(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I want to start a little bit at the beginning. Could you talk about your early relationship with percussion and what drew you to that particular form of expression?
Lisa Pegher: I always like to tell people when they ask me that question that percussion chose me. If I had to pinpoint how I got into it, somebody handed me a pair of sticks one day, and those sticks just ended up becoming part of me.
I don't even remember who it was—maybe a family friend at a party who handed the little kid a pair of sticks. But I felt as if I had already known how to use them, and I just started playing around. I think my first instance of performing was getting behind a drum set and playing.
As I got into it early on, I was naturally drawn to it. It wasn't necessarily an immediate "Oh, I think I'm going to be a drummer" when I was seven, but I was drawn to playing with the sticks all the time. I started playing wherever I could. Then eventually, when I got into grade school and was exposed to different types of instruments, the teacher saw that I had some talent and encouraged me toward playing percussion. Ever since then, I just started practicing a lot and knowing that was what I wanted to do.
Lawrence: Did you have a typical drum education? Did you start with the drum pad? Did you work on grip and all that stuff?
Lisa: Yes, I think I was fortunate in that I ended up getting a very good teacher who emphasized the importance of having really good technique. I think that can go two ways: you can either get in with a very good mentor when you're really young who teaches you the right way, or you can get in with a mentor who teaches you the wrong way and develop bad technique.
I was fortunate enough to get in with one of the best teachers who had a long lineage of studying with great teachers in the area where I grew up. It was very much like The Karate Kid in that you had to pass one phase to get to the next. It was very disciplined practice, and the teacher taught all of his students the same way. It didn't matter who you were—you had to pass these different gates to get to the next phase.
That meant perfecting a specific technique before moving on. Once you got past one hurdle on a technique, it was, "Okay, now you can learn this type of drum music, like rope drumming, snare drum." I started out with the basics: this is your technique, this is your main instrument that you have to learn your technique from, and everything else expands from that. Once you got past that gate and your technique was down, we'd introduce another type of percussion instrument.
Then we'd talk about keyboard instruments after you'd already mastered snare drum, drum set, and the main core of percussion instruments. It was only once you passed the technique gate and gotten to a certain point with reading music that you could move into other types of percussion instruments.
It was very much an everyday practice type of teaching, which I'm very grateful for, versus some people who bounce from teacher to teacher and maybe pick up different techniques but don't really have anything solid to grab onto. That core teaching really lent itself to everything else in life. Looking back on it, I realize you could say that about anything you're learning: if you really focus on how to do the essence of the thing first, it can make everything else much easier.
It doesn't matter if you're becoming really good at baking bread or painting—all these different types of arts. It really comes down to getting that foundation solid, and if you can get past that discipline part, it eventually makes the rest of it easy.
Lawrence: How long did your formal training or formal studies last?
Lisa: I like to say that I'm a forever student—I never stop learning. There are always more things to learn. Also, what is formal? Formal might mean something as simple as when did you stop studying with a mentor.
Basically, whenever I got out of college, there was a transition phase where you're in college and you become the teacher. You start teaching other people, and there's just a natural transition that happens, I think. But as far as learning, I don't think that ever stops, and if it does, then I feel like it's time to learn something else.
Lawrence: At what point did you have the concept or realization or desire to bring percussion to the front of the stage and to reconceptualize the role of percussion in your own practice, your own performance, your own creativity?
Lisa: That's a really good question. Thanks for asking it. When I got into playing percussion, I grew up in a very rural, remote area and for better or worse, we didn't have exposure to a symphony orchestra when I was just starting out. I think my path may have been very different if we did, but who knows—fate is fate.
What ended up happening was I got into percussion, but I've always felt, from the first time that I started playing the drums, that they were like melodic instruments. It was just natural to me to hear and play drums that way. It was only when I got exposed to different types and genres of music that I realized there's the opposite of that, where people consider drums as just playing as loud and as fast as you can—that's how you're determined to be good or not.
But to me, I love melodies, singing, and expressiveness. When I got into playing drums, I was almost taken aback that everybody just assumed when I said that I played the drums that it was about how fast and loud you can play. I would rather compare myself to the violinist than to somebody who's just trying to see how fast and loud they can play.
