Frank Horvat: Transcript
Frank Horvat:
So I'm a planner. I tend to be a type A of personality, but I have learned over the years, I have to let a lot of that stuff go. There's only so much you can plan for, and then you have to realize that you're just going to go with the flow and do things. And I always think of Bach. Bach. People always say, why didn't Bach compose any opera? Well, nobody hired him to do that, or the right collaborator didn't come along. Who ever thought of doing that? Maybe that's the only simple reason why we don't have opera by Bach, right? And so for me, it's the same thing. A series of events have led me to where I am, but the most important thing is I'm happy and I'm invigorated, and I'm always looking for new projects that will invigorate me. And the cool thing that I'm excited about it, even though I'm getting older, is that I don't know what's going to happen next.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. This podcast strives to inspire you through the personal stories of a diversity of musicians worldwide with in-depth conversations and great music that reveals the depth and breadth to a life and music. Frank Horvat is an acclaimed Canadian composer and pianist whose music has been featured on over 20 albums. In this episode, you'll hear how he has forged meaningful collaborations with a wide range of musicians internationally and found and given solace to audiences through his focus on themes of mental health, the climate crisis, and social justice. He's so prolific and involved in so many diverse projects with music in many styles that we could only focus on a few of his works in this podcast episode. You'll hear clips from several of his compositions, his perspectives on generating new creations, his outreach with music students on the subject of mental health. And we start this episode with his Arctic Circle Expedition Residency. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast, and I've also linked the transcript to my website, LeahRoseman.com. Please do share this episode with your friends and consider supporting this series by buying me a coffee. The link is in the description now to the episode.
Hi Frank, thank you so much for joining me here today.
Frank Horvat:
It's a pleasure, Leah. Thank you for having me.
Leah Roseman:
I know we have a lot to talk about. You do so many interesting things, but I thought it might be really interesting to start with your Arctic Circle trip you took last summer.
Frank Horvat:
Yeah, I mean, this was one of those things where I often use the term once in a lifetime opportunities, and it really felt like that to be invited on a Arctic expedition, which was also an artist residency was quite amazing. Basically, I was invited along with 29 other artists from around the world, artists of different disciplines, various disciplines to sail around on a tall ship in the arctic north of Norway, specifically around a body of land known as the Svalbard Archipelago. And this was quite an amazing experience because of two main reasons. One, I've always been fascinated by the environment and have a lot of concerns and hold the issue of climate change close to my heart. So to basically go to the epicenter of how the world needs to deal with climate change and to see firsthand the ravages of climate change on that part of the world was quite moving from a spiritual standpoint.
It was also very interesting to have the privilege of visiting a place which is so serene and barren, where in our life we're so exposed, we're always exposed so much in this day and age to constant bombardment of stimuli, light pollution, noise, pollution from the big cities we live in. To visit a place where for three weeks I didn't see a car, but to just have this view of the barrenness of never ending landscapes and scenery was quite moving. Then the other big thing, of course, was to get to know all these wonderful artists from this different part of the world. And that was such an interesting thing because we all went into that experience being complete strangers. But because we went through such a spiritual cathartic journey of going on this trip together, you instantly become super close to each other. So these are people that are very close to my heart now because of that experience, and yet before that I would never know them if we walked by on the street.
Leah Roseman:
And this was a tall ship, like sometimes you were just using the power of the wind.
Frank Horvat:
Yes, that's correct. That was quite interesting because we would be sailing in open water and the captain would say, well, the wind is floating or blowing the right way for where we're going, so we might as well just shut the engine off and use that. That was sort of like a gives you the feeling like you're going back to hundreds of years ago how explorers sail the oceans and the seas and makes you realize how much ingenuity there is in the world without requiring machines and everything like that all the time.
Leah Roseman:
So what kind of other artists were there on the trip?
Frank Horvat:
Visual artists, multidisciplinary artists, photographers. We also had some interesting other people, architects, academics, researchers. Surprisingly not a lot of musicians, not too many writers. So it was really interesting because we spent a lot of time chatting and we had a lot of time for that and people also did presentations. So to see what other amazing work people are doing is quite amazing. As a creative person, I tend to spend most of my time in this cloister of just working on what I do, and so you don't often get a chance to see and learn very intimately what other people are doing and not just to see the outcome of their work or past work, but also just to see what the motivation behind that is and to have that time to have those chats with fellow creatives was quite engaging and enlightening.
Leah Roseman:
And how did you find out about it or get invited?
Frank Horvat:
That's a really good, I'm trying to remember how I found out about it. For me, my experience with the trip, it's run by a not-for-profit, just simply known as the Arctic Circle Residency. And I can't remember how I found out about it. And the reason why I'm having a hard time remembering is because I heard about it years ago. I applied years ago, was accepted years ago, but something called the Pandemic got in the way and delayed my trip. I was supposed to be on this trip back in the summer of 2020 and it got delayed for three years because of the pandemic. And so that was something I was really happy about that some things I had planned, I had plans prior to the pandemic, got either canceled or postponed. So this one was, I'm so happy that this was just postponed and it was worth the wait for sure.
