Paolo Eriani

What does music mean to you personally?

Music for me is the world I live in within

Do you agree that music is all about fantasy?

No I don’t agree. Of course you need fantasy too to write a piece, but without proper training, personal self-organization and hard work, you can’t achieve any noteworthy goal

If you were not a professional musician, what would you have been?

Who knows, I’m too busy with my current life to think about anything else

The classical music audience is getting old, are you worried about the future?

Yes

What do you envision the role of music to be in the 21st century? Do you see that there is a transformation of this role?

Yes, music is the mirror of the society. And in a society where appearing is more important than being, in a very superficial society, music is just about that: appearance and superficiality. And in a world where you have to run, run, run all day long, where you don’t have the time to sit and think, there is no longer place for complex music like the classical one, but very simple and easy to listen music that works as a soundtrack of your life, while you are endlessly running around

Do you think that the musician today needs to be more creative? What is the role of creativity in the musical process for you?

Indeed, if you write something new, it has to be new for sure, not just a copy and paste. When I was studying Schubert, Schumann and others’ lieder I was astonished by the fact that every and each lied was a unique piece with very different melodies, harmonies and piano accompaniments. The difference between Schubert and Schumann lieder can’t be achieved without a strong originality and creativity. With my pieces a want to do the same, I start using a consolidated musical form and use my creativity to give the piece originality

Do you think we as musicians can do something to attract the younger generation to music concerts? How would you do this?

I think it will be a really hard job. Not everyone can or want to understand classical music, or “waste” their time sitting in a concert hall listening to music for 1 or 2 hours. We don’t have to do anything special or different to “attract” them, we have to be ourselves and do our best as classical musicians. A classical piece need someone who takes his/her time to stop and listen to it, and not everyone is willing to do that. For sure there are still plenty of potential listeners who doesn’t know we are here as well, so a good advertising and some more websites like movingclassics.tv would help

Tell us about your creative process. What is your favorite piece (written by you) and how did you start working on it?

To say which one of my piece I prefer is a hard job. Maybe it is Sonata per oboe e pianoforte, since it’s the first “serious” piece I wrote. I started it thinking what a new way to write a piece using the Sonata form could have been. So I thought that instead of changing the harmony between the first and second theme, I could have used a totally different kind of harmonization and then I continued following the classical development of a Sonata form

Can you give some advice for young people who want to discover classical music for themselves?

Well, to fully grasp a classical piece, that usually was written for a well educated audience, they should learn at least the basics of music. Otherwise how can you tell if or why something is a classical piece and another one is not? Why the lieder from Schubert are classical pieces and the songs from Michael Jackson are not? To listen to the western music since its beginnings in the XII century ‘till now, to see how it changed during the centuries.

Do you think about the audience when composing?

No

What projects are coming up? Do you experiment in your projects?

I always experiment in my music, that’s why I compose, I always try to make a new piece a real new piece