The launch concert for my new CD with the wonderful Myriad Trio, featuring my flute/harp/viola trio The Eye of Night is this Sunday 11 March at Soka University Performing Arts Center, Aliso Viejo, CA. If you're in the area come along for a chance to see these three amazing musicians perform and, I'm guessing, signing copies of the new CD!
Spitalfields Festival are currently looking for 200 singers to take part in the London premiere of Fire my new piece for choir, horns and pyrotechnics! An unmissable chance to make music in the heart of Spitalfields and celebrate the close of the Spitalfields Summer Festival.
Silk Road Ensemble, rehearsing Cut the Rug in the beautiful Kirkland House, Junior Common Room, Harvard
I'm just back from an inspiring week in the presence of some of the finest musicians the world has to offer - and that's not just hyperbole, The Silk Road Ensemble really does contain just that. My piece Cut the Rug went down very well, and hopefully will feature in some future performances/tour of the ensemble.
But more interestingly, it was a very thought-provoking week in a variety of ways. It made me think for one about how I, as a composer of mainly notated music, interact with musicians via my score, and the pros and cons of that way of working, versus the aural traditions that exist in most other music cultures. I suppose in a way it reaffirmed my desire to work with musicians that have elements of both worlds - a particular revelation in this respect on this project was Syrian-born clarinettist Kinan Azmeh, who can read the most fiendishly notated music if required (he went to Julliard after all), but can also bring his rich cultural heritage to bear in his use of vibrato and ornamentation for example.
With Kinan Azmeh and Cristina Pato
Working with such a rich array of people from all sorts of cultures around the world inevitably leads you to contemplate ways of living in society and music's place within that. For example, Avi Avital, my hugely talented mandolin-playing friend, is an Israeli and he immediately hit it off with Kinan, a Syrian, and remarked to me that he felt that kinship you feel from someone who shares a similar background - here were two people who have an infinite amount of things in common, whether it be hummus (and how little the US version of hummus resembles the real thing); old TV shows they remember from their childhood in the Middle East; or simply a revulsion at the things that cause their two peoples to seem so far apart on the world stage. And interestingly, as far as the music goes, Kinan's style of playing is often mistaken for klezmer (unless he uses the distinctively arabic scales including quarter-tones), although both myself and Avi could hear something subtle but uniquely different in Kinan's tone.
As to the uses and functions of music in society, well of course most folk music originates in something fundamentally practical - a wedding, a funeral, a dance. I'm inspired by many of these traditions when I write, but of course my music is divorced from those social environments, so what is it's purpose?
I guess part of why I do what I do is to reflect on that very issue - to think about emotional and spiritual questions which are sometimes drowned out by modern life. To throw up these musical landscapes as a sort of hypothesis of things worth exploring.
And yet part of me still is aware of a certain disconnect or hypocracy inherent in what I do - I'm exploring riotous abandon through the use of precision notation; spontaneity through pre-meditation; the life of the body through the use of the mind; the music of 'the village' through something performed in the concert hall.
It's all very complicated, but I do feel that one of the things I want to explore more going forward is something less 'hypothetical' as it were, something that deals with the contemporary world I live in and faces it directly, even if it continues to posit alternatives to it. That probably won't make sense to anyone but me, but useful to try to articulate it.
Just to add to the mix, one of the other composers present for the week was the renowned jazz pianist Vijay Iyer (who wrote a fabulous piece for the group) and during a discussion with students he remarked 'all Classical music - whether it's Western, Iranian, Indian or any other - is basically music for rich people'. That's a very provocative statement, and if it's not true, I certainly haven't found a fully coherent way of refuting it.
Trying to squeeze a note out of the Gaita
Relating somewhat to all the above, I met Cristina Pato, the extraordinary Gaita (Galecian bagpipe) player of the ensemble on the first evening in Harvard. Somehow I immediately knew that she had to be part of my piece, so I got up at 5am the next morning and quickly found two spots for her in my piece. One was at the celebratory/death-defiant ending; the other was at the climax of an aching tutti melody in the third movement.
I've never experienced anything quite like how that moment turned out with Cristina playing - every time she played during rehearsal I would get goose-bumps, and I lost count of the number of people who said they were in tears at that point after the final performance. There is something so intense and raw about the bagpipe sound, it's like a beast, barely under the control of its master, that wails and screams. It's impossible not to be affected by it. The fact that such a moment happened during my piece I took as very little to do with my own creation, and much more to do with the instrument and its amazing 'custodian' - dear Cristina - but it was also one of those miraculous puffs of smoke that sometimes occur during the creative process. A late addition, cobbled together in the early morning before the first rehearsal, becomes the defining moment of the piece. Will someone please just tell me how I can learn from that and recapture it in future?!
Finally, on a lighter note, I was pleased on the train up to Boston to find us passing through my birth-town of Stamford, Connecticut - the first time I had been back since autumn 1970!
