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Samn Johnson
680 Plays2 months ago
Samn Johnson (he/they, b. 1991) is a composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and historical linguist. Their work often harnesses research on acoustics and historical phonology to set texts in ancient languages like Latin, Old English, Hittite, and Gothic. Samn has written for a range of performers including Chromic Duo, Righteous GIRLS, JACK Quartet, and harpsichordist Nathan Mondry. His latest work is the song cycle Consolation, setting Latin poetry from Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy for vocalist Tis Kaoru Zamler-Carhart. It is out on innova Recordings, June 28, 2024. The two preceding recordings, both self-released, are Ageless Sea (2022), for chamber choir, chamber orchestra, electronics, and rock band, and First Book for Piano (2022), performing his own piano works.
Samn is also half of the synth pop duo Acraea, together with Leora Mandel. Samn holds degrees in composition from the University of Michigan and NYU, studied composition at the Interlochen Arts Academy, and has taken courses in Indo-European historical linguistics at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:57
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you
00:01:04
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Save my wounds, to the beat of solstice,
00:03:18
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it.
Exploring 'Consolation' by Sam Johnson
00:03:34
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a
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a
00:03:58
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Hey everybody, this is Ken Vellante with the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast and I have ah ah quite a fascinating episode here with Sam Johnson. and about ah an album, a song cycle, ah called Consolation, and a really strong connection, of course, to um philosophy. Consolation is a song cycle composed by Sam Johnson for vocalist Tiz Kearu Zamla Karhart, setting Latin poetry from Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. It features layers of Tiz's voice, accompanied by Sam's electronics and instrumental recordings.
00:04:40
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Boethius wrote the consolation in 524 AD while awaiting execution after his political downfall. He is visited in prison by the feminine allegorical character of philosophy. Through their imagined dialogue, it is apparent that both characters are, in fact, himself both male and female, both free and captive, facing his own questions about his life choices, money, fame, power. Did they make him happy?
00:05:10
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Consolation the album has been described by composer and music critic Alex Temple as wildly poly-stylistic. The Satan can perhaps be said of Boethus' original. It is a mix of poetry and prose carried but by ancient readers along in the visceral flow of Latin meter, careening between intellectual elegance and sheer terror.
00:05:32
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Sam's music cues closely to the maelstrom of Boethius's emotions, but renders it with different devices. Tis' voice, the backbone of the album, has pushed the virtuosic limits of range and timbre, spanning over four octaves with an astonishing array of colors and tuning systems.
00:05:53
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Sam Johnson, welcome to Something Rather Than Nothing podcast. And so pleased to have Jan. Thank you very much, Ken. I am thrilled to be here. Thank you.
00:06:05
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i yeah I really enjoy the opportunity to to to talk to you and and end um ah having listened to Consolation. um I listen to ah a lot of a variety of music and there's a strong connection in my head because when I was listening to Consolation and how it sounded, it seemed so new, I didn't feel like I was trying to look for my grounding, what's this sound like, which my head does. And um ah just a quick background, um ah Liz Kiger, who introduced me to ah you to your music ah with a strong recommendation. And I remember talking to Liz, and they just had a
00:06:51
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Just an incredible intelligence. And I just learned really quickly about the Baroque and some of the filming of Orfeo. And I know you've worked with ah Liz as well.
Collaborations and Musical Influences
00:07:04
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So it was a great connection, reconnection for me that brought me to you. But can you tell us a little bit about your work with Liz? Yeah, sure. So Liz is a very close friend.
00:07:17
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um and I think one of the things that we have in common is this interest in historical music and bringing music history to life in our and various ways that are sort of modernizing or updating it to make it a little bit more viscer visceral and immediately accessible to audiences. And so for them, a lot of this is creating these um very aesthetically put together cinematic opera
00:07:49
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performances. um And I think the way that I go about approaching a sort of maybe scratching a similar sort of edge or this desire to take this historical material and kind of re synthesize it in some way, for me it is, ah is not literally using the exact music from the past. um But nonetheless,
00:08:08
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calling a lot on devices from historical music and from different periods of music history and um bringing them into my own composition of vocabulary. But yeah, one of the things that I do in addition to my composing is audio engineering. And so with Liz, I've done some work engineering ah multiple of their opera productions, including the Orfeo production that you had them on to talk about.
00:08:34
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so Yeah, I really enjoy um working on these sorts of early music projects alongside the kind of more contemporary ah music projects that I work on. Early music's a big influence for me across the board, so it's cool to have my hands on the knobs working on those recordings this month.
