Raphael Weinroth-Browne Part 2 Transcript
Leah Roseman:
Raphael Weinroth-Browne is an internationally renowned Canadian cellist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer. He merges his classical cello training with a love of progressive metal and Middle Eastern music, and has formed several acclaimed ensembles, including The Visit, Musk Ox and Kamancello. This duo is with a previous guest of this podcast, kamancheh player, Shahriyar Jamshidi. Rafael has been touring with the Norwegian progressive band Leprous since 2017 and has appeared on over 150 studio albums. In 2020, he released his first solo album, Worlds Within. Raph is a very thoughtful and articulate person, and this conversation touched on many interesting topics.
This part two is a bit shorter than part one, has more music and includes some interesting background on Raph's development as a musician. He also shares his advice on building relationships in the music business to help artists find different avenues to promote their music. He speaks about improvisation, his love of Middle Eastern music and his collaboration with Shahriyar Jamshidi in Kamancello. If you missed part one, it is linked in the description of this episode. In part one, he demonstrated and talked about the first part of Worlds Within, and you got to hear about his career as a studio musician and his experiences touring with Leprous. He also shared his thoughts about knowing yourself, being creative, connecting with your audience and balancing your life and expectations of yourself.
I'm curious what you were like 10, 15 years ago as a young teenager, because a lot about you seems like you would've been a joy to teach, but maybe a little bit challenging for your teachers.
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
Yeah. Yeah, probably pretty challenging. I think that the thing about me is that I've always had a pretty clear internal compass. I always had a clear sense of where I wanted to go and I think I've always been a selective learner. So if a teacher said some stuff to me, I wouldn't just absorb all of it and then just do all of it, I would think critically about it and take some things, but not take all of it. And I think also I have a certain defiance, for me, I would want to prove something to the teacher that I also knew something and that I'm not just a blank slate. I would say looking back on my student days, I can really see that. I think that teachers probably liked the fact that I was kind of hungry for it all the time, but there's also a feeling of I was hungry for it, but for my own reasons.
And because for me, the lessons and the learning were not the objective, they were a means to an end. And I already had an idea of where I wanted to go kind of a general idea. And when I'm presented with a piece of music, I have strong opinions about it and we may not, might not share those opinions. And so I think that probably, it was challenging for some of my teachers, but also I think I've always, for the most part, had a good relationship with them, but actually there was a point... Of course, as you go on as a student, you go to grad school and stuff, you become more independent. You're not so much under the wing of your teacher in the same way, usually, and for me, it was definitely that because my teachers didn't even live in town. They would just come and visit and then give lessons once or twice a month. And then I was left to my own devices.
So then I kind of felt it was more like a master class or coaching, where I just needed to have stuff ready and then they would kind of give whatever they had to offer. And then I would go back to my own independent work. But I remember at the end of studying, I had a chamber coaching, and I remember the teacher was asking me to play in a certain way, and I was there with my group and I just said, "No, I don't agree with you. I'm not going to do that." And for me, that was the end. I knew I wasn't going back to school at that point.
I had finished at GGS and I was like, "I'm not doing school anymore. I can't do this." I would just want to be in the real world, doing my thing and making a living and who cares if I'm not going on the right path, I just need this for me. So I just felt ready for that. But then it was sort of this last straw thing, where I just went, "Nope." And then he just kind of realized, he couldn't push it because it just wasn't happening. And I was going to just play it in my way, and that was it at that point. I think that's also when you know that you're maybe ready. When your opinions are too strong and you just need to learn for yourself, and experience teaches you.
And sometimes something that your teacher told you years ago clicks for you later on in life, but it took you that long to get there, but you had to get there on your own. You couldn't just get it from them then, you weren't necessarily ready to absorb it. But that's because I think a lot of these things come from life experience, you come to certain types of music also in your own time. There was a lot of repertoire that I just wouldn't play. And then later on I understood why it was maybe good music and why I would maybe want to play it. And I think it has to do with evolving as a person and your tastes change and your life experience teaches you to feel things in a different way and understand types of music that you didn't connect with before.
