Remembering Bill - William Mathias by composer Michael Parkin

I have many fond memories of my old professor and composition teacher William Mathias.

I lived just down the road from him in Beaumaris on Anglesey and he often picked me up as I was hitching into lectures having missed the early bus. ‘Late again Michael, jump in’. He drove the largest Volvo I’d ever seen, in the winter wore a huge Russian black fur hat and as often as not had a fat Churchillian cigar notched in his right hand. There was always a fog of cigar smoke in the Volvo, but at least it was warm. As a nervous, overawed undergrad I rarely ventured conversation, but on the rare occasions when I did summon up the nerve, I got views and opinions on Tippett, Walton, Britten, Berkeley et al. He had met them, knew them, conducted them, and so I treasured this third-hand touch with greatness. Later on, as an over-confident and rather self-opinionated postgrad, I sometimes sought his views on my then heroes; Ligeti, Xenakis and Stockhausen. Sadly, at this later stage my professor did not share many of my enthusiasms.

I found myself at UCNW Bangor because as a pre-university student at Huddersfield School of Music I’d chanced upon two early pieces by Mathias; Celtic Dances and the Harp Concerto. After this, there was only one place for me to study, and when the professor burst into my first composition class, sat down at the piano and rattled off a Clementi sonatina at twice the metronome speed, followed by a critical demolition that took less time than he had taken him to play the exposition, I knew that the next 3 years would at least be colourful and entertaining.

Although not a tall man, everything about him was slightly larger than life, exaggerated, enlarged. Always in a hurry, he bounded along the corridors of Top College like a Welsh hill farmer in search of a flock, greeting students with a ubiquitous ‘Any problems?’ It was never a real question, just rhetorical. There was a rumour that one student had tested this by responding that his wife and child had died that week in a car accident, and he’d just returned from hospital with a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Turning around to gauge the response, he saw the professor disappearing through a door at the far end of the corridor.

Composition classes were always entertaining, often colourful, and sometimes downright surprising. After presenting him with a truly awful setting of Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, I discovered later that he had scribbled on my score above a particularly crass chord, YE TIGER!!!  His ear never failed him. And yet, one Christmas vacation I set a chunk of Ted Hughes ‘Crow’ in aleatoric and graphic notation, just to confound him. He praised it; ‘one of the most imaginative pieces you’ve written so far Michael’.

I wish I could have mastered his trick of using two (sometimes three!) separate themes and then combining them in an exuberant, dexterous coda. He showed us how, but I’ve always failed miserably to juggle even just two balls, let alone three. Advice on getting stuck; ‘keep reading up to the blank bar at twice the tempo, over and over again. Eventually it will give’. He’s right, it does!

As a composer he was a man rooted in his time, place and culture. Place was important to him. By a strange twist of fate I now live just down the road from his childhood home in Whitland (or Hendy Gwyn as he would have known it as a Welsh speaker). Carmarthenshire, rural West Wales, steeped in chapel and choral singing - as bible black as nearby Laugharne. Only lately have I begun to understand the Marquez line ‘I came to map the island, but the island mapped me’. Bill would have understood this implicitly, it was after all, in his DNA.   

       

If I were to take just one piece of his to that mythical dessert island, it would be his Violin Concerto, a late work that explores the Bardic tradition of Penillion (improvisation sparked between voice and harp). It sounds like home for me.

Sun Dance from Santa Fe Suite for Harp – William Mathias

Inspired by the composer’s trip to the New Mexican city in 1987, this three- movement suite is suffused with the culture and rhythms of Spain. The final movement, Sun Dance, depicts the American Indian ritual in sparkling Latin guitar rhythms, often reminiscent of flamenco.

The suite was commissioned and premiered by the Welsh harpist Caryl Thomas at the Wigmore Hall in 1988.

Michael Parkin

Composer of the Month: Timothy Raymond

Composer of the Month: Timothy Raymond

Timothy Raymond is the former Head of Composition and Contemporary Music at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama where he taught for 15 years. He has worked subsequently at the University of Aberdeen and at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. His music has been performed both in the UK and overseas and broadcast by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. He is Director of Music – and Composer-in-Association - at the Priory Church of Bolton Abbey

Timothy Raymond’s Memorare will receive its first performance by La Mer Trio at the next Late Music concert on Saturday 3^rd May.

