Anthony Brandt Interview

Exploring Creativity with Anthony Brandt: Below is the transcript to this interview, and you’ll find the link button back to the podcast, video, and show notes with all the links. Anthony Brandt is an acclaimed composer who is also a multi-disciplinary researcher. Dr. Brandt is  a Professor at Rice University and co-founder and Artistic Director of Musiqa. Like many people worldwide, I had first learned of his work as co-author with neuroscientist David Eagleman,  of the amazing book “The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World”. We started this episode with an overview of that book, and Tony’s passion for the importance of encouraging creativity at all stages of life comes through in our discussion of his research, compositions, teaching and mentoring. You’ll hear about how he and other researchers are using mobile brain body imaging, and how research into the arts are so important to the development of neuroscience. You’ll learn about his unique childhood, his mentors and approach to composing and teaching composition, his valuable insights on presenting new music and how integrating art forms can help to connect with audiences. We’re also shining a light on his recent album of string quartet music Meeting of Minds and LiveWire, which are both collaborations with the NobleMotion Dance Company and the University of Houston Brain Center.  Central to this episode is the importance of creativity, and different ways to investigate and explore that.  

Anthony Brandt (00:00:00):

I think the arts have an incredibly important role to play in understanding the human mind and our social interactions. After all, the arts have been around for thousands of years and the science studying this is really relatively young in comparison and the arts are not just entertainment. They are actually incredible bodies of knowledge because they are based on what we understand and what moves us and what we pay attention to, they are literally an encyclopedia of how we think.

Leah Roseman (00:00:35):

Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of guests. Anthony Brandt is an acclaimed composer who's also a multidisciplinary researcher. Dr Brandt is a Professor at Rice University and co-founder and Artistic Director of Musiqa. Like many people worldwide, I had first learned of his work as co-author with neuroscientist David Eagleman, of the amazing book, "The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World". We started this episode with an overview of that book, and Tony's passion for the importance of encouraging creativity at all stages of life comes through in our discussion of his research, compositions, teaching and mentoring. You'll hear about how he and other researchers are using mobile brain body imaging and how research into the arts are so important to the development of neuroscience. You'll learn about his unique childhood, his mentors and approach to composing and teaching composition, his valuable insights on presenting new music and how integrating art forms can help to connect with audiences. We're also shining a light on his recent album of String Quartet music, Meeting of Minds and Livewire, which are both collaborations with the NobleMotion Dance Company and the University of Houston Brain Center. Central to this episode is the importance of creativity and different ways to investigate and explore that.

(00:01:58):

Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on all the podcast platforms, and I've also linked the transcript to my website, Leahroseman.com. It's a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the description of this episode where you'll find all the links.

(00:02:22):

Hi, thanks so much for joining me here today.

Anthony Brandt (00:02:24):

Leah, thank you for having me.

Leah Roseman (00:02:26):

There's so much to talk about and many of your fascinating recent projects and music. But to prepare for this, I have to say, I revisited your wonderful book that you wrote with David Eagleman, "The Runaway Species". So I thought, if you don't mind starting with that because it's such a great book, and if we could just touch on some things because I like to encourage other people to read it, so I don't know, you call that the under title, is "How Human Creativity Remakes the World", and it was just great revisiting this great book. It's been a few years though, right? You wrote it what? 2017 was published

Anthony Brandt (00:02:57):

2017. That's right.

Leah Roseman (00:02:58):

Yeah. And it's been published many languages all over the world.

Anthony Brandt (00:03:02):

Yes, 14 countries. Yes. Thank you so much for reading it.

Leah Roseman (00:03:06):

Yeah, it's interesting, I was thinking, it's one of the few books I've read that I would just recommend to mostly everybody I know because it just touches on so many fascinating aspects, of human creativity and things I don't often think about like engineering and science because I'm a musician. I'm more in the arts, but you tie it also beautifully together.

Anthony Brandt (00:03:26):

Yeah, that was one of the foundational principles of the book was we were going to illustrate every point with an example from the art and the example from the sciences to show how comparable they are, and we really carry that through all the way through.

Leah Roseman (00:03:41):

Yeah, and at the end of the book, you really get into why kids need arts, robust arts education.

Anthony Brandt (00:03:48):

It was one of the big motivation for writing the book. It's just, I think, kind of a human scale tragedy, arts being ripped away from public schools in the United States and millions of children not having access to it. It's really a crime against humanity, in my opinion.

Leah Roseman (00:04:08):

And have you seen changes since the book came out in any kind of positive direction?

Anthony Brandt (00:04:13):

No. No. And I'll have to say that I'll always remember, David and I, we were on our book tour and at one point somebody interviewing us asked "David for you, what's success for the book?" And he said," more arts in the schools". And I was so happy to hear him say that. I was like, yeah, that was one of our big motivations for writing the book. But the education system in the US is so balkanized and the emphasis on testing is only escalating. And so it's been really felt like a tremendous uphill struggle. And maybe the most important mission of the book is just to say that creativity is built into every human brain, and we're very personal and individual in how we express that, but that machinery is operating inside of all of us, and it needs to be nurtured and encouraged and celebrated. And yes, I find it deeply frustrating that that just isn't a main mission of education.

Leah Roseman (00:05:14):

Now, you had got to know David Eagleman through a musical project before that?

Anthony Brandt (00:05:18):

Actually, we had this funny way that we met since about 2002, have directed a new music ensemble in Houston called Musiqa. And a few years after we were founded, we were having one of our annual benefits. And for some reason I had it in my head, it would be fun to have a scientist give a talk. So I had heard about a scientist at Baylor, I teach at Rice and Baylor's right across the street. I'd heard about a scientist there, Read Montague, who had written a book, which I love the title of the book, "Why You Bought this Book: the Science of Human Decision Making". I was like, okay, that sounds great. So I sent him a nice email and he said, oh, I am honored to be asked, but I'm on a book tour and I don't have any time, but I have this brilliant graduate student, David Eagleman, and he's a fantastic speaker. Why don't you ask him? And so I wrote David, and he very kindly said yes, and he gave this fantastic talk on synesthesia. He's one of the world's experts on synesthesia. And in fact, someone at the talk didn't realize she had synesthesia until she heard the talk. And she went up to David afterwards and said, wait a minute, you mean January isn't purple for everybody? And all of a sudden she realized that her whole way of looking at the world was very much her own. Anyway, we became friends after that, and one day we met for lunch in the medical center and we started talking about creativity and we talked for hours and basically we agreed on 99% of what we were saying. And some people sometimes say, well, okay, so what was the 1%? And actually there was no 1%. We agreed on pretty much everything.

(00:06:57):

And at the end, David said, we should write a book together. And it took us four years. David was extremely busy at that time. He was doing the PBS series, The Brain, working on several other projects. And so I would go over there basically on weekends and we would sit at his kitchen table and work on the book weekend after weekend after weekend. But it was an amazing experience, super fun. And I really kind of consider him my teacher in terms of science. I learned to be a scientist from listening to him reason through everything, challenge everything. There would be times when we would come up with some paragraph and it read really well, but David would say, yeah, but it's not quite accurate, and we'd have to toss it out. And so that was a really special experience.

Leah Roseman (00:07:49):

I listened to a recent podcast he did. I have an interest in synesthesia, and a couple of guests I've had on the podcast have very strong synesthesia, and he was talking about something that you guys did mention in the book. At that point, it was like a vest he developed to help people who are deaf hear, and now it's like a wristband. It's just fascinating.

