Episode 17 — Sound balancers, Bowie's favourite studio and Debussy
In this episode Steve heads into the legendary BBC Maida Vale Studios with sound balancer Martin Appleby to explore what recording engineers actually do beyond "press record". From Proms broadcasts and Royal Albert Hall logistics to live big band sessions and Jamie Cullum with Hackney Colliery Band, Martin explains how sound balancing is about translating a messy, glorious acoustic reality into something that feels honest, powerful and clear for listeners at home.
Then Genre Tombola lands on Arabesque, sending Steve into Debussy with New-York-based pianist Benjamin Steinhardt. They dig into Islamic and Japanese artistic influence, old modes and pentatonic scales, French vs German traditions, and what actually makes Debussy's Arabesques float. Steve's own Debussy-inspired piece and an AI-generated attempt get put under the microscope to see where machine-made music still falls short.
What we cover
Maida Vale from the inside: Asbestos, budgets, Grade II listing, and why it remains a one-of-a-kind recording space.
Sound balancers: Phase, mic placement, speaker systems and building an "ideal seat" mix for Proms and live sessions.
Radiophonic Workshop: Boiler parts, tape loops, Delia Derbyshire and the DIY roots of British electronic sound.
All-in-one-room sessions: Jamie Cullum, HCB and the risk/reward of zero isolation and maximum performance.
Debussy & Arabesque: Salon culture, modes, pentatonics, water, Turner and why the lines never quite resolve where you expect.
AI vs Debussy: Pleasant piano wallpaper versus intention, ambiguity and real compositional thinking.
Further listening & links
Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript, reflowed for readability only. No wording edits.
Hello, my name is Steve Pretty. I'm a musician, performer, and composer from London, and this is my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces. This is the show that helps you to hear, understand, and enjoy music in new ways. Hey, everyone, how you doing? Lovely to be back, as always. Thanks for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed the last episode, as always. If you haven't listened to that one, do go back and check it out. We had an exploration of the double bass, courtesy of Charlie Pine. Really fascinating, kind of in-depth insight into how the double bass works, and some beautiful bass music, I think. And of course, a little jam session at the end with me and Jolny on the trombone, and Charlie Pine on the bass. That was a lot of fun playing a little blues. And of course, also, we looked at a distant star system, the resonance of planets orbiting a star many light years away, courtesy of my show at Wilton's Music Hall from way back in January, where one of my guests was my occasional double act partner, Chris Lintott, Professor Chris Lintott, who presents the sky at night, and he's an amazing astronomer and all-round interesting fella. So do go back and have a listen to that. Lots of interesting stuff in the episode, I think, and thanks for all the feedback, as always. And of course, just a little reminder that you can find that full video explanation of the double bass and a lot more besides on my Patreon. If you go to originofthepieces.com, you'll find all the links there. So head over there. You can sign up for free or you can choose to give me a small amount of money every month to help make this show whatever you prefer. There are obviously some extra little bonus bits for people who choose to donate. So thank you very much for that. Building a really nice little community there, I think. Coming up on today's show, at the end of the episode, I'm gonna be looking at Arabesque. That was the genre that was chosen for me by the genre tombola random genre picker last episode. And so I take a bit of a dive into Debussy and piano music and even have a bash at creating a bit of Debussy style piano music myself. But I really enjoyed looking at that. And I speak to a brilliant guest all the way from New York down the line, a bit of an expert on Debussy and Arabesque music. But first I am interviewing someone who plays a very, very important role in how we hear music in the UK. And that is because he is an engineer with the BBC. He's based mainly at Maida Vale. And I had a session down there a few weeks ago and he was kind enough to speak to me about some of his experiences of 40 years working as what he calls a sound balancer. That's what the BBC referred to as recording engineers for reasons we'll go into in the interview. Yeah, it's a really interesting insight, I thought, into the recording process. I think we mainly managed to avoid getting too geeky, which I have to say is quite an achievement because I can be a bit of a gear nerd. And of course he, in his job, I'm sure can be as well. And especially in that place, which is full of absolutely delicious audio gear from decades of music history. It's sort of easy to get distracted and get a bit too nerdy.