Steve Crowther: Can you describe the work to us?

Timothy Raymond: It takes its cue from a prayer addressed to ‘Our Lady of Consolation’, which – like a number of Marian prayers – evokes ideas connected with escape and protection. The music is dominated by rapid changes of mood from ‘agitated’ to ‘suddenly calm’. Sequences which appear to be moving forward are suddenly arrested and replaced by music of stillness and delicacy, underpinned by atmospheric harp writing. The second ‘half’ of the piece includes the development of several tonal/modal elements which emerge only sporadically in the first, and is characterized by a recurring dance-like passage (viola), briefly suggesting a mediaeval connection. Other passages include an intense, sustained and still chorale followed by a complex canon in which the three instruments attain complete musical equality. The music sort of evaporates at the end as the closing bars reflect the upward flight of the opening, but purged of its anxiety. The flute is associated – though not solely, by any means – with this latter element.

SC: Do you write at the piano, do you pre-plan? Can you describe the compositional process?

TR: I don’t use the piano at all during the initial notating of musical ideas and I only use it as a check to the ear at an advanced level of the composing process. I’m a relatively fluent pianist and can improvise – both skills that I’m keen to dissociate completely from my composing, where musical thought, its structuring and symbolic representation is, for me, the key to a degree of control and precision which would otherwise be unavailable. The traditional nomenclature and identification in harmony and counterpoint of ‘voices’ with ‘lines’ remains supremely relevant and continues to be a creative spur. It colours my approach to writing for instruments.

The ‘process’ might best be described as ‘empirical’ rather than ‘methodical’. It is methodical in certain respects but it is deliberately ramshackle. It’s also seamless and osmotic and has become increasingly sculptural (with sound as the matter to be shaped) and only partially follows notions of beginning, middle and end. Those notions do emerge (from the block, as it were). I have become committed to creating closed forms characterized by organic connections between the parts.

An initial stage of research involved ideas suggested by the prayer, continuing with an investigation of related symbolism and plainchant. That was completed by an amassing of musical ideas and material and a full consideration of instrumental resources and the musical figuration appropriate to them, including selective study of repertoire (the Debussy Sonata is inescapable). A partial mapping of a musical world is followed by the planning of a journey through it, the end result of that process being the closed form to which I referred. Only at that point do the concepts of beginning, middle and end become palpable (I recall that the beginning changed several times and was only finalized towards the end of my work on the piece). Matters of musical taste are, needless to say, a constant factor. One question I ask has become something of an obsession for me after I proposed it to composition students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland this year: What is the difference between a musical convention and a cliché? Or perhaps: When – or under what circumstances – does a convention become a cliché? I don’t claim to have answered that but it does make me think.

SC: Is it important to know the performers? Do you write with a sound in mind?

TR: Very important for me. Composition tends to be an appropriately isolated activity. It benefits immensely from the empirical and practical input of performers at any and at all stages. If, as is the case here, you don’t know them personally, then your knowledge of the instruments, their capabilities and limitations, is all that you can go on. I always invite performers to respond to a score and to make any suggestions which they feel would aid the performance and improve the score’s effectiveness. I’m always keen to acknowledge any such collaboration.

Whilst I acknowledge that musical composition can be linked or even equated with research, adventure and discovery (whatever we individually understand by those words), throughout all the stages of sketching leading to the production of the score, I can only ‘put pen to paper’ (so to speak) when I have as clear an idea of the sound in my inner ear as I can imagine, including as precise a sense of pitch (harmony) and rhythm as I can muster.

SC: How would you describe your individual ‘sound world’?

TR: I approach the composition of a new piece as an imaginative/musical adventure as far as possible peculiar to that piece alone. I don’t regard stylistic consistency from piece to piece as an ideal but, that said, it’s obvious (to me, at least) that certain characteristics have remained constant in my work: a concern with harmonic consistency together with full integration and inter-reliance of all the compositional parameters both in controlled flow and direct contrast of ideas. This is informed by the conviction that systems don’t guarantee any interest whatsoever and that on no account should they be allowed to inhibit fantasy and imagination. I have an abiding interest in the necessity of anarchy in all walks of life (if you can negotiate the fundamental paradox). I don’t believe that music has to be anything at all. The moment someone pontificates that music has to contain this, that or the other in order to be significant, it’s in my nature to try very hard to exclude that ‘this’, ‘that’ or ‘other’ from my next piece! However, I have to say that for certain types of musical expression and certain types of musical discourse to become viable, hierarchies of values need to be established amongst the elements of the composer’s musical meta-language.

