, more richer. And then when you listen to Bream, you either reject that or listen with fresh ears

but that was all over with by the time I was in my late twenties. That Was the direct result of touring

Evan Goldfine: because you got different feedback from the audiences [00:22:00] that let you go

Jason Vieaux: through. I, wasn't the feedback from the audiences. I've always been able to please audiences, but I never really cared that much about what they thought.

Evan Goldfine: Oh, wonderful.

Jason Vieaux: I take my pleasures now as I did then. From the fact that they didn't throw tomatoes at me and they seemed to enjoy it. They called me back for an encore or two. They, or they stood up, you know, when they stand up, that means they really liked it, you know, or what, you know, stuff like that.

And that's about the furthest I ever thought about. I never I dig. I was telling students this last week at this festival in Connecticut, 'cause they asked me these same questions and I said I wanna get to, I just wanna be in a place where I am digging, like I'm a member of the audience and I'm listening to this guy play.

And I go, I am digging everything that that person is doing. That's the way I want to, that guy is the way that I wanna play. But you're the one doing it. That's a great, that's a very good place to be. I know that sounds egotistical, but it's not. Because that's what [00:23:00] we're all actually trying to get to you're answering to nobody really after a while, but yourself.

And that should take place if you're a proper musician. Like you should have that voice, that inner guide, that inner compass should be firing by the time you're in your late twenties, early thirties. For sure. Yeah.

Evan Goldfine: Can we go back to Bream for a moment?

Jason Vieaux: Sure. Yeah. Why not?

Evan Goldfine: I love Julian Bream.

Jason Vieaux: Oh, yeah.

Evan Goldfine: For these listeners who don't know Julian Bream, go listen to a lot of Julian Bream. For me, the genius of Bream is that it feels like every note is so perfectly placed. It is just so songlike and lyrical at every moment. And I, I hear that still in your playing, that those aspects, at least

Jason Vieaux: that's

Evan Goldfine: so what does that work

Jason Vieaux: He had a natural intention behind every note. He's not second guessing anything. There's no, that's what it sounds like. It sounds, it's the it's, it sounds like somebody who gives zero Fs. About what I think about what [00:24:00] you think and about what the audience thinks. I love it.

And when I listen to that today that's what I hear. It's full one. It's like it's close to 100% intention. There's no hesitation. He says what he, he's he means what he says. He says what he means. That's the kind of people I like to listen to and I don't, you can take two guitarists and they're wildly different, but marans like that.

Marcin Dylla is like one of my favorite players of all time, Zoran Dukic, you know, it can be different every time, especially with Zoran. But like, those are just two examples. Lorenzo Micheli, holy cow, that's something like, it's just all, they're inside of the music and you can tell they're not playing....

they're playing for your enjoyment. But they would play that way. Whether you and I were there or not. I love it.

Evan Goldfine: And none of these guys are particularly showy players either. Do you know the Japanese guitarist? Kazuhito Yamashita.

Jason Vieaux: Oh God. Unbelievable.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah, like chops to, [00:25:00] from here to eternity. But I don't find his records particularly pleasing. There's too much. Going on.

Jason Vieaux: He's better, he seemed more convincing Live, right? Is is, let's say that on records, right? I think I'm more convincing live than on records. So too, because the thing about making records is you gotta get, you gotta make records.

They're commercial records. If you're recording for a commercial label, like there is, I'll be honest, I mean, I know a lot of people don't wanna hear this, but you can't blast away like you're on stage playing to a thousand people at Kaufman Hall in New York City. Like, you can't play that way.

The mics are 10 feet, eight to 10 feet from you. They're gonna sound, it's gonna be like, eh, God, why? Why is this person screaming at me on a recording? And it's gonna sound like, like, okay, okay. It's like all caps. It's gonna sound like all caps, right? They gotta get reigned in. Someone with a big sound.

I have a big sound like Zoran got a big sound Aniello Desiderio , big sound, [00:26:00] Kazuhito, like massive personality through the thing. My, knowing what I know about making commercial records, they probably had to reign and they probably had to kind of rein him in a little bit. Or else all you'd hear was all this rattling of bass strings and, and just the detritus that's coming off of that right hand.

From like, he's like a John Daly. Like, yeah, John Daly was the golf, right? He's just swinging for the fences. Like there's no, there's no halfway with that guy. Right? So it's, it's kind of like, so those players sometimes don't translate on record. They may, they translate better live. And I think to a lesser extent, I, I do that as well.

I try to bridge. Those two things as best I can, but honestly, when you're like, I had to really learn how to create the sound of something that's loud on an open E string or D string without actually playing loud. Because if you play loud, the thing's gonna rattle.

Evan Goldfine: How do you do that?

Jason Vieaux: Uh, you play thin you, you thin out your tone [00:27:00] angle.

You don't play with your rich David Russell, sort of, sweet, dark, chocolatey tone, you know, angle, you know, you play straight across the string for that one note, right? And maybe a little bit more toward the bridge than you want to play. You gotta do these little tricks like that to keep Oh yeah.

Evan Goldfine: That kind of keeps the tone inside a little

bit.

Jason Vieaux: Keep it, to keep it clean. You gotta make a clean recording for radio because the record company's trying to get that stuff on the radio.

Evan Goldfine: The loudest record. I'm thinking about Your repertoire might be the Metheny album.

Um, not Images of Metheny, the one of his. Oh. He wrote for you to play right, that has some really big guitar. Sounds an absolutely amazing achievement of an album. I'd love for you to talk about that a little bit.

Jason Vieaux: that's not my producer, obviously. That's Pat producing.

Evan Goldfine: Right?

Jason Vieaux: So he, I

Evan Goldfine: He wanted that big, big sound.

Jason Vieaux: You want I by, if we're gonna make a comparison, he, the classical way of the, the more traditional classical thing of, of recording a guitar [00:28:00] is like I'd said like our, our guys, you know, like Alan does something between, I'm gonna give a really rough estimate, but like seven to 10 feet from the thing, and then he may put a couple mics in the back of the space to pick up ambiance so you get spatial depth. So it sounds like I'm playing in a nice, nice small concert hall. We have a wonderful space now to record it. Not that church that Play in everything before was, that was overly reverberate.

