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ÓLAFUR ARNALDS
Looming Large
“There’s very little political polarization here, so very few conflicting ideas of how to handle all this. It’s actually not in the hands of politicians. It’s down to a committee they created to distance politics from it. It’s been handled in a very common sense way.” Headliner can’t resist asking Arnalds for a little retrospective on how this tiny community of neoclassical composers have become among the most imitated musicians in the world, and the unlikelihood of everything from bank adverts, to Katy Perry songs, to films taking on elements of the neoclassical sound.
HEADLINER USA
“It’s definitely been a really interesting trajectory,” he says. “It’s somehow exploded. I think it’s largely thanks to people’s different ways of listening to music these days. We kind of got rid of the radio jockey. So we don’t need approval from someone who works at the national radio for anyone to hear my music, because it’s on Spotify. And if your algorithm knows that you like piano music, you’re gonna find more of it. I really think this changed everything for us because we would never have been played on the radio. This new way of listening to music has allowed us to become a genre that is not just some really niche thing, but actually semimainstream.”
But, like with any musical scene exponentially growing, with the good comes the bad. Once it was just a solitary group of Arnalds, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Peter Broderick and others crafting this sound. Now, as more and more playlists take up internet space such as ‘Peaceful Piano’ and ‘Classical Sleep’ on Spotify, more and more pale imitations make this once ethereal space feel a lot more crowded. Headliner asks Arnalds if he’s aware of rumors that the streaming giants have even got composers to write music for these playlists under a fake alias, in exchange for a buyout instead of royalties.