Maria Schneider interview: “I’m not interested in everybody in the world listening to my music for free, I can’t exist that way”

As curriculum vitae go, they don’t come much better than Maria Schneider’s. A National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Master Award – the United States’ highest honour in jazz – elected into the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of five Grammy awards, an album inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress (a collection of aural treasures worthy of preservation because of their cultural, historical and aesthetic importance), an esteemed ASCAP Concert Music Award, an honorary doctorate from the University of Minnesota, a long line of distinguished commissions from Jazz at Lincoln Center to The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra plus many honours in Downbeat and Jazz Times magazines. Add a Grammy award for a collaboration with David Bowie and you might think it was time to pause and savour the rarefied air at the top of the jazz profession. But no.

Maria Schneider is angry. Not just angry, angry, but testify before the US Congress angry. Appear on CNN angry. Write newspaper features angry. Appear on US Copyright Office roundtables angry. Maria Schneider has quite some bee in her bonnet.

“It makes me angrier than almost anything”, she says. “The corporate greed of the big data companies. What troubles me the most is that we are driven, not by the music, not even by the technology, but driven by the corporate greed of the big data companies that knew that data was the new oil. To gather the data they needed to get the eyeballs, to get the eyeballs they needed a carrot, and music became the carrot. So they found ways to erode copyright, they found ways to make everything for free – YouTube made it difficult for your average smaller musician to protect their music. They moved all around the very weak laws for the digital age and they built whole empires around the loopholes in the law and then made the world expect music for free. Any thinking person who was looking out for copyright was labelled a Luddite, and they used words like ‘fair and free’ to make it seem like this was the new liberal way of doing things – everything should be free where in reality it was the opposite of ‘liberal’, the opposite of what they purport to be. The corporations are basically stealing work to become rich and incredibly powerful, and using surveillance to manipulate people”.

Schneider has become a powerful voice in music advocacy and the impact of digital data on music, culture and privacy, and is deeply concerned about the impact of streaming platforms on working musicians’ revenue streams.

“There are so many record labels that are not paying for the making of the record,” she says. “So there’s all these artists putting this money into making a record who have absolutely no chance of getting even a small fragment of that money back on streaming services. The way the music streaming economy works is [based on] how many times people listen to a piece of music and everybody is paid according to a play. So now everybody starts making their music shorter, so they can get more plays and what’s really absurd about it is somebody like me is making a record that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and if I agree to have my music on a streaming site I’m being paid the exact same rate as a kid who makes a record in his bedroom. We’re all being paid the same, I’m not allowed in that system to figure out my costs, figure out the size of my market – if you were selling clothes, or selling food or selling shoes, lampshades or doorknobs, anybody who manufactures things has a cost for design, for materials, for manufacturing and distribution and knows the size of their audience. So if you’re a small company making chi-chi lampshades you’re going to charge a fortune for them, but if you’re selling them in a discount store or a place like Ikea, you’re charging much less for it. But in music we can’t do that, we’re all the same. We’re not allowed in the streaming market to be part of the free market. This is not only driving changes in the music, and changing the brains and the physiology of young people and old people – everybody; it’s also affecting our politics and our polarisation and it makes me angrier than almost anything – the problems are largely coming from the corporate greed of big data companies, they say, ‘Oh, music should be free, you can pay for your record by performing’. Not all the composers and songwriters can perform, not everyone can perform for ever, and now we’ve got Covid-19 and everybody has lost all their gigs, and their music is being given away for free, so it’s like WOW! It’s like how long can this go on? It can’t, it can’t sustain itself.”

It was perhaps inevitable that such powerful emotions should begin to surface in Schneider’s music, and gradually her latest album Data Lords (ArtistShare) began to take shape.

“This whole thing of what has happened and what is happening and how planned it is by these corporations started coming out in my music”, she explains. “For me writing music has never been, ‘Oh, I’ve got this idea for an album, I’m going to write about this subject, make a theme’, or something. I’ve never, ever pre-planned things – I can’t do that. It doesn’t come naturally to me and I have no interest in doing that. For me, music has always been something I just sit down, and I start writing and it tells me where I’m at. Sometimes I write the music and I don’t really see the relevance to something in my life until much later, and a whole body of music might come out within a period of a couple of years and then I look back and say, ‘Oh my gosh! I can see what that was about!” in the same way if you were to psychologically analyse somebody’s actions, ‘Well, you know, they were trying to get a number on us’, you know? Whatever it is. I can look at this music and say, ‘Well, Big Data has done a number on me!’”

Recorded over four days, Data Lords is intended to evoke different aspects of our world under the control of our ‘data lords’, the big data companies. A double vinyl release with her critically acclaimed Maria Schneider Orchestra, the first LP is marked by dark, minor tonalities that express the foreboding Schneider feels at a future increasingly dominated by corporations who move fast, break things and who are seemingly laws unto themselves. The title track, ‘Data Lords’, commissioned by the Library of Congress Da Capo Fund with support from the David and Reva Logan Foundation, features Mike Rodriguez on electrified trumpet and Dave Pietro on alto sax. It’s based on descending minor thirds: “When I was writing it, I was thinking about this idea that we’re just being bombarded with this data thanks to Artificial Intelligence that is reading us and also I was reading about how Stephen Hawking and others – and there are a lot of others – who say that when this Artificial Intelligence becomes smarter than we are, that moment of singularity, it could easily turn on us and destroy us. So this piece is kind of apocalyptic, just building and building and building and breaking down into sort of little machine sounds. It has a kind of relentless intensity to it, because it’s how I feel it’s what we’re in, this relentless intensity that doesn’t give way and it’s just eating us up and in the end may truly swallow us.”