And I feel that so much that there's things that 10, 15 years ago, I would've written music in a certain way. And now what I'm looking for and what I create is altogether different. And so that has a lot to do with me and my experience and where I'm at in life. Eventually all of our cells and our body are replaced so we're biologically different people. So we can't be fully the same, but we can also understand where we came from. So you always have that part of you there, but at the same time, it exists more as memory than it does really as part of your actual physical being. So that's a kind of an interesting thing, not to get too trippy there. I would say there's a lot of things, for example, that I learned from my teachers, not that I learned so much, that I was just hearing from them, that wasn't important to me then, and now it's important to me, but for my own reasons.
And I think that's very powerful when you come to it in a place where you feel like it's important. And so then you take ownership over that thing. You're not doing it for someone else. And I think that's the whole trouble of being a student actually, is that you see people, they've been to so many different teachers and they're bringing all of this stuff to the table, that's all these mixed messages a little bit. And if they don't really have their own voice or their own experience of being able to get out there and play that thing and understand what works, they just have all these conflicting voices and they're trying to synthesize them into a piece of music that's not their own. And then it's really hard. I always felt that as a student, you still had to play a master, you still had to own the music almost as though you had written it.
And that, if you came to it from a place of trying to please other people and make sure that everyone was satisfied, that it wouldn't be authentic and it wouldn't all come together as one thing. So just this idea of being able to feel that something is important because it's important to you. Nothing can really replace that. You can't do it because it's important for someone else. I think that an audience will feel that too. It's important to you to play a certain way, and I see that a lot in musicians, I can see what their priorities are from watching them play.
Leah Roseman:
Beautiful. Thank you.
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
Thanks. That's the beginning of the record and I've kind of gotten into the habit of starting my shows with that because it doesn't give the audience too much too soon, and it's actually a nice way to begin if you haven't been playing already. For example, we've been talking for two and a half hours. So it's a nice thing to play first, as opposed to something that's very technical and has to be done very precisely. There's a lot of space to just ease into it. And that's also what I like about playing the album, is that it starts off really minimal and then it gets to all the technical stuff in the middle, and you feel by that point you've been on stage for a little while and you're ready to attack it.
Leah Roseman:
One thing you can't really show us today, but I encourage people to check out the percussion effect you do with your bridge. It's very cool and unique.
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
I could demo it quickly. I'll just play a bit of that.
So now it's looping.
And so on and so forth. It's just a quick demo of what that does. And the sound can... Actually shift the camera a little bit just to show what's happening down here. I've got a Schatten Bridge Pickup and it's on the bass side of the bridge and I'm just thumping it with my middle finger and then I'm flicking the opposite side of the bridge with my other middle finger with the nail. It's not even really a snare, it's kind of like a cross stick. It's very much like a hip hop beat.
And of course what you're seeing is different from what you're hearing. So you're hearing a lot more hits and that's being produced by a delay pedal. So if I just go single hit, you hear the delay coming off of it and then I can adjust the tempo, but then once it's there, it's there. So really it's up to me to play rhythmically. And if I don't play rhythmically, you can hear that in every loop. You know what I mean? So I can do a slower beat where it's an eighth note, I guess you could call it an eighth note pulse.
So for example, on Worlds Within, the piece, "Tumult IV", is based around that, it's a cycle of seven plus 6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 1. Also with, "Tumult I", it's a 16th note pattern based around a polyrhythm. It's a three against four polyrhythm. The whole movement is based around that, so what you're getting is a juxtaposition of these two things that are playing against each other, plus the delay, which creates this 16th note kind of underpinning, kind of like a 16th note kick drum. That's just going the whole time, completely random accident that ended up being a cool thing. That's what I do with the bridge percussion and I abuse it way too often, but it's too much fun, so-
Leah Roseman:
I love it. That's great. Yeah.
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
Awesome.
Leah Roseman:
Thanks so much. Because you had a pretty straight ahead classical education, did you consider following a different path in university or just doing composition?
