Lisa Pegher: Percussion Pioneer
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Lisa Pegher (00:00:00):
Any concert that I've ever played of these percussion concertos, the audience, like you said, they love them. I've never gone to a concert and performed one of these concertos and had the audience not just be extremely excited that they got to hear something different, amazed at what percussion can do. And so it's always just been a challenge, but also a mystery to me, why orchestras are fearful of being able to program this type of music more frequently, and it's a lifelong challenge for me as well.
Leah Roseman (00:00:35):
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 with in-depth conversations and great music that reveal the depth and breadth to a life in music. Lisa Pegher is a brilliant American percussion soloist and drummer. She's also a composer, improviser and software engineer. She's known for pioneering percussion as a solo instrument within the orchestral realm and beyond making it her life's work to present percussion to larger audiences by commissioning, collaborating, and creating new works and performances that bring percussion to the front of the stage. We talked about her new concerto show Circuits and Skins written for her by Paul Dooley, which explores ways to meld orchestra with electronic dance music and also her project A.I.RE, Artificial Intelligence Rhythm Evolution. You'll hear about her perspectives on self-care, social media, the value of mentors, and a fascinating variety of her performances during this episode.
(00:01:34):
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. The podcast theme music was commissioned from composer Nick Kold, and you can use the timestamps to navigate the episode. Before we jump to our conversation, I wanted to let you know that I have a new way you can support this independent podcast through a great collection of merch with a very cool, unique and expressive design from artist Steffi Kelly. You'll find that link in the description for the episode. This weekly podcast is in Season Four, and I send out an email newsletter where you can get access to sneak peeks of upcoming guests. Have a look at the description of this episode where you'll find all the links, including the store for the very cool shirts, mugs, and more, and the support link to buy this independent podcaster a coffee.
(00:02:24):
Hey, Lisa, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Lisa Pegher (00:02:30):
Hey, thank you for having me.
Leah Roseman (00:02:32):
Well, we have lots to talk about, and I don't usually start with people's start in music, but I was thinking with you, it's kind of relevant in terms of the fact that you've been a trailblazer as a soloist, and I heard that you had an elementary school teacher who offered to buy you your first drum.
Lisa Pegher (00:02:50):
Yeah, it's maybe a really interesting story because going back to that time, I didn't grow up in a musical family, but I did grow up in a family of really hard workers, and so I was just a kid and just many kids go into elementary school and they get introduced to some kind of music. And at my school, I think that that was around fourth grade where they were trying out the different instruments and whatnot. So that was really my first experience with even being introduced to the different instruments. And the story goes essentially, I went to try out and the teacher played back a bunch of rhythms to me. They handed me the drumsticks, and I guess the test for drums was they play a rhythm and you play it back. And so each rhythm that the teacher played, I played back almost perfectly, and I had never picked up a pair of sticks before that point, and even rules and complicated rudiments.
(00:03:58):
And the teacher just was kind of taken back and said, Hey, I'm going to write this down on a piece of paper. Make sure you give this to your mom, and I really need to talk to her at the open house. And so I went home just a very innocent kid and handed my mom the paper, and she still has it today. This is the five stars in the note, I think up in the attic somewhere. But sure enough, she did what he said, went to the open house and he said, you have to encourage her to play the drums because she has a natural talent for it. And my mom was like, no, we can't afford lessons. I don't know what that's about. There's no time. And it was, she was giving a little bit of pushback to the teacher, and the teacher was like, look, just to get her started out, I'll pay for her first drum and the lessons, and then whenever you feel like you can take it on yourself, we can switch over, but I want you to at least give her a chance. And so that's kind of how I got started. And I took that drum home and it kind of just was immediately my best friend that I just wanted to be around all the time. And I started practicing and I just was very inspired to see what I could do with percussion and drums from pretty much that point. I would say, oddly enough.
Leah Roseman (00:05:19):
In terms of your early start, I was interested that you had this idea that you wanted to compete in the concerto competitions in university.
Lisa Pegher (00:05:28):
Sure, sure. So probably by the time I was about 14, I was introduced to orchestral music and I realized very quickly that there were soloists in orchestral music and that the soloist didn't necessarily play percussion. And I was kind of astounded by the violinist and the pianist, and I really wanted to be able to do that with percussion. And so I kind of started to think about ways that that might be possible. And I actually went to my teacher at that time who I do keep in touch with, who I kind of consider one of my main senseis, if you will, in the Pittsburgh Symphony, and was like, Hey, is there a way to do this? And I'm really interested. And there was very little percussion concerto repertoire at that time. But I did start looking into it and thinking, wow, I would really like to do that.
(00:06:27):
I want to stand up at the front of the stage, and I want people to think of drums as musically as they think of a violin or a piano, because typically when I would run into people, they would say, oh, you play the drums. What's your favorite rock drummer? And they would tell me who their favorite rock drummer is and immediately almost associate drums with rock bands or pop music or heavy metal or loud bombastic playing. And I kind of always saw it and felt it as something much more beautiful than that. Not that there's anything wrong with heavy metal or rock or anything. I like all of those things, but the way that I feel in see percussion is more in a melodic sense and the beauty of it and what it can do kind of almost as a human language to speak to people in a melodic way.
(00:07:20):
And I realized quickly that a lot of people didn't relate to it that way. And I kind of wanted to see if I could change their minds, what a big endeavor, who knew where that would take me in life. But that is kind of how I started to be interested in percussion concertos and solo percussion. But like I said, there wasn't many avenues for that. So oftentimes the only time that you could get in front of an orchestra was a concerto competition. And so I went to a lot of these competitions and I said, Hey, I'm a percussionist. There is this repertoire. The very first one that I tried to do was the Schwantner percussion concerto. And at that time it didn't have a piano reduction. And for a concerto competition, you have to go in with a pianist, they play the accompaniment and you play the solo part.
(00:08:12):
And so for that concerto, there was a, I guess floating around and my teacher had told me this, that somebody had done a handwritten piano reduction of the schwan percussion score, and they told me maybe this person might have it or maybe this person might have it, reach out to them, whatever. And so I tracked this thing down and it was literally a handwritten piano reduction of the Joseph Schwantner's percussion concerto. And I use that, and I still, to this day, I have it. And it was the first thing that I used for several of the concerto competitions that I did when I was just getting started. And that was really the catapult that got me into it. And as I grew in that realm, the percussion repertoire also grew, and eventually I started to grow it myself. And so it kind of just all evolved in that way. That was a long story, but that's kind of how it went.
Leah Roseman (00:09:10):
Yeah, that's really interesting. And who is Joseph Schwantner?
Lisa Pegher (00:09:13):
So Joseph Schwantner is a really amazing American composer, and I would say, well, I don't know the stats these days, but for a long time that was pretty much one of the only percussion concertos that was out there being performed. But yeah, he's a modern American composer, really amazing. And I've actually, as I've performed his concerto, we've actually been at concerts together, and he's not only just an amazing composer, but also an amazing person.
Leah Roseman (00:09:45):
So with my orchestra, the National Art Centre Orchestra in Canada, we've performed several times with both Evelyn Glennie and Colin Currie, the Scottish percussion soloist, and I think the audience loves it, so theatrical, all these percussion concertos, and it's always surprising to me we don't do more of these.