But I think instead of that, hopefully what we managed to do is take a bit of a more philosophical approach to what recording is, what the role of a sound balancer or mixing engineer is when you're trying to capture a live ensemble, and some of the considerations that you may not have thought of before when it comes to capturing audio. I think there's a lot in here that's really interesting and that we'll probably unpick more in future episodes because we touch on all manner of things. Anyway, without further ado, here's my interview with the brilliant Martin Appleby. My name is Martin Appleby. For a living, I'm a sound engineer for the BBC. I'm a musician myself. I play bass, guitar, double bass, and Appalachian dulcimer. Do you really? Appalachian dulcimer? Yeah, and recently, so I did my masters in the music of the Appalachias. Wow. And making connections between the Appalachian mountains and the west coast of Africa. Oh, amazing. So I've studied the dulcimer, the banjo, and double bass from those traditions. And now I mostly play jazz, but that is in my background. I had no idea about that. Well, I'll have to get you back on and talk about the Appalachian dulcimer because that's something I know nothing about. What I do for a living is I studio engineer for the BBC for Radio 3. So I do the proms and I do the live music during the week. I do the drive time show in tune. In tune, yeah. So two or three times a week, I do two live bands and a magazine programme. I think I've done in tune, maybe with you, I'm not sure. We did it, I think, with Hackney Colliery Band a few years ago. That's entirely possible. Broadcasting house. Yeah. Not here, right? No, it's a broadcasting house. We have occasionally done it here if there's a lot of musicians. Yeah, I think we did a session at Broadcasting House. It was a great, amazing, amazing programme. And we were at Made of Ale, of course, incredible studio with absurd history. It's a place that just oozes history, doesn't it? It feels, I mean, it's almost a cliché to talk about it, but as you walk in, it does just feel, you just, as a musician, you're kind of overwhelmed with the weight of history and the people who've come through the door in recent times, let alone going back decades and decades. Yeah. I mean, you must have worked here for a long time. I started working here 37 years ago. Wow. And I remember walking through the door and being told that we'd be moving out of here soon because it's too old. 37 years later, they're saying, we'll move out in about two years. So you detect a hint of suspicion that that may not be the case. But
it has been, yeah, it's been, as you say, it's been under threat for a long time. Maybe you can talk about why that is. Well, it's, I mean, the main problem is asbestos. At the time when these places were built, asbestos was a wonder material because you could craft it and make it into anything you wanted. And of course, it's fireproof. Perfect for places where you might have a lot of musicians or an audience. The trouble is that it sheds dust, which if it gathers in corners and you breathe it in, it kills you. So, as long as you don't touch it, it's fine, and so we just leave it alone. But the problem is, long term, this place needs a new roof, it needs an air conditioning system that's fit for purpose. And you can't do that without closing it, evacuating everybody, putting a big tent over it and removing all the asbestos, which will cost millions. I see, I see, I see. And so it's been a bit of a liability in terms of the BBC's portfolio of property, I guess. Yeah, we had the same problem with Television Centre. They closed it and sold it to a developer so that they could rip out all the asbestos. And now it's working again as a studio base. Oh, is it? I thought it was just flats. No, no, it's flats above it, which is how they funded it. Ah. But Studio One is still where they do Strictly and Jules Holland. And a lot of stuff for ITV as well. I hadn't clocked that, OK. That's good that that's still... Yeah, I think the same will happen here. I think eventually they'll gut it and it will be a working studio again. Well, that's because it's been sold to a consortium of buyers, including Hans Zimmer, is that right? It's fantastic it's gone to a musician. I was very... Because the last time we were here, it was a couple of years ago, and it was right at the time, I think, that it was being threatened with, you know, the last time we'll be here because it's going to close. And I remember thinking at the time, I mean, this is criminal that this place is just going to be bought up for expensive West London plants. Yeah, 10 and a half million. But then... Yeah, and that's peanuts. Exactly. But then, so I was very relieved to hear when Hans Zimmer and co. bought it, because it seems an obvious buy in a way, because all of the infrastructures here, I mean, admittedly, yeah, we've got these very expensive problems to sort out. But the history of the place and, you know, the fact that it's so well set up in lots of ways for big ensembles, orchestras, of course, the BBC Symphony Orchestra is based here at the moment, all that. But yeah, only when, only in Vertical Commons, went for ten and a half million. It's quite a lot of money, but... But given the size of the place and the location in West... It's meaningless, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, this studio, for example, was designed for big band jazz, and there is nothing like it. And you could never reproduce this, because the value of the land in London alone would be astronomical. You know, so this is why it's listed. It's a Grade II listed interior. And it has to remain a recording
studio. So it's fantastic that musicians take it on. I'm so relieved to hear that. And I mean, you say this room is known for... We're in Studio 3, right? And that's... You say it's known for big band jazz, and that's what we're doing today, right? We're doing a big band. This is where Bing Crosby made his last recording, famously. And it used to be the home of the BBC big band, although that got privatised. It's moved away now. It was also one of the favourite acoustics of David Bowie. He recorded here several times. Was it? In this particular room? Yeah. Wow. And you really do. I mean, people talk about stepping back in time when you come in, and it really does feel like that. Just even from the door and the entrance way and things, it feels like going back to the late 40s, 50s. All those art deco features, aren't they? But then also, it's sort of just matter of fact, walking down the corridor. It's like a sort of boring office corridor, except that behind some of the doors were the location of the Radiophonic Workshop and things like that. We did an amazing project recently, where we sampled every instrument that the Radiophonic Workshop ever used. Oh, wow. And things like, they used bits of old boiler and this sort of thing, bits of old steam engine and all sorts of things. We even recorded the original string instrument that the Doctor Who theme was built with. Wow. It wasn't quite the sound you hear, but the duggaduggaduggaduggadug that was then processed. Yeah. That was this crazy little guitar that we recorded. Wow. For those who don't know, the Radiophonic Workshop was, I guess, is really at the forefront of electronic music and making music with electronic instruments. Well, it was the answer to Pierre Boulez, who had an institute in Paris that was for creating electronic music. The BBC felt they should do the same thing. And so for early television, it was the perfect way of doing the sounds of computers and sci-fi sounds and this kind of thing. And it was where Delia Derbyshire worked, who was one of the pioneers of electronic music. Yeah, she, I mean, she was, she's quite rightly revered as one of the earliest pioneers and incredibly influential person for all of the stuff that she created. But you get a sense just walking through the doors and along the corridor of, of that slight, of the weird combination of like extremely professional, BBC, world famous studio, world famous institution, but also that whole slightly DIY element that Delia Derbyshire embraced and the sort of slightly, almost, what's the word, steampunk sort of aesthetic of taking bits and bobs of strange instruments or non-instruments or tin cans. We're still improvise, that's the strength of this place is that everybody who is a sound balancer here is a musician. And so we work with musicians who come in here to create a vision of what they want