When I started to realize that was really where I felt I could make an impact in percussion—really leaning into how I hear percussion—that's when I started to search for ways to actually do this. Luckily, I got into one of the youth symphonies in the area and started to realize, "Wow, there are soloists that play in front of the stage, these concertos and things, but most of them are violinists or pianists." Again, I was very drawn to that melodic sense of things.
I wondered why people don't hear percussion that way—why can't we have percussionists standing up there and playing all the percussion instruments beautifully and melodically in the same way that these other soloists are playing concertos? That's when I had the shift of thinking maybe this is somewhere where I could make an impact and start to bring percussion to the front of the stage. Very quickly, I realized that it was a very big task, a very big effort.
Lawrence: Because of lack of repertoire or lack of audience acceptance?
Lisa: Both. I mean, lack of repertoire, lack of areas where I could actually expose the repertoire that did exist. Most of the concerto competitions wouldn't even allow percussionists to join. I had to almost beg and plead for them to hear a percussionist. I had to get some of my piano friends to write transcriptions of these concertos, piano transcriptions so that I could take them to some of these concerto competitions early on. It was an uphill battle to even get presented in that way.
Within that time frame, it didn't matter to me because ignorance is bliss in a way. I just knew what I heard in my head and I knew what I wanted to do at that time, so I was just striving for my dreams and my goals. But then I also realized maybe there are other avenues for this as well. That's when I started to get into creating my own recital-type shows to take into places.
This almost happened naturally where I would come up with these themes of things in my head and start to consider how I could create a show around a specific type of theme. Oftentimes in my life, it just naturally evolves from wherever I am in my evolution of life. Artistically speaking, there's some theme going along that happens to be a good artistic palette that I end up creating some type of percussion show around that would embody that theme.
So there are kind of two angles to it. There's the more traditional angle where I really tried to lean into the solo realm of what percussion could be in front of the stage. And then there's the themed shows of how I could create these concepts based on a specific theme and bring like an entire fifty or sixty-minute percussion show into a smaller concert-type setting.
Lawrence: Okay, that is phenomenally helpful and I think sets the stage for some of the other things I want to talk about in a moment. But one last question along the developmental lines, if I can say it that way: Can you tell me a little bit about electricity, electronics, technology—when did that enter your practice?
Lisa: Again, it goes back to my evolution, in a way. I think that what I've noticed is that holding on to any one thing really can hold an artist back. What I started to realize pretty early on in the classical music industry was that I didn't feel as if that was the only place for me. In fact, I started to have a resistance towards it at one point where I thought I don't want to just do one thing.
It kind of goes back to the technique thing where once you have that solid technique, it would almost inhibit you to only use that in one realm. What I started to feel resistance to is that in classical music, what you're often doing is taking something that somebody made for you and trying to play that as perfectly as possible or as flawlessly as possible. Yes, putting your own stamp on it in a way, but in another sense, to me, it was holding back my own self-expression.
That's when I started to really reach out to find where my inner artist was and how I could get my own inner self-expression exposed and not feel like I'm just stuck trying to represent somebody else's thoughts and feelings. That's where I started to have that resistance in the classical music realm. I wanted to improvise. I wanted to write my own music. I wanted to create my own shows, as I mentioned earlier.
During this time, electronics were creeping into music and arts. I mean, they always have, especially in drumming. We can point back to when drum machines started to scare musicians. I always point back to this because there were phases where people were like, "Oh, live drummers aren't going to be needed anymore because we have drum machines now and those are going to take over recording sessions."
That was the first big scare. During those phases, as a percussionist who hears things and like a drummer who wants to create soundscapes, I'm looking at it as a different timbre, a different type of music, a different set of paints that I can add to my palette. I'm thinking, how can I actually get this technology integrated into the things that I'm doing?
Lawrence: Yeah.
Lisa: So I started exploring different types of software and different programs where I could actually sample my own drum sounds and manipulate them somehow, and then start to trigger them live in my performances. I was also reaching out to other composers at the time and saying, "Hey, instead of this traditional stuff that a lot of people are writing, can you write me something that mixes electronics with acoustic percussion?"
