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Electronic technology has been a part of music making and music listening for a century. We always treat it like it's new, and cutting edge, but it's actually omnipresent, so we should just treat it as part of the arsenal today.

Vijay Iyer

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Vijay Iyer
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: January 1
Composer
Jazz Musician
Jazz Pianist
Pianist
Rochester
New York
Making
Electronic
Part
Edge
Today
Treat
Music
Cutting
Always
Listening
Like
Century
Technology
Omnipresent
Actually
Arsenal

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My concern with this approach is that music becomes a substance devoid of people. It's a consumer model of what music is: subjects listening to objects. For me, music is subjects listening to subjects. It's about intersubjectivity.
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In a mystical sense, three can become one, in the sense that two is not one three is a way of resolving difference between two. It's about creating balance: of energies, of dispositions. Sonic balance. That's the approach for me, what it means.
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I want to make sure that I represent a variety of backgrounds and that represents the reality out here in the world.
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To interact means being among others, and taking others into account in a way, to act.
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I like the idea of the objecthood of music being destabilized by process and things like improvisation. That's what empowers us that's how we make each day new as players, as people.
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I think what music can offer is the feeling of forward motion, also the feeling of accumulation of information, of sensations, of feelings, like we're going somewhere. When I say 'feel like,' I don't mean to suggest that it's not real, but that it's the work of the imagination, which is what narrative is.
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If we reject the word, or any word that labels music, what's left? That's the question we should all ask ourselves. Ben Ratliff asked it, and he came up with aesthetic categories. That's not what I would say. What's left are communities who make music together, or among whom music circulates. That's it.
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Resonance is a physical process through which similarities are highlighted.
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What we call music is what reminds us of ourselves. And sometimes electronic music helps lead the imagination to a space that seems outside of ourselves. But it never really is.
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If you look at my collaborations, it is very much in line with all these others in the sense that it is a building of community, particularly among artists of color. This is what I learned from the example of elder African-American artists, which is where it is all coming from to refuse to be silenced.
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This is the last sentence of my dissertation: What is soul in music if not powerfully embodied human presence?
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Lately I feel being political is also about the company I keep and the ideas I put forward. When I do a curate a program or do a workshop, I want to make it intergenerational I want to have women on the faculty and also among the students.
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My music is always called cerebral. It is a way of saying I'm Asian, and therefore everything I do is brainy.
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A successful relationship is not about two people staring into each other's eyes, it's about two people looking ahead together. I think in order to construct, it's not just, you do this, then I'll do this. It's more like, let's work on these ideas together, and just move together, with these ideas. It does create a balance.
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It is one thing to be a virtuoso, but a different thing to play with compassion.
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Whatever we can do to just give people a sense of hope in the face of what seems like hopelessness. That's a small thing that an artist can do sometimes.
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I make a lot of music with other desis - that's hugely important to me, but it can't be the sum total of who I am and what I do. It's not accurate it doesn't reflect my life experience.
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With electronic music it's often a little more hidden - the relationship between gesture and sound - which makes it confounding for audiences. But the ingredients of electronic music are the same ingredients of nonelectronic music.
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What I find the challenge is with working with, say, digital machines - performing electronic music - is that when we play instruments there's a physical act that results in a physical vibration. There's a mapping between our exertions and resultant vibrations, or resonance.
Vijay Iyer
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The sense of having to be the best at everything gets in the way of anybody doing anything. I put all that aside it's not worth thinking about when I'm there. My agenda as an artist doesn't go away when I teach. It actually gets intensified.
Vijay Iyer