to achieve. And often it will be an album that they might have worked on for a year. And we have to get the same sound within probably eight hours. So we have to improvise with what we're given and how we use the equipment to get an incredible sound very quickly. So we did a session in here. I did a session in here with Hackney Colliery Band for Jamie Cullum's show a few years ago. And Jamie joined us on a couple of numbers. And I may have told this story on the show already, but it was really amazing that day in general. It was a really, really inspirational day for me. But working with Jamie and having him sing, so bear in mind Hackney Colliery Band is a nine-piece band, two drummers, and everyone else is brass players, so it's loud. And you know, it's quite bombastic. We did this ballad with him, with him in the same room like we were today, so no separation. And again, if people don't know what I'm talking about, often in recording studios you've got different rooms, so you'd have the drummer in one room, the bass player in another, and horn players or singers completely isolated from each other. But in this room, as we did today, all just in one big, beautiful sounding room, which is amazing but scary because one mistake can ruin the whole take. Yeah, that's true. Whereas one mistake... It's harder to edit, isn't it? Yeah, it's harder to edit, definitely, after the fact. And it's definitely, I feel, more pressure as a musician, which isn't a bad thing necessarily, but I think that thing of when you're all in one room, everyone can see each other, it's where the magic happens, but it's also, you know, you're very hyper aware of making a mistake or it not going... But the great thing is you don't need to work with headphones. If you've got that isolation that's seen as a real positive in a lot of studios, you're working away from, you're not within contact, you know, you can't hear each other, can you? Whereas in this acoustic, because you can all hear each other so well, you can react to what each other are doing as well. Exactly, so it's a much more sort of organic process, much closer to a gig than a normal studio session is in my experience. But anyway, going back to the Jamie thing, funnily enough, it's actually slightly contradicting what you're saying, because we couldn't really hear Jamie that well in the room, because even though we're playing a ballad, it's quite a big, loud ensemble. And he was just playing with, again, no isolation at all, but singing very, very close into a mic. And because Jamie's such an experienced singer, an experienced professional, I remember thinking at the time, oh boy, is this gonna be okay with him singing all there? And then we came into this exact room where we are now and sat at this desk while you or one of your colleagues was playing it back. I just remember thinking, man, this guy really knows what he's doing. Jamie's singing was just absolutely on the money because he was moving in and out of the mic as he needed to. And just once you run it, once you've balanced it in here, suddenly the whole thing comes
alive and you think, okay. Once you've got a really experienced singer, you've got some great gear and above all, you've got great engineers sort of making it all happen. It's incredible what you can do in one room, all acoustically, no separation, no retakes, nothing. Just one take of like, okay, do we know what we're doing? Yep. Okay, cut. We are a bit spoiled here, because the musicians who come in have usually been touring, and so they're really tight. So all we've got to do is reflect their performance. We're not creating, it's not like going into Abbey Road for three months and creating Dark Side Of The Moon. These people know what they're doing, they walk in, and we've just got to work very quickly to get the sound that's in their heads. So it's about capturing the sound rather than the sort of creative production theme. Capturing the performance, isn't it? It's the one thing you really can't fake. You can spend months editing, you can spend months mixing, but if you haven't got a performance, you've got nothing worth listening to. Yeah, and that's often quite intangible in my experience, but you can't always put your finger on what it is that makes something great, because it's often, you can fix things like tuning these days quite successfully. But yeah, there's just something about the kind of little spark that can be there. And again, for me, being all in the same room, playing acoustically and kind of having the eye contact and not being encumbered by wearing headphones and worrying about the balance makes it really special, I think. We've got all the digital ties that everybody uses these days. You know, we can, we use Pro Tools, that's our main recording equipment. And so we can tune things, as you say, you know, we can edit fluffs out and this kind of thing. But the great thing that we can do that nobody else can is we've got the space. The musicians can all come in, be in one place, do their thing, go away, and we just mix it. Yeah, it's that, again, slightly more organic approach to mixing than some people might be used to. I mean, you work predominantly in the kind of classical music and jazz. Yeah, that's most of my living is in Radio 3 classical music. And it's interesting that you called yourself a sound balancer, and is that rather than an engineer? Is that a distinction that you make? That's interesting, that's a BBC thing. Yes, because we're all engineers, and everybody will be able to edit, they'll be able to mix features for radio. So we're all radio engineers, but then some of us are music balancers, which means that basically, I mean, if you're wanting to explain it to your listeners, it's about having maybe 120 sources coming from the stage of the Albert Hall, and knowing that you can get them all in the right relationship, so that the performance is heard in its best possible quality. Exactly, because in here, it's difficult enough, or in Studio One, or wherever, but in the Albert Hall, maybe we can talk about that for a bit, seeing the proms, because you've got, there's something called phase, which is incredibly important, right, where you've got
all of these microphones, as you say, maybe 100, 120 microphones around a big orchestra to pick it up for the radio and for TV, but it's not just a case of representing what people are hearing in the room, because, of course, the room is enormous, so it depends where people are hearing it. It depends whether they're behind the orchestra or in front of the orchestra, whether above or on the same level. So there's a lot of... It's a fascinating, huge subject. And if you stand where the musicians stand, you might only hear the bass guitar, you might only hear the keyboards, and you walk six feet in one direction, you literally can't hear yourself. And so what you're doing is balancing all those sources in a way that so the musicians can hear each other and so that the audience can hear them the way that the composer intended, which might not be reality, actually. It almost certainly isn't. Because speaking as someone who goes to the Albert Hall to watch a performance, it's a mixed blessing, actually, because it depends where you sit in the auditorium, what you actually hear. And a lot of that is actually... A faked is a loaded phrase, but there will be somebody balancing the music at the front of the auditorium, into the PA as well. And so what we try to reflect is an ideal seating position for the radio audience or for the CD customer, which is quite different from reality, actually. And it's a very subtle job, that, because I think a lot of the time... I mean, you're talking about the PA, so in other