Archive for the ‘Composers’ Category
Composers Talking, a new podcast produced by Topology, is being launched today with a conversation between Topology’s Robert Davidson and Red Symons, TV/Radio personality and former Skyhooks rock idol. Red and Robert are both active in making music from speech melodies, and they talk about how this is done and what it means.
Robert Davidson: Your music would seem to indicate that you take Duke Ellington seriously when he says “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing” Steve Reich: Yes, I do. That and Chuck Berry’s “Any old way you use it”. I think those are very good guidelines. I mean, you remember the days when everybody had to send out their tapes or scores with apology notes (laughs)? It just has to work. I mean, look, I’ve taken plenty of baths performance-wise. Sometimes when I’ve had to be there to actually listen to it, and I’m sure that when I’m not there to listen to it . . . but that’s not the point. The point is that the piece should have it within it to work, period. That means it’s got to be written right for the instruments, it’s got to endure acoustic situations which may not be ideal. I think a lot about groove when I listen to your music The only thing that’s worth saying about that is when I was starting out in the early sixties, there was this third stream movement, with people like Gunther Schuller trying to self-consciously take jazz and put it in a twelve tone system and come up with some blend. It failed. I wrote a piece, my thesis piece at Mills College . . . Oh yes, for your Masters. I’ve seen the score. It’s a terrible piece of trash. Jon Gibson told me he didn’t mind it. He played it didn’t he? Oh yeah, he played it. So did I, but that’s too bad for us. It uses a twelve-tone-like system. What I’m really saying is that most of us had grown up listening to jazz, rock & roll, world music, and that’s as it should be. But people who try to be . . . “I’m going to do a jazz piece, I’m going to do an Indian piece, I’m going to do a Balinese piece” - I think generally speaking that’s always failed. What seems to work is when you did what you did, you played jazz drums or whatever you did, you listened to what you listened to, and then you sit down and you write. Then it all comes out. You can’t avoid it coming out. That way it’s believable and it’s been worked through whatever it has to be worked through to become yours. You’ve really invented your own groove. Yeah. I wouldn’t have possibly done what I’ve done if I hadn’t heard Kenny Clark, if I hadn’t heard Miles Davis, if I hadn’t heard Balinese music. All of those things made an indelible difference, especially if you learn how to play those musics. Being a drummer, learning how to play Balinese and African music. You may forget about it, but it still leaves a trace in the organism, along with everything else you do in your life and that’s the best way to deal with those things. In interviews in the past you talked a lot about intuition. Is that still the rock bottom of your approach to composition? Yes, certainly. What are the rules of four-part harmony based on? Well when we hear things moving in octaves they kind of disappear, so contrapuntally it’s more like reinforcement than fully independent lines, so a rule arises to say “don’t write lines in parallel octaves”. The rules are common human perceptions that people have; pretty soon we say that’s a rule of counterpoint. All common musical practices and conventions are based on things that people commonly notice as working or not working. To take an individual case, it’s like I was saying before: you have all these influences; a lot of composers imitate. When you’re a student you really should imitate; the job of a student is to imitate. The more you imitate the better you are, because you learn about different styles. And then at a certain point, when you’re no longer studying, you hopefully begin to follow some internal musical chemistry, which is fed by the influences you’ve got, the information you’ve learned as a student, but hopefully it reaches some point based on - I’ll call it musical intuition, because I certainly don’t know what it is, whereby you find your own voice. I must say that’s what I look for in another composer, that I admire in somebody. You can easily tell that. Glenn Branca’s Glenn Branca; you can love it, you can hate it, but that’s who he is. Michael Gordon’s another one; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work, but that’s who he is. That’s the bottom line for me, and I admire someone who has their own voice, even if I don’t particularly enjoy it. David del Tredici’s found his own voice in a totally different world, a different set of techniques. You certainly have a strongly established individual voice, and for me it’s difficult not to be curious about what led up to it. I’ve read about but not heard such pieces as Music for Violin and Piano. Oh boy, that’s early. Those are student works, not worth performing; they’re mostly junk. People biographically will dig up student works, but the pieces of that period say from ‘58-’63 - it sort of switches from pretty much straight imitations of Bartok’s middle period around his third and fourth quartets, to early Webern, early Schönberg pre-twelve-tone, which I call “free atonal music”, though it was neither free nor atonal. It was done in imitation of early Webern, pieces like the string quartet op. 5, Schönberg op. 19, the piano pieces of op. 11, the first two pieces. I actually got into a lot of that stuff in those days. And then of course, I had to take the big dive and start writing twelve tone music, which I did. As I’ve said before, my solution was “just repeat it, man!” That probably was the beginning of everything. You were in California at Mills College then, and Pauline Oliveros and Terry Riley were on the scene. Terry and I met, and Terry certainly had an influence on me, just as I had an influence on Glass and just as LaMonte had an influence on Terry. I had heard African music, I had read the book by Jones, which really got my thing going. But In C was a way of seeing all this stuff happening together, as I’ve talked about before. A few years later you wrote your "Optimistic Predictions" about the future of music, and other manifesto-like statements in program notes. Actually I got a pretty good batting average on those! Yes, a lot of the predictions turned out to be right. But one thing which stuck out to me was your statement from the 1969 Whitney Museum concert “obviously music should put all within listening range into a state of ecstasy”. Is that something you’d stand by today? Oh yeah, either it’s happening or it’s not happening. Like with the piece I’ve been working on this morning - what’s the way I judge it? I ask “is it working”. Well what does that mean? That means you feel thrilled when you listen to it. If you don’t, you try to figure out what’s missing. That really doesn’t change; though the situation you find yourself in changes. A lot more is going on musically in my pieces than used to go on. There’s no such thing as progress, but there are changes. Do you find that with experience you can predict better what will work? As you have probably noticed, I’m not one of those composers (there are those we could name) who tend to keep certain techniques going over and over again. I am contrapuntally oriented and I do use the canon, but the canon is such an open situation - it doesn’t really tell you that much, but it does orient me. Orchestrationally, I’ve decided I’m not writing for the orchestra and generally I don’t do a great deal of brass. So with certain things - you know, I can draw up the page at the beginning more clearly, but the hardest part is beginning. The earlier pieces basically spun themselves out because there really was a strong “this is the technique only” going on, and therefore if I had a good module then I could have a fifteen minute piece. Now you don’t find more than three or four repeats in any piece any more. There’s a demand that I put on myself: “go and put in more musical material”. Part of it’s also that you’re dealing (loosely) with narrative structure now, especially with the speech-melody pieces. Yes, that’s part of it. Actually in Bikini I’m interested in making it really non-narrative and more cyclical. I think that instead of telling a story, we’ll say “there is a story there, what you’ve simply got to do is take slices of what went on there, and just roll them”. We’ll keep coming back over and over them and let it all come out that way. There’s been a tension. When I decided in 1987 that I wasn’t going to write for the orchestra anymore, I also decided that I wanted to get back to the early tape pieces, and get the fire that was in that documentary