Making music...
is not something that you look out there in the world to discover how to do.
Music isn't something you pick off a tree like fruit.
Your music has been growing in you your whole life.
You don't look out there for it. You look in here.
So if you're going to make music, you have to bring it up from inside you
and figure out a way through your hands, your ears, your eyes, your brain,
to have it come up out of you and out there into the world.
And then you're... Most of the hard work is done. Now it's out there.
Now you figure out who likes it. What do they like about it?
Now you listen to criticism. That's your best friend.
When people tell you they like it, good, it proves that you've done well.
When people say, this sucks...
they're either wrong or they're right. If they're right, good.
If they're right and your music is bad, good.
Now you should go make some different music.
And if they're wrong, well, show them that they're wrong. Show them how they're wrong.
And that makes you defend your work. So criticism will never hurt you.
You have to be willing to go out there and take it.
What qualifies us as creative people is that we learn, probably from a very young age onwards,
to accept that some of our ideas are odd.
I mean, again, I can only speak from personal experience.
My family, no one was ever a musically educated person.
When I insisted I want to have a synthesizer, the answer was, well, then get a job and try to buy one.
And they were expensive these days, so I had to work a lot till I got my first Juno-6.
And I had no formal musical education. So I made all kinds of weird things inspired by the weird music I was listening to.
I played my mother what I was doing, and she said, "Urgh...
that's really not nice."
And I was deeply frustrated because I thought it's fantastic. It was complex harmonic with weird clusters.
So I made an experiment. I played my mother a stupid C major chord.
C major, G major, F major.
Okay, so example one. And then I played this kind of complex clustering thing.
I said, which one is better?
And my mother, of course, did the completely predictable and said, Well, the first one is music.
And this was the moment where I understood
that it's just a completely different reference frame, and it's not my failure.
It's just that the reference frame is not the correct one.
And probably every artist has those moments at some point.
And if you continue doing things after those moments,
then you're already prepared for all the things which come up later.
Because whatever you do, there's always people who dislike it.
So I think part of our discipline has to be to understand that when we do things
and it doesn't go as we had expected it to do, to be able to use it as an experience to kind of step back and... look at it.
Notice how many times we are willing to examine the bad stuff and don't examine the good stuff.
If we would also take stock after the good performances as to what it felt like,
why it was good, what seemed to be within my control
and what was not, what was that magic, that stuff that was happening,
that was just making things just flow almost out of body experience.
We have to review those in our minds too, so when the bad ones or the ones that don't go well happen,
we don't attach our entire worth to that moment that didn't go well.
We take away something that we say, "OK, I got it."
And we use it to try to best ourselves in the next outing.
When you've done your very best, it's amazing how you don't feel so bad when something goes wrong that's out of your control.
How do you deal with external opinions and input in your own creativity?
-Ignore them. -Yeah, ignore them.
Unless it's coming from someone that you really respect and someone from your circle, it just doesn't really matter.
It's good to know generally what people think of your work, but don't let it affect you one way or another.