00:08:56
Speaker
Yeah. i Oh, man. I just just just listen and ah just listen to that. you know One of the analogies I had just in my head to understand kind of like a different period, I've always had a big literature. I study tons of literature throughout my life. but And for me, it's that kind of like you know old English, middle English, almost worlds of words.
00:09:23
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um And like for me, that's how I'm transported with, you know, a deep appreciation for music, but sometimes lacking the vocabulary in having that world, but then hearing it through your sounds and how you create it, the modern piece of it.
00:09:43
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Can you talk about that old that that old world or that world and what you're putting together right now, 2024? Yeah, sure. Well, it's kind of a complicated question and I come in from a lot of different angles, so I think it's worth just mentioning at yeah that you know you're mentioning Old English and Middle English is exciting for me because I'm um i read but I read both of those languages and I'm involved in a lot of historical linguistic stuff and um Old Germanic languages are one of the things that I have the most knowledge of. So um I think really a lot of it comes down to this just personal synthesis of things that I find engaging and I'm so interested in literature from these time periods and kind of trying to imagine these
00:10:28
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these worlds that existed once and influence ours, but we can't quite get direct access to any more than how linear time works. um And so I've always liked just taking things that that are exciting to me and somehow synthesizing them into my creative projects. um And so I think part of it is just simply that I love these old languages. um Latin is also what by languages I read, and that's the yeah um yeah all the poetry on this project. I just love that poetry so much um that I can't help but want to bring it to life musically in some way. um So that's one answer. i just let I just like that stuff and I think it's neat. And it's particularly the poetry is so musical to start with that it really just like invites itself to be adapted to music. oh Another element too I think is a larger more aesthetic thing where I think a lot of the
00:11:24
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Sensibility that I try to express in my work relates to a little bit of what you might call like a meditation on impermanence, this feeling of things all going by and that being a bit terrifying, but also there being an element of this that aye is very powerful to come to some type of peace and resolution with, which is a lot of what Boethius is dealing with. There's no work, anything that's part of the book. The Consolation of Philosophy has spoken to me so much.
Philosophy and Art in Sam's Music
00:12:00
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So it's also just very congruent with this sort of, I often call it like a kaleidoscoping of time, where I'm trying to, music is such a time-based art form, and I like having this kind of micro-macrocosmos layering active at once, where there's like that you're aware of the time passing within the music itself over the hour that you listen to the album, but that also kind of kaleidoscopes out into the centuries that the album is drawing on. And you're also aware of that time having passed as well. So there's this aesthetic effect that I'm looking to create ah by drawing on that material as well.
00:12:42
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Yeah, I could hear. And then the listening experience, there's a couple of times I'm like, this this is like cutting edge metal right here. Like, what yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm listening to a in a thrilling way. Yeah, no, I mean, so I mean, again, some of this is just like I'm saying, I just ah artistic creation has all of.
00:13:02
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a lot of a lot of the role that it plays in my life is this sort of like amalgamating and refiltering things that I'm interested in. So it's like, yeah, I like some metal music. So okay, that seems appropriate. I'll put that in. But also in this and this project in particular, it gets really, ah it's the most extreme ah that I've gotten in my work so far in terms of this sort of multi-genre approach.
00:13:27
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A lot of it is from the text itself. It's just got such a wide emotional breadth of what we see as experiencing this sheer terror at his impending execution, this you know wailing against fate for the unfairness of the whole situation.
00:13:43
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to these moments of really sublime transcendence and all of that's just in the text. And so part of actually what drew me to set it was that range that I tend to be a little bit more drawn to making music. It's kind of sedate and slow. And some of these texts is like they are so angry and visceral and violent. i'm like i angry Like sedate and slow isn't going to cut it. So I want to set something that pushes me to draw on that but much more aggressive variety of music when the text... yeah And you can all be amongst the sentries too. that That helps me understand.
00:14:17
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helps me understand it. Thanks. Yeah, good. Yeah, a lot. And this is voice, right? Yeah, their voice is also extremely diverse, too, and appropriate for this sort of thing. They have this huge range, which is very virtuosic. And they also have a lot of training in or experience as well with medieval music in particular. So there's this element of historical early music sort of stuff in their way that they approach vocal performance. um And on top of that, ah they know Latin very well and are also very well versed in ancient languages and just linguistic stuff. So you know it was really fun to work on it with them because like they I did not have to coach them on the pronunciation.