words, the speakers that are putting sound out into the room. But with an orchestra, you won't have that, right? Well, you do. That's the interesting thing. The Albert Halls got a really subtle and clever phase-coordinated speaker system. One or two musicians will actually ask to have it turned off, but that's because they don't understand it. The Albert Hall is such a difficult acoustic that what they do is they sample the music, sample the sound and project it into the room at different time intervals. The idea is that they're trying to homogenise the experience around the auditorium. You're not aware it's coming out of speakers, but it's a lot of the time it is. Interesting. That's quite a new thing at the Albert Hall. I was going to say millions, but I don't actually know what it costs. I know it costs an awful lot of money. I've done shows in there and I've seen a lot of stuff there. Again, I remember it was notoriously terrible. Then I saw a show. I think I saw the band Alt J in there, which is obviously a big amplified show. Fantastic show. I remember thinking, oh God, I was right up in the upper circle somewhere. I thought this could be quite bad sonically. A kind of rock band in there is going to be tricky because again, it's such a reverberant space. But then actually, again, because of this new PA, it was incredible. I was sat right at the top. I could hear everything really crisply, really perfectly aligned in terms of time. But you're not aware there's a PA involved a lot. I was there, but yeah, that's what I mean. I went to see Vivaldi being performed at the Proms last year, and
you weren't aware that it was amplified at all, but basically what you were hearing was an orchestra, which your eyes tell you it's an orchestra, but you could hear it perfectly crisply as well. And there's speakers everywhere. It's a multi-way speaker system. Yeah, so just coming back, not to get too technical, but this phase thing, you've got all these different sound sources, so in an orchestra, say, the violin section, so each individual violin, and then the violas, and all the different strings, and they each are projecting waveforms out into the room, which then, of course, are bouncing around and stuff. And just to clarify, some of those waveforms, so the squiggly waves that are going through, that are moving the air, can kind of go into a slightly funny relationship with one another and kind of cancel each other out, right? Yeah, and what, I mean, putting it very simply, and going back to the early days of recording orchestras, you would put a microphone in front of the orchestra, and that would be, you know, you'd put the, you'd pick the sweet spot in the room and stick a mic there, and you'd have the sound of an orchestra. But we all listen to classical music now on film scores and on television, and we listen on the radio, and it's a completely different listening perspective. So what we do now, because you actually want to be able to hear the double bass or the piccolo in an equal sort of balanced relationship, we put microphones on everything. But the difference between that first microphone that we talk about pointing at the orchestra and the one on the piccolo might be 30 feet. And so the time of arrival difference between the two microphones would actually effectively cancel each other out. So you put 20 milliseconds delay in. You actually measure out the difference between all the microphones, and you put delay in to make sure that there is no cancellation. There's always going to be a certain amount, because time of arrival is how you picture things in a certain perspective, in a certain space. And so you actually do want a certain amount of kind of splash of arrival between the different microphones. But you have to measure it and then take into account the difference between the microphones. Otherwise you actually get... I'm trying to think how you describe the sound. Sort of phasy. How would you describe what phasy is? Well, maybe... Wishy-washy. Maybe what I can try and do while we're talking here, just to demonstrate phasiness, is to put what's called a phaser, which is a box basically that introduces phaser, in other words, puts the audio out, the phaser with itself, so that you can hear. It's this sort of, yeah, wavy... I know the exact thing, if you can... You know, for older listeners, let's say, Ichikoo Park by The Small Faces, that was the first time that commercially phase was used as an effect. And you can hear the drums swishing, can't you? Exactly, it feels a bit like you're in a sort of washing machine, a tumble dryer. It's kind of swirling around. That's because one set of waveforms are kind of overlapping with another and filtering out some of the frequencies in between. Yeah, so it's kind of washing around like that, is that right? Yeah, we call that a comb filter. And it's literally a filter. It's
a bit like taking all the bottom end off, or the top end off, or that sort of thing. You know, like using a treble or bass control on a record player. But it does that across lots of different frequencies. It's not just taking the top or bottom off, right? Well, it's very complicated, I have to say. I do a lot of mixing and things these days, and I approach it... I don't have any training as a mixer or anything. I've learned myself pretty much through working in studios and that kind of thing a little bit. But I approach it as a musician, and so rather than as a trained engineer. So with things like phase, I have a degree of technical understanding of it, but it's a real... In terms of things like setting up mics and things, that's why I very much defer to the professionals. Because again, you can do a lot with different ways that microphones are placed, right? And so that's why you sometimes see in studios engineers with bits of string or with measuring tapes or whatever, measuring mic distances to try and minimise those issues. I think that's one of the things that we've been trained to do that I don't know, maybe commercial engineers do or don't, I have no idea, but we actually put our ears near the instrument that we're micing and find out where the noise is coming from and how it sounds at its best and then we put a mic in there. Rather than putting a mic on an instrument and using digital effects to make it sound better, we get it sounding perfect and then we only have to use the digital effects to a certain small degree to improve it. Yeah, or for a particular special effect that you could only achieve that way maybe or something, whereas when you're working with acoustic instruments or voices, we talked a bit on the show about using the sound of the room and again we talked about Jamie using the sound of the microphone and coming in and out of it and that sort of thing. And there's a real artistry to that, I think, both as a player and especially as an engineer. There's this interesting interaction between the science of it and the kind of deep engineering of it and still making artistic choices. Have you ever had any problems, particularly at things like The Proms, where it's a live event and you're working with conductors and sometimes composers who might have particular artistic ideas about what something should be? Is there ever any tension there? Well, there is, yeah, because everybody hears music in their heads. And it might be that when they're looking at an ensemble, they think they know what it sounds like because they've been looking at the score and they've been drawing it out for weeks on end, then when an engineer actually sticks two mics in front of it, it sounds completely different because the microphone actually does color the sound. And the microphone that you choose is important because it might reflect a particular sonic palette that the composer might not have in mind. What we do first is we put out what they call omni microphones, which pick up sound from everywhere, and they're the closest you can get to a human ear. So we'll start with a pair of omni microphones so that you get stereo image coming out of left and right. And that's the purest way of hearing a piece of music, if you like.