I never loved that place. I liked it, but I always thought that those were overly reverberate. The space that we have now that you hear on volume two and the next record coming up this fall. That's coming out is in this newer space and also the Escher String Quartet record is done in the new space.

It's in Indiana. Anything from 16 after that, Pat's approach of course is a bit different, right? It's a little bit more closer to the way he records things in general. I don't mean to speak for Pat because he know, I mean, I'm, I probably know just a [00:29:00] sliver of what he knows about recording a guitar or production or anything like that.

But it's closer. It's like you're more like inside the guitar.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Jason Vieaux: So there are classical guitar recordings like that, but I like that kind of little bit of space between the mics and the guitar to get the sense that it's kind of nice to hear a guitar, like you're sitting in the fifth row of like of like a small, like a good concert hall that holds like the one that's good for guitar, one that holds like 300 seats type of, yeah. Yeah, but it's like with terrific acoustics that's the kind of thing we've got now. It's amazing

Evan Goldfine: when you first play start that Pat album, the Four Paths of Light,

it feels like, it's like that, it blows your head back, like in the very first string, uh, for the first moments. It's so exciting. And also very different from a lot of the other, uh,

Jason Vieaux: and that's exactly what he wanted. He had me playing with strokes with my right hand. I was playing them with my arm, so I was going, like, I was, I was basically using elbow joint and stuff, like it [00:30:00] was never loud enough for him.

He's like, can you, can you even me more? He is like, he said, he goes at one point, he's like. All right. That's good. That's good. But like, don't, he said Don't be afraid. I know. I get it. You guys like, you guys being classical guitars, like these guys, you guys are very careful about overplaying the string, right?

And, and rallying. He's like rattle away. He's like, I want you to get in touch with your inner Pantera is nice.

It's fun on the first movement, right?

Evan Goldfine: On the first, right? No, it's huge. It's huge. Very cool. You've recorded some of these works of Bach for guitar. Not, not all of them.

The biggest, most famous one is the D minor violin sonata the famous Chaconne.

Jason Vieaux: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Evan Goldfine: What are your feelings about that piece as it's arranged for guitar? Is that something that is on your mountaintop? Are you waiting to do that one? What do you feel?

Jason Vieaux: Yeah, it's not so much of a mountaintop thing, I guess.

I mean, in some ways I've always, I, I play, I played, I learned the Chaconne in high school. I've been basically [00:31:00] working on it with students for, I don't know, 32 years really, or, or 30 years or something like that. I mean, I've been at CIM for 27, 28, Curtis for 13, 14, 14 now. And so, especially, particularly at Curtis, I'm working on Chaconne like every year with someone all through the whole school year, so.

There's so many different transcriptions of it. And at this point I would almost rather if I had an AI type of brain, like I could process it in my brain. I'd rather have AI just cherry pick what my proclivities would decide are the best, you know, kind of ways of doing it rather than have to do the work myself.

But eventually I'm gonna have to do the work myself if I do it. And that is a future recording that I like to do. Yeah. In the way that volume two completed. D Lute works by doing the fourth Lute suite, which is even, we call it a violin works cd. Of course it's the third partita, right?

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Jason Vieaux: By eventually [00:32:00] completing The Sonatas by doing the second sonata, that would make a record right there.

Second Sonata and second partita done. 60 minutes.

Evan Goldfine: Well, I'm glad we've decided together.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah. Eventually I'd like to. I'd like to get to that. Uh, my playing is really getting pretty strong right now. I mean, it's in a really good place.

Evan Goldfine: Does it feel like you're like climbing another step?

Jason Vieaux: I'm

actually kind of making another, well, the pandemic is really kind, I have to say, it really kind of took a chunk outta me. It took the wind outta my sails. 'cause I was, I, I was such an trained animal by my profession that when I didn't have.

You know, initially anything to really prepare for. And then even then, like when people were starting to piece things together through virtual concerts, like the virtual experience, for me personally, just didn't really Yeah. Do

Evan Goldfine: many of us.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah. Because that's what we all learned, right? As humans.

That there's something about [00:33:00] the all of us in a room, in a space together. And there's an energy there. And that's a thing. That's a real thing. I think that's what we really discovered. So like a lot of these more tech-minded people at the time that were writing articles, a million things came out on your media outlets or whatever came out on your phone. Oh, and this, you know, people are gonna, this is gonna change things forever. 'cause then when, when the pandemic's over, people are gonna continue to do this at home. And I was like, that doesn't that doesn't sound right at all.

You're really gonna go. You know, see Metallica or Coldplay or whatever, or, or whatever pick Yeah.

Evan Goldfine: On your screen.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah. Oasis or whatever. You're really gonna go see Oasis on your screen if you have the money and time, to go see him at a stadium, please.

Evan Goldfine: Jason, you had a pandemic at a concert with a cellist named Clancy Newman from Philadelphia.

Jason Vieaux: That's a good one.

Evan Goldfine: That concert is amazing, including the. Cello and Guitar Sonata by [00:34:00] Radames Gnattali.

Jason Vieaux: Oh yeah. I love that piece. I play that a lot.

Evan Goldfine: Such a cool, that's the first time I heard it when I heard that streamed, and it is just a gem of a piece. It's my and I went down the rabbit hole listening to other recordings, and that live recording is, I think, the finest recording of that piece.

Jason Vieaux: Oh, thanks. Yeah, that was a good, that was a good, I was starting to get a little bit more used to the thing, the thing, 'cause it felt like you had to learn how to perform in a way all over again when you're when it's virtual. But then that they allowed by that point. They had allowed, uh, 30 people that were distanced in the hall.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Jason Vieaux: So that was nothing.

Evan Goldfine: At least

there were some people there. Right. They probably changed it. That was it. You got the

energy.

Jason Vieaux: Oh, yeah. If there was five people that would've changed it for me. That was, that's the whole thing. I mean, it's like, if there's one person in front of me and they're there.