material. And Different Trains was very much the wedding of looking forward and looking back. It’s led to a lot of things; it opened the door to opera (the way I do it). In a lot of the pieces I feel the wisdom of the early pieces and I feel the wisdom of the later pieces, and there’s a tension of wanting more overt emotionality in the music and yet I don’t want to get soupy or sentimental, and so that tension is operating. It was operating earlier today - a lot of it’s choice of notes. As you’ve been composing the new Triple Quartet? Yeah. The piece for Kronos. It has to be a triple quartet, because I wouldn’t write a string quartet. Similar to Different Trains, but without the documentary material? Yeah, but once you take away that, you’ve got a different piece. But it’s scored for multitracked string quartet in the same way. The working title for Different Trains was Triple Quartet wasn’t it? Yes. For a while I didn’t know there was going to be any samples in it. So yes, exactly. This is the piece I was going to do before I did Different Trains. It’s nice to have thought about it now. You can do it in two ways: with all of the parts live, or obviously you can do it with Kronos playing with tape. I started thinking about the rest of the opera - I could increase my string section by using prerecorded parts. When people like Ensemble Modern (who are doing a concert of my music in Europe) want to do it with all live strings - great. But from a working musician’s standpoint, with his own ensemble, I can use a string quartet, prerecord and go out with eight or ten string voices, which widens the palette considerably, especially if you’ve got all the percussion and keyboards. So this piece is also “aha! Band in a box!”, as a lot of us are becoming aware of - that you can do a lot through technology in terms of touring. We’re living in the nineties, and there’s no clear view that things are going to turn back into the eighties anywhere in the near future, so how many people you take on the road and how many people you travel with really matters. Stravinsky faced similar problems in the aftermath of World War One, and his solution was the scaled down scoring of L’Histoire du Soldat. Exactly, exactly! He went from the ballets, World War One came along and there was a recession, and Histoire was something you could tour on the back of a truck. It was also expandable and contractable - you could have a narrator, you could have dancers.The result was a masterpiece, as great in its way as any of the ballets. It’s a reasonable problem to face and it’s one that doesn’t cripple you at all. I’m interested in pursuing the ideas you mentioned a little earlier, about tension between narrative and non-narrative structures - or could we talk about linearity versus non-linearity? Narrative structure to me means telling a story. Hindenburg is quasi-narrative, and I think in Bikini it will be different, and in Dolly, well I don’t know. Dolly’s the big one, it’s going to be the longest in Three Tales. It’s not just about cloning, it’s about the entire situation of genetic engineering, mapping of the genome, and all the computers underlying it - the technological situation we’re in now. But in the instrumental pieces . . . One of the most successful pieces I’ve written in a long time is Proverb. Proverb is cyclical; the key to Proverb is that the text is short. It couldn’t be much shorter. That’s why the piece can work the way it does - I can say “I’m really going to get into this thing, and open it up”. It’s the first time I really did augmentation canon, just thinking about it, knowing about it from the medieval period, and thinking “just do it”. The first and the last scenes of Hindenburg are augmentation canons with the three tenors. The increase in duration also serves to heighten the emotion. It’s a similar process to that which forms the basis of Four Organs. Yes, but I’m talking about things happening melodically. But yeah. Augmentation is. well, I’m surprised more people don’t take it seriously. It’s a new way of lengthening something that’s pre-existing, and you can take it to great lengths. Also in Hindenburg, I finally stretch out the voice. . . You’re doing Slow Motion Sound at last? Exactly! It really is there, and it really works. It’s the voice of the famous announcer who saw the Hindenburg go down: “it’s crashing, it’s crashing, oh!” becomes “o-o-o-h!”. You really feel it in your gut as you see this thing in slow motion going down. So Slow Motion Sound has come full circle. Yes, partly because it’s actually possible now, and here it has a purpose. It also the desire people have had for microtonality - you have this tonal thing happening, and over the top is this sliding voice, because every vowel is a glissando. It’s something I’m definitely going to go further with in Three Tales. To me digital time stretching is still slightly unsatisfactory because of the discreet steps in the resulting glissandi. Yeah, but what I’m using now is a part of the new Digital Performer program, which is becoming a whole audio recording software as well as sequencer. I usually use Finale, but when I’m working with Beryl I need something to keep me in sync with the images, and it slaves beautifully - Hollywood uses it a lot. In that program is this time stretching, and it started out as just a time stretcher where you keep the pitch the same, but then they refined it whereby the formants are treated separately from the actual pitch. That means that when you stretch a male voice, not only do you keep the pitch the same, but you get the formants staying the same, and that’s really what is characteristic of the voice. It’s so good that if you move something within a third, possibly even a fourth of where they were, you do not hear the difference. They themselves would think it’s the same. So when you begin to elongate, there’s still a little artifacting happens, but that’s kind of nice. (imitates sound of noise buildup). I’m not against grain and funk - I’m an old 35 mm film buff! Grainy pictures and grainy recordings - I mean the Different Trains recordings! We’ve had people play the piece and say “how do expect us to use this terrible recording?” These recordings are historical recordings - being bad is part of what they are. We’ve cleaned them up as best we can, but that’s the way it is. I didn’t make the recordings - they were made with some Radio Shack piece of junk in 1972. I’ve long been interested in the concept of ambiguity in relation to your work, and in relation to music of long duration, especially in regard to harmony. It was important in the formation of pieces such as The Desert Music and Sextet. Is it something you still think about? Yes. Right now, the piece I’m working on for Kronos is structured very much like the third movement of The Desert Music. It’s a series of dominants in minor, the dominant of E minor. First of all the dominants have added tones - they’re not voiced 1, 3,5, 7 at all - and second of all, as they move from section to section, they move in minor thirds, which are outlined as a diminished seventh chord. Which means you don’t really know where you’re going, because you’re not going anywhere - you’re always just moving ahead. I have at times gone V-I, such as at the end of The Four Sections, and I’m not really happy with that. I think that the ambiguity that I talked about many years ago in rhythm, with various subdivisions of twelve such as you find in African music inherent in the meter, because it can be either a triple or a duple meter, has its analogy in unresolved dominants, which of course Debussy was keenly aware of. Indeed, a lot of what I’ve done, a lot of what other people have done which is called minimalist owes a lot more to the French than to the German tradition. That’s why someone like John Adams really left the fold (which is fine, he is who he is) - John really cares about Schönberg, he really cares about Mahler and Sibelius. I can’t listen to any of that stuff. But harmonically speaking . . . well, a lot of it happened unconsciously. First of all, when I was a kid, every movie was a reworking of Ravel or Debussy. A lot of bebop was very sympathetic to French Impressionism. Then there’s Gershwin - Gershwin and Ravel were like a mutual admiration society. I don’t think it’s surprising that someone of my generation would sop that up. Only later did I realise if you play something in the middle register, you change the bass and don’t change the middle - that’s the Afternoon of a Faun, or Mother Goose. Another thing is the combination in simultaneity of functional chords traditionally placed in linear sequence, for example the stacking of a tonic and a dominant with the tonic on top in Four Organs, or often in Thelonius Monk’s music. Right. Well, that particular