00:15:06
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Wow. I mean, I love the combination. and For me, it's combinations of words, sounds ah in and language. One of the one of pieces I told this ah told this bit a couple of times on the podcast in the past, but I was studying literature under or undergraduate at the unit University of Rhode Island. And I had this professor and I was studying everything literature. It almost didn't matter. Like it was like throw it at me. Like my head is like hungry to know it all. I was young.
00:15:36
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And um he ah taught both old English ah poetry course, so it was under you know under the under the ah kind of rubric of thinking of like poetry. Same thing with the middle English. And it got deep into the text and got deep into the sound. But the part that always threw me, and I think you you might have a sensitivity towards this, was I had never had a ah professor or somebody talk to me about poetry and say, like, just listen to it. Like, it's almost like the meaning was, don't worry about it. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Like, just because the story was there and he he would he would deliver. He would deliver these readings of a poem from the 11th century. And I kind of walk out and I'd be like,
00:16:32
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I understood something, you know, like I had this kind of like time travel. I'm like, I don't know what just happened. Like I'm early 90s for me. I'm going to go watch, you know, the TV. Like, I don't know what the heck just happened. But I had that experience. Sound, right? Sound, voice. Yeah.
00:16:53
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It does something to you, and I think this is something that modern readers really lose out on, is that um i don't I think a lot of people don't quite understand, maybe it's projection, but I didn't understand this for a long time, that the practice of silently reading in your head is a relatively modern phenomenon. People in the past used to always read aloud.
00:17:12
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And so all of this poetry is, I mean, that that like I view poetry and music on like a spectrum. I don't see a strong divider between them, particularly um poetry in this tradition that the Latin poetry I'm setting is, which involves these very um specific meters. So it has rhythm, you know, yeah in some ways it's more analogous to like ah yeah like almost like rap or something,
Art's Role in Society and Personal Identity
00:17:40
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where it's it's it's you're not necessarily delivering them with specific pitches, although you could, but the the rhythmic delivery of the poetry is really key to how it was experienced.
00:17:54
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um and so Yeah, if you're just sitting there, you know, even if you're reading it in Latin, if you're reading it quietly in your head, even if you understand Latin perfectly, like you're still kind of not getting it, it's almost better to hear it out loud and not understand it and actually experience it as this oral musical phenomenon.
00:18:14
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right like the sound because the the m the emphasis right you had to remember or you want to be impacted by the uh you know the peril like here's the peril we're explaining yeah you know with the voice and uh There's such an adventure in that and I'm glad I had that experience because you need somebody from the outside A lot of times to tell your to suggest that your brain should do the opposite how it's done by itself You know, yeah and be like don't get caught up caught up. Mr. Thinker, you know right now and like and all that like experience the
00:18:53
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yeah oh yeah yeah right like I think a lot of the kind of, you know, whatever way that poetry is often taught, i ah at least in recent times, the way it was sort of presented to me in high school, and I talked to people in the few generations preceding mine, and it seems like they had a similar experience, involves like, you got to decode what the poem means. And it's all symbolism, and it's all metaphor, and you have to like come up with some interpretation and unravel it. and it I think that's a horrible way to engage with poetry, honestly. It's it's just it totally cuts you off from it and it makes it seem like it's some alien thing that you're outside of. You can't understand unless you think about it a lot. Very conceptual. Right. That's not how it's, you know, do you think like people sitting around listening to the Iliad at social gatherings was like trying to decode it like they were enjoying hearing these stories about the Trojan War and yeah being impressed by the poet's skill in delivering them.
00:19:50
Speaker
They weren't like, um well, the armor is a metaphor for something like, you know, they're experiencing rock andnew experiencing their rock and roll. I went to the, I went to the show. I gotta ask you, I'm gonna ask you a couple of big, uh,
00:20:08
Speaker
philosophy questions also, you know questions about you too is One of the I the Identity questions I asked is seeing yourself as a philosopher um as ah as as as an artist um I say philosophy we're talking so much philosophy, but sure in general i ask but um ah When did when did you see yourself you know, as an artist, a creator, yeah a lot of ah philosopher, like I said. So I'm not sure I would call myself a philosopher. um it You know, maybe some days I am, some days I'm not, you know, I don't know. um with With art, ah
00:20:49
Speaker
I can't pinpoint exactly when. I definitely see artistry as a sort of mode of being and way of engaging with the world. And I think I can see roots of it pretty early on in my life. And a lot of it involves this um this drive to like assimilate information and turn it into new stuff.
