more chats with Hayden Nickel and Marty G

Martin: I think one of the things I love about making music is that I firmly believe creativity is the same no matter what field you’re in. I think the way musicians approach creativity is the exact same as a dancer does, or a visual artist, and I find that relationship so interesting. The thought process is the same. That goes beyond art. Any creative aspect of life I feel like is this… it’s like the force, from Star Wars, or something, it’s just all around us and it’s kind of the same for everyone. 

Hayden: I love that you’ve brought up this conversation of creativity. Getting out of Uni is great because you suddenly have to look at what kind of role music is going to play in your life, and what you’re going to do about it, and I’ve recently been struggling with this idea that, I’ve realised, I don’t feel very creative when I’m playing the violin because I feel more like an actor. 

Martin: Mm, playing a role

Hayden: You have a level of control over it, but really someone else wrote that script. So hence why I’ve been trying to force myself to improvise. SO what's your take on how I feel about that?

Martin: I feel like that’s…. Hmmm. I don’t think it’s an uncommon train of thought. I guess when a lot of music education preaches perfection rather than self-expression, which I kind of feel like you’re talking about a little bit. 

Hayden: I guess I have a tendency to categorise things, and I’m working through this idea that you can be the person the art is impressing or be the person sharing the art, and I have a lot of dancer friends, people who create their own music and form their own niches, and I’ve really enjoyed soaking that all up. So that’s kind of the coming into myself, and then I wonder what I can do with all of that and I struggle with the output side of things. In terms of the people around me, it does make a big impression on myself and on how I view music and how I view art in the world, and that to me feels selfish at the moment because I’m like “oh I’m the only one benefitting from all of this, all of this awesome stuff I’m seeing around me, and I have to figure out ways to share it” I guess I can share it through teaching, but I’d like to create something. 

Martin: I think you share it by being a part of it as well.

Hayden: That’s probably a good point. I think I downplay how much of a role that is

Martin: Yeah and performance in itself is still creativity, even if you’re playing a role a bit. Even if you are not necessarily involved in the conception, but involved in the production of it. You’re still a huge part of it. Yeah I think you’re downplaying yourself. I think you’re the man.

Hayden: Fair enough. This is also why it’s important to have people around you, I love different perspectives. Also just what you were saying, one person can’t really cover everything, so having lots of people in lots of different scenes help you to make those connections and help you know where you sit and where your views sit. 

Lauren: I also notice that having friends outside of classical music is really interesting because of the ways they look at what we do. Coz I don’t think I’ve ever talked to anyone who’s been like “oh you do classical music? No creativity there!” Yanno? Like, no one is ever like “oh that doesn’t count as art”, everyone else is really impressed and thinks it's really cool. I really enjoy having those relationships just as a reminder that we are so entrenched in our own form of art that I’m sure a lot of people have a lot of similar thoughts and feelings about their own art form, or things that are unique to that art form, that we don’t see, because we haven’t done those years of training and practice. 

Hayden: Yeah. Interestingly, how we naturally start talking about broader ideas and approaches to how we approach and think about our music, rather than the nitty-gritty like “we play these things” and “these people influence us in these ways” I think that's really cool, how we look at our music similarly from quite a stood back position. If you’d asked me these questions two years ago I would have been like “I make art, I make my music so that I can play well. I play so that people can be moved by my music, which is probably still true, but it's very narrow, or at least how I thought back then.

Lauren: I also don’t think that’s such a bad thing. I’ve been thinking recently about that mindset that you have in uni, and sometimes I’m kind of like “oh my god, that’s so messed up, that you do a music degree and you don’t feel like you’re making art” but I also think that's part of learning to do something. You have to get to a point where you have the actual skills, and groundwork, to then be creative. 

Hayden: I also don’t think you realise you’re working towards creating art for the world until you get into the world and start doing these cool things. Poneke sessions, shoutout, having that, and having something different than what I spent four years training to do felt really amazing, and really liberating. Having opportunities to do new things, helps to contextualise why we’ve been training so hard, and not sleeping for like a week.

Lauren: I want to say that playing with the quartet when we did your works Martin, was like probably the first experience of that I had, pretty much. That was the awakening of this mindset I have now and it was while I was still studying, but I was mentally and emotionally out of music school at that point. And I think that has laid a lot of the groundwork for how I view creativity and art now and my relationships as well, because that quartet menat a lot to me while I was studying, and then getting to play works that you’d written for us was really cool. So that's just a little shoutout to that moment. 

Martin: You made the point that you think you need a groundwork of technical ability before, and I find that difficult, because I think the sense of creativity, at least for me, is where I get confidence from. And I think part of being a great performer is having the confidence to put your own mark on whatever you’re playing. I feel like this is a thing I hear with like jazz students who are still in school, that they think it is an insurmountable mountain, and they have to get to the peak before they can start doing their own thing. But they’re way further up than they think, and they should just start doing it. I guess it might be more obvious with improvisation, but I feel like you can hear it whenever when someone feels like they’re at a point where they can put themselves into a performance. Who was the violinist from the string quartet who did that Bach? 

Lauren and Hayden: Helene

Martin: That was gangsta. That was so cool. She’s so cool. 

Martin: But I don’t know, that’s just a feeling I get when I watch performers, and it’s something I look out for as well. If you were a featured performer, you kind of have to have a little bit of an ego. Which is not necessarily a destructive thing, but I think you need to back yourself, and I think you can hear that, and for me that comes from a place of creativity, and not of technical ability.

Hayden: Definitely having a resolution that is fully convincing to yourself is how you give a performance that is moving and convincing. 

Martin: It’s ego but in a very inward way. 

