Phillip Golub: Recording the Impossible Piano
Brooklyn pianist Phillip Golub splits the traditional octave into 22 notes for his innovative composition 'Loop 7,' demonstrating how microtonality can create mathematical precision on top of profound emotional resonance.
Today, the Spotlight shines On Brooklyn pianist Phillip Golub, taking his music in bold new directions.
Phillip’s new project, Loop 7, is a set of minimalist compositions performed on a piano tuned to 22 notes per octave instead of the usual 12. Working with producer Joseph Branciforte, he’s created something that lives between acoustic chamber music and studio art.
It’s a groundbreaking approach—Phillip’s performance was captured on a special Yamaha piano in a unique way he tells us about. The recordings were then layered with guitar, vibraphone, and subtle electronics to create a technologically advanced and deeply human sound.
Phillip has worked with jazz legend Wayne Shorter and brings that same spirit of innovation to his own music, blending jazz, classical, and experimental sounds in ways you’ve never heard before.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Phillip Golub’s Loop 7)
Dig Deeper
• Purchase Phillip Golub’s Loop 7 from Grayfade or Bandcamp
• Phillip Golub Experiments with Loops on Mesmerizing LP
• Interview | Phillip Golub | Offerings of Love - 15 questions
• Introduction to EDO tunings
• Beyond the Veil: Behold the Xenharmonic, or, Understanding Microtonal Music
• Exploring The History Of The Disklavier: A Look Into Its Incredible Musical Past
• He Expects You To Read The Tea Leaves: An interview on the past & future of Wayne Shorter’s orchestral work
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: Something that strikes me initially in your work is that—and I think this happens often when we get into process music or process-like music—we can get caught up in the intellectualism of it, but I find that especially in Loop 7 and Filters, it maintains so much humanity.
How does one not over-intellectualize it? Because clearly you have a background, you're immersed in the knowledge of the music and the traditions that you draw from. How do you safeguard the humanity?
Phillip Golub: That's a great question, and I appreciate you saying that.
I guess I've always been a rather intuitive composer and musician. I have always centered intuition in what I've done, throughout my education and schooling. When I would learn about how some composer at some time set themselves strict parameters to write a piece, I was always curious about what that could produce, but I never felt like, "Oh, that somehow makes it credible or worthwhile or more valuable." I never felt that, though I'd sometimes notice my colleagues in school would. That's just not a feeling I ever had growing up.
That's not why I got interested in music. I became interested in music for the visceral things it would make you feel and, fundamentally, that feeling you get when you hear something you haven't heard before that you're attracted to and you say, "Wow, I didn't know that was possible." I didn't know you could do that with instruments, with sound, with human bodies, with whatever your tools are. So that's just been always kind of clear to me.
And I'm sure we'll get into it—Loop 7 does have some pretty strict process elements going on, but I happened upon it. It's there, but it's not what the piece is about. The piece isn't about showing you that process; that's just a thing that helps me do something.
My composing process my whole life, from when I was very little to this day, is essentially very slowed-down improvisation. I'm messing around with something, finding something, sketching it out, and then I might say, "Okay, it looks like I have this thing which could turn into a device or a tool or become a process." And then I might see it through, or I might not. Another thing I love to do is set up a process and then just let the train get off the tracks at some point.
Lawrence: Do you have any interest in music that can't be played?
Phillip: Yeah, sure. I mean, I think most recorded music that we hear on a day-to-day basis is music that can't be played, essentially. A version of it can often be played, but most music we listen to on the radio, top 40, whatever, is a studio creation—a thing with overdubs, with effects, with whatever, chopping up audio, with things that cannot be done live. The mixing and production today is as much a part of the music as the so-called music itself. That's a unique element of recorded music.
So I'm very interested in bringing that into my world. I'm more in the jazz and creative music and new music side of things, which I feel often forgets about that, ignores that, hasn't caught up with that, at least in the recorded medium.
And I guess more to what your question was after—I studied with Michael Finnissy, who is known for writing some of the most difficult piano music. He also should be known for much of his other music, which he's unfortunately not as known for, which isn't all crazy hard, but he's partially known for his insanely hard piano music and pushing the boundaries of what's playable. Really interesting things can happen in that space.
Lawrence: There's a lot in there. As you were responding, I was realizing the sort of ignorance behind the question. Of course that's how so much, increasingly more of popular music in particular is made. But then also there has always been that strand in jazz especially. Like I think of the Miles Davis tapes that Teo Macero basically assembled from that electric Miles era stuff, and I'm sure even going back with people with razor blades and cutting tape up to get the best cuts or the best takes of something. So although that doesn't make the music unplayable, it makes those versions certainly different.
Phillip: Right.
Lawrence: I wonder if we could maybe open the aperture a little bit or step back and hear about your journey, particularly to microtonality. Maybe talk a little about the early Phillip in terms of jazz and classical music. Is that what you were raised in? Were you, and are you, ever into popular music? Just set the table for me a little bit—some context about you.