That was kind of the first phase of it. I started exploring all these different types of software programs, looking at how I could trigger these sounds, how I could take an existing acoustic sound and make it different than it is today. I was really interested in the beginning of just taking analog sounds and mixing them with anything else that would make them more unique—like extra sauce, extra special in a way, because what you're doing is you're taking something existing and then you're finding something else and mixing it. It's like coming up with a color that nobody else has yet.
That became very interesting to me, and then I started really exploring these different software programs. That actually led me into software engineering and programming myself, where I started to dig into the code, started to figure out how these things actually work under the hood. It took me into a whole other realm of things, like actually building programs that create the music itself. I leaned in heavily to that, but in the beginning, it was really just an exploration of how I could mix analog with digital and make a different type of sound. That's opened up a whole completely different world, and it just continues to. It's like an endless journey, a way of mixing paints that never ends. And that's what I really love.
Lawrence: Along those lines, could you talk to me—first of all, I want to make sure I pronounce it correctly. Is the project A.I.RE? Is that the right way to say it?
Lisa: That's how I say it.
Lawrence: Okay. Good. I mean, it looks obvious, but you know, sometimes there's the devil in the details. Can you summarize what that project is for listeners?
Lisa: So this is one of those programs, a concept that came up from this evolution that I was going through in my own personal life where I was getting heavily into technology programming and mixing these types of analog sounds with digital sounds. A.I.RE came out of this idea where, again, we started going through this phase—this was before ChatGPT went crazy and everybody started talking about AI. This was when it was just kind of creeping in and starting to get into the headlines a little bit.
People were talking about, "Okay, what is artificial intelligence?" It hadn't even hit the music industry yet. I was already digging into technology at that time, and so it was at the forefront of my mind: "How is this going to affect music?" And at the same time, this collective of composers in New York City called the Iceberg Composers Collective had reached out to me. I knew one of the composers from a different project, and they do collaborations with artists. They were like, "Let's do a collaboration. Do you have any ideas of how we could do this?"
The idea they proposed was that they had—I can't remember how many composers in the collective, it's like eight or ten composers—they'd all write me a piece of music. I thought, "Okay, that's interesting, but how can I make use of all of these composers in a way that makes sense?"
I immediately came up with this idea: why don't we do something focused around AI and mixing electronics, taking whatever we have in the music industry currently? This was pre-pandemic when this concept came up. My task to them was, each composer makes a piece of music that evolves from exactly my love of what technology and music and percussion is. So it's like a timeline, essentially. Like, we have eight composers, one through eight is a timeline of analog and percussion, to starting to mix electronics with percussion, to just electronics—percussion as just electronics, no acoustic or analog at all. And then the evolution of integrating artificial intelligence, which is where we are today.
It probably would have gone faster had we not lost two years of our lives from the pandemic, but by the time that was all over, that's exactly when ChatGPT hit the headlines, and everybody started going wild about artificial intelligence. Here now we have this show, and we're about to get it presented in New York City, which was great. So the timing worked out well, making sense as to, yeah, this is really our now and the future of what we have available for us in percussion and music.
Being able to tap these composers to get their creativity—but I also composed some of the music in that show as well, so I also got to do my own expressive points in that show. It's an evolution; it stands for Artificial Intelligence Rhythm Evolution, and it really is that timeline of acoustic through electronics, through mixing electronics with acoustic, and then eventually the artificial intelligence learns from all of that and can perform by itself, not just working with it, but it literally can learn from all of the things that I did in the show and make its own music without me doing anything.
Through the show, it takes us through that journey. There's a visual aspect to it too, where I have a live touch designer who takes some of those ideas and does like a live DJ of the animation with it. Then towards the end, it actually takes my human figure and I turn into the image on the screen and my motions are actually what is triggering the music. And then, like I said, eventually the computer is just playing things from what it learned from me within the entirety of the show. So it's not always the same, and also the learning could be different given whatever show is happening.
Lawrence: That was something I wanted to ask you about—is that part of the performance generated? Basically, how is the AI integrated? Because to your earlier point, you know, AI can mean a lot of different things. Like, in the context of a creator's software kit, it could just be a tool that you turn on to help manipulate something you're already working on as opposed to generating fresh artistic work.