It's not colored by somebody else's perception of what it sounds like. This is the ensemble, this is what it sounds like. But at the same time, that's not going to be a very satisfying experience for the listener because the sound is going to move around and different frequencies will come out of different speakers. So the next stage then is we use what we call a stereo pair of cardioid mics to focus the image into a particular shape. And this is the point where I'm making artistic decisions. And the cardioid means that they only pick up sound in front of them, right? So they have what's called rejection behind them. So in other words, they don't pick up stuff from the sides or the back very much. Yeah, exactly that. And this is the point where you start to editorialize what you're seeing and hearing. So the engineer makes a decision that this is what I would like it to sound like, even if this isn't the way it does sound. And then we use close mics so that the different instruments then give a direct signal of their performance. And this is where the balancer comes in because the balancer, he or she will then focus on a different microphone to bring out and enhance the tonal characteristics of that instrument as they perceive them. But it's all completely editorialized. It's somebody's decisions. I do quite a lot of photography, and I hear the same kind of arguments from people about photography as I do about music sometimes, or people who think, oh, you know, just take the photo and show it as it is. Well, what does as it is mean? You know, as the eye sees it, well, firstly, everyone's eyes are different. Secondly, every camera is different. Thirdly, every paper is different. Every screen you're looking at is different. So there are certain things that you're having to pull out or be aware of when you're making not edits to a photo, but when you're adjusting hue and color temperature and things like that. I very much think of as analogous to what I'm doing when I'm mixing music, where you're thinking, well, people say, oh, we just have it like it was in the room. Well, again, where were you in the room? Were you in the band? Were you in front of the band? Were you to the left of the band? Were you at the back? If you're at the back, and depending on the room, maybe the bass, you can't hear the bass there because of, again, what's called this phase cancellation of when you put these frequencies into the room, standing in one place, it will mean it will sound totally different. So then, in other words, whenever you record anything, whether it's photographically or sonically, you immediately have to make editorial decisions on some level. Yeah, I mean, the photography analogy is really good, actually, because you may have a beautiful bucolic scene with a mallard duck sitting on a lake, but you've cropped the fact that there's a power station next door, and it's just the same. It might be that I'm looking at an orchestra, and I see it as architecture, by the way, because everything's got a foundation, and it's got the filigree battlements above it, and I'm creating that image from my head, basically, using the elements that are given to me. But it might be that the guy playing the electric guitar over this side can't hear
the person playing the flute at this side of the stage. It doesn't matter, because they know how the music's supposed to work from their perspective. But then someone with an overview is looking at it and saying, well, this is how it should work. And also, I've got an experience of how this has been done over the decades. Exactly. And so I'm imposing my schema, is the technical term, of how I think this should work. And the reason I was talking about the Omnis is the composer might say, well, this isn't the way it's supposed to sound. I say, well, look, these microphones are telling you the way it is. Yeah. And then I'm actually going to make it sound better. Yeah. But I can promise you that's what it sounds like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's if you're standing in those two spots. It doesn't necessarily make it good. Yeah. But it is what it sounds like. It is what it sounds like because that's what they do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, that's all fascinating. I could talk for hours about this stuff, but for the sake of my... Yeah, I could bore for England. Well, not boring at all. Not for me. But anyway, thanks so much. It's fascinating. Good to talk to you. Right, let's go and look at some more gear, Paul, on the way out. Okay, I may have slightly been stretching the truth when I said it didn't get too geeky, but I hope that was a geekiness that you enjoyed. Thanks once again to Martin Appleby for that really fascinating insight into Made Of Veil and into the recording process. Thanks again, Martin. And so we come on to the genre Tombola. Now, I'm still working away at Carido, the style from Mexico that was selected for me a few weeks ago. There will be a track coming for that very soon, I promise. But meanwhile, you may remember the last episode, the random genre picker picked Arabesque. So I've spent the last couple of weeks listening to and researching Arabesque and what that means in a musical context. There is a Coldplay song called Arabesque, but many of you may be relieved to hear that I'm not gonna dig deep into the Coldplay catalog. Instead, I'm looking at Debussy, because Debussy is probably the best known classical composer for writing a piece by that name, Arabesque. And so I wanted to talk to someone who knew much more about it than me. So I put out a post on social media, calling out for other composers or musicians who might be prepared to talk to me about Arabesque music and Debussy in particular, and lots of really helpful replies, but particularly from Amy Balkham, who is a composer, I think, based in the UK. And she referred me to a pianist who is based in Las Vegas called Travis Lohman. And Travis referred me to another pianist called Benjamin Steinhardt, who very kindly gave up some of his valuable time in a break from recitals and teaching and all the other
