A Peculiar Incident

Joel Roston

Interview by L. Valena
March 3, 2023

Why don't we start from the top? Start by describing the prompt that you responded to.

What this looks like to me is a sort of woven landscape with clouds and majestic mountains which are in the exact colors that visual artists probably tend to see landscapes in, but which the rest of us just tend to think of as being a sort of, like, light gray—maybe brown. When I look at it, I think, “Huh. It’s certainly a person’s interpretation, but I bet that’s really what mountains actually look like sometimes.”

What were your first thoughts and feelings about it?

My first thoughts and feelings were what they usually are when I start to write music, which is, “I have no idea how to write music, but I’m a professional composer, so, like, I assume something will happen soon,” and, so, I just kind of stared at it thinking, “How do you write music?”

Then I started trying to figure out exactly, like—“What am I hearing inside of this landscape?” and I think, what it turned out I was hearing—and this is maybe so on the nose and ridiculous—but, I sort of saw a person standing, listening to the exact landscape in the way that I was listening to the actual artwork. I was just, like, “What would be happening in this scene?”

I think part of this is that I just started teaching a class on media composition and I was turning this into some kind of story for myself.

And, so, the voice of that person—like, what they were doing when they were listening—they were just sort of, like, tentatively speaking to the landscape to see if they heard anything back. So, in my my mind, the sort of synth-y, pluck-y, echo-y thing was a person just, like, feeling kind of crazy and being like, “I guess I’ll say something and see what happens,” not expecting anything to happen, but then, what they hear back is this sort of growing piano thing that gets longer and more complex as the conversation between the two—the person and the mountain—goes on.

That’s the general thing. I can dive deeper into specific moments, but—

Yes, please do!

Well, to me, it seemed like the person standing is just talking and they just sort of have available to them all of their earthly, human vocabulary. I thought of the mountains, though, as having, sort of, a vocabulary of any sound that has happened inside of the mountains, really, and they just choose to—there are just kind of, like, echoes bouncing off the mountains; the history of what’s happened there. The mountains are just choosing to modulate what they show to the person. So, the person and the mountain start to sort of collaborate with each other and the way that that happens over the course of the piece is that—the human that’s speaking sort of keeps changing the things that they’re saying. Throughout the conversation, they’re thinking, like, “Well, I keep getting a response. How would the mountain reply if I said THIS thing.” When the first round of clouds go by, the human is just like, “What’s happening? Why am I having this weird conversation? Clearly, it doesn’t have anything to do with the clouds because I was having this conversation when there weren’t any clouds, the clouds appeared, and I’m STILL having the conversation, so none of this seems to have anything to do with them,” and then there’s a moment when—the longest phrase, I think, that the mountains say—the synth voice sort of matches the harmonic landscape of the mountains in a, like, musically consonant way, and the human is like, “I’m doing such a good job! I’m talking to the mountains and they’re talking back!” but then, for some reason that the human doesn’t understand, the mountain just completely spits out this totally different thing in response and the human’s like, “Whoa. I feel like I just did something wrong,” and then the clouds come by again and then mountains never talk again and then the human is like, “Maybe the clouds DO have something to do with it—I don’t know.”

That’s, essentially, what life feels like to me [laughs]—just, like, a weird thing happening that’s kind of cool, but sort of uncomfortable and you don’t understand why, and then it ends and you feel like you maybe did something wrong, but everything’s just kind of fine.”

I love that. It reminds me so much of things like my experience in meditation, or any of these things that feel impossible to understand. If something is working, my ego immediately wants to pipe in and say, “I'm so good at this!” That voice takes over, totally takes me out of the moment and out of the meditation, and I have to figure out a way to get back.

Totally, yes! I’m a meditator too and, like, the number of times that I'm feeling focused and then all of a sudden realize that, for ten minutes, I'm just thinking about what a good job I'm doing being a meditator is just, like—it’s very disappointing.

Good thing we can’t do it wrong!

Yeah, that's totally right. [both laugh]

I feel like what I hear you saying is speaking to something deeper about our experience with perception, and what a call-and-response process that is. You were talking about the colors that we see when we look at the mountains, and how different people see different colors. We're all just doing our best to throw stuff from our experience out into the world and ask, “Is it that? No. Is it that? No.”

Yeah, we’re, like, pinging the world to try to figure out exactly—we’re, like, echo-locating in some sort of psycho-spiritual sense.

Exactly. It's really cool.

Yeah, so, it was a pretty linear way that I put the piece together. Once I found a language for the mountains, I sort of just wrote things in a similar style.

It really actually did—maybe it was just a sort of throw-away line in the email that you send people, but—you were like, “This is not your magnum opus,” and I was like, “Okay, okay. I don’t have to explain…”—because, the things that I tend to write, if someone, like, points at a certain pitch and asks why it’s there, I can usually be like, “Oh, THAT pitch. Here’s why that’s in there. Let me tell you all about it!” With this, I tried to just write it a little more intuitively. It was okay with me that the piano was just, like, in a similar language throughout and not necessarily developing specific melodic material or hiding any secret, easter-egg-y thematic material or anything like that.

The most messing around I did was with how much space there was in between the different—like, the cadence of the conversation. It just kept getting longer and longer and longer. In my music production software, I tried to keep things sensibly grouped into measures—switching time signatures when appropriate and stuff—but then, at some point, I was like, “WHO CARES? It’s not like the Queen is gonna ask to see my project file here,” you know what I mean? I just—it was kind of a more intuitive process—and much more intuitive than I usually, like, allow myself to be, which was sort of nice. So, thank you for giving me the space to kind of see what happens when I direct a maybe less rigid process toward my personal music.

That's great. That's what this is all about. I think that we all get so locked into our process, whatever it is. It works, so we keep doing it. But it can be very profound if you answer the call in this way. Allowing it to be something different can shake things loose a little bit.

Yeah! No, totally, and that's what I was hoping was going to happen with this project because I’m, like—I tend to enjoy making things alone in a room and then intermittently showing them to my special life-partner, them being like, “Well, here’s what I think..” and then me being like, “Okay, don’t say anything else!” and then going back to the room and fixing it up. For me, this was, like, a step outside of a comfort zone, which is why I wanted to do it. I’m just like, “Wow. This seems like something I would NOT want to do—I should probably give it a try.” Like, it’s not like anyone gonna get hurt if I do it wrong, you know what I mean?

So, yeah, this was a really fun experience for me [sentimental voice] and I got to learn a lot about myself, Lu.

[laughs] Well, do you have any advice for another creative person approaching this for the first time?

I don’t know. The advice that I’d give MYSELF is that it really is—you really do sort of feel like a link in a chain and it really is cool that there are constraints, however vague, but that you also get to sort of direct your own personal system and language within these parameters and it does NOT have to be a crazy thing. The collaboration is the point—the collaboration through personal language is the point and I think that that’s super cool. That’s the point to ME, I mean—I don’t know if that’s the point to you.

Oh yeah, that's the point. You got it.

Okay, cool.

Call Number: M69VA | M71MU.roA

Joel Roston composes music for all kinds of things, performs all kinds of music for all kinds of audiences, and teaches all kinds of musical things to all kinds of people.