Episode 11 - Time Travel - The failed Symphony (ft. Anna Hamamjyan)

Francisco:

Hello, and welcome to another Danetkas podcast. I am your host, Francisco Chaves, and today’s Danetka is called Time Travel. In this episode, we will also have a very special guest. I will introduce her later in this episode. I hope you enjoy it.

Time Travel.

A composer experienced absolute failure. To overcome it, he traveled back in time, with the help of a master. What was the failure, how can the composer travel back in time, and who was the master?

Accompanying each Danetka, as usual, we have a picture. This picture is very enigmatic and has a lot of details. We see a man wearing a hat, and three different scenarios, or three different things, are coming out of his mind.

In the first one, he stands in front of an orchestra, and he seems happy. In the other one, he stands in front of the orchestra, and he feels sad. And on the other one, he stands in front of the orchestra, with more of a neutral stand.

So this story has something to do with him standing in front of an orchestra. What is the mystery here? I will now read the three rigolettos, three hints that will help you figure out what might have happened.

The first rigoletto says: “My symphony is terrible. I’m going to stop composing.” So we know this story is about a symphony.

Second rigoletto: “Relax, follow my voice.” Third rigoletto: “I’m seeing the past in many different ways. Now I feel recovered.”

So apparently this man, this person, was having a tough time and now feels recovered. Do you know what happened? How can this person travel back in time?

Who was this master that helped him travel back in time? I will now read the answer.

Time travel.

After the failure of his first symphony, a composer got depressed and stopped composing. To cure his problem, he went to an hypnotherapist. With the help of hypnosis, he had the opportunity to experience the same event with different outcomes.

These self-reflection sessions helped Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff gain inspiration and confidence again. The premiere of Rachmaninoff’s first symphony was considered a disaster due to under-rehearsal, as well as a poor performance by the Russian conductor Alexander Glazunov. Not only did he conduct badly, but he also made cuts to the score and changes in the orchestration.

Rachmaninoff left in agony before the concert was over. He went on to suffer a psychological collapse and decided to stop composing. His mental state would only be solved with intense therapy sessions from the hypnotherapist Nikolai Dahl.

From these sessions, the second piano concerto was born, premiered in 1900. In 1945, two years after the composer’s death, the symphony was performed a second time. Since then, it has been performed and recorded frequently.

This problem is a universal problem, not only among musicians. To delve a bit more into these questions, I will now introduce our guest, Anna Hamamjyan. Anna is the person behind all of these fantastic illustrations.

She is a fantastic artist and I am very happy to have her as a guest in the Danetkas podcast.

I am here now with Anna Hamamjyan, the illustrator of Danetkas. Welcome Anna.

Anna: Thanks for having me here.

Francisco (F): So was it very hard to draw this Danetka, the one about Rachmaninoff, time travel?

A: It was not hard, it was interesting. I was thinking about how hypnotherapy could help him to go through such difficult time for an artist, you know. And I think the beautiful part was how he took his pain and kind of used it as a motivation to keep moving forward and continue to composing.

So I think it was a very interesting story for me to know how you can take your pain and make an art of it.

F: It felt kind of personal almost, no?

A: Yeah. Yeah.

F: No, but it’s nice because it’s like a universal thing that artists have been dealing with, which is like how to take feedback and sometimes you do something that is not well received. In this case, he wrote a symphony that basically didn’t have a good premiere and the second time they played it was only after he died.

A: Yeah.

F: So that’s kind of sad, but he went on and composed other things.

A: Yeah. The story is very interesting.

F: Do you also have these moments where you’re like: “OK, I’m done with illustration, I’m going to stop doing art because something went wrong” or something like that?

A: Oh my God, so many times. Like right now I have an art block so I can draw. It’s hard for me to draw on paper, it’s easier for me to draw digital.

I think it’s because of that comment, you know, like you put something, your feelings and it’s kind of only you can understand what you want to say with that drawing. So it’s kind of hard to share with people. I think it’s more easier with music to show like what you are feeling, what your story is. It’s more easier with music than with paintings.