Anthony Brandt (00:08:06):

Yeah. I was at his kitchen table when he basically tried it out for the first time in public, and he was telling me about this, and I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I said, wait a second, A vest where you can hear. I said, so how does the wires attach to your head? He said, oh, no, it's based on neuroplasticity. So basically the way David will put it, your brain is a black box, and just like a computer has peripherals, our senses are our peripherals. They bring data to the machinery of our mind, and our brain is just trained to look for patterns. It doesn't care where it gets the data from, and different animals get their data in different ways, but it's this all-purpose computer. And so if you're hard of hearing, you can retrain the brain to get sonic information through your skin. And basically now as you say, it's a wristwatch, the company Neosensory, you wear that wristwatch for a few weeks and it has buzzers on it that are equivalent to the way frequency is laid out in our ear. So low sounds middle and high, and it's optimized for certain consonants, like s that people who are hard of hearing have a hard time hearing first. It is the first thing to go. And basically you wear that for a few weeks and your brain learns to hear through your skin.

Leah Roseman (00:09:31):

So fascinating. And maybe just in terms of the book, if you could just talk to people who haven't read it about the three main ideas of bending, breaking, and blending.

Anthony Brandt (00:09:40):

Sure. Okay. So one of the main thesis of the book is that this creative software can be thought of as involving three basic concepts. And these are the concepts that are responsible for all creativity, working together, not ever necessarily by themselves. And we call them bending, breaking, and blending. So bending is based on the principle, make a copy and alter it. In music, it would be a theme and variations. Breaking is based on fragmentation. So in classical music, that's what would happen to a theme in a development section. And blending is taking two or more sources and merging them together. And that would be, in music an example, would be counterpoint, playing multiple themes at the same time. But the argument is that these are very open-ended tools that our brain repurposes depending on the situation and uses in various combinations. The most common in the creativity literature, the most common cognitive mechanism that's talked about is what we call blending. And in fact, we got that term from two cognitive scientists, Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, but it felt like that was incomplete. Just telling people, oh, take different concepts and throw them together, was not actually enough to encapsulate the creative process. And so the argument of the book is you essentially need all those three things. So for instance, a mermaid is half a person and half a fish. So that is a blend. But of course it takes breaking not the whole fish and the whole person. It's an example of how that works.

Leah Roseman (00:11:16):

We can't talk about the book the whole time, because so much else to talk about, but I was just thinking about some things that struck me as I was rereading it. One of the things was cultural conditioning, especially in terms of listening to music. And I remember you guys wrote that we associate in the west with lullabies are gentle and soft experiences, but not the same in every culture, for example.

Anthony Brandt (00:11:39):

Right, right. Oh, I think this is a huge, hugely important topic. One of my favorite articles is by a scientist from Harvard, Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World. And the argument of the book is that the great majority of psychological studies are done on basically American undergraduates. And most of the studies are done by Westerners and all the universities around the country and in Europe. But a lot of research wants to generalize and say they're speaking for all mankind. Well, that turns out to be a very, very risky argument to make. And it's a fantastic article in terms of taking a few cases at that time where there had been non-Western examples and comparing them. And it turns out that not only are the Westerners not representative of mankind, they're the outliers. So for instance, there's a visual illusion called the Müller-Lyer illusion, where imagine two lines and the lines are equal length, but at the edge of the lines, there's either arrows pointing out or arrows pointing in, and westerners see those lines as different lengths.

(00:12:51):

And it was assumed for a long time that that was a universal feature of human vision. It turns out that we see the greatest distortion and San foragers of the Kalahari in Africa see them as the same length. And in fact, most of the world sees it close to the same length, and we see the weirdest distortion. I remember talking to David about this, and he had a fantastically interesting theory, which we couldn't test, and I don't know if anything ever happened with it, but he was like, "oh, I wonder if it has to do with the fact that we drive in cars all the time" because our eyes have learned that when the road seems to be getting narrower, because it's off in the distance, we know that doesn't mean the road is now shrinking and it's only an inch thick up ahead of us. We know that it's actually equal all the way through, but we're seeing far into the distance, but we're driving at 60 miles an hour. A San forager in the Kalahari desert is walking on foot, and they don't have the same issue with their vision that we do, so maybe that's why they don't have the distortion; our eyes have learned to compensate. So really interesting theory and a good example of the diversity that happens in across human populations.

(00:14:04):

I don't mean to pivot to another topic, but I think one of the great contributions of the arts to the future of science and the understanding of the brain is going to be understanding the diversity of people across populations and cultures.

Leah Roseman (00:14:23):

Well, when you were researching this book, were you surprised by some things? Like you must have to do so much research to

Anthony Brandt (00:14:31):

Yes. Yes. I mean, we were very determined that we would always have these pairs, that there would be a science story paired with an art story. And of course, the more closely the stories align the better. For instance, I remember this wonderful story of the person who invented the windshield that didn't have glare. And it was a huge problem, and people were dying because they were in car crashes because the headlights of the early 20th century cars would shine in their eyes and nobody could figure out how to create polarized windshields. And the crystals that they were using were very large. And then one day he had this inspiration: "Wait! We will shrink the crystals" and the modern windshield is based on the same principle. It has embedded inside of it a whole array of tiny crystals that refract the light and prevent the glare from happening. And so such a great story. But we wanted to find art, which also involved shrinking into little miniatures, and we found this artist who engraves on sand little sculptures made out of sand. So yeah, tying all those things together was challenging work.

Leah Roseman (00:15:45):

Wonderful. Well, let's move to your recent album, which is String Quartet Music for Dance, incorporating Body Brain Imagery. So Livewire and Meeting of the Minds, were they written around the same time both these pieces?

Anthony Brandt (00:15:59):

So Livewire was written in 2022 and was the reason for it was there was the very first, what they called a Brain on Dance conference hosted by the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. And my colleague in Houston, Jose Contreras Vidal, who goes by Pepe and I'll mention Pepe as we are discussing all this, he was one of the organizers and he said, Tony, how would you like to write a piece that somebody can choreograph to and we can perform at this concert? And I said, great. And I immediately had the idea that I would base each movement on a different feature of brain behavior. And then as it worked out, I collaborated with this wonderful dance company, NobleMotion Dance, and two of the dancers wore mobile brain body imaging as they performed, and we performed it in Houston.

(00:16:55):

We also did it at the conference. Well, that was an exciting beginning. And one of the things that the scientists were able to do is study the neural synchrony between the dancers' brains. So we have that expression, "You and I are on the same wavelength". Well, neuroscientists are finding that that is actually kind of physically true, that when we're doing the same task, our brainwaves tend to coincide with each other. And the way Pepe describes it is that when we're really in sync with each other, our brains are foreseeing the same future right ahead of us, and they are aligned, and scientists are extremely interested in this studying this, the mechanisms of how it works. And something like music or dance is a fantastic way to do that because there's a certain amount of rehearsing that goes into presenting it. So it's very organized. It's not like free flow, real world experience, but it's still happening in the real world as something that human beings do.

(00:17:57):

So we did that study and we learned a lot about the science interest in neural synchrony. And so when we had an opportunity to do another project, the choreographers and I decided this time let's build the scenario in the art around what the scientists want to study. And that's the genesis of meeting of minds. So the idea in meeting of minds is that we would write a piece about the building of social connection, and then the piece itself would be divided up into stages where at first the two dancers are in opposition to each other, they're conflict, they don't get along, and then gradually in the course of the dance, they become more and more affiliated and brought together. And that way the scientists could study the different stages of the relationship between them. And so that's how Meeting of Minds developed. And I decided to score it for live and prerecorded string quartet because Livewire was for string quartet, and that was about one brain. So I thought, okay, so I'll do Meeting of Minds for two string quartets about two brains.

(00:19:07):

And the other thing, which of course is not on the album, is that we, in Livewire, when we did it in 2022, we had a monitor on stage which showed the raw brain data live to the audience exactly as a scientist would see it, learn from that experience, do not show the audience something that they're not going to understand. So people really loved the dance. They loved that it was an art science hybrid, that it was both a performance and an experiment, but they were very mystified about this monitor with just, you can imagine you've seen it in movies with just the jagged line showing brain activity. What did that mean? What were they supposed to get out of it? I have a really fantastically talented student Badie Khaleghian. He's a wonderful composer and now teaches at Bowdoin College, but also supremely gifted multimedia artist.

