Part 1

Name: Phillip Golub
Nationality: American
Occupation: Composer, pianist
Recent release: Phillip Golub's filters is out via greyfade.
Recommendations: J. M. W. Turner: Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway; Ran Blake: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

If you enjoyed this interview with Phillip Golub and would like to find out more, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram, and twitter.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

I grew up in a musical family. My dad is a composer and plays the piano. My mom, who is an amateur, plays piano, guitar and a bit of cello, too. So, in the beginning, there was a lot of Bill Evans, Schubert, Bach, Erroll Garner around the house.

I noticed at a very young age that music can immediately change what you feel like in the present moment. The other thing I noticed was the hang. The discoveries I would have with people I made music with when we first heard Sun Ra or Ligeti or whomever it was were special moments.

Both of these things still keep me going having a life in music, today.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

For me, music often mirrors the experience of life: joy, frustration, effort, ease, it’s all there. But music can also create emotions that are unique to the experience of music. This happens mostly in my chest and in my gut. I do want my music to do those things to me, and by extension to other listeners.

So in that sense, my bodily experience of music, and my own music, is like a north star. It is the central thing that I’m paying attention to as I’m composing, editing, recording, performing, and so on.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

I had to go through a long period of being a young artist actively (and anxiously) “searching” for a personal voice in order to finally let go of the anxiety of not “having” one or not “finding” it. At some point, I gradually realized that what’s important is not to figure out how to “find” your voice, but rather how to create the conditions around yourself for collaborative music-making. I find it has always been the challenges and ideas that other musical minds have presented to me that have led me to my best ideas.

At some point, I started to look around and think about my favorite music both across history and in the present. I noticed that everything I loved was made in a collaborative environment. Even when there were individual contributions, such as solo recordings or compositions by a single person, they occurred in the context of a community of people all dealing with similar ideas and concerns. In this sense, the people you surround yourself with are as important or even more important than the ideas you have.

Realizing that I had to “look for my voice” as much around me as I was looking within myself was probably the biggest breakthrough. I’ve developed this understanding of things in part through many conversations with another recent 15 Questions interviewee and frequent collaborator, Vicente H. Atria.

[Read our Vicente Hansen Atria interview]

As a pianist and an improviser, I felt myself coming into a personal voice alongside a group of peers at the end of my schooling at New England Conservatory, with whom I recorded Axioms // 75ab under the name Tropos.



Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

The cultural eminence of identity and its subsequent capture by elites is felt all across the music industry. Instead of talking about identity as relates to my biography, I want to talk about a related but crucial phenomenon: the material conditions of music production.

The devastating precarity of music workers has never been truer than in New York City in 2022, where the cost of living falls way above the compensation most musicians receive for their work. Working musicians in New York are all insanely busy all of the time because we, especially those of us who don’t have intergenerational wealth, have to work so much to keep a roof over our heads here in New York City.

In this dire context, one identity I hold in relation to other musicians and that I value above all others is that of comrade. I mean this in multiple senses.

Musicians of all kinds share the experiences of hours of solidarity practice, of wonder and appreciation of our musical heroes and influences, and of some sense of honor and respect for “the music” itself. We also share experiences of exploitation in our industry, of the difficulties of gig work, and of a general lack of recognition by the state and society as a whole for the value of what we do. We all also witness how other structural oppressions including gender, race, and immigration sow divisions in our community and we have the opportunity to stand up for each other.

I care about the comradeship born of this social position, which has led me to organize with the Music Workers Alliance.

Music isn’t only about the sounds as sounds. For me, it is also about the person that I hear behind those sounds. As a bandleader or composer, I think about creating a meaningful experience for my fellow musician-comrades. I may ask a lot of them in what I write and the time we need to put into rehearsing, but my hope is that it gives them a great sense of fulfillment when we play, and that this will be conveyed and transmitted to listeners on the recording or in the performance, too.

Against the despair of what surrounds us, I do my best to ground my identity in what Cornel West calls a hope that is unhopeful but not hopeless (echoing DuBois I believe).

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

1) Go about things in a way that makes your collaborators care about it.
2) Study of the past is crucial, but misinterpretation is even more important.
3) Make sure there’s always something inexplicable about a piece of music. Things should make sense, but not too much sense, or else the chance for magic will disappear.
4) (and this is a quote from Wayne Shorter during a rehearsal on “… (Iphigenia)", his opera that I worked on) “There’s no how it’s done until it’s done”.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

All originality and innovation builds on tradition. All traditions develop, change, and innovate. This was always true, but it has become especially the case in a world where virtually all music ever is available at our fingertips.

We’ve all heard an extraordinary amount of music. You can’t “unhear” what you’ve heard! My favorite music conveys the sense of a person, with all the complexities that people have, behind the sound.

Music that expresses personality will necessarily include elements of tradition and can also be forward-looking, just as people have a background and context that they come from but live in the present and look towards the future.  

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

My tools for both composing and developing myself as a musician are pretty rudimentary.

I mostly use old fashioned pencil and staff paper to write. I like large paper so that I can keep an overview of what I’m writing at the same time as focusing on small details. I use the voice memos app on my phone to record myself trying things out at the piano. I use a simple piece of software called “Transcribe!” to slow music down and loop small sections as I study recordings or write down my own improvisations to edit and make them into compositions. I sometimes also use simple midi sequencers to try things out and I use the playback on notation software to check compositions for certain details in the editing process.

But, my main tools throughout my life have been the piano itself and pencil and paper, for composing, and just listening obsessively to recordings (and live shows, too), to compare my ideas to what has been done by others.



I am catching up to the rest of the world and starting to do a bit more home recording and use other digital tools. One example is a Christmas album I made during the first Covid winter, called Committee to Save Christmas.