Leah Roseman:
So before we leave this trip, were there any memorable, there must be memorable images or nature you witnessed while you were up there?
Frank Horvat:
Yeah, I mean glaciers calving was quite an amazing thing. I'll never forget. What we would often do is we would spend time on the tall ship and use that as a means to go from one area to another area as we traversed around Svalbard. But what we would do is we would often anchor in some kind of a bay or inlet, and then what we would do is there would be small boats or dinghies sort of thing with small motors and then that would drop us off and we would do landings. So we did plenty of hiking on, and that was quite an experience to be as a group, to be walking through various types of landscape through ice, through snow, through just plain rocks as far as the eye can see.
But those were definitely the memories of really absorbing yourself within the landscape and having a chance to spend so much time on the landscape. But the other things I'll never forget is one day we took one of these boats and rather than go to land, we sort of did a little quiet tour of this inlet, which because of the nearby glacier that had calved, there was literally hundreds if not thousands of bits of ice floating around, some being this tiny and others being the size of a bus. And I'll never forget myself and four of our colleagues along with a guide, we were in one of these little boats floating around and we happened to come across one of these bus sized glaciers and it was so peaceful and quiet, we were observing it.
It was such a sort of calm and peaceful thing to look at literally something that has been intact for so many thousands of years. And all of a sudden after floating around and being peaceful with this thing for 10 minutes, we hear this super loud crack and all of a sudden the whole glacier or iceberg I should say, just sort of like you see a crack and it's this loud thing and it's just like this really sort of calm and everything moves in slow motion. It's just part of it breaks apart and one goes right up into the air, like a whale jumping into the air as high as 7, 8, 9 stories high. And at that point our guide is like, well, we're getting out of here because we need to get some distance away because there's going to be some waves from this. So as he's driving our little boat away, we looking back and we just see this thing go in, we see the other half just go down deep, come back out.
And after 30 seconds of this larger than life surreal thing that you're looking at, it almost looks like some kind of a visual effects in some action adventure film, the whole thing basically flipped over and when it flipped over, it was unlike the white that the very white and the snow type of cap that it was, it flipped over and underneath was just this shiny, see-through almost like glass. There was black dirt and speckles in it, but there was this incredible blue, I've never seen the blue like this before. And it was just all calm, nothing had happened and you were looking at the bottom side of this thing that really had never experienced, I guess air or the atmosphere before, and to see it transform, this was what's quite stunning. And we tried to take video of it between the four or five of us, I think we only got the tail end of it, and it was just like, no one's going to believe this. It was just like, well, only us, the small, five of us on this rubber dinghy is ever going to remember this. But that left a profound mark on myself that it makes you realize how small and insignificant we are on this planet. There's so much mighty power that is just like, doesn't care whether we're there or not, and it's quite momentous.
Leah Roseman:
Were you fearful for your life? I mean, could have been?
Frank Horvat:
No, no, no, because our guide was just, as soon as the cracks started happening and that thing started to move, it was out of there. So we really got back like a half kilometer and that type of thing. So that's the beauty. That was the one thing about it. I never felt unsafe on that trip. We had such an expert crew that was looking after us guide and crew, and I'm not much of an adventurer by nature. I'm not like some National Geographic go to the far edges of the world and that type of thing. So for me to feel safe and that type of thing was so amazing, so well organized.
Leah Roseman:
Fantastic. Thanks for sharing that. I really love to include music close to the beginning of an episode. So maybe it would be interesting to go to your recent album that you wrote for the SHHH!! Ensemble. I'm not sure how they say it. How do they say it?
Frank Horvat:
That's a good question. I always just say, shh, ensemble. But yeah, I think that's how they say it. I've heard them say it like that. So yeah, what a great name. Who would ever think of that for a music group? Because often they can be quiet, but it's sort of a beautiful irony.
Leah Roseman:
So if you could talk about what that duo is and the album.
Frank Horvat:
Sure. Yeah. The ensemble is a duo, a piano percussion duo based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and they're made up of pianist Edana Higham and percussionist ZacPulak. And they're a wonderful dynamic duo that's really focused on doing very innovative things. So we touched base a few years ago, and I've always admired what they do, and I thought, Hey, why don't we collaborate on something? And after some conversations, I realized that they had a really strong passion for the environment, their avid outdoors people. And they're also, like I said, they're quite daring artistically. They don't mind taking chances and thinking outside of the box of how music can be performed. I mean, the majority of, the vast majority of repertoire they play is by living composers. So the fact that they have that very strong dedication to new music is quite amazing. Anyway, so in our conversations we realized we had this really strong connection about the environment and because they are a duo that can play or cover or present so many different instruments, I came up with the idea of this epic work that would feature a variety of instruments, but also tell the story of where our world is at.