Lisa Pegher (00:10:03):
So that's kind of one of the interesting parts too, is that it is a tough road. And both, I often as Evelyn and Colin both have kind of been in the same realm as myself. You really have to not only just have a piece that people are interested in, but you have to almost, for whatever reason, convince the orchestra and the conductor and the music artistic directors that the audience is going to love this. However, it doesn't make any sense because any concert that I've ever played of these percussion concertos, the audience, like you said, they love them. I've never gone to a concert and performed one of these concertos and had the audience not just be extremely excited that they got to hear something different, amazed at what percussion can do. And so it's always just been a challenge, but also a mystery to me why orchestras are fearful of being able to program this type of music more frequently. And it's a lifelong challenge for me as well.
Leah Roseman (00:11:14):
And to close out this chapter about the concerto competitions, your early stages, I was interested to read, you got your Master's at Northwestern University, which is a very esteemed music program, and you were the first percussionist to win the concerto competition there.
Lisa Pegher (00:11:29):
That's correct. And also in my undergrad as well. And the interesting thing there is that, again, there was very little to go off for these percussion concerto competition. So if you didn't have something like a bootleg piano reduction to go into those competitions with, you're basically out of luck. And so that was kind of the perseverance part of it for me, where it was like, okay, I was so determined to do it, and then I persevered through it with that concerto and then I was able to do those competitions and luckily win with the support and going in it. It was something where there were different instrumentalists who are amazing at all of those places. So I was grateful that I was able to break through there and bring percussion.
Leah Roseman (00:12:25):
At the end of this wide ranging conversation, I asked Lisa if she'd consider improvising something for the podcast. And to my delight, she agreed. We'd been sitting there talking for 90 minutes about so many of her fascinating projects, and she just got up and created this beautiful little gem. During this podcast, you'll be hearing quite a bit of her recorded work on many types of drums and percussion instruments, including the use of some electronics, and you can use the timestamps to navigate the episode. However, I thought it would be really nice to edit this spontaneous vibraphone moment early in the episode to give you a taste of some of Lisa's creativity. Later in the episode, you'll hear her talk about composing and how improvisation helps her with that.
(00:13:05):
I was wondering if you would consider maybe doing a little improv with just one or two simple. I know you could do so much with two sticks even.
Lisa Pegher (00:13:14):
You're putting me on a spot. It's good. I didn't improvise this morning, so let's see what I come up with. I'm going to unplug my headphones. Alright, well I'll just play a little bit. I don't know where this is going to go, but I'll do a little improvisation for you.(music)
(00:13:32):
So that was a little something.
Leah Roseman (00:16:33):
I loved it. Thanks.
Lisa Pegher (00:16:36):
Getting put on the spot. Yep.
Leah Roseman (00:16:37):
Yeah. So that's a vibraphone you were using.
Lisa Pegher (00:16:42):
Yep. That's a vibraphone.
Leah Roseman (00:16:44):
Do you want to speak to that instrument, that particular instrument?
Lisa Pegher (00:16:48):
Sure. Yeah. So I guess I could say the thing that I love about the vibraphone, which is that it really is probably the instrument that we have as a percussionist that is closest to the human voice because you have that sustain. And so whenever you press the pedal, it actually allows you to have that more resonant sound where it bleeds through as if you were extending your singing voice. But it also gives you a lot of different colors. So you can actually have a dampen sound if you, the pedal up, you can have that very, I guess prominent, no resonance sound, but as soon as you put the pedal down, it's just this gorgeous melody type sound. But then you can also turn on the motor, which gives you even more closer to the human voice, a type of vibrato, and you can actually speed the vibrato up or turn it down depending on what kind of effect you want to get.
(00:17:46):
So I would also say that the interesting thing about the vibraphone is that it was one of the earlier instruments that was used a lot in jazz improvisation, one of the first percussion melody type instruments that came into jazz, but also I found it to be very relatable to some of these things, getting into electronics. A lot of the stuff that I've done with electronics blends very well with the vibraphone for all these reasons that I mentioned. It always the first instrument that a percussionist could plug in. And so naturally you start to think about how that relates to some of the electronics because, oh, what else can I plug in here? And so oftentimes I'll be triggering different things from the vibraphone and then creating melodies off of that too. And it's just kind of a natural evolution, if you will.
Leah Roseman (00:18:37):
Very cool. Thanks for that. Okay.
Lisa Pegher (00:18:40):
Yeah.
Leah Roseman (00:18:40):
You'd mentioned briefly your mentor in Pittsburgh Symphony. Do you want to speak to?
Lisa Pegher (00:18:46):
Sure. So Andy Reamer, who, again - So I say my sensei. I've had a few teachers over the years that have really had a profound impact on my technique, the way that I practice, the way that I perform, and just the way that I structure my practice routine and things, the way that I create my setups even. And I would say that Andy is one of those people that maybe unless you're around and go to the Pittsburgh Symphony a lot, you wouldn't know. But he not only is an amazing teacher, an amazing percussionist, but also is a manufacturer, he creates and makes his own drums, which is amazing. So he has a drum shop and he makes drumsticks that are the highest quality drumsticks out there for classical percussion playing and rope drumming. And his studio, he actually makes rope drums, concert bass drums, things like this, that field drums and the most beautiful instruments you could ever imagine for percussion. And it's just very in alignment with what my vision for percussion is, which is the beauty of it. And he not only has taught that over the years and is able to do that in a percussion section type setting, but also he actually makes his own drums and manufactures them. And there's other orchestras all around the world that play on Andy's drums, but I actually have one of his sticks right here. It is so beautiful. Yeah.
(00:20:33):
Yeah. And he's the one that I went to when I was 14 and said, Hey, I want to be a percussion soloist. And he was like, okay, let's talk about that. And he let me for four years, drive my career towards that and was very supportive and never stopped me and said, Hey, you should just audition for orchestras like everybody else, get a section job. No, he was like, he believed in me and he gave me the tools to build things. The way that I think in my brain to build multiple percussion setups really came from Andy. And that was the first percussion concerto, like I said, the Schwantner. We actually detailed it out and came up with the setup and the multi setup, and he actually helped me build one of the tools that I used to hang the triangles. And as a 14-year-old, this is all being downloaded into my brain in a way that I wasn't really aware of at the time.
(00:21:33):
But years later, I actually just recently actually came and played with the Pittsburgh Symphony, and there I am standing next to my mentor, one of the most meaningful, inspiring moments probably up in my life as a musician where it's like a decade had passed. And here I am standing next to my mentor, my sensei, and we're about to play music together, and there are all of his setups, and it's naturally exactly the way that I would set it up. And our brains completely think the same way. And I think that that really speaks to how important it is to have a mentor, not just in music, but in life, and the impact, the profound impact that having the right person with you to be that mentor that sensei is. And how as a musician that really molds a lot of what you do in the future.
Leah Roseman (00:22:27):
Do you do martial arts at all?
