COLE KNUTSON

● First and foremost, please introduce yourself to our wonderful readers.

My name is Cole Knutson, I am a musician from Saskatchewan, Canada. I say musician because I’m not only a pianist, but also a saxophonist.

● Since you mentioned it, let’s get right into it. Your first degree was in Saxophone, and yet you are paving your path as a song pianist. How did this switch happen for you? Or was it always your passion to be a song pianist?

Good question. No, it was not my plan to go the route I’ve gone. If we rewind things quite a lot, I started with piano when I was 12, and my piano teacher was really a voice teacher and a good singer. After having studied the piano for about a year, she said I should take up singing lessons and also a wind instrument, because it would help my piano playing substantially. Through her, I got the chance to make music with a lot of singers and realized that I could make a living through playing for singers. I started to do it quite a lot and really loved it. As I played more saxophone, I came to understand the relationship between soloists and pianists and I thought it was really interesting to explore that. I am not as passionate about performing as a solo pianist, although I love playing the literature for my own pleasure in the privacy of my own home, and I knew that a solo piano degree would make me very unhappy, so I applied to a number of schools in both piano and saxophone with the hopes that I would be studying saxophone. Studying the saxophone really reinforced my understanding of the voice, and it made me understand the relationship between pianist and soloist from both sides. Then I moved to Europe with the understanding that I would be able to do a degree in piano accompaniment with a previous degree in another instrument, so I studied at the Guildhall School of Drama and Music, and going into piano accompaniment after having studied saxophone gave me a great insight into both being a soloist and an accompanist.

● What is your fondest memory in relation to Song?

One of my dear friends is a singer called Kristján Jóhannesson, not the tenor, his nephew. I was in  Austria, at the Schubert Institute, where I met such lovely friends and colleagues. I was on stage there with Kristján and we were suddenly in a free-flow mode. It really felt like we dissolved into each other, and it meant that we weren’t thinking and the music really just became one with us. I later found out that this is a proper free-flow state, and I  had never really experienced something like that before. Having access to that feeling, where it was almost like you’re inside of someone in every possible way was something very profound and very meaningful. It took me many years to understand what this was and I tried to also pursue this sensation. The funny thing is, it isn’t something you can actively pursue. The whole point is, that something just evaporates. The reason I picked this memory as my favorite is because I have been lucky to have experienced this sensation many more times as I kept performing. Just like the first time you do many things in life, it was like an awakening.

● This question might sound similar, but we would love to get a different answer for it. Is there a core memory that shaped you as a human being or an artist?

I don’t think I can speak to a specific memory. There isn’t a single moment that defined me. I would say coming into contact with my first real piano teacher, not the woman who was also a singer. Sitting in her home, whose family was well-traveled, well educated, and just reading books from her home library, which is to this day the biggest private library I’ve seen, was exactly what I needed as a kid who grew up in a small town. There was where I also saw my first Steinway piano, and this very cultured home gave me the feeling that I was stepping into the world, which was beyond my comprehension at the time. This whole image, I would say, is my core memory.

● You’ve lived and studied in various cities. Among those cities, which were the most significant for you? What are some similarities and differences that you have recognized between these cities?

The immediate place I think of is London. London was my home for half a decade, and it still feels like my home, even though I haven’t lived there in some time. Every time I fly to London, I feel like I’m coming home. It’s actually a really weird thing. I’m not from London and I don’t live there any longer and yet it makes me feel at home.

There’s also Montreal, Copenhagen, Lyon and Heidelberg. All of these cities have a specific type of warmth that the people there give. When I’m in these places, I see so many people who smile in the streets. When you’re ordering something at a restaurant, they are willing to let you try their languages, and they don’t shame you for not being fluent in their languages. They are cultures that embrace people and are open. Many of us who study this craft feel like wanderers. I think we are attracted to it as well, seeing how often this actually is a theme in the poetry that we encounter in our repertoire. And in these cities, I felt welcomed as a wanderer.