And this is how the idea for the composition and their album was born. So the work that we collaborated on that I composed for them is called an Auditory Survey of the Last Days of the Holocene, which is quite a long title, but the piece is actually quite long, so maybe it's fitting in that respect. It's a continuous single multi movement, continuous multi movement composition, 60 minutes in duration. It's for fixed electronics along with a variety of many other instruments that they included in the work. The piece is made up of about 150 electronic samples, many sound effects, and basically, as the title suggests, it's this exploration of where our world is at right now as far as dealing with climate change. What are the sounds associated with the issues that's putting more and more carbon into our planet, but also what are the sounds that are going to help us get through this and what are the sounds when we do achieve that, that we'll expect in this world?
So it's quite an epic journey and it's quite intense. We spent many months, many months working on this, conceiving it, planning it out many, many weeks. For me to compose it is quite, from an auditory standpoint, it's quite a graphic work. There's a lot of really intense sounds that are not always pleasing to hear, but again, Zac and Edana were so open to allowing me not to feel any sort of being stifled or for us to sort of censor ourselves that, oh, well, maybe audiences won't like this or that. And I'm really happy that we did that. It was a bit hard for me on a mental health standpoint sometimes to work on the piece because it was so intense. And to hear those sounds over and over again as I worked the material and composed it was difficult. But at the same time, we are living in dire times and I felt that even though it's in the abstract instrumental work, there needs to be some elements that are very quite direct that people will recognize and make a statement as we presented this auditory survey. So I'm really happy with the outcome for sure.
Leah Roseman:
You're about to hear two short clips from two contrasting sections of an Auditory Survey of the Last Days of the Holocene with the SHHH!! Ensemble. The first clip is Switch Off and the second is Negative Energy.(music)
Well, thanks for sharing some of that music and I'm curious, to perform it live will be more difficult, right?
Frank Horvat:
Yeah, I mean that's the challenge of that work for them to ever perform it live because honestly, I think Zak alone I think plays 20 to 25 different percussion instruments during the piece and some very large ones. It's not little handheld things. We've got marimba, we've got timpani, we've got huge one things, vibraphone of course, their grand piano's needed with speaker set up to have the fixed electronics part be in sync with what they're playing live. So I hope one day that they get an opportunity, they still have not had an opportunity to perform it live as we record this. I hope they do, because I think it would be quite epic and make a statement in a sort of live setting as a collective setting that I know you and I are know about how great it is to have the energy of a live audience and especially in a work like that.
But the other things that is being explored right now and that actually has started is the idea of sound installations. The work itself is definitely a composition. It has a lot of, relies a lot on the discipline and the tradition where used to in sort of a classical music tradition of the virtuosity and the technique required in the execution of the instrumental parts, that's all in there. But there is something also just quite that can be appreciated in a sort of sound installation recording. So that obviously is more logistically and probably financially easier to arrange. And we actually did have an installation like this in Ottawa at the Peak Arts Festival in December, 2023. So that was really exciting to hear that. And again, to experience it in a room with all the multiple speakers set up and experience it with a group of people, there was a great energy about that. So yeah, those are the options I guess moving forward for now, the main thing is the album is out there. I'm just happy that there's this great album out there featuring the piece.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, of course it'll be linked in the show notes to your website. I had to miss that performance. I had a show of my own, but that's great.
Now, it might be interesting to talk about the world of, I hate to say classical, it's such a misnomer to me, this word, classical composition when it's anything but, you know what I mean, we're far from the world of Mozart, but you write a variety of styles and genres. You write electronic music, singer-songwriter, it's quite a wide variety of creative output.
Frank Horvat:
Yeah, I basically do that because I feel comfortable with it. Growing up, I was exposed and I'm still exposed to so many styles of music. I'm just a big music fan. When we used to have CDs or do downloads and stuff, my collection would be filled with any style of anything. And when I was growing up in Ottawa, I had my traditional piano lessons, the classical training, taking my conservatory exams, et cetera. So I had that traditional upbringing and that resonated with me. And of course, that traditional sort of approach to music learning continued on when I went to university Toronto for music where I was studying composition. So I had this sort of the traditional classical basis to my education. But at the same time, I've always loved other styles of music. And not only that, but played a lot on other styles of music I had growing up.
I remember I played in blues band in Ottawa, and we used to jam so much in our high school music room, and that was a very sort of impactful thing, improvisation. And I think I wouldn't be composer I am today if I didn't have those experiences of that. And collaborating with singer songwriters, with musicians from other backgrounds is something that I really, really love because as a composer, I am always proud of the work. I wouldn't put my work out there if I wasn't proud of it and stand by it. But then when I move on to other projects, I'm also quite determined not to write the same piece over and over again. So the only way to ensure that you don't compose the same piece over and over again is to not only just sort of think about style or that kind of thing, but think about process and how you're doing things and who you collaborating with.
What are their strengths and weaknesses. So when I compose, either if it's a straight out commission, somebody says, compose this for me, or it's more of a collaborative thing where we go through the steps in the creative process together, I always try to think of, okay, well what makes them tick? What do I love about what they do and how can we combine that? And then the outcome of that is that I'm able to create something new that I didn't ever do. It sort of passes my own personal litmus test of what feels good. So I think that's why I do what I do, but it's just really ingrained in me to do that anyway, because of the fact that I've always listened to so many different styles of music and I'm just a huge music fan.
