David Mason - Bad Art
I caught up for coffee with National Youth Orchestra composer in residence David Mason, to do what I love most: talk about music and art and life. After the interview I message David to ask him one last question to put at the start of this interview. “What do you love most about music?”
“What I love most about music is how it can create and pull you into all these different worlds of sound, and how you can just get lost in that immersion. My favourite music is always music which evokes such a vivid image in my mind or is just dripping in such a unique aesthetic that I am taken away by it all! I love how these sound worlds are intrinsically collaborative too, between the composer and those who perform the work, but also the audience member, who gets to choose what they take away from the work and how exactly that sound world comes together in their mind and what it means to them personally.”
*Recording started halfway through conversation about the juxtaposition of western art music and outside influences
David: Something I’ve been thinking about is working within this euro-centric music western style music as a Māori person, and how do I reconcile those two things.
Lauren: I was really interested in that when I read the bio they put up for you on the National Youth Orchestra program so we may as well start there. How have you found the journey of trying to find the juxtaposition or middle ground between your experience as a Māori person in the classical music world? I would imagine that would be quite a personal experience, with a lot of quite intense emotions or feelings caught up behind it, so how have you found making that a public experience?
David: Yeah, I guess I’ve been looking at that journey as a way of creating my own identity and I think drawing from a lot of those ideas is a cool way to look at what I want to do with my music. So that’s been fun, it’s been a nice thing to tap into. It’s definitely been my own way of figuring out my style, my position, my contribution to society in general, and just figuring out what I want to do and what kind of things I want to put out there. This whole piece and this journey, in general, is inspired by this game, and I’m actually wearing the t-shirt, called Umurangi Generation. It’s this game by a Māori guy from Tauranga, Naphtali Faulkner and he’s done this really cool game about climate change, politics, and NZ identity explored through photography. It’s brought in both his Māori heritage, so it’s about Māori people in New Zealand, but also drawing from his outside influences, things like art and media, film, tv shows, and music. All of those things have created this really unique art style and expression.
Lauren: That’s really cool. So when you’re making art or music, you talk about finding your own style and what you want to be creating, do you have any idea yet of what that is? Do you have a particular audience in mind or a particular motivation?
David: That’s been an interesting journey. It starts to touch on like, being a classical composer it’s been difficult to figure out where my music sits. We call it classical music, but it’s this very contemporary style of classical music, it’s a very distinct style that a lot of people do. It’s a style that a lot of composers, at least my peers who study at Auckland University have a lot of conflict with. Do we like this style, what do we want to do with it? Some of it’s super weird, crazy and out there, but ultimately coming out of it I’m quite happy I was exposed to all of this weird stuff, and I think a lot of my teachers pushed me to experience it and figure out what in it is valuable, and meaningful, and don’t worry if honestly some of it you think is bad. And I think that’s something about making art, it’s okay to make bad art. So a lot of that art that I don’t like, that I don’t want to go back to, has still had an impact on me and I can kind of do whatever I want.
Lauren: I’m really interested in, if you feel like talking about it, if you’ve had some difficulty with the classical music tradition, in finding your path. I think that a lot of people especially our age, with the way the world is moving, it doesn’t quite align with the way that classical music has moved in the past
David: It’s a weird thing to navigate. I feel like my experience of classical music at university was quite good because they were very much like “hey you can do whatever you want. We’re not gonna push you around, we’re gonna figure out what you want to do and just do it, don’t worry about all this fuddy-duddy stuff if you don’t want to. Or if you wanna use it you can”. But yeah, it is an ongoing thing, I don’t know what my position is in classical music. Yeah. I don’t know.
Lauren: And I know that you also do production and things as well as composition. Do you want to talk about that and where that fits into your life?
David: Yeah, so I’ve been doing a lot of other stuff, but I’ve got myself into a position where half of my time is doing a lot of classical music, and half of my time now is video game music. So at the moment I’m working on a video game called Dredge with Black Salt Games, a company in Christchurch. They’re making a game which is a fishing RPG (role-playing game) which takes inspiration from Lovecraftian horror. The idea is you go out and you’re catching fish and you have to come back and sell your fish but you need to come back before nightfall, because then the fog sets in and scary stuff starts happening. So I do the music for that, and I do the sound design. The music is a lot more classical, drawing from my classical repertoire, there’s a lot of solo piano, piano and cello, stuff like that. The sound design is field recordings of New Zealand birds, and using that to create all these different islands which have different eco-systems. So I have some islands which have Kākāpō, others will have Tūī, and stuff like that. The other game I’m working on is called Denari which is by a company in Auckland called Astronaut Diaries and that team is doing a hack and slash Anime inspired video game, but it’s also sort of incorporating a lot of our cultural influences into the game to create this world and this story.