I mean, my dad told me that when I was a kid. You gotta play to that person. Like you're playing to a thousand people.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah. Right. Well,

Evan Goldfine: thank you so much for taking the time to chat today. There's one, question I wanna end with, so I wanna [00:35:00] switch to gears about another band that we both love.

In the immediate aftermath of the death of Steely Dan's Walter Becker, you posted, attributed to him a video arranging a bunch of Steely Dan tunes. It sounded thrown together, but what I am requesting is Steely Dan cover album in the same way that you did the Metheny cover album. And what do you think about that?

Jason Vieaux: I do. I do think that, and my producer, uh, also, has, that's a possible record that's on the table, like the works of, Fagen and Becker and stuff like that. That would be a very easy record to, honestly, like I've, I've arranged so much pop music and jazz material for the guitar by this point.

A lot of it off the cuff on request. Yeah. You know, like I've done it at festivals with, for a friend or something like that, you know, like a Stone Temple Pilots song or whatever. Right. But for my boss at CIM I did an arrangement of Limelight, by rush or whatever. Just because, just because they, it was, that was like the request.

That was meant as a medley and that happened like the, I think I put that up the day after.

[00:36:00] Or something?

Evan Goldfine: Something and it in the immediate aftermath..

Jason Vieaux: I remember having to practice it at home and I actually asked my wife and my kids were really quite small then I was like, could, if could you put them to bed? And then I, because I'm gonna need a couple hours to kind of run it down. And then I took several takes and that was the cleanest one. And it was like 2:00 AM and I'm like, all right, that's going out. That have to be it. But I listened to that back again.

I was like, that's a lot. I mean, that's, that's a lot to do. In one afternoon,

Evan Goldfine: i, I think you have a lot of people listening to that one. I, I'd love to hear more of your pop covers. It's not easy to do, and I think I, I'll close by saying that your sensibility with pop and jazz informs the composed stuff that you're interpreting that kind of, uh, ear for different styles of rhythm and um, and integration of harmony and dance helps everything.

Jason Vieaux: And it does.

Evan Goldfine: You really hear in the music.

Jason Vieaux: It does. In the nineties and stuff when, you know, sort of the coming in age years, some, some [00:37:00] people, musicians in a given community would say, well, don't you feel that might prohibit, your experience or learning with, of like say Bach 'cause you also play a lot of Bach and whatever.

Do you feel like this kind of works its way into this or the other thing? It's never felt like one encroached on the other, that one suspended the other or anything like that. Like I've never, and also when it comes to say this idea of crossover, I think you've probably noticed, 'cause you seem to know my catalog really well and li and live performances and stuff on, on YouTube from radio stations and whatnot.

I've never had a desire to cross hybridize to say Rock up Bach? No. Or Bach up? No, no. Or Bach up Rock? No. Like, always sounded, it's always cheesy. Sounded cheesy to me. And it, it was never really convincing. If I now. It's different if I do. What a wonderful world that has like a dash of Joni Mitchell and a pinch of like [00:38:00] Brazilian That's what pop music is really good at doing is you can, I. You can sort of, you can spin the thing into another thing, but a piece by, but something like by Bach or whatever, or like, I just can't, it's just like it doesn't need anything else to me.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. There have been some people in my listening over the course of the year, people have said, you should listen to this.

I've listened to Jacques Loussier Trio who did like these jazzed up versions of the classics. Oh, not great. Yeah, not great. And then, I'm trying to remember, there were a couple others. The s Swingle sisters or the Oh, the

Jason Vieaux: Swingle singers. My dad had

Evan Goldfine: singer. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Vieaux: Do bottom, it's like, yeah. Okay. I mean, they look.

Evan Goldfine: If it gets

people into it, fine. Right. Like if it gets people interested, but that's not, uh, those are more novelty acts and that's not what we're going for here. All right, Jason, well thank you again. What's your third album? What's volume three looking like for the fall?

Jason Vieaux: Well, volume three would be after the one that's coming up in the fall. It's actually all [00:39:00] my compositions, all my,

Evan Goldfine: oh, wow.

Jason Vieaux: All like, um, mostly like, uh, intermediate, etude kind of things for students, but then some sort of con pieces you can play in concert.

They're, they're perfectly harmless. They're mostly kind of like Americana sort of influence type of things. But I've been playing, I played one this last, these last two cities the new one called Tidal Pools for the first time. And it's gotten great response from it.

And Home is a tremolo piece and there's a couple really great guitarists that are playing 'em now. Colin Davin and Bo Kyung Byun. She's a GFA winner. So people are already starting to play that, which is wild. So

Evan Goldfine: yeah, who knows? Just

Jason Vieaux: the

Evan Goldfine: world. Alright, well Jason, thank you again. Uh, I'll put some links in the description to get everybody to click on all this wonderful music you've, uh, made and shared with us today.

Thank you again.

Jason Vieaux: Thanks, Evan.

Episode 1 of the Year of Bach Podcast features Henry Oliver, author of the Substack The Common Reader, and the excellent book Second Act, a study of late bloomers in business and the arts.

Our open-ended conversation touches on Bach, Shakespeare, late blooming, and the pleasures and problems of Glenn Gould. Henry describes the “expectation of astonishment” in music and literature, and names his favorite recordings.

Links & references

* Henry’s Substack – The Common Reader

* Henry’s post on his favorite Bach pieces.

* The Second Act (Amazon)

* Selected recordings, with YouTube links:

* Henry’s favorite: Gould playing the Sinfonias live in Moscow

* My cantata gateway album: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing “Ich Habe Genug”

* My ‘dark horse’ record: Peter Schreier (tenor) and Karl Richter (organ) perform BWV 487 - “Mein Jesu, was für Seelenweh”

Support & subscribe

* Get the full transcript and future episodes straight to your inbox:

* Please share the show and rate it!

Intro music: Adagio of BWV 974, performed by your host on his home piano.

Transcript:

The Expectation of Astonishment: Henry Oliver on Bach and the Hunger for Seriousness

Evan Goldfine: Welcome everyone to the premiere episode of the Year of Bach podcast.

This series features a set of conversations with artists and writers who have a deep and personal connection to the music of J.S. Bach and how this music inspires and moves them throughout their lifetimes. Today my guest is Henry Oliver. I. Author of the recent bestseller, the Second Act, a Study of Late Bloomers in Business and the Arts.