Leah Roseman:
Maybe it'd be interesting now to talk about during the Pandemic you had this really beautiful generative project that just really helped with connections all over.
Frank Horvat:
Yeah, so I know you're referring to the Music for Self-Isolation project that I did that basically started in an impromptu way in March of 2020. I guess that is sort of an infamous month for our part, this part of the world, and especially for our music community and arts and culture community where basically everything sort of shut down overnight. We're what now, almost three and over three years now since that happened. And it's hard to believe, it still feels fresh. It just happened that feeling of like, well, what are we all going to do now? You know what I mean? Now for me, I have to say though, on a personal level, I felt I was quite lucky in that a lot of my work is not performance based. I myself have done a lot of performing over the years, but it hasn't been a big part of my life in the last number of years.
It's basically been working on creative projects and composing. And so I really felt for my performer friends who work in orchestras or are freelancers especially, and how were they going to get by and deal with this. Of course, I did have things like I mentioned earlier, I had things that were postponed or canceled, and so all of a sudden, well, my schedule was freed up. I didn't have to stick to my strict timeline of deadlines for this or that. All of a sudden that wasn't important. So I thought, well, I got to do something that just first and foremost keeps me occupied. So I gave myself a daily goal starting in late March of 2020. I would compose one short piece for a solo instrument, a different solo instrument, and I would do that for as long as I can come up with different solo instruments and until I run out of ideas.
And I ended up doing that routine for about 30 days in a row, I think 30 days. And there's 30 pieces in the music for self-isolation suite. And basically every day I would compose the piece in the morning, I would compose the piece, I would quickly make sheet music for it, and then right away I would post on my website and do a social media post just to say, Hey, world, I've done this. I'm composing this. If you're feeling little bit down that you have nothing to do, like to play your instrument, you have nothing to play for. Well, hey, here's something that I've composed for this moment in time and how we might be feeling all of us collectively, even though we're not together.
And it just took off. It was just amazing. I was so honored that people love the music so much. The very first piece I did was the flute piece and the solo flute piece, and that just, people love that solo flute piece so much. All the flutists, it just spread amongst their community. And it was just so honored to have people post videos online of themselves at home by themselves playing this piece from every corner of the world, because how often do we have such a cataclysmic event in our planet where every pretty well every single person on the planet is affected, impacted equally? I mean, it was quite unprecedented. And to sort of engage and correspond with all of my colleagues from around the world and sort of create this defacto community. Well, the whole project just gave me purpose, but it also a creative purpose, but it also kept me engaged not to feel depressed, not to be able to see people in person. Nothing beats in person, of course, but thankfully we had all this technology. And to be able to use the basis of a project like this impromptu project to bring people together and interact with people was so exciting. And then we ended up doing chats, some electronic pieces that were born out of that. We ended up doing an album. We made a documentary film about it. It just over the couple of years after that, it just expanded.
Leah Roseman:
And is there some music we can share from that album?
Frank Horvat:
Sure, yeah, if you're interested. I know I just talked about the flute piece. So the flute piece from the music for a self isolation album would be fantastic by, it's performed by Christopher Lee on the album. He did a fantastic job. We recorded it in an empty Roy Thompson Hall in the January, 2021. That was quite an experience to be in such a well-known concert hall in Canada and right in the heart of downtown Toronto, and other than some technical staff that was working there and everybody wearing masks and social distancing to be in such a place that's usually full of life and such a huge audience, that was quite an amazing thing. So I think Chris is, that piece is sort of fitting because it really was the first piece I composed, and I think it really sort of encapsulates the feeling of what I was feeling at that very moment in Chris's interpretation. It captures that beautifully.(music),
Leah Roseman:
Thanks for sharing that, Frank.
Frank Horvat:
It's very fascinating. A lot of things in our world are very planned out, right? It's like I have projects that are often, they have a two to five year span, and those first years are so much planning without any creative work done. It was so unique and fun to be able to just wake up one morning, come up with an idea and start it that day, and then just keep working on it until it felt like it was right to be over. I mean, that was the other beautiful thing about it for me personally, that we don't often get to do in our work as professional musicians.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, that's really beautiful. And I've heard some of those interviews. Was there anything, do you remember from those conversations, the kind of themes that kept coming through?
Frank Horvat:
I did eight in-depth interviews with people that participated in the piece, and they became audio, almost like radio documentaries, all the original footage of the interviews on my YouTube channel. But what I ended up doing was creating electronic compositions out of it, and they were also moving of how people were dealing with it. A lot of them were quite uncertain. I remember everybody felt so uncertain at that time what was going to come next. But what I also appreciated was the hope people felt that this would go away. This was just temporary. That yes, there was a lot of uncertainty of, well, how is the world going to change after this, especially as our lives as professional musicians. And of course now looking at it now in the present, we can see that there has been changes, some things for the better people doing very unique, interesting programming, but we've also had musical institutions just disappear because they couldn't recover. And so a lot of the things that people were talking about were prophetic. There was also some heartwarming stories of how people were dealing with loss during that time period. The loss of loved ones, really how they were dealing with being by themselves, it's quite a - Listening to it now it's quite a beautiful time capsule of that time period that we all lived through the voices with those eight various musicians from various places.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a short break from the episode, which I hope you're enjoying so far. If you want to check out over a hundred episodes you may have missed in addition to your podcast player or YouTube, I have an extensive website, leah roseman.com with show notes, transcripts, the complete catalog of episodes, and you can sign up there for my weekly newsletter to get access to sneak peeks of upcoming guests. Please do share your favorite episodes with your friends, follow me on social media and share my posts. And if you can spare a few dollars to help support the series, that would be amazing. And you can find that link in the show notes. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. Now, back to the episode.
