David Robertson is a rare conductor who unites avant-garde complexity with accessibility. After serving as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Pierre Boulez’s storied contemporary-music ensemble, he went on to rejuvenate the St. Louis Symphony. Robertson combines a fearless approach to challenging scores with a deep empathy for audiences.
Tyler and David explore Pierre Boulez’s centenary and the emotional depths beneath his reputation for severity, whether Boulez is better understood as a surrealist or a serialist composer, the influence of non-Western music like gamelan on Boulez’s compositions, the challenge of memorizing contemporary scores, whether Boulez’s music still sounds contemporary after decades, where skeptics should start with Boulez, how conductors connect with players during a performance, the management lessons of conducting, which orchestra sections posed Robertson the greatest challenges, how he and other conductors achieve clarity of sound, what conductors should read beyond music books, what Robertson enjoys in popular music, how national audiences differ from others, how Robertson first discovered classical music, why he insists on conducting the 1911 version of Stravinsky’s Petrushka rather than the 1947 revision, and more.
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Recorded March 12th, 2025.
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Thanks to listener Timothy Kubarych, writer of financial and economic poetry, for sponsoring this transcript.
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I’m happy to be here in New York City with David Robertson, who is one of my favorite classical conductors. In the year, I think, 2003, I went to hear David in Paris at IRCAM, and I’ve been thinking about him and what he does ever since. He served as principal conductor of the Ensemble Intercontemporain from 1992 to 2000, has been chief conductor in Sydney, Australia, music director in St. Louis, where he’s credited with having revitalized that symphony, and he is very well-known for his numerous recordings, including those of John Adams, Pierre Boulez, George Gershwin, and much more.
He teaches at Julliard, and he conducts regularly at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. This November, he’s conducting with the New York Philharmonic, an exciting concert featuring Stravinsky’s Petrushka, 1911 edition. David, welcome.
DAVID ROBERTSON: Thank you very much.
COWEN: Now, as we both know, it’s the 100th birthday of Pierre Boulez on March 22nd, and we’re recording just a few days before then. You studied with Boulez.
ROBERTSON: I didn’t actually study with him. In a sense, that was the benefit of coming to him relatively late. I went to London to study in 1976 at the Royal Academy of Music, and of course, that was when Boulez was no longer the chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, but he still had a very strong relationship with the organization. So, he came a lot, and I got to see all sorts of amazing concerts at a very formative period of my life.
Then later on, I figured out how to get into the studio where the BBC Symphony Orchestra rehearses. I would go to rehearsals that he had, and he was always very nice, and he would say hello when he saw the stranger sitting in the back of the room, but I never had the courage to speak to him. [laughs]
COWEN: He had this reputation of being a bit severe and uncompromising. Do you think that’s wrong?
ROBERTSON: I think that he came of age in a period that was fraught with all sorts of musical challenges. He often used to say, “I’m Capricorn, so I’m very stubborn.” I think that he was somewhat combative as a young man, and I got to know him — we never had a filial relation. We had a grandfilial, if I can call it that. Your grandfather looks at you and is very forgiving of all of the things that you do which are silly. I think this was the nice relationship that I had with him when he asked me to take over the Ensemble Intercontemporain, but we’d had, really, almost no contact beforehand.
COWEN: His music is very emotional. Do you think he’s more properly thought of as a surrealist composer rather than a serialist?
ROBERTSON: I think that because he doesn’t wear, or never wore, his emotion on his sleeve in any way that many people — and also with this extraordinary emphasis on precision that was connected with his performing One of the headlines in a New York paper announcing his arrival at the New York Philharmonic was “The Iceman Cometh.” I think there’s that sense of things. While I can understand where that came from, I never really saw that side of him.
In fact, what was fascinating doing a number of his works — I remember in Japan, I was lucky enough to fall into the opportunity to give the world premiere of Explosante-fixe, and that was because he had knee problems. So, the tour that we had made for Italy and Germany — he was just not going to be able to do because of waiting around for airplanes, and it was extremely painful. I got to rehearse the piece with him in the hall, right behind all of the computers. I heard him rehearse it first with the ensemble and work things out.
That was fascinating, both to see someone working with players and have a clarinet player say, “This actual tremolo between these two notes doesn’t work very well.” To have the man that I would think of as supremely knowledgeable about writing for instruments say, “Oh, well, if we did this one, would it work better?” And the player says, “Yes, sure, that’s fine.” To see this kind of flexibility with his own works, and then to be up in front, conducting and having the computer create the sounds in real time based on the information that the MIDI flute was giving it.
For me to say, “Pierre, I think it’s actually just a little too fast for us to be able to — ” and he said, “Oh, just a minute. Just a minute. We’ll make the calculations.” He calculated everything so it would be slightly slower. I turned with some chagrin to the ensemble and said, “Do you know how we recalculate the tempo?” And I just gave an upbeat. This was one of the things that we worked on together in a sense. It was very close collaboration.