Phillip: Sure. I grew up studying classical piano from the age of five. My dad is a composer. He went to school for new music composition. He also works in film and theater. So there was a lot of music at home, and he's a jazz fan. He had Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner and Thelonious Monk CDs at home. So I grew up with all that around me.
And frankly, I'm pretty ignorant about current popular music. I'm a little more knowledgeable about older popular music, and sometimes I regret that because I think there are things to learn from all music and certainly things to learn from our current culture always. But it is what it is—there are only 24 hours in a day, and I can't make myself interested in things that I'm not interested in at the end of the day.
In terms of microtonality, I can't really think of a moment where it started. It just crept into my music slowly but surely over years. Back in my early twenties, I maybe started to use some quarter tones in some of my concert pieces when I was in school for composition and just starting to learn about some just intonation things.
I think I've grown and caught up with it as the world around me has too. I think there is more and more awareness of just intonation, of different EDO systems—equal divisions of the octave—and what they can do and why you might use them amongst people interested in avant-garde music today. I think I'm honestly just riding the wave a bit.
But it is increasing in my work, though I don't think it will ever dominate what I do, because at the end of the day, I play the piano, and a lot of my music happens on the piano, and it's not going to be microtonal for the most part. So it's never going to be a dominant thing in my music. But I think I will always have projects going that do deal with it, because it's just like discovering the world anew again. When you find a microtonal world that you want to write in, it's like you can find harmony again—it's a new thing to discover.
It's like, I don't feel like there are that many new chords I can find at the piano. Of course, I can rearrange them in new ways, and that's fun, but actually finding a sound that I like—that's not an experience I can have that often at the piano. I'm working on a microtonal jazz record right now where I don't play the piano. I actually play a MIDI keyboard instrument, and every song is in a different tuning. It's definitely going to be part of my world going forward.
Lawrence: Some of these questions are going to be as much for my shameless personal benefit as well as for our listeners. But something that has always been a blocker for me, sort of intellectually, around microtonal music and the various EDO systems is I've never understood—is it possible to—do you have to modify traditional instruments?
Phillip: It really depends on the family of instrument. Generally, people don't modify instruments. They find solutions on the instruments they have. Of course, it'd be great if we could just design instruments for different systems, but that's just not realistic.
Well, I know people who've done it. I know people who have 3D printed double reed instruments that have different microtonality. It is possible to do, and people do it. People design guitar necks with the frets in different places or with movable frets. So modifying instruments is definitely a thing. It's just such a niche. It's so costly to design and create instruments. There's so little demand. It's actually hard to get it done. And there are also so many competing microtonal systems—you might want to use one for one reason and another for another reason. Unless your instrument is somehow going to accommodate all that, it's hard to figure out the perfect solution in terms of modification. So people find ways.
For string players, there are no frets, so they can essentially play anything. They just have to be able to hear it. For wind players, it's often about changing your embouchure to change the tuning, finding alternate fingerings that change the tuning. It can get quite confusing because sometimes those alternate fingerings aren't where you expect them to be in terms of your normal fingering patterns.
For Loop 7, which we're talking about today, the guitarist was able to retune the strings to very precise things that we figured out to be able to get the notes of my piece so that when he plays, we know that if he plays on the sixth fret on the G-string, it's going to actually be this note, and that's exactly what we need. So that's called scordatura.
And for the vibraphone, we used this technique where you put mortite, which is like what you use to seal your window in the winter.
Lawrence: It's like a gray putty, like string-like putty.
Phillip: Yeah. You could also use BluTack or people also use magnets, but basically anything that can stick to the edge of the vibraphone. It essentially adds mass to the bar, which lowers the pitch. So you can lower the pitch of vibraphones by doing that.
Steve Lehman, who's an alto saxophonist and composer who's really led the charge in the jazz world on microtonality, writing microtonal music in the jazz context—he's had custom mouthpieces made for his octet. So it's just different, context-specific for sure.
Lawrence: And just to, at the risk of restating something you already said, is the main draw of composing in that realm, for you, just about more palette to work with?
Phillip: I think broadly speaking, for me it's that. I'm someone who loves harmony. I think all of my music deals with harmony in a pretty fundamental way. I'm drawn to microtonal music because of what it offers in terms of new harmonies, new sounds.
But that is not universal. There are people who are drawn to microtonality because it creates certain sonic phenomena when you have two notes that are very close to each other, and you hear the beating pattern, and it creates these amazing sonic phenomena. That's really cool and wonderful, and I love some of that music, but that's not what I'm interested in.
I had a teacher who once said, "Actually, it shouldn't be called microtonality. It should be called macrotonality."
Lawrence: All the tones. (laughter)
Phillip: Well, his reason was microtonality makes it sound like it's very small intervals, like it's all intervals that are smaller than a half step. But actually, he didn't like those intervals. He thought they were ugly and dissonant. But it's macro—it's actually about bigger intervals than steps and how they interact.
So I'm kind of more in that camp a bit. I like really interesting thirds and wide seconds and strange fourths and in that range rather than these really small intervals which create these sort of beating patterns. But that's a whole other side of microtonal music, which is totally legitimate and cool. There's lots there too.
Lawrence: When you say a whole other side, you mean that sort of vibrational element or that almost somatic experience you can have around this music?