If we could talk about your virtual therapy tour, what do you call it? Your piano therapy virtual tour.
Frank Horvat:
Correct. Yeah. So this is again, one of these projects that was born prior to the pandemic and had to evolve because of the pandemic. I've been quite outspoken in the last number of years about talking about the importance of mental health and how as a society we need to work harder to deal with mental health issues. And that sort of advocacy was born out of my own personal struggles over the years, the last 20 years, dealing with issues around depression and anxiety. And after I went through my journey of healing myself and managing it better through a variety of therapies, I think about six years ago I made the decision, or six or seven years ago, I decided I'm going to write some music about that experience that ended up that solo piano music ended up being an album called You Haven't Been that I put out there.
And by putting that album and talking about what inspired that music, I basically opened myself up to the experiences I went through. And because I did that, people on similar type of platforms like yours started asking me, would you talk about it and talk about the music and talk about your journey? And at first, I was very hesitant about that because it's one thing to write music about that type of experience, but it's another thing to talk about it. I think as creative people, whether you're a composer or a performer, we often will hide behind our instrument or our voice to deliver feelings and messages without having to be literally talking about it. But after a lot of thought about it and making sure that I would feel safe and okay, I decided I would do it. And when I did it, I felt quite good.
I felt that this was something that I felt comfortable with for myself. I felt safe. And so because of that, I thought, okay, well, how do we expand this idea of combining the music with sort of the advocacy of promoting better mental health? So the original idea was the piano therapy tour, no virtual in there. And the piano therapy tour started about a year or so before the pandemic. And I did some live performances and live performances with playing these pieces and talking in between the pieces about my experience. And that was very gratifying and went well, and we wanted to do more of that. And then of course, the pandemic started. So at that point, that's where we decided, well, why don't we start to think about the sort of a virtual option for this? And rather than doing live streams, we thought maybe tab the best quality sound and the best performance, we decided to record or film a concert film of me performing the pieces.
And then interspersed within that would be little bits of the little bits of me talking. So we had a director, we had a beautiful film crew that did this. So professionally, it's a beautiful concert film that I feel very proud of that really sort of captures the essence of what I'm trying to convey. And what we do now is we have the Piano Therapy Virtual Tour visit, university and college music campuses all over the world. So basically what they do is they, at a specific day and time in their space, they will play the concert film, and then right after the concert film is part of the same session or class period or whatever, I'll join them via Zoom or some video chat, and then we can have a live chat and a Q&A. And it's a great way for schools to promote the mental health services they're offering in schools.
And this idea about the Piano Therapy Virtual Tour has always been focused specifically on that crowd, because I think you and I talked about this both back in the past in our student days, how challenging it is, especially for music students to deal with the rigors of being a music student, the hugely competitive atmosphere, the dealing with the personal things about imposter syndrome, which is so huge in our music community. So we thought that to target and try to bring the piano therapy virtual tour specifically to college and university music campuses would be helpful because those are things that I wish existed when I was a student, but that didn't exist. And unfortunately, a lot of people who couldn't withstand that very talented people dropped out. And it just breaks my heart to know that talented people can't pursue their dreams just because of the mental health issues they're dealing with. So it's been great. We've had a chance to visit some schools so far, and the response to it has been wonderful. And this is just an ongoing indefinite project in my life that I can do from the comfort of my own home, but at the same time get to interact and talk with students and faculty about this kind of stuff.
Leah Roseman:
There's a beautiful promo video you've put together from that. Could we use a clip of that in this episode?
Frank Horvat:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Thanks for that.(music)
Frank Horvat:
I first became aware of my depression being an issue in my life when I was in my twenties. What I found most difficult to deal with was the fact that not only was I going through this, but that I wanted to, and it felt like I needed to push people away. I decided to use my battles with depression and anxiety as the basis for what this piece was going to be. And I think that process was so cathartic and important in my journey because it was really representing all that I had gone through in the past and all that I had achieved in my process of bettering my mental health.
Leah Roseman:
So in talking to these students, what kind of questions have they had for you?
Frank Horvat:
A lot of the students, this is one of the things that's hard about the Piano Therapy Virtual Tour, is there has been some students who open up and they say, well, I'm dealing with this or I'm dealing with that. But in general, most of the questions are going to be about the music and the process, and that's understandable. After all, you're in this quasi open forum. It's not open. It's not being live streamed on the internet publicly, but you are amongst your peers and that kind of thing. So it's understandable that somebody's not going to be like, well, I'm dealing with this, so what would you suggest I do for that? Well, first of all, I'm not a mental health professional. That's why we want to make it this thing where the mental health professionals are there. So then hopefully they can go and ask privately, which of course is the best way to deal with these kinds of things.