But then about two years later for a big birthday celebration in Tokyo, I was doing a performance of it in Kioi Hall. We got to the slow central passage of Transitoire VII, which is the first movement of Explosante-fixe, and I remember thinking, “This is so incredibly sensual, and it sounds so beautiful in this hall, I’m going to really push the envelope.” I think Pierre’s tempo marking is ♩=40, which is quite slow, but I was down almost at the double of that, like ♪=40. It was the most unbelievably seductive Ravelian sound that you could imagine.
After the rehearsal, Pierre was there, and I went up to him, and I said, “Pierre, I’m very sorry. I really indulged in this little section.” He said, “No, no, no, no, you can actually do more.” That was the moment where I realized he has no problem when the emotion is put into his works in an immensely intense way, but he is not able to do that himself as a performer.
There are a lot of his works where I have done things in his presence, which he doesn’t do, and you won’t find it on his recordings. He said, “Oh, yes, that’s really very nice. That’s lovely.” It’s a fascinating question, this one of how does one express emotion and how comfortable is one with emotions in public.
COWEN: Your recording of say, Notations VII — you think that’s more emotional than his recording of the same piece?
ROBERTSON: I haven’t listened to them back-to-back.
COWEN: I actually prefer yours. His is almost overly rigorous, I think.
ROBERTSON: Right. One of the things that’s interesting that I found often is — and I know this from my own paltry experiences as a composer — you get very nervous when your piece is being played. It’s almost like sending your child onto the Little League field, where all of the parents are watching and, oh my goodness, what’s going to happen now? There is a nervousness, and that frequently, I think, for composers translates into “If I just do this faster or if I just do this with more energy.” Yet, sitting and listening to it, one has a completely different experience of the piece than when you are necessarily in the driver’s seat.
We did the Notations VII with Pierre in Lyon, and so he heard all of that, and there was no sense of, no, no, no, you shouldn’t do this like that. It’s a fascinating thing, working with composers, not only with Pierre but with all sorts of different composers because of that sense of here’s what it sounds like in my head, not in an acoustic, not with real players who are putting things in.
In fact, one of the difficulties I’ve found with composers who work with electronic sounds, electroacoustic music and with live performers is that they constantly feel that the live performers are inflecting their music with something new and allowing it to develop. Whereas, the thing that has been worked out, however sophisticated, in the electronic area, lies there inert while the living musicians move along.
COWEN: Now, there’s some non-Western influences in Boulez’s music, gamelan music connotations. How do you prepare for those? Do you go listen to gamelan? Or you just ignore it and focus on Boulez?
ROBERTSON: I think the answer is both, is the interesting thing. For example, in the work Sur Incises as well as in the 7th Notation, which are about the same gestation period, there are steel drums. This is not a sound you would necessarily immediately think that Pierre would be drawn to. Yet the story behind it is that when he was quite a young man, he became responsible for the musical side of the Renaud-Barrault Theater Company.
This was a company that the French government used in the aftermath of the Second World War to tour around a great deal, and to some extent, to show what was happening in French culture, in this case, in theater. Pierre got to go to all sorts of places that at the time, were totally not touristic. He remembers flying — they gave you wax to put in the ears when you flew over the Andes and little tubes with oxygen would come down that you would put in your nose. All sorts of things like this that gave it a real character.
He happened to be in the Caribbean, and he was walking along the beach. This was before Club Med or anything like this, so there were no tourists. As he was coming along the shore, he kept hearing this strange sound. As he got closer, these were steel drum players. This sound always stayed with him. I think this is similar to the experience of many French composers, where all of a sudden, a gamelan is brought to the Paris Exposition, and it completely changes the idea of what you think of as sound coming in.
This is a constant — the African masks and Picasso and Braque, and the whole idea of changing the perspective of things in Cubism. There’s so much in Pierre’s music that is about his paying attention and listening all the time, whether it’s to Scottish bagpipes, to work out this idea of “Oh wait, the chanter has all of these tiny little notes that it plays and they have very specific rules for how they play these. I like this idea and I’m going to bring it into my music.”
COWEN: Cognitively, can you memorize these scores — or shall I call them tunes — the way you could with Beethoven or Brahms? Or is that just impossible for everyone?
ROBERTSON: When I first got to the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which was 1991, this is unusual in that I think they were probably desperate to find a music director. Peter Eötvös had said, “No, I am not going to extend anymore.” So, Pierre happened to find me. The interesting thing was, he nominated me and gave me the job as music director. I had never conducted the ensemble before. That was slightly daunting, shall we say, to go in. But what that meant was, that at the end of my first season, we had a tour.
We did a fabulous production of Le Marteau sans maître with the ballet of Régine Chopinot, Ballet Atlantique, with this fabulous choreography to Le Marteau sans maître, which meant I needed to conduct it. I came in and I realized that my first Le Marteau sans maître was going to be the 293rd that the ensemble was playing. My first couple of seasons, I felt like I was drinking from a fire hydrant.