Another aspect of our Digital Age is how connected we have all become, how dependent we are on our phones and devices. Apparently some of us check our social media feed, emails, texts and various apps more than 200 times a day.

“As the music started expressing what I was feeling inside at the same time I wanted to cleanse myself, like, ‘Oh my God! I just spent a whole day on email’ – everybody has access to you, which is lovely but it’s a disaster at the same time. So at the same time I do fight to turn it off and try and remember what it was like to have space in my life. The days are longer, the atmosphere in my brain is clearer, there’s even something called ‘boredom’, which can fire the creative juices and the imagination and out of that would come incredible joy and I wanted that in my life again.

“I talk to students about it – ‘You guys have to learn to turn off you devices for your creative mind to fire. You have to allow uncomfortablility, you have to allow even boredom to exist’. The fact is we all just grab our phones every spare moment we have to see if somebody called – it’s taking that away and creating an empty canvas that we need to be human, to be artists and to be creators, to think and ponder, come up with your own ideas instead of every idea that’s being fed to you through Twitter and social media, but I fear there’s no going back now”.

It’s during these periods of reflection, away from our devices and the internet, where Schneider says, “I can easily find myself again” that’s “away from devices bombarding me with information” where she finds space for “nature, people, silence, books, poetry, art, the earth and sky”.

Such encounters have influenced the moods that flow through the compositions on the second LP of the Data Lords twofer. ‘Stone Song’ celebrates the art of actually listening without distraction, while ‘Look Up’, whose rising line reminds us to look up to the sky on a sunny day to contemplate the wide, blue yonder, and ‘Blue Bird’ soars through different moods and keys and celebrates Schnieder’s favourite bird — she’s a dedicated ‘twitcher’, or bird watcher, in her spare time.

But it’s the pieces on the first LP that remain in the memory. They represent Schneider’s most powerful and memorable writing to date. This aspect of her musical personality, releasing what she calls ‘the beast within’, she credits David Bowie, when they worked together in 2014 on Bowie’s composition ‘Sue (Or In a Season Of Crime)’ that brought her a Grammy in 2016 for Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals.

“When David came to me he said to me – I was really surprised, I knew he’d heard the band but I didn’t know I was on his radar in a big way – he told me, ‘I really love ‘Wrgly’ and ‘Dance You Monster’ and he brought me the beginnings of a song that wasn’t that dark but he wanted it to be dark, and he wanted to collaborate on it. I had so much fun doing it and had fun delving into that part of myself.

“At the same time – this was 2014, the same year I testified before Congress and started really advocating [for musicians’ rights and copyright] – it had been building and it started coming out in my music. David wrote me a very funny thing when his song ‘Sue (Or In a Season Of Crime)’ came out and my album Thompson Fields had just come out. I said, ‘I feel my music is Mamsy Pansy’, but after what we had worked on together on ‘Sue’ I found it really hard to go back and listen to where I was because I felt so changed on the inside, and he wrote back and said, ‘Well, my work is done here now’. I think I said he ruined me or something like that!”

‘Data Lords’ was written shortly after Bowie died in January 2016, and to this day Schneider regrets he did not hear it, as she feels he would have enjoyed hearing this ‘darker’ side of her musical personality coming to the fore. The album itself is released on the ArtistShare label, which has released all her albums since 2004.

A strong advocate of the label’s approach – artists themselves get to participate in a greater share of revenue an album generates – she says: “My first album with them was called Concert in the Garden, and it was unbelievable how well it worked, and then I did Sky Blue through it, and then I did Winter Morning Walk and then I started doing commissions through the website, Thompson Fields had a lot of commissions funded through the site, and Data Lords had one commission from David and Ginger Koma, ‘Don’t be Evil’, and there were two other commissions.

“But it’s been amazing, all these records and so much of my music would never have been released. I don’t understand why more people don’t do it. Maybe some people don’t want to put in the work for it, but it’s great for building an audience and keeping an audience, and having transparent sales. It makes you think and be entrepreneurial in your own career, especially if you think of artists who are really successful doing this – people can be making a lot of money on their recordings and for me it’s so much more gratifying”.

And, with a final swipe at the data lords, she adds: “I’m not interested in everybody in the world listening to my music for free, I can’t exist that way. No. It’s not going to happen.”

‘Data Lords’ was written shortly after Bowie died in January 2016, and to this day Schneider regrets he did not hear it as she feels he would have enjoyed hearing this “darker” side of musical personality coming to the fore. The album itself is released on the Artistshare label, which has released all her albums since 2004. A strong advocate of the label, since artists themselves get to participate in a greater share of revenue an album generates, she says, “My first album with them was called Concert in the Garden, and it worked so well, it was unbelievable how well it worked, and then I did Sky Blue through it, and then I did Winter Morning Walk and then I started doing commissions through the website, Thompson Fields had a lot of commissions funded through the site, and Data Lords had one commission from David and Ginger Koma, ‘Don’t be Evil’, and there were two other commissions. But it’s been amazing, all these records and so much of my music would never have been released, I don’t understand why more people don’t do it. Maybe some people don’t want to put in the work for it, but it’s great for building an audience and keeping an audience, and having transparent sales. It makes you think and be entrepreneurial in your own career, especially if you think of artists who are really successful doing this — people can be making a lot of money on their recordings and for me it’s so much more gratifying”. And, with a final swipe at the data lords, she adds, “I’m not interested in everybody in the world listening to my music for free, I can’t exist that way. No. It’s not going to happen”.

This article originally appeared in the August 2020 issue of Jazzwise. Never Miss an issue – subscribe today!