chord is the magic chord, that’s Scriabin’s dominant eleventh, with the tonic on top. And you do find that in Thelonius Monk, and you can find it in Debussy’s Trio for viola, flute and harp. There’s a communality: French Impressionism, bebop and me (laughs). And a lot of other people. It seems to work particularly well in a piece like Four Organs. Four Organs needed something that would sustain twenty minutes of the same chord. It’s playing with the V-I cadence in a really interesting way. Instead of following each other, they are on top of each other. Yeah, you just take away one - well, that’s resolved. You put it back in, it’s not resolved (laughs). That sort of thinking continued through a lot of your pieces. A lot of pieces of mine, such as in The Desert Music, I take away the bass. I usually end by going up. I never want to affirm something in the bass at the end of a piece, as you find in eighteenth and nineteenth century music. It sounds too gauche, too heavy handed - I mean how could you do such a thing? It’s too obvious. It’s too obvious. We can’t do that anymore. You can do it, but I don’t want to hear it! But those are realities, they are musical realities, so how do you deal with them? Well, if you just let it resolve in a register where there’s no bass, it hasn’t got that obviousness, and what’s more, other things happen. At the end of The Desert Music, you get to a situation where you’re still on a dominant chord, but you could be in major or you could be in minor - that’s basically the three areas of traditional Western music. Once you put the bass in, it’s over - then we know where we are, we’ve done it. But if you begin removing it, then the ear, depending on how you set the situation up, will flit around assigning various values to it, depending on how it’s heard that chord before. That is something that I feel was, albeit unconsious, a very important lesson. In the early eighties I actually spent some time thinking about this ambiguity and where it came from; I concluded “this is Debussy”. Historically that’s very important, because what happened at that time? Debussy’s basically coming a little after Wagner, and Wagner is an issue to be dealt with. Wagner is pointing to Schönberg - “if we keep going in this direction, we’re going to lose the whole thing, and good riddance, we’ve had enough of this. You won’t know where you are - that’s freedom.” Debussy’s basically saying “well. . . I don’t think I want to throw it away, I just want to make it extremely ambiguous. I want to bring the modes back again.” Because the modes had tonal centres. And then, look at Bartok: at a certain point pretty early on, Bartok hears Debussy. If Bartok had not heard Debussy and all he heard was Richard Strauss etcetera, he would have been a much less interesting composer, and I wonder if he would have been as free to become as Hungarian as he did. This is one of the theories I have about him (it may be completely wrong, but it feels nice to me) that Debussy must have encouraged him to go “hey, folk music is where it’s at” because already this modal freedom had bubbled up somewhere. It’s become a cliché, but it’s funny: Boulez loves Debussy but Debussy had it right, Schönberg and Wagner had it wrong in a sense. It isn’t over; it’s just that now there’s a whole other way of skinning the cat - lots and lots of ways of skinning the cat. Debussy’s a tremendous pat on the back, encouraging you: [in thick Brooklyn accent] “sure man, there’s all kinds of ways you can do it; you don’t have to throw it away. You can almost throw it away, you can stretch it. . .” It’s interesting that Boulez is almost embracing that attitude himself now. Yes, he seems to be. He’s much less doctrinaire. I’d like to hear some of the recent pieces - I mean, the guy is fantastic. I like to think of Debussian harmony as a way of playing with time. As I was saying before, sonorities instead of being sequential and goal-oriented become reinforcements of sound. This sits well with early minimalist ideas of the eternal present and of continuum. Is that something you’ve thought about? In Four Organs certainly, but in other pieces it’s different. In Sextet it goes to A minor, and it really resolves as it goes up, and it’s a very, very effective cadence, and it is goal-oriented. How it gets there is not how you would expect. It’s goal-oriented but the goal is somewhat softened. It’s like the end of Tehillim, which is that same dominant eleventh chord as in Four Organs. It’s satisfying as an ending, but it’s actually still a dominant chord because it’s voiced that way. “Hallelujah” - that last chord is saying “let’s go to D major” and you’re already in D major. You’re already there, but you’re not - the tension and resolution are simultaneous. But it’s also a very strong ending rhythmically. But it’s not a tonic chord, and that’s what saves it. It’s hammered out, but it’s hammered out the same way Four Organs is hammered out. You accept it, but you also feel that it’s pushing you on - that’s why it’s such a great ending. This not wanting to end is what makes me wonder about the concept of the continuum, popular in the sixties - the idea that the music is always there, and you’re just tapping into it for a little while. Well, that’s LaMonte and Terry in a sense, that’s the Indian thing. I was not part of that - my pieces have a beginning, they have a middle and they have an end. I’ve always got that - Piano Phase has a beginning, a middle and an end. I could point it out - the middle is eight beats long (laughs), and the beginning is twelve and the ending is four. And it works that way - it’s a stretto too. There’s a lot of old ideas, except that the timing is such that you can’t think of it that way, but it has that effect - getting more intense and shorter. It also moves forward harmonically. Yes, exactly. You can see it as a II-V-I progression in minor (laughs), ending in A minor. There’s a definite sense of arrival in Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ when you reach the last section, with the bass ending on the dominant. Exactly, yes. The dominant is an engine - the fifth is present in all music. The perfect intervals are always present. Take Schönberg - you can disregard that, but then you cut yourself off from the rest of the world. He’s a great composer, but he’s like somebody sitting in a little dark corner - and that’s okay, but life is such that you only go there once in a while. And that’s what’s happened - the postman’s never going to listen to Schönberg. He thought that eventually he was going to be like Tchaikovsky; that was absurd! In a thousand years that’s not going to happen. But he’s still a great composer. It was a marginal concern that somehow got to dominate the entire intellectual musical world between the fifties and seventies. If Igor Stravinsky can do it, well I mean. . .but that’s another story. I’m interesting in talking about your endings, because they do tend to avoid finality. I just don’t want to get into a V-I situation. There are lots of ways of ending pieces without getting involved in that. The earlier pieces were basically a process of “snip”. In Music for Eighteen Musicians it doesn’t really cadence, it comes back to where it started; all of those chords are really ambiguous. What’s really nice about an ending is when you get a feeling of “and” - the last word is “and”. It’s got to be a satisfying end, and it’s got to be one that also makes you feel that there’s movement there, that it could go on, that it isn’t a stone wall. Different Trains has quite an unusual ending with its stopping and starting. That piece I’m obliged to, and I think I did a very good job of dealing with that ending. There’s quite a story being told there in that section: “and when she stopped singing they said ‘more, more’ and they applauded” - that’s saying a lot about a lot of things, certainly about what I was doing in the piece, which was “it’s not going to change the world, it’s just a piece of music”. The ending itself is a comment on that. Absolutely. [Sings] “There was one girl (’hallelujah’ - it’s the same notes) who had a beautiful voice, and they loved to listen to her singing. And when they stopped singing, they said ‘more, more’ and they applauded”. We know that, probably not even just in the officers club, but actually in the enlisted men, there were a lot of people who really knew music, they played and knew it themselves. They enjoyed the singing of this Jewish prisoner and then probably gassed her. Exactly. Ethics and aesthetics have nothing to do with each other. There’s a desire to think “I like composer X, so composer X has got to be a good guy” - no way! Might be, but there’s just no connection. It’s also the effectiveness of political art. Guernica is a towering