Maria Schneider: Composing in the Age of Curated Rage
Composer, bandleader, birder, and unapologetic alarm-sounder, Maria Schneider brings 'American Crow' to The Tonearm for a conversation about listening as both artistic practice and civic obligation.
Today, The Tonearm’s needle lands on composer and avid birdwatcher Maria Schneider.
Few composers working today have Maria Schneider’s range. She holds seven Grammy Awards, was named an NEA Jazz Master, and this year took home the Rolf Schock Prize in Musical Arts, one of the most prestigious honors in the field.
Maria Schneider joins the podcast to talk about American Crow, her recent EP that uses jazz to make a case for something we’ve mostly lost: the ability to actually listen to each other. The music moves from distressed Americana into something quiet and more human—a sound Schneider connects to her Midwestern childhood, when disagreement didn’t have to mean war.
Maria’s here to talk about the record, what jazz improvisation has to teach a fractured society, and more.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Maria Schneider’s American Crow)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Maria Schneider at mariaschneider.com and follow her on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube
• Purchase Maria Schneider’s American Crow EP from ArtistShare
• Watch American Crow: A Narrative in Notes and Frames — the full longform music video, free on YouTube
Selected Discography:
• Data Lords (ArtistShare, 2020) — Pulitzer Prize Finalist; two Grammy Awards; the double album that precedes and informs American Crow
• Sky Blue (ArtistShare, 2007) — includes “Sky Blue,” discussed at length in this episode
• Evanescence (Enja, 1994) — Schneider’s debut; features “Wyrgly” and “Dance You Monster to My Soft Song,” both favored by David Bowie
Ensemble Members and Collaborators:
• Donny McCaslin — tenor saxophonist; featured throughout the conversation; also Bowie’s Blackstar bandleader
• Donny McCaslin on The Tonearm
• Ben Monder — guitarist; featured soloist on Data Lords
• Mike Rodriguez — trumpeter; featured soloist on American Crow
• Jeff Miles — guitarist; featured on “A World Lost” on the American Crow EP
• Gary Versace — pianist; longtime Schneider Orchestra member; on faculty at Eastman School of Music
• Bob Brookmeyer (1929–2011) — valve trombonist and arranger; Schneider’s mentor; his critique of “Green Piece” is discussed in this episode
• Frank Kimbrough (1956–2021) — pianist; longtime Schneider Orchestra member; referenced in the discussion of “Thompson Fields”
Books Referenced:
• The Art Spirit by Robert Henri — the key artistic text Schneider returns to when discussing how music transmits lived experience to an audience
• Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter by Michelle Mercer — Mercer reviewed a live performance of “American Crow” in Call and Response, quoted in this episode and in the press release
Birding:
• Merlin Bird ID app — the free sound- and photo-identification app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, enthusiastically endorsed by both Schneider and Lawrence
• Cornell Lab of Ornithology — the institution behind Merlin and one of the world’s leading centers for ornithological research and citizen science
The David Bowie Connection:
• Blackstar (Columbia, 2016) — Bowie’s final studio album, featuring McCaslin’s band and Schneider’s arrangement of “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime),” which won a Grammy
• Donny McCaslin on the Blackstar collaboration — background on McCaslin’s role in Bowie’s final project
Awards and Advocacy:
• 2026 Rolf Schock Prize in Musical Arts — awarded to Schneider in January 2026 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; the prize also recognizes achievements in mathematics, logic and philosophy, and visual arts
• ArtistShare — the world’s first direct-to-fan funding platform, founded in 2003; Schneider’s advocacy for artist-controlled distribution is a recurring theme in this conversation
• Schneider’s music advocacy writing — her blog includes articles on streaming economics, digital rights, and musicians’ intellectual property
Visual Art:
• Aaron Horkey — illustrator from Windom, MN (Schneider’s hometown); created the artwork for both Data Lords and American Crow
Venues and Institutions:
• Town Hall Seattle — where Lawrence attended the Maria Schneider Orchestra performance discussed in this episode
• Detroit Jazz Festival — where Schneider describes the audience encounter with “Sky Blue” discussed in this episode
• Emory University — commissioned “American Crow” (premiered there in 2022)
• Jazz Standard (New York City, closed March 2020) — the venue where Schneider’s orchestra held an annual Thanksgiving week residency for fifteen years; Schneider expresses regret at its closure
• Visiones (New York City, closed 1998) — the Greenwich Village club where the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra held a weekly residency from 1993 until the venue closed
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence: You've been on my bucket list for a couple of years.
