![]() ![]() The cello and baritone saxophone are doing this low undulating fifth. Steven Banks: Steven Banks: The first bar starts. For them to be able to, uh, the listener, to be able to engage with the meditation content and listen and receive and experience everything, the guidance and the musical content is something that we need to take into consideration. It's almost like the audience member is another member of the ensemble because they have something to do too. ![]() Matthew Hepburn: One of the things that we realized pretty early on is that, you know, in a typical piece of chamber music, your audience are listeners. And we went back and forth on that kind of stuff a lot. Like a specifically musical experience and how is it going to feel like a meditation experience. Steven Banks: As a composer, I also really had to think a lot about how much of this is going to feel. And it took us a while to actually build some momentum in the face of how kind of daunting the blank canvas was. Matthew Hepburn: We were kind of confronted by the blank canvas, you know, or the potential of what we could do. I just thought it would be fun to have these instruments with these people. with Andrew Yee, uh, Cellist and Xak Bjerken, who's a long time collaborator of mine. ![]() and also I, I wanted to work with these musicians. So, um, it's very much a part of the chamber music experience. In this case, the guidance is actually written into the score. the meditation guide is not just a separate thing. Steven Banks: the instrumentation is, uh, baritone saxophone, cello, piano, and meditation guide. Matthew Hepburn: This is a collaborative piece of music that is meant to help people use contemplative practices to explore their relationship to their direct experience, to find more agency, more wellbeing, more balance. So I thought that this would absolutely be the right person to go into dreamland with me in creating this piece I was meditating with his guidance pretty frequently, I was having a lot of sleepless nights and just not really able to function the way that I was supposed to.Īround this time I found the Ten Percent Happier app that Matthew is a part of. And there was so much political unrest going on that was just really messing with me. I was at the end of my first year teaching at a new university and then everything shut down and I was already kind of burnt out from being a new professor. I had just gotten out of a really long term relationship. During the pandemic like so many people, just everything really was going wrong, basically. Steven Banks: I knew about Matthew Hepburn, before he knew about me. I'm a dharma teacher and meditation coach. Matthew Hepburn: Hey, I'm Matthew Hepburn. I'm a saxophonist and a composer and one of the creators of Begin Again. Here are Steven Banks and Matthew Hepburn. It received its world premiere in the Greene Space on October 18, 2022.įirst, we’ll hear from Steven and Matthew about what makes this piece special, and then, we’ll hear Begin Again in its entirety. To wrap things up, composer and saxophonist Steven Banks, and his collaborator, meditation and dharma teacher Matthew Hepburn, take us behind the scenes of Begin Again, their collaboration that they created just for the Artist Propulsion Lab.īegin Again is a composition for baritone saxophone, cello, piano, and meditation guide, in which the meditation and the music are equally supportive partners. John Schaefer: You’re listening to the final episode from the Artist Propulsion Lab class of 2022. Artist Propulsion Lab - S1 E9 - Inside Begin Again
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