masterpiece protesting civilian bombing. It’s survived as a painting but did it stop civilian bombing? Come on! Picasso’s not even a midget in the world of political action. It would have been better if Wagner had been shot to death - he really blew it as a human being. It might have averted a lot of bad things, because he did have a very powerful influence. But Wagner is, in my own estimation and in the opinion of many others, is a genius. His music is incredible. (By the way, Hindenburg’s third scene is called Niebelung’s Emblem and it basically takes on the Niebelung’s theme and makes a really old-style repeating pattern piece out of it: (sings) dun-da-dun dun-dun-dun). So I think those are things which are true and you just have to face that - it was possible for Nazis to be extremely cultured and extremely inhuman, and that is the nature of artistic excellence and moral excellence have no necessary connection whatsoever. But then can’t a piece like Dolly at least raise awareness of the problems and lead to informed discussion? Absolutely. The point is, if I’m going to do an opera, if I’m going to do a theatre piece, I’ve got to be burning with interest in it, or I’m going to bore the pants off anybody if I’m not. Wagner was really possessed with seeing the answer to what was wrong in all the Germans around him by finding their roots back in all their early Nordic mythological heritage. How many people really care about that now? Obviously some people do, but Wagner made you care about it because his music’s so great. So basically, I’ve got to do something I care about: I live with technology, you live with technology, we all live with technology, and we’re about to go around a really big bend with it. As I’m reading and looking into this genetic thing . . . The changes could be huge. Yeah, you could have beings walking around the streets which are not like you or I. We’re now at the stage where we can make beings - we’re at the dawn of this, where we can have asexual reproduction en masse, where we can go to a baby boutique. All kinds of very basic human phenomena could start suddenly slipping away. Huxley stuff. No, he didn’t see it. It’s not so much that it’s going to be controlled by Big Brother. Mary Shelley with Frankenstein had a brilliant insight, that there’s a desire to make things and to investigate them, and carried far enough this can lead you to the point when you become a kind of deity in your own eyes, because you can create. . . life. Life forms anyway. Whether we’re equipped. . .! It’s adding a megadose of self-destruction on top of the already abundant means of self-destruction, and it also indicates certain possible religious blindnesses which have been accumulating for many years now. We’re finally setting the stage for something that could be nightmarish. On the other hand, I’m very interested in using my computer (so are you), I’m not a Luddite, I’ve got to say I’m guilty as charged - I’ve got my hands dirty in this stuff too. So it’s a very, very seductive and puzzling situation we’re finding ourselves in. It has to do with Faust, it has to do with the Garden of Eden and Knowledge, and it’s moving so fast I can barely keep up with it. Have you heard about nanotechnology? Yes I have, and it scares the pants off me. We were interviewing Marvin Minsky - he’s a pretty scary guy when you really get him going on how there’s no soul and how we’re going to be able to . . .[imitates Minsky’s voice] “you’re not going to die, Robert, we’ll just download all your thoughts and emotions into a floppy disk, put the floppy disk into a drawer, and you can live forever.” Really this is not just some harebrained scheme, this is MIT, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, this is people with big research grants working to make this reality, and a lot of other things associated with it, and nanotechnology’s a big part of that. Were you interviewing Minsky for possible inclusion in Three Tales? Probably not. We happened to up there doing other interviews - I sort of know him through mutual friends, we’ve got some contacts so I thought “let’s do this”. I think he likes to be outrageous. But there’s this whole reductionist school, and there are so few people against this. There’s a lot of things brewing which are really very basic, but also cutting edge, and that’s what Dolly will be about. Bikini is about the cold war. I think Bikini will open up for us as artists the possibility of presenting the material without it being as narrative as The Cave was, or even as narrative as Hindenburg was, and that will transfer into Dolly. Each section in the piece is going to be different formally, and Hindenburg really should be the most narrative. In Bikini the narrative will begin to break down, and I hope it will break down further in Dolly. Also the look of the piece will change - the first piece is all black and white, it’s all archival from 1934, and in the second piece you’ve got some colour and some very good black and white, and then the last piece will be today. So they’re period pieces as they should be - they will look and feel like their period, because the documentary material reflects that. Which is very appropriate for a piece about technology which changes so rapidly. Yeah. The medium is the message. Interview conducted January 1999, New York City
Interview with Chris Hobbs By Robert Davidson January 1999 Your situation at the beginning of your career, associated with Cardew, was rather parallel to that of Christian Wolff with Cage. Yeah, certainly as far as age difference was concerned. Reading interviews with Christian it seems that he was in rather a similar situation, except that in my case I started off in music, and I’d heard of Cardew and those people already. I started writing what I considered to be experimental music in my middle teens, around about 1965 with a Morton Feldman-influenced piece. And then I discovered La Monte Young and people like that. A friend called Philip Pilkington, who’s a pianist, was studying at the Royal Academy of Music, and they told me that they had been thinking of getting Cardew along as a teacher. So I applied to go to the Academy and study with him. How did you come to know about this music – it would have been presumably not easy to come across as a teenager in the mid sixties. I was lucky that I had a music master at my secondary school who was very interested in new music. At that time the American Embassy in London had a record library. They got all the Time records for example. So right from the word go, when one got to secondary school, as well as hearing Schubert’s Trout Quintet and the Planets and the Eroica symphony, he’d also play Fontana Mix, Le marteau sans maître, Zeitmasse and things like that. I quickly discovered I preferred Le marteau sans maître, Zeitmasse and Fontana Mix to the Trout Quintet. He [the music master] probably thought Cage was a bit mad, but he was willing to give it a go. Then I started going to the Central Music Library in London and getting scores out. And how did you come across Cardew? I knew his name, though I don’t think I’d heard any of his music. I think probably through Philip Pilkington who mentioned Cardew as a teacher – I’d heard of Cardew and he seemed to be a kind of gateway through which one could go into experimental music. There was a quote from Feldman, who said “any experimental music would happen through Cardew”. I’m not sure if I knew that quote then – it may have been later. At the time that I met him, he was working on Paragraph 1 of what was then called The Great Digest, and he’d just finished Treatise, or was just finishing Treatise. Certainly the Academy kept him very quiet – I was his only pupil for the first year – almost the first year. And gradually word seeped out to other people – I probably told Hugh Shrapnel and so on that he was there, and they all went “wow – here we are studying with Lennox Berkeley, and could be studying with Cornelius Cardew”. So they did. But at first it was only you. That’s right. All the time I was with him there, he was working full-time at Aldus Books as a graphic designer. That was his bread and butter. He was probably paid a couple of hours a week at the Academy. How do you think Cardew influenced you? Not personally, but as far as his music was concerned I think… the age difference was quite considerable. He was very friendly. But really more as an organiser – obviously starting things like the Morley College classes and then the Scratch Orchestra. But it certainly wasn’t a friendship. He took us out for a drink when we decided we were going to leave at the end of my second year, but he was quite stilted, not very good with us in company – I think he was better with people his own age. And perhaps with large groups? Perhaps