Artist Spotlight: Vijay Iyer

A Harvard faculty member since January 2014 and the recipient of a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, the internationally renowned jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer splits his time between duties in Cambridge, New York City, and on tour promoting “Mutations,” his March-released ECM Records debut. The Crimson caught up with the multitalented improviser before his March 14 concert, which featured former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinksy and the Vijay Iyer Trio in Sanders Theatre.

The Harvard Crimson: “Mutations,” your most recent album, incorporates elements of improvisation into a classically inspired strings framework. How does the cognition of an improvisational musician differ from that of a musician who is not improvising?

Vijay Iyer: That was the exact question I was asking myself…. [I was] writing not just for classical musicians but for myself, in the context of people who specifically don’t self-identify as improvisers. In this particular case, where our skill sets are having to somehow work together, where our priorities as musicians are in dialogue somehow, we find that we are actually coming from very different places; certainly they’ve submitted themselves to me being the composer of the piece, but then I have also invited them to make choices that I would classify as improvisational behavior, basically making real-time decisions about what to do and when to do it and how to do it. The emergent totality is something I can’t predict, so it thrusts all of us into the moment together because none of us know how it will sound four measures from now. It’s a score in the broadest sense, but it is more like a recipe.

THC: What do you feel is the most interesting area of investigation into music and music cognition at this time?

VI: I investigate as an artist. That is my research. I would like to see a serious commitment to cross-cultural work. What happens in the field of this research is that people try to make claims about music cognition, human cognition, but they don’t know what a human is. We are really speaking from the West even in ways that we can’t understand sometimes. There’s a research paper called “The Weirdest People in the World;” Weird is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, and basically all psychology research subjects are from that narrow strain of humanity. Beyond that they tend to be undergraduates, so that’s even smaller a strain, and from this we are trying to make universal claims about how the brain works, so we have not fully disambiguated cultural assumptions from our understanding of things like the psychology of music. I would like to see a true decades-long commitment to understanding music on a global scale, from that perspective: not to erase difference but to understand how difference could operate, change your understanding of what music even is. There’s a lot of work happening in terms of music and the brain, but some of this prejudice slips through in a way that is not very rigorous.

THC: How does your understanding of music as embodied action inform the way you listen to music, and the way you perform it?

VI: The way we talk about music is partly afflicted by our experience of listening to music separate from each other, our isolated, individualized earbud experience of music. That has influenced how we talk about it in such a way that we forget that we are forgetting what it was first: something that we did together, for each other. Also, what we forget is that the other thing we call music wouldn’t exist if that were not possible. Often people will [ask],

“How does the brain perceive music as if music didn’t come from us, as if it just comes to us?” I tend to be kind of extravagantly speculative about the origins of music, to be almost irrational about it, to hypothesize, “Why? Why did we do this to begin with?” We have a way of talking about music as something that is not of us, something that we consume instead of do, something that doesn’t have a role in the foundations of what we are, but it’s a bit wacky to talk that way. Whenever I have that experience of “That isn’t music” [when listening to something], then that draws me toward it as an artist—that is exactly the kind of experience that I crave because it leads me to a new understanding of what music is. This thing that we call music maybe is so broad that we cannot theorize it separate from ourselves…maybe it is actually just what we do together with each other.

THC: How would you describe your experience so far at Harvard?

VI: Harvard is like the internet. You can really fill your life up with interesting things here. I have found, being with other artists here, my colleagues that are composers, for instance, that you have to be really protective of your time. You can’t just go to everything or sign up for everything; you have to have some time to be still with yourself and be able to create things.  I have friends and colleagues in all these different corners of the university—and their work is truly interesting. Part of why I am really interested in being here is to enrich my artistic perspective through this sort of thing, but I have to keep a balance, especially because I’m commuting between here and New York, where my family is, because that is a huge part of my life—a part of being human, to be part of a family—and I’m still learning. But I am fortunate to have a lot of good will everywhere I go here, so I am having a good time.