F: I mean, if you have if you have words, then yes, because there’s a song like there’s sometimes…

A: Even if you don’t have words, even with a simple like instrument, you can show you’re sad or you’re happy, like you can guess what’s going on. But with drawings, it’s hard. Like you draw something and five people can look at it and everyone has a different opinion. Everyone, like maybe none of them could understand what you have done there. So it’s hard to share with drawings more than with music. I think so.

F: Yeah, I understand. And do you think it’s important for them to know what the artist was dealing through when he was doing that drawing, for example?

A: Sometimes you want them to understand, you know.

F: You want them to know the pain.

A: Yeah. You know, sometimes you just want to share and sometimes you just share it with your paper and your work, you know, it’s between you and your canvas and you don’t care about what people think. And sometimes there are like, I have one painting that I was going through a very hard time at that point. And I really wanted everyone to like feel what I was feeling. And it’s really hard, you know, you need to tell, you need to show like I was going through this stuff or that stuff so they can relate what you were showing them. So it’s really hard with drawings than with music.

F: I can imagine. I can imagine. Is there like a specific Danetka drawing or Danetka illustration that you felt that was particularly difficult or you want people to get something like a specific message or something?

A: I was thinking about hints a lot for every Danetka. There is no special one, but I was thinking how can I show them it’s without showing them so much more, you know. Yeah. But it was very interesting. I love this project so much. But the hard one, I guess, was Apocalypse.

F: The Apocalypse. Okay.

A: Yeah. It was hard for me more mentally because it was about war and it’s kind of a hard topic for me.

F: I interrupt this podcast for a little contextualization. The Danetka Apocalypse is about French composer Olivier Messiaen that was arrested by German soldiers during World War II and sent to a concentration camp. There, he wrote beautiful music with other prisoners that were also musicians and they performed a concert for the guards and the other people present at the concentration camp.

A: So, yeah, I was thinking a lot how from where they got that power to like after all that stuff, they start to like play it where it’s very hard to really.

F: Yes. Yes. That story is really emotional. And when you listen to the music, you feel it. You actually feel it very deeply.

A: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

F: It’s actually one of my favorite pieces that Messiaen’s piece.

A: Yeah. It’s very emotional.

F: About the hints, for example, in the time travel, I think this one is one where you see the first picture where you have these three different scenarios. I think most people think: “What the hell is going on here?”

A: Yeah.

F: Because there’s a lot going on. How were you approaching this technically? Because I think when I asked you to make this one, I think you were even doubting everything would fit into the picture, right?

A: Yeah. Because there is so much to tell, you know, it’s hard to put everything in that small picture. And it’s really hard to make a very simple picture when there is so much big story. You know what I mean?

F: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. That’s always the dilemma with the Danetka’s illustrations. Yeah. You want to show a lot, but not too much. But also give some information that people can decipher.

A: I really like that solution, like with clocks, with the answer pictures.

F: Yes.

A: Yes. It kind of says something and doesn’t say anything, you know? You need to understand what is going on.

F: Yes. I think the pictures have a lot of very, very interesting details. I find it, actually, I have to tell you, I find it a bit sad that when I play with players, they check the picture, but they don’t go really into the details.

A: You need to look very closely to pictures. I think players need to know that. They must look at the pictures to understand what is going on.

F: Yes. And really look at it very analytically.

A: Yeah.

F: And one of them, the pictures that I think we worked really hard on it, and it’s one of the ones I’m most proud of, is the one of the master, where we put the tuning process with arrows, you know?

A: Yeah. Yeah.

F: And it’s one of the Danetkas that I play so often with my students. I’ve played that one like 20 times at least. And I only got like one person that looking at the picture and they are looking at the distorted notes. They like, oh, the notes are distorted. And then why are they distorted? They started to think like, are these distorted on purpose or something? And they’re like, oh, maybe it’s like about fixing the notes or something like distorted notes, fixing the notes. And then it came to the answer of the piano tuner. But it was like one person in 20.

A: Yeah.

F: Yeah. So, yeah. So I was very surprised that, yeah, for example, with that one, they look at it.

They’re like, oh, just some notes. And they just ignore sometimes.

A: Yeah. It’s really interesting to see how people react, what everyone is thinking. Like everyone can have different thoughts about pictures and different approach to find the answer.