with large groups. You didn’t finish at the Royal Academy? I didn’t finish, no. There was too much else going on. I’d cut down on pretty much all my other classes – this was about June-July 1969. There seemed very little point in continuing; by that time I’d done what I wanted to, which was to meet Cardew and make contacts with experimental music in London. I was doing a lot of playing by that time, and I saw no point in continuing [studies]. So you were involved full-time in composing and performing? That’s right. And your involvement with the Scratch Orchestra was quite intense? I couldn’t say intense – it was a very important part, but so was being with AMM or the Promenade Theatre Orchestra, or doing other gigs – the Scratch Orchestra was a part of it. But you were one of the regular members at weekly meetings, performances etc? In the early days, yeah. I left in ’71. Just when Dave Smith was arriving. Absolutely. Yes, I didn’t know some of the later people. Dave and I didn’t meet until a couple of years later. You’ve been involved with making use of existing music in your own work for a long time. Was that idea somewhat related to the ‘popular classics’ idea in the Scratch Orchestra. No, I think it evolved independently. It was something that John White and I developed together – the concept. I think John came up with applying the Duchamp term “readymade” to the music, whereby you simply took a piece… With the Scratch Orchestra, the idea was that you tried to play the piece the best you could, or you took a part of it. In that sense, the natural heirs of that was the Portsmouth Sinfonia. But no, what we were doing was making actual pieces of music, mostly for the Promenade Theatre Orchestra. I never used readymade concepts in writing for the Scratch Orchestra – the only pieces I wrote for the Scratch Orchestra were verbal, because so many of the members were non-musicians – couldn’t read music. But the readymade concept – the idea of taking existing pieces of music and building something out of them was probably much nearer to Duchamp’s concept, one of which was a technical musical matter, rather than the conceptual nature of music for the Scratch Orchestra. I’ve been struck by how much more use of readymades from the Western heritage there is amongst British composers in this area than by comparable American composers, where non-Western music is more likely. I suspect that one reason for that culturally is that in Europe we’re much more burdened by history than you were in America. Perhaps people grew up knowing the William Tell Overture and all these pieces (that of course the Portsmouth Sinfonia plays so marvellously), and perhaps there just wasn’t the need to try to get rid of that heritage. But it’s more specific than that, because there’s more of it here than in Germany, for example, including amongst modernists such as Max Davies. It does seem to be so. That goes back to the Renaissance idea of parody – the Parody Mass, isn’t it? You know, all those masses on L’homme armé – it’s much more a Renaissance concept, it goes right back there. I don’t know German composers don’t have that – I guess they’re too serious. But it is an important point – the element of humour, which I think all of us have, all of us in a certain type of English music-making, which does seem to be absent from a lot of [continental] European music-making, which seems to be approached in a much more serious way. One is a Composer! High minded. Absolutely. The words ironic detachment spring to mind. There’s always been, certainly, an element of quotation, in many areas of music. It’s there in jazz all the time. I think my own reasons, and I suspect with Gavin as well, is in the way that one uses quotes in jazz. You’re at a particular harmonic structure and you think “oh, this would fit in here”. Except in jazz, of course, you do it at the point of improvisation. With my music, or a lot of experimental music, it’s either seeing a structure that you might develop into something, or simply that this context is one in which you could introduce particular content, for example, this piece by Tallis: Which is in one of the Quadrum Pavanes – the Galliards from the Quadrum Pavanes. I rather like the flattened and sharpened 7th. So just the idea of repeating: Which became a piece called Working Post. And that’s all it is – it just plays around with those notes, simply because I was playing through the Tallis one day and I thought “that’s nice”. So you kind of lift out a fragment and make it into a much longer piece. I still use concepts rather like that. There’s quite a long series called L’Auteur se Retire which uses a basic chromatic structure subtracting musical notes from composers’ names to chosen works. That’s quite a lengthy series – there’s a piece by Scarlatti, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Satie après Cage, where I used Cage’s two-piano arrangement of Socrates. I think I took Cage out rather than Satie. The piece I wrote for a concert called the Satie collection in February uses rather similar techniques with a piece by Satie except that I don’t extract – I use music which is left and then make my own piece out of that. With the rest of L’Auteur se Retire, I’ve been content to simply leave what was there, having subtracted the composer; in this case I’ve actually taken little fragments and used that to build a piece, which demands a more interesting approach. It does strike me as connected with a desire to question a linear view of music history. Going back and finding things that have been left by the wayside, picking them up and saying ‘well, what can we do with this?’ I think that’s certainly true. In the last forty years, the history of all the arts is one of eclecticism and of self reference, simply because you are in a position where you’ve got all of music history available to you at the touch of a button, which has never happened at any time in the history of music. Nobody could have done that. Bach thought of himself as being modern, Mozart thought of himself as being modern and went back to Palestrina, but it would have been unthinkable for Mozart to have known what Perotin was writing. Whereas now we’re in a situation where we can call up Perotin just as easily as we can Mozart or Status Quo or Oasis or Balinese gamelan or African drumming etcetera. And you see, that’s in all the arts, so you’ve only got to watch an episode of the Simpsons to see the number of self borrowings, the references you’re meant to have to movies, to the whole American movie tradition. Though once again this may be a generational thing – I teach a course called Music and Media at De Montfort University, and it’s becoming a truism that for a lot of people about eighteen or nineteen, film history begins with Star Wars. I began a course last year and the first film that I dealt with was the opening ten minutes of Casablanca, quoting Umberto Eco’s essay on it. And I discovered that out of thirty people in the room, twenty-six of them had never seen Casablanca. Which to me, as something of a film buff, is quite extraordinary. It’s the equivalent of a musician never having heard The Rite of Spring. And perhaps the study of history is something which is beginning to disappear. History courses aren’t taught so much – people aren’t required to know history. I think the whole history of ideas tends to be perhaps turned over at a much faster rate. On a much more general level of history, it’s becoming much more difficult to read history through biography – we’re obviously witnessing the death of the biography, because people don’t write letters. I remember John Tilbury’s quote about the Maoism days – “we’re witnessing the sunset of capitalism, but what a beautiful sunset”. And similarly you see it in the world of biography. It’s a wonderful time for the big biography, but in twenty or thirty years’ time, such books will be quite impossible, because everybody communicates by email. And already we’re discovering that there is no cast-iron retrieval system – the technology moves on so fast. Whatever you’ve got on your hard drive now will be not retrievable in the near future, perhaps ten or fifteen years time. I think one has to live with that – it’s going to make things very, very different. We’re also living in a time of breadth rather than depth. Yeah. I mean going back to why English composers use references more than [continental] Europeans – maybe it’s the way that people don’t form groups in this country, or haven’t, or the groups are extremely disparate. If you go to a small country like Holland or Belgium, all of the composers know each other and tend to work together for obvious reasons. They’re all geographically in a very small area. Now in Leicester we’ve got Gavin in Billesden, I’m