(00:20:04):

And so for Meeting of Minds, he designed not only projections, but he came up with what we call the brain synchrony meter. And basically it's at the top of the projection screen. There's two brains, one on either side of the stage, and the brighter the image between them glows, the greater the synchrony between the brains and that the audience could get instantly, they immediately understood what it was. I'll tell you also an interesting part of the story, which is an indication of how much this was an experiment. So I wrote the music that always has to come first. Then the choreographers create the choreography, and then finally when they've learned the dance this time now the neuro engineers come and we put on the brain caps and we're going to see the data for the first time. And we're hoping that in the course of this 35 minute piece, we're going to go from very low synchrony when the dancers are in conflict with each other to high synchrony at the climax of the dance when they come together. But the first couple of times through that didn't happen at all. It was always high synchrony.

(00:21:10):

And so we were like, oh, no, this is not good. So we talked to the dancers and what we learned from it was, of course, when it comes to conflict, the dancers are simulating being upset with each other. And in fact, they had to be more alert than ever in the choreographer where they're moving all in contrast to each other. So they didn't collide, they didn't hit each other, they didn't want to hurt each other. So they were hyper aware and in a way more connected during the conflict dance than during the harmony dance. But what was cool was as they learned the choreography and rehearsed over a course a couple of weeks, they got more and more comfortable being oblivious to the other person during the part where they were supposed to be in conflict. And they got more and more independent in those sections, and eventually the synchrony meter told the story. So when you watch Meeting of Minds live, you see at the beginning a very fuzzy data points in between the two brains. And then at the end it's glowing very brightly

Leah Roseman (00:22:15):

And there's different images like flowers and just so people have an idea.

Anthony Brandt (00:22:19):

Yes. And eventually two faces that come to face each other as the characters come together.

Leah Roseman (00:22:27):

So in the show notes, I'll be linking, of course, the album, but also some of these videos you have in your YouTube channel. So people can

Anthony Brandt (00:22:32):

Sure, yeah.

Leah Roseman (00:22:32):

Just click on that.

Anthony Brandt (00:22:33):

Yeah, thank you.

Leah Roseman (00:22:36):

Yeah, I had some ideas of clips to include, but do you have any specific ones?

Anthony Brandt (00:22:42):

I like Scene nine. It's one of the ones that I've posted. It's one of the ones that I think works as a self-contained unit. The music is very thematically interrelated. So there's the music for the female dancer, there's the music for the male dancer. And basically as they come together at first it's very acrimonious, and then eventually they get woven together, and that's all acted out by the music. So it's hard, excerpting it is difficult because the audience is missing some information, but I think number nine works on its own, so that's one of my favorite to share.

Leah Roseman (00:23:20):

Okay.(music)

(00:26:14):

Yeah, you write very well for string quartet, and I really liked your use of texture and pizzicato and the contrapuntal nature of things.

Anthony Brandt (00:26:21):

Thank you.

Leah Roseman (00:26:22):

Do you play a string instrument?

Anthony Brandt (00:26:24):

I used to be a violinist, yes.

Leah Roseman (00:26:25):

Okay.

Anthony Brandt (00:26:26):

Yep. Yep.

Leah Roseman (00:26:28):

You've written a lot for strings. I was wondering about that.

Anthony Brandt (00:26:30):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Used to be a violinist. Yeah, I didn't like to practice. I liked to perform, but I didn't like to practice. And the difference for me for an hour of practicing was like torture. My parents would make sure I had to practice for an hour. I'd literally go hide in the bathroom for part of the time. It was just very difficult. But composing I could do all day and it felt like no time had passed. And I feel like all of us, the blessing is to find the thing you can do in life where you can do it for six or seven hours, and it feels like no time went by. And for me, that was composing.

Leah Roseman (00:27:10):

So do you ever have challenges for that flow state?

Anthony Brandt (00:27:14):

So yeah, it's interesting, the flow state, I have a great admiration for Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who is the person who came up with that concept. Composing, I find it the most difficult thing that I do. I need to always have, I mean, everybody's different for me. I need to have unbroken time and I need to have it in a whole long stretch in a row. So if I know I'm going to be interrupted, I really can't function very well. And my favorite thing is to work on my music first thing of the day so that if I get a good day's working four or five hours by noon, then the rest of life intrudes. But at least I got my work done. And if I get a chance to go back to it, great. But if I don't, I had a solid block of time during that time.

(00:28:04):

There are those Mihaly would talk about the flow state where you're just like, oh, I am in a groove. But a lot of the time it feels like a wrestling match. And again, I think there's people with great facility for whom writing comes very easily. For me, I work it and work it and work it and work it. I love the Michelangelo quote that he would find the sculpture in the stone. That's what composing feels like to me. I get it wrong. I get it wrong. I get it wrong until I finally get it the way that I'm hearing it in my head, and then I move to the next part. I don't know that I would ever say that I picture flow as this kind of blissful all is going so smoothly, we're just swimming in this wonderful river of imagination or so on. I wouldn't say it feels that way to me. Again, I can't function if I don't know that I have that river of time ahead of me and that I can, maybe I'm paddling upstream part of the time, but that is going to be unbroken and uninterrupted.

Leah Roseman (00:29:08):

In the book we were talking about earlier, one of the quotes I'd written down was production lies at the heart of a creative mentality. And so many composers and improvisers I've talked to on the series, it's just about getting those creative juices flowing.

Anthony Brandt (00:29:23):

Yeah. I would say for me, the very, very hardest is the starting part. It's just been winter break, which is one of those times where I just leap into action to work on what I need to write. And I'm writing a cello concerto, and I knew I was going to have about a month for winter break, but the pieces due to the performer at the end of the spring, and that means I have to finish it while school is going on. So I was very anxious about that. I was like, oh my gosh, I've never done that before. I tend to not write when school is in session is it's just too many distractions. So I was like, okay. But I knew also that starting is so hard for me. So the little trick that I have is that I start on the piece a few weeks earlier, and boy, that was the saving grace this time. I started before Thanksgiving and it was terrible and I hated every minute and I was tearing my hair out. This is not going to work. But the minute the open field of time comes and I get to work on it, I wrote twice as much music I was expecting over the break, and I'm put myself in a good position to finish. And so I'm in a happy mood right now. But yes, the beginning is hard. That's where I really, really struggle. And many of my colleagues would say the same thing.

Leah Roseman (00:30:49):

Yeah, it's interesting about the blank page for myself as a violinist and podcast or other stuff I do. I don't shy away from having things just half baked or something dangling because I figured the next time I come back to it, I'll finish that thing and then keep going

Anthony Brandt (00:31:04):

Yeah. Well, and it's interesting. AI is so big right now, and one of the things that's fascinating about AI is all the light that it shines on underappreciated facets of human creativity. And one thing that AI is actually only just like probably within the last couple of weeks starting to be able to do is revise, is judge its own production and think whether there's worth trying it out another way. That's such an important part of the creative process for what I call desk composing. And sometimes when I'm struggling, I remind myself that actually I'm maximizing the value of something that's a uniquely human thing to be able to do.

Leah Roseman (00:31:52):

Musiqa, you'd mentioned this new music collective that you're one of the founders of. I was really interested to read about it because you integrate other art forms from the beginning and all this work you've done with schools. And we also started talking about the importance of arts. You've played the music of over 250 living composers?

Anthony Brandt (00:32:08):

Yes, yes, yes. And from emerging to very established. And I think all of us involved in Musiqa love the multi arts way that we present things. Part of the idea in the beginning was people, you talk to an average cultured person, would you go to a modern art gallery? Of course I'd go to a modern art gallery. Would you go see a brand new play? Well, of course I would go see a brand new play. How about modern dance? Yeah, absolutely. Modern music, huh? People still write classical music, and I've had people tell me, I don't care if no music was ever written after 1900. I was like, how could somebody possibly have an attitude like that? So we thought, look, if there's people who are love to be au courant of the arts, other contemporary art forms, let's get them hooked into new music. There's the same level of imagination and searching and curiosity and trying things out and experimenting in the musical domain as of course there is in every other human domain. And so that was one of the motivations for that.