You mentioned that span of time and when you first came up with the idea and started working with the collaborators and the composers. Can you recall in any specific way in that sort of roughly two-year gap of the pandemic how the technologies you had available changed from when you first started tasking or collaborating with the composers?
Lisa: Sure, it's drastic.
Lawrence: I would imagine.
Lisa: I can hardly believe how fast the technology—I mean, we think about how long have iPhones been around? Not that long, but how much they've become integrated in everybody's lives. If you think about how long the internet has been around, it's not been that long, and it's so in its infancy, but we feel like it's been around forever.
That's exactly how I felt with this technology. When we first started out, we're digging in, we're looking for tools. Google Magenta was in the headlines a little bit. There were some text-to-music prompts that were coming out at that time where you could write something in that was an idea and it might prompt out some pretty poorly generated song for you. Those were the early types of tools.
When we first started digging into it, by the time that the pandemic was over and we revisited, like, "Okay, we're actually going to put on the show now finally and have the New York City world premiere," we dug back in and not only were all of those tools way better, the outputs were too. This points to the learning models, like how fast the learning models can actually learn from whatever they were given previously.
Whether folks know or not, but these models that ChatGPT is using, a lot of them are trained on information that was happening three years ago. We're not even getting to the point where it's caught up to us yet as far as learning. So in three years from now, they'll be learned on what was happening in 2024.
That's exactly kind of what you see in the music tools as well, where the generative music is coming out. The output itself is getting much, much more easy to listen to, better results, more of what you would expect, less digital sounding. The interactive things that you can set up, the tools, the software where you are actually controlling what's happening by motions, motion detectors, connecting visual types of software with the music inputs too—all of those types of integrations are getting way, way easier to use.
Lawrence: Your point about the speed of the learning is fascinating to me because just as a user of various tools and someone also with a history of using technology and being, for lack of a better word, a student of technology, I've noticed just in the last several months, like for example, with Zoom, they have this thing called the AI Assistant. When I first turned it on earlier this year, it's basically a note taker. So at the end of a Zoom call, it sends you the notes from the call. They used to be—it was like performance art, how silly they were. You know, it was either overly literal or it didn't really understand things. It was just flat out bad. This was maybe March when I started using it.
By the end of May, it was like, "Wow, these are really useful." Now when I get them, I'm like, this is stunning. Like it's picked up nuance. It's really shocking. And that was in a very short period of time. For chatbots, I use Claude. I just like his personality. They released an update last week, and I was using Claude before I knew last week that the update had come out.
I emailed my collaborator on this project and I said, "Have you noticed that Claude changed today? Claude sounds and is behaving much more intuitive today. Like he's asking me questions before he starts the tasks. Something happened with Claude today." And then we saw there was an announcement that they updated the model, but it's really fascinating.
Your point about what the models are trained on—I would have to think that to be in the labs within these companies, it seems one hundred percent clear to me that they have real-time versions of the models. Like there are playpens where there are much more capabilities than what have been released or deployed yet for a variety of reasons. But it's got to be shocking to see some of the bleeding edge versions of the models.
Lisa: Yes, and we're not fully prepared for it, which is why we can only keep the guardrails on for so long. I say this in a lot of interviews when I get a chance to talk about this stuff: there's always the bright side and the dark side of things. You can talk to the people who are really deep in these learning chambers and they don't know what the guardrails are. That's why with the speed of the learning, once the models can learn from each other and they don't need any human there anymore, that's when we need to come up with some kind of guardrails or at least figure out what to do in those types of situations.
We can look back though—I mean, it's just like, we didn't know what to do with the internet when it came out either, and to some regard we still don't know what to do with it, and it's probably going to be the same.
Lawrence: Look what we've done with it. (laughter)
Lisa: Exactly.
Lawrence: We've only destroyed democracy!
Lisa: Exactly. We've lost control of a lot of things. Again, I just hope that we are able to contain what we need and it doesn't take away from human creativity because that's my fear with it. If I have any fear on the other side of all the great things that it offers as far as a new creative palette, the dark side of what I see happening is with people who haven't been exposed to something like learning a technique, understanding music and composition at a deep level of what it actually is.