In most of the music I’ve written lately, there’s a sense of a musical spectrum or a network of relationships which incorporate a significant spread of tonal resources (including the post-tonal. Our vocabulary fails us here – we don’t yet have the words (the most useless is ‘atonal’, which is misleading and almost always untrue)). I also recognise a similar range of rhythmic resources, from free to strict, from additive to metrical or whatever. As I get older, I’m more and more convinced that it’s important to try to do something different. Not to rewrite the same piece.

SC: What motivates you to compose?

TR: I’m absolutely fascinated and enthralled by composing. It’s the only thing I think I can do which I believe defines me as a worker. I like solitude. Composing’s an act, like playing an instrument, a performance which you need to develop skills – technique – to bring off. It isn’t (for me, at least) a branch of academe or a set of tricks or dodges but a very satisfying form of thought in action – one which doesn’t mean anything in a strictly linguistic sense but one which I think we’d be poorer without. It’s capable of many types of power and expression ‘[w]hereof one cannot speak…’. Again, I can only say that, for me, there’s been no better adventure.

SC: Which living composers do you identify with or simply admire?

TR: I find it hard to identify with anybody now – least of all my self. I just want to do something ‘different’ now. Most composers I could identify as influences are dead – some of them have died recently. And I now tend to look further back for reading/listening, though I’ll also listen with interest and enthusiasm to things that seem to be at an extreme edge. That’s a trait I acquired from my teacher – composer, John Lambert (1926-1995)). I like Edwin Roxburgh and Hans Abrahamsen. I’m interested in Julian Anderson and Paul Archbold and in the work of some of the post-spectralists such as the Belgian composer, Luc Brawaeys. I’ve heard one or two impressive recent pieces by German composers, Enno Poppe and Georg Friedrich Haas. I’m sure I’ve missed some or other key figure (so important to me that I’ve forgotten them altogether). One or two of the real Oldies are still alive: Boulez and Nørgård (to name two people as alike as chalk and cheese). I’ve mentioned Reich in the past as the only one of the minimalist and post-minimalist generation whose music held any interest for me, but nothing much later than the mid-1980s - in fact, nothing since his baseball cap became inseparable from his head.

SC: If you could have a beer and a chat with any composer from the past, who would it be and why?

TR: Charles Ives, simply because you probably could have had a beer and a chat with him. And you could probably avoid talking about music with him too, if you wanted. He remains one of my very favourite composers.

SC: Now for some desert island discery – please name eight pieces of music you could not be without, and then select just one.

TR: This is hard (because I can’t get many composers mentioned above or Sibelius 5, Bartok’s 4^th Quartet, Varèse (anything) or Berg Wozzeck or really anything much in there). (See what I did?) But I love being pretentious as you can tell, so here goes:

1) something from the Netherlands polyphonists: let’s say Obrecht, Missa Maria Zart, primarily because it’s beautiful and then, because its structural complexities are so fascinating and absorbing; 2) J.S. Bach – almost anything, but the B Minor Mass will certainly do; 3) Wagner, Götterdämmerung; 4) Brahms, 4^th Symphony; 5) Fauré, 2^nd Piano Quintet in C minor; 6) Dutilleux, Métaboles; 7) Ohana, 2^nd String Quartet; 8) Carter, Duo (for violin and piano).

First choice (er…….): Fauré, 2^nd Piano Quintet in C minor because of its profound beauty; the first movement’s journey into blinding light; its modernity, subtlety and poignant expressivity.

SC: …and a book?

TR: Robert Frost,The Poetry of Robert Frost, perhaps.

SC: …a film?

TR: A Sunday in the Country (Un dimanche à la campagne, Bertrand Tavernier, 1984)

SC: … and a luxury item?

TR: : A massive, well-stocked wine cellar containing good French reds for the most part (though I wouldn’t say no to a few hundred assorted Belgian beers too) and a bottle-opener.

Composer of the month: David Lancaster

Composer of the month: David Lancaster

David Lancaster is Head of Department: Performance at York St John University, managing Dance and Theatre degrees along with the Music and Music Production programmes.  He is composer-in-residence with Vox Aurum Chamber Choir and with the EYMS Band.

