How Joe Brent and 9 Horses are Redefining Chamber Music
Armed with deep historical knowledge and a revolutionary spirit, mandolin virtuoso Joe Brent and his chamber ensemble 9 Horses craft music where classical, folk, and jazz traditions dissolve into something entirely new.
A conversation with acclaimed mandolin player Joe Brent is like a class with the most engaging music teacher one could hope for. His recent appearance on the Spotlight On podcast featured, among other topics, fascinating and knowledgeable discussions on the long history of the mandolin, his philosophy of chamber music, and advice on running an independent record label in 2024. The interview below provides those moments, but there's a lot we left out. You'll have to listen to the podcast episode to get ahold of the full enchilada.
Amid stints with the likes of Regina Spektor, the Philip Glass Ensemble, and Alice and Ravi Coltrane, Brent assembled 9 Horses, an acoustic chamber music ensemble, alongside violinist Sara Caswell and bassist Andrew Ryan. 9 Horses was the impetus for the 2021 formation of Adhyâropa Records which proudly touts itself as a "100% artist-owned collective record label." The imprint is presented as a means for artists to seize control of their music and earnings and, as you'll read below, a call to action for other labels to echo in a beleaguered music industry.
Joe Brent's classical training with the mandolin bends toward innovation with his recent projects and a confident artist's mindset. Performances call upon the improvisation and experimentation of jazz, a respect for the folk tradition of plucked instruments, and the occasional Flaming Lips cover (you'll have to listen to the podcast for more about that). This conversation is but a glimpse into the world of Joe Brent and an even tinier glimpse into the complex world of the mandolin. The rabbit holes offered here are many, as are the inspiring words for potential record label owners that close the conversation. It's a wild and wonderful ride which has been edited for length and clarity.
A History of the Little Almond
Lawrence: What tradition does the classical mandolin come out of? Could you give a capsule summary of what classical mandolin is?
Joe: To trace the history of the mandolin, we need to start with the banjo. The banjo came from Africa centuries ago as a stringed instrument with skin stretched over a gourd. While it has many permutations, African griots generally call all versions the banjo. It first traveled east from Africa, where it became known as the oud. The French and English later adopted the oud and called it the lute—simply the French word for oud, a connection many people don't realize.
The instrument then made its way to Spain, where it became the guitarra and, eventually, the guitar. Around the same time, Italy developed its version, called the armandolino—Italian for 'little almond,' referring to the almond-shaped back of the bowl-back mandolin. From armandolino to mandolino, the early instrument that Vivaldi wrote for was a six-string single-course instrument tuned G, B, E, A, D, G.
Playing Vivaldi on modern mandolins, which are tuned like violins, presents challenges because the intervals often don't align. Vivaldi wrote his mandolin pieces for orphans living in his church, a girls' orphanage. They must have been exceptional players, as the music is challenging even by today's standards, though it has become more difficult over time as the instrument has evolved.
The mandolin was modified to resemble its modern form during the early Romantic period or perhaps the end of the Classical period. This change allowed players to perform violin repertoire. The modern mandolin is tuned like a violin but with double strings: G, G, D, D, A, A, E, E, and both strings are played simultaneously. An interesting characteristic of these paired strings is that they're never perfectly in tune with one another, regardless of tuning precision. There's always some beat in the waveform. Even if you could theoretically tune those two strings perfectly, you won't strike them at precisely the same moment.
This slight imperfection creates a unique resonance. While it doesn't sound out of tune unless it actually is, you hear the beat and the rub in the waveform as a ping and resonance. This characteristic gives the mandolin surprising projection power—it can be heard clearly with a symphony orchestra despite its relatively low volume.
Lawrence: I read somewhere in a conversation where you discussed the mandolin as a projection instrument. One of the challenges when working with students was hearing yourself correctly, playing at the right volume, and using the right dynamics because the best sound projects away from you.
Joe: Exactly. Imagine holding a mandolin in the traditional playing position. The instrument's sound is designed to project forward, jumping, and leaping away from you toward the audience. The sound that reaches your ears directly from the instrument isn't the ideal form of the instrument's voice—that's heard about ten feet in front of you by the listeners.