What decides what projects you take on? Is it the people, the type of music, or money? 

Hayden: Yes.

Hayden and Martin: All of the above.

Martin: Sometimes you do things for money. And that’s fine. I went through a transformative thing with my old relationship with music where I stopped wanting to do projects that I’m not in charge of. As in, I want a large creative role, in the stuff that I do now. If it’s a friend and I think it is a cool project I will happily pick up some gigs playing trombone, but it’s not what drives me. Preferably, I wanna be the guy. I’m happier that way. Even doing less, but I get more say over it, is satisfying to me.

Hayden: I think those are the three perfect Venn diagram labels for me. You’ve got your mates, music, and money, and the aim is to always hit the middle, where you’ve got all three at once.

Lauren: Always? Do you manage to do that with every project you do?

Hayden: definitely not. But hitting the middle is awesome like I’m feeding my soul and I’m feeding my stomach

Lauren: Can you give some examples of times you’ve hit the middle?

Hayden: Honestly no. Like Adam Summer School and NYO is mates and music but you’re paying for that. Things that start with mates are more likely to hit the middle. When you and your mates are like let’s get together and do something and it’s like cool we get to play this awesome thing that we all like, let’s go somewhere where they’ll pay us

Lauren: for me, it’s starting with Leah. Leah has access to good people, good music, and money. 

Martin: She’s the other part of the Venn diagram. 

Hayden: She encompasses all of them. What a powerhouse.

Hayden: There’s that Venn diagram, with the three of them together, and then there’s a whole separate thing that’s always been there I think I’ve just never really acknowledged it, and that’s a “challenge” aspect. I will veto all three of those things if I feel like it will challenge me and help me grow personally. Most recently I took on this gig that was like an Easter Play. I got an email saying that I had been recommended by this guy, and we’re gonna give you themes that are gonna be sung, and we’d like you to take them and improvise on them, to lay a scene-setting for what we’re doing here. It was challenging for me in a good way because I’d never done something like that where I was expected to make it up on the spot, and I was responding to something that was happening in the scene. I really enjoyed that and it gave me a lot. I did get paid, but I didn’t do it because I needed that money. It was something that I knew was challenging me in a direction I was wanting to go in already. 

Hayden: I used to have performance anxiety, I used to fully just flop, or I felt like I’d flop in my performances, but something that helped me a lot was realising that “oh once I get up there and perform I can do whatever I want and no one can stop me.”

Martin: I love that. That's so great. That’s so cool.

Hayden: Once I realised that, like I’m in charge on stage you can’t stop me it was like it didn’t matter what my teachers thought like “ugh I was supposed to play it this way” or it didn’t matter that people knew how it sounded already and I’d played it “wrong” I get to do what I wanna do. So we’d rehearsed only once despite having four rehearsals, and then it got to the show and I made up so much and it was awesome and I loved it. So apart from mates, music, and money, there are challenges, and being forced to grow. 

When have you been most excited about a project?

Martin: I guess that's just the same thing as what's your best gig. I mean playing with you guys is always very exciting, especially that first performance. 

Lauren: Actually, to answer this question, that was really exciting because I love Rogue and Vagabond.

Hayden: Yeah, to play on that stage after being to so many gigs there

Martin: It was the perfect thing for that as well

Hayden: So there are places where I’ve been inspired, and I really wanna play here, like the first time I played in the Michael Fowler Centre. I was like wow I’ve been to so many shows here and now I’m the one people are watching. I’m in a place where I’ve been here so many times and been inspired so many times. Rogue - I never thought I’d be on that stage because I was like “I don’t play the right music to play here!”. We’ve grown since then. 

Lauren: We don’t confine ourselves to a genre anymore

Martin: We play San Fran now

Hayden: There are things that have inspired me, getting to be the one to present that to somebody who maybe hasn’t heard it before. Playing Mendelssohn violin concerto, I think that was the first piece I was obsessed with. I listened to it so much and I remember showing it to my siblings as well, and then when I got to play it, I never ever believed I’d get a chance to perform this piece. I love Venn diagrams, I’m gonna bring them up again. Its when everything you love and everything you are as a person comes together and you get to do it all at the same time, so when we did the schools concert with our chamber music group, it was an interactive presentation of music and getting to play and rehearse music, and we got to play at 3 schools in the Wairarapa. That was all-encompassing of myself and what I do music for and what I’m good and what I like to do. I got to make money and share something with kids who maybe hadn’t been in that space before. That piece was awesome too, that Dvorak string quintet. Those have been the most exciting things.

Hayden: When was the first time you got to be in complete control of a project and it was your music?

Martin: End of first year. It was Wellington Jazz cooperatives emerging artists or something, and it was terrible because I didn’t know how to write music yet. But it was really fun and all the ideas were there, I just didn’t know how to write parts or anything, and it was a crash course and I was thrown in the deep end and I love doing that, and I got some really cool people to play. Louisa played, James Guilford, people I still work with now. That’s been a really satisfying thing as well, I think this is way off the question but the good thing about music school is growing with musicians as people. Practising next to Louisa in the practice rooms for three years and suddenly she’s got like 10 million dollars to make a big band album and she gets me to conduct it was very satisfying. Also, whenever I get to write a lot of music I’m just very happy. I’m completely blanking on anything I’ve ever done in my entire life right now.

Hayden: From these prompts, I’m starting to recognise a general theme with us and myself, that it’s really important why we’re doing it and why we love it and what we have to offer because that’s how I’ve been answering these questions, my favourite and most inspiring and all that but it just means you can give more, when you know why you’re doing it and what you’re doing it for. I think I say yes a whole lot more than I used to because I don’t view it as work anymore, I view it as creating something, sharing something.