brilliant piano work that he does from his studio in New York. And it was kind of a mad dash to get the diaries to work with the time difference and him being busy. And I've had a very busy couple of weeks with one thing and another. So I had to do the interview from my car. I had to pull over on the way to a gig and set up my laptop and do the interview like that. And Benjamin was in his piano studio in New York. Bit of an unusual one, but really appreciated Benjamin taking the time to talk to me about Debussy. So here he is over in his studio in New York. Here I am in my car at the side of a road in North London on the way to a gig. This is Benjamin Steinhardt and here we are talking about Arabesque music. I'm Benjamin Steinhardt. I'm a pianist teacher and pianist based in the New York City area. The genre this week is Arabesque, right? And so the entry point that I took with Arabesque is of course Debussy because he's probably the most famous composer of pieces with that in the title and that sort of style. So I wondered first if you could just give me a very broad overview of what Arabesque means to you. Well, you know, it's an interesting question because it's what it means to me and it's also what it means to Debussy. When I teach students about Arabesque, one of the first things I do is just show them the beautiful Islamic art in which you're dealing with all these wonderful curly cues and pictures of nature. So much of Islamic art is about finding beauty and God in nature. And I spent a lot of time actually at the Met Museum in their Islamic wing because it's always nice and quiet in there and they have kind of these amazing gorgeous works. For Debussy, I think it's a sense of not being too conscious. It's a sense of not planning things too much, but rather allowing the beauty of nature to sort of invade your senses and your being. So it's about not being too orderly. Interesting. Not orderly seems almost in conflict with the Arabesque style, which is, as you say, quite intricate and often quite geometric. Is that right? Yes. So you get these wonderful sort of curly cues, these curvilinear lines that sort of often meld with each other. And what I think Debussy was really going on for was trying to find something that's mysterious and that goes immediately to your heart as opposed to being something that's particularly rational. And I think that's what he loved about it. And when he talked about Arabesque, he often, I think, thought about the Baroque period in which there are composers like Bach and Massonet and Rameau and things who had these wonderful little lines that just seemed to go on and on and on. These wonderful figurations at the keyboard that go on and on and on. So I think that was his big inspiration for this sort of piece. So you're talking about him harking back to earlier composers of the Baroque period, but also there is this sense with, of course, the title Arabesque in itself, and also the fascination at that time with the Arab world, I suppose, in the early 20th century, with that particularly in France bringing Arabic culture, if it's a very broad term, but looking at that slightly different approach to music and art and things. And that was a very influential on Debussy and on a
lot of French artists at the time. Is that right? Yes. And Debussy is such an interesting composer because he was really a revolutionary, but he was a revolutionary in a way that other composers like Schoenberg, who we can, I really love Schoenberg, but we can still find kind of grating at times. He was a revolutionary and he found solutions that I think were shocking at his time, but we often find very beautiful today. And he did it by getting away from what had been the tradition for the last 150 years. And that tradition really came sprouted out of Beethoven. And so you have composers like Beethoven and Schubert and Brahms and Schumann, and who were sort of the dominant composers for the most part of the last 150 years. And the big one of the time was Wagner. And everybody was going through this great craze over Wagner. And he wanted to find a music that was very distinctly French. So that was getting... He was a bit of a nationalist, and he wanted to get away from the whole German thing, the Germans being very sort of rational in the way they deal with music, the way they put things together. And the way he did this was actually to go back to very old musics. He won this thing called the Prix de Rome, which is a really big competition at the time. It allowed him to live in the Medici Villa for three years in Rome. And he spent a lot of time listening to old, old church music like Palestrina and all these guys from the Renaissance. And the other thing he came in contact, right around the time he was writing these pieces, we're not sure the exact dates, but he went to the French Exposition, which is where they debuted the Eiffel Tower. And he heard the Japanese Gamelan. So this is from Indonesia and he was absolutely enchanted. He found that the complexity of the Japanese Gamelan was made all of even Bach look a little, a little underwhelming in his eyes. So we get all this sort of amalgamation of things put together to create something that's very distinctly his and also something very distinctly French that really gets away from the German strands of music. So something that's really interesting in that is that the name of this podcast is Origin of the Pieces, right? And that's obviously a play on the origin of the species as in terms of musical evolution. It's that thing where one world, one musical world meets another and fundamentally changes the, if you like, the ecosystem of that musical landscape. And that seems to be what happened here. So that as you say, the French Exposition, where he finds music from Asia, now obviously, you know, arabesque is a bit of a broad term that wouldn't necessarily apply to Indonesia. But nevertheless, this sort of other worlds of music that most other composers in the 20th century classical world were not necessarily considering and then feeds that into his music. I think that's absolutely right. And the other thing I know about him is that he really loved art. And I think we often think of Debussy as being sort of Monet paintings. But he wasn't actually into Monet that much. But he did love, he loved Turner, for one thing, which is sort of has a hint of
