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Interviews

Coming soon: Gavin Bryars, Glenn Branca, Paul Dresher, Carl Stone, John White, Howard Skempton, Michael Gordon, Terry Riley and many others

Basically it's like cooking
an interview with Elena Kats-Chernin

"Every time I'm working with a single element, at some point it breaks down and gets its own life, and I can't predict that. For the first two or three days I can hang on to that idea, but I get very bored very quickly (that's my nature) and start changing things and breaking my own rules."

A vast, synthesised approach
an interview with John Adams

"The basic way I compose is to take a cluster of sound, like a handful of paint. First of all I give it some kind of rhythmic impetus, and then I let it go forward. There's a sense of a vehicle travelling forward across terrain."

Time and Motion
an interview with Steve Reich

"Ethics and aesthetics have nothing to do with each other - it was possible for Nazis to be extremely cultured and extremely inhuman, and that is the nature of it: artistic excellence and moral excellence have no necessary connection whatsoever."

Sacred Geometry
an interview with John Rodgers

"I was interested in Dante partially because I had just worked with South Indian musicians, who have a strong connection between philosophy, geometry, music, religion - they are all interrelated as they are in Dante."

The Power of the Cadence
an interview with Michael Nyman

"I actually think that I'm a really old-fashioned nineteenth-century composer. Take away the late-twentieth-century minimalist repetitive trappings, and I think that's the composer I really am. It's the old game of repetition and difference that I'm playing."

Program Notes

Strata

Strata is in three movements, fast, slow and fast. Each of the movements treats music as a kind of layer cake, with several strands composed from the bass upwards (which is perhaps not surprising from a composer who is also a bass player). As the bass repeats, it is varied, turned upside down, and combined with an ever-changing array of upper parts, which intertwine with each other and engage in hockets (the word means "hiccup" and is a medieval technique by which a melody is divided between several performers to give a "hiccup" effect). In the slow movement, the harp plays constant regular pulses in cycles which shorten with each repetition, creating a gamelan-tinged texture with long meandering melodies in the winds and strings.

Trio

My Trio was composed shortly after returning from seven months of travel, focusing on musical study in South India and spending time in Europe and the USA. Perhaps as a result of the stimulus of this period, I found myself approaching the composition with a sense of openness, changing from my usual concern for the unity which results from reduced material. While the use of material is reduced, it stems from a wide range of sources, playfully combined. Hymns from my Methodist upbringing, Bach counterpoint, Sibelius harmony, Beatle tunes, rhythms of Kerala and countless other musics went into forming, in varying degrees, my musical intuition as it was in 1993. I attempted to allow this intuition full rein, believing that music is most successful when it accurately reflects its composer and his or her background.

Rational structures serve to organise the intuitive material of the three movements. The first and third movements are simple ground bass canons. I am attracted to this form by its neat combination of repetition and variation, simultaneously defying and satisfying expectations, and by the way the instruments copy each other and get beyond their individual concerns. In the second movement a process of ever diminishing time intervals articulates a handful of stretched out chords, which accompany free pattern-melodies, swapped between the instruments in conversational fashion. Surrounding the first and second movements, and in the postlude, is music of quiet simplicity. Here there is less concern for rational structure than for communication of emotion, though not without a certain distance.

Four Places

Four Places was composed with the idea in mind of several different rooms in a house, each with a distinctive mood and character. The experience of each section of the piece is rather like the experience of visiting a place and gradually exploring it - everything is there all the time but one's attention shifts. The models for my music are almost always static - visual arts, sculpture, locations - and very rarely literary or dramatic. There is little direction or goal-orientation in the traditional sense - cyclical time is generally given precedence over linear time. This will be a familiar concept to anyone interested in the traditional music of India, West Africa and Japan, which have been unavoidable influences in this work because of the people for whom it has been written.

The influence of the performers goes beyond the stylistic background for the music -this is very much a collaborative work between composer and performers, whose distinctive playing styles have influenced the direction the music has taken, and who spend a significant proportion of the work in improvisation in the form of solos. They also add much of their own character in embellishing musical material which is often given in the score with only skeletal indications.

The music is largely structured in cycles - very long cycles taking place while shorter cycles work themselves out simultaneously - this apsect is very reminiscent of Indian tala cycles. Within the cycles there are often processes at work, such as a continual shortening of time, an expansion of range, or a movement of timbre.

Musical material often consists of modules chained together, rather like a jazz-head arrangement. These modules are almost self-contained and do not rely on this specific ordering - it would be easy to imaginine many different ways of sequencing the fragments, just as different people will not follow the same line of sight in experiencing the various perspectives of a sculpture. Some of the original modules, which could be imagined in another version of the piece, do not appear at all.

I was rather surprised when I had composed the last section of the work, which seems to combine rhythms from many different sources, including South Indian mridangam playing, West African polyrhythm and the sped-up sampled breakbeats of drum n bass ("jungle"). These musics seem to share with my own music a desire to escape the present and experience a different kind of time.

Arch

The title Arch is a pun alluding to both the Italian word for string instruments (archi) and the arch form of the work. A canon for three violas, Arch is constructed in sixteen-beat modules which are ordered with the intention of achieving a balance between repetition and variation, between familiarity and surprise. When the centre of the piece is reached (signalled by fast repeated notes), the modules begin to run in reverse order until the opening is again heard.

Arch was composed shortly after a lengthy period of music study in south India, a culture which to my ears possesses greater subtlety of rhythm and melody than the Western tradition. I was reaffirming to myself the value of one of my own tradition's greatest attributes, which is little developed in India - counterpoint. The harmonic and textural aspects of the work are maintained as quite static, allowing for a focus on shifting and intertwining contrapuntal lines.

String Quartet

My String Quartet was begun when I was in California studying with Terry Riley in 1995 It was with some trepidation that I showed my early sketches to this masterful composer who has written so definitively for the Kronos Quartet. When I was not with Terry at his home in the Gold Country in the gorgeous Sierra Nevada foothills, I was staying in the Tenderloin, a fairly seedy central area of San Franciso, where homelessness, violence and destitution are commonplace. I feel that some of the contrasts of the two locales are reflected in the music. There are areas of quite intense expression (though of an indirect, guarded sort), with something of alienation and uncertainty, and there are areas of very detached, process-oriented music more expressive of some inanimate natural environment than of any human emotion. The overall pace of the piece is gradual and perhaps hesitant, with a distrust of easy answers and simple certainties.