SuperNova: An Interview with David Cutler

I am excited to be bringing more interviews to the blog this school year, starting with an interview with musician & author David Cutler, who just launched an exciting, Suzuki-licensed project through Kickstarter called SuperNova. You can read an excerpt from my conversation with David about this exciting new project and creative performance practice.

This is not a sponsored post, I personally supported the Kickstarter and am sharing it with you because I think it’s a valuable resource. This interview has been edited lightly for length and ease of reading in print. 

Christine Goodner:

Thank you so much for speaking with me today. I wonder if you could tell everyone a bit about who you are and what you do? 

David Cutler: 

It’s such a pleasure to be able to have this conversation with you. I’m David Cutler. I’m a pianist and a composer, an author and a whole bunch of other things.

I work at the University of South Carolina, where I serve as the director of music entrepreneurship. And like so many musicians, I wear a lot of hats. I balance a portfolio career, which means a multiple income stream career and do a lot of different exciting things, which keeps it interesting.

Christine Goodner:

I wanted to see if we could give a little background about how you got into music. I don’t know you well enough to know if you were a young child when you started in music or came to it later. I would love to hear what got you into music in the first place.

David Cutler: 

I actually started on the violin in my preschool. Everyone played violin, Suzuki violin, and I was pretty good. But my baby sister, who is two years younger, was even better. So I was a failed violinist by the time I was five and then started to play piano and immediately took to it. (laughs) 

I mean, I was practicing long hours even at that early age and had found that passion. But even back in those days, I was not like the other kids. So I would be practicing my Mozart or whatever it was and working really hard, but also just changing it up a bit. [For example] changing the notes and the rhythms to make it a little better, which I’m not sure if I did. 

But beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

Well, that did not make my mom happy, who is in the next room and would say, “David, play what’s on the page.” [etc.] 

[People say] Here’s the answer key. Your job is to get all of these notes and rhythms, the dynamics of articulations, as some other creative genius had imagined them. 

And I like those choices. But there was something inside of me that just had to find my own voice. So it was those inclinations that ultimately led me towards both jazz and composition and places where creativity was not only tolerated but also expected. 

So my early childhood was very interesting because I had a very musical life, but two totally different worlds.

From classical music, I learned about attention to detail and the pursuit of excellence. From jazz, I learned about walking that tightrope and finding your own voice. 

And I’m so grateful to both of those experiences. They’re both really important to me in everything that I do. I think they really informed my world view, having that kind of a balance.

I try to have a very balanced approach as an educator. On one side of the spectrum, I think it’s all about making your own choices and creating your own music. And on the other side, it’s about me creating. I think personally I really try to find the balance. 

I could not imagine being a musician and never making your own decision, but I also could not imagine not being able to go and and and try to realize someone else’s voice. 

I just think they’re both so essential, and they teach such different lessons that, in music education, having one without the other would be really lacking in something.

Christine Goodner: 

And I think as someone who was not really taught, as a young child, about improvisation or anything like that, it’s easier to learn when you’re younger. The longer we wait to introduce it, the more it starts to become hard to engage with. I wish I had had more of that as a young child for sure.

David Cutler: 

Totally. As you know, Dr. Suzuki made the argument that all children are musical. I would make the argument that all children are creative, and in fact, all people are creative. 

In most schools, preschools are pretty creative places, and so is kindergarten. And what happens to our whole education system, as people advanced through the system, is it becomes more about excellence and less about celebrating that creative genius. 

But all of us are creative and it’s such it’s such an important skill. Leaders from across the aisle and from all sectors of life will agree, even if they don’t agree on anything else, that creativity is among the most important twenty-first century skills. 

I think for a lot of us when we think of creativity and music, our mind automatically goes to improvisation, or composition, or arranging. There are many ways to be creative, and those are three great ways to do it through music. But there are so many additional ways. 