impressionism to it. He found there was real mystery in Turner. And then he loved Tokusai, and he loved Hiroshige, and all these great Japanese print makers. In fact, that was one of his inspirations for his symphony he would write, which he didn't call it a symphony. He called it La Mer. He called it the sea. He was, I think that goes along with these pieces as well. He was very interested in water imagery his whole life and in the water. And these pieces have this wonderful flowing feeling to them. Yeah, they're really extraordinary in that way. Flowing is right. There's very much a sort of sense of fluidity in this music. I wonder, since you have a piano there, are you able to play any of the Debussy arabesque at all? Sure. I'll play just the first three lines or something. So beautiful, thank you so much for that. That was lovely. Incredible, flowing piece of music. It's lovely to hear it. It's amazing to hear that across from New York, to this, my car and sitting in a side road in London on the way to a gig. Yeah, thank you. And I just wondered if we could briefly mention that where would these pieces have been played? Am I right in thinking that they would be, it was part of the kind of salon culture of France at that time? I mean, are these more concert hall pieces? I think these were sort of more salon-type pieces. And Debussy had a great gig early on in his life as a talented student at the Paris Conservatoire. And that is he got to be the house pianist for a lady. She was a wealthy Russian widow. Her name was Nadja von Meck. And Nadja was the backer of Tchaikovsky. She basically funded all of Tchaikovsky's music with the caveat that they were to never meet. So that was her rule. She gave Tchaikovsky tons of money to write music, which she adored Tchaikovsky. And she would go to the concerts, but they would just never ever meet at the concert. If they were in the same hall, it didn't matter. And anyway, he got this job working for her and he traveled all over the place with her. He went to Venice, he went to Vienna, he went to France, he went to Moscow. And basically his job was to teach her kids. She had, I think, nine daughters or something. And to play duets with her and arrange music for her, for her sort of salons and things like that. So I think probably that whole time with Nadja had an impact on his writing these particular pieces. I don't know about you, but I would really like a patron like that who paid me lots of money to never meet me and just to write some music. Isn't it the best deal ever? It's the best gig I've ever heard of, yeah. Okay, interesting. So these pieces were written sort of with that in mind, so for some of his students. That's, yeah, we don't know a lot about why he chose to write these pieces, but that would be my guess. And the other thing to know about Debussy is I named a lot of German composers who were great romantic and classical composers, but there was one composer he really loved from the romantic period, and that was Friedrich
Chopin, who was a great composer for the piano, and Chopin was French. He was born in Poland, but his father was French, and he lived in Paris most of his life. And we're not sure if this is actually true, but Debussy's first piano teacher claimed to have studied with Chopin, so he felt there was a real link there, and he edited many of Chopin's works, and Chopin was the master of taking sort of salon-style pieces which are often kind of very fluffy, and then elevating them to real masterworks. We talked earlier about how his writing was influenced by lots of different styles, other than his contemporary classical composers, starts from around the world. Can we talk a little bit about his departure from... I mean, a lot of people might think of western music as existing in major or minor, and we've explored a little bit on the show in recent weeks about how some music can kind of sit between that, right? So it's ambiguous what the tonality is, whether it's major or minor. And Debussy, I think, explored that quite a lot in his music, is that right? Oh, absolutely. I think this was kind of a crisis point in music, because major and minor had seemed to be explored so fully, and it had really dominated for 150 years. And so he was looking for other ways to get into it. So he went to, without getting too technical, he went to old, old scales that predated major and minor, things like Dorian, which is... Da da, and so forth. He went to all these wonderful old scales that were used in folk musics and also used what they called ancient church modes, things like Dorian and Lydian and Phrygian. And then the other thing he did is, Western scales are seven-note scales, or seven, so like an A minor scale is A, B, C, D, E, F, G, there's seven notes in the scale. He went to Eastern music where there are five-note scales, what he called pentatonic scales, reflecting his love for Asian music and for Asian art. And actually, in this piece, there's little hints of what we call pentatonic, these five-note scales in them. And the nice thing about pentatonic scales is you can sort of improvise on them, and you never get a funky sounding dissonance. They always sound good together. They just have this wonderful way of melding. So I think that's a big part of what he did to get away from what had been done the last 150 years with, particularly the Germans. As part of this section, I often try and write or attempt to write a piece in whatever style I'm looking at. And I have done that here for better or worse. So it feels slightly criminal mocking up a bit of faux Debussy in a couple of hours this morning as a non-pianist myself really, or not much of a pianist. So I sent that to you just before we started recording. I wondered if, firstly, if you were able to play that for us, if possible, I would really appreciate that. Of course, of course. So I'm guessing that's the first time you've heard your piece, right? Well, it is, yes. I mean, I heard the Plinky Plunky Computer playing it, and obviously nothing like it is a piece, isn't it? So I really appreciate you playing that.