So what ends up happening is people end up asking me questions about the process of composing the music, performing the music, practicing the music, how it made me feel. I found that really fascinating, some really amazing insights that provoked a lot of thought for me personally, talking with them that made me think more about my process and how it made me feel. Often we just do what we do. We don't think about why we do what we do or we just do it. Maybe it's very intuitive and feels right. So by the students asking me these very sort of pointed questions related to the theme of mental health, but also talking about the music, what I can't help but think is that they're looking for ways of how they maybe could do something similar like this. And that's really exciting for me because if there's only two takeaways from anybody who gets to experience the Piano Therapy Virtual Tour, it's one that people feel like they can get help if they need help, or they can encourage somebody in there like a loved one to get help.
That's the first thing. And the second thing is the fact that maybe it inspires something creatively either to explore that theme or give other ideas. That's pretty exciting and makes me feel like I'm looking at projects these days in my life that's not just about me. You know what I mean? Oh, it's like, Hey, what are you doing? Or This is me. This is me. It's all about me. We as performers or as performing musicians in the performing arts, it can become like that. And I think that I'm feeling as I'm getting older, I'm feeling more and more comfortable that we have a lot to say. We can have a lot to say that, yes, refers to who we are specifically and sharing a little bit of ourselves, but also provokes thought to the wider world of how the world can be better. So I'm really into that kind of thing these days. As far as projects go.
Leah Roseman:
And the students you've met, or were they mostly composition students or also performance?
Frank Horvat:
Both actually. Yeah. So that's why it's been fascinating, and I think that's why I got my piano playing in chops to record this concert film a few years ago. I am happy that I did it myself, because this is something that I've done a lot. I love playing and performing piano; these days, I don't do very much of it because I just simply don't have time to practice. So many of my projects are geared these days for others, but I think that was really exciting because there's something exciting to see people performing their own music. I think there's one thing that from our classical or art music tradition that we can learn from the pop music side, the singer songwriter, where you listen to somebody sing a personal thing or share something through their music. I think that's super exciting, and I definitely see that as being a thing. When I started years ago, there was nobody, there was hardly anybody who was composing and performing their own stuff. Now it's becoming more and more common. We're starting to break down the barriers of, well, you can only be a composer and you can only be a performer. You can only be a teacher. I think that the economics of our music world demand that anyway, it's just sort of happened because of the way our world has become.
But I think it's a good thing, it's a healthy thing because I think we can present things and experience things in such a different way when we get to participate in all aspects of the sharing of what we're producing.
Leah Roseman:
I wanted to highlight another inspiring recent project of Frank Horvat's. You're about to hear an excerpt from the Odin quartet's performance of Frank's Winter from the Four Seasons in High Park as part of their album from Oblivion to Hope.(music)
And when you were a teenager getting ready to apply for the composition program at U of T, were you encouraged by your piano teacher? Were you just composing on your own? How did that work?
Frank Horvat:
I started music lessons when I was five years, and I think I probably composed my first piece when I was nine. So it was really in me to compose early. I remember I used to sit at the dining room table and my parents, where I grew up with my parents, and I would just get, they would give me blank manuscript paper with the musical staff on it, and I would just start writing notes randomly. And I was always very intrigued about the creative aspect of it. And I always knew in my heart that would be a big part of my life. So that's why when I came of age and I was starting to apply for university, I definitely knew I wanted to go into composition. But at the same time, even though I knew that I also loved to play. And so even though when I did my degree in university, even though I didn't have to take private lessons in order to fulfill the requirements of my specific degree in composition, I did anyway. I did it as an elective. And it was just because, I mean, I'm not the greatest piano player in the world, but because I've worked at it so many years and studied it and taken lessons and coachings and things like that, so steadily over the years, especially in that chapter in my life, I really benefited for that. You know what I mean? Compositionally. So to keep playing, there's something just really powerful about that. So that overlap again is so crucial for me.
Leah Roseman:
So a number of years ago, you were still performing more, and if we could just touch on, you did this interesting, what was it, 60 plus Green Keys Tour?
Frank Horvat:
Yeah, so that was my first major project related to thinking about the environment. So this happened back in 2010 and 11 where I visited 60 plus cities playing a solo piano concert. And the main piece that I would perform on all those piano concerts was a piece I composed called Earth Hour. And Earth Hour is a continuous 60 minute piece, I guess. I have this thing about 60 minute pieces. I love these kind of long-winded pieces, I guess. And yeah, I performed this piece, and the whole idea of that piece was that it was inspired by being in the dark. So every hall I would play in concert venue, all the lights had to be shut off. And that was quite an experience because when you travel and you tour, especially as a pianist, you have a different piano. It has a different acoustic and a different size room, and there's a different size amount of people in the crowd, and there's light pollution that might seep in some places.
