Ep35 Musicianship & Pastry Connection - Kristine Dizon

Automatically Transcribed With Podsqueeze

Luke 00:00:06  Welcome to another episode of the Impro Pod podcast. My guest today is Christin Dyson from Montreal in Canada. So you run a organization called the Modern Artist Project. Can you tell me a bit about that?

Kristine 00:00:21  We help artists in different disciplines be able to create their digital presence using social media digital platforms.

Luke 00:00:30  So are you a musician yourself?

Kristine 00:00:31  I'm a clarinetist and a conductor. I've recorded two albums recently. I found out that I was a winner of the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship in Canada, where I'm going to be hosted at Concordia University. So a lot of the work that I'm going to be doing there is on poetic musical compositions. So being able to understand the relationship between the spoken word to music and using different composers, different poets, a different sound artist, and being able to eventually create a book from that. a lot of the current research that I'm doing right now, relates to, understanding the relationship between gender and power and compositions by French and Quebec female composers for the clarinet. So that's going to be recorded in May and hopefully dropping in the fall.

Kristine 00:01:23  So I'm really excited about that.

Luke 00:01:39  So I'm going to play you a piece of music, completely improvised, and I want you to tell me what it makes you think of.

Speaker 3 00:01:47  Okay?

Luke 00:01:47  So don't overanalyze it too much. Anything that comes to mind thoughts, visions, ideas.

Kristine 00:02:43  It was making me think of being in one of those fancy houses in the dark part of the house, near the fireplace. The only light that was there was a fire in me just sitting right in front of it, just absorbing the heat and the darkness.

Luke 00:03:02  What was it about what I played that reminded you of that?

Kristine 00:03:06  I guess it was one of those things that when I listen to different chords, especially ones that have some dissonance, but also at the same time that have a direction when you think about the space of being somewhere. It made me feel warm in the sense of hearing the music, but also because of the different colors that you chose. It was very dark for me, so being able to have that light, that warmth, but also be around darkness.

Luke 00:03:47  Are you up for telling me a story of some kind?

Kristine 00:03:50  Okay, so one of my really good friends, I call her strudel. We have nicknames for each other. My name is muffin. Right. So one of the things that we had done was we met on a food blog. She is one of the people that is actually not only vegan, but she's also gluten free, so she can't eat anything with gluten, right? We were talking about pictures of food and we really connected right away. And what ended up happening is we finally met in person in Alberta, which is like a four hour flight from Montreal. So she literally lives on the other side of Canada. And it was so funny because we have this affinity for pastries. When I look at pictures of cookies or cakes or biscuits, I'm just I don't know what's wrong. It's like I just want one. And so we always like joke about like being a pastry and all those things. And she's actually really been supportive in certain things that I'm going through.

Kristine 00:04:57  She's really one of the kindest people I've ever met.

Luke 00:05:01  Did you go and eat some pastries together?

Kristine 00:05:02  And she can't eat pastries. She has celiac, right? If I couldn't eat gluten. I shrivel up like a mushroom. We actually joke around. Canada's huge right to handle the both of us, right? So that's why she stays in Alberta and I'm in in Quebec. If you had two of us together, it'd be like confetti, explosions, pastries and things like that. We got to do a project together, which is really great. She took photos. We also did some interviews and helped me record some course outlines for my students, which was really great.

Luke 00:05:41  What I do is I break the story down into sections and then improvise a soundtrack to the story. first I want to go for this idea of distance that you've met, but not in real life. There's a disconnect, so I'm going to try and get a sense of that. And then I, I'm going to go for the flight and then this sort of pastry thing.

Luke 00:06:06  I'm going to try and bring the pastry theme in. Okay. Let's just see what happens. That's. What I was going for. There is this kind of disconnect by just playing a chord down at the bottom of the piano, and then playing another chord that's quite a long way away from it. And then when you met in person, playing more cluster chords, so it was more of a condensed experience with some random pastry kind of vibe in there as well. Did that work for you?