Phillip: Yeah, people like Alvin Lucier have been exploring that for a long time, and many people now like Catherine Lamb. The music I think I'm dealing with is somehow closer to music that we might already know.
I would say there might be a third category of microtonal music, which is to make strange what you already know.
Lawrence: Oh, I love that.
Phillip: And there are people who do that as well. I think I'm neither—I'm somewhere in between where it's like you recognize elements, but I'm trying to make my own new thing over here. But the basic building blocks are shared with other music we might know.
Lawrence: There's another element to it as well that strikes me, not specific to your music, but in discussions around maybe the history of microtonality in Western music, or at least the more modern history, which is this attempt to get at other musical traditions through Western forms. I think specifically of maybe Indian music or Indian scales, and how a lot of this music seems to—the emergence of it seems to really parallel or rub up against Western contact with Eastern forms. And I wonder, as somebody who's not hyper-educated in the history of this—referring to myself—does that make sense? Is there resonance there?
Phillip: Absolutely. I mean, I think as we move further into the twenty-first century, there's more and more awareness of non-Western music and culture more broadly speaking. I think that is part of the reason for this sort of more and more interest in microtonal music as people learn about Arabic music or African music or East Asian music or what have you.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Phillip: If you dig even a little bit below the surface of any of those musics, you'll find different approaches to organizing, to dealing with pitch, essentially. And you'll find almost very few things that are consistent between all of them. They can be very different from each other, with certain shared attributes as well.
I should mention, I play a lot with a Lebanese violinist and composer named Layale Chaker. I've been in her band for about six years, and for the past few years, we've been incorporating—I mostly play piano in the group, but I now also bring a MIDI keyboard and for a couple of songs I play an instrument on the keyboard which we tune differently for different songs. In the Middle Eastern world, people have been using keyboard instruments microtonally for five or six decades. It's nothing new over there.
But I think that's part of it for sure. And for me as well—I'm not necessarily interested in microtonality for the explicit purpose of getting at the things of other musics and cultures. However, I absolutely check out musics from all over the world, and I would say I'm indirectly influenced by them all the time. The sounds are in my ears, and I might find myself imitating a certain sound or something, even if I'm not dealing with it directly as a kind of explicit reference point.
Lawrence: Yeah, I get that. In fact, for a lot of artists, it's not entirely different from how you'd interact with any other input or any other reference or what have you.
Phillip: Right.
Lawrence: Could you tell me a little bit about the 22 EDO? I have a couple of questions around that. One is very specific to this piece, to Loop 7, which is: how did you arrive at that as the modality or the mechanism? The other is, I wonder if you could talk, again, for my benefit as well as listeners, a little about—I guess I was going to say—the history or the development of the EDO systems, if that's the right way to refer to it. How did those emerge in Western music? Did somebody sit down and discover them? Are they a discovery or an invention?
Phillip: I would say—interesting question—an invention. I would also preface everything I'm about to say about the history with: I'm not a historian of any of this, and I'm not using these things because of any particular historical knowledge. I've picked up what I've picked up by being around it a little bit. Kyle Gann's website is a good resource if you're starting out being interested in microtonality. There are other books, other websites.
Lawrence: You're not the official ambassador from the Land of EDO? (laughter)
Phillip: No, no. Hardly. But I do know a few things. EDOs, which again, for listeners who don't know, means equal division of the octave. So taking the octave and dividing it into an equal number of steps. When we talk about equal temperament, which is so-called normal for Western music, that's just 12 EDO. That's what that means. And so really all the other EDOs are a logical possibility or extension from the fact that we have 12 EDO already.
The fact that we got to equal temperament is a whole other historical story that goes for several hundred years from the medieval period to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There was no equal temperament until a little more than a hundred years ago. Yes, piano keyboard instruments had 12 notes. That's true. But they were not tuned equally for most of the history of these keyboard instruments. They were tuned in different ways, sometimes for different pieces.
The big sort of struggle or kind of push and pull that led to the compromise of equal temperament or 12 EDO is how to get your thirds and your fifths sounding good. Because if you get your thirds sounding good, your fifths start sounding bad; if you get your fifths sounding good, your thirds start sounding bad when you want to play music in all 12 keys. This was a kind of constant push and pull, and it led to this thing called mean tone, which was used in the eighteenth century a lot.
Eventually, composers started to write in more and more keys. They wanted to modulate in their pieces into more and more keys. Some of the keys don't sound good in mean tone, whereas other keys sound great. So equal temperament ended up being this sort of historical compromise that was like, "Well, we'll have all the keys sound okay." And once all the keys sound okay, then we'll be able to play in all 12 keys, which is what composers were increasingly wanting. But it's a big giant compromise, the tuning system that we take for granted in the West.
And then once you have 12 EDO—I don't know the history of this very precisely, but in the early and mid-twentieth century, people start to say, "Why can't we divide it in other combinations and why can't we have other ways that we think about tuning that are completely from a different perspective?"
The reason people use 22, or the reason why I and many other people use 22 a lot, is that it just so happens that if you look at the intervals that you end up with in 22, there are a lot of intervals that very closely approximate some really nice just intonation intervals.