Leah Roseman (00:33:24):

I was wondering if you'd, because it's been around for a while, right? Over 20 years, have you seen

Anthony Brandt (00:33:27):

Yes

Leah Roseman (00:33:30):

If you've seen changes in this generation, the types, there's more inclusivity with different composers coming from different backgrounds, the styles of music. Is there more diversity there?

Anthony Brandt (00:33:42):

Oh yes. Okay. My brain went in a fork there and I wanted to answer two things at the same time. So the first thing I'll say with respect to the diversity, obviously there's been a mission in classical music to diversify what had been basically a white male profession for hundreds of years. And the challenge, of course, is that that's not backwards compatible because basically women and minorities were not given the opportunities in the 19th century and the 18th century. And there's scattered few people, but you have to look long and hard to find them. Everybody else was just told, no, don't do it. So I think one of the great contributions culturally that contemporary music plays is the best and most effective way to address the question of diversity. We have to do it now and we have to do it with the voices of today.

(00:34:38):

So that's been a very important priority for Musiqa in terms of the diversity of styles, there is such an interesting cross flow going on. I was thinking about this today preparing for our interview. So in the first generations of neuroscience, basically neuroscientists were doing something very understandable. They were looking for what all brains share in common, and that's where brain maps come from. So when you see an MRI and it points and says, that's Broca's area for language, that's the kind of things that was preoccupying neuroscientists in the first generation. But in the latest generation of neuroscience comes the recognition that every brain is as unique as a fingerprint, and that in fact, we are incredibly shaped by culture and experience. Interestingly enough, neuroscience has learned more about that from music than any other human activity. So instance, musicians, brains are measurably different from non-musicians brains in all sorts of ways, in fundamental ways, even in the way that we perceive sound.

(00:35:49):

There's some fascinating images. If you just Google music and language and you see musicians and non-musicians will process language differently and so on and so forth. So the old way of averaging brains and coming up with a sort of collective brain, or if you want to call it a normal brain, is now being replaced by a much more nuanced view. And to what extent do brains vary? What are our limits? What are the spectrum of possibilities? That's really largely unknown. And again, I think one of the engines for discovering of that is in the arts, because right now the arts are so much about individual voice and finding your own language and speaking in your own terms. And of course there's always going to be threads and fibers connecting people within a culture, but there's also an incredible amount of diversity. Now, I said there were like two flows.

(00:36:43):

The other flow is, of course, because of mass media, everything is becoming homogenized. And it's sort of sad that we didn't have tape recorders and brain science back in the 12th century when cultures were really totally isolated from each other and nobody knew there were other people halfway across the world whose musical tradition was completely different from ours, et cetera. Unfortunately, now finding people who have never been exposed to pop music or so on and so forth is really, really difficult. And our ability to understand some of the profound differences that can happen between brains is being reduced in a sort of ecologically valid way in terms of populations. But on the individual level, I think it's becoming more and more to the forefront. And when you hear things, people talking about personalized medicine, that is really going to depend on understanding the individuality of brains and what works for me may not work for you. So yes, to your question, there are a huge variety in the voices. I think that's incredibly healthy. I think it's one of the ways we as a species are starting to understand the range of what's possible in a human brain. And I think that science can latch onto that. It's again, one of the ways where the arts and the science really belong together is the understanding of how we differ from each other.

Leah Roseman (00:38:15):

And I'm curious about these school programs. How are you presenting this music to kids?

Anthony Brandt (00:38:21):

So music as education program essentially has two generations divided by the pandemic.

(00:38:28):

So for about 15 years, we gave field trip performances at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts in Houston called the Discovery Series. And my wife is an extraordinary singer, but also very dedicated to working with kids. And so she would go to every public school that attended our programs and do a workshop with the students so that they could sing along with the musicians when they were in the hall. And we created two shows, both of which use folk songs as the basis for contemporary music. So one was pieces like excerpts from Luciano Berio's folk songs and George Crumb's setting of Black is the Color. So stuff that had been written by other composers as well as ourselves. And in the second show, we wrote original music based on folk song, but the idea is the kids could come having known the folk songs and they could sing them along with the performers, and then they would hear modern composers transform those songs.

(00:39:27):

And I have to say, the sound of 500 kids singing along with the musicians may be the happiest sound I have ever heard. And I'm more proud of the work that we did with those kids than really almost anything else Musiqa has done. Just because what one field trip can mean to a kid in those kinds of circumstances can be life altering. And we get little letters, oh, now I want to be a flute player. And they're like, okay, if you changed one person's life as a result of going to that, I feel like we did something wonderful. And then the pandemic hit and the Hobby Center, of course had to close like everybody else, and they lost their educational staff. And so we had to pivot and in sort of re-imagining what we might do, we also realized, heck, we're a group directed by four composers. Creativity is really important to us, and it would be great to be in the schools and helping kids learn to compose. So we started what we call musical lab, which involves working with often it's the music, AP students and composition workshops, and we premiere their pieces at the end of each semester. Then wonderfully, the Hobby Center reopened with a brilliant new staff actually, and relaunched the Discovery series. And so we've also now been able to do more field trips for kids and are really excited about that.

Leah Roseman (00:40:55):

Okay. I didn't know that your wife was a vocalist, and you've written so much for oratorio and operas. Is that part of

Anthony Brandt (00:41:02):

It? Is part of it? Yes. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. She taught me so much about the voice and writing for her also always has been a thrill.

Leah Roseman (00:41:13):

In fact, this year you wrote another opera, the Iphegenia climate change story.

Anthony Brandt (00:41:18):

Yes, yes. So I had a sabbatical. I thought, look, it's a chance to do a dream project. And I've always said to myself, if there was a genie that somebody handed me a genie and a bottle, and I had three wishes, one of my wishes would be to be able to write a piece without a deadline, because most of the time a composer, somebody asks you for something, your commission, you got the deadline. And I'm a very deadline driven person. Making the deadline is incredibly important in our field. You can't postpone the concert if it's going to be, but I hadn't ever written a piece without one, and I wanted to feel like I could make decisions and function without having something from the outside. And so during my sabbatical Meeting of Minds was one of the pieces that I wrote. And then I thought, okay, I like to write another chamber opera. I have a wonderful librettist, Neena Beber, and this would be the third time we worked together, and that would be my dream project. And so that's what I did in the second half of my sabbatical.

Leah Roseman (00:42:23):

So do you want to speak to that project at all?

Anthony Brandt (00:42:25):

Sure. So the two previous chamber operas, and these are all pieces that are about 45 minutes long with a small cast and a small number of players. The first one called Ulysses Home was a modern retelling of the story of Ulysses coming home to Penelope. But this time Ulysses is a modern soldier with PTSD coming home to his wife. And Neena had done a writer's workshop for veterans, and so knew firsthand some of the experiences that couples had had, was somebody coming back from the war with PTSD. And I have to say, when we premiered this in Houston, we coordinated with several veterans groups and about a hundred veterans and their partners came to the performance. And I remember that morning thinking, oh my gosh, I mean the music is challenging. And then we've got a whole modern music program even before my piece. And these are soldiers, they're probably not that familiar with contemporary classical music. This is going to be, what's this experience going to be like? And they were the most attentive audience we have ever had, period. And at the end of the performance of Ulysses Home, we had a little question and answer, and I remember someone raising their hand and saying, thank you. My dad came back from World War II, a change person, and I never understood why until tonight.