He also writes the excellent Substack, the Common Reader, where he advocates for people to read the great classics of literature with a special emphasis on the works of Shakespeare and Jane Austen. He's also a great fan of Bach and a supporter of my substack from its earliest days, and I'm glad to have a readership that overlaps so strongly with his.

So, Henry, thank you for being my first guest, and I'm excited to talk to you about Bach today.

Henry Oliver: Oh, I'm delighted. This is, this is gonna be one of my favorite podcasts.

Evan Goldfine: You're setting me up. Okay. So Henry, why do you keep returning to Bach [00:01:00] throughout your lifetime?

Henry Oliver: Oh, because the best, the human, the human spirit loves what is best.

We love beauty, we love excellence. We love virtue. Bach embodies all of these things. You can hum him. You can have raptures about him. He can be fun, he can be serious. He’s the Shakespeare of music, right.

Evan Goldfine: Clearly. Do you, do you find it to be a more intellectual or emotional experience or both?

Henry Oliver: , more emotional. I think maybe that's because I don't understand music to, to a great degree, but I feel that Bach is able to find deep expressions of human feeling. I prefer the word feeling than emotion, deep expressions of human feeling and very subtle expressions of those things. So I think one reason why the cello suites are so, so universally popular is because they give [00:02:00] voice to a set of moods that have not really been expressed quite in that level of finery before or maybe since.

Evan Goldfine: Is there something there also about it being solo pieces along with the violin sonatas also That particularly triggers that emotional core for you.

Henry Oliver: I suppose so. I love the cello. I think that's probably the heart of it. And I think, again, they are some of his best works and, we respond, we do respond to excellence.

I believe that very strongly.

Evan Goldfine: Do you like the cello and piano sonatas?

Henry Oliver: I don't love them as much. I must confess. Martha Argerich is good at those, right?

Evan Goldfine: I, I have that album.

That's the one I know. You just pick her over everybody. That's easy. She's threatening to come to New York in a couple years, but we'll see.

Henry Oliver: Every time I listen to it, I'm not left feeling I want to go back.

Evan Goldfine: Wow. Yeah.

Henry Oliver: Yeah. That's the,

Evan Goldfine: [00:03:00] yeah, that's, it's disappointing because you want it to be also the best, but we can't have the best of everything.

Henry Oliver: No.

Evan Goldfine: Bach is clearly enriching your life and, and you've spent your career talking about literature mostly. So in what ways does music enrich your life? That, that literature cannot.

Henry Oliver: I've had a very strong response to music since I was young. And I have just had always a great hunger to listen to a lot of music.

I listen to much less than I used to because I prefer now to read in silence, and usually to write in silence as well. But what I said about Bach, giving an expression of feeling, I feel music can do that in a way that language can't. And people often talk about the limits of language.

The struggle to make words mean what you really want them to mean. The fact that when you are conceiving of something [00:04:00] to write, it has this big feeling inside you of what you're doing, and then when you get it onto the page, it always just seems a bit reduced and not quite what you were trying to capture.

Music, I think, gets you a lot closer to the thing you were trying to capture or express, but at the cost of language really means something that you and I can agree what it means.

Music is a much less precise form of communicative exchange, I guess. So I think those are the trade offs, but I come back to it because nothing else can express, his range of moods and feelings.

if you want to know, this is a, this is a great question. At the moment, I'm reading this book by Lamorna Ash. "Don't forget, we're here forever." And it's all about how people are turning back to religion. And she interviewed 60 young people who became Christians. And what she's interested in is how does that happen?

How does it come about that someone else becomes a [00:05:00] Christian? And this is a very difficult thing to get your head around if you're not a Christian. Right? Not just, what are all, what's all this theological talk? What are all these denominations? You believe this, someone else believes that. Just what does that feel ?

I just need to get into the vibes of this whole thing. Well, put some Bach on and you will very quickly be given the feelings of what it is to be devout, what it is to, to love God, what it is to feel the glory of God. Something that in your ordinary life may be incomprehensible to you, Bach can deliver up in a way that language, I think would struggle to break through those barriers.

Evan Goldfine: I often thought when I was listening to this music for my project, especially with the Passions and the Mass and B minor, the idea about sitting several centuries ago in a big cathedral or even a small church, and this was probably also the [00:06:00] loudest thing you ever heard.

Henry Oliver: Yeah.

Evan Goldfine: And the power of the voices and the orchestra together reverberating in the halls.

You're also in community with the people who are around you listening to this, I can't imagine the power of something that in a, in a great performance and, and to think about. Bach there. Also, I, I don't know if he was considered this, this great among, he was just the guy in town who was the composer who happened to have been pretty superlative relative to his peers.

But that was your local guy. And I should say that also that there's no evidence that Bach ever heard the Mass and B minor perform in his lifetime, which is crazy.

Henry Oliver: Absolutely crazy. People talk about Beethoven composing deaf, which obviously is, is fascinating, but I find this more fascinating how, how he managed to do that and, and leave it in such a state of completion and never hear it.

I mean, the power of the inner life must have [00:07:00] been much, much stronger than we are currently aware of. I think.

Evan Goldfine: Do you think we can have a good sense of Bach inner life? I mean, there's very limited extant writings of his that are not about pursuing a job here or there or writing and to try to placate a nobleman.

But that what can we know of, of Bach in ways that would be easier to understand some of the other greats internal lives, or maybe there's just that Romantic movement that is between us today and Bach's time.

Henry Oliver: I'm cautious about this. Someone Kingsley Amis once said, , you don't need to write a biography of a novelist.

He's told you everything about himself, and he's put it into a series of books called novels, but other novelists would deny that and say that it's just an exercise in the use of language. Now we don't believe them and we find all sorts of resonances between their actual lives and their [00:08:00] fictional lives.

I am very cautious of this, and I don't, I don't feel I have a good sense of Bach’s inner life. It's hard to believe that you can write the St. Matthew Passion and not have a very, very intense inner life. But I also know that he was busy. He had a job. He had kids, he was churning out music at a phenomenal rate.