00:21:10
Speaker
I loved Star Wars as a kid. I still quite like Star Wars. And I was also really into Legos. And I would like kind of create these Lego worlds that were like Star Wars fan fiction. I would take characters from Star Wars stuff and try to amalgamate them into my own Lego designs and things like that. So I think that's, I see the artistic impulse in that type of behavior.
00:21:34
Speaker
of And then, you know, as I got more and more interested in music, it's like I'm just going to keep doing the same thing I was doing with my Legos, which is taking stuff that I already like and am interested in and trying to find ways to reverse engineer it, represent it myself. um And so a lot of that for me was yeah Well, I mean, I started out playing like rock music. um And my friends and I were trying to make bands and stuff in middle school. And I was very quickly drawn into being like, oh, these Green Day songs are cool. Why? What are these things made out of? like you know So I would kind of try to reverse engineer the stuff. And then sort of pivoting through an interest in like soundtrack music and video game music, I got exposed to ah more classical music.
00:22:20
Speaker
particularly um I was really grabbed by a lot of 20th century music. And so OK, I thought that was cool. And then I just kept doing what I'd been doing with other music I like, which is try to figure out how it works and reverse engineer it and start making stuff like it. So for me, that's a lot of what artistry means for me personally. And i I'm not interested in like an objective definition of it. It can mean something totally different for somebody else. But for me, I think I've always had some some of this impulse to kind of take experiences, refract them through my own consciousness and
00:22:54
Speaker
turn them into something else that kind of amalgamates them together. Yeah, yeah ah yeah yeah thank you for your for for your thoughts for your thoughts on that. What about the role of art? like I mean, we've talked a bit about it like through the through our discussions and so forth. But formally, like the role of art, is it supposed to be is supposed to be you know doing something in particular?
The Creative Process and Existential Themes
00:23:21
Speaker
you know what what's What's the role of art? you know yeah We're talking here September 2024. What do you think?
00:23:27
Speaker
Yeah, okay, so right now, um I still struggle to give an across-the-board answer because I think it could be difficult, but I guess in some ways I would just say ah the most general sense is something that kind of enriches the texture of daily experience, something that makes you makes somebody who's experiencing it ah experience of the world somehow more vivid and engaged. um And it can do that through a number of ways. A lot of it is social. I think in some ways art functions very similarly socially to how religion functions, which and i I don't have a negative view of religion writ large. I think it can be a you know people getting into ritual settings and experiencing emotions together um can can be a very positive thing.
00:24:19
Speaker
with a lot of caveats, but it it that can be ah a very transformative sort of group of experience. And I think art provides something like that. And it's not a coincidence that art and religious behavior, again, you know writ large, any type of ritual social behavior, um so often involves singing songs together, moving in coordinated ways. And so I think part of how it enriches our daily experience of the world is by fostering connection with each other, um helping us see connections between things that we otherwise wouldn't have or so even just experience ah our feelings more vividly and get excited at or experience off.
00:25:01
Speaker
you know, help process negative emotions or whatever. It can it can be all sorts of things for for people. But I think all of them involve somehow taking something that's a bit different than just the day in, day out experience that we normally have and somehow kind of focusing it into this emotionally enriching of event.
00:25:22
Speaker
And it makes a lot of sense to me. And in a lot of it has to do with it's like the ah different angle or different, you know, mixing things up or looking a different way um that I think is common to like creativity and and new things. Yeah, and in in the ah chat speaking of listeners, I'm chatting with Sam Johnson, and their great work, Consolation, which you can find, I yeah listened and on YouTube, and but we'll we'll talk about some places in a moment.
00:26:05
Speaker
or where else you can find it, but ah I just wanted to recommend to everybody who's listening to the show um ah just ah a wonderful experience and a new experience as ah as a listener for me. um And like I said, it seemed to go from what we've talked about, seeing the kind of, you know, older music, older sounds, older, ah you know, ah voice.
00:26:30
Speaker
and all the way to kind of this metal edge to it and just the experience and, you know, that emotion. in in in And so I'm a big fan of it. Thank you so much. Yeah. Yeah. So tell us, ah just sort of make sure we get it in here since I was chatting about it. Where do folks find, I saw Sosora and I'm being camping, there's some beautiful compilations. I was wondering if you could mention these and such.
00:26:58
Speaker
so it's i mean It's on like pretty much every major streaming service, so you can listen there. and Then on Bandcamp, there's a number of offerings. um You can buy a CD there if you are you know living in the ain't old in times like our author Boethius and have a city player. But there's also a ah paperback poetry book that I created, which was a huge part of this project for me, actually. Also, I'm sort of a yeah hobbyist translator, although I guess I'm now a published translator, although it is self published.