Kristine 00:08:26  That was really cool, actually. I think when you started doing the cluster chords, I was like, I think that's when we met. It's awesome because you're taking the actual distance of the nose and actually like bringing them closer together.

Luke 00:08:43  And also I'm just doing it on the fly. So it's like the first thing I came up with. It might be the most obvious.

Kristine 00:08:49  I can't wait to show this to her when you finish producing it.

Luke 00:08:52  Did you get the sense of the plane? The flight? Yeah I.

Kristine 00:08:56  Did. And I liked how you went from the Florida to the more extreme parts of the piano, like actually flying over and then being able to, like, somehow meet in the middle, even though it's not really the middle, because Alberta is like, over yonder and I'm like over here. Right. But being able to meet at a place.

Luke 00:09:18  It's interesting how the music of the pastry is fluffy as they can kind of light, sweet thing. It's flighty in nature as well. They seem to work together in terms of their musical relationship. Yeah.

Kristine 00:09:33  It's always so funny because sometimes we use words like, oh, I feel so flaky today, or oh, I feel so crummy inserting these pastry adjectives to describe how we feel. Our shared passion for pastries, even though hers is more like a forbidden passion, right? Because if she eats them, then she gets sick and she has to go to the hospital. I could tell her, oh, this croissant tasted like this. And she'd be like, yeah.

Luke 00:10:08  So do you improvise a lot in terms of your music in clarinet?

Kristine 00:10:13  I do it, but I don't do it publicly. I think it's one of those things that if I do it, I want to be really prepared for it. It's so contrary because when you improvise, you're just, like, on the fly. But to be able to say, if I improvise it, I want to reproduce that, that I can to be at that stage to remember. I'm also a poet, so I write poetry. One of the things that I'm working on is being able to improvise, sound like clarinet playing to spoken word. So like me reading a poem in a recording and being able to have that be part of life performance, those are the things I'm working on.

Luke 00:10:55  What I normally do in this podcast is I have the story and then I play the music, but I would have never done is done it simultaneously, like you were talking about. So that might be quite interesting. Experiment with something that's been pre-written, like a poem.

Luke 00:11:10  Okay.

Kristine 00:11:11  Yeah, this is an unpublished thing, but let me just grab it right here. So death by silence. Death is scary. Death of friendships. Death of dead animals. Or worse. Physical death. Death by silence is the most confusing. Almost guaranteed way to kill a relationship. Silence and music. Something that lets melodies breathe. Harmonies settle. Silence is just as scary. The suspense that moves you. An unwanted anticipation of what is about to happen. The moment we hear our breath. As if our ears are muted. Relying on what we see to understand what is happening. Death by silence. A dangerous cocktail, but a wonderful gift for the broken hearted.

Luke 00:13:18  Nuts are cool. Nice poem.

Kristine 00:13:22  Thanks.

Luke 00:13:24  It's interesting because it's a poem about silence. And of course, I couldn't just be completely quiet because that would be not the idea, but to introduce the piano. That's that's working with your poem about silence.

Kristine 00:13:39  I think it's one of those things that a lot of the work that I do as a poet is also being able to share personal experiences.

Kristine 00:13:50  That's also something that I do in music. Sometimes I find with poetry, it's one aspect of how I can express things that I wouldn't be able to do in music, so it's something that I really feel passionate about.

Speaker 4 00:14:03  I see.

Luke 00:14:04  Like in a relationship, that metaphor you're using, not saying what you feel or what you mean when you go quiet, becomes a potentially dangerous thing, isn't it?

Kristine 00:14:15  It's one of those things that I find today when we think about the term ghosting today, it's like an accepted behavior. The idea to completely ghost people, or whether it's like a romantic relationship or whether it's like a friendship or a professional relationship. A lot of times people think it's just okay because it's easier. Whereas actually I find it like so damning and terrible. I think it's like a crass behavior that our society has developed over a course of time. That's part of the reason why, when we think about the idea of silence and the idea of these emotions of confusion, that we feel it's inevitable.