At ten, twenty, or even a hundred feet away, you get the full effect of the air vibrating, mixing, and bouncing around in the room. The sound coming directly to your ear doesn't represent the instrument's true voice. This can make it seem less powerful, so I tell all my students they must learn to trust the instrument. It's doing what it's designed to: projecting the sound outward toward the audience. You must resist the instinct to think, "I'm not making enough sound; I'm not projecting enough," which leads to overdriving the sound. That's how you diminish your projection.
You must trust that the instrument is designed for this task: to throw sound out in front of it. It's a trust exercise—a trusting relationship between you and the instrument.
Lawrence: While I'm sure it becomes more natural and integrated over time, it's fascinating that the idea of being subtle and having dynamic range is something you must work at and develop a feel for.
Joe: You do. If you were to measure it, the actual dynamic range of the instrument isn't great, certainly not like a piano or a brass instrument. However, what mandolin players—and any plucked string instrument players—learn to do is to play with the way your ear perceives sound rather than the actual volume of the note. A distinctive mandolin technique is the tremolo, used extensively in Italian and Romantic music. The mandolin tries to emulate a legato sound that a violin, voice, or wind instrument can produce naturally.
You still play dozens and hundreds of little notes, even when playing quietly. Your ear will grab onto each new note, even at a similar or lower volume to other instruments around you. The listener's ear is drawn to the sound of this tremoloing instrument with its unique waveform. So, it doesn't take a lot of volume to accomplish what another instrument's fortissimo can do.
Another interesting characteristic of the mandolin is that while there isn't much volume variation, there's a stark difference between ponticello and tasto sounds. For those unfamiliar with string instrument terminology, ponticello means playing near the instrument's bridge, while tasto means playing with your plectrum closer to the fingerboard. Playing near the bridge produces a bright and edgy sound while playing toward the fingerboard creates a warmer, softer, more pillowy sound. I can use this contrast to grab attention or modulate which parts of a phrase I want to accentuate, all without changing volume—just changing the phrasing to emulate what volume typically does.
While other instruments can create ponticello and tasto effects—particularly bowed string instruments—the contrast isn't as pronounced as on plucked string instruments. Vocalists have even less variation in this regard; the sound of the voice is relatively consistent, and in classical music, you rarely hear vocalists purposely making their voice brighter and edgy within a phrase since they have more dynamic range available to them.
Returning to the banjo's role as the ancestor of these plucked instruments, they share another common trait beyond their physical similarities. You usually encounter folk music wherever you find a plectrum or fingers plucking strings. Regardless of their eventual evolution, these instruments are predominantly used for dance, song accompaniment, and folk or secular contexts—much more so than bowed instruments or other families of instruments.
Some of these sounds—like the ponticello or tasto effects we discussed—might be undesirable in instruments with more sacred or academic associations. But for folk instruments, they're perfectly appropriate. When you listen to Bill Monroe, one of the original great bluegrass mandolin players, and compare him to someone like Chris Thile today, Monroe's original sound is very bright to modern ears—twangy, to use an overworked term. That's because he comes from a folk tradition, playing an instrument that has always been associated with that style. The sound isn't out of place; it's the special flavor of a plucked string instrument.
Lawrence: When plucked stringed instruments started to be incorporated into classical or Romantic composition, was that considered profane or avant-garde somehow?
Joe: I think it would have been seen as—I hate to use the word—but it's like schtick. Take Don Giovanni, for instance. There's a famous aria called "Deh vieni alla finestra," where Don Giovanni woos a girl from her window while he's on the ground below. A mandolin accompanies him because it's supposed to be this very charming nod to folk music in the middle of a dramatic opera—and let's be clear, this isn't a comic opera, as Don Giovanni not only has his way with the girl but later murders her father.
Mahler frequently used mandolin in his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde. He's explicitly referencing folk music from his Austrian upbringing. He lived in Vienna for the most part until he came to America. While it wasn't necessarily avant-garde, you could consider using folk references in capital-C Classical music as somewhat avant-garde for that time.
The sticking point came from Berlioz, who wrote an orchestration textbook—and while I like Berlioz's music, there's a chapter on the mandolin where he dismisses it as having a "poor tinkly tone quality" ill-suited for modern orchestral applications. I strongly disagree [laughter]. Thankfully, so did Mahler and Schoenberg, who wrote for mandolin quite extensively in his Serenade for Seven Instruments. As it becomes less unusual to include explicit folk music references in classical music, the mandolin is now seen as another instrument.