Maria: Oh, good.
Lawrence: This project came up and I pounced.
Maria: Good. Thank you.
Lawrence: I took my son to see you the last time you were in Seattle at Town Hall. I've gotten friendly with Donny McCaslin over the years, so we had a chance to talk to him and see the show—it was phenomenal.
Maria: The guys are so amazing. I feel so lucky. I was fortunate to be part of a project with the New York Philharmonic, which is arguably one of the best ensembles in the world—whoever you talk to. But there is something special about when it's your own group—when you can hone things, call rehearsals, pick at details, and adjust them. I just realized that most composers don't have that. Their music is played by fantastic groups, but they don't have the chance to really develop their work with musicians with whom they have this intimate relationship. We grow old together. Most groups don't have that, and many musicians don't even know to value it—sticking with one group for a long time.
Lawrence: Especially in creative music. Getting everybody to come back together and maintain that consistency of an ensemble is pretty rare and fortunate.
Maria: I feel so lucky, and these guys are so amazing. My music, of course, has improvisation, so I work very hard to create pieces that have this connective—you could almost say mathematical—development. It's motivic, built on motifs, so that you try to build in a sense of inevitability. But then you have this challenge of writing for improvisers. What I love is when people meet the design of my music—where I try to build in the intent of where it needs to arrive: a sense of finality, conclusion, suspense, whatever they are supposed to go to. I have these amazing musicians who are all like-minded, so they do those things in the most sensitive and intelligent way.
They are not improvising in a vacuum, and they are not only improvising with what I've given them—they are improvising in the presence of each other. The bass player, the drummer, the guitarist—maybe accordion, maybe piano, depending on who is accompanying them, maybe someone alone. What I'm so addicted to is listening to these musicians, and their level of listening is so astounding. Donny will go somewhere and Gary Versace will hear it and just, harmonically, go to outer space with him. That kind of support allows them to do miraculous things.
I'm writing for them, but then they surprise me. When I bring my music to other groups, new people come in and play it—sometimes doing things so inventive that I bring them back to my band and say, "Hey, we did this and it was awesome." My pieces stay alive that way. They can grow and develop with the people, become something else. I've even gone back and rewritten things based on how a piece evolved through performance.
Lawrence: That's a real gift. I want to make sure we spend a large portion of our time together talking about American Crow. There's a lot in this record.
Maria: There's a lot, and it's short. There's a lot, and there's not a lot. (laughter)
Lawrence: It's really incredible. Tell me about what you're saying here about the act of listening. Words come to mind: commitment, requirement, obligation, intention. They can coexist with entertainment, but they speak to something a little deeper. Can you talk about that—the act of listening versus receiving?
Maria: I started the band in the nineties. We played every night at Visiones. We had these great players—people like Frank Kimbrough—and the first record had Jay Anderson on bass, then Tony Scherr, who always tried new things, and other great musicians, many of whom are still in the band. At that point, Donny was subbing in.
Over the years I started to really value the musicians who came into each performance vulnerable, not wanting to repeat themselves—coming in empty and waiting, wanting to hear what somebody else gave them so they could go somewhere new. Not just being like, "I've been working on these diminished patterns, and come hell or high water I'm going to put them in my solo tonight." There are players who are fun to listen to—more showmen who have certain things that work and they play them. But my guys are different. They come in wanting to discover something new and not repeat themselves.
