Huffington Magazine Issue 26 | Page 84

Exit KARL WALTER/GETTY IMAGES 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.