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
This is an interesting thing. I never felt I needed to study composition and that probably sounds really arrogant. I did study it a little bit at Ottawa U, I had some classes which were really good because I had this incentive to write music. I had a third and fourth year composition class. I didn't really have a portfolio that I could present to anyone for an undergraduate degree. I mean, really, I didn't have anything for undergrad. I just squeaked into Ottawa U to be honest. And I think they were almost not going to admit me actually, and I was lucky, but because I was lucky, I took full advantage of it and I really went for it and I was just really hungry and I figured, okay, I'm here. It's an opportunity to get as good as possible so that I have the tools to do whatever I want to do. I didn't really say that to people, but I always kind of felt that way.
Leah Roseman:
So did you-
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
Kind of-
Leah Roseman:
So did you practice less cello as a teen because you were doing so much other stuff?
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
Yeah. And I didn't really have a sense of priorities. I was doing it, but there wasn't a main thing, but it seemed like the obvious thing to do, "I guess I should go to university and well, I'm playing cello." It just seemed the most... It's weird to say the smoothest path, because I was playing other instruments, but I didn't really have the sort of the connections, or it didn't feel like it was a strong enough sort of thing to work off of. I was playing flamenco guitar as a teenager, which I don't really do so much now, but I did a lot then. And I remember my teacher said, "Well you could pay your way through college and stuff doing this."
And I had a vague idea of what that was, but you can't really go to university here to study that, you would have to study classical guitar, which is a completely different beast actually. And it didn't interest me at all. I wasn't interested in classical guitar. Then with drumming too, you would need to go to a university and study jazz, and I wasn't good at jazz. I could play metal. With cello it was like, "Okay, there's a program here. I know the teacher and I live in Ottawa already, so I can just live at home and kind of just go there." I didn't even really consider anything else. So that's how it started for me with my education.
It's funny how these things lead you on and it's just how it all happens, but because of being in that environment, then I committed to it more because I thought, "I guess now that I'm also studying this, I should try to use it in other places and kind of take advantage." I was playing in bands, and so I was having not only the opportunity to play proper études during the day, but also play in groups where I was coming up with my own part or I was learning existing material or I was improvising. And so I was getting experience in another way, gigging and playing with people. And so it's kind of a dual education in that sense.
I always try to recommend this to people. I always say if you're going to school, you should try to do that. Don't just be on campus, try to get out there because not all institutions really give you enough opportunities to go out and play and get to know the scene and meet people. And as you were saying before, knowing people is everything really. If you have the relationships, that's half the battle in your career. So you have to put yourself out there and just also be a person, not just a player, you got to be a person and just be in society, be in the community.
Now, especially, I feel responsibility to be there for the community also. When you're really young, it's kind of like, "Okay, what's going on?" As you get a bit older, then you think, how can I give back? And how can I support people who are coming up? And maybe some other people haven't had certain opportunities, but maybe I think they deserve it or just in general to help them because I know that I appreciated that when I was starting out, that people connected me and were willing to try working with me and stuff that. So I feel that's really important to give back to the scene and to show up as well.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I'm curious about album review sites. Because I know you're very good at submitting. You're in the progressive world a lot, are you submitting for those specific album review sites? Are there different ones you'd suggest for people?
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
There's so many, so where it started for me was my first record that I ever did, which is the 'Cholera Project' which was a progressive death metal thing that I started as a teenager. And I had really no connections in town at that point when I started, and I was doing that and I didn't really know a lot of musicians. I kind of knew people through MySpace, it was back in those days, but I had this record that I felt was a cool thing and I was putting a lot into it. Basically I looked into different review sites and I did a bit of research and then I started reaching out to them. And at that time I was actually still mailing a lot of stuff.
I would say people preferred that you would mail a CD rather than send them MP3s or something. So I started with that and I learned how to pitch that way. Probably when I was 17, 18, I started doing that. And then every time I released something, I gained new contacts. So if it was just a single or if it was a band project and we had a new album of some kind, then I was constantly making these new connections. So with the visit, for example, I remember that we released our first single, it was kind of a 15 minute piece. It was 2014. And I had just worked, I was playing in a band called Little Suns at the time, also a completely different band that no longer exists, but we had done this record and we were assigned to a label.