In the early years we played a lot of the same music night after night, and I did Data Lords later, which I would say is the precursor to this. But I want to backtrack for a minute. I don't generally sit down and say, "I want to write about this subject." Each of our lives is permeated with things we obsess about, worry about, stay awake over, love, adore, and things that repel us. When you sit down to write, if you are present to yourself and all your feelings and just start playing with sounds, what happens to me is that those sounds suddenly illuminate what's been on my mind. It's almost like a Ouija board—the music draws out what I've been thinking about without my actually thinking about it. Data Lords was like that. I was writing this music that was very intense—one piece was "screw Google," the next was about birds or poetry, and then the next was about AI destroying us. I thought, this is so disparate. But then all of a sudden it showed me the struggle I was having trying to stay connected to myself amidst all of these things. That's just how I work.
So with American Crow, I've been watching my band—especially in the last few years, since Data Lords. When I see my guys doing that deep listening I was talking about, seeing them on stage—and this probably happened several times in Seattle, where somebody did something and you could see the guys in the band smiling: wow, this is something that didn't happen before—I would think: what if our elected leaders could witness the beauty and the miraculous things that can be found when people don't come in with a preformed agenda, but come into a situation really wanting to listen and to find something unexpected?
That's democracy at its best. So when people say jazz is democracy, I wasn't sure what everybody else meant, but all of a sudden it was hitting me. This is showing us how democracy should work: that we, as a country with very diverse opinions, can listen to each other and not want to win our idea, but to say, maybe if I understood more about you, there could be some balance here, a win-win for both of us.
So I was thinking about that a lot. And then I grew up with crows—I was thinking about crows, hearing them just this morning. Knowing how they live in these wonderful communities and how much they care for each other—if one dies, they practically have funerals. They all get together and mourn. They're protective of each other. They're a lot like we are, but they're also really noisy and argumentative.
Then I thought about the words "American crow." I wrote one opening phrase—the opening phrase of "American Crow"—because it felt like Americana, but it felt dark. I said to myself: what if I make a piece about listening, and I call it "American Crow"—like crowing about things, so it's a double meaning? I tried to write something that has this intensity but then goes back in time to remind us what it was like when we listened.
From that first idea, I had to extract the DNA of it. (sings) That phrase is throughout the piece. I started developing a harmonic section that felt very much like where I'm from—the Minnesota prairie—and I immediately thought of Mike Rodriguez because he has this warmth in his playing: warm, lyrical, beautiful, but he can also be really intense. That's where the idea for this piece came from. Then it was really challenging to get it to happen. I wanted it to sound like there were crows, so we ended up using solo tone mutes. (laughter) When I work on these pieces, I want them to be intense, but I want them to have something fun in them, too. Data Lords is a little bit like that—it's not just brooding darkness. It's dark, but slightly tongue-in-cheek.
Lawrence: With that record in particular, even the title—it's intense, but it's also kind of funny in a dark way. You mentioned your Midwest upbringing in Minnesota. I was curious—how much do you trust your memory of what you're talking about, this time when we used to listen to each other? How real was that, versus a mythologizing or a longing?
Maria: That's a really good question, because certainly people could come to consensus. We didn't have twenty-four-hour news where we were in these—only ever hearing our own story echoed back at us and never hearing the best of the other side. Only hearing the worst of the other side: "they're crazy, they're nuts, they're this, they're that."
It was a different world. We didn't have curated news that was curated to each of us individually. I was talking to somebody about Germany during World War II—you know about Goebbels? The People's Radio: they gave radios to people so they could do propaganda in every home. Think about how much deeper the propaganda is now when we have our radio, but it's listening to us, feeding us. It's not a literal radio, but it's our newsfeed. And the algorithms know that the angrier you get, the more you're going to click. So it keeps feeding you what incenses you, what makes you angry. If you look at the cover of American Crow—that's what I call "curated rage." They're curating us to rage at each other. The data lords, to me, are the destroyers of democracy. This isn't about people; this is what we get as a result. That's why I say it's a result of Data Lords.
