A Quote by Missy Mazzoli
For me, writing music is a way of processing the world. It's not a concrete thing, as in, "This piece is about giraffes." It's much more of an emotional sort of thing. I want people to find something out about themselves through my music, something that was inaccessible before, something that they were suppressing, something that they couldn't really confront.
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I want my music to be something that people use in order to access parts of themselves. So in that sense, every piece I write is about all emotions at once, about the lines in between. It's never only about one thing or another. It's emotionally getting at those things that we can't really describe - things for which we don't have labels. So yes, it's about something, and it has a use. It's neither about nothing nor about something concrete - it's about what you bring to it as a listener.
The thing that makes me want to write a piece of music is having something to talk about, you know? Something I want to get across. Because I'm a composer, music is my first language, and that's what I reach for when I want to convey something.
Information is floating around really fast. I write something, or a piece of my music comes out and I see people writing about it on the Internet as if I'm having a conversation with them. We've never met, but somehow, my music is communicating something to them. Very often, it really makes them feel something.
Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.
Once I tried to find myself as a musician and a composer, I went back and saw that there was something special about Puerto Rican music. I knew that before, but had never sat down and thought about it. The more I learned about it, the more it found its way into the music I was writing.
I've realized along the way that a lot of things that I do as a performer are about waiting for somebody to write something for me or develop something for me, but music, music was the thing that I don't have to wait for anybody's permission to do.
I don't think it's something that people would ask a man. Some people make a huge deal out of the fact that I sing about drinking all the time, but I don't think of it as singing about drinking. It's singing about emotions, and sometimes that centers around drinking. To me, I'm writing about things that I'm going through that mean something to me, but some people just reduce it to: "She must drink all the time." But if a guy sings about that sort of thing, no one really looks twice.
Climate change is often the first thing I think about it in the morning, and the last thing I think about before I go to bed. It is not something that escapes that my mind, so inevitably, I had to kind of express that existential terror through art and music. My hope is to channel that confusion and energy into something good.
It's really important for me that the people who listen to my music get something that can hopefully help them get through whatever they're going through. Music is the only thing that's able to help sooth my soul in that way, and my goal is to always put things out there that that do the same thing for other people.
There was something about the music on that tape. It felt different. Like, it set her lungs and her stomach on edge. There was something exciting about it, and something nervous. It made Eleanor feel like everything, like the world, wasn't what she'd thought it was. And that was a good thing. That was the greatest thing.
I was drawing before I did music, but me, I'm a dilettante. I jump into everything until I find one thing that I enjoy more than others. Rap was something that was always there because my brother used to rap - piano and musical instruments is something I learnt on the way.
A lazy person will try to always find some way to do something; they'll always be looking for ways of doing something faster, more efficiently, and if you really want to control the world, that's a really sort of hubristic notion - excessive pride, the thing that Zeus zaps you for having.
At a young age, I really wanted to make music and make my own sort of thing. I'm sure if it wasn't music, it would have been writing, or it would have been maybe painting. I just always had the drive to try and make something with my hands and to just pull something out of myself and shape it and see it in front of me, if that makes any sense.
One, something emotional has to be at stake. There has to be something important for me that I'm writing about. And then two, I have to have a formal idea. Something has to be being worked out in poetry.
Flamenco is Arabic music and rhythms filtered through centuries of gypsies making music. The gypsies themselves came originally from India. And then there is the Caribbean influences... This whole idea that there is any such thing in music that "purity" is bunk, it just doesn't exist. I love that I am playing these rhythms to people. And the next time they hear something that's maybe a little more exotic, I have created a little bridge, and they are going, "Oh, this actually sounds really cool. It reminds me a little bit of that, but it's something different."
Music gave me something that was not only good for me - it gave me something to work on, something to be proud of and something that I really loved and have a love for - but also music was good for other people because you put joy into the world.
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