One of the things that I’m advocating at this moment is an approach called creative performance practice. And that’s something maybe for even people with a classical background. It’s dipping your toe in and can be incredibly meaningful. 

Creative performance practice is just a different paradigm focused on different lessons and outcomes. Music-making becomes like a collaboration between two creative geniuses: the composer, the performer, and the student. You are important in defining the vision. 

[For example,] one that I often use is to have the rule that the notes may not change, the rhythms may not change, but everything else is fair game. 

So if you want to add a crescendo or change the bowing, put something up an octave, or play it pizzicato, be my guest. You have permission to do that, to take a piece, keep certain elements the same and say, “I know this was intended to be a fast piece, but I’m going to play it super, super slow.”

And of course, there’s a consequence to that, and it’ll sound different and belong to you in a way that it [otherwise] wouldn’t. That can be incredibly empowering, not only for a six-year-old but also for a classically trained violin teacher, for example.

Christine Goodner: 

I love that. For people interested in learning more, can you tell us more about the supernova project you have coming out? 

David Cutler: 

I’m really excited about this and hope that this project will make a meaningful impact on string music education. Supernova is a reimagination of all seventeen tunes from Suzuki Violin School, Volume One. 

Each of them is placed in a setting that is wild and inspired by different genres of music from across the globe, from boogie to baroque, from tango to techno. And there are many, many pedagogical goals of this. But the first one is being able to perform in all these different styles. 

So we’ve talked about creative performance practice (above). The melodies are exactly the same as they were in book one: the notes and the rhythms. We’ll have some play-along recordings as one way that you can work with this collection, which I think can be especially helpful during this time of isolation, where we’re all at home and trying to figure out how to have meaningful musical experiences. 

We made a recording with World-Class musicians. The rhythm section has piano, bass and drums [performed by] some of the finest musicians on the planet. And these parts are hard. 

So you get to play with two superstars while you’re playing your own version of Suzuki Violin School Vol. One. And you can play it the way that you learned it originally. Or, you could try your hand to create a performance practice and make some different decisions about that. 

So when we recorded the collection, there are actually three sets of recordings. One is with melody recordings recorded by Dr. Rebecca Hunter, a Suzuki educator and great violinist extraordinaire.

We used creative performance practice for this. So again, don’t change the notes, don’t change the rhythm, make it your own so that she could try some very, very different things. 

The first piece, of course, is Twinkle Variations: the very first piece that students learn in the Suzuki method. And although she didn’t change a single note or rhythm, that’s probably the hardest one to play the way that she decided to execute it. 

When people perform it, they could try and play it the way they’ve always played it, authentic performance practice, or they could try to imitate the way that Dr. Hunter performed it, which is another kind of authentic performance practice. 

Or they could say, all right, I’m going to make some of my own decisions and I’m going to do it differently in some places. And those are all fair game. So that’s the first set of seventeen recordings. 

And then I worked with one of the world’s great jazz violinists, Christian Howes, just an amazing, amazing player. And he improvised over all of these settings and 17 different styles and just is incredible. 

And then the third set of these play along recordings, we finally refer to them as Suzuki. It’s the rhythm section, but minus the melody so that performers can play along with it. 

There are a number of parts to this project. There will also be a print edition of the sheet music that not only has piano accompaniment plus the melodies, but also a number of resources around creativity and technique.

Those are two things we focus on here: creativity and technique. 

How can you use book one melodies to learn about really advanced techniques? As one of the great things that things I really admire about the Suzuki method is this idea of you use the same repertoire to develop different kinds of techniques as you go along.

Christine Goodner: 

That sounds great, and especially as a teacher, I want my students to go back and use early book one pieces to refine their technique and to add new ideas. SuperNova seems like a great thing to use for that : to come back and keep making it interesting. I’m excited to see and hear it! 

Thank you for reading this excerpt. I hope to publish the audio interview in its entirety soon. To learn more about the SuperNova Project click here.