When I was a kid, everybody listened to Walter Cronkite. My dad and my mom were both from Milwaukee, and then he moved to Windom to run the flax plant. They made him get a pilot's license because he had to travel to South Dakota and North Dakota dealing with the flax business. My dad was a Democrat, and he flew Hubert Humphrey around for his early campaigns in state government. I have movies my dad took of Hubert Humphrey in my hometown, in front of the movie theater. Then Humphrey ran against Richard Nixon. My dad married my mom, who was a Republican. She had been an economics major and was really into Adam Smith and trickle-down economics. She moved to Windom and became the Republican chairwoman.
How often would that happen these days?
Lawrence: I remember more of that from being a kid.
Maria: There were more things like that. I wouldn't exist if my parents had grown up now, because my dad would have hated my mom, and my mom would have hated my dad. Over the years, my mom became much more liberal and my dad became much more conservative. So they changed, and it was fluid. Whereas now most couples are in lockstep—they're wearing the helmet, as I have on the crows, with the cord attached digitally or through Bluetooth. They're being fed the same line. I think we were better listeners. I don't remember people saying, "I can't possibly have Thanksgiving dinner with them because of who they voted for." But it's so common now.
Lawrence: It wasn't immediately pre-qualifying. When your work is dealing with political concepts, social concepts—where you're overtly putting that as part of the presentation, talking about it in interviews, writing about it in press material—it's not just a hidden subtext; it's part of the work. When you're doing this in the context of music without words, there's a level of abstraction between your intention and what the audience hears—there's no chorus they can sing along to or anything like that. Have you had moments where you feel the intention of the piece was misheard, or the audience didn't get it? Can you tell when the message is landing, or does that all go away once you get to performance?
Maria: This is such an interesting subject. How does one make that happen as a composer transmitting experience?
For me, it's hard to say how that happens, but the closest explanation I've found came through a book by an artist named Robert Henri. He wrote a book called The Art Spirit, and he talks about how the most important thing about making a painting—because he taught, and this book is all his lessons as dictated by his students—is that a painting should feel alive. You're not making a painting of a person sitting there. What you're doing as an artist is making something that is a trace of your experience. If you're connected deeply to being inside that moment—with yourself, with how you feel—and you create something expressive of that, it's a miraculous thing. It's like teleporting the experience to the audience.
The best example, and the most shocking for me, is when I wrote the album's title piece, "Sky Blue." My best friend was dying of cancer. I had to do this commission. She was in her final week. I spent every day with her, and she kept asking, "How's the commission going?" I went home one night, sat down—something I never just do—and found myself in the dark, crying, in this world of love and loss and profound mystery. And "Sky Blue" came out of that. We performed it, and we recorded it.
I cannot tell you how many people have come up to me—not knowing the story—and said, "My brother died of cancer, and that piece got me through. I don't know why; I just kept listening to it."
I played it at the Detroit Jazz Festival with the band. Steve Wilson performed it on the record. I was signing CDs—there was a line of people—and the last person was a man who knelt down and said, "Seventeen months ago I was diagnosed with prostate cancer and told I had about seventeen months to live. That last encore piece"—he didn't even know what it was called—"is the first time I've felt at peace in seventeen months."
How does that happen? You can't make that happen. You allow it to happen. You work on your craft, but then you have to be in that moment. This is the thing so many people struggle with. When we are constantly connected to this device, constantly on and pinging, it's harder and harder to get to that place—it's almost like a meditative state.
That's the place I go. With American Crow, I was actually scared to play this piece when I first wrote it. I went to colleges and thought, who wants to listen? Everyone was so raw—2022, especially on college campuses. I premiered it at Emory, then went to Michigan, which is a very liberal school with a lot of young people, and I thought, are they going to react to this? Kids came up to me, and some were crying. It had such an impact.