Lisa Pegher (00:22:29):
I am actually a trained yoga instructor. I've done yoga for, I mean, almost as long as I've played the drums. And it kind of is my martial arts, it's my meditation, it's the way that I kind of get into the zone. It's been the thing that kind of translates very much on the same frequency I think as music and to the point where I almost feel like they compliment one another in a way that is a level beyond what normal day-to-day human capacity is. It's like when you're in music and you're in meditation, there's a place where you can go that is beyond our day-to-day human interactions. And I think that that's the place that I am always trying to be able to go to at any point, whether I'm on stage in front of thousands of people and or I am in a traffic jam in the middle of Manhattan. And I think that when you find that place and you realize that it exists, everything else in the universe comes into perfect harmony.
Leah Roseman (00:23:50):
Well, there's so much to talk about. I wanted to highlight some of your compositions. Could we include, maybe, you have a piece called No Reply?This is No reply, composed by Lisa Pegher. This version is from a live performance in 2010 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. This composition is also on her album, Minimal Art, Imaginary Windows, and you'll find all the links in the show notes.(music)
(00:24:16):
Do you want to speak to marimba and what it means for you?
Lisa Pegher (00:27:24):
Marimba again was one of those instruments. As a percussionist, I often get asked the question, oh, okay, so are you a drummer? And then I have to explain now I'm a multi percussionist, so any of the keyboard instruments in the percussion family, et cetera, et cetera. And when it comes to the keyboard instruments, I guess the one that you're faced with is the marimba. Can you master technique on the marimba? And there are, again, several techniques out there, but I was lucky, again to have a amazing fundamental sensei master teacher who taught me what the foundation of technique and why that is important and how it leads over to all the other instruments. So my foundation comes from rope drumming and snare drumming. And surprisingly enough, those elements that I was taught led really well over to the technique, Steven's technique over on marimba. And so because my teachers were very adamant about technique, I practiced technique in my early days over trying to do anything else.
(00:28:43):
And so once I felt like I had pretty good technique, everything else gets easier. It's just like we can go back to the meditation thing. It's like when you can get into that zone and you have a good foundation, everything in life becomes easier. And so what happens a lot of times is people try to skip over that step and say, well, the technique will come later and I'll just try to play this really hard music right now. And luckily, I wasn't in that camp. I was in the strong foundation, and then I could play all this really hard music. So marimba, I was really drawn to some of the difficult marimba repertoire in the beginning. I was like, I'm very, like I said, I like to bring what the melodic part of drums is to people. And so naturally, I really was also drawn to marimba and the repertoire.
(00:29:36):
And so when I'm being creative and I'm in that creative space, oftentimes I'll just pick up four sticks, go over to the marimba and start to improvise and say, okay, what am I feeling right now? And in some instances, that's where some of my best ideas have come from. No Reply came from a place of solitude, reflectiveness, things that were happening in my life during that time. And I was able to take one of those themes that I had come up with while I was in that space and make it into a piece of music. Most recently, similar thing happened, I was actually going through a creative block, which I don't ever remember in my life, having gone through a period of time where I felt creatively blocked as if I had just gotten through all of these different projects. I don't know if it was burnout.
(00:30:36):
I don't know if it was just like you take on the world and then you just pause. And did I have any effect on anything? Was it worth it? It was one of those moments in my career where I didn't have anything. I was like, did I give it all away? I don't know. And so I went through and I had some experiences, and because of that, it led me back to the marimba and what didn't it. One day I'm in this state and I come up with this, I wake up in the morning and I just start improvising on the marimba, and I'm just kind of letting out all the things that I can't say or I want to say and I can't. And there lands this beautiful theme, this melody, and luckily I was actually recording. I had to set my phone and I had pressed record, and I just went with it.
(00:31:38):
And this piece that I'm talking about right now, it's called Fate, Amenable to Grace. And I am going to premiere it as part of the A.I.RE show, but it kind of fits into the theme of, I don't know if you've all of us hear about Elon Musk a lot, but he names his ships after Ian Banks, a lot of the ships that are in that book. And that book itself, Player of Games, actually relates to my show a lot. And so I had read that book, and also there were a lot of relationship things with that book and what was happening in my life and the reasons I know all of this is because one of his ship's names was, Of Course, I Still Love You. And that's what made me look into why would Elon Musk name his ship name? "Of Course, I Still Love You".
(00:32:35):
And that's how I got into like, oh, it's the Player of Games, and it's like book and it's actually relates to AI. And so I started looking up the ship names myself, and one of them was Fate Amenable to Change. And I was like, that's a really good title, because that really fits along the lines of not only where I was coming from creatively with this, but also the piece itself and the meaning behind it. But I didn't want to just use the title. So I did a play on words, and I called it Fate, Amenable to Grace, because I really feel like grace is the thing in the universe that kind of leads you to the place where you're supposed to be. And in the creative realm, it's very much relatable to fate in a way where it's like you think that you can change things or you're having a profound effect on things, but actually a lot of this is just divine intervention in a way. I changed the words around a little bit. I'm calling it Fate, Amenable to Grace, and it's going to be premiered at the New York Show on May 17th.
Leah Roseman (00:33:44):
And this book you were just referring to, what is it?
Lisa Pegher (00:33:48):
So the Player of Games, it's by Ian Banks, and you can learn a little bit more about it, but very, it gets into a lot of these concepts that in our world we're kind of thinking about now in a more supernatural way, I guess, but just made up worlds things that could happen essentially with AI if it took a different path and things like that. So it's just an interesting thing, and I think that it just had a lot of relationships and it was inspiring to me. So I kind of fit it in there.
Leah Roseman (00:34:27):
Now we're going to be sharing some of your recorded work, but I'd asked you if maybe you could do a little demo, especially with the artificial intelligence integration you're working with, and if you want to speak to that project.
Lisa Pegher (00:34:40):
Sure, sure. A little bit about that program coming up. It's called Artificial Intelligence Rhythm Evolution, and the show itself is an evolution of percussion music in the format of 10 composers in the ICEBERG new music collective who were given the challenge to take this concept. And each one of them were to write a piece in the timeline of the evolution of percussion as it evolved from its roots grassroots, ethnic drumming, as the instrument itself grew from a xylophone per se, to a five octave marimba, then into the contemporary realm, then into pop music, then into electronic music, and then eventually into the computer itself starting to integrate itself over top of percussion music, and then eventually AI being able to generate its own music from being able to listen to what human is playing. And so this piece, one of the pieces in the program is called I Am AI, and what's happening in this piece, it's a piece by composer Derek Cooper, one of the ICEBERG Collective composers, and Derek wrote this piece so that it's all mapped together in the computer so that the computer actually hears what I'm playing and then will respond to what I'm playing given the rhythmic structure.
(00:36:05):
And so there's a lot of different improvisational things that are happening there, but the output can actually be seen on the computer. And another element of the show is that there's a big multimedia aspect of it where the audience can actually experience this in a way that's not only me as a performer, as a percussionist, but also in a visual format with a visual engineer, Kat Zhang, who's included in the program as well. So this piece, I am ai. It's in several different movements, but in the first movement, it's really just me getting started talking to the computer. And the idea here is kind of in a way to make people think about how machines, a lot of people think about AI, and they're like, they're fearful of it, and there is a fearful side of it. It's like, what is it going to do?