The weird thing about EDO systems is that they're not based on sound at all. They're just entirely theoretical. It's just mathematical. There's nothing about the way it sounds—it has nothing to do with the overtone series.
Lawrence: Oh. So are there EDOs that don't work well sonically?
Phillip: That's subjective. You might want to use 21 EDO because it has this sound.
Lawrence: But more apt to create a dissonance as opposed to...
Phillip: I suppose. If you're looking to have the things that EDO is great for, and it's the same thing that equal temperament or 12 EDO is great for, it's modulating. Because if all the steps are the same, you can play the same thing again, starting on a different pitch. You can move down the keys, you can move around. That's what's so special and cool about EDOs, but actually none of the intervals are tuned to any real overtone. There's nothing that has to do with the actual physical, resonating nature of sound that is captured in EDOs, except of course, the octave, which is the first and second overtone.
But 22 just so happens to have a bunch of notes that are very close to the fifth partial against the fourth partial, the seventh partial against the fourth partial. Those are good intervals that people interested in just intonation often want in their music, and 22 just by chance happens to have a bunch of them.
31 also has a bunch of them, so people often use 31 EDO as well. It's just a little more unwieldy because you've got a bunch more notes to deal with—harder to notate, harder to figure out how to do on a MIDI keyboard. But that's why I chose it, essentially. I know that it's a thing people do who are interested in pure intervals. They use 22 EDO.
When I was writing the piece, I wasn't thinking "Now I'm going to use the fifth partial here, and now I'm going to use the seventh partial." I wasn't thinking super explicitly about that. But when you look back at the chords that I did write, you will find a combination of very pure consonant intervals and other more dissonant ones in most of the chords of the piece.
Lawrence: Thank you for that, first of all. Knowing that this is not a visual medium, I wonder if it's possible for us to have this next part of the conversation—are you able to describe what 22 EDO notation looks like? My understanding is that you used a little carat mark next to a note.
Phillip: There are a couple of different conventions for it. To be perfectly honest, I don't like any of them. I think it's really hard to notate these EDO systems because you're confronted with a choice: either use a bunch of new symbols that you then have to reinternalize, as if it's your first time learning about accidentals, or use some symbols we already know, but they don't mean what they used to mean. So then they're confusing.
I actually haven't had to properly notate that much 22 EDO music because when I play this piece—I'm sure we'll get into talking about how we created the recording—I play it on a MIDI keyboard, and I actually have it mapped out so that my MIDI keyboard is one half step, like normal. A half step on the keyboard is one EDO step. So it actually takes 22 steps to play an octave on the keyboard. It's totally a mind twister to actually play. But I'm able to notate the piece as if it's normal music for myself and just play it, and the computer will take care of the tuning in the MIDI output.
Of course, we were able to record this on a real piano, and we can talk about how we did that later.
When we recorded the vibraphone and the guitar parts, we ended up actually splitting up the 22 notes of the piece. So basically every note that is zero to 50 cents higher than an equal temperament note, we gave to the guitar and used scordatura. I was just able to notate the nearest normal note. And for the vibraphone, it was the opposite. Every note that was zero to 50 cents lower than an equal temperament note, we gave to the vibraphone, because you can tune the vibraphone down. And then I was able again to notate normal notes for the vibraphone.
So actually for this piece, I didn't have to deal with—I didn't have to answer that impossible question. But there are different conventions. Some people use sharps and flats and little arrows for the smaller ones. But again, a sharp isn't really a sharp, and a D isn't really a D. It becomes very messy very quickly.
Lawrence: And so to your point, it's the nearest approximation, which is already imperfect, and then these new symbols or repurposed symbols—I would imagine it's just so easy to take the player out of the moment, to be focused on all this technical stuff. (laughter)
Phillip: Yes, for sure. And that's why I think a lot of people don't use EDO systems. In some of the other music I've written that's microtonal, like that upcoming jazz record that'll be out in a year or two, I mostly used 31 EDO on one piece on the record, but most of the other pieces—I used just quarter tone, which is also of course 24 EDO, on another piece, and people are used to playing quarter tone and reading quarter tone. There's quite a long history of that at this point. People are comfortable with it on many instruments; there's a simple notation for it.
But all the other pieces on the record are not actually in any EDO system. They're just a specific set of pitches, usually pure intervals. I want the fifth partial of the root, and then I want the seventh partial of that note, and I want this and that. And I create my set of pitches, usually 12 notes so I can play it on a MIDI keyboard easily and have it all be intuitive to the exact pitches.
To notate that, there's a system called Helmholtz-Ellis Just Intonation, which is for notating—it's designed to notate just intonation, essentially all pure intervals, a whole number of ratio intervals. That comes with its own challenges because it's a new system, but it is a very good system and people are using it more and more. It's really robust and clear and not ambiguous—things mean what they're supposed to mean a hundred percent of the time. So those ones are notated with that.
Lawrence: Let's pull ourselves out of that rabbit hole a little bit and talk more specifically about Loop 7.