When we finish playing that piece, there's that whole section—I call it a Gordian knot of curated rage at the end. (sings) And when that melody comes in, when that thing stops, suddenly I hear people in the audience go, "Oh"—they get it. I don't know how they get it. I can't say I made it happen. I can only say I'm grateful when it happens.
Some of my pieces—there's a piece about sailing. When I play it, I feel like I'm sailing, and I hope other people feel that motion even if they've never sailed. "Hang Gliding"—I hope people feel the experience of hang gliding, and never actually do it, because somebody was just killed doing that in Rio. (laughter)
Lawrence: You're providing a public service there.
Maria: I was so horrified. Students I worked with in California had played that piece and then went to Rio, and a lot of them went hang gliding—oh God, no. That one inspired people to jump off a cliff. Maybe people are too nice to come up and say they didn't get it.
Lawrence: You mentioned Mike Rodriguez earlier, and I had in my notes to bring up Mike as well as Jeff Miles.
Maria: Oh, yeah.
Lawrence: You set up what I wanted to ask you about—this narrative element in their soloing, not just the solo itself but the context within the piece, how it furthers the overall narrative. When you're working up a piece with the band, do you ever write any of the solo? Is this all what they bring to it? Do you collaborate on the solos, do you talk about them? I'm sorry to ask you to look under the hood, but I'm so fascinated by that.
Maria: I talk about it with them. That can be difficult because you want them to know what the piece is about without putting too much in their heads. In the case of "American Crow," it was really difficult—that big intense section, because there's so much going on. I have another piece, "Thompson Fields," where I used to say to Frank Kimbrough, "Don't listen—I want it to feel bitonal." And he would say, "I spent my whole life trying to learn to listen. I can't not listen." That's in this piece, too. I don't want Mike to listen, but I want him to sound like he's not listening. (laughter) It's a really tough thing to play, and slowly over time they kind of find it. I can't, after every performance, say, "Well, you didn't really do that right—maybe try this." Sometimes I do that. But you have to be so careful because everybody is trying so hard. They're trying to find it themselves. There's a concert, they play it, and sometimes it doesn't quite feel like it. Or sometimes they think it feels like it and I don't. But I think we're usually aligned when it works. It's like: okay, you found it.
With Mike, I tell him when he first comes in—the thing I created is that slow line that comes down (sings), and then the band comes in with some chords. I said to him: play lyrical. I don't want any outside notes. Do not talk over any phrase—you respond. This is all about listening: letting somebody speak and then responding. And then when things start getting crazy, that's when you start jabbing and talking over, and they talk over you. That's as much as I gave him.
With Donny—poor Donny always gets the bird pieces. (laughter) A lot of times he'll hear me talking to the audience about what the piece is about, which is much better than me telling him directly, "Donny, imagine you're a bird doing this behavior." That's a way to kill it. But if I tell the audience—"There's this bird, and it does this thing"—and Donny's there, the whole audience is expecting it, and he delivers it in some unique way every time. That's what makes it fun.
Here's the other thing: there are different levels of freedom I give them. My early music had open sections. There was a piece called "Green Piece" that has this first solo—it's an "anything." Free. The bass is walking, there's comping, and the tenor goes all over the place. Then the band comes in, and it's hard to know where to come in because I have no idea where they're going to go. Brookmeyer made a comment to me. He said, "You lost creative control of that." He said, "It's not always successful. Do you think that's successful?" It's not a commentary on the soloist—it's a commentary on what I wrote. It didn't give enough guidance about where to go.
So after that, I started writing pieces like "Hang Gliding" that have a harmonic pathway that Donny has to follow—or it was Rick Margitza at the time when I wrote that. And a lot of pieces had this very tight structure.
Then, fast forward a few years: we were playing at Jazz Standard in New York.