(00:36:54):
Humans are often afraid of things that they don't understand. And I can tell you, none of us completely understand the impact that AI will have on us in the future. But for now, it's also a new creative palette. And the way that I've been looking at it is like, what can we do with it in the music realm that hasn't been done before and always thinking of the future. And so this piece is really, really cool because it is that piece where I'm actually getting to interact with a computer in a program in a way that just wasn't, up until this time, wasn't something that people would even think about. And to me, it's really exciting because it really is a different creative palette. But I can try to plug in for you here if you want me to. Yeah,
(00:37:38):
Let's see if it'll work.
(00:37:40):
I'll just play a little bit of this, but what you can see happening on the computer here is that the output is actually the computer itself listening to what I'm doing and taking that as an input to decide what it's going to respond with. And so I'll just play a little bit of the opening. (music) So there you go. And it kind of goes on from there. It gets a lot more complicated, but that's kind of the basic call and response that happens. I'm playing some MIDI triggers, and then it's taking that input and then deciding from what it's hearing, what it is going to play back to me. And then in the music, I can respond to it with certain things, and then it will pick up that response and respond in a different way.
Leah Roseman (00:39:59):
So this is a big element of improvisation in this work.
Lisa Pegher (00:40:03):
There is. Yep.
Leah Roseman (00:40:04):
Okay. Now, you're quite an incredible improviser. I've heard you with your jazz trio and different contexts on YouTube. Do you want to speak to improvisation and what it means for you also as a composer?
Lisa Pegher (00:40:19):
Yeah, that's a really good question. Thanks for asking it. What I found, and I'm sure that this is different for everybody, but what I've found is that improvisation leads to, for me, the creative process. And so oftentimes my ideas come from improvisation. Whether some of the pieces that I've written all started as some kind of improvisation. This piece that I actually wrote for this program coming up began as a moment of creativity. As humans, we go through things, we have emotions, and luckily as musicians, we have the output of music. And that's oftentimes where our creative ideas come from. And I could speak to the improvisational part of it is often I feel like that is one of those moments where you have that innate ability to go beyond into a place where you're not always able to go. And from that place you land ideas.
(00:41:23):
And I've been able to do that, especially with, I guess keyboard instruments, but also in jazz drumming where I feel like it allows you to break beyond the barriers. Whereas if somebody hands you a piece of music and says, Hey, I wrote this, this was my thing, it almost confines you to a space where you have to do the music the way that person's creative idea. And so you're trying to make them in a way feel like what you're playing was their idea and their creative process, which is a much different thing than when it comes from yourself and you're saying, this is my voice. This came from my own experience, and I want to put this out there. And so it's also kind of like the difference between improvisation and classical music, where in classical music, you're always almost trying to perfect something in a way that you can never reach.
(00:42:27):
And I find this every time that I go back to classical music. I love classical music, and it is humbling the amount of effort that you can put into any classical piece of music or handwritten piece of music and still never get it to be perfect. It is the most humbling thing as a musician, I feel, but also that leads to a confinement where you also don't feel like you're able to break out and be that creative and get those emotions out. And so that's where I really love improvisation and just getting in there, having my jazz trio, us getting in a room together and saying like, oh, here's a bassline. Let's just see where we go with it. There's nothing more, I think just fulfilling as a musician to be able to get into that space. And again, not just get into that space, but then be able to create a piece or a show or anything like that that is a result of that. And yeah, I guess that's kind of my take on improvisation.
Leah Roseman (00:43:34):
Yeah. Hi. Just a short break from the episode, which I hope you're enjoying so far. I wanted to let you know that I have a new way you can support independent podcast through a beautiful collection of merch with a very cool, unique, and expressive design from artists Steffi Kelly. You'll find that link in the description of the episode. 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, leahroseman.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. You'll find that link in the show notes along with the merch store. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. Now, back to the episode.
(00:44:28):
There's one of your recordings I really loved. Let me just find it. Oh yes. Matthew Rosenbloom's Northern Flicker.
Lisa Pegher (00:44:37):
Oh, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. So that is a very hard piece. This is one of those pieces that I could tell you Matthew's an amazing composer, and he also wrote me a percussion concerto that also is very, very difficult. And Matthew, the thing I really love about Matthew as a composer is that he has his own, definitely his own language that he's come up with, and it is all him, and it's really, really interesting some of the stuff he comes up with. So he came up with this solo percussion piece, Northern Flicker, and the setup is huge. And you look at the music and it is just like this is when you get into solo percussion music on the classical realm, and you think to yourself, this is all written out. This is extremely complicated, multiple percussion music and this huge percussion set up all these drums, electronics, and pages and pages of music.
(00:45:45):
And Matthew's like, here, I wrote you this piece, Lisa, and I love the piece. But it took me a long time to get it to the place where I actually felt like I was doing it justice. And never, I could say this is one of those pieces where I never could feel like I perfected it, but I could feel like I could perform it well. But to say that I was perfectly playing every single note, just like you can't do it as a performer, you have to break through and be like, this is the way I'm going to perform this as a performer. And I think that that's what makes the composer to performer relationships so great. And why Matthew, we have a great relationship because he likes the way that I do that, and I like the way that he can write this complicated music, and we kind of make it happen that way. But Northern Flickers is a really big, big solo multiple percussion piece.
Leah Roseman (00:46:41):
It's eight minutes, maybe we would include a clip of it. Would that be okay?
Lisa Pegher (00:46:45):
Yeah, I would love that. Yeah.
Leah Roseman (00:46:48):
Now, this is a clip from Lisa's brilliant performance of Flicker for solar percussion and electronics by Matthew Rosenblum. And the complete video is linked in the show notes of this podcast. You can also find the audio recording linked on her website.(music)
(00:47:03):
Now, notation, you mentioned the challenges of that, and you must collaborate with composers to give them feedback about what's working and not working
Lisa Pegher (00:50:27):
Yeah, notation has been a really interesting topic throughout my career, talking to people, especially composers, and even when I start to do collaborative projects with composers, some of them have their own idea about it. Some of them will not write a percussion piece because they're like, I don't know how to write the nomenclature for that. I'm just like, what? I dunno what to do. And so what I try to do, especially if I like a composer and they're in the camp of like, I don't know what to do. How do you want me to write this? I always go back to thinking of percussion in a melodic way. And I've actually given master classes on this, and I love to talk to composers and especially university composers who are just starting out about how to write for percussion. Because I think oftentimes they're taught in school a very old school type way, which is looking at orchestral scores and thinking of them as separate instruments where in reality, the instrument has evolved into, you almost have to think of every single percussion instrument that you have as a part on the melodic staff.
(00:51:38):
So if I had a bass drum, a snare drum, and two Tom Toms, I'm talking almost speaking about a drum set up here, but you would take FACE and think of it melodically and say, okay, what's the lowest instrument? And then go up from there. And then you have to obviously write different notation for all the different instruments and figure that out. And I think that there's enough examples of very complicated solo percussion pieces now where people have something to go off of that makes sense that the trouble we get into is whenever they go off the one that doesn't make any sense. And then you get a piece of music and you're like, what is this? I can't play this. We have to rewrite it. So yeah, I think that it's always evolving over time, but my standard to say to composers is think of it as if you had 32 percussion instruments, how would you write that for a piano and then figure it out from there? And that usually coincides and makes sense to folks.