Check out this fantastic proposed design for my 20x12 Fire piece. The choristers (around 150 of them) form a giant soap-box-raised circle and a forest of wax torches forms the centerpiece. The audience comes in via the two gaps in the circle. Thanks for Mandy Dike and The World Famous, both for this awe-inspiring design and for allowing me to reproduce this here.
I've created what I hope will be quite an intense meditation on fire, with musical phrases repeating and bouncing around the circle. I finished the piece a few days ago and it's now making its way round to the various choirs that will be involved, so they have plenty of time to learn it. Coming to Salisbury, Brighton, Spitalfields and London's South Bank Center in May and June.
In mid-Jan I'll be starting my Harvard residency with the Silk Road Ensemble, but just before that I'll be popping into the New York to catch my dear friend, harpist Bridget Kibbey's mouth-watering concerts at Le Poisson Rouge on Jan 11th and 15th. It's the first of a new Resident Artist series from my other dear friends, the Metropolis Ensemble, and features an amazing range of music from all over the world, including my own Caja de Musica (from whence the concert derives its title), a new piece by Paquito d'Rivera and also, coincidentally a new piece by Syrian clarinettist and composer Kinan Azmeh, who will be joining me to perform in the workshops in Harvard the following week. I'll be at LPR on the 15th, and I hope to see you there!
I will always remember the lessons George Benjamin gave us at the Royal College of Music in the early 90s. In fact, they weren't lessons and they weren't at the Royal College (though they were paid for by them) - they took place roughly once a month at George's home, usually on a Sunday, and were somewhere closer to lecture, informal chat, intellectual debating society. They were the kind of events as a young artist you dreamed of being able to attend - like those given by Benjamin's own teacher Messiaen in Paris. There were great sandwiches at lunchtime (free food was always the way to any student's heart), in fact the only thing that prevented them being truly legendary was the lack of alcohol. If they'd taken place in a smoke-filled back room of a North London pub, I think it would by now be a shrine. But for George - always boyish in both appearance and in the giggling delight he took in his subject - well, I guess smokey pubs just weren't his style.
So on these Sunday mornings somewhere between ten and twenty usually rather gaunt composer-types would file in to George's house. There would generally be a morning session and an afternoon on a separate topic. In the morning he might take half an act of Janacek's Kata Kabanova and pick apart the ingenious ways he stretched and pulled a main theme, less a straight-forward 'thematic development' and more theme-as-elastic-band which maintained its most general shape but could be stretched to snapping point anywhere along its length. Then in the afternoon he might invite somebody amazing from the music world to come and talk. To this day I can't believe I missed the one when the great Indian bansuri flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia came - I knew and loved his playing even then, and can't think what could have been more important.
What made these sessions so riveting was George himself. He was so enthusiastic and full of passion it was impossible not to get caught up in it. I used to bring even non-musician friends along just to feel the extraordinary atmosphere of excited learning. I think they were the first events where I actually felt someone was teaching me things I needed to know as a composer, there was no waffle, this was visceral, direct injections into the nervous system of composing. Indeed I think the main thing I took away from all those sessions was how to learn, which, in a tritely simplistic way you could describe as 'quality not quantity'. I think until that point, as quite a late starter in my knowledge of classical music I had always felt a little daunted by the Julian Andersons of this world, who could expound at length about the fascinating second theme of Glazunov's 3rd Symphony. But here I realised that a day spent by yourself looking - really looking - at a single page of a Beethoven Symphony could yield more priceless information than a lifetime of academic textbooks. And I think it's the self part of that equation that is particularly important. We're all as artists trying to discover that thing which is as sickeningly easy to describe as it is unbearably hard to understand - our 'true voice'. And it's only by looking at things with your own eyes rather than through someone else's that you can start the process of finding it.
And it's strange now to realise that that mantra applies to George's lessons themselves. However much I loved those sessions, looking back from where I am now I can see that my 'true voice' is quite a long way from George's and that deeply inside I even knew that back then. I remember, for example, taking some pieces along to show George. One little piece 'Baka Studies' played around with some African rhythms. It was by far the best thing I had ever done, but although he said nothing negative, I could sense that it was too straight-forward for George, he called it 'cute'. For quite a few years after that I attempted to follow the path I admired rather than my own inner calling. What a paradox. One piece from that time ended with a great little interlocking hocketing groove. It sounded great, and was the moment everyone picked out from the piece - "loved that bit at the end". That was my own voice poking out, but I wasn't ready to accept it at that stage, I dismissed that moment and binned the piece. I wanted to write something that George would have called something better than 'cute'.
What George would think of what I'm doing now, I really don't know. But the important thing is, it doesn't really matter. I have to trust what I do, and what I like, follow my own path. People usually say that, meaning "even if it's so obscure no one will like it", but in my case, the bravery has come from accepting that my own path might be something that speaks much more simply and directly and that I should follow it, even if it leads me far away from people whom I still greatly admire, like George.