And so the label had gotten a bunch of reviews through their publicity. And so I actually kind of stole some of those review sites and then used them for the visit. And a lot of those ended up being contacts that I still have. And then with Musk Ox it was the same thing. I had experience pitching with every album and then every time I had amassed extra contacts, but then of course, every year some blogs disappear, and then you have to find new ones and you have to keep your finger on the pulse. In general what I would say is, at this stage, it's different now than it was. It really helps, for example, if you've already connected with those people on social media and you've already had some interaction with them, it's so easy now to locate an individual.
In the past, it was like, "Where do I find their email? How do I contact them?" The website looked it was from the nineties. It was really hard to navigate or do they even still write reviews? Now it's like, "I could probably DM them on Instagram or something like that." And so I would recommend to people, to figure out, first of all... I think both of us don't like the idea of tagging music too specifically. But I think that the more you can get a sense, and sometimes you need to do a survey with your fans to know what type of music you really play. Sometimes I do that. I try to do it, but then people just say nice things. And I'm like, "No, I want you to give me concrete information so I can market myself."
If you can figure that out. And I think an easy one is also to name five artists that sound like you, and then based on that, you can get a sense. Maybe you look at the reviews they've gotten. And so I think a big part of it is stealing what works for other people. And I would say, seeing, "Okay, if this person has done this thing, I could try it also." Or I could pitch that review site or whatever it happens to be, whatever that contact is, I could say, "Hey, I'm a big fan of so and so, or I know so and so, and I know that they did this thing with you, thought maybe you'd be interested in checking my stuff out and maybe if you want to write a review or we could do an interview." Whatever the case may be.
I would say that's always a good move because the association will get you in, or even better if you have someone who already puts in the word and then you can follow up. If you have a friend who's connected, maybe they can make the introduction, but you don't have to have that. With prog and metal, there's almost an overabundance of websites that cover music. And so if you play that type of music, it's very easy. That's what I learned quickly, is that I think you have a huge advantage if you play that type of music over anything else in a way, because there's more sites that will cover stuff. Jazz to a degree, there's a good amount of stuff too. But I think jazz is a smaller niche in terms of the review sites and the scene. So that would be my recommendation, but definitely amassing contacts, having active socials where you're connecting with people and you're working the room a little bit. You have lots of stuff that's easily accessible that people can listen to.
And I would say in terms of making a pitch, I probably got a response, every one out of 10 emails roughly. With Worlds Within, I went all out on the promotion actually for the reviews. And it was like, "Okay, I might as well to see what happens." And I gave it a lot of lead time too. So the album came out January 2020. I started emailing sites in October 2019. And I just gradually got through my list. I had a massive list by this point. I was on tour, and so I would actually try to send five to 10 emails a day on tour. And when I got home, I just continued. I think that's a good way is to give yourself a lot of lead time and at least then people have the album or they have the promo and then you can follow up.
I think nowadays, people will kind of forget a little bit if you don't let them know a month in advance maybe, and then it's just the perfect window for them to write about it and then maybe publish the week before it comes out, which is the best time usually. But then I think having reviews later is great too. I think there's nothing wrong with that. It's nice to be able to extend the campaign and those people are doing it for you, so that's really nice. We were talking about having someone who's already been reviewed that you could piggyback on.
I had a connection like that with the Guardian actually. So there's a guy that wrote a little bit about Worlds Within in the Guardian, and it was only because I knew someone who he had written a good review for not too long ago, and I thought the music is similar enough and we had also done a show together. So then it was, "Might as well just try this and see." It's just about again, putting yourself out there a lot and then it's one in 10 really, but then the more you put yourself out there, the more you get back. So.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I wanted to talk to you about musical influences and it's interesting, some of the things I was hearing you talk about in other interviews, is you love the sound of the Armenian duduk. That instrument is such a cool instrument. We hear it a lot in movies' soundtracks, which leads me to a couple things. One thing I was curious about is your music, a lot of it's very cinematic. Have you been commissioned to write for any shows yet?