And I don't know, I, I always just wonder, how much time did he have for inner life? Was there some way in which the way he was operating on the manuscript page was a substitute for the inner life and it happened, the inner and the outer were just happening together for him.

I really don't know.

Evan Goldfine: A pure sublimation

Henry Oliver: Something. Yeah. It's startling when when you look into how much time he actually had to do everything that he did, it becomes more of a mystery really.

Evan Goldfine: It must have just in the physical writing of the music. [00:09:00] Just before, not composing, but the physical writing is, is years and years of, of, of time limited by paper and ink.

Henry Oliver: Really. And, and all the other huge demands on his time. Right, right. So, I don't know, you could look at that and say, he must have had an extraordinary inner life and it must have just come pouring out of him. Or you might look in that and say, well, he, how, how could he have had time for an inner life? It must have, he must, his inner life must have lived in his pen.

Yeah. So, I don't know. But he was clearly, something was happening inside that is very alien to the rest of us.

Evan Goldfine: It's unapproachable in a way. And as we get deeper into the music, he feels in some ways further away. For me at least, I just get deeper and deeper into it, and I, I just don't have a feeling of the person.

Whereas I think if you read Jane Austen. Despite what Kingley Amis says, you might have a better sense of what she [00:10:00] might have been to, to sit down with. Do you have that?

Henry Oliver: No, I think Jane Austen remains a great mystery to us. Partly because we don't have enough of her letters, and partly because the letters that we do have in some ways show a bit of a gap with the novels.

And there's a lot of debate about what person she was and she's been, or what she believed, and she's been claimed by, , every ideology, every, every group going. , a bit with Bach, the question about Jane Austen is how did a young woman from a rectory in the countryside become a, a genius of world literature.

She wasn't surrounded by authors, she wasn't going to London, she wasn't given a fancy education. She was raised in quite a liberal manner. She had the run of the library. There were lots of novels. Her father was one of those, , one of those men who kept up and read all, everything that was being [00:11:00] published.

And, and so there was lots of intellectual life in the house, and she wasn't treated , oh, you're a girl, so you can't read. -. But I don't think that really goes any anyway, to explaining how she became Jane Austen. , and Bach is a similar thing, right? He's, he's a a provincial guy, and it turns out that he was the greatest composer ever, just, just sitting there.

And I, to me, that enhances the mystery. I, I don't think we can hope to explain it.

Evan Goldfine: So, I'd to also talk a little bit about Shakespeare. Another one of your, passions. Similarly, Shakespeare's achievements Austen and and Bach are staggering, the breadth and the depth of the work and how they speak to us, through the centuries.

You've spent a lot of time with both of these giant figures. How do you think about them in relation to one another?

Henry Oliver: They're very different. Shakespeare seems to be able to write everything and anything. He seems to have a, a universal [00:12:00] or a panoramic view of human life. Samuel Johnson said that. Shakespeare gives us a, a mingled picture of things.

So at the same time that one man is being carried to his funeral, another man is running off to the tavern. , and this is, this is the bustle of life. Jane Austen isn't that. She works within one strand of social life and she depicts people she's familiar with and she gave advice to her niece. She said. “you must only write about the things you really know and understand.”

And in this story, your characters have gone to Ireland, but you don't know anything about Ireland, and that's pretty painfully obvious. So you should, we should stay at home so that you can write about that. Whereas Shakespeare's happy to just do everything and he, he's not worried about those, those sorts of issues.

And he still makes it compelling and fascinating. And he's a great philosopher. He's a great poet. He's a great observer of [00:13:00] human nature. He's a great dramatist. I mean, he's prolific across these multiple dimensions. What they share is a genius literary technique. I think Shakespeare is very inventive in his depiction of character, in his dramaturgy in the way that he can drive a story through an individual.

And Jane Austen is very inventive in her narrative techniques and in the way that she positions the narrative from the perspective of one character or another. Very, very inventive in that. So those are the sorts of things that they have in common. Samuel Johnson said something, “the essence of poetry is invention.”

And they both sum that up. Bach sums that up as well. Right? Huge, inventive capacity.

Evan Goldfine: Unlimited, it feels like. He had all of these melodies in him and there's this phenomenon I feel, especially when listening to some of the fugues where he sets [00:14:00] something up, maybe a short melody line, and then it's like he's flicking a pinball and, and it just is naturally going follow the path that it's going to go.

And he sets up another line behind it that's gonna follow the same path, in the sand, and if they just move together and he had it all in his head. And, I think that I. The depth that you saw psychologically with Bach is, is akin to the depth that you see in Shakespeare, although he's creating them in characters, whereas Bach is creating them with melody and harmony and structure and rhythm that is speaking to something that moves us in, in similar ways. I mean, it hits you in your heart and it hits you in your head depending on how it's performed.

Henry Oliver: Absolutely. I think to me, Bach's work it, they feel works of nature.

I don't, there's, there's nothing artificial about his best work. There's nothing where you can say, oh, I can see exactly what he's doing, even [00:15:00] when you can see what he's doing. You don't quite know how that has equaled the, the music you've just experienced, and I think that is something a bit with Shakespeare.

He, he takes us beyond what we thought were the capacities of musical language.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. There are moments where you, I hear when Bach is about to take a melody that he had perhaps in a major key, and that he's going to pivot it into something in the minor key and , it's this anticipatory, oh my God, I can't believe this is about to happen.

And that it does. And because it's inevitable feeling. And you can get that in some of the plays, I think as well. Or even great novels, what the plot is that is about to happen and then it comes, and if it's executed beautifully, it can really, really hit, because you have a flavor of what's coming.

Henry Oliver: Yes. It hits even harder. I call this the expectation of astonishment. So I, if, if you say to someone, have the power to forecast the [00:16:00] future, and you see him over there walking down the street,when he gets underneath building number 30, a pane of glass will fall out of the top window and kill him.

And then two minutes later this happens. You wouldn't say, oh, that was not shocking to me because you had I you had given away what was going to happen. It would be worse, it would be more horrifying, right? And there's something about literature where, as you say, very often, explicitly or implicitly, we are told what's going to happen.

