PIANIST AND COMPOSER MAX PETERSEN
I live in Winterthur Switzerland, which is a little town, quite lively actually, with a small but bright cultural scene. I'm half Australian half German, so that's sort of where my roots are. I also studied music in New York City in 2013 and before that in Basel, Zurich and Lugano. My new album LiberA is my sixth album and the first one with this ensemble.
Tell us about your greatest inspirations or influences?
I'm a jazz pianist, but over the last three years classical music started becoming more important to me. I studied with classical concert pianists and invested time into classical improvisation and composition as well… so the legacy of jazz and African American music in general has been a main influence, with pianists such as Brad Mehldau, Fred Hersch, Vijay Iyer being very pivotal to me. But lately also classical composers such as Dimitri Shostakovich or Mozart, Bach etc. and the classical pianists I studied with such as Bulgarian pianist, composer and improviser Galina Vracheva and pianist Ronald Brautigam.
This year I have been exploring lots of Australian music and listening to artists from Melbourne and Sydney such as Liza Lim, Simon Barker, Barney McAll.
Tell us a bit about your creative process?
It’s usually project based. When I work on the music, I am usually preparing concerts, composing or studying something specific. I also like reading and I spend a lot of time thinking. That's why my music is usually influenced by the things that concern my life at any given moment in time.
How has the pandemic affected your creativity and how do you see the world changing?
So, the new album, LiberA, is the first one one of this sort for me – it’s really a studio album. It also wouldn't have been what it is without the pandemic. Since playing live shows was hardly possible there was more space to invest time and energy in a studio project like this: having the time to prepare the music thoroughly and spend enough time on the postproduction process.
The pandemic definitely transformed the music scene. It has shifted the operations further into the digital space and therefore posed some very important questions to us musicians, about how we communicate our art. In LiberA there was more interdisciplinary collaboration going on, not only aesthetically between classical, jazz, Electronics, but also through the music videos, which feature dancers and animation.
Who do you consider to be an icon of our time?
Not sure if she is an icon, but currently I'm fascinated by Australian composer Liza Lim. Her music deals with a lot of urgent questions of our time, such as our relationship with nature, and specifically how we could deal with climate change and how our music reflects the Anthropocene era.
What does wellbeing mean to you, and what do you practice?
I try to care for my neighbors, friends and family as much as I can. Professionally, I try to cultivate relationships with people whom I really respect and trust. Besides that, I am a runner and live right next to the forest, so I try to go running a lot, not so much for the fitness, but rather to spend time with nature and exploring the meditative state that it induces.