● We’re going to be a bit more specific with this question. You started a Ph.D. a few years ago regarding programming of song recitals (or curating). Could you explain to us what it was about exactly and why you felt it was important to start a conversation on the subject?

To start from the back-end of your question, starting a conversation on this matter was exactly why I was attracted to it. I felt like there was a lack of literature that approached the practice that we do in an insightful manner. We talk so often about programming in cafes, in pubs, or whenever musicians are wanting to philosophize a bit. Sadly, none of that ever finds its way onto paper: which means we have the same conversations over and over to a point where it becomes incredibly repetitive and does not develop. It wasn’t even a question of what it exactly is that I wanted to say. I just wanted to say something in the hopes that someone in the future would refute that or develop it based on actual literature that has been written.

When I was starting my Ph.D., which I have taken a break from at the moment, I was struggling to find any literature on the subject. I had to look elsewhere, where there are established bodies of knowledge to explore in the topic: investigating theoretical, flexible frameworks that may exist in a song recital. In visual art, there are different principles: shape, color, movement, etc.. Of course a painter does not look into those components when drawing, same way a composer wouldn’t generally get bogged down in such specifics. But we as observers can break  it down and think about why a piece moves us, what is the composition of the piece and how can we aesthetically break it down. I was interested in establishing a similar flexible framework. For example, one of the aspects of my methodology that I was wanting to dive into was to take a bunch of programs by “experienced” programmers, not necessarily “good” programmers (what is good or bad art is a conversation that people have been having since even the time of Greek philosophers). I have found that experienced programmers tend to curate programmes with greater precision. They shape contrast, flow, and the juxtaposition of different aesthetics or sound worlds more convincingly, and they are better at identifying potential problems in a programme and addressing them early. This allows them to create a strong structural blueprint that supports a wide range of interpretive possibilities rather than narrowing them. A well constructed, robust, and flexible programme is palpable, whether it is a Schubertiade or something more eclectic.. If anyone goes to a song competition, you can almost always tell who has had more experience and who has a bit less. You can even make predictions on who will progress further in the competition simply by looking at their programs. How can we do this? It’s because we have in our time and experience figured out what is “good” and what is “not good”. Of course, everyone has their own style, but when we are talking about the composition of a good program, what does that mean? So I looked into visual arts, how DJs think about tempo and harmonic relationships. DJs especially really know how to feel the energy of the crowd in real time: when they need to slow things down or bump it up. We do the same thing in a song recital, but the difference is that we have to anticipate where it could go rather than to feel things in real time. I also looked into narrative construction to see how poetry plays a role in the decisions that we make. So I drew ideas from these three main disciplines of art to put on paper and hopefully someone can refute my ideas or build on them when I am done.

● You aren’t just an intellectual musician, but you are very capable of diving into your emotions. How do you balance those two sides of your abilities?

What I’m learning is that both sides need their space. I am surrounded by great friends and colleagues who tell me when I am leaning a bit too much to one side. But going back to this first piano teacher that I had, who was a very interesting and well educated person, she was a very head-strong personality, but she also was spiritually strong. This I think is one of the most important lessons I learned from her: that what we do as musicians is a very spiritual practice. That having been such a strong foundation for me, it has always been at the heart of what I do.

Now, being a nerd, you get obsessed with rules and traditions. You want to respect everyone who came before you, and also those who are handing over the mantle to us right now. At some point though, when you’ve done enough masterclasses, and you’ve worked with enough people, you need to find your own voice, whatever that could mean. You can’t constantly be choosing your path through the eyes of what other people would approve or disapprove of. You can very easily lose yourself in that process. Part of what we do is integrating who we are into our work and ultimately accepting that there is this part of my brain which is very analytical, and there is also a part of my brain that just wants to have fun and be playful. Those two things can be separate, but they can also coexist. That’s why I am looking at rehearsals as less of a flex of intellectualism, and much more as a playground. We can build sand castles and talk about architecture at the same time, but ultimately we are still playing with sand. I think if you respect the platform and the spiritual relationship you have to it, then that becomes also a different type of playground.

