118 – The Art of Composing – with Composer Steven Lebetkin

Have you ever thought about composing? Have you already started your career? Are you interested in taking your composing game to the next level? In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I talk to composer Steven Lebetkin, who shares about his forthcoming release, Perpetuum Immobile, New Age Chamber Music and his specific way of approaching composition. Download the PDF Transcription Podcast Highlights: 00:14 – Introductions 00:23 – Who is Steven Lebetkin? 02:23 – Perpetuum Immobile 05:29 – What is New Age Chamber Music? 10:11 – Is it costlier to work with real instruments and musicians? 12:30 – Who are you influenced by? 17:33 – Is there a specific way you approach composition and making music? 22:24 – Is there a specific message you’re looking to share with your audience through your music? 27:32 – What are your plans moving forward? 29:23 – Is there anything else I should have asked? Transcription: David Andrew Wiebe: Today, I’m chatting with composer, speaker, and thought leader, Steven Lebetkin. How are you today, Steve? Steven Lebetkin: I'm great. How are you today, David? D.A.: Great. Thank you so much for asking. So, for those who don't know, why don't you paint us a picture of who you are and what you do? Steven: Okay. Well, I'm a composer. I've been doing this for quite a long time. I started out in my young teenage years taking composition lessons and studying classical music, and going pretty much every weekend to Lincoln Center in New York at the Library of Performing Arts as a 13, 14-year-old young boy adolescent. I just traveled to the library for years learning music, listening to vinyl -- yes, those were the days of vinyl -- and studying scores. And then went on to college at City University of New York Queens College and had the very good privilege and distinction of studying with about five of the great giant composers of the 20th century. Unfortunately, no longer with us today as we are in the 21st century. Learned a very solid and rigorous background of traditional Great Western compositional techniques. That forms the basis of all of my work for many decades since then in whatever style I choose to write. Whether it’s classical, symphonic, popular, or commercial, new age, as we're going to be talking about shortly in this interview medium than any other framework. So, I have a solid foundation of compositional technique which gives me the ability to build and create in whatever language or style is called for at the time. D.A.: That's great. Composing is definitely an art form. You have a new album on the way and I want to make sure I'm saying this right, although I'm not sure I am. Titled Perpetuum Immobile. What can you tell us about it? Steven: Well, it's Perpetuum Immobile. D.A.: Immobile. Steven: Yes, correct. That’s the title track of the album and the title of that track seemed to get a good sense of what the sound is and who is on that track for the listener. D.A.: So, what sort of mood were you trying to evoke with this music? Steven: Well, it wasn't really such a mood. I was actually… I gave a considerable amount of thought and preparation prior to the composition and then ultimately the production of this album to music in the 21st century, particularly for a larger commercial audience as what's going on in the last 15, 20 years and how I could approach a commercial genre with a sense of compositional integrity at the same time but not losing the audience to something that was too deep or too deeply entrenched in the classical or you know avant garde 20th century type of sound. The idea was consistent with my other works to approach and embrace a much wider audience than classical music generally is able to achieve, which is declining. The audience is declining, that's pretty well established. The idea was to take a classical set of contemporary techniques, actually a classical set of techniques, and apply that into a very, very appealing set of compositional styles that people can really relate to and enjoy without getting lost. Not too challenging but just enough so that it bears repeated listenings. That's the key. You want to be able to write music that is not only here for today but will be here tomorrow, where each time the listener presses the play button for one or more of the tracks on the album, hears something new that they hadn't heard or focused on before. That's the key to writing great music in the classical vein or the jazz vein or any other vein. So that you could hear it again and derive some additional sense of joy that maybe they didn't get some of the other times. D.A.: Yeah. I think that's great because I think a lot of the music that I've come to love certainly has layers and depth to it that I wouldn't have noticed the first time around. And there's yeah, there's many albums like that that I definitely have an appreciation for. I think you describe this kind of as New Age chamber music. So, what is that? Steven: That's a very interesting question. A lot of the new age music by definition and the way that music is structured and laid out for the listener has quite a bit of space in it. Whether you’re dealing with music, let's say by Arvo Pärt, which has a great amount of repetition or some of the other contemporary artists like Einaudi, Max Richter, and the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. So, what I did was… And then a lot of the other New Age artists are heavily reliant on sound design and effects to do to this kind of ethereal, transcendent, universal feel, in a very slow-moving sound palette and environment. So, in order to go just a notch or two up in complexity but without losing the audience, one of the things that I decided to do in the planning of the music for this album is to start from the base level of actual live instruments. Live instruments of course are the environment that a lot of great classical music is written. And of course, chamber music, which gives that intimate sound. You want to be able to give an intimate sound even if it's on headsets or speakers. You want to be able to have that sense of human intimacy in music that's not just filled with kind of these ethereal type of sounds and sense and that sort of thing. The music in this album built from the bottom up where the musical ideas are fully formed and accessible. Purely and easily accessible to the listener and then add layers of some combination of instruments, contemporary instruments or traditional instruments whether its piano or a solo string instruments, and then add synths on top. So, really, what I've developed here is the first subset of New Age music, which I call New Age chamber music. Now, if you go to the internet and type in New Age chamber music on Google search, you're not going to find anything, so that means I’m the first and successful. If I’m not successful you'll never find another one again. But you know that being said, the idea was really to create an album using contemporary sounds and sound designs in a way that maybe Mozart would have done if he were alive today. A lot of his music is great sounds and great tunes and melodies. Almost sounded like music that was written for a child. They're very, very simple and elegant but deceptively simple because the melodies and the musical structure is actually quite dense and complex in Mozart but it doesn't really sound that way or feel that way to the listener. They don't have to know how to play this but they have to experience it so I approach this album pretty much the same way at that level to get a sense of great appeal but also wrapped in intimacy and the use of synths and other electronic sound design techniques and samples that would add color but not become the foundation. Because if all you have is sound design, it’s sort of like having a cake, which is one inch of cake and six inches of cream with sugar. If all you have is the icing and that sugary type stuff on the top and all you have of cake is at the bottom, you're not going to really eat that cake. You’re not going to eat very much of it and you're not really going to go back for more. But you know in a chamber music environment, if you have the intimate sound of music that is accessible and has the human touch and add to that in a very tasteful way, hopefully done tastefully, the contemporary sounds of the synths and other production techniques that I think which I have is something new that again bears repeated listenings by the listeners and hopefully the desire to hear more in future albums. D.A.: Yeah. I think creating that type of music is perhaps more challenging just from a practical standpoint. I would imagine it takes a little more time for musicians to prepare and to have the piece the way you want it as well as the fact that it could be more expensive to have real instruments as a baseline. Steven: Actually not. You would think that. Well, first of all, when it comes to writing music that is a little bit more higher level but not too higher level, so as to turn off a broader audience... But what that also does is severely limit the number of composers, other composers in the world that could approach this new genre, the genre of New Age Chamber, Music which is what we’re calling it here, and make a good faith effort to compose their own version of it. Because you can't really do it unless you have a solid compositional background. Without a foundation, it's going to be very, very hard to do. You could write sort of sounds that kind of dance around it and so on but if you don't have a solid foundation, there's only a few percentage appointments of composers in the world that can write out of the bo,x which is the use of these DAWs electronic MIDI and sample configurations. Most of them really can't write music at this level, unfortunately. So, it's a much more limited market.