Home Biography Performances Works Listen& Look Survey Texts Links
|
Extracts from an interview
with Gwyn Pritchard for
Composition Today (2005)
Tell us something about your background.
I
was brought up in the country near Marlborough in Wiltshire, the son of a
farmer, and other than his enthusiasm for harmonizing hymns in church there was
virtually no music in my childhood until the family inherited a piano from a
deceased great aunt. I immediately started trying to teach myself, and at 13 I
also took up the ‘cello for which I demonstrated a reasonable aptitude. I
quickly developed a passion for music, but I knew next to nothing of the wider
musical world beyond what was typically on offer at that time in a small English
country town. In 1966 I went to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music to study the
‘cello with Joan Dickson as she was considered
at that time to be one of the leading teachers in the country. When there I was
given an award to study composition as well as the ‘cello, but I only really
found my compositional feet a few years later after a period working as a
professional ‘cellist. How
did you start composing? Almost as soon as that piano I was referring to had arrived, when I was about
twelve years old, I started trying to write music. I still have some of it –
mostly attempts to imitate the ‘classics’ that I occasionally heard at that
time, but a few pieces contain moments of charm and originality. Then in 1964 at
the age of sixteen I went to the now famous Wardour Castle summer school and
heard contemporary music for the first time, particularly Messiaen; I also met
Tippett and the young Birtwistle, and Maxwell Davies. The whole event was a
revelation to me and I immediately started trying to write music which drew on
that experience. Unfortunately I gained little compositional stimulus throughout
my student years, except for strong support from my composition teacher Frank
Spedding, as Glasgow at that time was pretty much a musical backwater as far as
contemporary music was concerned. But although I still acknowledge a few works
from those early years the first pieces about which I felt really confident were
composed in the mid 1970s after a period of rigorous self-teaching and analyzing
a whole range of scores. You
set up the Reggello International Festival of Contemporary & Classical
Music in Tuscany, Italy. Tell us something about the festival and your
reasons for starting it. I founded the festival in 2003 for three main reasons. Firstly, I have a house
in Tuscany and I was encouraged by many Italian friends to organize some event
that would contribute to the local cultural life; secondly, I frequently hear
Italian musicians lamenting the state of contemporary music in their country;
and thirdly, members of my Uroboros Ensemble, which I was forming again after an
eight year hibernation, were very enthusiastic about the idea of paying a visit
to the Tuscan countryside to give some concerts, eat the pizzas and drink the
wine!
My programming policy for the festival is to present high quality performances
of contemporary music from around the world, and also ‘classical’ works,
avoiding the popular repertoire that gets widely performed in Italy. So far this
policy has not proven to be the problem that one might justifiably expect, and
although we still depend mostly on a local audience it has been rewarding to
see, for example, a group of elderly nuns give Takemitsu at his most
‘avant-garde’ a standing ovation!
Starting
in 2004 the festival also hosts the Reggello International Composers’
Competition which aims to discover good pieces, not necessarily brand new
ones, by emerging or lesser known composers from around the world. It has always
seemed absurd to me that so many pieces, often commissioned, only ever get one
performance; not because they are musically deficient but because the majority
of competitions and calls for scores only accept new works. Musical substance, I
believe, is more important than the excitement of a world premičre. With my
Uroboros Ensemble we shall be performing the 2004 competition winners at St
Giles, Cripplegate on April 30th. How would you characterise
the Italian contemporary music scene as compared to the one in the UK? It’s utterly different. The more cynically minded would say that an
Italian contemporary music scene simply doesn’t exist. This is not strictly
true, but sadly Italy lacks the orchestras and ensembles with a commitment to
new music, and also lacks the organisations and institutions equivalent to those
in the UK that foster contemporary music by funding commissions and
performances. We complain about our situation in Britain relative to some other
European countries, but in Italy the situation is far worse. Even more sad is
the fact that at all political levels there is an apathy about the situation –
new music is not a vote winner, and in Italy everything has a political context.