It also is very helpful that I have a partner who is the inverse of who I am. When I tend to be intellectual, she tends to be based on sensation and focuses on the present. I was just talking to a dear friend of ours, saying how I am a person who often focuses on the past or the future. In the past, talking about the present has very often made me anxious but my partner gets anxious talking about the past or the future and is constantly living in the moment. Living with someone like that stimulates you as an artist in ways you haven’t been. 

I can also think of so many people around me who are nerds and artists at the same time. You (looking at Jeeyoung) are one of them, our dear friend, Ema Nikolovska is also one. We are all nerds but what we do on the platform is not about nerdiness, it’s about humanity, which sounds very kitsch, but it is, it's a transmission of sorts.

● Now we’re going into a quick fire round. Name for us a composer, a poet, and a singer-songwriter that come to your mind right at this moment.

Composer: Edvard Grieg. Because we were in Copenhagen a few weeks ago performing some of his pieces. He was Norwegian, and my family comes from Norway. He also set music to German poetry, lived in Leipzig, his music has a folky perfume to it which I think is such a great mixture of cultures.

Poet: Emily Dickinson. Her poetry is so concentrated in its meaning and I think it brings out the beauty of the English language, which doesn’t always happen with English speaking poets, but also her poetry is very North American. I would say a close second would be Langston Hughes for the same reason as well (although he gives a completely different flavour).

Singer-Songwriter: Joni Mitchell, because she’s from North Battleford, Saskatchewan. Also I grew up listening to her music and it’s been very special to me all my life. I also think the spirit of what she does is exactly the same spirit of what we should be doing as song musicians.

● What other genres or themes interest you outside of music?

Um… Too much (all chuckle). Many of us who are interested in Song, we are very curious people. Keep in mind, I lived 12 years of my life not knowing a single thing about classical music, so I was enjoying fishing, camping, and I also had a side-hustle restoring and repairing espresso machines and reselling them. I was also a registered piano technician in Canada, so working on pianos and harpsichords was also an interest of mine.

In terms of other musical genres, I grew up listening to R&B, Blues, Bluegrass, ACDC, Meatloaf, who I dressed up as for halloween one year (all laugh). My dad was also a great musician, who couldn’t read music but could play the guitar and piano very well. He played a lot of Eric Clapton and other guitar music for me growing up.

● What artists inspire you outside of classical music?

Michael Cleveland for example, is an amazing blue-grass fiddler. INCREDIBLE. He is so virtuosic, his violin has 5 strings, it has a low-c on it like a viola. It’s just incredible. I also enjoy Gordon Lightfoot. I want to incorporate more of his works into my own programming as well. Jeremy Dutcher is also very cool. I love Elton John, he’s low-key a hero of mine. Billy Joel comes to mind as well. Frank Sinatra is also incredible. I also love works of visual artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami and other contemporary artists.

● Now that we’ve touched a bit on your interests outside of classical music, let’s get back to your biggest passion. What is it about Song that makes it so special?

I don’t think it’s about anything that makes Song different from everything else. I think Song brings things together in a way that I find incredibly enjoyable. First of all, I find it stimulating because there is an endless pursuit of knowledge. Another thing that I enjoy is there are things that you can do alone and there are things you can do as a collaboration. For example, I can recite / interpret a poem on my own, but I ultimately need to or get to make music with other people. If I were to just practice all the time on my own like a solo pianist, I just couldn’t do it. So solitude and community all play a big part in our practice. One other thing is: the music and the poetry gives us an insight into a foreign culture, space and even into a different time in history. Humanity has always loved, humanity has always struggled and they have always written about it. How different people from different time, place and culture have expressed these emotions differently is fascinating. How language functions is also an interesting factor.

● You just mentioned the importance of solitude and community. Which one is Cole Knutson at this current stage more attracted to?

Generally speaking, solitude. If I think about the work that we do and how I respond to it, I’m much more comfortable on the stage than talking to people after the concert. Even though I seem sociable, I find it very tiresome. I also get anxiety from my social nerves. As the old saying goes: ‘It’s humanity I love, it’s people I don’t like.’ It’s a little bit like that. I think it’s also important to know how to be alone and to be okay in solitude, it’s actually a big part of what we do in our practice. We give so much as artists that we need time for ourselves as well to recenter, regroup and recharge.