At the same time, what was interesting working with that group is that they brought the deep knowledge of his chamber music, of his whole repertoire that you might find in a great symphony orchestra with regard to Beethoven. You automatically start imbibing all of these different ideas.
What ends up happening is that, for example, for Explosante-fixe — that’s a work that has lots of shifting patterns but it’s written in mosaic form. Sometimes, to help the audience understand that, I will talk to them at the beginning and give musical examples, which requires me to look at the audience with my microphone and conduct the group that is behind me, with the score behind me at the same time. I could do the whole piece by heart.
I prefer by heart rather than from memory, because I think the notion is that, like any kind of music, it means so much to you that there’s no way you could forget it, in the same way that you can’t forget your parents’ names because they have volumes of experience and love and connection that are attached to those names. That becomes the same way in a piece that you really love dearly, as some of the Boulez speaks to me.
COWEN: Are the time signatures of these works just crazy?
ROBERTSON: No, the interesting thing is, not that there’s the law of the excluded middle, but essentially, composers use two basic ideas when they’re going to notate their music. One is to take a certain amount of time and subdivide it. This would be like [finger snapping and vocables]. There are many composers who do that. Then there’s the idea that you have, say, a group of eighth notes or sixteenth notes that form an underlying pulse. This is very much coming from the Indian subcontinent. You have this thing going [vocables].
That’s why the notation in Trois petites liturgies, which comes from the second movement of Olivier Messiaen, requires those differing time signatures, because otherwise, if you measure it by a grid, everything else that doesn’t fit in the grid becomes a syncopation. There’s nothing wrong with this. This is what is so wonderful about the grid that jazz players are able to manufacture, where there’s so much push and pull with the grid, and that’s, actually, where a great deal of the energy comes from.
At the same time, for Pierre, there are many pieces in which, for example, the second mosaic piece at the beginning of Mémoriale or Originel, the last movement of Explosante-fixe, [vocables]. You can’t really do that in a strict meter. It’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. If you tried to push that into a box, it would be a little bit like trying to take a very beautiful flower and squishing it down into a little glass case, where the whole reason you like the flower is because it has these expressions of space that otherwise are cut off.
COWEN: A lot of Pierre’s music now is fairly old. Does it still sound contemporary?
ROBERTSON: That’s an interesting question. I’m not sure that it’s possible to give a really compelling and satisfactory answer. The reason for this is that I think contemporary is a very movable feast, and it has to do with what it is you’ve experienced. Someone might listen to a piece of Pierre’s from say, the 1950s — I’m thinking like the First Sonata for Piano or the Sonatine for Flute and Piano — and think of that as very contemporary. Whereas someone else who has been involved in contemporary classical music, for want of a better term, for the last 60 years will hear that and say, “Oh, that’s very dated.”
This is one of the challenges. My sense, in any piece of music that I play, is to try and make it — regardless of when it was written — contemporary in the sense that it speaks to us now because we are contemporary. When I’m doing Mozart, I’m not expecting the audience to come in a horse and carriage and have knee breeches, and then to die from appendicitis on the early side. There are lots of things that one does, and I think that, from that point of view, there are certain works of Pierre’s that have become kinds of classics.
COWEN: Like the Second Piano Sonata, which doesn’t sound dated.
ROBERTSON: Yes. At the same time, for certain people, it has a surface complexity that will immediately cut lots of people off. I have a nice mixtape that I play to my conductors to put this idea across with not very many words. It has everything from reggae to AC/DC, to Bruce Springsteen, to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, to a Schubert lied, a Beethoven string quartet, a gamelan, some kabuki music, to Indian sitar ragga. It’s all put together with a maximum of 2.5 seconds. Sometimes they’re even shorter.
The whole reason for this mixtape that I play to the conductors is to get them to understand that, whether or not you feel musically sophisticated, the speed with which your brain decides, “Ah, yes, for me. No, not for me,” is very, very quick. That’s one of the things that I think we, as performers and programmers, have to take into account when we are deciding to do something.
For example, the little introduction that I do to Explosante-fixe is because if I start with Transitoires VII, which feels a little bit like you take your seat in the concert hall and suddenly it’s transformed into one of the runways at JFK and there are large Airbus 300s coming in right over your head, it can be a little bit scary. Whereas if I start with the delicate part of the piece, which is at the end, and give them a couple of things to think about, all of a sudden there’s enough context that that airport runway experience makes sense within the whole thing.
I think that’s where this idea of what is contemporary for each individual audience member is a tricky one to generalize about.
COWEN: This is maybe too difficult a question, but believe it or not, a lot of my listeners do not love contemporary classical music.
ROBERTSON: Gee, what a surprise!