Kristine 00:14:55  So when we think about the idea of music as this thing is like that continuous thing, people, especially younger people, think, oh, music, sound. But the thing is, we have to have rest, right? We have to breathe. We have to let the melodies breathe or the harmonies settle, because if we don't let it settle, then it's just sound right. We also have to take time to listen and enjoy it. I love spoken word, but if we're able to create it in a way that makes it so people can connect with it, then that's fine. I really enjoyed what you did when we got to the fourth stanza, so silence is just as scary. Because I felt at that moment we were connecting in regards to what I was reading and my pacing, the pacing of how I say words or how I perform words to the music that you were improvising to it. So I felt like you were adding these elements of color that I think came out really nice, you know, and highlighting certain words, certain emotions that I was trying to convey.

Luke 00:16:15  Is it just how you talk about color when people describing music, they often talk about color and they and in terms of a tone, it's like a different way to to imagine the music. You can say that's cool or red or that's the fiery often those terms crossover. What did you get out of this podcast?

Kristine 00:16:48  It was really cool because I was able to share some personal things. I'm talking about my friendship with strudel and being able to actually share a little bit of my poetry, being able to think more about certain elements of music, because I think about a lot of these things all the time. So like the idea of how do we feel? How do we show emotion, or how do we emote through sound? And how can we also teach people that connection, right? Not just to make sound for the sake of doing it, but being able to do it with intention and thought?

Luke 00:17:27  So when you approach teaching this kind of thing, the connection of music, how do you do that?

Kristine 00:17:32  When I talk about the connection of music, especially with younger students, because when you teach younger students, you encourage these ideas of having a strong technical knowledge.

Kristine 00:17:44  For example, having an understanding of chord structure architecture, being able to dissect a piece of music, and also to create music, right. Being able to develop the fundamental musician skills, for example with rhythm, solfege, pitch and everything. And by having that technical knowledge makes it so. The things that are inside of us, for example, having a warm heart, makes it so that way we're able to emote more, to have the tools, to be able to express as much as we can and an extremely high level. I can't remember the person that actually said this, and this is not a direct quote. When you make music, it's about having a cold mind, right? Very calculating mind, but also having a warm heart because those two elements being connected together in being able to produce the best music. And that's how I approach teaching.

Luke 00:18:43  I find that, yeah, I work on technique and I learn tunes, but I often have to disconnect myself from it, especially if I'm improvising.

Luke 00:18:51  I really think about what I'm doing in terms of the physical thing or what the harmony is. Or sometimes I'm like, okay, this is a bit where he falls off the motorbike and there's going to be some kind of discordance or full in terms of the music, but a lot of the time it's blank and I'm just imagining the space or the imagining the character or what they're doing. All of that technical stuff is important, but it's good not to get bogged down in it. I've met a lot of people who are musicians, especially who say they can't improvise because they're so caught up in what should be right and what is wrong, and what is good musicianship or what is acceptable. So it's an interesting balance, isn't it?

Kristine 00:19:35  Yeah. You bring up a really good point. I just view those as like tools, right. For example, if you understand the idea of what cluster chords are. Dominant seventh, if you want something a little jazzy, why don't add the ninth, right? Or sus4.

Kristine 00:19:56  You have to have that technical knowledge of what those things are. I have some students who are interested in that, so I always tell them, you just gotta go with the flow and with what you feel and not even think twice about these elements, but being able to have those elements naturally come out in your music.

Luke 00:20:14  Thank you for being on this. It's been really insightful.

Kristine 00:20:16  Thank you so much, Luke.

Luke 00:20:18  Join us again for another episode of Impro Pod. Thanks for listening. The Improv Pod podcast is slowly becoming a global phenomena, featuring guests from Barcelona to Lockhart, Texas, with stories and listeners from all over the planet, from Vanuatu to Chongqing. That's why I've made this interactive map where you can listen to stories and explore their locations. Find out approximately where the guests were interviewed and the listeners are. It's a completely new way to experience the Info Pod podcast. You can explore the map at Impro Pod. Com and on the Instagram page. Would you like to be a guest on this podcast? If you're into telling stories that inspire improvised music and exploring our relationship to music, then please get in touch.

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