here, Andy’s down the road a few miles away, but for various reasons, Andy and Gavin don’t talk to each other, I very rarely see Gavin, Andy and I see each other a lot because we work in the same department, but musically we go in very different directions. The group is very loose. When I look at someone like Howard Skempton – I like Howard enormously, and we get on very well – but musically, I don’t know what he’s doing, and he doesn’t know what I’m doing. And there’s no real urgency or necessity to find out I daresay. In England one finds people going much more on individual paths. But when you were younger, you were all in bands together and put out records together. That’s right, but one moves out fairly quickly. I wanted to ask you about the automatic aspect of some of your pieces – the use of process. Yes. There’s quite a big piece that I’m writing for my PhD – essentially I’m writing analyses of pieces written in the last three or four years – there’s a big piece called No one may ever have the same knowledge again, which is a series of letters written by cranks, essentially, to the Mount Wilson observatory in California in the first thirty years of the century. Which I’ve used for speaking voices, based on the number seven, on Holst’s Planets suite, on the necessity to get from the surface of Mercury to the surface of Pluto in twenty-eight minutes. The number seven – there are seven instrumentalists, there are a lot of complicated systems, which give everything except which notes to play. And even then, one of the offshoots of that research was discovering the finite number of how many scales there are in the world, which I’ve now done. So how many are there? I haven’t got the details – there’s something like 34 seven-note scales, considered as circular strings. For example, all white-note scales are considered as the same family. It’s like a circular bus route – you can get on the bus at any point, go around the circle and get off where you got on. There are something like 137 eight-note scales. I’m restricting the scale steps to augmented seconds. Obviously you could very easily devise a program for deducing how many possible scales there are using major thirds as well, but I decided not to. It reminds me of a piece by Andrew Hugill – A Slight List – which systematically works through many seven-note scales. Yes. Using those kinds of systems is still there, though I write empirical music as well. What interests you in using systems? It’s simply another way of organising structure. Certainly in No one may ever have the same knowledge again, I wanted to write a musical background to these thoughts about the universe that people had felt it necessary to communicate to the astronomers at Mt Wilson observatory. And these were people who’d gone to enormous lengths to construct very complicated theories – sometimes on the origins of planets and how long the universe had existed, or sometimes just write their visions. But I wanted to take these very seriously, and at the same time try and reflect the kind of thinking that went into the writing of the letters. So one way of doing that was to construct systems which were maybe the kinds of things the writers may have constructed had they been composers. A lot of it may sound very mechanical, but in fact it is empirical, because sometimes you’ll find it’s a system that works, and sometimes it simply won’t. I wrote a piece called The Back Gates of Kiev, which uses a Bach chorale in which successive lines are kept on the same note and the other lines are transposed to keep the same intervallic relations to that note, so there’ll be a lot of chords all of which, on their own, are the original Bach, but then horizontally of course become transposed, because I’m keeping successively the soprano, alto, tenor and bass on monotone. That piece worked very well. Whereas John White told me that when he tried it out with another Bach chorale, it didn’t work. It didn’t sound good. When I was writing No one, because I was using everything I could based on the number seven, I wanted to use Koechlin’s Seven Stars symphony, and also Prokofiev’s cantata Seven, they are seven. But however, I simply couldn’t incorporate them. I couldn’t incorporate the Koechlin because I thought it was such an awful piece of music. And I couldn’t incorporate the Prokofiev, because there was no way in – it was impenetrable. With the score in front of me, there was no way I could use what he had done. I tried dividing the thing up into seven, and looking at it vertically – it simply wouldn’t work. So though there are systems, the intuitive response remains primary. Absolutely. I mean the discovery of the systems is serendipitous. Are systems and structures a way of hanging the sounds, like pegs? They’re exactly that – that’s right. I’m mindful of Joyce – what he said in a letter about Ulysses, which was that the structure was simply a method of getting his troops over the bridge. He didn’t mind if afterwards the enemy blew the bridge sky high – that was what he needed in order to write the book – these structures. And that’s exactly the way I think about them – they’re a necessary way of getting the troops across. I think that John White in his ‘70s electric pieces tends to use systems in a much more rigorous way. To my mind, the problem with that is that sometimes the pieces go on rather longer than they ought to. But that’s simply my personal view of the pieces. The systems you describe sound as if they wouldn’t necessarily be very apparent to the listener. Actually they’re not. With No one, you would be completely unaware, probably, of what the system was – you would just be aware of a rather nebulous sound world, because one is in fact moving through seven planets. You can’t really tell how the piece is structured in one minute chunks, each one having a different combination of seven instruments. So it’s obviously quite a different approach from Steve Reich, with his early concern to make the process heard. Yes. But once again this is only part of my work. There’s a whole bunch of stuff which is, as I say, completely empirical, based on the necessity to write for particular instruments at a particular time – a ten minute piece to play, or something like that. It depends on the needs of the moment. There’s an ensemble I was in at the end of the eighties called the Hartzell Hilton ensemble, for which I wrote several pieces (one of which Jeremy played the other month). There’s just starting at A, finishing at Z and whatever happens in between happens. Writing what pleased you. That’s right, yes. There’s a whole lot of music where that happens. The systems part has probably been overstressed. The majority of my work isn’t systemic. Do you often work by improvising at the keyboard and seeing what comes? It’s occasionally that, it’s occasionally knowing performers – it helps knowing performers a lot – knowing the sound world, knowing what they can do with their instrument. I’m sure you as a composer would find the same thing – if you know the group, if you know the person, sometimes it’s a matter of imagining the performers on stage. They’re about to pick up their instruments. What sounds would one like to hear them play? Starting with that. Or starting with a phrase that you hear. Part of it’s improvising at the keyboard, partly it’s thinking about things and then beginning. It varies – I’m sure you know yourself – it’s very much an intuitive process which is rather difficult afterwards to realise in retrospect exactly what you’ve done. You don’t normally start with a concept or a map of some sort? No. In the early seventies when I was writing pieces for the Promenade Theatre Orchestra, the necessity was having a new piece to play every Sunday. We rehearsed every week – we met every Sunday afternoon, and the understanding was that one would come up with at least one new piece every week. It’s a very similar situation to Bach or Haydn – simply, Bach’s got to write a new cantata. As Haydn said of that situation, “I was forced to become original”. You know, you’ve got to write the piece. That accounts for a lot of things like self borrowings, using other people’s music because it’s already there (Bach plagiarised himself, as did Händel, as did Haydn) – any composer, I think, in a situation where he or she has to generate a large amount of music in a short time is obviously going to feed off his or her previous work or other people’s previous work. Thus the concept of readymades, thus the concept of doing arrangements of pieces. We used to have a percussion ensemble at De Montfort, and Dave Smith and I would construct pieces for them. If you’ve got fourteen people – four marimbas, a vibraphone, steel drums – well, there isn’t very much existing music for it, so what do you