F: Yes. Yes. And that’s the interesting thing.

But I like when we have these kind of Easter eggs and these kind of small details in the pictures.

A: Yeah.

F: The players can figure out and can kind of try to arrive to the solution.

A: Yeah.

F: Is there something you want to tell maybe to the players about the illustration process or about, I don’t know, your favorite or least favorite illustration, favorite or least favorite Danetka? I don’t know.

A: Oh, I have favorite one. I need to remember its name. I think it was “Memories”.

F: Memories. Ok.

A: Yeah. I love that one so much. The story and the illustration both. It’s so interesting. And I kind of think about it since now. And when I tell my friends about Danetkas, I always give this example, these Danetka “Memories”.

F: For contextualization, the Danetka “Memories” is about the infamous piece of experimental avant-garde composer John Cage. In this piece, the musicians are 4 minutes and 33 seconds sitting on the stage in silence without producing a single sound. During that time, the audience sometimes produces sounds and hear the environmental sounds that are happening randomly. That is supposed to be the music. So every time the music sounds different, however, the musicians don’t perform a single note.

A: It was very interesting how they thought: They bring all that people together and not play anything. It was silence.

F: Yes.

A: And so deep, you know? It’s real. When there is silence, you can hear so many voices. Sometimes that silence can be noise for you and sometimes it can relax you. And it’s very interesting. I really like that concept that they have done. It’s very interesting.

F: John Cage is really like the composer. If you can call him a composer. But he’s like the artist behind that crazy idea of using the silence as the piece. Because he tried to meditate, you know, and he was really into deep meditation, Asian stuff and oriental stuff. And you reach the conclusion there was never silence.

A: Yeah.

F: So every time he was looking for silence, there was always music around him. There was always birds or cars or whatever. So it’s like, oh, that could be the music.

A: Yeah, it’s really interesting. Remember our process when you draw something on paper to show me what you want me to draw as a final result?

F: Yes.

A: I looked at your picture and I’m like, what is this?

F: Because I have zero drawing skills.

A: And in the end, I gave you exactly the opposite version of that illustration.

F: Even if you do the opposite, as long as it works for the player, that is the most important. Because sometimes I have an idea, but then when you draw it, you draw it in sometimes a different way than I expected. And then I was like: “Oh, this actually is better.” My idea was actually not that good.

A: Sometimes I thought maybe I’m not doing it right. If you send me some pictures that you imagined, then it came that way. I was thinking maybe I need to do his way, but I couldn’t. I’m sorry.

F: That’s the thing about the artist. I’m going to tell you a personal story. I had three different composition teachers and they had different views on art and they have different ways of composing music. And they had a specific method that they would use to create music and stuff. End of bachelor, end of studies. I wanted to give them an homage because I liked all three. They were very kind people. And I wanted to make a piece honoring each of them, like copying them. That was my goal, to copy their style. But when I was doing it, I couldn’t copy it because I didn’t want to do like they did. So I was trying to copy, but then in the end I had to change it because I couldn’t copy it exactly.

A: Yeah. You never can copy. It’s always there is something that you want to put from yourself, you know, to add from yourself. There’s something you want to change.

F: Yes. That was the thing. My goal was to copy their style. But then when I was doing it, I was like, oh, I want to do this. And they were like, oh, but you would never do this.

A: Yeah.

F: But then I did it anyway.

A: Yeah.

F: I think as an artist, you just have these ideas and these creative impulses and you just have to do it.

A: Yeah, I agree.

F: Oh, that was so nice. Thank you so much, Anna.

A: Thank you.

F: Yes, it was such a nice talk. Thank you for the amazing illustrations, of course.

A: You’re welcome. Thank you for the game and everything because I really like this game. It’s very educational. It’s very interesting. So thank you for that. You’re doing a great job.

F: Oh, thank you. Thank you.

A: You’re doing good, believe me.

F: Thank you. Thank you. Have a nice day.

A: You too. Thank you so much.

F: We will finish this podcast by listening to Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony. The conductor is Stanislav Kochanovsky and the orchestra is Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. We will listen to a small excerpt of the first movement.