We caught up with Bryce Dessner (bryce_dessner) of The National (TheNational) to talk about classical music, ‘First Two Pages of Frankenstein’ and the songwriting of Taylor Swift.
“I often feel like the kid in the playground going back and forth between two gangs to get them to play together,” Dessner explained. “Most musicians are really open-minded; they like to perform with musicians from a world that’s not their own. But the machinery of getting the music out there is very different, and sometimes I get whiplash moving from one world to the other.”takes its title from the opening scene of Mary Shelley’s 1816 novel.
A summer tour in 2020 got Berninger’s vocals working again. Then Bryce sent Matt a demo that caught the singer’s ear. Like many of the Dessner brothers’ musical ideas, this was a short phrase that seems to repeat but which is actually morphing gradually into other possibilities.
“We call them sketches, songs without words,” Bryce explains. “My brother does lots of them, I do some; sometimes we do them together. Then we give them to Matt, and he riffs on them until he finds a melody and a phrase that he likes. It’s not dissimilar from the way R.E.M. or U2 operate, where there’s a vocalist and a band.
“As we got to know him,” Katia told me in 2021, “we were struck that he could write whatever he wanted. I’d never met anyone like him, because he can articulate his music in both the classical and rock worlds with the same facility, the same passion. He’s not afraid to show all his love for different musics; Bryce is an amalgam of them all.”
Bryce, Aaron and Bryan Devendorf were teenage pals making music, while Bryan’s older brother Scott met Matt in the University of Cincinnati’s graphic-design program. While Bryce was in grad school at Yale, the other four were jamming in Matt’s Brooklyn loft. By the time the nascent group played its first live gig, Aaron had pulled his brother into the line-up. But Bryce never gave up on his other career in classical music.
Bryce is not the only musician straddling the border between pop and classical music. Classical composer Terry Riley worked with the Velvet Underground’s John Cale; John Luther Adams was a rock’n’roll drummer before becoming a much-commissioned classical composer; San Fermin is led by Ellis Ludwig-Leone, a protégé of classical composer Nico Muhly; A 2014 album by the Copenhagen Philharmonic featured a long composition by Bryce and another by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood .
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