My understanding, both from the material I've read and as a listener, is that one of the big differences or advancements between Loop 7 and Filters, one of your previous works, is that it's no longer just piano. You've brought in multiple other collaborators and instrumentation.
I'm curious if you could tell me a little about the relationship between the electronic and acoustic elements in Loop 7. Because for everything you've said so far, one thing that strikes me is that controlling for variables must help make the composer's job a bit easier. I can understand why there could be an extensive body of solo piano work in this realm—it's easier to manage. Now you're going to bring in other instruments. Could you talk a little about that?
Phillip: The way I've done that in this piece—and by the way, the Filters work that you mentioned earlier, which is a solo piano recording also on Greyfade—I've done it before with other instruments, so that's not necessarily a solo piano piece. The loops I've written are like, as you just said, a body of work that is all sort of within a certain approach to composing.
Lawrence: A songbook almost, or a…?
Phillip: Yeah, something like that. It's like a thing I think I'll keep adding to for many years, like one or two a year. We'll keep recording these things, and it's just kind of a thing I do over here.
Lawrence: It's like Masada, it's like Zorn's Masada. (laughter)
Phillip: Yeah, something like that. And actually, I mean, there are pretty strict rules, which I, again, sometimes break. But there are rules about how that works, whether it's microtonal or not, whether it's with other instruments or not. And that basically has to do with a sort of dominant melodic voice, which is accompanied by a bass note, which moves at a slower pace than an internal voice, which is always triads. Usually triads—three or sometimes four notes, usually simple triads. That of course changes with microtonality a bit, but that's how it's structured.
You'll hear this very clear outer voice, then inner voice, attack and then a response in the range between the outer and inner notes at a quieter dynamic, and it's about the interplay of those two and the resonance of those two on the piano. That, for me, is what these pieces are. It's not what they're about, but that's one of the things that they do.
Like I said, I've done all the previous Filters pieces with a large ensemble. I did them once in a large church with musicians spaced all around the church, all kinds of different instruments, and basically they have my entire part and they have certain parameters—instructions for when they can enter and when they can exit and which lines they can take. But essentially they're doubling me, and what's happening is the orchestration is constantly shifting in a kind of kaleidoscopic way over the course of 30 minutes or 40 minutes that we're playing the loop, in a kind of very fluid way. So that's always been one version of the piece, which we haven't recorded. Solo piano is another version of it.
So the pieces are the material, and then there are different ways we can perform and record them. Loop 7 is the first time we're giving a window into "Okay, this doesn't have to be a solo piano work." We've now added guitar, we've added vibraphone, we've added very subtle synth, and we've added some live processing electronics.
Lawrence: Sounds beautiful.
Phillip: For me, it isn't a huge departure from how I've conceived the pieces in the past, which is that the piano is always playing the whole piece. That never changes. And we just have other sonic elements which float around the space, which add to it, which support it, which amplify certain things. Makes you more aware of this bass note on this repetition, and then more aware of the internal voice on this repetition. But the piano is always at the center, always there.
The thing that's really new is that we're making a recording that really does this, and we haven't released something like that before.
Lawrence: It seems like Greyfade is a great home for these projects in particular. One, because they're assembling quite a catalog of really interesting new music and process music, but also because of the technical ability that Joseph brings to the record. It seems like the right home, and I wonder how you feel about that.
Phillip: I couldn't agree more. It's the right home in every respect. Working with Joe has been such a blessing. I'm so lucky to have found him. I cold-emailed him with the Filters record, and a few days later he wrote back and said he'd listened to it many times and he wanted to do it.
He's just such a good musician, such good ears, such great technique in the studio. But also, we were talking about intuition before—he's someone with so much gear, so much experience, so much technique, but such an intuitive person as an engineer. He won't just do something because, "Oh, that's how you do it. You're supposed to put this compressor on this, and that's just what you do." No, he's really intuitive.
So being with him, working on the production of these things has honestly been so eye-opening and such a learning experience for me. When you look at all the music that Greyfade has put out, it's hard to say what exactly it is, what genre.
Lawrence: Processed, minimalist...
Phillip: But it's somehow not that and more than that. It absolutely feels like one of those "you know it when you see it" things, and it really does feel like this music fits like a glove on this label. I think this record, even more so than the first, because of the way it really subtly exists in the space between acoustic chamber music and produced recording, like a produced studio creation. It's almost like you're listening to a piece of chamber music that was played live. It's almost like you're listening to an entirely studio-created mélange of sounds, and it's really both all the time.
Lawrence: Yeah, I agree with that perception.
Phillip: I really like that. I'm very proud that we've created that, and I think that is Joe's bread and butter. He's the perfect musician and engineer and music thinker to create that kind of thing.
Lawrence: I know it's an inelegant analogy, but there is something almost—more broadly you could say he's building what a great independent label does, which is a very specific sort of sonic and visual identity. It's very hard to escape a comparison to ECM. He's starting to develop a world where you almost could recognize a Greyfade release. But also the artists are still so unique. They're not subsumed by the label. It's really a wonderful thing to witness.