When you can just push a button and generate music and have very limited if not zero knowledge of what any of it is because we have a computer model that does it for us, and then just taking that as "Oh, that's good enough" and losing all of that human expression—I think that's where the fear comes in for me. I see a sadness in it where there's so much lacking with just pushing buttons and hearing it versus really creating it from the depths of your soul.
I hope that we don't lose that really deep, important human aspect of things. I think the fear comes in when people aren't exposed to anything except asking the computer a question and getting whatever it needs. It's like putting your hand out and just having somebody put something in it and never having to work or know what that feels like to really embody that deep emotional, your own DNA into something. Where it's like, "Oh, I have an idea," push a button, put it in a prompt, and it's kind of like the McDonald's of music in a way. There is bound to be just a realm of that that starts to really build up in our society. I just hope that we don't lose the other part of it as well.
Lawrence: It's interesting because it's hard to talk about AI without that shadow of that specter of the AGI conversation and the doomerism. And I don't mean to dismiss any of that—I'm not seeking to direct the conversation there. If to stay in the place where we talk about the analogies to other technologies, I'm not seeking to—where it is more interesting and sort of fun to talk about is when we do look at how other technologies have been applied and embraced, right?
Like to your earlier point about drum machines, there's some shitty overproduced drum machine music or digital-only music that isn't that exciting. It probably won't stand the test of time. It might be fine in the moment. But there's also work that has been beautifully crafted and has used those tools or maybe took something that existed in the box and then modified it and edited it and used it as a source or a collaborator. Again, it's hard to say AI can also follow that pattern because it has all these other capabilities. Like I'm not really worried about the drum machine taking over the world, the same way we fret about this other stuff.
Lisa: Working on the A.I.RE project and given how you have to think about AI and techno and advanced technologies in my "day job," how did working on A.I.RE change your perspective or did it challenge any assertions you had? Basically, do you have a different perspective in any way about AI in particular or the use of technology in general than you did when the project started?
It's ongoing—I don't think the phase has ended quite yet. I'm still in it in a way. Yes, I learned a lot about the space and what can be done in the performance realm with AI tools, but it was only one themed show. I feel like I could do a whole other part two, with just the advancements that have happened in the past year. I would learn a whole slew of other things incorporating these different ideas.
I mean, there has to be a stopping point when you're putting on like a sixty to ninety-minute show where you're like, "This is the framework that we have to work in. These are the composers. This is the timeline." And within those guidelines, I think no matter what you're incorporating into music and art, and if you're speaking from your own voice, I think that that's always going to be what makes the things unique. That, to me, is the importance of collaboration, improvisation, and expressiveness in art and music itself.
That process of taking all of these composers together, myself, making an idea, looking and researching these technologies, and then making it into something that we can stand up in front of people and present in a story type fashion—I think not only does it just speak to how important creating anything is, but that you can't necessarily put it in words.
Lawrence: Yeah, I think where I have the freedom to lose a lot of the doomerism or where I get most excited is when I talk to artists about the tools because for as many different artists there are that are dabbling with the technologies, there's as many different points of view and outputs. That part's really exciting to see what an artist does with this. It's no different than giving an artist any new tool, any new technology to play with. They're going to do things that are much more interesting than what a tech oligarch is going to do or a product development group is going to do.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about Circuits and Skins. As a listener, it's another piece that—and you can tell me I'm completely wrong, by the way, I'm just sharing an impression with you—it's where I also perceived a sense of narrative, much like what you talked about with A.I.RE. You know, there's, it's, I don't know, twenty-five minutes or so worth of music across a few movements. There is a movement to it. There seems to be a narrative flow, and I wonder, could you just talk about that journey? You know, is it there, and if so, what is it to you?
Lisa: Totally. Thank you for listening. It is to date, I would say—I don't like to say things are my favorite, but up to date, I've commissioned and premiered a lot of concertos, but I really love this concerto. The reason why is because I do feel like it has the narrative of, again, what it is to work in a collaborative space with an idea and then take that idea and actually bring it into fruition.
And so working with Paul, I actually went to Paul at one point and said, "Hey, I want a concerto that has electronics and percussion," because again, I'm in this phase, right? And I want to bring percussion to the front of the stage. But what I also want to do is bring new types of audiences and different types of people into classical orchestra halls. That has always been one of my big passions.