● We’re going to talk a bit about your career achievements. Just in the past year, you’ve won two international competitions. What was your experience like in competitions, and was there something different about the two competitions you won?

Part of being in London was playing for different singers when they are competing in competitions and there are pianist prizes awarded as well. I did a lot of that and enjoyed it, but what I got from it when I was 22, 23, 24 is different from the experience over the last year of doing competitions. I’m a bit older now. I was 28, 29 when I won those competitions. I took a big gap between those years away from competitions. It was mostly due to practicality. I moved to a different country and was finding my footing. When I look back on it, it was incredibly important for me to take that break because it meant that it gave me time away from that culture. I did a lot more soul searching, I went through a lot more in my life, and I sorted out what my priorities are during that time. Also, I went through a near-death experience and recovering from that was also a process of finding myself. I thought about all the things I’ve done or missed out on, and it made me realize how special making music with precious people around me is. That was the thing I thought I would miss the most: not being able to make music with the people I love. Coming out of that, it then became my goal to become more honest with myself, the music that I was making and also with whom I was making it. This was the stage in my life when I underwent the transition from being intellectual to focusing on the “why” in a more spiritual sense. I also didn’t feel a need for approval from the competition scene. I didn’t feel the need for validation from anyone else for some reason. What made me actually compete in these competitions again was the urge to explore more in our work together (pointing at Jeeyoung). The whole goal was to learn from that process. I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant, but I feel like at this point, I have enough things on my CV that I don’t need the approval of more people on a jury and I think that really made the difference in the process of music making, and that was also why those two competitions were more successful.

● Tell us any line out of any song that has a special place in your heart and please tell us why.

“Ich bin ein Fremdling überall” from “Der Wanderer” (Georg Lübeck, Franz Schubert) would definitely be my choice for that. I think it’s very self-explanatory. It’s from a very standard Schubert song, and it goes back to a lot of what we were talking about earlier, how we as artists are wanderers, this feeling of being a stranger wherever we are. A lot of us musicians feel like wherever we are, we are partially home, but also partially foreign. I think that feeling is okay, we all just need to learn to accept that. That line makes me feel much less alone, knowing that people before me, and from a different culture to mine have always felt that way gives me comfort.

● When you look into your future, as you told us that you so often do, how do you imagine your life to be? What kind of musician would you be? What kind of person do you expect to be?

That’s a good question. Who knows? When I first moved to Germany, I had no idea I’d be where I am now. I never thought I’d call Hannover my home, but here we are. Where I will be? I have no idea, but that’s the beauty of life. I just want to see where opportunities lead me and follow that. I just want to go where I am wanted and where my work is appreciated. In terms of who I will be, in addition to performance, pedagogy is something that’s very important to me. I’ve had the privilege especially over the last two years to do a lot more work as a pedagogue. I did some work with Ema Nikolovska in Kalamata at the Kalamata Music Days, working with some younger colleagues to help them along their paths, I’ve been having more teaching responsibilities at the Musikhochschule in Hannover and I’ll be doing musical coachings and correpetition at the UdK (Universität der Künste) in Berlin. By taking on responsibilities as a pedagogue, I’m gaining so much from it. I’m learning and growing from it. You have to leave your ego at the door to do this job, and sometimes it’s not that easy. But ego can easily get in the way of someone else’s progress and that’s really not okay. You have to question yourself all the time and you need to understand people’s psychology well. These are all things that I care about as a person and I hope to develop myself in these aspects. I hope to be someone who’s articulate, someone who is more considerate and someone who knows how to get out of the way of themself. Wherever that will be, I am very excited to experience it for myself.

● Now that we’ve spoken about where your life could be, let’s talk about our industry. What is a trend that you see in our industry that you are happy to see, and what is a trend that you’re more concerned about.