And it doesn't make it boring. It doesn't make it less awful or less hilarious or whatever. It, it increases the whole thing. And Bach has this, as I say, I think on another level. And that's why you can listen to Bach again and again and again throughout your life and get more out of it. That's why so many, there's so much potential for new performers with Bach, right?

Because [00:17:00] they can, they can exploit what you are expecting it, and I'm gonna do it, but I'm gonna slightly do it in a new way, and I'm gonna show you, wow, there's even more in here than you realized, and I think that's what makes him very exciting.

Evan Goldfine: On that note, what do you think makes a great performance of Bach or Shakespeare?

I mean, these are both things that live on the page and have to come to us embodied by whoever is living with us right now, or I guess in the, in the case of recordings now, we have a little bit of reference, but what, what makes these performances great?

Henry Oliver: Great. I struggle to articulate this.

I'm not a good music critic, but I don't think it's, I, I think it's to do with more than technical perfection. I think you can hear a very exact performance that is not really the best performance. I saw Mitsuko Uchida recently. She wasn't playing Bach, she was playing Schubert and Mozart.

Oh, and it was insane. [00:18:00] It was one of the best, I went twice. It was two of the best nights at the concert hall I've had. She is able to use very, very precise and careful technique in the service of strong feeling. And I think Bach lends himself very much to that.

I think that's why everyone enjoyed, was it Olafssohn, the new Goldberg recording that came out? I saw that live.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah, I saw that live.

Henry Oliver: Insane.

Evan Goldfine: Right? One of the best con I've been to thousands probably of concerts in my top 10.

Henry Oliver: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And he has that same thing.

Incredible control. Of all different aspects of performance, but he's doing it in the service of strong expression of feeling. And I think Bach because of the religiosity, because of the intensity of what he's trying to do. You have to get some Mozart, I feel you don't have to have the strength of feeling the, the music will do it for you.

[00:19:00] But with Bach, and, and this is I think why Glenn Gould, was a genius of Bach and was really nothing for Mozart, right. 'cause he —

Evan Goldfine: Well I have some pretty strong feelings about his, I think that he expressed a contempt for Mozart and his Mozart playing, which shaded my feelings about Gould on the whole, after hearing some of those records, after hearing his piano sonatas, I went back to say, well what, what is he doing here?

Why did he do that? And I love some Gould on Bach. He's very particular, but I also don't connect with some of it now. It's, it's unusual that someone's so quirky and eccentric became the standard bearer of how, for example, the Well Tempered Clavier is, is played.

But that was my first recording where I would listen over and over again and I found, found the richness in it, but I was able to also listen to others afterwards. And I aw, wow, that is a very particular recording. It exemplifies Gould's own genius for sure. But I'm glad he's not the only performer we have of those pieces. Do still connect with Gould?

You sent email about this. So tell me about how Gould still moves you over the years and have you ever had any complicated feelings about him?

Henry Oliver: I'm a big Glen Gould obsessive. I have never loved his Well-Tempered Clavier. Don't it at all. Can't listen to it. It's, it's weird.

I hate his Mozart recordings. I was offended. I have to turn them off. It's just, it's dreadful. And I think he has, because he was obviously, I don't know if troubled is the right word, but he was an intense person. He was a person of solitude and interiority.

[00:21:00] Maybe he was troubled, he was taking anxiety medication and other things. This is what eventually killed him. And I think, there is, that's very Bachan, right? Whereas Mozart is a composer of the world. He's a composer of social life. , people say the great waste of his talents when he was, when he had patrons and they made him write mints and little dances and some stupid little things, and this guy could be writing you the best operas the world's ever seen, and you are getting little party music. What the hell are you doing? But it's remarkable how good these, silly little pieces are that he's forced to write. And I think that's because he's naturally comic, he's naturally joyous.

There's a certain happiness that only exists when you're listening to Mozart. He's an extrovert, right? He's, his music is, is part and parcel of, of the commerce of life. Gould's not that at all.

Henry Oliver: When you watch those documentaries on [00:22:00] YouTube, which are fabulous, everyone should watch them.

You see him in the recording studio at the piano shop in the cafe with the taxi driver, and he's doing great and he's interacting, I'm not saying anything, but it's not his milieu. It's not his natural state. And when he's back home, by the lake, or in his house, he, he visibly becomes much more at ease and much more attuned to his surroundings.

And I think that really is a temperamental affinity with Bach. And so that's why his, , the p the piano music, the solo piano music, the partitas and stuff, that's why it's so fantastic.

Henry Oliver: Because, okay, he's not a Lutheran or whatever, but he is psychologically a bit of one of those, right?

And it, it just, it aligns him with Bach so well, and so he has that huge inner feeling that maybe he can't [00:23:00] express any other way than through his playing. And sometimes a great act of interpretation is a form of composition, and I think that's, that's what's happening with Bach.

That's obviously how you get new works of philosophy that someone interprets someone else to a degree of just creating a new philosophy on the back of their interpretation. And that's why Gould attracts all this pro and against and all these, and you can love him at one time and hate him at another because he's created some hybrid of Gould and Bach and it's, it is whatever it is.

And it's, he's got so much inside him to express just as Bach did. So I think that's what makes him the best.

Evan Goldfine: It feels him, it feels very, very personal. Everything that he's doing. What do you care for more? The early or late Goldbergs of Glenn Gould?

Henry Oliver: When I was young, I found it just in unconscionable that anyone would not prefer the early [00:24:00] Goldbergs from Gould.

I, I just, when you're so young and you see older people saying things and you're , I just dunno what it must be to be one of these. “What, what is this?” Whereas now I love listening to them both.

Henry Oliver: And I've really come to appreciate the later one. And, I listen in general much more to slower recordings or more classic recordings. When I listen to Gould, I'll do both.

Evan Goldfine: I find the later one to be too slow. I can't do it. I still can't do it.

Henry Oliver: I have come to enjoy slow Bach quite a lot, and I'm just gonna check it on my Apple Music. But my, my current favorite St. Matthew Passion is certainly at the beginning quite slow.

