15 Questions to Carl Stone

Hi! How are you? Where are you?
Greetings! I'm fine thanks. At the moment, I am in Los Angeles, taking a one-week break from Tokyo life.

What’s on your schedule right now?
Short term: dinner tonight.
Long term: working on a series of pieces that I eventually hope to combine into a larger work, all involving a new kind of live processing of acoustic materials that I'm getting kind of excited about.

What’s your view on the music scene at present? Is there a crisis?
Crisis?

What does the term „new“ mean to you in connection with music?
Anything I haven't heard yet.

How do you see the relationship between sound and composition? How strictly do you separate improvising and composing?
Quite UN-strictly. For me improvising is composing in real time. An improvising artist is functionally indistinguishable from a composer. My work involves pre-determined structures (which could be called compositions") filled in by materials that run the gamut from pre-composed to improvised at the moment of performance.

How would you define the term “interpretation”?
Most commonly to mean musical gesture by a performer using elements that have not been precisely specified in a score to frame the elements which have been specified.

Harmony? Dissonance? The freedom to choose both, none or just one?
D] all of the above

A lot of people feel that some of the radical experiments of modern compositions can no longer be qualified as “music”. Would you draw a border – and if so, where?
I believe in an open border policy.

Are “serious” and “popular” really two different types of music or just empty words without a meaning?
First of all, as terms they are very problematic. The term "serious" implies that anything that doesn't fall into its category is inherently "un-serious", hence frivolous, silly.

True or false: People need to be educated about music, before they can really appreciate it.
False. People can enjoy and appreciate music without studying it. Which does not mean that music education isn't good, or won't help people to enjoy and appreciate it more.

True or false: The cultural subsidies doled out by governments are being sent to the wrong kind of people and
institutions.
Sometimes true, sometimes false.

You are given the position of artistic director of a festival. What would be on your program?
That depends on the history, profile and budget of the festival, but generally speaking I am interested in programs that combine a number of different aesthetics and styles, and which present a variety of choices within a theme to an audience.

Many artists dream of a “magnum opus”. Do you have a vision of what yours would sound like?
The details are fuzzy but I am sure it would sound fantastic.

Selected Discography:
Woo Lae Oak (1983) Wizard
Four Pieces (1989) EAM
Mom's (1992) New Albion
Sonore, Over-Ring-Under (1992) EMI
Monogatari - Amino Argot/ w. Otomo Yoshihide (1994) Trigram
Kamiya Bar (1995) New Tone
Exusiai (1998) Newtone
Pict.soul/ w. Tetsu Inoue (2001) Cycling '74
Nak Won (2002) Sonore

Homepage:
Carl Stone