Artists let themes into the world; that is, their projects don’t finish anything — they just let things start. As I’m a musician it’s fairly easy for me to answer the question of mission by mentioning that the Cosmos makes a sound. Both the ancient Hindus and modern physicists have said this. The job of a real musician, purely and simply, is to let this music — which Pythagoras called the music of the spheres — into the world, very precisely, through oneself. You just have to be a perfectly tuned conductor, and my aim is to achieve this precision.

We all go through pain, torment, grief and various ordeals. In Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom, where he compiled wisdom from around the world, he wrote that we are all the eyelashes of the Absolute, which the Absolute uses to sense the real world. Eyelashes must feel, and if they didn’t feel, they would die out; they would be useless. Any person’s goal is to feel, and the wider the range — from black to white, from sweet to sour, from the frightening to the funny, the more the “eyelash” works. People shouldn’t fear serious ordeals and should be prepared for them, because that’s our mission: we’re an eyelash.

In the film Wings of Desire two angels are talking. One of them says how much he would like to soak his feet and smell the aroma of coffee. They’re angels and they can do anything they like, but they can’t soak their feet or smell coffee. We can. In fact, those are the sort of experiences we generally live for.

For me personally, the past is above all about my parents who I lost at a young age. The time we all shared together is what encapsulates the past for me. I remember everything — shades of green, the smells, the rhythm of life, smiles, and overheard grownup conversations. I remember the music they listened to and the films we watched. It’s lodged inside me, like a magic picture that has stayed with me to this day. Some people can phone their mother or father at night about something really important but I don’t have that opportunity. That’s why I turn to the past in those situations.
Life in a day

It’s a great advantage if you can live a day as though it’s your last and if you can live a day as though it’s a lifetime. Morning and evening become like birth and death. If you can treat any moment of your life as though it’s the last, you’re less likely to fritter it away. The same goes for your loved ones: you value each moment that you spend with the people who smile at you and who share your world.

It’s a great advantage if you can live a day as though it’s your last and if you can live a day as though it’s a lifetime. Morning and evening become like birth and death. If you can treat any moment of your life as though it’s the last, you’re less likely to fritter it away. The same goes for your loved ones: you value each moment that you spend with the people who smile at you and who share your world.

I started to count down at one point; I remember it physically. Everything I’d done and hadn’t done flashed before me in a moment. I understood then that as a musician, I didn’t have the last word. You have a big prism called “like last time.” It’s a massive filter that protects you from everything in the world. With it, there are no wrong notes and no wrong words; there’s only your big idea. You don’t care about anything except succeeding. So then I made the Supertango album. The moment I pressed Save, I suddenly remembered that a fortune-teller had told me I would live to ninety-five — though I’m still not sure whether it really happened. The countdown stopped, but I was already re-set. After that my life was about projects, not albums.

For me, music can be either living or lifeless. Living music connects you to the world and helps you attune yourself to it. It could be a three-minute pop song but still be timeless, even if has a funny name like Money, Money, Money or Yesterday. It could be some big symphony. But what’s important is that when someone hears this music, without understanding what’s happened to them, they recognize that it’s meaningful to them. They feel at peace with the world and that the world’s not against them. They stop feeling that everyone’s bad, everyone’s an idiot, and everything’s terrible. If you have those sorts of feelings, life is very hard. Music gives people a sense of peace like nothing else. It helps people attune themselves and re-charge their batteries. They smile: everything’s great, everything’s wonderful and they can move forward.

The twenty-first century has a different sound to any other. What’s most important is learning how to listen. Because it often seems that there’s noise pollution everywhere, throughout the environment. There are new mechanisms and gadgets and even pop singers have an unfamiliar tone. But on the other hand, there’s so much sound that you can turn it into celestial music within yourself if you know how, or you can transform your view of the music that’s played.

We often talk about clean air, parks, bikes, healthcare, healthy ageing programmes and so on, but this aggressive noise environment has a ruinous effect on our life, our health, and the way we see the world. I haven’t seen or heard anything about this in the last ten or even twenty years. It’s worth thinking about. There are unpleasant sounds you can’t do anything about, like loud motorbikes, but there are things you can do something about, like the tone that public announcements are read in.

Everything starts with education. So, you can explain to a child that their tone is not quite right. You could have a “Silence Day” in schools, so that children could listen to the world around them. In fact, you could have a Silence Day for the whole of Moscow, so that people could notice the urban soundscape.