(00:43:56):

Okay, somebody tells you something like that. You feel like what you did was worth it. Then the second collaboration, Cassandra is a modern retelling of the myth of Apollo and Cassandra. So in Greek myth, Apollo says to Cassandra, if you become my mistress, I will give you the gift of prophecy. And she says, no thank you. And so he gives a curse that she will be able to see the future, but no one will believe her. And she actually around Troy warning them, the horse is coming and like, what are they talking about? A horse? Nobody pays any attention. So we thought, okay, what a great story to update as a climate change story with Cassandra as a scientist, and Apollo as a venture capitalist supporting her work, and she has got this prediction machine that is able to forecast the weather and do climate change modeling.

(00:44:56):

He makes a pass at her, she turns him down, and then he sits out to ruin her career. And of course, she's warning about the dangers that are coming and no one will pay any attention. And the opera really tried to be about what is it going to take for us to really recognize, acknowledge the scientific consensus and the fact that we're in this peril? What is it going to take to wake up? So Iphigenia is another climate change story, so in the Greek myth, Agamemnon's fleet is stranded on an island on their way to Troy because the winds stop blowing and Agamemnon finds out that one of the gods has been offended, and in fact will not have the winds allow them to blow again until he sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia. And Agamemnon reluctantly does so, and the wind is restored and he fleet is saved, and they go.

(00:46:00):

And eventually, when the Trojan War, a lot of times people tell that story, it's about the patriarchy. There's a lot of debate even with scholars about how much agency Iphigenia has in the myth, does she just put to the slaughter by Agamemnon or does she actually sacrifice herself? And there's debates about that, but we saw it a very different way. We saw it about short-term versus long-term decision making where, okay, he's got an immediate problem, he's got to get the wind blowing so he can have his fleet sail. And the long-term issue is having his daughter grow up and remember talking to Neena about this, and we were talking about in my own children who wonder about whether they should have children and bring them into a world where we don't know what the world is going to look like. What are the temperatures going to be like?

(00:46:59):

What's the weather going to be like in 50 years? And is it right to bring a child into the world? It's painful as a parent to hear your kids talking about stuff like that. And so Neena said, what Iphigenia is never born? And so that's the tragedy in our story is that it's a couple who are, they have a wind farm and the wind stops blowing and the mayor cancels the project, and as a result, they realized that the future that they had dreamed was going to happen was not going to happen. And Iphigenia is never born.

Leah Roseman (00:47:32):

Yeah. You were talking about the veterans earlier in there, you were worried about their appreciation of the music. So these strong narratives really help. But I'm curious, when you present concert music, like we talked a little bit about working with the kids, but just with regular audiences, what ideas do you have to bring people into some of the complexity of the music?

Anthony Brandt (00:47:53):

Oh, that's a great question.

Leah Roseman (00:47:55):

Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I have linked a few episodes in the show notes for you, that you may be interested in, with: Thomas Cabaniss, Frank Horvat, Dorothy Lawson, Cheng2 Duo, Nimrod Borenstein, Ceara Conway and Diane Nalini. It’s a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, notebooks, water bottles and more, everything printed on demand. On my Ko-fi page you can buy me one coffee, or every month. You’ll also find the links to sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Please check out my back catalogue, with weekly episodes going back to 2021. And a great way to share this episode is to text it to a friend!

Anthony Brandt (00:48:50):

So I was thinking about something today, which I've never articulated before, so I'm going to try this out. I've never said it before, but I was thinking when I sit down to write a piece, I would put them in three categories which overlap, but it's sort of three focuses. One is, let's call it a programmatic piece, my Livewire piece with each movement based on a different feature of brain behavior. That would be an example of that. The second one would be a narrative piece where there's a plot, and there third kind would be a piece which is about the musical material, and it's about a theme or a chord or something that excites you as a composer and you want to flesh it out and see how it develops. I think how you introduce those pieces to the audience all depend on what that type, what category the piece falls into.

(00:49:41):

So one thing I feel very strongly about with a program piece, and I talk to my students about this all the time, is you should be able to answer the question. If the program wasn't there, how would the piece be different? If you can't give a satisfying answer to that, then the program is not going to be heard by the audience. So there should be something absolutely recognizable. Oh, I see how that's about the program. That was what I would introduce to the audience if it was a programmatic piece. What about the piece is there and only there because of the program with the plot, of course, that's essentially the easiest because there's a story to follow. And in fact, I love those situations because there's often a chance to be more experimental and stuff that on its own terms, maybe an audience would go, huh, but in the service of a plot, they go, yeah, I needed to hear it like that. And then with the musical material piece, talking about some of the milestones in the composition, things that happened to the material, maybe foreshadowing for the audience a little bit how this material might be varied in the course of the piece so that they can recognize and follow it. But yeah, that would be my strategy.

Leah Roseman (00:50:55):

You mentioned your students. I was wondering how have you changed your approach to working with composition students over your career?

Anthony Brandt (00:51:03):

So yes and no. I would say there's a couple of bedrock principles that I have in teaching. One, which hearkens back to something we've been discussing is that in my view, 20th century concert music is the first time in the history of the world there's been a repertoire without a common practice. And that's not unique to music. It would be the same thing in modern dance and in modern literature, you got Hemingway and Faulkner and Twila Tharp and Martha Graham, everybody different from each other. And in music, of course, starting maybe Stravinsky and Schönberg splitting apart, but now just this amazing proliferation. So ever telling a student that there's a right way of doing it or there's this way of doing it is completely, I think, dishonest to where we are in the 21st century. And I see my job as just trying to bring out what the student wants to do as impactfully and as persuasively as possible.

(00:52:02):

So that's my mission as a teacher. The other thing is I feel like I'm training two people. One is of course the person making up the music, but the other is the most dedicated, concentrated, honest and direct listener any composer is ever going to have. And that's themself. And one of the interesting things that was really fun about writing the book with David is there were two sets of editors. There was an editor in England, there was an editor in the US and we turn in the manuscript all happy, and then we get it back covered with red marks all over the place. And of course, they make it so much better with what they were suggesting. Too many examples here, not enough clarity there, blah, blah, blah. We don't get that in composing. Basically, when you hand the score to the string quartet, it's like Moses with the 10 Commandments, you can't really change very much of that point except for massaging the dynamics or so on.

(00:52:59):

And so being able to be ruthlessly honest with yourself is incredibly important because you are your first and best audience. And I feel like one of the teacher's roles is to model that. I will tell my students, you can tell me whatever you want about your piece. It's a memory for your dog, or it has the series or so on. And then I'm going to forget and I'm going to pretend that I just bought a $20 ticket to hear the premiere, and I'm sitting there listening to it and it's going to make sense to me or it isn't going to make sense to me. And I will try to share with you as articulately as I can where it's working and where it's not working. And very importantly, if it's not working, I got to tell you why. And so that's where I think the skill and craft of having a musical background comes into play.

(00:53:50):

I don't feel like I'm hearing the piece any different from somebody who's untrained, but I feel like I have better resources for articulating what I'm hearing just from being embedded in our profession. And so I try to share as honestly and completely as I can, and you can't care how much effort it's going to cost the composer to fix anything because you can't apologize for your piece. I was thinking about this working on my own piece during the winter break. I can't come out onto the stage when it's being played and say, ladies and gentlemen, I'm really sorry I had to write part of this piece while I was teaching. And I normally don't do that. And so if you don't like the end, that's why, well, you can't do that. It's got to, it's a ship that cannot sink. Every bolt has to be fastened. And so whatever effort it's going to cost me in order to achieve that, I have to be prepared to do. And that's a very important thing to train a composer. There's no way out. You have to answer the needs of the piece. You have to be able to know when things are not working properly and you have to do everything possible to fix it. And that's I think one of the great roles for a teacher.