I want to understand the recording. First of all, thank you so much for being so willing to get into process. Hopefully it's not too annoying.
Phillip: Oh, I hope listeners are actually interested to hear all this sort of under the hood stuff.
Lawrence: It's why they come here, trust me.
Phillip: Right, right. (laughter)
Lawrence: I'm so fascinated about the mechanics of the separate recordings. Could you tell me about using the Yamaha keyboard and what's going on there? (laughter)
Phillip: Well, I have to really hand it to Joe because this was really his idea. I wrote some loops last year. I sent them over to Joe and I said, "I have some new material. I'd love to record them. I'd love to work with you." I said, "This one, it's in 22 EDO. I don't think we're going to be able to record this on a real piano because, as far as I know, there haven't been any 22 EDO pianos created."
Lawrence: Yet. (laughter)
Phillip: I said, "Here's a mockup I made with software, and maybe we could make a really produced software instrument version of this and record some other instruments on top." And he said, "Yeah, okay. Maybe that sounds all right. I don't know about that. It's missing some important element."
He wrote back a little bit later and said, "I have an idea." And it was crazy. Well, first, we had this idea to record it one note at a time and then varispeed it so that the pitch would shift, and we'd record each note at different tempos so that when we change the pitch, it would be at the right tempo and everything would line up.
Lawrence: Oh my God. There'd be a special room for you at Bellevue by the end of that. (laughter)
Phillip: It would've worked, and it could have been cool in a certain way because we would've had each note of the piece on a different track and could have mixed it in a crazy way. I'm still curious about that idea for some future thing.
But basically what we ended up doing is: I made a performance of the piece on my MIDI keyboard with piano tech software in my DAW, the way I described—each step on my keyboard is one of the EDO steps.
We then took that and we were super lucky to have Yamaha let us use their pianos and their Disklaviers and, most crucially, their space, of course, but most crucially, their technician and tuner. When we were there trying out the original varispeed idea that I mentioned, this tuner named Shane from Yamaha—he was the in-house guy, super amazing technician and tuner at Yamaha—he was interested in what we were doing and he said, "Yeah, I could retune the pianos for you. No problem." We had assumed we couldn't retune Yamaha's top of the line pianos.
Lawrence: Well, you can't. (laughter)
Phillip: That's right! But we had assumed they wouldn't allow it, and Shane just said, "Oh yeah, I could do that. No problem." They're essentially his pianos that he's taking care of.
So what we did is we muted half the notes of the performance. We separated it onto two different MIDI tracks. We muted, let's say track A, which has 11 of the notes of my performance, and 11 of them muted. Track B has the reverse—the other 11 muted, and the other 11 present.
We then start the timeline at zero, put the MIDI through Joe's laptop into the Disklavier with the piano retuned for those 11 notes of the piece and hit record. We then retune the piano for the other 11 notes of the piece, use track B, which now has those notes, hit record again, also with the timeline starting at zero, and we now can stack the audios together and have a performance of the piece. Same piano, same room, same mic placement, same day. And so it creates the perception of a 22 EDO piano in the same space, in the same room with the same mics. I gotta hand it to Joe because I would've never thought of that.
Lawrence: What an aha moment, right? That must have been a visceral, somatic charge you must have gotten realizing that could work.
Phillip: I was skeptical until it happened, to be honest. We all were. It was frankly an experiment where we think this will work, but who knows? And it was really weird to hear the Disklavier play half of my piece back at once. It would play 11 of the 22 notes at a time of the piece. And I'm like, "This sounds so weird."
Lawrence: That alone is kind of interesting.
Phillip: Yeah, for sure. After that, we basically had a performance of the piece that we were married to. We already knew we liked the performance because I was able to edit that in the MIDI before we even recorded. Then we got together at Joe's studio in Mount Vernon and brought Ty and Aaron up to record the guitar and vibes, and they just overdubbed several takes. And we used bits and pieces of all the takes.
Lawrence: Could you explain what a Disklavier is and how it extends the capabilities of the piano?
Phillip: Disklavier, and that's Yamaha's version of it. Steinway has one called Spirio. They're very much in competition, but basically it's a digital player piano, essentially. It's hooked up to a piano and it can both record what you play at the keyboard and with the pedals and everything. And it can also accept MIDI—you can plug it in USB and play MIDI.
You can download files onto it. What it's used for is up to anyone who owns one, I suppose. But it can be used creatively the way I've done, and people have. You asked earlier about music that's impossible to play. That's something a Disklavier can be used for—you can program music that's impossible to play by two hands, by a human being, onto a Disklavier with MIDI and create a performance of a piece that way.
I imagine if Nancarrow were alive in the time of the Disklavier, he would've used a Disklavier.
Now there are people who use Disklavier to record classical piano. It used to be that you would record—I mean, it still is for many people—of course, you record many takes of your Schumann or your Beethoven or whatever, and then you'd edit. But now some people record onto a piano with a Disklavier or a Spirio, and then they edit the MIDI, and they can actually listen to what exactly the performance is going to sound like because they can hit play and it will play on the actual piano. So they've recorded themselves playing, and then they can edit the MIDI on the computer and then make the recording of the piece by hitting play. So people use it for that.