Leah Roseman (00:52:43):
And can we talk about found objects and discovering different ways of using instruments?
Lisa Pegher (00:52:49):
Sure. Well, it's funny, I was over, I went to visit my parents recently and they were painting, and I went in to the room and there was the most glorious just setup of paint cans and the paint can, the stirers that you stir the paint with, and actually the piece that you just mentioned, Matthew Rosenbloom's, Northern Flicker uses multiple different tin cans, and the pitches of them can be very, very amazing and quite different depending on the sizes and the shape and the thickness of the metal. So I walk in and some of these paint cans were filled a little bit. Some of them were totally filled up, but they all had lids on them. And so I took the stirers and I started playing on this glorious setup of paint cans, and it was, I didn't record it, but my parents were enjoying the performance.
(00:53:52):
But it was like that kind of speaks to those moments where you see something and you could hear what it sounds like. And that's kind of where I come from a lot as a percussionist. And I don't know if most people think like this, but as a percussionist, I'm always thinking that way, oh, what does that sound like? I'll see something out on the street and be like, Hmm, I wonder what that would sound like with a combination of X, Y, and Z. The paint cans at my parents' house, I was like, immediately I imagined in my head before I even started to try to play them what they could sound like. And then I was like, my expectations were like, I've blown out the window because it actually sounded way better than I even thought. So that's just some of the things that you kind of dig into and think about. And then there's the moments where you kind of know what you're looking for. So in a percussion concerto, a composer might write for pitched something, and it's my job to go out and kind of find those things that I think might sound with the harmonic structure or the melody that's happening, or the main theme that's happening in that music. So there's a lot of different elements to it, but it is one of the more different and also sometimes fun things to do as a ionist. Yeah,
Leah Roseman (00:55:10):
I think it was in season two of this podcast, I had Jesse Stewart, who's an artist, percussionist, lots of things. And he was at that time writing these snare drum etudes using the snare drum in all kinds of different ways. And for the podcast, he actually put a wrench on the snare and then did a little improv. It creates all these very interesting sounds. You have the resonance of the wrench and then how it interacts with the drum.
Lisa Pegher (00:55:35):
Yeah, yeah. There's all kinds of different sound combinations you could come up with. Yeah.
Leah Roseman (00:55:40):
Now we should talk about your life as a coder, software engineer. And you work for Splice, right?
Lisa Pegher (00:55:47):
That's correct. And that was a more recent part, one of my more recent evolutions as a person, as a human, I like to think of my life as evolutions, the different versions of me. So this was kind of my most recent evolution, I think, as a human. And it kind of came by way of music. Everything goes back to music in a way. But I got into programming kind of by accident, but because of some of the stuff that I was doing in music was working with a lot of these software programs and I wanted to understand, I'm a very curious person, and so it wasn't good enough for me to just do it and use the software. I really wanted to understand how it was working and what was going on under the hood. And so I started to dig a little bit deeper and get into the language of coding.
(00:56:46):
And that's where I really started to be like, wow, there's such a strong relationship between code and music and the way that I think that sometimes we think of programming or we think of computers as this dry wall, so uncreative, it's just this thing, and I have to go to it. And I do get into those spaces sometimes where I'm like, ah, I don't want to be around my computer. I just want to be in enveloped and music and not see a screen. But the magic that happens in code itself is very relatable to music, the way that you have to compose it, the way that the programs get put together, the structures, the language. It is one of those things where it's beyond the face value of it. Just like music is where it's like, you might see the notes on the page in music, but what you're hearing, you don't need to see the notes.
(00:57:50):
And same thing with software. It's like when you're coding a program, you don't have to see what language is happening in order to experience the results that right now we're in a podcast where we're having a conversation together because of somebody who wrote code and the software that is underlying there. And so that is where the relationship gets really, really tight and close. And I just started to almost enjoy the idea that you could compose essentially programs that do things. And not only that, but you could compose programs that do things that are related to music. And so that's kind of how I got into it, just kind of as a hobby. And then it led into more things where I started writing and writing software and helping create creator tools that musicians could use to make music. And to me, what I realized as a soloist is that being a soloist is a very lonely life.
(00:58:51):
And I spent all of my time, I mean, think about it, just in this podcast we talked about, I've been playing percussion, and I started being a soloist when I was 14. That's a lot of hours in a room by yourself practicing something that is a solo piece that you're going to go up and play by yourself. And so it can be very, I guess, siloing. And so I started to have this. I wanted to reach more people. I wanted to have, it wasn't enough for me to just stand up on stage, learn my music, go stand up on stage. Yes, you're having an impact on a couple thousand people when you show up to a concert every night. But there was something about it that I just wanted to reach more people in programming when I was given the challenge of like, oh, you could actually write software that stadiums full of people would be using for their own, create creative projects and be able to make their own creative ideas come to life.
(01:00:00):
That to me was like, oh my gosh, I could be part of something that is helping all of these people be creative. And I was kind of like, I want to do that too. And so that's when I started working at Splice and got to make some, I get to work on some pretty cool stuff that creators use to make and create music producers, people like myself. I'm actually using one of the tools in my show as well that I actually did some of the programming and coding for. And that to me, when I wake up, that excites me about life where I'm like, I'm helping people in a more profound way, and it's not just about me standing up on stage playing this music. It's like I get to help these people make their own music. And that's pretty profound, I think.
Leah Roseman (01:00:51):
Very cool. Now, if we could just back up a little bit. I was thinking about community because you participated in an international percussion competition in the Netherlands in 2017, TROMP.
Lisa Pegher (01:01:04):
Oh, wow. You've really done your homework here
Leah Roseman (01:01:09):
Lisa, I was thinking, what does this look like? What does this, who shows up with these percussion competitions? Right?
Lisa Pegher (01:01:17):
I don't even know Leah. I don't even know who shows up with these things, but I can tell you that I packed up my gear, I went to the Netherlands. I wanted to do this competition. I didn't really know what to expect, to be completely honest. It was a lot of music. I had to learn for the competition. And I remember getting to the area of Eindhoven with my huge percussion suitcase bag and dragging it across the square. This is what I remember about the competition. I'm dragging it across the square in Eindhoven, and I'm like, where am I supposed to go? I have no idea where I am. And that was just competition life.
(01:02:04):
The TROMP competition, this is another thing, I guess I could say it out loud, but I've always had this vision where I would love to bring something like the TROMP competition. TROMP. I keep saying it sounds like I'm saying Trump, but it's TROMP, like T-R-O-M-P, the TROMP competition to the United States. But there's just not the same support, which is always been very odd to me where we can't get the traction in the United States for percussion and just the excitement about it that they seem to have in Europe. But in Europe, people actually do show up to these things, and they're into it, and the community is there and they're like, TROMP competition is happening. And you would be surprised at how many people show up at the audience, and there's a final concert, and all the people get to play at least one of the pieces that they learned for the competition.
