Interview with composer Chris Hobbs
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