And then other places it was pitch dark. You couldn't see absolutely anything. I just had a little clip on a tiny little LED light just to give me enough light to read the music. And the piece was exactly 60 minutes to the second. And basically, I did this tour in order to prove the point of how we have so many other senses that we do use, and how in tune we can get in with that and realize that there's so much in our life that we think we need, but we don't really need as far as energy conservation goes and helping the environment that way. And it was really great. It was really great to get feedback from people who would come to the concerts because they never went to a solo piano concert in their life, but they were environmentalists and they heard about it.
So they came and they would talk to me about how the whole experience made them feel. So just to cross boundaries of, to connect with people who normally wouldn't go to such an event was really special. And yeah, we had amazing eco-friendly sponsors and helped raise money for the World Wildlife Fund. We were traveling in a sustainable fashion. We only used public, but like bus or train to do the vast majority of the tour. We visited, the US used a Prius to drive across the US because the bus service and the train service in the US is terrible. So it was really exciting, and it was really exciting experience to connect with people and share music. And again, try to do something that isn't just about first and foremost, I love composing music, but what kind of message or what kind of thing do I want to leave to get people to think about when they hear my music? It was such a wonderful experience in that way.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful.
You're about to hear an audio clip from the album Fractures with a wonderful singer, Meredith Hall. Frank is involved in so many projects. We didn't get around to talking about this one, but we wanted to include some music from it. This is an excerpt from an Orbital Tour of Cities at Night with Meredith Hall, Soprano, Brahm Goldhammer, piano, lyrics by Rachel Morgan. And the composer is Frank Horvat. Of course, Frank's website with the links to all these albums is linked in the description of this podcast (music)
So if we could talk, you have two current projects that would be interesting to touch on. So you read a beautiful book to speak for the trees, and that is inspired a beautiful co-creation. So maybe just if you could talk about that.
Frank Horvat:
Sure, sure. This is an ongoing project that is not out there yet, but it will be in the coming months, in 2024 should be out there. And this is a collaboration I'm doing with the harpist, Sharlene Wallace. Sharlene is quite a, well-known harpist based here in Toronto, but very, very well known in the harp community in Canada. Very, very well known as a clinician and a teacher and so forth. So Sharlene and I have known each other for quite a few years, and with the ensemble, it sort of comes together, Hey, I love what you do. Maybe we can somehow collaborate on something. And again, just through conversation, we realized there are a really in-depth connection to nature and the importance of nature. And so this idea about trees came up. So what's interesting about this project is not just the theme, but also the fact that the process, so what we're doing with this process with Sharlene is we're co- composing.
What we do is we are composing a suite of nine pieces that are for solo Celtic harp and fixed electronics. And basically we've created this and begun this very multi-step creative process, which basically featured us recording samples of Sharlene in a recording studio. Then step number two was for me to create electronic fixed electronics part that includes the vast amount of samples that we recorded. Then Sharlene composes a solo harp part on top that will go on top of that fixed electronic part that she could play live. And then the final step is we put it all together, together, figuring out how we can adjust her part, how I adjust my part. So a very, very collaborative thing. And then eventually in the coming months, we'll record an album. She'll record an album of it, and she'll be able to perform these live. So the idea of Trees.Listen was, like you said, was born out of this amazing book by very renowned botanist who's based outside of Ottawa, named Dr. Diana Beresford-Kroeger. And she wrote this beautiful book that inspired Sharlene and I very much of talking about the need for trees, how trees are so important. But it was also part memoir about her life growing up, orphaned in Ireland, being raised by aunts and uncles who espoused on her the ancient Celtic tradition. She's literally, she is the offspring of Celtic kings and queens from thousands of years ago. And so the pieces that we're composing are all based on the ancient Ogham script that the Celts invented was the first type of alphabet. And what's interesting is the Celts the ancient Celts, named each one of their alphabet. The letters in their alphabet is inspired by a specific type of tree. That's how important trees are to them. So what we're doing is we're including the pitch named after a specific tree. That main pitch is the main tonal center or pitch for each of those compositions. So in essence, the spirit of the tree and tonally is incorporated right into the piece. And so it's been a beautiful project because again, something to talk about how trees are important, how can we promote this through a musical presentation. But just Sharlene and I are such good friends, and she's such a sweet, kindhearted person and super talented. So just to make music with somebody that I admire and do it together in this collaborative way outside my normal routine of how to compose a piece makes that project so awesome.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. Yeah, I haven't read that book, but I've read about Diana. Isn't she one of the researcher that discovered about the mother tree sending energy through the fungi?
Frank Horvat:
Yes. Isn't that amazing? Yeah, yeah. The root systems, basically how trees communicate with each other and how literally there is trees in a forest that's sort of like the mother figure that's looking out for all the other trees, and we'll share nutrients through the roots and so forth. So it just shows how we take so much of the beautiful nature around us for granted. And not only do we take it for granted, but we also, we underestimate how smart they are and how sophisticated they are. And thankfully, we have these amazing people out there doing this research with species of animals and plant life now that is making us realize that. And hopefully if we keep doing that, we'll realize, well, why would we destroy something like this? Why would we not preserve it? So yeah, her work is invaluable, but she's also this super inspiring human being that she's infectious.