Lauren: That sounds really cool, and really fascinating. I love the idea of video game music. I love the way it can be used to tell a story and I’m really interested in the intersection between music and other art forms, and I don’t have any experience with video games or gaming music but I think it sounds really cool.
David: It’s cool to work with interactive music, it's really fun. It’s quite complicated to get working, but doing things where the music changes depending on what’s going on, and it can loop when you’re not doing anything, and that’s really cool. I guess the idea of trying to intersect these different mediums is similar to how I’m wanting to bring in all my other things and find an intersection between all of those.
Lauren: So is it all very tied up for you, or is it quite separate? Do you have an escape from all of it, an artistic outlet?
David: I suppose they impact each other but I definitely feel like they’re different worlds in a way. There’s a different goal for each one. The classical music is more focused on my own personal journey and the video game music has that but it's a group vision that I’m trying to get across.
Lauren: That’s interesting, coz I can only speak as a classical music performer, and especially as a violist, it’s very rare that I’m doing anything completely by myself, I’m always working with the composer, whether or not they’re alive, it’s still like a collaboration, and then more often than not it’s chamber music or orchestral playing, so it’s always a community-oriented thing. So it’s really interesting to hear that for you as a composer that’s a more solitary, personal thing.
David: I guess even when it is doing a group project you have a lot of creative power. That’s something I’ve been finding with video game music, is that I have a really strong creative impact on the direction of the game because the sound is so much of what makes the game the game, and that's not even getting into sound effects and stuff. It’s cool, I enjoy it.
Lauren: What drew you to composition in the first place?
David: I really liked video game music, that’s where I started. I used to listen to film music, I’m pretty sure the first song I got on my first mp4 player was the music of Star Wars. I still listen to it so much. I really liked the music for a video game called FTL, which a guy named Ben Prunty did like a very classic chiptuney kind of soundtrack for that. I really liked that and then we got a composition assignment at high school where we had a digital workstation, really basic, and I was able to start doing that, and that’s where I found a passion for that. I was like “I can do my own music like this game, this is cool!” I kind of kept doing that. I had a lot of music experience outside of that. My brother started playing trombone when we were quite young. I kind of wanted to follow in his footsteps, and I started playing tenor horn in a brass band. From there I ended up in a concert band playing flute, I kept changing instruments, I could never agree on one instrument. I played bagpipes for a while, that was pretty cool. I got pretty far, you start on like a chanter which is basically a recorder. I eventually got up to - I think they call it the Goose? That’s a small bagpipe, without the pipes but with the bag. Then I got to the bagpipe but it’s so hard to play when you’re a little kid because you actually need a lot of strength to squeeze it. I fell off eventually. Waipu has a lot of Nova Scotian ancestry. That’s one thing I want to reconnect with. Anyway then I played in metal bands in high school playing electric guitar, but the one thing I settled with was composing. I get stage fright too.
Lauren: My last question is can you tell me about the people you work with, your mentors, the relationships in your music? How have those affected the music you make and your relationship with music?
David: That’s a good question. It’s not something I’ve thought about. I guess for me I would start with my mentors. At the University of Auckland I had Leonie Holmes, Eve de Castro Robinson, I had John Coulter, and I had David Chisholm who recently came over from Australia. Usually I would have one for one year and then move on to the next, and that was really cool. Like I was saying before, they definitely had a vibe of just “do what you want, what do you want to do, we’ll help you do it”, rather than trying to push you towards something. They would always want to push you away from being derivative. John Coulter was very much the type of person who was like “there’s a lot of bad art, and that’s okay.” Because that’s how you make new art, you’ve gotta try some stuff that’s not gonna work. But sometimes it does and that’s really special. He was also the one that would laugh in the middle of concerts when something silly happened. That made me realise there’s all of this stuff that we’re doing that’s ridiculous. We shouldn’t take it seriously necessarily. It’s okay for the music to be funny, and it’s okay to laugh during a concert if something silly happens. Instead of looking at someone throwing a banana on the floor and stomp on it in the middle of a concert, which could happen, and stare at it really seriously like “yeah this is really meaningful” the composer probably wants you to laugh.
Lauren: How’s it been working with Salina Fisher this week?
David: It was really cool that they paired me up with Salina, because her piece Rainphase was a massive inspiration for me a couple years ago. I did an essay on it in one of my university classes, I really liked how she created a soundscape. I felt like her music, going back to where I position myself, she uses all of these innovative techniques to do something really new, but it also felt really accessible for people who aren’t in the contemporary-classical scene. I feel like she struck a really nice balance, which was really inspiring. It was great to ask her how to achieve these things and look at her scores, and she walked me through what she did.
Lauren: We’re really lucky to have her in our scene in Aotearoa.