COWEN: If you just had to explain to them shortly why they should listen to Boulez or you conducting Boulez, what’s the pitch?
ROBERTSON: The pitch is basically that every artist has a unique way of viewing the world, and they express it through music. Part of that experience is the history of what’s come before them, how they deal with that history, and what they see around them at the moment.
For example, there are people who have incredible senses of pitch. I’m thinking of the composer George Benjamin or the late Peter [Scott Fish], who, if they hear a pitch, can tell you how many cents it is above the normal one that you would play on the piano. It’s just uncanny to me because I can’t do that.
At the same time, when I’m listening to music — and maybe this is [laughs] the residual of being a recovering horn player — I hear the overtone structure of pitches, I have realized, much more than many of my musical colleagues. It’s not that they don’t hear them, but it doesn’t enter into their calculation of what’s important in music.
So, each composer has these particular unique experiences that they’ve had as a musician. Then they use that with their own imagination to come up with ideas that they hope are saying something that is unique and that has not been said before.
What this means is that, similar to what happened in poetry in the 20th century and in our century, all of a sudden, it feels as if the rules which we used to be able to hold onto when we were listening to something that was new and with which we were unfamiliar, are suddenly broken down, and it feels like a free-for-all. What do I do?
Then different people’s comfort with discomfort is something that I think contemporary classical music really deals with. There are ways of listening where you can take in the whole thing and say, “But I tend to like music that is more consonant.” I can find you a whole group of contemporary composers who agree with you, who like consonant music. Then there are other people who say, “I find that in my philosophical outlook, much consonant music that’s being written today feels like it’s somehow a cop out, that actually reality is a much trickier and nastier beast.”
COWEN: That’s how I feel.
ROBERTSON: To grab hold of it, you need to use language that doesn’t somehow apologize for that complexity. There are a number of composers I could give you in this way.
I will say that my own background is one where I am slightly prejudiced against things that are ultra-complex. I have spent much of my life being convinced, after engaging with a work, that there’s much more, and that I should reserve judgment before I really start to understand things.
COWEN: With what Boulez piece should a skeptic start?
ROBERTSON: Oh, I would say start gently with a piece like Mémoriale, where there the sound world — it’s for solo flute, it’s for a small string ensemble and two French horns — the sound world is delightful and at the same time, it is a piece that has a very strong emotional tenor. It really is a memorial for a beloved member from the Ensemble Intercontemporain, who was quite young when he died, who was working very closely with Pierre on developing the MIDI flute. In other words, a flute that a player could play like a normal flute, and it would be able to interface with a computer.
He passed away very suddenly. Pierre took one of the fragments that he had written around the memorial of Stravinsky and wrote this piece originally for flute solo, and in trying to work on the piece for its premiere at a memorial concert for Lawrence Beauregard the flutist, he and Sophie Cherrier felt that something was missing. So overnight, he wrote this accompaniment part for the strings and the two horns, and it is an absolute gem. At five minutes, it won’t take too much out of your time, and you won’t feel as though you have spent your time incorrectly.
COWEN: I have some general questions about conducting. How is it you make your players feel better?
ROBERTSON: Oh, I think the music actually does that.
COWEN: But you smile at them, you occasionally wink or just encourage them, or what is it you do?
ROBERTSON: I think the thing that’s fascinating is, we’re enormously privileged to be able to play music. It’s best summed up by John Cage’s phrase, “Happy New Ears.” When I’m in the situation with musicians, whether it’s rehearsal or a concert, there is that sense of wonder that sound can communicate meaning. We are speaking in sound all the time. That means that if a player plays something that’s really wonderful, the recognition of that, I feel, falls principally to the conductor to reflect that out to the rest of the musicians.
There’s an unwritten rule in an orchestra that you don’t turn around and look at somebody, even if they’ve played something great. I think that part of our job is to show the rest of the players, gee, how great that was. Part of the flexibility comes from if, let’s say, the oboe player has the reed from God tonight, that if they want to stay on the high note a little bit longer, or the soprano at the Metropolitan Opera, that you just say, “Yes, let’s do this. This is one of these magical moments of humanity, and we are lucky to be a part of it.”
ROBERTSON: Oh, that’s a fabulous question. I’ll now have to go public with this. The funny thing is, every single individual in an orchestra looks up at a different time. It’s totally personal. There are some people, they look up a whole bar before, and then they put their eyes down, and they don’t want any more eye contact. There are other people who look as though they’re not looking up, but you can see that they’re paying attention to you before they go back into their own world. And there are people who look up right before they’re going to play.
One of the challenges for a conductor is, as quickly as possible with a group you don’t know, to try and actually memorize when everybody looks up because I always say, this is like the paper boy or the paper girl. If you’re on your route, and you have your papers in your bicycle satchel, and you throw it at the window, and the window is closed, you’ll probably have to pay for the pane of glass.