What I love is globalization and how the world is becoming more accessible. Again, I come from a small town where I didn’t have easy access to culture. I had to drive days to go to a really good opera, I had to go to the library to listen to Schubert CDs and the literature at the local library was very limited. Now with the world being so connected, you can learn so much and you can have a sense of where you want to go. It was only after I had easy access to the internet that I decided I wanted to move to London and I could prepare myself for it. People can get to a new place much easier now. By extension as artists, it’s much easier to show the world our work and technically is a lot more affordable financially. For our line of work, it has gotten much cheaper to make CDs and to put out to the world.

The converse side of that is that there is way too much information. There is too much noise. There are a lot of things that I, as an audience member, would not tend to want to listen to, but still gets traction in today’s world. Sometimes I question whether it’s the algorithm, or that people’s tendencies have actually changed. I think because of this, uniqueness is less celebrated in the arts. The more generic you can be, the more you can push certain topics, whether or not they actually resonate with you is a completely different question, you’ll have a platform for it. I think it distills the quality in a world where we have so much access to information, people are also so ignorant. We don’t check our sources and easily believe in the first piece of information we obtain.

It also has changed what we think of as hard work. We had to sit down and write essays and with the access of sources such as ChatGPT, some people don’t need to sit down for hours to obtain knowledge. I don’t think they don’t work hard, but the idea of hard work is changing as technology improves. A lot of people today do not understand the discomfort of having to sit down for hours to search for information. They take it for granted and that kind of knowledge can be seen as less valuable. I hope the improvement of technology doesn’t hinder quality of work.

● Now we have a less serious question. What would you say is a songbird that represents you?

Chickadee. without a doubt. It has a very repetitive, structured call, and yet very beautiful. They are also very cute!

● We’re already at our final question. Is there a question that you’ve always wanted to be asked? Or is there something that you just want to put out there?

Maybe less about a question, but more about a topic that we have looked through today. People get really uncomfortable around the term spirituality because it can have many negative connotations to it, but I believe religion and spirituality are very different things. I’m not saying I’m a very spiritual person, but there are people we know that treat our work like a religion, and there are people who treat it like a spiritual practice. These things are entirely different. Whether one wants to talk about process, whether one wants to talk about the “why” of what we do, for me, all of that can be summarized in the spirit of what we do. What is our spiritual path as artists? I don’t even know what that should mean. All I’m saying is that people sometimes are afraid to go to that place, wherever that may be. I believe it’s a place of vulnerability. I play for a lot of voice lessons and you have no idea how much they talk about the soft pallet or breath support, but nobody’s asking why you are doing this. Why are you making music? You don’t even have to answer that, show me why you want to make music. I think people ask very often ‘what’ questions. They want facts: what is this song about, who’s the composer, what style does it have. We are given data, which turns into information, which turns into knowledge, which then, if we’re lucky enough, turns into wisdom. I think we live in a very data-driven world and industry and our practice is very much the same. There is very little environment or conversation that is created to gain wisdom. I think if we are going to investigate the ‘why’ of what we’re doing, I think it’s very important to develop a relationship to spiritual practice. I think it will also help artists through difficult times. If you’re a singer just because you have a beautiful voice, what happens if your voice changes? If you don’t have a solid spiritual relationship to the work, I think you’re a bit more fragile. I think people need to be less afraid to have these conversations.

● Listening to all that you have to say, I now have one more question for you. Do you think that we put the artform and the works of other artists too much on a pedestal?

Yes. Without a doubt. The people who created these works of art that changed our lives are also people. I think it’s beautiful that people can observe a piece of art and admire its beauty, but to pay millions of dollars for a sketch, I think is too much. St. Matthew Passion is one of the most beautiful pieces of creation and it has changed the world. That manuscript should be protected. But it came out of a living, breathing human being who loved the same things we love. All of these people are just people. They are also flawed the same way we are. I think to glorify them is very dangerous. I also don’t like verticality in relationships, and when we create a verticality with these composers and the art itself, I think we distance ourselves from the actual point of art. I think we can be inspired by people, by anyone, but we can not look at these artists as idols and create the aforementioned verticality.