David first encountered contemporary music when as a young cornet player he took part in a performance of Harrison Birtwistle's 'Grimethorpe Aria' at a brass band summer school. Music studies at York and Cambridge Universities and at Dartington Summer School (with Peter Maxwell Davies) followed, along with a period as Composer-in-Residence at Charterhouse. He gained a number of important awards including Lloyds Bank Young Composer Award, Michael Tippett Award, LCM Centenary Prize and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival Composer Award; the Parke Ensemble presented a London concert series of his work.  Around 2007 he returned to composing after a long period of silence and has since produced a series of works which again attracted performances around the UK.

David’s recent work includes music for choir, string quartet and several song cycles, such as Memory of Place (which sets poetry by the York-based poet Daniela Nunnari and which has recently been issued on CD on the Meridian label).  David’s choral work Fallen, originally composed for Canterbury Cathedral, was used in a documentary made for Sky Television; more recently he has produced an electronic version of this piece as part of a collaborative arts installation project ‘Vestiges of Spirituality’ which has been presented to critical acclaim.

In November 2013 his new orchestral work ‘Strata’ was performed by the Orchestra of Opera North and the sax quartet ‘Swan’ – first heard at Late Music in 2010 – is currently included on a national tour by the Delta Saxophone Quartet.

David’s new piece Sciamachy for soprano saxophone and piano will be performed at the next LM concert (Saturday 5^th April) by the Sam Corkin and Timothy End.  In May his ‘Echoes from the Phantom City’ for flute, viola and harp will be played by La Mer trio.

On June 14^th David’s major choral piece Apocalypse will be performed in the Chapel at York St John University as part of York’s Festival of Ideas.

Steve Crowther: Can you describe the works to us?

David Lancaster: Sciamachy is an evolution of two former pieces, both of which involve saxophone; I originally wrote Suspense for a student to play on soprano sax in 2008.  That music later formed the basis of my sax quartet Swan and the music in this concert is the latest incarnation of those ideas, with a new piano part built around an enhanced version of the original melodic material.  There’s a slow section followed by a faster section, both based on slowly unfolding processes.  In May’s Late Music concert you can hear a trio I composed in 1995.  It was performed extensively in London for the next few years but hasn’t been played for a while – I’m looking forward to hearing it again.  I programmed the score into Sibelius which was quite tricky owing to the extensive aleatoric sections but I resisted the temptation to change anything.  The title is a reference to a wonderfully inventive – if disturbingly  violent - novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

SC: Do you write at the piano, do you pre-plan? Can you describe the compositional process?

DL: I do own a piano but only use it occasionally when composing.  I think of my music in terms of linear, lyrical lines and I fear I might lose that if I concentrate too much on the vertical, as I might do playing chords at the piano.  I compose everywhere: on the train, sitting at my PC, in the shower – so a piano isn’t always practical. And I’m a terrible pianist in any case!  There isn’t a great deal of formal pre-composition these days, but I do keep sketchbooks - Beethoven-style - and ideas evolve gradually and deliberately.  In fact there is more ‘post-compositional’ work in my process: I can write quite quickly and then spend time reflecting on what I’ve done, then refining the work in terms of shape, pacing, consistency and so on.

SC: Is it important to know the performers? Do you write with a sound in mind?

DL: I do like to write for specific performers but it’s often the context which is more influential at the point of composition.  How much detail will be audible, what will the atmosphere be like, how intimate will the performance be, will it be a warm tone, will the sound distort at high volume?  But when the music is finished I hand the copies over to the performers, whoever they are, and I’m happy for them to interpret it as they think fit; I like them to take ownership of my work and show me things I didn’t know about.  (I also like hearing second performances of my pieces which differ from the first since each new performer or venue brings a fresh perspective to the music).

SC: How would you describe your individual ‘sound world’?

DL: I think it reflects the down-to-earth grittiness – the bleakness at times – of the place I was brought up, but also the warmth of the people around me.  I’m a little bit schizophrenic: my music often inhabits extremes of calm/desolation or energy/violence but I see them as different aspects of the same thing: I’ve recently heard a performance of my orchestral piece Strata where the two are starkly juxtaposed.  Some people tell me that my music inhabits a very dark sound world, others tell me that they hear a black humour – and they’re probably both right!