Whereas if the window goes up, which is the equivalency of someone looking up to get information, that’s the moment where you can send the information through with your hands or your face or your gestures, that you’re saying, “Maybe try it this way.” They pick that information up and then use it.
But the thing that no one will tell you, and that the players themselves don’t often realize, is that instinctively, and I think subconsciously, almost every player looks up after they’ve finished playing something. I think it’s to just check in to see, “Am I in the right place?”
That is a personal moment, where the orchestra is thinking about what’s coming. They’re not thinking about what’s behind because you’re constantly in the present and the future, but that’s your moment to send a message to somebody which can be, “Oh wow, that was incredible.” That sense of “Maestro came to my house” is really one of the things that I think helps build this kind of communication and trust between the players.
We recently did a concert, one of the recreations of one of Pierre’s Rug Concerts. There were a couple of notes that people played in the Webern symphony, which is very hard and very austere. You play one note, and then you have four bars where you can chastise yourself because that note didn’t come out just as perfectly as you wanted it to. Those are moments where the communication with the conductor, I think, is just essential because that’s what keeps the whole thing alive and full of meaning.
COWEN: So that’s the skill a conductor needs to have that even a great musician might not have.
ROBERTSON: Right.
COWEN: What would be another skill a conductor needs to have that a great musician might not have?
ROBERTSON: I think you need to feel comfortable with sometimes looking slightly foolish. I had a wonderful mentor and colleague named Janos Fürst, who started out as a violinist, grew up in Hungary. In ’56, he crossed the sea from Hungary into Austria, and then was a wandering person until he managed to find a spot in Ireland and then London. He taught conducting, and I was fortunate enough to be his assistant in a summer course in Ireland.
Janos would often say to people, “Imagine the moon view that there’s some extraterrestrial who’s come to observe the Earth and thinks that a safe distance to do this is from the moon because you don’t want to get too close. You don’t know how these people are going to behave. He sets up a telescope, and the telescope is trained, purely by chance, on an orchestra room where there are all of these people looking like they’re trying to saw through something with a bow, and people who are going red in the face with these yellow instruments that they’re playing.
There’s this one person who’s just holding a little stick and waving their arms like crazy. All of a sudden, the moon view makes you realize that being the one person not making sound in the room is a little ridiculous. I think that’s something that sometimes, not taking ourselves too seriously is something that is hard for some musicians.
COWEN: Having been a music director, you’re also a manager of sorts. What is it managers can learn from conductors?
ROBERTSON: Oh, you can only do your job by listening. That’s the only way to do the job. It looks as though you are somehow imposing your will on other people, but you’re not at all. My father was a research engineer. Although I didn’t have the mathematical skills to follow him into those domains, it’s fascinating to me — in the latter part of his life, he was often managing these brilliant scientists, many of whom were phenomenal at what they could do, but they couldn’t necessarily figure out how to do things together.
So, your job is to figure out how to harness all of the collective artistry that’s right in front of you and manage to get it to move in the same direction. Yes, sometimes there are decisions that you need to take, like any manager, and it may be as simple as a short-term decision: “Tomorrow morning, let’s rehearse this and start with this, and then we’ll go to this other piece after the break.” Or it may be a long-term decision such as, “What are we going to play in the coming seasons that helps develop the orchestra?”
Or it may be a decision that impacts the orchestra for 25, 30, 40 years that you won’t be involved with anymore, as when you give tenure to a particular player in the orchestra. But all of these things and the efficacy of them is based on your ability to really deeply listen to what is going on and listen to the different points of view.
COWEN: Which part of the orchestra do you have the most trouble with?
ROBERTSON: I’ve never thought about it. I think at the beginning, you tend to have the most trouble with the instrument or the group of instruments with whom you have the least practical experience. When I was first starting out as a 21-year-old, the idea of telling a brass and woodwind section, “Let’s breathe here,” felt far more comfortable than turning to the first violin and saying, “What would that be like if we started it up bow?”
Then with time, you gain a greater understanding of what’s going on. This is why the work with the Ensemble Intercontemporain for nine years, for me, was absolutely formative because there are two things.
One is, when Boulez founded this group, he made it so that each one of the players was considered a soloist. It was an ensemble of 31 soloists, and their contract was modeled on the soloist’s contract in an orchestra, which is usually closer to two-thirds of the time so that they’re not playing every single piece every single week because they need the time to keep themselves, like a great sports player, a tennis player, or a gymnast, in top form. There’s lots of practice that’s going on on the side. That’s one aspect of it.
Then the other aspect was that when I would come into a rehearsal, and you have composers pushing the envelope, there would be times when I would think, “You can’t possibly play this on the instrument.” They would say, “Oh yes, you can if you do this this way.” They would show me a fingering, or they would show me a combination of the position on the string instrument or a type of circular breathing on the woodwinds in such a way that I felt I was getting a master class in every single instrument.