I'd say in terms of what they exist on the market for is largely for people to have background music at their cocktail parties, or to put on cruise ships to have a piano going in the background or whatever.
Lawrence: Really?
Phillip: Oh, yeah. I would say that the vast majority, if you look at the marketing, that's where they're selling them. They're selling them to wealthy people or institutions that need, essentially, background solo piano music. And it's a thing that can, just like a player piano, it hasn't changed that much, just like the player piano from back in the day.
Lawrence: It's like a more beautiful player piano with an endless repertoire.
Phillip: Yeah. A repertoire and velocity sensitivity and pedaling and everything. Their actual use in the world I'd say nine times out of ten is that, but they have this incredible creative potential. Lots of people have used them. Dan Tepfer, pianist, has done interesting things with Disklavier. There's a lot of people who've done interesting things with Disklavier.
Lawrence: Oh, it strikes me as like, you're buying a Ferrari to go to the grocery store. (laughter)
Phillip: It's a little bit like that, but at least the Ferrari exists for the one in ten person who wants to do what it's designed for.
Lawrence: So it's not a toy though. I think that's the thing that is interesting—it's not like, because there's such an interesting history in creative music and other realms of people taking instruments that weren't necessarily professional caliber or built for professional performance and then using them in various environments. But this is a high-end instrument, correct?
Phillip: Yes. They're not cheap. I don't remember exactly what they are, but when you buy a piano from Yamaha or Steinway, you can now have it shipped with it installed already. You can also install one on your piano, and it doesn't have to be a Yamaha or a Steinway. You can have these systems installed on any piano. It's essentially just a bunch of sensors that they put in the action, which capture the motion and can replicate it.
Lawrence: I know our time together is running out, and I want to ask you a couple of other quick things. Could you tell me a little about the first time you heard the whole piece? You expressed the—I don't know if surprise is the right word—but the wonder around hearing your performance split across the two pianos and missing half. Were there any revelations when you heard the finished piece with all the players?
Phillip: I'll just say, we were able to hear the whole piano, the piano part come together while we were recording Part B, because on Joe's laptop with our monitoring headphones we could unmute what we just recorded on track A and listen to it tracking in real time. And it was like, "Oh my God, it's happening. It's really happening."
Lawrence: So cool.
Phillip: And the part that really got me—you'll recognize once you hear the piece—there are a few grace notes that precede some of the chords occasionally. And sometimes if it's two grace notes that proceed a chord, one of the grace notes would be from A, and the other grace note would be from B.
I remember thinking when A was recording, I'd hear these really short notes and it would sound so awkward because it was just like maybe the first of two grace notes before a chord. It sounds so weird and not like my piece. And then the B part would fall into place and then the second grace note would be there and it would just be like, "Oh my God, this is actually working. How is this possible?"
So that was pretty amazing. And I remember just feeling like a teenager sitting there with Joe, just freaking out that this was working. In terms of the whole finished thing, I saw it come together slowly but surely with Joe in the studio. Every time we listened to a chunk of it, we felt it was getting closer and closer. "Oh, let's just—we just need a little bit more of this, a little bit less of that." Once I finally got some space from it and heard the final mix again, I was very happy with it.
Lawrence: Could you tell me a little about—you do a lot of work with Wayne Shorter's work, and I'm really curious about how being so immersed in another composer's scores the way you are—how and if that affects your creative process? Do you have to—I've said this on here before, I talked to a lot of artists who have to go out of their way to be careful, either from influence or inadvertently cribbing. There's this sort of fine line between integrating from the past and then mistakenly—whatever. But how do you benefit and how do you protect yourself in that work?
Phillip: Part of the answer is that Wayne Shorter is almost un-copyable, so I couldn't if I tried.
Lawrence: Mmm-hmm.
Phillip: No one sounds like Wayne. He just has—I don't know how he does it. He just hears harmony and melody and rhythm and everything just in a completely personal, unique way. So I almost feel like you just look at it, appreciate it.
I say that, and yet at the same time, he kind of invented all of modern jazz harmony. I mean, that's a little bit overstating it, but so much of our language today in modern jazz actually does go back to Wayne. But it's not Wayne—it's like things that Wayne made possible, but it's not Wayne. Wayne is its own thing.
For those listeners who don't know, I worked on his opera, and then after working on the opera, I ended up scanning all the music at his house, and we're currently working on publishing it. He kept most of the music from his whole life. So basically almost everything he wrote, I ended up scanning and cataloging.
Two of the things I really got from being that close to so much of the music—one is how a piece was never done for him. I would find versions from across the years of pieces, including some that go back to the sixties, and he would still be changing a rhythm, changing a melody note, adding a different chord change, whatever. There are so many different versions of a piece that when we actually get to creating, it's very close to the top of our sort of priority list of things we want to do—create an urtext edition of Wayne Shorter compositions and songs.
