Professional musician and Harvard professor of the arts Vijay Iyer recently sat down with Fifteen Minutes to chat about his career, his teaching philosophy, and the neuroscience of music.
Excerpt:
Iyer: “I’ve been very fortunate to, for the last 30-something years, to have been mentored by really visionary and generous Black musicians. And prior to that to have digested and studied the creative output of this incredible legacy of Black artists.
It’s partly that they embraced me because it was evident from my playing that I had studied that legacy and that history and heritage. But the other side of it was that they wanted me to be myself — not to pretend I was somebody I wasn’t. That’s the question: How does one work from that foundation and yet somehow also be true to yourself? And what it means to be true to yourself is not necessarily defined by your race or your ethnicity, right? It might be a part of your, say, musical language, it might not.
I was not someone trained in say, Indian classical music or any of the South Asian traditional forms of music making. I had to learn about it.”