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
I personally haven't. I've played on a lot of cool shows and movies, mostly shows. I've worked a lot with Andrew Lockington, who's a film composer, film and TV composer, I guess. He's very esteemed. He's really up in that world, with Hollywood movies and stuff. And we've done a lot of cool things. I mean, he's a really cool composer and I think he is good at sort of getting me in on a project and just capitalizing on the spontaneity of my playing and just finding a place for it and giving the right instructions and working through all these cues very quickly and just knowing what to ask for and how to integrate that stuff. So that's been a cool process for me because most of what I was playing wasn't scored out. There's a few set themes that I would sight read and then we would record them, but most of it was, "Okay, I've got this cue here, can you do this type of thing?" And then we would do two to three takes, and then boom next one.
That's been cool, and I'm working kind of on and off with a long time friend, Laura Bitner, who actually I went to high school with, and she's also now a full time film composer, film and TV. There's a series that she's scoring that I'm playing on pretty regularly too. Really cool stuff. So I like that stuff a lot. You don't really know what you're going to get sometimes, but it's also part of the fun of it, I think in a different way from an album, I feel less attachment to it. And because of that, sometimes I think that I actually come up with cooler stuff. Sometimes holding onto something too tightly and caring about it too much can get in your way. And so this idea of kind of non-attachment and just going with the flow and just letting these moments pass and just doing whatever makes sense for that specific thing.
And then just forgetting about it is really nice and with those projects, it's often that way because the turnaround is so quick, much quicker than music. I mean, they have this whole apparatus and they've got these deadlines and there's a lot more budget and everything. So it's often you get asked to do something and it has to be delivered within a day or two. And it's so different from music where there's stuff that I worked on last year that still hasn't come out. Even things from 2019 that I recorded on that still haven't come out. So it's just a different world altogether, but I enjoy it a lot. I would love to actually compose for film or TV that would be super fun.
I think because it's a different world, you need different connections. So I've mostly been in it as a player, but it's been cool for me to at least get a sense of what it's like. I don't know if I'd be cut out for the turnaround. And I think for me, I like to linger with something until I feel like it's really good. And sometimes you don't always get to do that. I think you really have to be super efficient. And I don't think it's my strong point. I think for me I need to get into the process and then I start to get a rhythm, and then finally, the good stuff comes out. I have to coax it out over time. I can't just go into it cold necessarily, especially from a creative standpoint. Again, it's often letting go of the feeling that you need to be making your best work and just doing the work, because you don't know what is going to be your best work or how other people will see it.
And that's something I've realized, is that often people like a thing that you thought was a throwaway, or maybe even not that good. You don't know what people are going to like. And so in that sense, it's better just to keep making and keep putting it out there because you don't know what's going to hit. And I think that for any person who's creating, it's really difficult to be the judge of your own work. And to know what things among your own work are actually the best. And I think that time, of course always eventually reveals that. The things that are really good tend to last and resonate with people over a longer period. And the other things might fade into obscurity a little bit more. And there's a reason for that. I think certain things just resonate a lot, but of course we feel a certain attachment to what we make in a more personal way. So it's harder for us to see that clearly.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So about the duduk, I don't know if it's pronounced duduk. So it's interesting with this podcast, because I listened to a lot of music I wouldn't otherwise listen to. So then I was listening to some of that music and then I thought I have to find a duduk player to interview, of course. So then I did a couple cold calls and one of the people who responded, I won't give it away because they're going to be in an upcoming episode, such an interesting musician.
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
Cool.
Leah Roseman:
Just one of my dream guests, I was like, "All right." And it's interesting with these cold calls, sometimes I have connections and sometimes it's just someone I don't know at all. And they're just, "All right, sure, I'll talk to you. Let's do that." And I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Kamancello because Shahriyar Jamshidi was a guest on this podcast.
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
Yeah. I listened to the interview. Loved it. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And you had mentioned in another interview that you had grown up hearing another Kurdish Iranian player, Kayhan Kalhor, who I guess was living in Ottawa in the early nineties. Did you hear him live there?