Thank you so much. And this is where I ask your opinion of it. And please, no holds barred. It's not a value judgment, but more just whether I've managed to address any of the things that we talked about in terms of the style and Debussy's piano style. Overall, I think it's really a really nice little effort. And I love the way you've melded the da-da-da, da-da-da theme in there. And with students, I always think it's such a great exercise what you do to really immerse yourself into the world of composer, to try to sort of imitate what they're doing. I love the ending in particular. I think it's very Debussy. The way you end with the minor chord and the sort of haze above it, I think is really beautiful. If I had a criticism, it's that when Debussy starts in this piece, he starts in a way where he withholds information. He doesn't really tell you where he's going until he's arrived. And with your opening, it's quite clear. So I think it's a good way of telling the difference between what Debussy would do and what probably most other French composers at the time might have done in this similar circumstance. It's a really interesting observation and I think you're absolutely right. It's funny because I literally only had a couple of hours this morning to try and bash that out. And so, listening back to it now, that is very obvious that you're quite right at the beginning. What we're talking about, I think, is the fact that it is very distinctly in a key. It's not got this kind of floating quality. And so, listening back to that now, and I think as I worked through it, and I just had, because of time, I just had to work through it fairly linearly and go, okay, bang, bang, bang, and I thought I'd give myself the challenge of trying to write it around Frère Jacques as a classic French nursery rhyme. But listening back to it now, I would certainly go back and make that more ambiguous, I think, at the beginning, because it's very defined. I wondered, before you go, I wondered if I could ask you one last favor, and this is the first time I've done this, but what I would quite like to do with this section from here on in is something a bit unusual. So I don't know how much you're engaged with this debate, but AI music is obviously becoming a big thing for composers, particularly media composers and in the pop world and things. And so what I thought I would do for this segment in the next few episodes is give a prompt to an AI to see if it would be able to write a piece and then play it to the expert. So I have a piece, it's just a few seconds long, and I wondered if you might be able to take a listen and let me know your thoughts on that piece, if you would. Okay. So you're just looking for my opinion, or? Well, yeah, I'm looking, I mean, bear in mind that I briefed it to write a piece of Arabesque music in the style of Debussy. Well, I would say first of all, and I hate to say this, but it's very enjoyable to listen to. I know, this is the scary thing, right? Yeah. It is a scary thing. It has kind of a nice vibe. It's the type of
thing if I were like hanging out in a club or something, just like having a drink or whatever, it would be a very nice thing to have in the background. Who knows? If you prompt it in different ways, it might give you different things, I'm sure. It doesn't sound anything like Debussy, if that was the goal. I mean, it has a vaguely kind of French quality to it. It sounds a bit still like it's computer generated in that it's mostly just using repetitive sort of patterns. It has sort of an almost minimalist feel for that reason, so enjoyable, but not necessarily Debussy. Not Debussy. That was my take on it as well. To me, what it speaks of is the fact that these things will presumably be trained on Spotify playlists of ambient classical piano, a sort of newly piano stuff, backgrounds for studying or whatever playlist on Spotify. But as you say, it doesn't really engage with a brief in terms of sounding like Debussy. So I guess that's good in terms of human composers, but I thought it would be an interesting exercise to pit the two against each other. So thank you so much for all of that brilliant insight. I really, really appreciate you taking the time out. Is there anything you would like to plug before I let you go? No, although you can always go to my website, which is www.benjaminsteinhardt.com. Benjamin, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and all your insights. You're very welcome. Thank you for having me, Steve. And thanks once again to Benjamin all the way down the line from New York to a little cul-de-sac in North London. And all of the stuff from that interview, so the full video and audio and the sheet music will all be available for my Patreon subscribers, so if you head over to Patreon, you can check out my Debussy-esque tune if you want to have a bash at that yourself. I would love to hear what you make of it. In fact, if any of you are pianists, do send me your versions and I'd love to have a listen to how you interpret it. Anyway, it's that time of the show where we need to look at the next genre. Now, as you can tell, as the summer wears on, I'm getting busier and busier, and so sticking to the picking a genre in one episode and doing the deep dive in the following episode isn't necessarily going to work, at least not for the next few weeks. So I think what I'm going to do is what I've done with this last couple, which is as I get the genre, maybe I'll look at it in the next episode, maybe I need a little bit longer to line up some interviews, to write some music, so it might be two or three episodes of time, but I will get to them all, I promise, or maybe not all of them, there are 1,334. Speaking of which, let's put that list into the random genre picker. Here we go, copy and paste, okay, here we are, and we've got tona, T-O-N-A with an accent on it, tona, so that's what I'm going to be looking at over the next few weeks as well as corrido, which I am already well into exploring and starting to make some music in. I've been really, really enjoying that and I can't wait to make a bit of music sort of vaguely in that style. Anyway, tona is going to
be the next one after that. Now before I go, quick update on that little rant that I did a couple of episodes back about how difficult the music industry is at the moment, even more so than usual. Unfortunately, that has not changed massively, but what has changed is the Jazz Bar in Edinburgh, which I lamented the loss of, is being reinvented, I think, as a kind of community-owned arts hub and venue, which I'm really, really excited about. There's a fundraising campaign to get that off the ground, so please do check that out. You can search, I'll put it in the podcast notes. You can find it there, which is fantastic news. I'm delighted about that, and I wish them all the best, and really keeping fingers crossed that that continues to build and does amazing things, just like the old Jazz Bar did. But just to counteract that brilliant news, there is some slightly sadder news, which is that the Towersie Festival is gonna close down after 60 years in business. 60 years they've been running that festival. It's a really lovely festival. I've played it a couple of times. I've played it with Hackney Colliery Band, and last year I played it with a band called Molotov Jukebox, who I'll be talking about I think later in summer because I've got some shows coming up with them. And it's, yeah, it's just a lovely festival. My kids came to it last year. Very family friendly. It's run, I think it's family run. Really great lineup of bands and different acts. I saw the Divine Comedy were there last year and all sorts of other brilliant bands, but it's, yeah, it's a terrible shame that it's closing, but I can understand why it must be an absolute nightmare trying to run a festival in the current economic climate and climate climate with all the unpredictable weather that we're having and everything. So yeah, commiserations to Towsley and to all of those who sail in it. Very sad to see that go, but congratulations to the Jazz Bar for its kind of new lease on life, I hope. Anyway, just thought I should give you that little update. So I think it only remains for me to say thanks once again for listening. Once again, head over to the Patreon. Please do leave those reviews. It really does help out. Five-star reviews, all of that business. I think a couple of people have had problems with the subscription. There was a technical glitch a few weeks back, so you may need to unsubscribe and then resubscribe. Please do resubscribe on some of the podcasting apps in order to be able to review it. But yeah, if you haven't done that yet, that would be really helpful. Meanwhile, thanks again to my guests on this episode. Benjamin Steinhardt there from New York and all of the people who helped me find him and tap him up for his knowledge. And of course, also Martin Appleby from the BBC and Mayda Vale for sharing his wisdom about the recording process. The music is by Hackney Collery Band and Angelique Kidjo. Stay musically curious and I will speak to you in a couple of weeks.