Vijay Iyer Quotes - Page 2

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• Electronic technology has been a part of music making and music listening for a century. We always treat it like it's new, and cutting edge, but it's actually omnipresent, so we should just treat it as part of the arsenal today.

  Vijay Iyer

  Cutting, Technology, Listening

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• What I find the challenge is with working with, say, digital machines - performing electronic music - is that when we play instruments there's a physical act that results in a physical vibration. There's a mapping between our exertions and resultant vibrations, or resonance.

  Vijay Iyer

  Challenges, Performing, Electronic Music

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The thing about physicists is that they tend to think that everything is physics. I don't. That's not what music is to me. You can explain aspects of it in physical terms, including the physics of anatomy: how our bodies move, the torsional moment of inertia, the way you move your body to a beat, the inherent periodicities of the heartbeat, the gait. That's physics, too, I guess - maybe they'd call it biophysics.

  Vijay Iyer

  Moving, Heart, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I notice that Indians love to tweet about each other - will be like, yeah, go India, we're awesome, Indians are awesome, here is another example of an awesome Indian. That's a dangerous false nationalism that I am not interested in. There's a huge amount of diversity within our so-called communities; within the South Asian community, there are people who would never talk to each other.

  Vijay Iyer

  People, Diversity, Community

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I find myself skeptical of music that forces you to have a certain experience, emotional reaction, or specific constructive arc of experience. But performers should still take care of that, to a certain extent - how does it add up? What you want from performance, because we're all in a room together, is that somehow we've gotten somewhere at the end, together. You could call that a sense of narrative, but it's not so obvious how that happens. One way it happens is by everyone caring about it happening.

  Vijay Iyer

  Caring, Emotional, Together

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think what music can offer is the feeling of forward motion, also the feeling of accumulation of information, of sensations, of feelings, like we're going somewhere. When I say 'feel like,' I don't mean to suggest that it's not real, but that it's the work of the imagination, which is what narrative is.

  Vijay Iyer

  Real, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Music is made of what we do when we move, and we can only move in certain ways, in certain ranges of tempo because of the inherent constraints that our bodies offer, or you can call them 'affordances' - that's another word for me. It's a little more positive; doesn't make it seem like a limitation, but rather, a set of opportunities. You can say that that's part of music making, but there's also the imagination. The power of the imagination is kind of trumping - sorry to have to use that word.

  Vijay Iyer

  Sorry, Moving, Opportunity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• This is a tradition of resistance to the term that's as old as the term itself, especially because that term has been used to commodify and reduce black creativity, and also to appropriate and sell it. That's what John Coltrane said in an interview with a Japanese journalist: "Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist." And he's treated as one of the central figures in the history of jazz. So if he rejected it, then why is it weird when I do it? I'm in the tradition!

  Vijay Iyer

  Creativity, Black, Jazz

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• You figure out how to create opportunities to make music, and then, if you take care of the music, audiences will come around. They also might leave. What matters is the moment: the moment of making music, with and for and among others, and what that offers to those people in that moment. They might never see me again; they might never learn my name. But it might still be something they carry with them.

  Vijay Iyer

  Opportunity, People, Care

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I've put live performance in a lot of spaces. Part of what I want to do is take over the takeover. Another way that someone put it is, you climb over the fence and you cut a hole in it, and let everyone else in. That's kind of what this is. The museum is a repository of great works, but there is certain work that no one ever calls great. This is an insistence on directing their attention to other stuff that's great, that never gets to be in a museum.

  Vijay Iyer

  Cutting, Attention, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We can create the sensation of community through the accrual of actions, and that's often the clichéd way that storytelling is talked about, as someone taking a solo, and that's great for lots of reasons. But I don't really like to feel like I'm forced to listen to it in a certain way, or that there is one master reading of performance. I think what we want from performance is multiplicity, which is lots of ways in and through it, because it's for lots of people, and it was created by lots of people, often.

  Vijay Iyer

  Reading, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• This is the last sentence of my dissertation: "What is soul in music if not powerfully embodied human presence?"

  Vijay Iyer

  Soul, Dissertation

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In a mystical sense, three can become one, in the sense that two is not one; three is a way of resolving difference between two. It's about creating balance: of energies, of dispositions. Sonic balance. That's the approach for me, what it means.

  Vijay Iyer

  Mean, Balance, Energy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Resonance is a physical process through which similarities are highlighted.

  Vijay Iyer

  Similarity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I make a lot of music with other desis - that's hugely important to me, but it can't be the sum total of who I am and what I do. It's not accurate; it doesn't reflect my life experience.

  Vijay Iyer

  Important, Life Experience

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I've realized that a lot of people come to me because of what's called identity. In the sense of "he's like me" - more like identification. Identity is one of those nonsense words: it's been used so much it doesn't mean anything. As individuals, we don't want to stay the same; identity means sameness, and we don't want to be the same, we want to keep changing, we want to grow, we want to become something else. We want to evolve. So when people come to me, it's about resonance - it goes back to that word.

  Vijay Iyer

  Mean, People, Identity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'm what they call a 'non-black person of color': NBPOC. It's easy and seductive and common to mobilize around these identity issues, but often that's done at the expense of considering structural anti-blackness. That puts everything in a slightly different light for me, especially because of where I am and why - where I am in the world of the arts, where I live, in Harlem - and the music that I've been able to make, whom I've been able to make it with, who has nurtured me. It's not just about solidarity. It's actually about debt.

  Vijay Iyer

  Art, Seductive, Identity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• To interact means being among others, and taking others into account in a way, to act.

  Vijay Iyer

  Mean

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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