(01:02:56):
So I think I have mixed feelings about competitions having struggled and trying to break down the barriers of percussionists being allowed in competitions. The idea of competition itself in a creative realm kind of bothers me, but as far as community goes, I can see the value in it because it is a way to bring people together. I just wish that we could take the competition out of it in a way and be like, you all did really hard work and you all succeeded in some way, and there is value in that. Instead of being like, there's winners and losers and losers, get out of here. It's very detrimental, I think, especially to people who put so much time and effort into the preparation that goes into those things.
Leah Roseman (01:03:43):
Well, you had mentioned stadiums and using Splice, so Paul Dooley wrote some music for you incorporating EDM and Orchestra. Has that been recorded at all?
Lisa Pegher (01:03:56):
Oh, thank you for asking because it is in post-production right now, and we are about to release it. So I actually just met with Gil Rose, who's the conductor of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and we were just doing some of the mixing and the takes from the recording sessions and it's set to come out this summer. So yes, it's very excited about it. And so Paul Dooley wrote this piece, it's now called Circuits and Skins, and this is my other life endeavor where I'm really trying to get percussion concerto music to bring other forms of audience members into the concert halls. And one of the biggest, I'm actually very close to music producers at Splice too, where I'm like, I see all of these different worlds of music, not just the classical world anymore. I'm really enveloped in all of the different genres. And one of the things that is probably one of the biggest, most popular concert going audiences is EDM.
(01:05:03):
You should see the people that show up to these festivals, thousands. You can't even believe how much people love this music. And I thought to myself, why can't we mix those genres together and get a piece that could get people that excited to come into orchestral concert halls? And so Paul and I, we collaborated on this piece and this idea, and he wrote this piece. This is one of my favorite percussion concertos ever written. I'm so excited for it. I just don't know what to do to get my excitement to go over to these artistic directors to be like, please see my vision, understand this, and bring these people into the concert hall because this is the type of music that will get younger generation into the concert halls and get them excited about symphonic music again, if we could just convince the artistic directors that the future is the way in this type of concerto, in this type of format.
Leah Roseman (01:06:00):
Excellent. I couldn't agree with you more.
(01:06:02):
You had mentioned SideFire Trio, your jazz trio, and I saw and listened to some of your music. Do you want to include a clip of that just to show another side of your
Lisa Pegher (01:06:15):
I would love to. Yeah. I think that I mentioned earlier how I feel like I have these evolutions not just in my music career, but my persona in the way that I see and am learning as I evolve. And one of the things I also try to steer away from is being confined. What I noticed when I started out was like, oh, you have to be this thing. If you're going to be a soloist, you are a soloist in the classical music realm, and this is what we're going to call you, and this is what you are. And that just never felt right to me. And because I was always evolving and learning, and my tastes were changing as a musician, and I didn't want to just be this one thing. I wanted to do all kinds of different creative things and come up with and put on these shows, and how can I make a difference if I'm just stuck in this little tiny box?
(01:07:09):
And so I look at my life as a creative, and I'm like, I definitely have these evolutions of where I've recreated myself and tried these different things, and they're all a little bit different. And one of them was the SideFire Trio, which I would probably still be playing with a lot had the pandemic not happened. But that kind of got sidelined a bit, and it was one of those dead stops when the pandemic happened. However, that came from a very creative space, and it was taking the idea of jazz and making it more freeform, but also, again, mixing different types of formats where I would trigger samples. Sometimes I would sing behind the drums, don't judge me Again, though, it was one of those expressive moments where I was like, you know what? I realized something very special, which is that the best singers, the people that I think we respect and who get on the radio and stuff, they're just being their natural selves.
(01:08:15):
They're not trying or anything like that, but what they have, and all we have as humans is what we innately have to offer. And one of that is our human voice. And yes, it might not always be in perfect pitch, or it might not be my friend Jones, who's an amazing opera singer. I am never going to be that level, but I can still express myself with words and vocally in an expressive way in music. And so sometimes I'll be singing with a side fire trio. I'll process my vocals and be singing some of the tracks and lyrics. And that to me was one of the most creative times up until then that I had come up with this show. Again, I'm always thinking of these show formats, but the SideFire Trio show was called Imperfection. This was the idea, my kind of stance against, not against, but the idea that there's beauty in imperfection.
(01:09:13):
And a lot of our creativity comes from those moments where it's just raw, innate, emotional, and you come from this place that isn't necessarily a written down. Those things can't be written down. And so Imperfection was the idea that although you have this classical music where you're always striving to be perfect and you're never going to reach that perfection, you can also have this beautiful thing that's imperfect. And in those imperfect moments, you get this improvisation, this rawness, this humanness. And I look back on it sometimes. I'm like, oh my gosh, I wonder if I are going to look at that moment in my life and say, how does this fit in with who this person is supposed to be? And I just got to the place where this is just part of who I am doing these different creative things. And I think one of the things that I've had to learn over time is be a little bit tougher and say, if people don't like it, they don't understand it.
(01:10:19):
I have to be okay with that too. But that's really Imperfection. It mixed all kinds of different things. It was raw improvisation. I had hip hop dancers, and so there's a moment where I actually get up from the drums and do this whole dance with the hip hop dancers on stage and then go back to the drum set and continue on. And the overarching theme of that show was this idea that how a lot of our generation and generations who are upcoming now are kind of stuck in this realm of trying to be something and reach for some kind of thing outside of themselves instead of within themselves. And this idea of ideal perfection that we can never actually get to. And so we do it in music, but we also do it with ourselves where it's like we have this idealism that we see on Instagram and Facebook and all of these different things.
(01:11:21):
It makes it so sad because we will never reach that perfection, but our own perfection is the thing that we should be striving for. I guess that whole album was kind of like an outcry almost, of somebody's journey from trying to be somebody's ultimate perfection to becoming completely undone, almost being abused by society in a way that is astounding and like, okay, we're going to force this on you and tell what ideas you should have. And how you should look and how you should be. And then the reaction against that, and then eventually the resolve. And it's kind of supposed to tell the story through improvisation, hip hop dance, and even the vocals that I sing during the program as well. So without that backstory, you probably would have no idea where that came from musically, but that's pretty much where it came from musically.
Leah Roseman (01:12:23):
Yeah. This is a clip from Fire in a live performance by Lisa Pegher and the SideFire Trio. And you can also listen to this on their album Imperfection. For the podcast listeners, I'll link this video in the show notes.(music)
(01:13:43):
I mean, what struck me that I didn't hear the whole album, but there's this raw energy, but it is melodic what you're doing with the drums right away you hear that it's very multidimensional.
Lisa Pegher (01:13:57):
Thanks. I appreciate that. Yeah, that was one of the things I mentioned earlier, that's always how I've heard drums, drum set music, multi percussion, all of these things. And I think that it's taken me a long, and probably up until that project and that group to be able to express some of those things that I was feeling. And even now I kind of get a little bit uncomfortable. I'm like, I really put myself out there. It is kind of a scary thing, taking a risk and putting yourself out there and being like, well, people might not like this. And that's hard for an artist too, where it's like you really believe in something or you're putting yourself out there to try to send a message and the message isn't received. And I think that those are the moments where you have, it almost feels like a hit where it's like, people don't like who I am or they don't like what I have to offer creatively. And only recently have I kind of been getting over that hurdle where it's okay, people might not understand it and they might not understand it in this lifetime, and they might not ever understand it, but you're putting it out there because maybe that's just what you can offer to the world, because everybody is unique in their own special way. And I think that if we could respect that about everybody, the world would be a much more harmonious place.