Lawrence: No. I loved that room. I lived in New York for a long time and I loved that room, but I didn't see the band there. I'm sorry.
Maria: I was so bummed when that closed.
Lawrence: I know.
Maria: We used to play there every Thanksgiving week, and for years they had three sets on the weekend—it's exhausting. But that third set, we'd pull out some of the older pieces and really open them up. The band had now played together for a long time, and those open sections suddenly became so alive because the whole rhythm section—everybody—understood the sense of inevitability the music had to have. So they would build that freedom knowing that. After that, I started writing more open sections again, because now I knew the band had developed a sensibility about how to approach them.
So on Data Lords, I wrote a piece called "CQ, CQ, Is Anybody There?"—it's all in Morse code rhythms. There's a solo Donny plays. I gave him nothing. It's just Ben Monder and Donny, and they are unbelievable. The sense of inevitability—it wasn't there in the beginning. When we first played it, there were some misfires because it's so free. But the one we got on the record, and what they manage to do with it now—it really works. I always wait for Donny to look at me. He gives me an eye like he's ready to go.
Lawrence: Did you perform that live when you were touring that record? I feel like I remember that from the show in Seattle.
Maria: We might have.
Lawrence: Ben in particular at that Seattle show—I found him almost impossible to stop watching. He's very compelling.
Maria: Ben is unbelievable. He is a genius. There's no question about it. He would laugh at that, but he's unbelievable.
Lawrence: We won't tell him. (laughter) Can you tell me about the relationship between birding and composing?
Maria: Birding is good for me because it brings me back to something I love purely for loving it. Just looking at birds—it makes you think about migration, it's like looking at the stars, full of wonderment. They activate my heart. I'm not one of those birders who counts birds or races to see as many as possible. I just love it, pure and simple. And that is so good for my composing—to get back into the world of just loving something, because with music you can so easily get into a place of judgment: judging every little thing you did, thinking that's not good, this isn't good, I need to write better, that sucks, I repeated myself. If I go birding, I access that part of myself that's just in love and not judging.
Lawrence: It's interesting—I don't know much about the pursuit, but even hearing you use the phrase "going birding" implies you just traipse out into an area and listen.
Maria: Birding is just—it's funny.
Lawrence: It's like fishing in my mind. I go fishing and I don't really care if I catch anything. I just want to go fishing. (laughter)
Maria: You go out with binoculars, looking for birds, listening. There's a great app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Lawrence: Are you going to say Merlin?
Maria: Yes. Merlin.
Lawrence: I just downloaded that two or three weeks ago. I wake up before dawn—I just wake up. I always hear the first bird. I didn't know what it was and I needed to find out. I grew up on the East Coast, and the first bird in the morning was always a robin. This was not a robin, and it turned out to be a Bewick's wren.
Maria: Oh, nice.
Lawrence: I love that app. I like to take it out when I'm sitting outside because I hear all these sounds around me and I wonder what Merlin's going to tell me. I love it.
Maria: Merlin is fantastic. Everyone should have Merlin. And then the next step is to get yourself a pair of binoculars. There's a good one by Kowa—not cheap, but not super expensive either, and they're really nice. Get yourself a decent pair of binoculars and start looking for those birds, observing their behavior, the colors during migration. Migration is coming now—we're headed into it—and you should get yourself a pair of binoculars, because things are going to heat up and you're going to see spectacular birds heading north or arriving to nest where you are.
Lawrence: I live in a very interesting spot for birds. My home office where I record is on the second floor, and I look out the back window at a little bit of a green belt. I can tell the cadence of the year based on what birds stop by the bird feeder or my little garden area. Sometimes they're more aggressive and territorial. Other times it's like there's a little commune out there and they're all just chilling together.
Lawrence: You're taking me down the rabbit hole.
Maria: You're birding. That's what you're doing. You're birding.