(00:55:07):

And the third thing is I feel like school should be the safest place to take risks. All of our heroes are amazing risk takers, but we know what real life is like. And obviously it's a hard culture in America to be a professional artist. Not much government support audiences fractured and fragmented and pulled in many different directions and mass media and commercial music and such and so forth. So if you don't learn when you're a student to be comfortable with risk and to celebrate that, you are not likely to learn that out in the world where you're trying to feed your family and maybe be up for tenure and all the demands that come on us. So I feel like that's very, very important. Now, what is risk? And so what I'll tell my students is have one foot in something you're comfortable with and one foot in something you've never tried before or you're afraid of.

(00:56:06):

Don't completely jump off the cliff because that's paralyzing. If I said to one of my students, okay, write a piece you never would write, what are they going to do? It is like, how do you even conceive of that? But if you are always writing pieces for piano because you play the piano, okay, maybe in this piece you don't put the piano in, et cetera, et cetera. And with each student, you're kind of feeling out what is their comfort zone and how far can they stretch? And I feel the happiest when in each piece, everybody stretches, stretches, stretches, stretches, and before you know it, you really can develop a lot.

Leah Roseman (00:56:43):

Really interesting. I'm curious in terms of you hearing music inside your head, has it always been very easy for you to hear the qualities of chords and have a good oral memory?

Anthony Brandt (00:56:55):

That's a really good question. I'm going to say no, but I want to put it another way, and I'm going to be very frank. I've been thinking about this. I'm a middle-aged composer now, and I was thinking about how a creative life kind of ends up in strata a little bit, where when you're a youngin and you're starting, you want to show you belong, you want to show, you could cut it as a professional, and then you measure up and so on. And there's a certain amount of, I've got to prove I got to prove my worth kind of thing. And then in your middle, after you've done that and maybe feel like you belong, now you're kind of trying to find your own voice. But where I've gotten to and my teacher, Earl Kim, has been very important in this regard, is that I've ended up feeling like no matter what, I need to be honest about what I'm hearing in my head.

(00:57:58):

And as a result, many times I'm very disappointed with what my imagination is cooking up. For me, I was like, I don't want to write music that sounds like this. I want it to sound like this other stuff that I admire. And I have to remind myself that my job is not to write other people's music. It's to write my own music. And that in the end, I am the happiest and my music makes the most sense when I'm very authentic to what I'm hearing in my head. So my answer to your question is a little complicated in the sense that I think that, and I still do this, there's a certain amount of fighting myself that happens. And I think when I was younger, I really did fight myself a lot and I would get in my own way in terms of, oh, I don't want to do this in my piece.

(00:58:47):

That's wrong. That's not living up to my standards or what my teachers of me or so on and so forth. And now that I've gotten to my comfortable middle age, I've really tried to get beyond that and I feel the happiest in the midst of composing when the thing that comes next all of a sudden appears in my head. And I was like, okay, that leads to that. And I see where it's going. Good. I must be on a path then. And still, there's a lot of the fighting that goes on inside really attuned, how could I do that to myself kind of thing. But in the end, the piece ends up as a Tony piece, which I think is what all of our missions is, and I say very humbly that that can be a struggle.

Leah Roseman (00:59:43):

You mentioned Earl Kim. I'm always curious to know what people's mentors.

Anthony Brandt (00:59:46):

So I had two very important ones. Mel Powell at California Institute of the Arts, and Earl at Harvard. Mel was the most amazing teacher I ever had in any subject and amazingly generous and the perfect teacher for me when I went to study him, I still don't understand how I even thought I could be a composer. Putting two notes together was difficult for me. And Mel patiently one step at a time took me from literally what now goes after this one to being able to write full body pieces. And he did that because he had such a fantastic way of talking in principles. So I still remember the very first thing I ever heard him say, which was orchestration is animating the inert. And the way that he demonstrated that was he put on the board a piano reduction of the opening of a piece by Debussy, which is just a pedal tone.

(01:00:49):

I think it's a B natural for five bars, and it looks like nothing. And then he puts the needle on the record because back in those days there was records and all of a sudden it sounds like this absolute voluptuous garden of a thousand things happening. And he showed how in the orchestration, the basses are playing harmonically through multiple octaves of the B, and the flutes are doing something else, and the harps are doing glissandi, or I can't remember everything, but that was animating the inert. And literally in five minutes I understood orchestration in a way no other teacher had ever been able to explain it. And he was like that point after point, after point, and it wasn't a limitation. It's great at the time when you work with your first lesson, he said, Tony, there's two kinds of lessons I can give you.

(01:01:43):

One, you write your own music, which case your lessons will be, okay. Two, you write in my style, in which case you're going to have the best lessons you ever had. I was like, okay, I pick option two. And working with him was like an apprenticeship. And he took you inside all of his decision-making and how he formed his particular voice, and you mimicked that almost like a Renaissance painter painting alongside their disciples kind of thing. And one of the beautiful things Mel would say is, now I'm treating the piece like it's mine. And he would work it over and then explain to you all the basis of decisions. And it was incredibly fantastic. What made it work in the end is that the way that he explained things could be generalized beyond his style. And I remember the moment where I sent him a piece where it's like, Tony, I don't hear the Mel in it anymore. And I was like, Mel, it will always be there. And that's how I feel it will always be there. But eventually I think in order to become your own self, you have to move away from obviously the mentor in terms of the actual character of the music.

(01:02:56):

Earl had a very different way of relating. He was very much about every note's got to count, and I don't want to know what theory is behind it or what fancy schmancy stuff is going on. Tell me why that note is there, is that a cadence? And students would be reduced to tears coming in with all sorts of conceptual things. And then they couldn't explain why that choice of note in that particular place. And he had fantastic ears and was brutally honest about how the music was working on its own terms. And in that sense, he's become one of my guide stars about You've got to be yourself. And when he started composing, he was a more cerebral composer and he eventually became more tonal and he got a lot of flack for that. But he wrote the music that he wanted to write, and in the end, you live or die by that essentially. And again, I remind myself of him as a role model in that respect.

Leah Roseman (01:04:11):

Last summer you went to Indonesia and you did some other research with the neurochemical, with the, maybe you can just speak to that.

Anthony Brandt (01:04:20):

Sure. Yes. I think one of the most important missions right now in science is diversifying the subject population as we were talking about earlier. And the study of music cognition is exactly like every other scientific discipline. It's almost entirely European based. And there are some fantastically interesting differences between different cultures and populations. So for instance, I still remember how shocked I was to find out that not every culture describes pitch as high and low. There are cultures that talk about it as old and young and thick and thin and all sorts of other different ways. And that's just one example of the amazing diversity. And then you have the nature of the music itself. Many scientists are insisting that consonance is a human universal. And I sharply disagree because there fantastic examples of other cultures who do not view the combination of sounds in the same way that Westerners do.

(01:05:27):

I remember doing a neuroimaging experience with Gagaku music, which is the court music of Japan. It's the oldest existing ensemble music in the world. It's a thousand years old, still performed. And we were playing this for someone in an FMRI machine, and the technician was listening to this and he turned to me and said, what do you say to someone in a Gagaku performance? Oh, you played so wonderfully out of tune. I said, great that you're saying that because to a Japanese person in their culture, that was gorgeous. But to Westerners, it sounds harsh and cacophonous. So it's incredibly important before we make any generalizations about how the human brain processes music, that we'd be looking at brains all over the world. And through a course that I teach at Rice, I got to meet a wonderful cognitive scientist, Elkhonon Goldberg, one of the great ones in the world.

(01:06:28):

And he and I developed a nice friendship and correspondence and he is on the advisory board for Udayana University in Bali, Indonesia. And his mentor, Alexander Luria, who pretty much felt to be the father of neuroscience, had wanted as a young man in communist Russia to investigate cross-cultural neuroscience. But he faced enormous pushback from the government. So Elkhonon tells this very funny story that Luria went into the countryside to see if the peasants living out in these remote villages had the same visual illusions as people who lived in the city. I assume the Müller-Lyer illusion must have been one of 'em. But anyway, something similar. And he wrote a telegram to another famous scientist, Vygotsky, and the telegram said, the peasants have no illusions. And he almost got thrown in the gulag for that because the government read it and thought he was making some sort of political commentary.