Leah Roseman (01:15:31):
Yeah, I think certainly context helps with anything that's challenging for listeners. Live is often better than recorded for anything with high energy and complexity.
Lisa Pegher (01:15:42):
I agree. I definitely agree. Yeah.
Leah Roseman (01:15:45):
Yeah. You did a collaboration with Andrew Knox, this Minimal Art Imaginary Windows.
Lisa Pegher (01:15:51):
You're really going back in my history. I love this because I actually just did an interview with Authority Magazine, and it was the first time that I was able to explain these steps in my evolution. And you're actually going backwards from it. You're going from this where I am now, the A.I.RE Project to the SideFire Trio. And where I started, my very first big formatted project was Imaginary Windows. And this was a collaboration with the music producer composer, Andrew Knox. And this was the first big vision that I had as a kind of, I guess in the realm of producing my own shows and curating my own shows as a percussionist to try to bring this to a wider audience. And imaginary Windows was, the vision was before people were incorporating multimedia, this was way before now everybody's incorporating multimedia and their performances. Like, oh, you go to a performance, you go to an orchestra.
(01:16:55):
It is becoming like the thing that people do now. But when I had Imaginary Windows, this was not mainstream at all, but I had envisioned taking some of the music. I loved his music, the stuff that was producing, and I wanted to play percussion to it, but also find a way to show people the music as it was happening. And so I also, during the time, commissioned a visual artist, Ben Hill, I, and as somebody who grew up with very little means, I can use the tools that I'm given. You hand me five tools, I'll figure out a way to make them work. And this is because I grew up very little means, I think. But it is been rewarding in that way because I can take just the people around me and figure out how we can make a really awesome project happen together.
(01:17:50):
And Ben, I had met who was working at a visual company, I was living in the south at the time. I was playing in some orchestras down there when I'd just gotten out of school. And I saw some of his stuff and I was like, Hey, I have this vision. I have this idea. You know how to do this thing. You're doing it for these movies and editing. Would you be interested in taking the music that Andrew and I do and setting it to some kind of visual thing that we could actually release as a DVD? And so I know I said the word DVD, so now it's like, what is the DVD? So we released this. So Andrew and I got together in the studio. It was the first big collaborative project that I ever did. Like I said, he brought in orchestral musicians to play over some of the tracks.
(01:18:42):
I did some of my own improvisation, but also we worked together and composed some of the pieces together in the studio. And then I took the music to Ben and we collaborated on it in his studio at the time, and saw the music on the big screen. It was like, here's the visuals we can put to it. And so if you watch some of the videos now, and this goes back to me being really down on myself as an artist, I put so much effort and soul and heart into that project, and I performed it in New York when it first came out, but then it was just all that effort, and I just felt like I couldn't get the response. It didn't get the response that I had imagined in my head. And I just actually looked at the video last night. It's funny that you bring this up because it came up that I had released it.
(01:19:37):
There's a lot of correlations with things that are happening in my life that also happened, or there's an evolution of it that happened 10 years ago. And one of it was that project. And I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, oh my gosh, I was so hard on myself when I released this, but I still love this. I love these videos. These videos are good. And they were like, this was before people were thinking about visuals in their stuff. And this was ahead of the curve, and I am not good at being proud of myself, but in the moment last night, I was like, I should be proud of this because it's kind of cool. And I actually was so hard on myself, Leah, I could tell you that I didn't even post those videos. And I was thinking to myself last night, I didn't put this on social media.
(01:20:23):
I was afraid people weren't going to like it. I was afraid. Oftentimes, it's one of my things as an artist where I'm so scared to put this stuff out there because I'm like, people aren't going to like it, and it's something I really struggle with, and I'm getting a little bit better at it these days. But that was one of those moments where I was like, I put all this effort into it, and I just never posted it because I was afraid that people wouldn't understand it or they didn't like it. But I love that project and there's some really good music on there. And Ben did some amazing, amazing work with the visuals. And I hope that there is an opportunity at some point for that project to be enjoyed by more people. So TBD, we'll see how life evolves. You never know.
Leah Roseman (01:21:12):
Yeah. Well, it was actually just last night I found some of those videos. I wanted to make sure I hadn't missed anything, and I was looking at your output. So they are on YouTube.
Lisa Pegher (01:21:22):
They are on YouTube, but I just never promoted them and I stopped talking about them. Also, the time that it takes to do all of that stuff as an artist, and it's, that in itself gets exhausting where you're like, if the project itself just performing it, putting it together, releasing it, getting it out there, and then, oh, you have to do all the YouTube promotion and the social media. That's why we kind of start to get burned out after a while, I think. But thank you for looking at it. I really love some of those tracks and the visuals that go along with them.
Leah Roseman (01:22:01):
Is there part of one of those tracks we could include that you think would be good? Yeah.
Lisa Pegher (01:22:08):
Yes. I think that, well, one of the most popular music tracks is Pure Passages, and then I think that Water Runs Up is also a nice one that folks might like. And it's on the short side too.
Leah Roseman (01:22:24):
Yes, Iheard that. That's one of the ones I heard. Cool. Thank you. You're about to hear Water Runs Up from Lisa's album, Minimal Art: Imaginary Windows with music by Andrew Knox and Lisa Pegher. If you're listening to the podcast format of this episode, you'll find the animation by Ben Hill linked in the show notes.(music)
(01:22:44):
Yeah, you were talking about burnout earlier, and you're just talking about social media, which is just unavoidable and it's pretty endless, right? There's all the media. It can't just be on one platform. How do you manage it?
Lisa Pegher (01:25:47):
Yes. Not very well, I can tell you. Let's have real talk, Leah. Last night, I practice in the morning, I work all day. I practice again, do yoga or go running, and then I usually go to work again, believe it or not. So last night, I'm doing my late night work, which is typically anywhere from 8:00 PM to midnight. And I spend that time writing, doing social media if I can, or catching up on other things that I wasn't able to catch up with. And the amount of effort that it takes. Not everybody is like this and props to the people who can just write things and not care about it and put it out there. I'm not that person. I'm always like, I want to say it. I want it to land the right way. I want to craft it the way that it's going to be right for this audience and that audience.
(01:26:47):
And so this is why I struggle with it because that takes so much time and energy and effort on my part that I'm oftentimes, I'm just like, I don't have the time and I give up. So last night I'm doing this and I'm thinking to myself, look, when the pandemic hit, there's so many things that happened. I stopped social media. I could not go forth with Facebook anymore. I could not go forth with any of these things. But slowly over the last year or so, I've started to be like, okay, I need to start doing this again. I got into Instagram stories. I had a friend who pointed out to me maybe just in a friend type way that was like, you do all of this stuff, but why don't you explain any of it on Facebook or anything? And I'm like, you use Facebook?