I'm thankful that I seem to contradict the male stereotype of only being able to think about one thing at a time. Along side all the crazy stuff that routinely happens in my 'real' life, in my composing life I've got four pretty major projects all on the boil at the moment. Normally this would be a good time for blind panic, but somehow I feel remarkably on top of the situation.
By far the biggest committment is The Firework Maker's Daughter. This will be a full evening of music. There will definitely be a tour in spring '13, and we are still finalising whether there will be a run in Christmas '12 which hangs on a chain of other groups and committments and possibilities. Either way I plan to finish it in the early autumn of '12 and we'll probably workshop an almost finished version in May just to iron out any last kinks. Earlier in the year I set myself the target of finishing the first half in sketch form by the end of this year, and I seem to be well on the way to doing that, with just one small final scene to go. The project is exciting me more and more, I just love the story and the colours. As I write I have a friend's old saucepan hanging from the ceiling which helps remind me of the junk yard percussion idea I'm aiming to bring to at least parts of the opera. The piece also seems to be developing a fairly massive marimba part. I would love to find a chromatic marimba that has the more 'ethnic' colour of a balaphone or folk xyophone. If anyone knows of anything like that please let me know!
What else? Well there's the piece for the Silk Road Project which emerged in a sudden flurry of activity over a period of just a couple of weeks. It's diverged a bit from the direction it was taking during the period I gave this interview. I was so hoping to try something out using an arabic scale with quarter-tones (I had some great sessions with Syrian clarinettist Kinan Azmeh to this end) but I just couldn't find a way - for now - to make them 'my own'.
But the resulting piece fits with my image of the Silk Road Project, as one giant, soulful jamboree. There are a few ideas that maybe hint at Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Southern Spain and elsewhere. In a way, I think of it a bit like the wonderful musical documentary Latcho Drom (much of which is available on YouTube) which traces the music of the gypsies from their original starting point in India through the middle east and ending with the flamenco musicians of Andalusia. I've called the piece (which is a series of four dances) Cut the Rug - which is an old phrase you say of someone who dances well.
Speaking of jamborees, what a crazy project I've landed myself with the mighty London Philharmonic Orchestra here in London. I'm to write a piece for Symphony Orchestra (the LPO), tanbur (an Iranian long-necked lute), daff (an Iranian frame drum), more daffs (possibly an ensemble of 15 daffs), 60 amateur violinists from the fantastic London Music Masters Bridge Project, a story-teller (Sally Pomme), and if we can, a spot of audience participation from the 2500+ school kids who will be packed into the Festival Hall for two consequtive days next May (part of their BrightSparks series). The story to be 'told through music' will be an excerpt from the Shahnameh, the Iranian epic poem. I'm excited because the story we've chosen features the Simorgh, whom I know from the great Persian poem The Conference of the Birds - in a nutshell, 30 birds (or 'Si Morgh') travel to find the mystical God-like bird, the Simorgh, only to find a lake and their own reflection. It's something to do with the transcendent within us all - which curiously enough is pretty much the idea behind The Firework Maker's Daughter, even if it presents itself on the surface as something much more humble. So yes..stick all that in your pipe and see what kind of smoke comes out!
Finally, there's the small matter of my piece for the 'Cultural Olympiad'. But that's easy, it only involves a fire artist, 200 choristers, a battery of horns and diverse locations around the UK which all need scouting out - a piece of cake!
I wrote my clarinet quintet Gumboots for Todd Palmer and the St Lawrence String Quartet in 2008, and it's gone on to become one of my most popular pieces. However after the premiere I made several changes to the piece, including, most controversially, dropping one of the dances in the second part of the piece. I say controversially because both Todd and Geoff Nuttall, violinist of the St Lawrence Quartet seemed particularly attached to this particular dance. But I insisted as I felt that without it the sequence of ever-livelier dances had a better overall shape.
Recently Todd asked me if I would consider resurecting the "movement oubliée" as he put it - as a clarinet and piano piece. I looked it over and found that it would work extremely well in that format, so I jumped at the chance and within 24 hours or so the new version was made. It's only 2 minutes long, but it's cute, memorable, and I think would make a great encore to any clarinet recital!
Todd's hoping to premiere the new piece which I've called Forgotten Boots next year, but meanwhile here's a computerized recording:
I understand that this Friday (8th Oct), Gumboots will be broadcast and syndicated across the US on Performance Today, "the most listened-to daily classical music radio program in the United States" as the blurb says. The performance is the (fantabulous) one Todd Palmer and the St Lawrence Quartet gave at the Spoleto festival earlier this year. It should also be available online and I'll update this with the link once it goes live.
The score and parts for Gumboots are available from Bill Holab Music.