It's Karl Richter from 1980, and he just, he just opens it up and, and slows it down in a way that takes you to the height [00:25:00] of what it must have felt to have these very, very deep and and unified religious feelings. And I think that's what Gould is getting at in the in the late. Goldbergs and I now love them very much.

Evan Goldfine: I had the pleasure of listening to a lot of Karl Richter's recordings in my listening project. I was not particularly familiar with the Cantatas, but that, and that's probably half of the music at least, that Bach composed, in terms of time. And Richter , didn't record all of them altogether, but the ones that he did were slow.

They're very influenced, I feel by,he's definitely listened to a lot of Chopin, and the Romantics and that's informing his Bach interpretations. He also had the best singers. His singers on those recordings are fantastic. Schreier, Dietrich Fischer Dieskau, some of the real heavy hitters of the 20th century recorded with Richter, so, [00:26:00] I'd recommend his cantatas, if you like the St. Matthew's Passion of his as well, also particularly slower than some of the others.

Henry Oliver: I struggle with the cantatas the most, occasionally find recordings I like. But I, I'm gonna try that 'cause I'm really, I've been working at it for a few years and it, it isn't happening for me yet.

Evan Goldfine: I will pick out some favorites for you.

Henry Oliver: That would be great.

Evan Goldfine: Sure when we were talking about Gould and Bach, and we talked a little bit about Mozart being lighter, but Bach and Gould, they're very serious. I guess Beethoven is also probably just about as serious as, as Bach, but probably the most serious.

I mean, when I listen to Beethoven, it's he's trying to shake the world or something, but, but Bach has a deep seriousness about him. Do you find you connect with the seriousness? Can you listen to it? Even when he is being light? It feels very important and not flippant at [00:27:00] all, which is not how I think our culture is well suited towards right now. What do you think about that?

Henry Oliver: I think there is a lot of hunger for seriousness in our culture, and I think people are increasingly persuaded of the need to be serious. And maybe it was the pandemic, maybe it's the fact that there's more war in the world. Maybe it's the volatility of modern politics.

But I think we've lived through a period when people have been in total denial about death and its implications and about the shortness of life and the need, therefore to do what you must do while you can, and to experience the best while you have the time. And people are now coming back to that and people are now realizing that wow, being serious is the whole point of being alive, so maybe we'll have a revival of Bach 'cause of that. I don't know.

Evan Goldfine: I love your ethos of, [00:28:00] we have all these great books. You can read them, you should be reading these great books. They're here for us.

Henry Oliver: Of course, and I get it that Netflix is great and I watch Netflix and whatever, but they're not great in the same way. Everyone knows what it feels to stand on top of a mountain and be amazed, right. To experience true wonder at the state of the world. Everyone knows what it is to listen to music that does that to you. But everyone, and I include myself in this, we get trapped in the limits of our own knowledge, the limits of our own experience.

We become habituated to what we think excellence is. And listening to someone Bach is a constant reminder that you have no idea this man was creating a heaven on earth in music. You have no idea. Please pay more attention to him and stop assuming what excellence is. And that's why I, and that's why I say it because they push the horizons [00:29:00] of your understanding. The great books do the same thing. They push the horizons of your understanding in ways that you can't anticipate.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. Your, your book, I've been thinking about tells the stories of late bloomers and, and you frame them as inspiring figures for the for the rest of us. The people who we've been talking about today are early bloomers, Shakespeare, Austen, Bach. These are not late bloomers. George Harrison was 26 when the Beatles were over. How do we normals deal with these outliers, even if we're hoping for our own second acts?

Henry Oliver: Was Bach really, was he not a late bloomer and an early bloomer? I mean, Art of Fugue right. Late. Right. The late work in Bach is, is truly extraordinary. I don't think he shows any signs of slowing down.

Evan Goldfine: Oh, that's interesting. So he a late bloomer, even though he's starting off early. His early bloom lets his late bloom go even higher than we could have imagined.

Henry Oliver: I, I [00:30:00] don't, I don't listen to the Art of Fugue and think, well, he's been at it for a few years and this is what I expect. I listen to the Art of Fugue and think, where did that come from? And I think there are a lot of composers that. The Beethoven string quartets, right? You can have the highest possible view of Beethoven's early work and still listen to those string quartets and want to know where did they come from.

Henry Oliver: Mozart is the same actually. I have Mozart as a very late bloomer in the sense that if you take the view that, not 10,000 hours necessarily, but it takes a certain amount of dedicated practice to become really excellent at something. The story with Mozart is that he starts that dedicated practice much earlier than the rest of us. Despite that the music that we record and listen to from Mozart and that we put on in the concert hall is all the second half of his career,

So it's K. 330 and onwards. [00:31:00] Obviously there are a few things earlier and, and whatever. But all this, if I asked you to name, just give me five pieces of Mozart.

Tell me the Mozart, you the Mozart, we put in car adverts, the most performed in the console. It's all later on in his career. And what we think of as Mozart's innovations, piano, concertos, the operas, some of the other work, it's all in the last 10 years, right? So I even think Mozart, it sounds crazy 'cause he's the most famous child prodigy.

I even think of him as a late bloomer. And I think in some ways this is inherent in music. Because the great composers are very experimental. They're always making discoveries, and they're always incorporating their discoveries in their next thing, their next work. Someone like Bruckner doesn't even start doing symphonies until he is halfway through his career.

Evan: Yeah.

Henry Oliver: Now, his early choral music is phenomenal. I mean, really, truly beautiful music, but it turns out you [00:32:00] can pivot to symphonies quite late on and do great work. Schubert, the last big piano Sonata writes before he dies. Where was he going next? Could we, could we not kill him, please? So I think it's, I think you can take some, if you want to take a hopeful lesson from these people, which maybe you shouldn't, but if you want to, the lesson is that if you keep doing the work and you keep being inventive, you can be a late bloomer, even if you were an early bloomer.

Evan Goldfine: It's a nice thing to ruminate on. Now. Just pivoting to, to one other thing I wanted to ask you before we talk about some specific pieces.

For a literature fan, you're a little bit more open to artificial intelligence than some of your peers. Will we get great artificial intelligence, composed literature or music in our lifetimes?