(01:27:36):
And I'm like, oh. And then I remembered, I'm like, oh my gosh, I used to do all of this stuff. And it's important, there's a whole realm that people just get their information from these platforms, and you can't leave that out. You can't act like it doesn't exist. But I struggle with it, and I'm not alone. I'm sure I'm also a empath. So I think about every single way that every single person is probably going to take the post that I put. And so that also hinders my progress of being able to post things a lot of the time where I'm like, what if they think about it this way? Or what if they think about it that way? And so it's one of those things that I'm working on, but I have to say that it does lead to burnout sometimes because I think that when it comes to social media, it's really tough to separate the line between you are an artist, you've done these things and you want people to be able to enjoy them.
(01:28:36):
You didn't just do it for yourself. Your hope at the end of the day is that other people have some kind of response to it that's positive, but in social media, sometimes their response is negative. And that's really tough. And I think that it's especially tough for the creatives who, like me and all of the people in our circles, everything is not for everyone. Having a tougher skin and being able to put it out there regardless of what the response is going to be, is one of the most challenging things I think for me. But I don't think that I'm alone in that. And it does lead to burnout because you kind of have to do it all the time. If you look at my Facebook page, you could see that there's a whole lull where I just stopped posting and I, there was too much going on in life, too many things.
(01:29:30):
And I look back, I'm like, I was still doing all these things. I just wasn't telling anybody about it, but not telling anybody about it these days can be detrimental because they think that you've just dropped off the face of the planet, where in fact, this show that I'm about to put on took four years of collaborative efforts between myself, the composers, and the dealing with the pandemic ups and downs. That's four years. And these other projects that we've discussed throughout the podcast, huge endeavors like dance practice, visual artist visits, recording sessions, and then you're also supposed to now these days, adhere to the new algorithm that Instagram just put out. And if you don't like 50 people's posts, you're not going to be shown to 25% of your audience. I mean, how is that fair?
(01:30:27):
Social media is also not fair to creatives, which bothers me, and I kind of did react against that in a way. Once you really understand the programming behind it, it does make you want to use it less sometimes, but that's just the reality of the situation. And I guess that's also been part of my healing process through all of this is knowing that it's not you. It's the algorithm. And so if you only get five likes on that post, it's not because it wasn't good, it's because they were told that in order to make money, they have to write the program a special way that makes people spend more time on their platform, and that's part of their business. So it's not part of our business. As musicians and creators.
Leah Roseman (01:31:13):
Do you have new projects in the pipeline?
Lisa Pegher (01:31:16):
My biggest thing right now is that I've spent a lot of time over the past, well, the A.I.RE project, I really wanted to go further than just this New York City premier. So my main two things right now are the Circuits and Skins, percussion Concerto, which the recording is about to come out this summer and this A.I.RE project. And they kind of are relatable in a way where it's like one is a solo recital format where I can take to different types of concert halls. And the other one is the concerto format, which I really have not given up. Despite judgment on all accounts and whatever blockages occur in the universe, I am not giving up on trying to get more people in the concert halls and getting more types of people interested in different types of music in the classical concert halls. So Circuits and Skins, I'm all in on that, trying to get people to program it for in the classical music realm on Masterworks concerts. And beyond that, I'm trying to get some of these projects just programmed. Honestly. This is one of the things that I do. I do these huge projects and then I don't do the follow up and just go on tour with them. So my hope is that I can at least tour the A.I.RE Project and Circuits and Skins for a while and then move on to, I'm talking to some composers right now about new percussion concertos too, and other albums in the works as well.
Leah Roseman (01:32:52):
I was also wondering, as a woman composer and a role model for, let's face it, percussion world's fairly male dominated. Have you been partnering with women composers as well, and
Lisa Pegher (01:33:06):
Yeah. Oh, definitely. And the ICEBERG New Music Collective, Stephanie Boyd, is there. My take on that is, yes. It's one of those things where there's a community, right? It's like we have to support each other and just know that we need to support each other, and that doesn't always have to be loud, and I think it's almost more powerful when it's not loud. It's just known.
Leah Roseman (01:33:40):
Have you seen change? I mean, you're still young, but you've had a pretty long career of doing this. Have you seen changes, positive changes?
Lisa Pegher (01:33:47):
I have seen more inclusiveness, but I've also seen, it's odd. I've seen more inclusiveness in some ways, but also a greater divide in some ways. And I think that's one of the dark sides of social media too, where people will take a side or they'll take a stance on it and say, if you're not on my side, I don't want to talk to you and I don't want to hear what you have to say. I don't watch tv. That might sound strange, but I am always put in these places where I have these huge screen TVs and I never turn them off. I limit my social media time to, you'll find whatever you want on the internet, essentially. If you're thinking something bad and you're like, you know what? I wonder if anybody else thinks this way. You'll find somebody else that thinks that way, and you'll be empowered to think that negative thing, and that in response will make you feel more negative.
(01:34:45):
I have a different take on it. My take is trying to get everybody to evolve to the point where we don't think about necessarily where that divide is and actually consider each person's unique perspective and try to get along from there. And I think that that's the part that I haven't seen grown enough where it's too easy now for people to just take a side and say, this is my side, and I don't care what you think. And that's really not going to help anybody. Until we get to the point where everybody can start to say, Hey, you have that perspective, and I respect your perspective because everybody has gone through different things in their life. They're in a different place in their life in this lifetime. We're evolving. Everybody is in a different path. Until we can step back and realize that about each other and still hold out the olive branch and say, I still care about you.
(01:35:51):
I don't necessarily agree with your perspective, but we can still have a cordial conversation and be humans to each other and be kind to each other until everybody starts to walk that path more on that side. Then on the, I'm just taking this stance and this is me side, we're still going to run into problems. So yes, I mean, in the realm of having more opportunities, I would say yes. People recognize it more and say, wow, we've gone all this time, and there was one female composer. We've gone all of this time, and we had one female soloist. It's not just percussion. I mean, you look in the music realm, and I can tell you that it's completely male dominated. I don't know how it got to be that way. Honestly, it makes no sense to me because there are so many astounding, amazing female artists, musicians, composers.
(01:36:50):
How did we get to a point in society where there's mostly just male conductors and mostly just male soloists? It's just weird. And so that part, I'm glad that we're pointing it out and saying, we need to question why this happened or it doesn't make any sense. And I think that that is something that's very positive. Those discussions that have come up most recently are very positive, and I think that that's great that we're having those discussions, but so much more work to do, and that work doesn't come from taking sides. It takes everybody to come together and say, Hey, each one of us has something cool and unique to offer. It doesn't matter whether we're non-binary, female, male, whatever. We identify as if we can all just identify as human, we will actually evolve in a more positive way in our society. I think.
Leah Roseman (01:37:43):
Thanks so much today for your perspectives and your music. It was great.
Lisa Pegher (01:37:47):
Thank you so much for having me. It was really great to talk to you.
Leah Roseman (01:37:51):
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Pleased to share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at leahroseman.com. I wanted to let you know that I have a new way you can support this independent podcasts through a beautiful collection of merch with a very cool, unique, and expressive design from artists Steffi Kelly. You'll find that link in the description of the episode. 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.
