Chilly Gonzales

DW: You've lived in world cities like Toronto, Berlin and Paris. Now, you live in Cologne. Why?

Chilly Gonzales: I think it's the secret center of Europe. You can get to London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg… I don't go up to Denmark very often, but you can probably get there within four hours too. You can get anywhere within four hours of travelling. But I feel I chose Germany over France, and I chose Cologne in particular for personal reasons. But regardless of those reasons, I feel like I am living in Germany and to a lesser extent in Europe. I really do believe that Europe is a country, and I believe that Germany is - and I hope that this doesn't offend anyone - but Germany is an extremely important province of the country of Europe if you want to zoom out and look at it from a foreigner's perspective, someone from Canada.

Would it be possible to do what you're doing here in the same way in Canada?

No, because I have a bigger audience in Europe. My music requires some knowledge of older ways of looking at music, if you want to get everything out of what I put into it. And that's why I've always had more fans in Europe than in Canada. In Canada, the musical and cultural literacy is much less as far as the whole history of music is concerned. It was invented here, so it's normal that the average German knows more about classical music, classical philosophy, the Romantic movement, Expressionism - all these wonderful things that came out of Europe and Germany specifically.

But you ask a typical person in Canada to say something about Joseph Beuys or Felix Mendelssohn or Schopenhauer, they just don't know about it. … These are things that I actually put into my music. I'm aware of them; I studied them; I really love them. I think it's also possible to like my music just for music, and you don't have to know all the ideas behind it. But I put so much into it and so I tend to go where I feel like people understand the totality of what I'm doing.

But your work doesn't exactly correspond to the picture of art music here in Germany…

I agree. That is something that the New World has really brought, and especially Canada, because we think that everyone else is better than us, so we learn as much as we can about everyone else's culture. So, a Canadian is very good at being an exile. A Canadian is very good at using humor as a distance to everything. It's almost like I want to shake Germany and be like: 'You have all the building blocks of a great culture! Take it from me - I come from a place where we don't have a culture.'

For me, to come over here was always very successful in the experiment of an audience looking at themselves through my eyes, the eyes of an outsider.

You've recently put out a collection of etudes under the title "Re-Introduction Etudes." The focus is on having fun with playing. It used to be that learning the piano was more associated with strictness and developing the right attitude.

I think it's because - I mean this is a sad cliché, and there are always exceptions - many teachers are frustrated musicians. My grandfather was a frustrated pianist. The first guy who showed me the piano was my grandfather. He wanted to be a concert pianist, but he ended up driving a taxi and doing other things for whatever reason. So, I know the type very well. And I think it was extremely important to me that I not become a frustrated musician.

A lot of people who teach are these frustrated musicians, and so they don't want the young musicians to feel the joy. Because the joy for them went away. And so they don't think anyone else should have it. They focus on: 'Do it the proper way; do it the proper way!' It's passing on their own frustration.

A big part of my book is, of course, to bring back joy.

Which criteria did you use in selecting the pieces?

The priority for me was: Is this fun to play? And can the person continue to play it and feel joy? And on top of that I did quite a bit of text trying to explain a little bit the musical gestures that I was using - whether it's ornamentation or ostinato or arpeggio, these musical tools that are still there in music today. So for me these are natural things that the human ear likes to hear. And so they will always continue. In 200 years, music will still probably have ostinatos and arpeggios and major or minor, and the basic blocks of what music is.

So, I took each block that I could identify and said: Okay, if it's something that existed 500 years ago and still exists today, I'm going to write a piece about it. I wrote a piece about the arpeggio; I wrote a piece about the third; I wrote a piece about the fifth, about the bassline. It's also for musicians - for very good musicians who are doing everything that I'm talking about anyway, but they just don't know the name for it.

When did you discover your skill at being an entertainer?

When I had the confidence at the piano that I could entertain people. But I would not be able to get up at a comedy club and just do stand-up comedy; I could never do it. I can only do sit-down comedy. Still today, there are certain moments when I play a piece of music, and 2,000 people at the Philharmonic are clapping for it. Part of me still doesn't believe it. And I only believe it if I can make a joke and hear them laugh. That's because laughter is involuntary. If you make someone laugh, it can't be fake.

Two things you can't fake in life are orgasms and laughter. It's a little bit like when you have a truck with a sticker that says, 'Hi, how am I driving?' You know this? For me, making a joke is, 'How am I driving?' I need the reassurance maybe that people are still with me. So, for me, that was always connected to the music.

You consider authenticity in music to be overrated. Why?

That's correct. Authenticity is impossible. Authenticity is only possible in the most long-term, intimate human relationships - with your family, your extremely close friends, with your lover or spouse. You can't have authenticity on a stage. You can't have authenticity in a situation where two people just met each other, and one of them is talking into a microphone. It's very difficult.

And so what you want is to understand that there is an artificial atmosphere, but you do your best in the artificial atmosphere to be honest that it's artificial. Then you can get somewhere. All the great artists have always done that. Why does it feel like Frank Sinatra is coming through the speaker speaking to you? He's not pretending; he's never tried to be authentic. He was always larger than life, more like a rapper. And yet there was something in his voice that recognized this is artificial - that this is also a great way for us to communicate, despite it being artificial.

I think art developed for this. Art developed as a way to create communication without authenticity. This is the magic trick that art does when it works - for me. That's why when 'Ode to Joy' was done, and everyone said, 'Oh my God, Beethoven is speaking for all of us,' - no one actually thinks that Beethoven can read your mind.

Some singer-songwriters think, 'I can break through this artificial thing and really be me,' but you can't. And they end up being the losers because they don't actually respect the artifice, and, therefore, maybe they don't really respect the audience. The big problem is when you disrespect the audience and this comes from a feeling of insecurity and superiority. This is a big problem in the music world that I normally would have to live in: the world of classical music.

And this is a real problem that a lot of people who make jazz and classical music get stuck in, which is: 'The audience doesn't like what I do? It's their fault!' My answer is: 'If the audience doesn't like what you do, it's your fault.'

Do you maintain this sort of analytic distance to everything, or is there some part of music that's very immediate for you?

There is no huge money or glory to be made in trying to teach 35-year-old hipsters the piano, really. I'm doing this because I have a real passion for it, and I've seen it on people's faces. This book represents that part of music also - that's very pure for me. That has brought me joy and saved my life in a certain way, in the sense that it gave me a place to put my difficulty and activity. That enabled me to process certain feelings without having to push them down completely. You push them into the piano.

With "Never Stop," Chilly Gonzales composed a global hit for Apple. He holds a world record for the longest solo artist performance at over 27 hours, and he has written songs with a range of artists including Daft Punk, Feist and Drake. The Grammy Award winner is known for his showmanship. Gonzales, who is from Montreal, lived for a long time in Paris and Berlin, where he collaborated often with fellow Canadian artists Peaches and Mocky. He now lives in Cologne.

Interview: Philipp Jedecke