I'm like, "Well, if we don't start bringing people who like different types of music into concert halls, we're losing out." We're saying like, this is only accessible to a certain type of listener. And I really think that mixing genres and bringing different types of audiences in is going to be the answer to getting people excited about classical music again. Because it doesn't just have to be classical. It can be classical modern. It can be concertos like Circuits and Skins.
It has to have some kind of thing that reaches out and speaks to a broader audience. And so when I went to Paul, I was like, "I really want a concerto that is electronics and percussion, but has some kind of like, almost like a DJ element to it, where it's accessible to audiences, fun to listen to, but also mixes some other genre." And what I said was EDM, which is electronic dance music.
So, Paul is actually a professor at one of the universities in Michigan and he teaches electronic music. So it was like a great collaboration and he was all for it because he listens to Diplo and he's teaching his students at the university how to write like Diplo and Deadmau5 and all of this. I'm like, that's what I want. I want to mix percussion and take that into the classical orchestra hall.
So he wrote Circuits and Skins, and again, some of these things I feel like we create them and it's not time for them yet. We did a first iteration of it. Audiences love it. I don't know that just yet the orchestra halls are ready for it or understand it, but that doesn't mean that it's not going to happen. I almost feel like now is the time. It's manifesting itself as all of this thing is happening in our society. Circuits and Skins is exactly the embodiment of this and people are hungry for something different.
There's a certain amount of people who will go to the symphony orchestra because they want to hear Beethoven. But I think the younger generations want to go in and hear something that they can relate to a little bit better. And that's what we're trying to do with this type of music and this type of concerto.
Lawrence: Yeah. It really strikes me, while you were speaking, I was thinking about the way like Mahler would have been perceived 125 years ago, whatever it was now, or more broadly, like when atonality started to creep into classical music and how audiences were either incredibly alienated and like outraged by it, but some segment of the audience completely just enraptured and excited by it.
But also that there was a time when the concert halls, when there would be a premiere or debut, people would come from around the world and go to Vienna, and it would be exciting. It would be a place to go, you know, not just Europeans, like people would come from around the world to be seen and to—it was a place to go. It was important cultural pop culture almost to be there.
And so I don't think it's far-fetched to think that, just because that connection with the music was lost in parts of the 20th century, not even really big parts, right? I think, like, Leonard Bernstein, like, you couldn't ask for a more pop culture figure in the mid-century in classical. I mean, it's just, it feels like it's not a pipe dream, those things you talk about, and they're not outside the tradition. It's reconnecting with that. You mentioned the feeling of a festival in the concert hall. Have you thought at all about, could you present this music at a festival? I mean, it seems to me like that audience would be open-minded to it and it would be very powerful.
Lisa: Yes, I have and I wish it was as easy as just thinking it and saying it because Paul and I are both like, "Yeah, we should do it South by Southwest. We should take it to the Northern Nights Festival." And in fact, even the Northern Nights Festival, they're like, "Yeah, this is like a cool idea." But actually getting it programmed and on the books is a much more difficult task for some reason.
But to answer your question, yes, I think that there's two realms of that. One is exactly what you're just talking about. There was a time when a premiere would happen in the classical concert halls and people would come and know about it and show up to it because that was part of an exciting thing to do. That's really what I'm striving for is that I feel like our culture is still doing that, but they're doing it at festivals and EDM shows.
What I want to do is see if we could reverse it back to say, look, the reason why we're shutting people out of some of these other avenues today is because it's not accessible in the same way that these festivals are. So we must break down the barriers on both sides, right? And be like, I do think that getting onto like an EDM festival or something like that—it's in the middle. It's like, we can do it both ways.
I think both ways would benefit from it. It's like, okay, take something like this to South by Southwest festival. Take something like this to any of the Masterwork series at these classical music concerts. It's all about reaching in to the different people who want and are hungry for it and are going to be positively inspired and affected by it whenever it's put in front of them.
I mean, I like to say, and it's true, that oftentimes people don't know what they want until you show it to them. We're not showing it to them, and we're not even open to putting something different and showing it to them. How are we going to know if it's something that people want? And that's where, you know, I wake up every day and I'll just keep trying.