do? You arrange pieces. So that’s what we did. So you have Dave Smith arranging Rimsky Korsakov’s Song of India. I did a lot of Alkan piano pieces, Busoni, for tuned percussion ensemble, simply because the instruments are there and the folks needed something to play. That’s very, very important. I don’t think very many of us (us in terms of English post-experimentalists) tend to write music simply because we get up and have the wonderful idea for a new symphony. I don’t tend to write unless there’s the prospect of a performance. Cage’s notion that music that hasn’t been performed is incomplete – I think it’s very important. I can’t see any point in the ivory tower, the ghetto mentality, where you have a wonderful piece and then have it played. It’s much more that you have the ensemble, you’ve got the gig, then you write the piece for it. This is certainly a prominent feature of the scene you’ve been involved with. Could you talk about the various composer-performer ensembles you’ve been involved with? The first one was the Promenade Theatre Orchestra, with John White, Alec Hill and Hugh Shrapnel, which was mostly in the early days toy pianos and reed organs. And then wind instruments which we happened to play, and percussion instruments. Then after that, John White and I split off and began a duo, either playing piano, because we’re pianists, or bassoon and tuba, which are our secondary and tertiary instruments, and then percussion. So we wrote music for that. Then I went solo and started writing for other groups, especially in America – California – mostly for Barnaby Childs at the University of Redlands music ensemble. Barney wrote to me and asked me to write a piece for them – this was in ’75 – I wrote a piece called Preludes and Chorales for clarinet… And Barney and I started corresponding, and I went out there in 1979. Then was the Hartzell Hilton ensemble, which was late eighties, then John White and I had another ensemble called Live Batts, which was battery-operated keyboard instruments. And then a couple of other duos along the way. We had a group called Assembly I wrote some pieces for, including the first version of No one may ever have the same knowledge again, and that was really constructed to get a lottery grant to do a performance at a new music festival in Leicester where we asked composers in the area to write pieces for us. Assembly still theoretically exists, but hasn’t met up for a while because the performers are rather disjointed, around the country. So performance has obviously always been an important aspect of your work. Yeah, I mean most of us, with the exception perhaps of Andrew, who’s not really a performer, all of us are composer-performers, and that is an important part of it. Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars are now quite famous and have big careers – did you share a desire for such a career? No, not at all. I don’t think Gavin did – he was quite surprised by the success of Jesus’ Blood. He fell into it in the same way as I imagine Nyman, who didn’t set out to be a famous composer; after all for a long period he wasn’t composing at all, as you know, which was a period in which he wrote the Experimental Music book, and then he started writing music for the National Theatre, and out of that he wrote incidental music for a play called Il Campiello , out of which came the Campiello band, and then he gradually became fashionable. I have a feeling that Nyman perhaps embraced his world fame rather more avidly than Gavin (I think Gavin accepts things – I think Gavin would be equally happy were he as obscure as he used to be). He didn’t go and seek out personal managers – they came to him. Gavin is not the sort of man who has ever struck me as a go-getter in that sense – it’s more that things happen. When Eno approached you for the Obscure record, he was quite fashionable. Yeah, though it was more just the opportunity of getting one’s pieces on some sort of recorded form. It was kind of a lark. None of us were under any illusions that “this is going to be a stepping stone to fame and fortune”. Did you know Eno well? Not really, no – the contact was mostly via Gavin. He simply contacted us, and I think he and Gavin sat down and thought “who will be the composers, who will be interesting on the album”. One composer included was John Adams – did you know him? I’ve never met John Adams. He’s another one who became famous in spite of himself. What are you doing with performance at the moment – do you have an ensemble at the University? Not really, no, because the department has moved very much away from live performance and it’s much more computer based, and much more based on what people will do if they go into the industry. It’s much more realistic. Has this sparked any interest for you in electronica? Not really. When I use electronics, it’s subverting it – we always use the cheapest possible instruments. I’ve tended to stay out of it – I use the casios, but not in terms of midi hookups. It is interesting that so much of what is happening in techno has links to what people like you were doing in the sixties and seventies. Probably not directly, probably from the people in rock who were influenced by that. Quite out of the blue, I got some email the other month from some guy who’d heard Aran at a Siouxie and the Banshees concert – it had been played before the gig began. I doubt that Siouxie Sioux was aware of it, because I haven’t been paid. This guy had heard the piece there and eventually tracked me down because he liked it, and asked me to send him a copy. The British critical press would seem to be rather unsympathetic even now to the area of music you’re working in. Has this been difficult? I think one just lives with it. The composers who are getting the publicity obviously get criticism. Nobody’s ever sent a critic along to a small experimental concert at the ICA, whereas where they would send somebody along to would be to hear a new piece by Mark Anthony Turnage. The whole of the new complexity school, which is something that is very different from the work which all of us have been doing… But you had early contact. Yes, but Ferneyhough and I were at the Academy together, but we had very little contact. He was in his last year when I was in my first. What was interesting at the Academy was that the two branches were going on entirely separately. Maxwell Davies’ side and the Cage side – we never met each other, quite literally. Ian Mitchell and I never met, even though we were at the Academy at the same time. He was with the Alan Hacker side and being a clarinettist, and that side never met with the Cardew side. It seems to me that the authorities did that, perhaps unknowingly, but it might have been conscious divide and rule. It was a side of music in which I was completely uninterested, and they in us. The Maxwell-Davies side came much more from European influence, and our side came from the American influences via Cardew. The last Stockhausen piece I remember liking was Momente II, and after that we got into Aus den sieben tagen, which seemed to be just ludicrous improvisation pieces. The improvisation rites we were doing in the Scratch Orchestra were a lot better. Stockhausen walked out of a Scratch Orchestra concert because it was too avant-garde for him. He was very conservative. And after that, of course, he became a lunatic, I think. I just have absolutely no desire to hear what he’s doing. He hasn’t written anything of use, it seems to me, since the sixties or early seventies. The music’s going round and round. Another thing about the influences of particular composers on the music of a particular country. If you go to Holland, once again, everybody seems to be trying to write like Andriessen. Andriessen’s shadow is inescapable. Like Boulez in Paris. Precisely. And luckily, we haven’t had that sort of influence. Boulez, by being so dogmatic and saying his is the music of the future and no other music is, but at the same time not generating any new music really to justify that position, it would appear to me, has simply dug himself into a hole. The same thing happened for a while on the East coast of America with Babbitt, that it was impossible to escape from. Babbitt’s notion that there was one way forward. The West coast has always been much more relaxed – the people we’ve always had much more contact with was the West coast. People like Harold Budd. Absolutely – Hal’s a great friend. I know Hal, I like his music, he likes my music – we get on very well. Once again, I’m not particularly in contact with him because he has this rock world/pop world part which generates income for him, but he’s a good friend. I know Riley, I know Reich, I know La Monte, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown. There’s been