punch druthers

"I think any form of participation in music is really a conversation. I’m a better musician for actually reaching out and trying to find out what someone else is thinking and why they’re doing what they’re doing and what the world means to them."

Yo-Yo Ma

to me, the purest form of composition is: what am I not hearing that I’d really love to hear?

"Two is when I wanted to start playing [the mandolin]. I didn’t get to start playing. And since then it’s basically been with me. I haven’t gone more than a day without playing. I love it. It’s not the mandolin, in particular, that I love. I have a fondness for it. Sometimes people over-emphasize the importance of the actual instrument, like an architect getting too excited by hammer wielding skills. The mandolin is a hammer. It’s a beloved hammer, though. I do take delight in slinging it. The thing that really lights me on fire is being to interact with music, and try to improve my relationship with it gradually."

Thile

And for me, the art that really gets me going is what surprises me. I don’t want my expectations met; I want them exceeded.

“The Punch Brothers are the leading the musicians in the world today. I've said many times, and will continue to say so: Chris Thile is the Louis Armstrong of his time. He's coming at the beginning of the century, he's reinventing an instrument [the mandolin]. He's creating a whole new vibrant form of music, out of folk music, just like Armstrong did at the beginning of the last century. I hold the Punch Brothers in highest regard.”

T-Bone Burnett

But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

Aristotle

If I set the sun beside the moon, And if I set the land beside the sea, And if I set the flower beside the fruit, And if I set the town beside the country, And if I set the man beside the woman, I suppose some fool would talk About one being better.

G. K. Chesteron

“Music that we like the best is rarely the most technically impressive... The cliche of tapping, like the great guitar shredders of the past. That rarely moves a person. It's impressive. But does it enable communal and personal transcendence? Not really.”

Thile

Q:  What do you see not happening in 21st Century music that you’d like to see a lot more off?

A:  I am not sure if this makes sense or is correct, but I have some interest in seeing more music that has common sense and universal types of appeal combined with more unlimited ambition and achievement.

Edgar Meyer

"Let’s take my favorite example of creativity from science. In ecology, where two ecosystems meet, such as the forest and the Savannah, the point of intersection is the site of ‘edge effect.’ In that transition zone, because of the influence the two ecological communities have on each other, you find the greatest diversity of life, as well as the greatest number of new life forms.

"The edge effect is where those of varied backgrounds come together in a zone of transition; a region of less structure, more diversity and more possibility. The edge is a time and place of transformation and movement."

Yo-Yo Ma

“Bill [Monroe] was constantly tinkering with his creation. Any music that’s healthy will be doing that. That’s the problem with genre. To keep it intact or keep it cohesive, there has to be some weird limitations placed on things—and that’s not how creative people work.”

Thile

Q:  Why bluegrass?

A:  It’s an interesting thing about Punch Brothers: people who would call themselves bluegrass fans don’t think that we’re bluegrass, people who don’t call themselves bluegrass fans think that we are. I want to say that whatever it is that we are, we don’t do it to be a bluegrass band or not be a bluegrass band...The answer to your question is basically, there’s no intent to be bluegrass or not on our end of it. That’s just very important to me. To go further, genres of this kind are completely unimportant to me. Adhering to the aesthetic conventions of any one genre seems foolish to me because bad bluegrass sucks, bad indie rock sucks. Good bluegrass is awesome and good indie rock is awesome. And those two things, good bluegrass and good indie rock have a lot more in common than good indie rock and bad indie rock do. So I think, other music that may be different aesthetically, if it’s made with a similar quality and standard of skill, and I also just think that Punch Brothers instruments rarely sound like bluegrass.

Thile

Q:  The way you approach these pieces on the mandolin, you have such an ability to bring in groove and shoulder shrug in a bluegrass kind of way. It’s a clear sign to the listener that “you need to be awake for this bit;" it’s a nice approach.

A:  I do want it to resonate. I think if you can get peoples' bodies moving, it’s a great sign. I think it’s so important to have moments in life where we forget ourselves—how we’re coming across—where we can lose ourselves for a second. Music is such an important part of that process—for it to almost physically grab your body and start moving it, apart from your own will. I think the music Bach wrote absolutely does that. All you have to do is get out of the way and play the notes.

Thile

"Chris might as well be my teacher; I learn from everything he does. He is a person of unique and very unusual ability. He is very thorough, and he's always looking around the corner to see what's possible. I learn from him every day. That's a lot of the fun of it."

Edgar Meyer

“As I drift off to sleep at night, I do a lot of thinking about what I want to do. I love music, I love the feeling I have at the end of the day when I’ve learned something new about it. And when I’m going to sleep, it’s almost like, how do I do that tomorrow, how do I do it next month, next year, in 10 years? And I hear very specific sounds and I see very specific steps to getting those sounds."

Thile

"I love pointing out the similarities between instances of good music. Truly great music has more in common with other instances of great music than it does differences. The [solo concert] program is constructed around that principle. It’s half Bach and it’s half other things; trying to keep people on their toes. So often we listen to Bach with our serious ears on, when Bach is just as well listened to with your fun loving ears on."

Or your dancing shoes?

"Absolutely! So, I wanna remind people that Bach is first and foremost just great music. It’s not first and foremost complicated music, or music for the mind."

Thile

“Genre, to me, is a very sloppy way of trying to communicate about music. And genres are not just imprecise, they stifle creativity. It’s almost like, if you can definitively apply a genre to a piece of music, chances are that piece of music is a little overly derivative, right? Bill Monroe—what he did was so creative that he got to apply a new name to it. That’s what you want as an artist. You don’t want to create a new shining example of something that already exists. You want to get in there and shake things up a little bit. Doing justice to the spirit of someone like Bill Monroe, paying homage to him as a creator, is not to re-create what he did, but to look at that kind of innovation and kind of live with that spirit.”

Thile