I don't know. It's going to be very hard to decide what is the song, because there's sometimes 10 different copies of a piece and they don't all match, and then the recording doesn't match any of them. That is really fascinating, and I've tried to keep that mentality. For example, my quintet record Abiding Memories—it's been out for half a year now. We recorded the music over two years ago, but we're still playing the music live. And I still make changes every time we play it in rehearsal. "Ah, you know, that thing, it's not working. Let's try it like this." That is a huge lesson that nothing's ever done.
And the other big thing is how he copies himself. So he is not afraid to just repeat himself, just take something he's already written and turn it into something completely different. I think so many composers today, I don't know if it's a bit of the capitalist mindset that we're in, but feel like we have to create something new every time we sit down to write. And it just doesn't have to be that way. You can take material that you've already written and spin it differently, draw it out differently. You can do the same thing you've done last week again, in a different way. Get deeper into it, find more meaning in it, see it on its head.
Wayne does that in big and small ways. I mean, the same harmonic devices would show up. I've noticed the way he uses voice leading, moving chords by half steps, some of the voices by half steps to get a new sound, keeping other ones—he does that a lot.
Lawrence: Hmm.
Phillip: Using a melody again, he'll just literally take the same melody. It was a ballad and now it's an uptempo tune and then it's totally different. Taking tunes from the sixties and completely rewriting them in the nineties, making a whole new world with them.
The craziest example of that I can remember, and people will have to wait until one day the opera is recorded to actually hear this—the opera ends with some really, truly crazy music. It's like full orchestra, two turntables, massive amounts of counterpoint, themes from the opera are all crashing against each other. It's completely amazing.
I was listening to the MIDI playback before we even had rehearsal in Sibelius because one of my roles working on the opera was to create the Sibelius file and create the score. So we had copied the whole piece with a team of people into Sibelius. And I was listening—like the first time, I was essentially the first person to hear these notes—and thinking, "What is that? There's something going on."
And I realized that at one point in all this craziness, there is in the basses and celli, a bassline from the end of Atlantis, his record from the nineties, which I have on vinyl and I've listened to a million times. It's from the last track, and what the hell is that doing there? And it's just like in there.
I would often find when he was composing a new piece, which I saw him do for years—towards the end, he would have old pieces, the score, he would have it on his desk, he would be pulling some inner voice from the bassoon from that piece, and he would be putting it in this other piece. That is just amazing to me, and it's something I've tried to start to do almost consciously with some of my music. Say, "Yeah, I love the sound I found. Why can't I just reuse it in a different way?" It doesn't always have to be entirely new.
Lawrence: It's interesting. I can remember as a young man being introduced to that idea from Frank Zappa. He had this thing, conceptual continuity, right? Sometimes it referred to characters or jokes, and oftentimes it was musical motifs. And you do see that—I can think of more examples in popular art of artists doing that, building a sort of universe that they revisit, whether it's musical or otherwise. But it's fascinating.
Phillip: And it was absolutely very common in the baroque and medieval era as well. Composers would not only—they would steal from themselves and others, and there was no sense of copyright or anything like that, which I'm not saying is a good thing. That is not so much a part of, I feel, my world that much, and that's something I learned from Wayne that I think a lot of people don't even realize is in Wayne's music that much. But I think the more that we publish this stuff, I think that will come out as one of the defining features of his world.
Lawrence: It would be really fun to be able to get like a book on demand or something if you could take one of his compositions and get all the versions right and have that. That would be a lot of fun.
Phillip: So that is one thing we're hoping, and it looks like this will happen. I'm not at liberty to say when and where and how, but it looks like a lot of these manuscripts will eventually be open to the public to view, certainly in person, perhaps online. And we will publish all the compositions—really not like the Real Book version, but really based on the actual manuscripts, and people will get to study this music because people want it. They need it.
Phillip Golub
pianist/composer
Phillip Golub (b. 1993), "a musician in fast ascent" (Wall Street Journal) with "seemingly boundless creativity" (Downbeat), is a pianist, improviser, and composer based in Brooklyn, NY. Originally from Los Angeles, he creates highly original and expressive music, grounded in but not constrained by his engaged practice in jazz, creative music, and new music. Technically audacious, Phillip sublates sound worlds as distant as Thelonious Monk and Alexander Scriabin, the ars subtilior and Cecil Taylor, negating conventions, yet building on traditions.
Phillip’s recordings have been praised as “cutting edge” (Sequence 21) and containing “a profound concept […] triumphant […] fascinating” (Pop Matters). As a player, he has been described as bringing “assurance, charisma, and infectious enthusiasm” (Steve Smith) to his performances and manifesting “exhilarating energy, charisma, and a canny ability to transform the complex and even inscrutable into sophisticated yet joyful noise” (Allmusic.com).
Phillip is in demand as a pianist on New York’s jazz, creative music, and world music stages, performing and recording regularly across numerous sub-genres and scenes, such as Layale Chaker, DoYeon Kim, Lesley Mok, Anna Webber, Jacob Shulman, and Seajun Kwon, at venues such as Roulette, National Sawdust, and many other Brooklyn mainstays.
Phillip has an unwavering commitment to honoring the genealogy of jazz. He has played numerous times with Cecil McBee and worked extensively with Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding on their opera … (Iphige… Read More
