Sascha Goetzel

Every generation invents a monster.

Today its name is AI.

Perhaps that is why we are asking the wrong question.

Not whether AI can create.

But whether we have quietly forgotten how to recognise what is truly original.

For years we have rewarded speed over depth.
Visibility over mastery.
Constant production over patient craftsmanship.

AI didn’t invent those values.

It learned them from us.

That is why this moment feels so unsettling.

The machine isn’t simply producing images, music or text.

It is holding up a mirror.

And the reflection is uncomfortable.

Because much of what we celebrated as creativity was already repetition.

The real threat isn’t artificial intelligence.

It’s natural complacency.

AI didn’t lower the bar.

It revealed where we had already placed it.

↓
I’d genuinely like to hear where you disagree.

A conductor doesn’t make the sound. I learned to call myself something else.

Nothing more, nothing less than a ‘Noise Shaper’

Music starts as raw material, an upbeat before sound, before it starts to form a motiv, a sentence, all vibration before it becomes architecture.

I stand between noise and form and serve many voices to become one living thing.

Istanbul was my musical home for many years. From the Borusan years on, this city and its people has never let go of me.

Thank you, Numéro, thank you Istanbul ♥️

Comments are open, don’t hold back to create noise.

— Interview: ·

01 Photography: Umut Ozge Balkan
02: ONPL - Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire

Thank you, OperaWire for such a thoughtful conversation.

We began by talking about creating Opera by the Fjord and the conversation quickly expanded to auditions, mentoring, authenticity, and the responsibility we have towards the next generation of artists.

Im happy to share here a few moments from that conversation.

Any thoughts which stayed with you?

My thanks to Afton Markay for the thoughtful questions.

Opera by the fjord
Bergen Nasjonale Opera

How many times do we fall in love in life? ♥️

Most people would answer once, twice, maybe three times. I think the answer, for anyone who makes music, is: every single time we open the score.

🎶The same symphony I have conducted for twenty years is not the same symphony tonight. If I let it become familiar — if I meet it with memory instead of curiosity — I have stopped falling in love with it 💔The sound might go correct, the correct notes might be played, but the music itself becomes mechanical and lifeless.

So I try to unlearn what I know.

To stand in front of the music as if I had never heard it.

It is sometimes one of the hardest things, but necessary✨

Beauty is not absolute. Truth is not absolute. To transform is to surrender to what is — no ego, no expectation, no image projected onto the living thing in front of you.

Complete surrender is the first step on the path of creating beauty. You have to keep losing the version you were sure of. 🕯️

Chapter 06 — transform.

—
Which piece do you keep falling in love with? 👇

🎼🤍

Just landed back in Korea.

An unforgettable week of recordings with the ONPL - Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire is still very much on my mind.

Now, one final project before the summer break:

Brahms’s Violin Concerto🎻 and Beethoven’s Fifth with 울산시립교향악단
Great scores are like books: alive.

Every orchestra changes the conversation, asks new questions and as our awareness changes from one moment of our existence to the next, the music changes infinitely with it.

That’s what keeps this life endlessly fascinating.

A hundred years later, this music still sounds like tomorrow.
Vol. II is done. 💿

After Vienna, ‘Shadows of the Fin de Siècle’ has arrived in Paris.

This week we immersed ourselves in the irreverent, elegant and brilliantly unpredictable world of ‘Les Six’ and Jean Cocteau’s ‘Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel’.

Performing and listening to this music today is both beautiful and unsettling.

It was written after one world had collapsed and another was inventing itself(the years after WW1). Old certainties had disappeared. Artists searched for a new language, questioned tradition and refused easy answers.

That is probably why this repertoire feels so alive today.

Every generation believes it is living through exceptional times. Then music reminds us that uncertainty, reinvention and hope have always travelled together.

🎶 From the first note to the final take, the musicians of the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire embraced every challenge with admirable craftsmanship, imagination and trust. Recordings where everyone on stage dives deeper into the score with every minute, taking risks, leaving comfort zones — that’s when I find myself most at home. This was one of them.

And we on stage depend on our journey to the critical ears in the listening room. A special thank you to Hans Kipfer. Another album finished, another week of listening together. Your ears, your friendship and your relentless pursuit of excellence have become an essential part of this journey.

Thank you also to the entire Take5 Music Production team for making every session feel effortless while never compromising on a single detail.

My deepest gratitude goes to every musician of the ONPL♥️, everyone behind the scenes of our ONPL-Team - making us being able to give our best on stage🙏, and to BIS Records for believing in this series from the very beginning.

Vienna asked the questions. Paris offered different answers.

Now it’s time for you to hear them.
Shadows of the Fin de Siècle · Vol. II

ONPL - Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire
Hans Kipfer
BIS Records

Merci ONPL 🫶

✨Six young conductors. One extraordinary orchestra. The first chapter of our ONPL Mentorship Program 2026.

🎶Today we closed the first masterclass of this new initiative at the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire — a space I have wanted to open for a long time, where young conductors can be challenged honestly and grow.

Out of more than 100 applicants, these six worked through a wide range of repertoire with this wonderful orchestra, and this afternoon they shared it with a live audience in a matinee concert.

We began where everything begins: listening before speaking👂

To the score, to the orchestra, to the language of music, to each other.

The craft can be taught. The willingness to truly hear an orchestra has to be chosen — help, but don’t get in the way. That is where everything starts.

🤍What I saw in them this week moved me, and I have the deepest respect for their commitment and sincerity towards the music and their art.

My deepest thanks to the musicians of the ONPL ♥️ whose openness turned a masterclass into a genuine encounter — and gave these six something rare: the experience of being truly heard, while being challenged by ONPL’s excellence, precision, clarity, and living interaction in music-making - a symbiosis of sound and artistic connection.

From September, I have the joy of accompanying them for a full year. I can’t wait to see them grow, and to see what trace each of them leaves.

Bravi tutti! 👏🎶

ONPL - Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire

Jaehyuck Choi | 최재혁
Joseph Sieber (JoSi)
Clémence Le Gac
Judith Ana Baubérot
Vincent Siret
CHRISTIAN SCHÜLLER

🤐For most of my life I thought hate was a kind of deafness. A shutting-out. The thing that happens when we stop listening.

I had it backwards.

When we hate something, we don’t stop listening to it.
We just listen differently. In fact, we listen harder than we ever did. We catch every flaw, every wrong note, and we keep them.

No one studies you as closely as someone who cannot stand you. It is attention with the same intensity love gives — the same fire — only turned the other way.

📝 Nietzsche warned about this. “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” (Beyond Good and Evil, 146). And to gaze, of course, also means to listen.
Stay too long inside observing, studying hate, and it begins to listen back. It enters your system. It moves in.

I have felt this on the podium — that a score full of darkness asks me to feel that darkness, not hold it away. Unforgettable in that way was my first Don Giovanni premiere, which almost made me lose consciousness during the “Höllenfahrt.”

You cannot shape what you refuse to let in. So I let it in.
Even the ugliness.
Even the hate.
Even evil.

But there is one room it may never enter.

When at last we want to create, it cannot be built from hate — because hate only knows how to make more of itself. It cannot imagine. Least of all beauty. Let it become our creator, and it makes us lose consciousness: toward ourselves, toward the world, toward even the people we love. It feeds only on itself. And so it can never move on.

So listen to everything. Even this. Then create with love. 🤍🎼