Lawrence: I've got another nerdy hobby. (laughter)
Maria: You don't even have to specifically say you're going out birding. When I go out in Central Park, I'm birding because I'm going out explicitly to look for birds. It's just the best.
Lawrence: I wanted to ask you about the lasting impact of the work you did with Bowie and what you've brought forward from that. I'm also curious more generally about the impact of the artists you collaborate with—there are as many different responses as there are artists. Some people try to be protective, guard themselves from too much influence—they might stop listening to their own instrument, or whatever it is. Others are just open, and they can take things in without it affecting their own music in any overt way. I'm curious about that interplay, that integration for you—your collisions with other artists and what you bring back.
Maria: With David, it was interesting. First of all, it was shocking when he came to me out of the blue. How did I get on David Bowie's radar? When he said he wanted to collaborate on a song and sing it with my band, I was just like, really? Why? Really? (laughter)
When we sat down to start working and he talked to me about my music, he came to hear the band. He really loved Donny. He loved everybody. It was fun watching him listen to the band. He was just smiling wide, loving it. He said he liked my older dark pieces. From my first album, "Wyrgly" and "Dance You Monster" were his two favorites, and he wanted to write something dark together.
I had been writing some dark pieces, but mostly pastoral, beautiful things for quite some years. My early work was all minor and brooding, and then came my period of nature and beauty. It was really fun to get into writing something dark with him. He also had this quality—I said before that I enjoy writing dark things but with a little bit of a smile in them? That would be the biggest influence David has had in my life, because when I said to him, "What's this piece going to be about?" he said, "I don't know—maybe vampires." And he was smiling, so excited.
When he finally wrote the final lyrics for "Sue"—he changed the lyrics right before coming into the studio—he gave me the new lyrics, and I'm reading them trying to understand, because it looked like the man in the lyrics kills the woman. He looked at me, nodded, and smiled. "He kills her." This is at the peak of the Me Too era. (laughter)
Lawrence: He gets to do that. (laughter)
Maria: It was perfect timing for me, because that was right when I started writing articles about big data and really beginning to obsess about this stuff. It allowed that to enter my musical world. It's like he reignited my older, darker side, but with this new attitude—it can be fun. It doesn't have to be brooding. That was the big impact for me.
I'm not scared of things influencing me. I also don't listen to music to get ideas, because I know musicians who do that—listen to music to spark new ideas. I don't really do that. I don't listen to music as much as I used to, which sometimes I wonder about. I think about needing to do that more. But sometimes what I'd rather put on is recordings of birdsong and dawn choruses—just the sound of nature.
Lawrence: I am curious about your receipt of the Rolf Schock Prize. I wasn't familiar with the award until I saw that it was granted to you. It recognizes both your artistry and your advocacy work—your social work around musicians' rights—and it seems to me there aren't many cases where both of those things get recognized together. I'm curious about your thoughts on that. It seems like a prize almost designed for you. (laughter)
Maria: I'm not sure about that. I did a lot of work in Sweden early on—I have a pretty long relationship with Sweden. They award it to a mathematician, to a person in logic and philosophy, and to a visual arts person, and I have to write a speech bringing those things together.
Lawrence: It is funny—when I teach, I'm really excited about this award and love that it goes to those different things, because a lot of times when I teach, I talk about mathematicians and math. You mentioned math at the beginning of our conversation.
Maria: Yes. And I tell a story about a mathematician named Gauss as a child. His way of thinking about a math problem—for me, that is a way to find a similar path to elegant solutions in music. It's like when I was talking about "American Crow"—the first idea I came up with, and extracting the DNA from that idea, making the whole piece come alive through the prism of that idea. That's like finding the most elegant equation that creates a world of possibilities from the simplest distillation.
The same thing happens in philosophy and logic—there's some idea that resonates as true and has a world of implications flowing through the prism of that idea. Certainly architecture does the same thing in visual form. I use The Art Spirit all the time. So I think it's really fun to receive this award because I feel genuinely connected to those things in my way of thinking about music—much more than arriving at music through listening to music.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Maria: But when I saw that they cited the advocacy, I thought: well, anybody can do that. Writing really good music is really hard.