What’s been fascinating is to be able to — and this is the heart of music in itself as a tradition where you give on the things that you’ve gotten from those before you — I would get to orchestras, and the percussion player would say, “No, I don’t think you can do this.” I would say, “Try it this way,” and they, “Oh, yes.” Because they haven’t necessarily come across something like that. So, most of my knowledge I owe to the members of the Ensemble Intercontemporain.
COWEN: Now, many of my favorite conductors, Boulez himself, you, Masaaki Suzuki — you can attain this incredible clarity of sound which seems distinct from simply the quality of the orchestra. How is it you all do that?
ROBERTSON: Well, it’s very funny you should say that because that’s one of the things that I always found fantastic listening to Pierre, either in a concert or a rehearsal or a recording. I once asked him, “How do you get such incredible clarity?” He said, “Oh, it’s very simple.”
As an aside, I must say that one of the things Pierre often said in the most complex situations would be to preface it with, “It’s very simple.” It became a joke at the Ensemble. “Pierre, how do I do 13 in the time of 17?” He would say, “Oh, it’s very simple.” That was the standard go-to line.
He said, “It’s very simple. You make sure that you have very clearly what you want to hear in your head, and then, even without realizing it, you will instinctively do what is necessary to make sure that you hear it.” And he’s absolutely right. So, for me, having worked with composers and struggling with writing music myself, I think very long about how I’m going to put something down on the page. This precise instrument, that detail.
John Adams used to say that you have just reams of details in a score. As an interpreter of someone else’s music, I try to take all of that, with as much precision and good faith as possible, that they didn’t just do it willfully. Therefore, I think if they want to hear something, they have put it in there in the score. It seems inconceivable to me that we wouldn’t try and make sure that it’s heard, even if it would seem, “Ah, well, the bassoons have the trombones blaring right behind them. Therefore, we won’t hear the bassoons.”
No, if there are moments when Janáček just leaves out the bassoons, great. But if the composer has put the bassoons in there, if it’s Berlioz, and he’s got his four bassoons and his trombones, and they’re all playing fortissimo, then you have to figure out what is necessary to make sure that the bassoons don’t just hang up their instrument and go home when it gets to that passage.
It’s true that without doing this consciously, you immediately bring the trombones down or you bring the bassoons up or you set the orchestra up differently. There are all sorts of ways that you can accomplish what’s necessary, but I think the fundamental idea is, every person in the orchestra, like every person in an ensemble of soloists, is equally important, and their viewpoints are equally valid. Your job is to figure out how to take all of that and synthesize it so that you have a unified whole that has as much clarity as possible.
COWEN: To be a great conductor, what is it you need to read in fiction or history or other non-musical areas? Anything? A lot?
ROBERTSON: I had trouble as a reader when I was a kid. I was born in a family of very fine readers, so I had a very low sense of self-esteem in that regard. At the time, this was before people talked about legasthenia or dyslexia and so forth, and it was hard for me to read. I managed to work it out through reading plays because in most plays, there’s a great deal of space around the text. All of a sudden, I found that that space allowed me to process things more easily.
A few years ago, I came across a book by Dr. Maryanne Wolf called Proust and the Squid. In this book, she talks about the fact that the squid has a very simple nervous system, so it is possible to study all sorts of aspects of it. This is the same reason that molecular biology uses things like C. elegans, the nematodes, because you can figure out what’s happening if you can turn off this particular cell and see what that does to the animal.
It turns out, unlike Proust, who is the quintessential reader, there are people who have difficulty reading, and there are squid that cannot swim when they are born. A squid that cannot swim when it is born dies. The fascinating thing, when you study these particular squid who have this anomaly, is that they don’t use the normal neural pathway to the muscles. They have to build one which is entirely unique.
Her whole book then talks about people and situations in which the relatively recent experience of reading text for Homo sapiens is something that the majority of people do in a certain neurological way, but there are others for whom — for whatever reasons — those neural pathways are not open to them, so they need to build something different. Part of my experience of reading plays and having this space was, going slowly through something in a play, I could put all the rest of the information in without having to think at all about expository writing or descriptive.
It’s a forest, and I would imagine the forest, and then I would have the things. I grew to love reading and was passionate about it. My reading has been very wide ranging. I’m a real hard-ass at Juilliard, and I make my students . . . I assume that they’ve all read Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style. I assume that they have a favorite orchestration book. For the class, I make them read all of, I’m afraid, George Steiner’s After Babel —
COWEN: It’s a great book.
ROBERTSON: — which is about translation and the whole process of taking something from one situation, in this case, one language into another language, what you can carry across and what gets, in the famous phrase, lost in translation. Then I make them read Words We Use, and Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, because that’s one where we tend to speak and we haven’t ever necessarily looked at the language we’re using and what it communicates. I make them read someone that you’ve had on the podcast before, Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow —
COWEN: Sure. Great man.
