A conversation with… is a Birdsong blog series

What was your very first composition?

Oh no! I’d like to pretend I can’t remember, but I can. It was a piano piece called The Playful Butterfly I wrote when I was eleven. It’s rubbish obviously, but I can remember every note of it and could play it now. Not that I would inflict that on anyone.

What have been some of your favourite musical collaborations?

A lot of my formative musical experiences were theatre-related ­– singing in the children’s chorus in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades for WNO, writing incidental music and songs for school productions and putting on scenes of new opera with Laura Bowler and others while at RAM.

A few years ago Rowan Williams wrote texts for me to set in my orchestral song cycle The Shortest Day which was a wonderful experience because his poems were so emotionally piercing and dark, totally appropriate given the subject matter and somehow not what I expected from a religious figure like him. I’ve enjoyed occasionally working with pop artists like Meilyr Jones and Baxter Dury on arrangements – you’re working within narrower confines on other people’s projects like that so it’s a different kind of challenge and you learn things about communication. I went to see Baxter supporting Pulp in Finsbury Park the other week and it was a thrill to be surrounded by 40,000 people dancing to my strings. Last year it was great to work with Daniel Pioro and Ryan Bancroft on my violin concerto Parallax after a long Covid-induced delay, two brilliantly energetic musicians. There never seems to be quite enough time for these things of course, but I was amazed how well they knew the material when we started rehearsals and how coolly Daniel approached my insane demands in the solo part.

The third movement ​‘Gaia’ is the ancient Greek name for Mother Earth and I was thinking about James Lovelock’s ​‘Gaia hypothesis’, the idea that the Earth can be seen as a single living system of which we as individuals are like cells, which has always seemed both beautiful and true to me. I wanted to convey the fragility of this blue speck drifting through the vastness of space – it’s a simple chorale melody on the violin surrounded by an ambient haze of string harmonics like distant starlight. I cried when I wrote it and again when I heard it performed, which is the only time that’s happened to me with my music. The chorale comes back in the orchestra at the end of the final movement ​‘Cassini’, named after the NASA space probe which photographed Earth from its orbit of Saturn in 2013 before eventually self-destructing as planned by burning up into Saturn’s atmosphere. Looking back at this piece a year on it feels like a summation of so many technical things I’d done in previous work, as well as reflective of the world of the pandemic in which it was written – dense and chaotic and scary, but still with moments of stillness and beauty. It marks the end of an era for me and I’m very proud of it.

You’ve written both vocal and instrumental music – how does your approach differ between the two?

I think how composers write for voices ought to depend on how they feel about the text being set, especially how important it is to them that the words will be audible in performance – in Baroque arias, for example, there’s often only a couple of lines of text repeated a lot, which means Handel or whoever can be very decorative about the vocal line, treating it sort of like any other instrument. I’ve usually been much more text-focussed than that in my solo vocal stuff, like Echoes where I wanted every word of these short, mysterious Hart Crane poems to be heard clearly, which meant hardly any melismas (where you have more than one note to a word). More recently though, in ap Huw Sampler, I made it clear that the soprano is not ​‘the soloist’ in the ensemble and should blend equally with the other instruments. They sing a mixture of vocalise sounds and an extract from a poem that’s there more for symbolic purposes, and I made a version of the piece where they’re replaced by a clarinet, which would work just as well. So for me, it entirely depends on this question of the text. I love writing for choir because with multiple voices you can foreground certain bits of text with rhythmic unison then do something completely different with texture in the next phrase. 

Besides composing, do you play any instruments?

The piano was my first instrument and still the one I play the most, though oddly I find it hard to write for as a solo instrument, I think partially because you feel bound by your technical limitations as a player when it’s your own instrument and partially because the piano is so exposing of your material as a medium – every note feels naked somehow. I used to play the cello, which gave me the invaluable experience of playing in youth and university orchestras. You learn so much about composition doing that without even realising it, just by osmosis. I’m quick at picking things up but I never would have had the patience to be a serious classical player, I just didn’t care enough about technique. My favourite players have always been ones that, despite immaculate technique, have thrown caution to the wind in search of intensity. I’ve had dreams where I can play the horn, which is something like a sacred instrument to me for some reason. It’s like something from another world, it feels like it shouldn’t exist.

What sorts of music would we find in your Spotify library? (classical or otherwise!)

Everything. I think I’m almost too curious about discovering music, I could happily sit there and listen to things all day in which case I’d never write anything, so Spotify has been dangerous for me. Having a look right now I can see I’ve been listening to a lot of Fela Kuti, Björk, Saariaho and Animal Collective, though this could be different next week. The past few years I’ve been excited by some new British acts on the fringes of pop/​rock/​folk/​whatever, especially Richard Dawson and Black Country, New Road. They’re finding new ways of combining head and heart in their music, and it feels like that’s what the world needs right now. I try to do that too.