(01:07:40):

So he had to abandon cross-cultural neuroscience, and Elkhonon really wants to pick up the torch and bring that back to life. And I completely and utterly support him in that. So he said, Tony, how would you feel about going to Bali and doing some research there? They've got a fellowship. And I was like, alconan, the timing is perfect because I'm about to be on sabbatical. And it took a year to put this together. But I went over there with Jose Contreras Vidal, who I mentioned before, Pepe, two students in his lab, my student body who did the live brain visualizations. And we worked with Gamalan musicians and a wonderful scientist and spent three weeks with the musicians as they prepared a new galon composition while different pairs of performers wore portable EEG caps, mobile brain body imaging. And we eventually did a public performance. And Gamalan has some interesting differences with western music rhythmically, for instance.

(01:08:46):

So of course a lot of the music all of us are familiar with has a steady pulse. But in Gamalan, the pulse can fluctuate in waves. And that happens very organically in the course of a performance. It's improvised. It doesn't have to be rehearsed, doesn't have to be the same way every time. But the players remain absolutely, totally coordinated and they don't know how they do it. Nobody knows how they do it. And we were talking earlier about synchrony. Well, that's a great way to study neuro synchrony because it obviously involves enormous something, skill coordination, connection with each other in order to do that. And then there's also something called catacan interlocking, which is a lot like the hockets in medieval music, but incredibly fast. So there's one instrument that's very long with a series of gongs arranged in a scale, but it's too wide for one person to play it.

(01:09:41):

So there's two people who sit by side by side, and one person plays the low register and the other plays the high register. Well, our composer Indra would go and he would say, okay, and the next lick is, and they would just go and like that they knew who was supposed to play what. And weeks go by and I'm watching them rehearse this, and it's like, dude, this incredible what for us would be 60 notes and 32nd notes is the rate of the interlocking. And finally I went up to Indra and I said, Indra, that's incredible. I said, it's amazing how fast they do it and how fast they pick it up. He said, what do you mean fast? That was slow. I mean for them it's effortless to do this interlocking and two people thinking as one. And so those are two of the things. Personally, I'm interested in seeing what the brain results are. And neuroscientists in the US have identified the places in the brain where rhythmic processing gets done, and they've said that's universal. Well, maybe it is universal, but it'll be really interesting to see how Balinese minds process rhythm and do they do it in the same way as we do? I don't know the answer to that.

Leah Roseman (01:10:57):

Yeah, I was wondering about, I just was thinking of a few things. I'm an orchestra musician and when things are great, it's just such an amazing feeling of 70 people on stage just syncing up, especially our orchestra tends to place quite a delay to where the beat is shown and the way we can all just feel it together. And I've wondered about that brain synchrony.

Anthony Brandt (01:11:22):

Yeah, so it's funny you say that. So Pepe and I have worked on three projects, the two with dance, and then a third one called Diabeli 200, which is a chamber piece that I wrote. And I'm happy to give you a little background on that, but I want to make sure I answer your question first or address your point first. I'm sorry. So in that piece, we put mobile brain body imaging equipment on the conductor and on the pianist. And because my piece is a series of variations, one of my students is studying the cue points of each variation to see how the brains connect at those points. And it's exactly what you're talking about. What is the magic thing that happens when all of a sudden everybody unites so that they're in phase with each other? And I think one of the interesting things that my student is doing is that existing studies are always looking at the parts of the brain that are in alignment, but as in an orchestra, I mean this was a little mini situation like that. The conductor's role is really different from the pianist role. The pianist is actually playing the music. The conductor is let's say, managing it. And so she can actually see in the brain data which parts of their brain are aligned and which are working independently.

(01:12:44):

And ours may be the first study to actually look at that, certainly in a live musical performance. A hundred percent. I'll be the first study to do that.

Leah Roseman (01:12:54):

I saw a video you had posted of this pianist, a Chelsea de Souza.

Anthony Brandt (01:13:00):

Yes.

Leah Roseman (01:13:01):

Improvising, wearing this cap.

Anthony Brandt (01:13:03):

Yes. So that's another experiment that we're doing in this one. Chelsea first played a prepared piece theme and variations on Gershwin's, Summertime by Fazil Say. And then I gave her theme she had never seen before, so that we knew that the creativity was happening in the moment. And she improvised variations on classical and jazz themes. I gave her the additional prompt, which is something that classical musicians are very familiar with in theme and variations, that her first variation should be relatively close to the theme. I said, follow the harmonic progression of the theme. The second one should be further away, and the third should be unconstrained just as long as it has some relationship to the theme, but should be as far off and as wild as you want to make it. And we're hoping that first of all, it will be possible to see the difference between playing something prepared and playing something that's improvised. And also that may be the imaginative effort as she moves further away from the theme will also be visible in the brain data. And actually I'm working with a computer scientist at Rice who is going to try to use machine learning to see if they can teach an AI model to recognize the difference from the brain data between playing something rehearsed and playing something improvised. If we're able to do that, that would be really exciting.

Leah Roseman (01:14:32):

Wow, so interesting. Before we end, I did want to talk about work you've done with the elderly, like involving musical creativity and some of that other stuff. I mean, you do so many interesting projects and if there's something you want to talk about certainly.

Anthony Brandt (01:14:45):

Well, yes, and I'll mention something else just which I think is important. I think the arts have an incredibly important role to play in understanding the human mind and our social interactions. After all, the arts have been around for thousands of years, and the science studying this is really relatively young in comparison

(01:15:08):

And the arts are not just entertainment. They are actually incredible bodies of knowledge because they are based on what we understand and what moves us and what we pay attention to. They are literally in encyclopedia of how we think now in a lot of science, especially science that happens in the lab, the art as it's represented is a mere shadow of itself. The stimuli have to be very simple. The time in the scanner has to be short, you can't move. It's not at all anything like real life. And I think one of the dramatic things that is happening is that this technology is developing where the mobile brain body imaging can be actually warned in a performance and a dancer or a musician can be wearing it. And except for the fact that you can't lie on your back because there's a battery pack, you can pretty much forget that you're wearing something and just be yourself out in the real world doing your thing.

(01:16:07):

I think the opportunity for the art to be itself, that is to say complex stimuli with moving bodies and so on gives it the chance to contribute much more powerfully to science. Now with the elderly, we are part of an NEA research lab that is offering a composition workshop to seniors with mild cognitive impairment. And we've done several generations of these workshops to have enough people in the subject population and have ended up with about a hundred people between the people who have taken the course and the control group, which is always very important because they're the ones who sort of show, well, if there was no intervention, what would happen? And we are just about to publish a paper on our most important finding. So when we finally did enough versions of the workshop that we had a large population, and I should mention that the workshop is specially designed to be for non-musicians and also to really emphasize creativity.

(01:17:18):

It's not about trying to reproduce your favorite music or write a song like your favorite songwriter or such and so forth. It's very avant garde. So you do like a soundscape, you do a musical accompaniment to a narrative that the people write themselves, and the fact that participants, most of whom don't read music, invent their own notation. It's one of the most creative parts of it, so that they can perform each other's works. And they come three times a week for several hours. Each week there's a different project. In the end, we do a concert where everybody shares some of the work that they've done and their brains are imaged before and after, and they're also take cognitive questionnaires and wellness questionnaires. And so all of that's analyzed. And finally we have enough people to be able to look at the results. And at first, we did what basically everybody does, which is we took everyone in the intervention group and we averaged the results compared them to the control group, and it wasn't hardly any difference.