ROBERTSON: — because this is one of the things — so much of what we do, I think, in conducting, is actually the real hard crunching of data that system one takes care of. System two, that thinks it’s in charge, is really just coming late to the party, like 50 milliseconds late, but it thinks it’s still in charge. It’s a little bit like the BBC show, Yes Minister, which is very amusing. But these things one has to understand.
Then sometimes, we will talk about which books are the ones that formed you, and whether you’re reading history, or whether or not you’re reading literature of the time or literature of your own time. I think the broadest possible reading list and experiencing list — whether it’s theater: going to plays, going to movies, watching something on television — everything in your experience, if you are a musician, I think, translates into your art. That means that you can come to it in many different ways.
COWEN: You’re very well known for working with younger conductors. As you observe the flow of them over the years, do you think they’re reading less as a whole, and they need more encouragement? How’s that evolving?
ROBERTSON: I’m going to boomer here. I think that part of the thing is that we’ve had a really fundamental shift in society with the age of smartphones. The internet was already the first major move in that direction, but the idea that you have essentially a supercomputer in your pocket is a huge change. I have no idea how that’s really going to affect things, but I think that the challenge for us in what we call classical music — for want of a better term — is the idea of long form.
That has phenomenal rewards, but it is dealing with what is seen as a very scarce resource, which is attention, and its concomitant aspect, time. I think that one of the things that one needs to learn to do for young conductors is to, in a sense, slow down and learn about yourself. That can be done through books, and much of it is done through contemplation of the score, whatever that score might be, whether it’s written by a man in Leipzig 300 years ago, or whether it’s something that was written yesterday by a person who is trying to wean themselves off of social media, as you are.
COWEN: What do you enjoy most in what might be called popular music? Another bad term, but you know what I mean.
ROBERTSON: Yes. Oh, the thing that I like the most is surprise. That can be surprise when it’s Tracy Chapman singing by herself, or it can be J Dilla figuring out a way to juice the rhythm machine in such a way that the rhythm has this kind of lilt which is both not possible without a machine first doing it, but then immediately becomes something that we humans want to be involved with. Or it may be the voicing of a chord that you hear from a guitarist, whether it’s Joni Mitchell or whether it’s John Mayer.
There are so many different things, but time is limited. One of the things that I enjoy is not telling a Lyft, Uber, or taxi driver to turn off their music, but to use it as a kind of John Cagian moment of —
COWEN: I do that too, yes. Learn something.
ROBERTSON: Yes. Sometimes you experience things. I remember being in a taxi in Milano over a long ride, very late at night after rehearsal, and listening to a song that was completely out of context and yet made perfect sense, about someone staring at the Rhine River in Dusseldorf.
You have this sense of the curious thing that music can do, which is to collapse time and collapse space and collapse distance between souls. That part, whether it’s in popular music or whether it’s in what the Germans like to call serious music, which is so pejorative to the light music, it’s crazy, but all of these things, the sheer . . .
And this is one of the things — I can’t walk around with any kind of pod in my ear. If I listen to something, I listen to something because when I’m walking around, the street sounds — whether those are cars, whether they’re annoying or whether they’re beautiful, like a sudden bird song in a lull of traffic — all of these things are things I want to experience. I don’t want to shut myself off from that because the randomness that this can generate, can have a butterfly effect in us and suddenly take us to a different place.
All of a sudden, the squeak of two brakes — suddenly you find your brain has shuffled the jukebox, and you have a piece of music you haven’t thought of in years because that particular interval just fired a couple of neurons that got some extra protein with breakfast.
COWEN: You conducted for some number of years in Sydney. How are Australian audiences different?
ROBERTSON: Oh, that’s a really good thing to talk about because I think all audiences are different. There are certain cultural aspects. I just came back from a European tour. The amount of applause you get from European audiences is sometimes surprising to Americans. I remember having to tell some American soloists when we’d come out for the seventh time, and they’d already played their encore, that the audience still wanted to see them again, in Lyon. You have a standing ovation in Carnegie Hall and you come out twice and then it’s over.
In Sydney, there is a sense of adventure. There’s also a sense of pride in their institutions that you don’t necessarily find in every place. There’s enough newness about the country that the idea that it’s the Sydney Symphony Orchestra is already a source of pride before you’ve even started to play.
There’s that, but I think the more important point is that an audience anywhere is a collection of individuals. We play a concert for one individual, but for economic reasons, we just get 2,000 individuals together at the same time because it’s cost effective, but each person brings their own sense of what’s there and their experience with them. This goes back to what you were saying about people hearing contemporary classical music and going, “Ick.”
That has to do with, have they played an instrument? When they’ve played an instrument, are they the kind of person who likes to make funny sounds on the instrument? Or do they want to stick with only what’s in the Tune A Day book? If they’re the person who liked to honk and make strange sounds to annoy their siblings, they’re probably going to be closer to contemporary music, and they bring that with them into the concert hall.