This is why it has been so refreshing to find that my local council in Reggello
has been generous in its support for the new festival there despite, or perhaps
even because of, my programming policy. There
are of course plenty of significant Italians on the global contemporary music
scene, both composers and performers. But within Italy many of these characters
all too often exert any influence they may have on the musical politics of a
city, conservatoire or a festival so as to make it very difficult for new voices
to emerge. I have even heard one Italian composers suggest that despite the
benefits to Italian musical life that were derived from Berio’s international
status, his death may, paradoxically, make it somewhat easier for emerging
Italian composers to define and present their individual voices. Do
you read unsolicited scores? Yes, always. As a composer I know how essential it is to promote one’s own
work, even if you have a publisher who should be doing it for you. I always
stress that I have only very limited resources to help even really good pieces
to find a performance; but over the last twenty years I have conducted quite a
number of works that have been posted to me by hopeful composers. What
excites you about a piece of music - what keeps you interested? The sense that I am a witness to, even a participant in, the unfolding of
a meaningfully integrated yet open ended world of sound structures; where
nothing is predictable, but with the benefit of hind-sight (‘hind-hearing’)
everything may seem to have been inevitable, but only through a logic that is
impossible to discern fully, and so the mysteries remain and I have to hear it
all again. More simply I like music that metaphorically takes me to places I
could never have imagined and leaves me with a sense of wonder and amazement at
what I have experienced. And
what turns you off ? Predictability, banality, incompetence or pretentiousness masquerading as
originality, and musical prozac presented as the post-modern answer to (evasion
of) the artistic challenges of the last fifty years. What
do you see as the role (intended and actual) of new music in the modern world? Potentially the same as music has always been relative to the time in which it
is written: a mirror which reflects back to society not merely its image of
itself but its innermost dynamics, the forces that drive it onwards, that which
the society wants to celebrate but also its limitations, both its integrity and
its contradictions. I am less sure about the readiness of certain influential
sections of our modern world to look into that mirror and accept what it might
see; much that passes for music today seems to me more like a diversion from the
realities of our time. Whilst I am certainly not against the idea of music as
entertainment or fun I worry about the drowning of imaginative and articulate
musical ideas reflecting the deepest human sensitivities in the unstoppable tide
of aggressively marketed fashionable trivia, musical or otherwise. But there are
still plenty of committed composers, representing a profusion of styles, all
continuing to write their music; and there always will be no doubt, however
difficult the artistic environment may be. Let’s hope that enough people get
to hear it. Who
or what has influenced your style as a composer? All composers get asked this question and I always find it difficult to answer.
Being effectively self taught in terms of the kind of music I ultimately ended
up composing I didn’t have any models presented to me by a teacher; and from
the many and varied works by Berio, Boulez, Xenakis, Messiaen, Carter,
Birtwistle and others that I studied and in many cases analyzed in some depth in
the early 1970s I tended to respond more to the kinds of sound-worlds they were
exploring rather than their technical means of exploring them. I wanted to
invent my own methods to integrate and develop the possibilities of those many
sound objects that had made an impression on me. So it’s fair to say that the
direct influence of any one of these figures is fairly minimal, but collectively
the music of many of the important figures of the 1960s and 70s exerted a
significant influence; as did some composers from earlier periods such as
Webern, Berg and even Beethoven and Dufay. Beyond musical influences I have
always been fascinated by visual art, and painters such as Miro, Klee and
particularly Ben Nicholson were probably just as influential as any composers.
Perhaps one of the biggest influence of all has been landscape. I am anything
but a latter day pastoralist, but I have written quite a number of pieces that
have their genesis in seeing relationships within natural formations, such as
rock strata, as tangible counterparts to more abstract musical ideas. Do
you have particular techniques - one's you come back to again and again? Tell us
a bit about them. Specific techniques, no; more general methods of approach, yes. In some
earlier pieces I employed matrices and magic squares; and subsequently, in
common with many other composers, I developed my own methods of controlled
permutations applicable to any musical parameter, with potential for lesser or
greater specificity according to the needs of the context. I have also been
interested in the idea of ‘sets’ of both pitch and duration which are
characterised not by fixed intervals but by ratios which can be expanded or
compressed. But in all my more recent pieces, whilst I continue to use numerical
structures simply to generate a framework of possibilities, I find myself both
adapting elements of past techniques and simply inventing new ones specific to
the musical context; also often working intuitively, trusting in my own
repertoire of compositional skills to give the music its autonomy, remaining
confident in the internal processes without needing to be particularly aware of
them. Increasingly I feel that whilst my techniques enable me to start on a
piece, they always become so adapted to the requirements of the evolving idea
throughout the composition process that my choice as to exactly which techniques
to adopt initially is far less important than I used to believe. Do you have a routine? A place that's special I wish I could have! My life includes so many things, like running a festival and
an ensemble that unexpectedly demand urgent attention, that settling into a
routine is practically impossible. In consequence I often go weeks without
writing a note, and even going off to my place in Italy
doesn’t offer much respite, what with emails to see to and so forth. In
reality though all this is of my own creation – I don’t have to do any of it
if I don’t want to, and I count myself very lucky to have a full and active
musical life. Fortunately I have never yet missed a deadline for a new piece,
but I do usually have to burn the midnight oil to get pieces done in time.
|