00:27:31
Speaker
um But ah I created translations in English of all of the poetry that I set. And so you can buy this ah poetry book that has the Latin original set alongside my English translation, on little notes on each poem. It's kind of like a souped up liner notes. But because there's such a key literary part of this thing, I had the idea at some point that like this is spilling well beyond what I could really fit in liner notes in the way that I want to present it.
00:28:01
Speaker
So I was very satisfying to me. Dealing with that text as has just been um enormously meaningful to visit and revisit. and The problem was i um my ideas about how to translate stuff change over time. So even if I published it, there was one thing that I noticed that was like just a mistake. There's other things where I'm like, oh, I could actually phrase it differently or whatever. That's part of the fun of creating, you know, maybe I'll make a second edition sometime.
00:28:27
Speaker
But that's a bit all that was a bit of an excursion. But yes, there's that you can buy this book in the CD on Bandcamp. You and you can stream it just about anywhere else. Yeah, well, and the thing you mentioned there on the bandcamp, and thanks for mentioning more about that, because I noticed the the at least the explanation of of of the booklet and part of it, and I was thinking, wow, that's this a nice way to pull together, because and the with physical media, I think of like CDs at times, some of those booklets were like discreet,
00:29:00
Speaker
art objects or the photography like lyrics and photography and layout and graphic design. and so Yeah, I love that sort of thing. Yeah, and and so that that option is is great. So yeah, check out um check that out on ah Bandcamp. And again, ah talking about consolation. I wanted to ask you a ah the big question of the show as well to make sure we ah actually ah address it. We're talking Boethius, consolation of philosophy, ah you know, all this other stuff. but
00:29:35
Speaker
The titular question, ah why is there something rather than nothing? Yeah, so my short answer is I have no idea. I don't think it's possible to know. ah I believe this would have said because um everything sort of sprang into being from the mind of God.
00:29:55
Speaker
That's a nice answer. I like that answer. It's a fun answer to think about, but that's beyond me to prove any of that. um ah So I don't know, I feel like it's kind of one of those questions that you get more out of thinking about the question than in trying to answer it, at least for me. You know, for me, anytime I deal with this question, and and you know, sometimes, at least for me, I'm just, it does pop into my head sometimes. There's something kind of surreal about how much stuff there is in the world. I think it's something that has amazed people as long as we have any record of it. And that's why we have all of these different origin mythologies and things. It really captivates people. where like All this stuff is so complicated and rich and varied and how did it all come to exist? And just trying to hold that thought in your head.
00:30:45
Speaker
yeah um is such an enriching thing that kind of takes you someplace transcendent. So I would say, you know, I don't know if I can answer that question, but I really like it. And I think um it's just leading you to be amazed at the fact that any of these things exist and that any of us exist at all or any any of these things.
00:31:13
Speaker
um To me, what it about is a power as I was talking about art taking you kind of out of the everyday lived experience. bre I think this is a question that does that as well. you know There's so much we just take for granted in our daily operational understanding of the world. It's kind of like if you try to become like aware of your own breathing or something you do unconsciously, you realize like, wow, there's all this really complicated stuff my body's doing. And then if you think, OK,
00:31:44
Speaker
This universe exists and it's got all this stuff at it Wow, that's even more amazing Sometimes we notice all the things that aren't working and been like sometimes when you notice these systems include our own like body system be like hu they Always work we know the permanence there. i'm not um Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, then that's one of those where um, yeah, I was I was doing um a translation. I'm not translating the whole thing, but I really liked a paragraph from the Zeybald novel, The Rings of Saturn, which is a German novel from the 90s. And there was a passage I liked so much that I decided to translate it. And I don't remember off the top of my head exactly what it is, but one of them was like, this idea that like, like the the physician, he's talking about some like,
00:32:38
Speaker
whatever, like Renaissance era painting of like people doing like a dissection. A lot of it is like also chewing on all this historical material. And he's like the physician who sees like all these illnesses in the body, like is like to hit to him, it's amazing that the body can hold together even for a day. You know, that there's a sense of like, seeing how intricate it is, trying to figure out how it works, just makes it like,
00:33:04
Speaker
I can't believe this thing works at all. um And I think if you want to do the kind of micro macrocosm thing, the the the whole external working of reality or like that too, you see how complicated it all fits together. It's no wonder that people have come up with all of these mystical and philosophical systems to try to Explain these correspondences in reality so much unexplainable that like you're you're you're left trying that you know, I think arts a lot of times connected to that and particularly when people talk about like a language right and in terms of ah using language or art as as the language you're saying hey like this is reality, but I don't know where it fits in that's reality, you know, and and try to try to throw something and Yeah, no, it's uh, oh just really great to chat and I and I like the kind of the ethos the answer around the ah Something rather than nothing because for me like For me there are like a lot of questions commonly that we want answers to like in a practical sense and then when I studied philosophy when I first started studying philosophy a long time ago and like doing this show I think that
00:34:14
Speaker
you know it's like philosophy is like jokes or something it's like a disruptive thing it's like it it seemed curious to me like in doing all these episodes and it's like why is there something rather than nothing there's no way there's no way the way I view the question that I'm Like I'm closer to a great aggregate understanding of it, but it's a possible question from the get-go. So it's like the setup, the setup is absurd to start with. Right. Yeah. And I love that. oh Yeah. You know, and I think something.