You have people who are there to celebrate a fantastic, “I just met this person and I invited them to the concert and they said, yes. Oh, this is great. Can I put my arm around them during the Tchaikovsky?” You have people who come in, and they are still in a situation of bereavement. You have people who come in, and they have looked at something in the news that has disturbed them greatly.
All of these people come in, all of them as individuals, and our job, I think, is to create the most open experience possible so that each one of these people feels they can come into the structure of the music in a way that they can then find themselves and have the incredible experience that it can bring forth, talk to them.
COWEN: As a kid, how did you first discover classical music? How did it click for you? I heard Bach on public TV, a Brandenburg.
ROBERTSON: In some of the other languages that I’ve learned later, as a young adult and an adult, I can tell you specifically where I learned, which train platform I was standing on when someone corrected me, and I learned this word in this language for the first time, but in my mother tongue, there’s no way I can go back and say when I learned “water.” Clearly, it was there at some point.
The thing with the classical music is, we had all sorts of music growing up. I was from probably what would be considered a middlebrow household. My dad played Dixieland jazz on his clarinet — badly, as he would say. He also played guitar and banjo. My mother sang and played piano because every young lady should learn to play piano. It was that kind of an upbringing.
There was everything, from church hymns to music that was known through musicals or from jazz, and then music appreciation records, which we had. There were all sorts of different things, and I can’t actually say when I became besotted with it. I was fortunate to grow up in the Santa Monica Unified School District where they had a wonderful music program. They still do, but this was before Proposition 13 in California. It was, as many other cultural things were, beautifully funded.
I started singing in the choir at the age of six and then started instrumental music in school at the age of, let’s see, nine, and then just went on from there. I can’t really say. I do have an early memory. We bought a Panasonic tape machine, reel to reel, and we only had one tape. That tape, I now realize — at the time I didn’t pay any attention — was William Steinberg and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra doing Bolero and Rapsodie espagnole.
I don’t think the Rapsodie espagnole of Ravel made any impression, but Bolero — I do remember actually listening to it and being able to hear that that’s the same melody now, but with a different color. I must have been seven. I was just besotted with music from the very early start.
COWEN: Your [November] 2025 concert with the New York Philharmonic — why do the 1911 Petrushka and not the 1947?
ROBERTSON: Oh, the Petrushka is an interesting case, as many of the works of Stravinsky are. It has to do with World War I and international copyright. Stravinsky made a small version of The Firebird, which is referred to as the Firebird Suite 1919 because it was published in 1919. This was in the aftermath of the First World War. I think he received some money for the actual score from the publisher, but he never in the rest of his life, received any rights from this piece. It’s the piece of his which was played the most during his lifetime, and to some extent, still is.
When the Second World War came along, and he had found refuge in the United States, he realized, “I need to revise a number of my works so that I can get the copyright.” Some of the works were made more practical, and some of the works were done entirely for financial reasons. There’s a revision of Persephone, his cantata for chorus and solos, vocal solos and orchestra, and he changed one note in the second bassoon part, but in Petrushka, he changed a lot.
One of the things that happened was that there’s a large piano part in the early part of the work, and then the piano never plays again. This comes from him thinking, while he was working with Diaghilev, that he wanted to write a piano concerto, and so these sketches for the piano concerto came in. The woodwind section is reduced. The number of harps is reduced to one. There are a number of things that are done with tempos to make it easier to conduct.
For example, one of the tempo relations, which I really like, is that the opening theme of “The Shrovetide Fair” has [vocables], and it has an eighth note pulse in the horns going [vocables]. He wants, at one point, to just up the tempo a little bit, and that means that he would like seven eighth notes in the time of these six, which means one, and two, and three, and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, and that’s hard for conductors to do.
In the ’47 version, he sanctions, which I think was probably because he would also like to conduct it, because you make money conducting, and so, he turned it into eighth note equals eighth note, and I find this is a very sad way of doing things. Boulez and I talked about this, and he said, ironically, it will turn out, when you are looking at a composer’s works, always trust the original. He never did the ’47, or very rarely.
I’ve done it occasionally, and I always feel, “Oh, why did I agree to do this?” I go back to insisting on the 1911. The colors are much better and the actual beauty of the orchestration — where it comes from in the Russian tradition with Rimsky-Korsakov — that’s all much clearer and much more evident in the way you hear it.
Of course, going back to Boulez, he revised his works all the time, and so, I find it wonderful that a composer said, “Oh no, trust the original,” and yet he would never say go back to the original of Le Visage nuptial.
At the same time, I can understand this because there are times when you say, “Ah, I did put the metronome mark too fast.” Or “Actually, that trumpet part would work once on a month of Sundays, but not normally, so let me be more practical here.”
COWEN: It’s been a pleasure. David Robertson, thank you very much.
ROBERTSON: Thank you.
Photo Credit: Chris Lee