Henry Oliver: I don't know enough about, I'm, I'm not a technical [00:33:00] enough person to be able to say timelines.

My impression from what I see among the AI experts is, is yes, in principle. My view is that scaling has solved a lot and it seems to have solved things that. Was up for debate whether it would solve those things. And the trajectory of the progress is incredible. If you go back and look at the things people were complaining about two years ago, those now seem extraordinary, finished. And so I'm on the side of we need to keep an eye on this and, and surely it will. The current output is quite bad.

It's much worse at writing poetry than it is at medicine now. I think that should be inherently puzzling. That's not the case for humans once humans are [00:34:00] advanced enough, in terms of evolution, in terms of human culture, in terms of tools and technology.

Once they can do medicine. They've already been brilliant poets. We got Paradise Lost before we got penicillin. So I want to know why it is, why the, to me, the progress seems very slow on poetry compared to other areas, but I think that just means it'll come later.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Henry Oliver: The big objection will be that AI is not in the world and that the creation of art really depends on physicality, smell, and touch and, and sound and so forth. And that the, the inner life that we've been talking about is an offshoot of the outer life of sensuality. And that may be what's limiting AI right now, but I really don't know.

And I think we start to reach a speculative zone very fast. The other option is AI will have its [00:35:00] own taste in literature. That won't be human taste. So someone set up a, an AI poetry assessment tool, and it's just some guy setting up a tool so we shouldn't take it super seriously.

And I tested it by giving it famous poems and it was, oh, incredible, 9.5 out of 10, so inventive, I can't believe the things it's doing with language. And I was like, great. And it, it knew, who's a nine, who's a seven? It was pretty good at not overrating certain people and whatever.

And then I gave it some AI poetry expecting it to say, “Really, you're giving me this after Emily Dickinson? No, this is not good.” And it was saying, Ooh, this is so clever, this is so inventive. And I was like, what? But the more I did it, the more I thought, well, I think AI will just appreciate poetry differently.

And, I've heard this from a couple of my friends who had it write a sci-fi novel. He didn't love what it [00:36:00] wrote, but the machine loved what it wrote.

Evan Goldfine: We all love our own reflection.

Henry Oliver: Well, maybe I just wonder if there will be something inherently different about AI art.

And that that will perpetuate the gulf we feel between us and the AI’s right now. But I still think that it will be possible now or in the near future for you to read something, to think it's really good and to not be confident. Maybe you'll say, I'm confident it's not AI, but you can't reasonably be confident of that anymore. And I think that reality is it's either with us or it's very close.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. I have not been impressed by any of the music that's been composed yet.

Henry Oliver: God, no.

Evan Goldfine: God no. I hope there's a gulf. I hope there continues to be a gulf, but I'm, I'm not sure

Henry Oliver: What, but why if someone, if, if, if someone gave you some music to listen to and it's Bach level. Brilliant. Do you care? [00:37:00]

Evan Goldfine: I want it. Well, what do we mean by Bach level? Brilliant. Is it is Bach was inventive in what he was creating. I mean you, I could see that the AI would be able to create a reasonable simulacrum of another prelude and fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Henry Oliver: No, I'm just saying assume it produces something original and new and you listen to it and you are wow, this is insane.

This is as good as Bach and Mozart and Beethoven and Schumann, whatever. And then someone says, oh, this is AI. I don't think you'll care. I think to begin with you might be a bit whatever, but this goes back to what we were saying about the inner life. Assume someone finds some letter somewhere. Oh, it's been kept in a cookery book.

In an archive and we didn't know it was here, and it's JS Bach saying. “My friend said, I must have an extraordinary inner life. What does he know? I'm empty on the inside, man. I just, I just throw notes on the page. It's all, it's all a technical game to me.” I wouldn't fall out of love with his music. No way. [00:38:00] Whatever. So if the, if the AI can do it and it is good and you just hear, you go to the concert hall and someone plays on a piano and then they're like, AI composed it, fine, I think that'll be fine. I think people will have a, a strong reaction against it, but it'll be more ideological than anything else.

They'll be freaked out by the fact that AI has made such an impression upon them. They won't be denying the impression.

Evan Goldfine: Maybe the gulf feels so wide now because I can't imagine what that would actually be, but we'll have to wait to see. We'll have to wait to see what it is.

Henry Oliver: Exactly. So, and that's why a one good analogy is modernism.

Whether or not it's true that people threw, threw chairs at the Stravinsky performance or whatever, right? they weren't denying that it was art in their, when they did that, they were trying to say, this is not, but everything about their reaction was saying, boy, this is some art. It's just not the art you expected or could have expected.

Evan Goldfine: Let's [00:39:00] talk about a couple of your favorite recordings before we wind up. What should everybody listen to from your personal canon?

Henry Oliver: The Three Part Inventions played by Glenn Gould live in Moscow is my favorite Bach album. And I go back to it again and again. It was not for a long time, I didn't know it, but once I found it, it became the best thing.

It's a niche pick. I can't claim that it's Bach's best music or, or anything that, but it really, It's really brilliant for me and that that's what I would, that's what I would suggest. I want to know, I want to know what's your dark horse pick for a Bach piece?

Evan Goldfine: Ah, there are some songs that I heard with Richter and Peter Schreier, the great tenor from the 20th century, playing just these, these organ and voice, just the two of them together.

Very, very delicate. Some really extraordinary music. And [00:40:00] I will drop the links to, to those in the notes to the show as well. But yeah, I was really taken by a lot of the singing during my listening tour of this music in ways that I was not expecting to. When I to listen to classical singing, I tend to go to Schubert and Schumann in particular.

The great songs from their great song cycles I've always been really connected to. But earlier than that, or even the, the more religious music, I, I was never able to. But some of, some of the stuff that I heard this year, I keep returning to.

Henry Oliver: That's great. I'm gonna listen to that.

Evan Goldfine: Henry, this has been so great. Thank you for talking Bach and Shakespeare and the expectations of astonishment and I'll be thinking about that as I read my next big thick novels.

Henry Oliver: Good. Well, thank you for having me. I enjoyed it very much.

Evan Goldfine: Alright, take care.