00:34:50
Speaker
Something that I've always kind of that I've maybe not always I think when I was like a lot younger I started reading some like philosophical literature when I was a teenager and I think at first I really wanted like to go here worldview and I tried a whole different going out worldviews out and then none of them like held up for his life and then the fact that they don't hold up became a big part of what I like about it actually that there's something that I enjoy about seeing these systems sort of push to their limit and failing. um And I see that in Boethius too, and that's actually part of what I like and find motivating about it. The first parts of the constellation kind of deal with like practical philosophy questions that are like pretty convincing and compelling about like why, you know, whatever, trying to be emperor and ruling the whole world like is not gonna make you happy, and there's always things that can go wrong, and you're actually gonna be way worse so off if you try to do that. Well, it's not a political question, right?
00:35:40
Speaker
Well, those are kind of practical philosophy. But as it goes on, it gets into some of these more abstract questions, particularly, ah you know, the problem of evil. If God is infinite and all-knowing and good and stuff, how can there be evil in the world? How can people still have free will if God knows everything that's going to happen and exists outside of time? ah Some of the answers that Boethius comes up with for these are kind of convoluted and don't quite convince me.
00:36:06
Speaker
But I like that because it's like he's running seeing that friction of like this brilliant mind who comes up with all this stuff that I really like and moves me seeing him kind of run up against these same questions that also stumped me. Yeah, i I don't know. There's something about that that I kind of that I kind of like and the acceptance that like.
00:36:27
Speaker
he couldn't, as much as he wanted to, he couldn't quite get that all to fit together. I think ironically that's actually part of the acceptance that I try to create it at the end of the album of this sort of you know dissolving back into the source or whatever there's this kind of mystical union that it goes towards but i think part of that is like letting go of the ego to the extent that like you can't as an individual actually figure out where these things come from yeah there's so many there's so many big ideas in there and i and i and i i really enjoy that i think of like
00:37:00
Speaker
ah You know of that letting go and like the questions of the ego a lot of ah philosophy I studied Eastern philosophy, but the big questions around whatever your approach is Philosophy, I think it's fun to have ah conversations around the big question being like yeah, we're talking like art and creativity as well because like I one of the thing that fascinates me about art is just like it seems like there's very distinct distinct prominent aspects of our lives that seem to be like near common experiences and they're like kind of magical or mystical and I think we yeah you end up talking about religion or you end up talking about a system or a system that seems to work and being you know of of of liking that or
00:37:46
Speaker
what it is that you what it is that you you know move your mind towards ah in it. And it's just, I think that the process is ah therapeutic and helpful. and Yeah, I do also, so yeah. I think it is one of these things where I find um the process of like engaging with philosophical ideas much more useful in some ways than like actually arriving at the conclusions and sorting them all out.
00:38:15
Speaker
I don't know, this may be kind of a postmodern way to look at it. I don't think Boethius would have endorsed that position at all. ah You know, that's okay. yeah I'm not Boethius and it's 1500 years later. I think he was really after like, we're going to sort out
Boethius' Influence and Setting Latin Poetry to Music
00:38:28
Speaker
absolutely. Yeah, I got to figure this out.