Noise pollution is everywhere. You’re walking along the street and you hear some sort of music blaring out of a cafe: it’s hellish. Or the announcer on a bus or train speaks in a tone that grates so much that you’re convinced all the passengers who take that bus or train will eventually fall ill and die. Ultimately, it’s all about education.

You could draw up a map of Moscow that identifies which areas work well from a sound point of view and which don’t. Firstly, you’ve got to identify which places have a problem, then once you know what the problem is, you can deal with it. And on the other hand, you can find a lot that’s wonderful in the seemingly unattractive. A place might be a bit far from the centre, for example, but you might be able to hear the ducks there.

It’s obvious that the sound of paradise is silver bells. People who can hear those “celestial bells” within themselves are happy. They’re a tuning fork: if you can hear those bells within yourself whenever you want to it means that you’re in tune with the world. But if you can’t hear those celestial bells within yourself it means that something is not quite as it should be right now, and you need to work on yourself a little.

I haven’t been connected to the state since 8 August 1988 when I went “off grid.” I’m a qualified electronics engineer, and since then I’ve been freelance; my profession allows me to be independent in every way. I have projects that go beyond the boundaries of music; they’re educational and inspirational and they’re aimed at young people. There was our project From the Life of Planets, where we explored the time when the events in it happened; we told the story of an amazing and almost Victorian era, which we illustrated with projects that didn’t come to fruition. The project was about a lifestyle and about what we should be proud of.

Another slightly more serious project is about the global phenomenon of Soviet film music. There is no other country in the world where such serious composers have written film music. Elsewhere, you’re either playing Carnegie Hall or writing cinema music. That’s it: you’re a Hollywood composer or you’re simply a composer. It was different here for a number of reasons. The subject is a very rich seam for me to mine. The subject is elusive and unarticulated beauty. People and witnesses die and archives disappear. It’s a big deal for me as an individual and for my children and grandchildren.
I suspect that as with From the Life of Planets, this is a very important topic for young people, because the aim of the project is to separate the music from the frame and commit it to posterity. Sadly, films age more quickly than the music that was created for them. In this gallery, there are a fair number of archives, serious names and research. Financing will need to come from people who are in a position to appreciate it and who can help, or otherwise there will need to be collaboration with state institutions. There’s an idea that all intellectual property that was produced in the USSR belongs to the citizens of today’s Russia and that it doesn’t need to be paid for. With this project, I take Soviet intellectual property, pay for it with my own money and make it available to twenty-year-old Russian citizens.

Daria Shadrina is perfect at turning the unattractive into something beautiful; I’ve always told her she’s an angel. It all started when I came to ask her to join the project that later became From the Life of Planets. A moment came when we needed to make a far-reaching decision because the project was about theatre, an internet portal, an examination of cinema, the history of cinema directors, music and more. There was one pivotal moment. Dasha was my producer and she said, ”assume that the moon is solid.” This is a famous phrase associated with the Soviet spacecraft designer Sergei Korolev: when the lunar probe was being developed, everyone was wondering whether the moon’s surface was liquid and whether the probe should have wheels or waterskis. Korolev said, “assume the moon is solid.” He was confident of this belief and took responsibility for it. We “assumed the moon was solid” and moved on.

The most significant New Year was the first one we spent at the theatre, with music, an audience and in each other’s company. It was New Year’s Eve 2014. Since then, we haven’t just had a December production — we’ve had a New Year’s Eve performance. That year, when we were starting to create the project, we thought that maybe no one would be interested in films from the 1960s that were never shot or some long-forgotten scripts and ideas. But it turned out that in many ways our production was about something else. It was about my parents, myself and my children, about what’s happened and what will happen, and where I am now. This was the first time we’d seen the New Year in like this; both the audience and we ourselves had been in tears at least three times during our show, and we went out into the New Year night absolutely ready for a big change. You know, you have to change or otherwise you’re in Groundhog Day. What we did, and the feeling we both had when we looked into people’s eyes after the show was something very special.

When humanity rallies around something, the world becomes perceptibly better. We’ll remember this time spent in solitude, immersed in the things that are important to us, and when we learned in many ways to live differently and most importantly, to notice more of the world around us. I think that the whole of humanity has gone through this; people have probably noticed this and will recall it when they sit down to see in the New Year together. I’ve noticed the leaves growing and I’ve looked at my child and his drawings in a different way. I’ve suddenly learned to live in a different way altogether and it turns out there’s so little I need to be able to live happily. I think that if that’s the main thing we’ve learned this year and it’s the thing we toast, that won’t be a bad thing at all.