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those things really didn’t translate
to piano transcription.
Since I haven’t seen the notation of the
pieces, my mind’s been racing — are these
for particular ensembles or is it for piano
notation and people can go and orchestrate them on their own? I am just wondering what you’re looking forward to
being the interaction between the music
and your audience. I tried to make the
songs as simple as possible. I would
write something different for myself
than if I had the idea that someone
else was going to be able to play
these songs. I started to think about
these kinds of songs that were
MUSIC
songs in the American songbook
— you know, these perennial kinds
of songs that work in different eras
and remain classics. Not that I was
— it would be pretentious of me to
think that I’d be making a bunch of,
quote, classics.
When I think about one of those songs,
I think about how you’ll hear a standard
from the repertoire, and while it’s a standard — and maybe this is what you’re saying — it takes on a new life because it’s
almost like the composer deliberately left
it open and free. While the pitch is there
and the rhythm is there, it’s still devised
with a simplicity that makes it so open for
that individual style to be implanted into
it time and time again. Yeah, and it’s
funny, cause for every one of the
HUFFINGTON
12.09.12
Beck
performs
at the LA
Weekly
Detour Music
Festival in
October of
2006. His
most recent
album,
Modern Guilt,
came out in
2008.