00:38:32
Speaker
yeah like yeah now the pressing of time, right? Facing death. Hey, um ah a couple tidbits going out here. One is, I'm a Boethius, it was great that you you dropped into talking a little bit more about Boethius and the the the backdrop um for this, but Would you, would you mind just talking a little bit about, um, you know, the text itself? I mean, you talked about the translation, but like the text itself, the conditions under which it was written and just, you know, your general appreciation of it for folks who might not be as ah familiar with it. Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I mean, who, okay, let's see how much time do we have? Cause I could talk about that for like three hours, but I'll try to keep it, uh,
00:39:20
Speaker
focused on the central points. So Boethius lived um around this time period that we call the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. um
00:39:32
Speaker
you know This this ah happens towards the end of the 400s. There are these people called the Goths, which is really a cool name. And they are like Germanic, quote unquote, barbarians. you know They're not Romans. And ah they essentially, ah after some back and forth of the Romans, end up ah taking over Italy as well, and that's what we call the end of the Roman Empire in the West at least. Now, ah they basically just set up shop in the old Roman institutions and they preserve the Senate
00:40:03
Speaker
and all kinds of Roman stuff is still around. So I think part of why I'm saying like the so-called collapse of the Roman Empire, somebody who lived through it might not necessarily see it as as big of a deal as we do. um A lot of the kind of basic infrastructure of their life would have remained the same.
00:40:21
Speaker
And Boethius is born like right as this is happening, and ah he is part of the ancient Roman era aristocracy. So he's one of these people who basically gets you know put into the Gothic administration.
00:40:38
Speaker
And he ends up, he's a very successful politician, basically collaborating with this new regime that's now running the place. um And he becomes something that is essentially equivalent to like a prime minister.
00:40:52
Speaker
um And being a Roman nobleman, he has a lot of access to education and learning and stuff. So in addition to being a politician, he's trained in all kinds of Greek, Latin literature, philosophy. He actually has writings that survive on all kinds of topics. He has theological stuff. He has ah he has a treatise on music. He has involve mathematics and all sorts of stuff.
00:41:16
Speaker
Yeah, he says he's one of these big polymaths who's kind of got, I've heard people sometimes say stuff like, you know, it's always hyperbolic when people say things like this, but like, he was like, one of the last people who knew everything that it was possible to know in his time. after that Like learning became too broad and specialized. sure So um that's kind of the type of guy he was, but being ah the Prime Minister in the Austro-Gothic regime is a dangerous job. And it turns out some of his political opponents accuse him of essentially collaborating with the what we would call the Byzantines, the Eastern Roman and Emperor, and ah to restore the the
00:41:56
Speaker
Roman Empire in Italy as well. We don't really know if he was actually doing that or not, or what the deal was. He says he wasn't, but like of course he would. um And that's enough to execute him. For some reason, they decide to let him be under a house arrest for about a year. And he uses this time very well to create this enduring classic called the Consolation of Philosophy. And it's basically him trying to deal with the fact that he is about to be executed by the gods.
00:42:25
Speaker
and um This character, just called philosophy, shows up and kind of walks him through all of this stuff. so Like a lot of ancient philosophy, ah the genre is often carried out in these dialogues.
00:42:40
Speaker
you know like Plato has these dialogues, he's talking to people and stuff and it's very much in that tradition but the characters in the dialogue are Boethius himself as like a self-insert first person character who's actually in prison in the story and then philosophy who's this allegorical character who's showing up in prison to help him deal with his situation so they you know they talk through all kinds of stuff a lot of it is about how the sort of pursuit of high honor and wealth and all these things that he also experienced himself as a nobleman and politician. So really is not all it's cracked up to be. And maybe if I would have lived a life of like quiet philosophical speculation instead of trying to become the prime minister, I wouldn't have ended up in this dang prison. yeah So part of what I like about it is that he speaks from experience on these things. It's not like hypothetical for him. He's like, no, listen, I tried it. it's It's not good. if You don't want that stuff.
00:43:34
Speaker
um And you know then he gets into more abstract sort of stuff. like I mean, his whole solution to everything is that like God is supremely good and outside of everything and basically has it all in control. And even if stuff seems like topsy turvy and bad down here and the kind of big picture view of God's mind is actually all fine. um That's kind of his ultimate solution that he comes to. Whether you accept that solution or not, there's all kinds of great tidbits along the way. And like yeah somebody struggle with those questions in such a visceral and immediate way.
00:44:07
Speaker
is really moving. um The last thing I'll say about it is along the way most of it is just prose dialoguing it back and forth and they're talking and she's like doing philosophical arguments on him and he's like hmm gee I guess you're right but what about this? But um she also has all of these poems. It's mostly philosophy that delivers these poems and they are really impressive. They cover a huge variety of different Latin meters. Boethi's in some ways kind of showing off. He has all of these different metrical forms memorized. So the the poems themselves are this huge compendium that reference all this earlier poetry. um And so that's the stuff that I set. I took those poems. I didn't set all of them. I sort of picked ones that I thought were most interesting to me and contained key ideas that were sort of checkpoints along the journey of the of the piece.