Lawrence: Maybe anybody can, but not everybody does.
Maria: Not many people do, and I did fight the good fight—but I wasn't that successful. I tried to sound the alarm with a lot of people when the streaming music thing happened. You get access to all the music in the world for $9.99 a month or for free—there is no way that will ever financially work out to paying people royalties. Ninety percent of the music gets one percent of the plays. How can opera, jazz, all these things possibly survive that? And I screamed bloody murder about it.
Lawrence: I know.
Maria: A friend of mine in Norway said, "Well, we're lucky here. Our government gives us money for projects." I said, "Oh, great. How do you feel about your tax dollars subsidizing Spotify and YouTube? Because that's what it's doing." They're paying for the artists' work because there's no viable way to make money from it for most people. I do, because of ArtistShare—I do very well through ArtistShare, paying for very expensive projects. And I tried to show people how to do that, too. But most musicians just want to make music and not think about that stuff. I understand that. But I thought there was a problem that needed to be addressed, and not enough people got on board. It's kind of sad.
Lawrence: Something I struggle with around this topic—and more broadly with everything we've asked artists to be these days. It started for me where it was like every artist needed to be a content creator and a social media marketer, and they had to understand so many things. It seems so unfair to ask even more of them. My favorite artist not making art is a lost minute.
Maria: I feel that about my own life to a large extent, although I wouldn't be able to do what I do if I didn't do the other things I do. Things like Spotify and YouTube—my case against YouTube was basically about that: you're not allowing us to protect our music from being given away for free.
We're like plate spinners, with one plate spinning here and here and here—and the last plate we're trying to spin on our nose is actually making music. (laughter)
Lawrence: I love talking to artists who also teach, and so many do in the creative music world for a variety of reasons. I'm curious—is there something you've found that you really can't teach? Something that has to be learned the hard way, or by making the mistake, or only on the bandstand?
Maria: I try to convey it. But I think it would be convincing people that less is more.
I'm talking to so many students these days writing pieces that have so many different things together that as a listener you're just dizzy. There is no logic. There is no elegance. There is no mathematical, elegant formula underneath that makes it come alive. It's just a lot of stuff. They listen to it again and again on their computer, which mimics what comes out of their imagination—it's being fed back to them, and they've heard it a thousand times. For them it has a sense of inevitability because they know where it's going. But I try to describe: you're writing something for somebody listening for the first time. It's like a movie. You're drawing them in. You have to take them through time, give them a sense of inevitability, and enough surprise that it doesn't feel handed to them, but like the listener is discovering it—so they're inside of it.
To get somebody to go inside themselves, in the silence—like I was talking about with Robert Henri—going inside and imagining and feeling: it's really hard. I think part of it is that they listen to so much music. They listen to fifty thousand different things on Spotify, peripherally.
But when we were young—"When I was young!" (old person voice)—we had a finite number of albums we listened to again and again.
Lawrence: And just the physical act of having to go get it and move it.
Maria: And you would sit there undistracted. You didn't have a phone in your dorm room. All you had was your record player and your books. The phone was at the end of the hallway—a pay phone or whatever. So all you did was listen to that album again and again, and you got inside of one piece. You felt the development of an idea, as opposed to listening to fifty thousand pieces with many different ideas. Now you come back to your writing and you're writing a thousand different things in one piece.
I think the problems come from all those things. And I tell students: your biggest challenge is this fricking phone. One day I had them pull out their phones and tell me their usage. I said, "How many hours did you spend on it?" And it was three hours, four, two. I said: don't expect to get a lot done in life if you're spending that much time on your phone. (laughter) I'm pretty harsh.
Lawrence: Maria, thank you.
Maria: It's really fun to talk to you. Thank you.