SC: What motivates you to compose?

DL: Performances: I love the act of musical performance – its inherent ritualistic theatricality - and I particularly enjoy hearing my work come to life in rehearsal.  When I don’t have a performers’ deadline in my diary I can sometimes find it quite difficult to finish pieces.

SC: Which living composers do you identify with or simply admire?

DL:  Oh that’s difficult!  John Adams and Harrison Birtwistle, Gavin Bryars and Arvo Part.  Very different musicians but all seeming more concerned with clarity than with decoration.  But I like to discover ‘new’ composers and at Late Music concerts often find myself more drawn to the work of young or local composers which speaks with unadorned immediacy: I have a low tolerance threshold for anything that smacks of pretentiousness.

SC: If you could have a beer and a chat with any composer from the past, who would it be and why?

DL: And that’s an even harder question – there are so many to choose from and their beer drinking preferences are not always well documented.   I’d love to meet Thomas Tallis, or JS Bach, Varese, Webern or Stravinsky but I can’t imagine they’d be the best drinking partners, and Gesualdo might be risky too.  I’m going to pick Bernard Herrmann who was a fabulous composer of concert music in addition to his film scores.  I’ve always had a high regard for his music and would be fascinated to talk about his many collaborations.

SC: Now for some desert island discery – please name eight pieces of music you could not be without, and then select just one.

DL: Must I?  I don’t particularly like lists of pieces.  There was one in The Times last year – ‘20 classical pieces you must hear’ – and they missed out Purcell, Debussy, Ravel, Sibelius, Messiaen and so many other important composers and in fact everyone since Britten. The elitist notion of a ‘canon’ of ‘great works’ is surely discredited by now, since by definition it relegates everything else to some sort of artistic ‘second division’, which is ridiculous.  If we all thought like that there could be no Late Music and probably nothing this side of Classic FM.  So there are very many pieces I wouldn’t want to live without, and here are eight of them: 

1.     Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms;

2.     Herrmann: Vertigo soundtrack;

3.     John Adams: Lollapalooza;

4.     Arvo Part: Fratres (for string quartet);

5.     Bruckner: Os Justi;

6.     Sibelius: Tapiola;

7.     Birtwistle: Grimethorpe Aria;

8.     Webern: Six Bagatelles.

And if I need to choose just one I will pick the Birtwistle, since that was the piece which first fired my passion for new music and composing, sending me on this exciting journey.

SC: …and a book?

DL:  Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter.  I love the fantastical theatricality of Carter’s writing and her ability to move so fluidly between the sublime and the grotesque.

SC: Film?

DL: Pandora’s Box, the film of Wedekind’s plays made by GW Pabst in 1929, famously starring Louise Brooks.  One of my long-term project ideas is to compose a new score to perform live, so extended exposure to the film on your desert island would be useful.

SC: … and a luxury item?

DL: I’m assuming that manuscript paper/pen is a necessity rather than a luxury item, therefore automatically included! In that case I’m torn between my camera, my bike and my box of ‘Oblique Strategies’ cards.  On reflection I think I’ll take the cards since they would offer some innovative suggestions to help tackle all of the problems I would encounter on the island, and there would be one for each day of the year so they would hopefully sustain my interest until I am rescued.

Composers of the Month: Gavin Bryars & Craig Vear

Craig Vear works with found sounds, making compositions using computers that allow the individual sounds to be free. His compositions generally concentrate on a time and location, journeying along channels of memory and imagination expressing the continuity and fluidity of thought.

In 1997 he co-founded the pop group Cousteau, which made 300,000 sales worldwide and gained a gold disc; as part of the duo ev2 he has been working with improvisation since 1992. During 2003-4 he held the Arts Council England Fellowship with the British Antarctic Survey, which resulted in a large-scale composition created from field recordings. In 2006 Play: Antarctica was commissioned about these experiences. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at De Montfort University.

Gavin Bryars studied philosophy but became a jazz bassist and pioneer of free improvisation with Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. Early iconic pieces The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet achieved great popular success.