(01:18:23):

So in science, any result is a good result. You can't want anything. You can't wish for something, you have to be ready to be wrong and all of that. But still, obviously that was disappointing. I mean, we had gone to a lot of trouble. We had taught a lot of workshops. We had designed the whole thing, and the difference between taking the workshops and the not taking the workshop was ah, so immediately we have this big meeting. Is it the dosage? Do we need to meet five times a week instead of three? Does it need to be a three hour class instead of two? And that brings in all sorts of tension about compliance. Would people come five times a week and so on and so forth, should it be longer, blah, blah, blah. Then one of my colleagues reran the data, but this time they divided the people taking the course into two groups, one that showed greater flexibility in their brains going into the course, and the other group not showing very much flexibility.

(01:19:19):

And the people who shed mentally flexible brains going into the course had a very strong benefit from the intervention, the ones who didn't, had no benefit from the intervention. So that is to me, an incredibly important finding because it says a couple of things. First of all, going back to what we were saying about the individuality of brains, how your brain is organized matters and averaging them all together is washing away individual differences. But we had essentially two subgroups that were very distinct with how they were going to interact with the cognitive effects of our intervention. The other is that if mental flexibility is so important in order to benefit from an intervention when you're trying to forestall dementia, maybe the lesson from that is that having mental flexibility from the time you're young is going to protect your brain when you're older. And one study isn't enough to make this argument. But I hope that if these results are confirmed, and more and more studies show this to be true, an even stronger argument for having arts for kids will now be made by science. Because in addition to obviously the arts having incredible value in and of themselves, they may also have a far reaching health benefit that really shows the payoff later in life as you're trying to maintain your mental resilience.

Leah Roseman (01:20:51):

And how are you defining flexibility?

Anthony Brandt (01:20:53):

Good question. So that's actually a measured physiologically. So in an MRI, they divide up the brain into all these different regions and modularity measures the degree to which that something is processed in a particular fixed area of the brain. A lot of repetitive learned behavior is very modular, like your brain devotes a specific network to do it, and it always happens there, and that's the most efficient, fastest way to do it. Flexibility is measured by how often the different parts of your brains change who they're talking to. And we did what's called a resting state, FMRI. That means the person is lying in the scanner, not doing anything, and we're measuring the modularity of their brain. How much of the stuff that's happening in their brain during the course of the scan is localized in one particular place. And the flexibility is how often the different parts of the brain switch who they're talking to. So if your brain is not very flexible, then each part of the brain is talking to the same people and only the same people. It's like us going to a party and we just stand in the corner and talk to the one person that we know. And then the flexible brain is constantly changing who it's speaking with,

Leah Roseman (01:22:20):

The different parts of its own brain.

Anthony Brandt (01:22:22):

Yes. So it's at the brain party and it's working the room and talking to different people. And again, the people whose brain showed more of that crosstalk happening in a flexible way, they were the ones who showed a powerful cognitive benefit from our workshop. And for the others it was neglibible

Leah Roseman (01:22:44):

I'm curious, when you were a reluctant violinist as a child, were you also very interested in science?

Anthony Brandt (01:22:49):

Yeah, I think so. I think I always wanted to have a career in the arts. I give my parents a lot of credit for two things. I mean more than two things, but I give them credit for, they limit my sister and my television. And my mom was a television producer, so it was a really interesting decision on her part. But we were only allowed to watch a couple of hours on Friday and Saturday night unless there was something educational on, and they made an exception. And my parents did not buy us any prefabricated toys. So we had construction toys like Legos and lots of paper and crayons and such and so forth. But basically I learned from a young age from that if I wanted something, I had to make it myself. And that idea that it was very natural if I thought of something that I wish for that I should do it myself, I really give my parents the credit for that. And as a result, just doing something creative always really felt like something I, you know, deeply enjoyable.

Leah Roseman (01:23:57):

Very interesting. And if you brought up your own children with similar kind of restrictions.

Anthony Brandt (01:24:02):

Oh, brother. Well, good question. So Legos is the greatest toy ever invented, and our kids still have them. They're all grown. They've graduated from college. My youngest is a graduate school, and yet when they come over, they go for the Legos. It's amazing. Evergreen, just playground for inventing and doing things. But the computer has made the world of monitoring how much you are entertaining yourself, blah, blah, blah. So much more challenging because it's this porous world. I mean, when I was a little kid, if I turned on the tv, that was TV time, but we all know that you can be doing your homework, and meanwhile you have a browser window open that's doing a chatted, and then you're on Facebook and blah, blah, blah. It's very difficult. Yeah,

Leah Roseman (01:24:55):

Yeah. Well, to wrap this up, we talked a little bit about your role as an educator and a mentor for composers, but you also teach all kinds of courses. Is there a favorite course you've taught over the years that you think is kind of interesting?

Anthony Brandt (01:25:07):

Oh, I now teach a course at Rice called Creativity Up Close. And it's the one course that I get to teach where I'm not just working with musicians, because most of the time it's all music classes. And so the course is very interdisciplinary. Each week, one day a week we're studying the science of creativity. And then on the other day we're doing hands-on projects in oral history, in music composition, in engineering, and in visual art. And so I've got everybody from all sorts of different majors in there, language majors, engineers and such and so forth. And for many of them, of course, they're doing projects in these particular domains for the first time. And I love the class. I'll give you an example for oral history, their task is to create a creative portrayal of mentor or a friend or a family member. So they interview the person and then they need to find a way to bring, it doesn't have to be their whole life, but to bring something about them to life in a way that is customized for that person.

(01:26:17):

So I have a wonderful colleague, oral historian who comes and shows the standard way that oral history has done and timelines are created and such and so forth, but they're meant to go one creative step further from that. And one of my favorite ones was students work in pairs. They interviewed the first blind chef to win Master Chef. She's a chef that has a restaurant in Houston. And they found out about her life. And then they came in on their presentation day having cooked three dishes from different milestones in the cook's life, and made little sample containers for the class to try it. I remember the first thing was an apple pie, because when the chef went blind, she was worried she would never be able to cook again. And knowing when a crust is ready, you do with your eyes. So she had to know that she'd be able to know the apple pie was ready in order to be able to be a chef, and it worked.

(01:27:19):

And that told her she could be a chef. So that was one of them. And I can't remember what the other two is, but the clincher was, they turned out the lights, and so we were all blind and we tasted the apple pie like she had tasted it. And that was the perfect example of a creative portrayal. It told us about her life, but in a way that was best fit for her. And in music composition, because I don't want them to necessarily have any musical background. What I asked them to do is a theme and variations on a poetry reading. And so I show them how theme and variations work in classical music. And like we were talking about before, I particularly talk about the near, middle and far concept. And that's their assignment, is that their first variation should be very closely related to the source, and then they should drift farther and farther away. So again, one of my favorites was one of the students did a poem about wondering if there was life in outer space. And her far version was the words of the poem translated into chemical symbols

(01:28:27):

Under the theory that if there was intelligent life out in the galaxies, they would be able to understand what the structure of an atom was and read the chemical symbols. And so that was a perfect example. It was still the poem, but it now had taken on a form very different from its original. And in the engineering, we do a little rapid prototyping exercise where the kids work in teams. And then the visual art often involves photography because the kids can use their phones. But I really enjoy many of the students taking the class say in our field, we don't get to be creative, especially in the STEM fields where it's all about accomplishing the task, building the bridge so it won't fall down kind of thing. And they just soak it up and really, really enjoy it. And I also have a bunch of guests, including a theater improv teacher who comes and does a lesson in theater improv. And I remember the first time she came, I was like, I'm the teacher. I'm going to sit this out. I will just watch. But they were having so much fun that now when she comes, I'm just one of the class and I join in too.

Leah Roseman (01:29:39):

Wonderful. Well, this has been such an inspiring conversation. Thanks so much for meeting with me

Anthony Brandt (01:29:44):

. Oh, Leah, thank you so much for having me on the show. It's an amazing program and wonderful that you're covering such a diverse number of musicians.

Leah Roseman (01:29:52):

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at Leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. Or you can browse the collection of merch with a very cool, unique and expressive design from artist Steffi Kelly with notebooks, mugs, shirts, phone cases and more. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. Have a wonderful week.