You would think that the deforestation of our planet, which is so doom and gloom, you would think someone who's in that field and who studied it for decades now would be so pessimistic and just always have a negative tone. And she's the complete opposite. You listened to Diane like she inspired Sharlene and I that hey, there is still time. We can still do something. You know what I mean? So if someone like that who's so educated and the terrible things, the calamitous things that happen already can talk like that, then none of us should be pessimistic and feel like there's still hope.
Leah Roseman:
Does she know about this project of yours? Have you talked to her?
Frank Horvat:
She does. She's so sweet. She's quite well known. And for her to reach out when we reached out, wrote a letter, and I got a phone call and she's giving me suggestions. And to have somebody of this stature support your project, it just shows how people who are passionate about, they just want it to keep happening and to keep the momentum going. And she's just so kindhearted, so very lucky.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. And you have another new project, a solo piano commission, More Rivers.
Frank Horvat:
Yeah. So this is an amazing collaboration, a piece that was a suite of pieces that was commissioned by Christina Petrowska Quilico, qui very well renowned, well decorated, justifiably so pianist here in Canada, so well known, composed, or performed so many concerts over the years and produced so many albums. And so another person that I feel very close to my heart that invited me to compose music for her, and basically what I've done in the More Rivers is composed a suite of solo piano pieces that captures the feeling of the flow of water. And as a stylistically, one of the aspects compositionally that I'm really into a lot is minimalism. There's a lot of elements in my compositions. I've quite minimalist loop oriented. And so needless to say, one composer that I've always been really admiring of, was Ann Southam, or is Ann Southam this late great Canadian composer who passed away I think about maybe now, about 15 years ago or so. And I got a chance to meet Ann over the years in my early days, sitting on some boards and so forth. And she's such a wonderful human being, and I just love her music all these years and very inspirational on me because she was exploring a lot of this. So she composed this really famous suite of pieces in the early 1980s called Rivers. And you don't have to go far to find people recording or playing Rivers. They're so awesome, these pieces and very hypnotic. And Christina was a good friend of Ann's, and Christina was the original person who recorded Rivers and worked with Anne. So I thought, I've said to Christina, what if we were to do something that sort of partially pays respect or pays homage to the original Rivers series by creating more? And she was so into it. She has been so into it. She's practicing it now. And we're again going to get ready for a recording later this year and really, really excited about this project, especially because of the fact that, or Christina worked with Ann on the original thing, and I feel like I'm going through the same process that she did with Ann. And that's so exciting because of the fact that I just love her music so much.
Leah Roseman:
So to close up this conversation, if you could reflect back, Frank, when you were in your early twenties in university trying to make it, what did you see as your future as a composer?
Frank Horvat:
That's a really great question. And it just shows how my answer is going to just show how you can have a vision, and that's great, but it doesn't always work out that way. When I was in university, I was hell bent. I was going to be a Hollywood film composer. That was going to be the thing. I was so excited I was going to be like the next John Williams or Hans Zimmer or something like that. And when I graduated from school, I definitely jumped into that world and did that kind of thing. But the one thing that I've realized about creative paths and life in general is that sometimes there's a series of events that happen, especially in the arts. I find this, that just make you do this or do that. And that maybe wasn't your plan. I'm a planner. I tend to be an A type of personality, but I have learned over the years, I have to let a lot of that stuff go.
There's only so much you can plan for, and then you have to realize that you're just going to go with the flow and do things. I always think of Bach. Bach. People always say, why didn't Bach compose any opera? Well, nobody hired him to do that or the right collaborater didn't come along. Who ever thought of doing that? Maybe that's the only simple reason why we don't have opera by Bach. And so for me, it's the same thing. A series of events have led me to where I am. And most importantly, not only are those series of events that sort of happened by accident or accidentally on purpose, however you want to frame it, but the most important thing is I'm happy and I'm invigorated, and I'm always looking for new projects that will invigorate me. And the cool thing, and I'm excited about it, even though I'm getting older, is that I don't know what's going to happen next.
I don't know what's going to come along. That's going to be something completely brand new that I never thought about. And that can be scary, but it's also super exciting at the same time and keeps things fresh. And I think we need that as artists, as people who are creating things. If you sort of get stuck in a rutt and saying, well, I'm only going to always do this kind of project with these people all the time and stuff, I think things can get stale really quickly. And with all due respect to professions out there that do have that kind of flow to it, that things stay relatively the same. I think as people in the arts and culture community, we can't get into that rutt too much because if we do, then I think things get stale and then the audience will realize it, but even more importantly, it's not as fulfilling for us.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thanks so much for this today. It was really wonderful
Frank Horvat:
Pleasure to be here. Thank you for such a great conversation, Leah. I really appreciate it.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed This episode, pleased to share this with your friends and check out episodes may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support the series, that would be wonderful. The link is in the description. Have a wonderful week.