Today, we have virtuoso players who are on par with the finest instrumentalists of any other instrument. Most people know about Chris Thile, and then there's Avi Avital, myself, and the younger generation, who came up after us and had us as their baseline. There's a player named Jake Jolliff right now who's terrifying [laughter]. And then in world music, like Brazilian music, there's Hamilton de Holanda, who's becoming well-known playing the bandolim—that's just the Portuguese word for mandolin. He plays a ten-string instrument, but it's a mandolin, and he's as much a virtuoso on his instrument as Heifetz was on his.
Lawrence: There are several interesting things there. You mention Mahler and Schoenberg, very modern composers from when modernity entered music. It seems they had fewer qualms about integrating folk music and atonality—some of the criticisms of the mandolin as having a limited range or a specific tonal sound would have been appealing to those composers.
Joe: Absolutely. And that extends to new music composers. Take Caroline Shaw, for example, who's a leading composer by any definition in both the new music and classical music worlds. She's as much influenced by pop music and folk music as anything else. It's no longer an explicit reference to pop or folk music from a classical musician—she simply embodies all of those things simultaneously. It's now just a useful, beautiful, and unique sound.
I think this acceptance is well-timed. The mandolin had its uses before the Romantic era and the modern era. Vivaldi famously wrote quite a lot of repertoire for the mandolin. Paganini did as well. There's a Handel oratorio—the name escapes me—but Cleopatra's aria is accompanied by mandolin because it's supposed to sound exotic, which I suppose it would have been to Handel.
Lawrence: He didn't have an oud? [laughter]
Joe: Yes! Even in Verdi's Otello, Desdemona has an aria accompanied by a mandolin in the score. It's written that she's accompanied by a Croatian instrument called the guzla. But to my knowledge, it has never been played on a guzla, always on a mandolin. Even in Verdi's time, it was played on a mandolin. I believe Verdi meant for it to be that way because he played in a mandolin orchestra.
Shifting Into Another Gear
Lawrence: So, how did you come to have one in your hand?
Joe: I don't remember the first time I played a mandolin. I remember being in my teens, around thirteen years old, and deciding this was my instrument because the mandolin, in the virtuoso repertoire, can do almost everything a violin can do. A lot of the virtuoso repertoire for mandolin is violin repertoire that we've simply co-opted.
The mandolin can also be part of the rhythm section and either strum or play a percussive accompaniment, which you frequently hear in bluegrass called a chop. That's where I get the most enjoyment out of music—being just part of a machine in an ensemble. The musicians who impress me aren't necessarily the most incredible soloists; they're the ones who know how to make others sound good. That speaks to a certain maturity and egolessness that I find very appealing and have always had.
Playing a II-V and letting somebody else solo for an hour is fun. And occasionally, I'm very happy to take a solo, but I play in a band with Sarah Caswell, and no one wants to hear me play solos [laughter].
Lawrence: Well, that sensitivity and egolessness you talk about, whether supporting soloists or not, seems key to unlocking your affinity—especially through 9 Horses—for a chamber configuration, the intimacy of that type of arrangement. What do you need to be good at to thrive in a chamber ensemble versus being a symphonic player?
Joe: That's a really interesting question, and I feel entirely qualified to answer it because that's all I think about. For me, 9 Horses is an improvising chamber ensemble. If you come and hear us and think we're a jazz band, you're not wrong. If you listen to us and think we're a classical ensemble, you're not wrong. There are many things we could call chamber music, but I think of it as chamber music because I grew up understanding that the key to chamber music is your ears more than your hands.
Listening and breathing together, having everyone move together, and understanding how the phrase will be—just starting a piece in a chamber music ensemble takes years, just to play the first note together. It's not always natural for every musician to want to breathe and move with everyone else because so many people want to be the soloist.
Playing as a group, the moment it clicks is like a bicycle shifting into another gear. Suddenly, you're just at a different speed and a different tempo—getting people to do that all together is sorcery to me. I don't always understand why it's happened when it's happened. But it elevates me in a way that I have never been elevated from listening to an extraordinary soloist. Well, maybe that's not true, but it's never elevated me in how I've felt playing a solo.
Listening, breathing, and everything we work on in 9 Horses is the currency for me as a soloist. And I am also a soloist. I always play concertos with orchestras, and I love it very much. The repertoire is often exciting because so few people play it, and there aren't centuries of pedagogical dogma telling me how the piece is supposed to be played. I still have some open field to run in with solo repertoire.