that personal contact, whereas the East coast people I simply don’t know. And I think there’s always been that contact, perhaps established by Cardew, but certainly by Bryars and by a certain cross-fertilisation of what’s going on in England and what’s going on in the West coast. And there you can see a certain kind of group. Once again, on the West coast there is no one person, unless it was Cage, who was of course an amorphous enough character – you can’t sit down and write a piece like John Cage in the way that you can write a piece like Andriessen. And the people influenced by Cage usually write utterly different music. Absolutely. An analogous figure, I suppose, would be Messiaen, who was such a very individual composer. So many people studied with him but nobody writes like him. He was obviously a good enough teacher to be able to encourage people to go their own way. Which in a way Cardew was too – he didn’t impose a personality or a style. He was a vessel through which things could happen. Messiaen had the same sort of abilities as Cage. The way we earn money is also rather different. Most of us don’t have university chairs to prop us up. We have to work as performing musicians, doing gigs, teaching – the music doesn’t make us very much money. It keeps you on your toes I suppose. Could you be making more money from your music as in the cases of Nyman and Bryars? We probably could, except that certainly I and I think John White are similar in that we don’t generate a similar enough product to make it very marketable. If you commission a piece from Gavin Bryars, you know what you’re going to get – you’re going to get something which is slow, very beautiful, gradually moving, gradually changing. If you commission a piece from Michael Nyman, you’re know what you’re going to get – a motoric, loud… you know what the product is. Whereas I’ve written very, very different kinds of pieces, simply in the last three years. No one may ever have the same knowledge again, some piano preludes, which are entirely empirical, and L’Auteur se Retire. They’re utterly different from one another and could have been written by different composers, because they use different techniques, different instruments. So if you commission a piece from me, you don’t know what you’re going to get. So in order to market something, you need a defined product. It’s not something I’m particularly interested in doing, in getting involved with – schmoozing, going out, buying a suit, going out and meeting A&R men is not something I’m very interested in doing. Are you interested in keeping your older works going? There are a few of them which come up again as old friends – “oh yes, it’s rather nice to hear that piece”. The verbal pieces from the early period I have no interest in hearing again, and I wouldn’t encourage people to play them. I wouldn’t suppress them, it’s simply that I’d have no interest at all in hearing the Voicepiece in this period. Some of the early PTO pieces – if someone wanted to play Working notes because it’s an early example of English minimalism (it dates from around 1969), then historically that’s probably of some importance and is rather a nice piece. There’s been rather a revival of interest in Fluxus which would make a good climate for your Voicepiece now. Yes – the obvious comparison is with Brecht’s Box. …investigate the origins of English systemic music, which as far as I’m concerned actually came through the visual arts, rather than through music. Duchamp was certainly an influence. Well, and then people like Jeffrey Steele, David Saunders, and certainly Geoffrey Swark. If you’ve been around to John’s [White] you would see his Jeffrey Steele picture, and I’ve got one of them, Parsons has got one of them – John’s got number one, I’ve got number two, I think Michael’s got number three. You mentioned Eno, who you know was an art student. The natural place for us experimentalists to go in the sixties and early seventies was art colleges. They were much more open than music colleges. That’s right. And my first teaching when I left the Academy was in art colleges. Barnett first of all. They had liberal arts courses you see, and they’d get us people down essentially to do experimental music with the students. It wouldn’t happen today. Absolutely not. But that was the cross-fertilisation. Portsmouth was of course where the Portsmouth Sinfonia came from. Gavin taught down there, Michael Parsons taught down there for years. I used to go down there regularly, John White used to go down there regularly. Eno was an art student, John Tilbury taught for years at an art college. That was the natural place for us to go – not to music college – that was the last place. But you all were very accomplished musicians as well, with a high degree of music college training. That’s right. In some cases that might have turned up later – it wasn’t particularly useful in the Scratch Orchestra. The Promenade Theatre Orchestra really developed out of a desire on the part of four of us to use our musical knowledge which we were not able to use in the context of the Scratch Orchestra. Has that increased over the years – the development of technique? I think inevitably yes. In twenty-five years one is bound to get better, but it doesn’t make writing the next piece any easier. There’s still a blank piece of paper and this problem – I guess one has access to more means of solving the problem. The problems themselves don’t go away. You just have more ways into the solutions. Though there is a great diversity in your style, do you think your music has a distinctive stamp on it? Looking at the work as a whole, I think you probably would be able to tell. It’s not something I particularly want to look into, because as soon as I’ve identified what it is that makes a Hobbs piece, there’s a danger that I will then begin to apply it consciously, so I try to steer clear of self-analysis. But it may well be that you would be able to identify something that creates a style that is recognisably different from John White or Dave Smith. I think there obviously is a difference, but it’s something I’m unwilling to go into in any enormous depth. Why are you interested in cheap and toy instruments? I think as an antidote to the necessity for more and more modern technology. When I did some pieces for solo Casio MT750 and I played them in America, a couple of the listeners who were into sound recordings were very dismissive of the music, because they couldn’t hear beyond the technology. They simply didn’t accept the fact that you could write music using such a cheap keyboard. Virginia once shared a house with a man who wouldn’t watch films made in black and white. He wouldn’t accept that films made in black and white could be acceptable as art, extraordinary though it may sound. Whereas I still believe there’s a great satisfaction about writing a piece for Casio VL-Tone and tape , which I did, and am probably the only composer who has. Probably because I just like the idea of being on stage with this tiny little instrument making these noises with a tape there. It was such an antidote to the days of pomp rock – Rick Wakeman and people like that, surrounded by keyboards. And Steinways? Yes, but not so much that – I love to use good Steinways, or a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand. No, as far as the technology was concerned, the idea is stadium rock. It’s why John White and I decided with Live Batts we would not play any instrument which could not be battery operated. So technology had to stop with that. Otherwise it becomes such a chase, in the sense that nowadays, when you get into music technology, like with sampling keyboards – “oh, you couldn’t use that, it’s six months ago!” Obsolescence. It’s obsolete, precisely. There’s a danger that technology becomes the goal, rather than the music. As soon as I say that, I hear myself being very old-fashioned, and very much old-generation, because if I was eighteen years old, that would not be the important thing – the important thing would be to get the new technology. So I shouldn’t criticise that – it’s simply that for me, that is not the goal. It’s interesting that fashion has brought out lots of the obsolete music technology. Absolutely. Back to Putneys, analogue. I used to have a Synthi, and they do sounds that you simply can’t get with digital. I like how they get just a little bit off sometimes and you can’t… They drift so much – you write the settings down very, very carefully. You come back a day later and think “how on earth did I get this” because all you’ve got to do is put the two oscillators up to 20000 and hear them moving there so fast – I love that – the fact that you can’t tie them down. And just the lovely reverb you used to get with a spring. End |