From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Music is often better than speech at conveying and understanding emotion, because music has a kind of openness and ambiguity to it. Words, on the other hand, tend to put things into boxes.
At its best, music is empathic… we can relate to it… it moves us and makes us feel connected. The best music for me captures a zeitgeist, captures something of the time and something of what we feel.
That was when I thought, 'am I going to be someone who only wants to do music when it's all going well? And only when it's served to me on a plate? Or do I want to do this… no matter what…' For me, there was nothing else, I wanted to make music.
I think music is a way for God to speak to humans. We have a connection through music that we can't find anywhere else. I believe that's why music is so important for society- its connection- its healing.
The way an orchestra is normally structured is cast in the image of what people in the 18th century thought society should look like. It's very top-down, a hierarchical power structure… reflecting the vision of society at the time. I wanted to subvert that by creating a new orchestral structure that reflected how society could be so it came through the musical DNA.
Listen, I was so poor I couldn't even afford to get a copy of my own record. This is before cassette tapes, I couldn't even get an acetate made so I could go listen at home.
Music allows us to express our soul and feelings in a way that's very difficult to replicate with words. I've spent more of my life playing music than I have speaking, and I find it a much more effective way of communicating my feelings and thoughts than words have ever been.
The difference between rap, jazz, blues, rock & roll, pop, r&b and all that is that the hip-hop artists held on to it…. MTV didn't play any people of colour until hip-hop came along. They had Michael Jackson then they had Run D.M.C. Run D.M.C's 'Rock Box' and these records were honest and real reflections of what came from these people's communities- from a poetry and music standpoint.
Music can reveal the nature that lies within us, the part of us we cannot hide. When you hear a single note, a C, it's not a single sound, it's the result of many harmonies. It's like God hiding in plain sight.
I want to take African rhythm and put it into classical music, European jazz, and symphonies. I want people to come together from all over the place, through music. That's my legacy.
For a long time there was a kind of cultural chauvinism: the idea that if you just played Mozart to people in the Amazon or to hunter-gatherer groups in the South Pacific, they'd instantly recognize its greatness, maybe even see God. But of course, they don't experience it that way at all.
The process can kill their musicianship. The process can drown-out the music so much that you can't hear it anymore… you end-up so cut off from your intuitive self that it's a series of obstacles playing a piece of music rather than something which is an expression.