00:45:00
Speaker
Then I just set the latin text to music and that's how I turn oh yeah my album. No, thank you for thank you for that background and and and talking. of that as as well. i yeah you know my yeah My background in Boethius is quite limited. I would say though, I did study for my master's in philosophy at Marquette University and I was around a bunch, of I had to be like a large theology department and large philosophy department.
00:45:35
Speaker
And just in the circles I was in, Boethius could be passing conversation for a couple of years. yeah People like that in theology world, yeah. Which is a wonderful which is a wonderful environment but for for maybe yeah myself. in yourself.
00:45:54
Speaker
um i right Well, ah ah in taking us out here, I wanted to make sure folks oh find you and also some of the, I think ah maybe with um ah your website, I know there's access to um or your earlier works, ah some of the other things that you do, but if you could just make sure folks can bump into you in those ways. Yeah, absolutely. So im I'm fairly active on social media, particularly on Instagram and TikTok. I have accounts. I'm not like posting a every day or something, but I do tend to share a lot of stuff about my work that I have in progress, as well as I'm often
00:46:37
Speaker
kind of going back and continuing to curate and talk about all my past work. I very much don't believe in just limiting things to promotional cycles. So sometimes I will be posting about like, hey, here's my string quartet that I wrote 10 years ago, that sort of stuff.
00:46:50
Speaker
um And yes, like you said, I also have a lot of that work on my website. um I have scores. A lot of my my more conventionally notated classical works for chamber music and choral music and things like that um are available there. Some of them are in an online store. Other ones you'd have to email me for. But yeah, if you you have a string quartet or require anything and you think this just sounds cool, you can go to my website and get ahold of me, it will hit you a score.
00:47:19
Speaker
Um, yeah, uh, I do, I have a little bit of work on YouTube. Um, I'm looking to grow there. I also make some educational content, mostly about musical stuff. So I'm looking to, um, I'll probably be continuing to expand some of that more. Uh, and yeah, so that that's, I think that kind of covers where my, where my stuff is.
00:47:41
Speaker
Yeah, well I i really appreciate um ah really appreciate finding your other the work in those places and I know there's there's there's just like a lot of great material and even thinking about the CD that you chatted about with the insert, it's like the the whole art piece thinking about in terms of print and translation and and like yeah sound and music. So I'd love to the opportunity to to chat about all yeah you all those things. And a big shout out to Liz Kiger for the great recommendation. A mutual connection there. And um ah Sam, you know thanks so much for for really um
00:48:28
Speaker
ah you know going into the episode I was thinking about a lot of things at once you know what I mean like thinking about all the different topics in the history and the music or I mean could have talked for an hour I could be asking some questions like, you know, in in in this in this part of the ah whole movement, you know, on consolation, what you're doing here, like in the technical, you know, just trying to understand it all. But yeah,
00:49:00
Speaker
yeah be able to talk. I've just really appreciated being able to, you know, really learn a lot from you as well. I so appreciate you giving me the space to to talk about this stuff.
00:49:11
Speaker
You know what, I just want to say it's been really great ah to have the the room to talk about kind of all Hankyism, my role as a composer, but I would be remiss to not emphasize that Tis, my collaborator on this, is just a huge part of the whole thing. And this would not exist without their voice. This this music is written so specifically for them. um And they are just the ideal person to to realize it. and that you know what what they can do vocally as well as just the devotion they put into really learning all these texts and doing these very demanding things is just incredible and really worth checking out just just for that part of it. It's a really incredible performance.
Accessing the Music and Final Thoughts
00:49:55
Speaker
And just in just in you know learning more about you and following Tis's other extensive,
00:50:05
Speaker
Yeah, they're involved in like every art area. They are incredibly impressive visual artists. They have a lot of fiction that they've written. They're a fantasy. Also, so yeah, have photography. yeah it was noah theyre they're they there Yeah, they really are amazing. yeah they are yeah they're They're one of my closest friends also. and You know, i I really enjoy talking to them. It was a really interesting conversation. It was great. Yeah, really, folks check into the art, both Sam and Tess, and, you know, in particular with the with music constellation. And yeah, thanks, Sam, for coming on to something rather than nothing. It's been a great joy. Absolutely. So happy to be here. Thanks a lot. All right. Take care. Take care.
00:51:32
Speaker
Not!
00:52:28
Speaker
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00:53:20
Speaker
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