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
I actually didn't hear him live here until pretty recently. He was playing with Kiya Tabassian, it must have been 2018 or '19. Can't really remember, but it was pretty recently, but then he was playing setar actually, he wasn't playing kamancheh. So it was a little bit like going to see someone who does something that's very specific to them, but then they don't do that thing. I mean, he is great, but of course he's synonymous with this instrument. And it's because of his playing primarily that I got into it growing up because we had CDs of it in the house and we were listening to a lot of Persian music and then actually there were some concerts here that I saw at the universities, on campus. It was a Dastgāh ensemble and they played twice in Ottawa when I was, I think 12, 13, 14, I saw them on two different occasions.
So that was really exciting for me to actually see those instruments because I'd been listening to the records and at that point, I would listen to the CD and then I would look at the liner notes and I would kind of get to know about the instruments. So I was really fascinated. So I had this background in it already from having heard it a lot and I knew what the instruments were. And I had some understanding about Persian modality, but again, I think a lot of it was very intuitive. And so when I found out about Shahriyar, I was like, "Okay, we have to meet, this has to happen." You know, it would just be so cool to get together and play. There're moments where you think, "Oh yeah, there's a cool musician out there. Maybe we should reach out. Maybe I should reach out." But it just doesn't happen. But there was something really spontaneous about that.
Someone had told me that they had played an improvised concert with him, and at this point, I was living in Toronto and I was playing a lot of these improvised music nights, where a lot of them were kind of self curated. You had to go sign up and different people from the community would be there and you would just play with them and see what came out. And so someone had recommended that I maybe try to reach out and they had done something together. And so I just sent him a message and I said, "Hey, do you want to maybe just play together?" And he was open to it.
And then we just played for two hours straight, barely talked and it was really good. So then we ended up doing one of those improvised music shows. We signed up and of course we were kind of cheating because we had played together for two hours already. So it wasn't a completely blind date so to speak, but it was great. It was for me, the best one that I had done, really in that way. And I think earlier I talked about having a musical affinity with someone. And with him we're just , when we play together. It's instant high speed connection. I just feel we understand each other and it's not really anything to do with... It's just we're very well matched musically I think.
And so over time also I think it got better and because we played together more. So you understand at first when you meet someone, you've only talked to them about a few things. So you don't know their boundaries yet. You don't know that maybe we won't go there. Of course, with more shows and stuff, we kind of got a sense of the range of expression that we had and maybe where we wouldn't venture, but also finding new territory that was experimental for us, because sometimes you do things that feel safe and comfortable, but then you want to try to do something that feels a little unusual on stage and that creates contrast within the set as well.
It's been a really exciting thing to do that, it was a really unexpected journey in a sense that I thought maybe we would play a few shows together, but then we ended up becoming this formed group and made three albums together and did this thing with the Windsor Symphony and basically we had our own concerto that we had to create to play with them and all this stuff.
So it's been a lot more than what I could have imagined. I remember with the pandemic, because we haven't played together since the beginning of 2020 actually, I had this feeling of well, if we never got to play together again, this would already be... It would've exceeded my expectations. So that's been really cool. It seems now that he's moving back to Canada actually. We're going to do some shows together later this year. And so I'm excited for that.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I saw that. I was excited too. The thing with Windsor Symphony, did you write out the parts for the orchestra?
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
Yeah. So what happened was they had reached out to us because they wanted to do something with Middle Eastern music, and we had just put out our first album and it was on Band Camp. It was the conductor, Robert France, and he had just looked this up on Google. I think it was 'Middle Eastern, music and cello' or 'Canada or Ontario' or something. And then found us right away and then listened and he thought, "Oh, this is cool. Okay." And then we got this email, not long after putting out the first album. So then it was this long process of communication, "Well what's the piece going to be?" And of course being the second thing on the program, you have the concerto, it should be about 20 minutes.
So Shahriyar, he had a piece of his own, which was kind of the starting point. It was a solo kamancheh piece. And then basically I remember I got that and then I decided, well maybe we should have a multi movement thing. So we had stuff from one of our, it was from our second album actually, mostly that there's a piece on that album that had some melodies in seven-eight, and then I thought it would be cool to maybe have a seven-eight movement and then a slow free movement, where the orchestra is kind of suspended and then we're improvising. And then almost like an improvised cadenza into the last movement, which is his Kurdish piece, which is a fast two-four piece.