The music I write for 9 Horses, which excites me the most, is the stuff where two things are happening. I've written the piece, so we're chugging along as an ensemble, not as three separate voices. And I've also written it in such a way, intentionally leaving it somewhat unwritten, so that Sarah and Andrew and whoever else we're collaborating with have a chance to put their individuality into the piece.
If we're collaborating with someone, it's never because I just need a drummer. I've thought of some specific musician with ideas, a voice, and a way of approaching music that I hear as part of this piece. Because of that, I intentionally underwrite a lot of this music when they come in.
For example, on one of the tunes on this record, we have a drummer named Jason Treuting. Jason plays quite a bit with Caroline Shaw. I know that Jason is not only an extraordinary classical musician, but within a parameter, I don't know many musicians who are more creative and will think of more different sounds and textures. So the part was just kind of "Do Jason stuff," knowing that he would. To me, that's the essence of chamber music—when individual voices blend to create something greater than the sum of its parts.
Lawrence: As you were saying that, I was thinking you could write a line for an instrument, or you could leave a line for a very specific player, and the player becomes your instrument in your score. You're playing Jason.
Joe: This will sound familiar to anyone who's ever studied Duke Ellington. At the top of the alto sax part, it didn't say 'alto sax.' It said 'Johnny' because he was writing a Johnny Hodges alto sax part. And so all these parts just had the player's name at the top because he thought similarly. It was like the best version of this piece is the one where everyone has some load-bearing creative input into its formation.
There's the composer school of thought of the composer always being right, and what you're hearing is the product of one person's imagination. That's great if that's how you write, but that is the opposite of how I write. And it's the opposite of the way that I think about music. I guess I depend on my collaborators in a manner closer to the jazz world.
Lawrence: I hear a lot of contrast between the last two 9 Horses records. Blood From a Stone has more electronic textures, elements, and contributions. Strum has more traditional instrumentation. Outside of pure experimentation, how deliberate is something at the outset?
Joe: Blood From a Stone was sort of the sandbox we used to play around with some of the ideas that went into Omegah, the full-length album that came right after that. Omegah is very heavily textural—many of the textures are electronic and borrowed from electronica and modern rock.
I love all of that, and I love the album Omegah. But for Strum, as I was writing the tunes, I discovered early on that I was writing them on acoustic instruments. Not with any intentionality at that point; I was just strumming on acoustic instruments and coming up with the sound of a very quickly repeated thing, which is what a strummed instrument is. It's something that goes back to the very beginnings of my musical life, strumming on an instrument—and I liked the way it made me feel to go from one tune to the other and still have that connection of one tune to the next, that they all share this kind of texture of a strummed instrument.
I wasn't necessarily thinking, "Well, I want to go from an electronic to an acoustic album." It was where my ear was at the time, and the record is called Strum. I couldn't help myself [laughter]. It was right there. At some point, you'll hear the sound of a strummed instrument on every one of these tunes, no matter how complex the arrangement is.
Lawrence: And there's also something very somatic about it.
Joe: Yes. Your uncle plays mandolin on a porch somewhere, and your friend plays guitar in a dorm room. I think many people play guitar or have learned a couple of chords on the guitar and know that feeling of learning two chords—"Now I can play a song even if I only know two chords!"—and there's something very satisfying about that. People have an actual personal experience with that kind of satisfaction.
On Strum, you'll hear this strummed instrument right in the middle, even in these complex textures. Whether you realize it or not, you're being put into a place and connected with something that's, I think, really at the center of ourselves.
To Practice What We Preach
Lawrence: Could you point to a common element among the artists you work with through Adhyâropa, your record label?
Joe: The common thread of artists on Adhyâropa is simply shit that I think is cool. We have put out a cappella pop operas and soundscape data sonification albums, jazz and classical chamber orchestras, singer-songwriters and bluegrass, and just about every genre.
Originally, 9 Horses started Adhyâropa Records as a boutique label for us. We were just trying to put out our stuff, own it, and control it. The financial relationship between artists and record labels, artists and distributors, artists and venues, and so on has, over the years, become worse and worse for artists in every case. So, artists need to take a more proactive stance on owning their music and deciding the contexts in which this music can be used. If you can own your masters, that's great. And that's the point of starting a boutique label.