I wrote all the orchestra parts to go with that. And I mean the first movement is kind of... I basically composed it around things that we had improvised. So a lot of the melodies were his actually, it was, "How can we create a structure out of this? And then orchestrate it and do something that would be kind of interesting on all levels." It's not just us playing, but the orchestra is really a part of the action.
And it was really cool. It was a lot of fun to do that. So we played that concert in Windsor in 2019. And then we did a chamber version with a small string ensemble twice in Ottawa actually. And that was a lot of fun too. It's nice to do it with a smaller group because you have that flexibility. I think the first Shahriyar, I remember it was a little bit being thrown in the deep end. I told him, "When we play with this orchestra, we can't move them once they're at a certain tempo, that's it." And he's, "Ah, yeah, whatever." And then first rehearsal, he went, "Oh, I see what you mean." But they were great. I have to say it was a really efficient process with the rehearsing, and to mount that piece and get it to all work.
I was really impressed by how it all went down in that way. I think because of the timing too, we had this pandemic that happened, but it would've been nice to get to do it again, not too long after, in a way, because when you build up something that, you need a little bit of experience to kind of break it into and work with a different group. So it would be nice at some point, but, it's so tricky also with that type of thing, because you have to have a very strong argument for why would we do this Canadian concerto. And we could do this one.
I think we're both really invested in doing that project more because it's a way of bringing together what we do in an improvised way, it's very intimate, into this big context that involves a written piece and classical music and a different kind of sphere altogether, really. It's called Convergence Suite. It's the name of the piece. And that was kind of the idea. It's these worlds colliding a little bit and it was the first time that we had really played a scripted thing together actually. But I think that it was a bit more secure in the sense that it was based off of the type of material we had already played. So it didn't just feel we were doing something completely alien together. You know what I mean? It was still the same type of music that we were doing.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, one of the main points for me of putting so much into the series that I do, is just showing the breadth and the depth of a life in music and these kind of projects just brings more listeners to different kinds of music, which is so great.
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
Yeah, for sure. It really opens people up. And I think also playing in Windsor, I think a lot of people had never heard that type of music before, it was really new for them. I think with that orchestra in particular, they do a lot of outreach and they're really trying to get into the community to get them interested, even just in the really standard classics. And actually one of the nicest things about that experience was, not even the concert itself, but we went and played at a school. We just played in a school gym for these kids. We had this really genuine improvisation. And sometimes when you go and play for an elementary school, they're not all kind of focused or they're not all there, but these kids were really into it.
And I think there was this really strong sense of connection. And I felt we had kind of done something valuable in that. And it was really nourishing to be there, even though it was just this very simple setting of us just showing up with our instruments in the gym and playing for some kids. But that really stuck with me actually. And it was a nice thing to get to do. And I know that some people when they do concertos and stuff, that they do the outreach, and I think it's nice to be on the ground with people and to really have that communication and not just be on the stage. I think that it brings people closer to that as well. And it's not this thing that's kind of out there that you can't relate to, as you're in awe of it, but you don't really understand it fully. So I appreciate that side of it a lot too.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well I know you've agreed to play and we have to have a different mic set up. So I'm not going to pretend that we don't splice that in earlier in the episode, which it will end up being. But I want to thank you for your time today since this is the end of our big conversation.
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
For sure. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And thanks so much for your perspectives and your experience, really enjoyed it.
Raphael Weinroth-Browne:
Yeah. It's a pleasure. Yeah. Thanks for having me on the show. And it's been really nice talking with you and talking about lots of different things too. I appreciate all your questions and everything. So yeah.
Leah Roseman:
If you missed part one of this episode, it is linked in the description. Raph demonstrates and talks about the first part of Worlds Within, and you get to hear about his career as a studio musician and his experiences touring with Leprous. He shares his thoughts about knowing yourself, being creative, connecting with your audience and balancing your life and expectations of yourself. My life is so enriched by getting to know all these fascinating musicians on this series. Please check out more of these episodes. I speak with the diverse range of musicians, following different career and creative paths. All these episodes are available in both video and podcast format. Everything is linked in the description of the episode to my website, leahroseman.com.