Smaller artists don't do that because it's front-loaded with a lot of work and expense, but we wanted to practice what we preach. I never intended for other people to be a part of it. However, after we released Omegah, my friend Sam Sadigursky from the Philip Glass Ensemble was putting out a duo record with Nathan Koci, an accordion player. I said on a lark, "Hey, I've got a record label. I'll put your record out." And now we're about to put out our ninetieth album in three years.
Lawrence: Wow.
Joe: It's been way more of a success than we could have conceived then—but I don't even know if 'success' is the right word. It's been way more of a popular idea. And it turns out that creating a financial structure that's much more favorable to the artists is popular with artists. How about that? Who would have thought?
In my conception of what a record label should be, it acts as a contractor. You call a contractor to fix your roof and do a job that you cannot do yourself for many reasons. You may not have the time for it or don't trust the music distribution services out there—and you have a good reason not to trust them. So, there's no reason we can't be a genreless record label, or any record label can't be a genreless record label. It's just like come in and do the job, and we can do that job as well as any record label. And I'm including the major labels.
The old financial arrangement between record labels and artists was that they come in, fix your roof, and then own your house for at least five years. And we don't think that's right. We believe a record label should be someone who comes in and does a job. The label gets a reasonable cut in exchange for doing that job and doing it well. But the old record labels didn't take a reasonable cut. They essentially gave you a loan you had to pay off, and if your album didn't do well, you never paid that off. The album could do very well in many cases—you still never paid that loan off. You were just in a constant state of debt. That's the death of the middle class of the music industry—musicians are just always struggling to stay at water level.
If this concept has been successful or popular, I would say, "Great. Every record label should look like us." However, record labels are hurting just as much as artists these days, and they're reluctant to change their approach because this is just how it's always been. However, the music industry is different now.
I think, for record labels to stay healthy, they need to become more like us. Not only that, but I'll go even further. The real industry change must come from the record label side because platforms like Spotify are doing great. Why would they change anything? Why would they care about the health of the music industry?
Artists are not well positioned or empowered to effect real change in the industry because we are not organized like other artists. When actors and writers went on strike, they did it together, and they got a lot of what they wanted because they were organized in a way that musicians are not. I'm not in a union with Taylor Swift, but the guy playing a corpse in CSI is in the same union as George Clooney and Julia Roberts, and they all strike together and get what they want.
Musicians don't work that way. However, record labels are in it together, even if no financial structure ties one to another. Certainly, we all understand implicitly that the bottom line reflects the music business. And so the labels themselves have to be the ones that need to be more progressive in changing how things are done. If the labels don't do it, then there just won't be a middle class in the music industry, and then, at some point, there won't be musicians.
Lawrence: As a label, what services can you provide? Do artists show up at your front door with a finished master, and then you take over?
Joe: When we began, we weren't in a position to make physical media, like CDs and LPs, which is really what a label used to be. I learned that because we don't print CDs and then essentially sell them to the artist, the artist makes more money if they print the media themselves. Our contract structure works because we have a storefront, which means our website and Bandcamp. We handle the digital distribution and promotion of the album on a limited basis.
We recommend that our artists get a PR person to help with that because we have limited ability, but we certainly pitch to the playlist curators on all the DSPs we send stuff to. And we pitch to sync supervisors—dozens and dozens of them—for placement. Artists collect one hundred percent of their sync royalties. They collect one hundred percent of their performance royalties. We only take a tiny cut of mechanical royalties. And since you're the one printing the CD and the LP, when you go out on a gig and sell it, you keep one hundred percent of that, too.
A record label should handle distribution or partner with someone other than TuneCore or CD Baby—an actual distribution partner. They should handle promotion, pitch to DSPs, and foster a community of artists. A record label doesn't have to be a jazz or a classical label or anything like that. You can be genreless like us. However, the Adhyâropa artists are a family of artists who understand that a rising tide lifts everyone's boat.
Something I tell students at academic residencies is that twenty people who come to all your gigs are worth way more than having twenty thousand Instagram followers. So, I hope that Adhyâropa is a family of artists supporting one another. I have done everything possible to create an environment where that's the case, as this only works if we're not mercenaries out for ourselves. The only way it works is if we're raising everyone else's boat.
Visit Joe Brent at josephbrent.com and follow him on Instagram, Threads, and YouTube. Check out 9 Horses on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Purchase 9 Horses's Strum on Bandcamp or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice.
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