His works include three operas, a large body of chamber music, several concertos and much vocal music (Hilliard Ensemble, Trio Mediaeval, Red Byrd, Latvian Radio Choir, Estonian National Male Choir, Iarla O'Lionaird, Singer Pur). He has collaborated widely with visual artists (e.g. Juan Muñoz, Bruce McLean), choreographers (e.g. William Forsythe, Merce Cunningham, Edouard Lock, David Dawson), and theatre directors (e.g. Robert Wilson, Atom Egoyan). Upcoming works include a full length ballet, Pneuma, created with choreographer Carolyn Carlson for the Ballet of the Opéra National de Bordeaux, to premiere in March 2014.

Craig Vear’s Three Last Letters (In Memoriam of Cpt Scott, Dr Wilson and Lt Bowers will be performed at the next LM concert on Saturday 1^st March, alongside the premiere of a Late Music commission by Gavin Bryars.

Steve Crowther: Can you describe your work to us?
Gavin Bryars: It's a short trio for bass clarinet, electric guitar and cello, written for three musicians, who I know, whom I like personally and whose work I admire. I've based the piece on reminiscences of trio vocal laude, allied to a sort of homage to the recently deceased Fred Katz who, unlike almost all other jazz cellists, did not step down from the double bass. This reference appears in the short interludes between the mains sections of the piece.

Craig Vear: I describe works of this nature as ‘Plays for Musicians’ in so far as there is a central dramaturgical form that is played out through music. In this case it reimagines the final moments in the mind of Capt Scott as he awaits his death, alone, in a tent in Antarctica. The piece was commissioned by Vale of Glamorgan Festival 2012. The ensemble comprises several groupings of musical forces that are in 3: each alluding to a relationship with the 3 men in the tent: Capt Scot, Dr Wilson and Lt Bowers. The human trios comprise 3 voices, who in themselves do not directly link with the three men, but rather identify certain characteristics shared by all three. These 3 voices work with 3 instruments which again allude to other characteristics. Each are guided through the piece by 3 networked laptops, who are in constant discussion about the ongoing generative visual scores and soundscapes. On a poetic level, the soundscape also features a pre-recorded ghost string trio, which represents the three women whom were the intended recipients our heroes’ last letters.

SC: Do you write at the piano, do you pre-plan? Can you describe the compositional process?

GB: I don't write at the piano and have always worked with pencil and paper - and for the last 32 years with the same make of pencil. I have an electric keyboard, a Korg M1 to the left of my writing desk, set on the internal string setting (number 27) that I use to check that what I am writing is indeed what I think it is...

CV: No – all the composing for this work was conceptual, and relied on a balance of materials and speculations about the nature of the death of the central characters. This is a similar process to all my other pieces. Through this, the drawing together of the found materials, the computer programming and the devising process with the live musicians, work towards the imagined theatre-in-the-mind of the work.

SC: Is it important to know the performers? Do you write with a sound in mind?

GB: I prefer to know the performers wherever possible and for that reason have maintained my own ensemble for many years. Roger Heaton has been with my ensemble since 1986, James Woodrow since 1993, and Audrey Riley has performed Biped, the score I wrote for Merce Cunningham, with James and with me for the last 12 years or so as well as playing with my ensemble more and more in recent years. I have their individual and collective sounds in mind when I write for them, as indeed I do when I write for musicians I don't know personally.

CV: Yes – this piece was created specifically for these performers.

SC: How would you describe your individual ‘sound world’?

GB: I don't think I can.

CV: It depends very much on the focus of the composition. For example, Audrey Riley has commissioned a hypermedia concerto for cello and digital technologies, and is based on Boris Vian’s Blues for a Black Cat. The sound world (if that's what we are to call it) of each movement is an imaginary romp around each short story, whilst the whole concerto, has another flavour derived from all 10 movements.

SC: What motivates you to compose?

GB: It's what I do, and it's what I can do well. I relish the opportunity to perform music, which I see as a supremely important social activity, and writing it can make that happen.

CV: To create work that I have never heard before.

SC: Which living composers do you identify with or simply admire?

GB: I don't identify with any composer and there are none who I admire without reservation. Arvo Pärt is a good friend and I like a lot of his work, though not all of it. I have always loved the work of Carla Bley, another friend, whose work is uneven but at its best extraordinary.

CV: I’m not sure that I do, however, I have several who have remained a presence within my ‘committee’ (the incessant self-reflection and doubt in the voices of my mind). Among this committee is Gavin, whom I have known for several decades, and whose careful guidance through my undergraduate studies introduced me to jazz (especially Steve Lacy, Bill Evans, Jackie McLean, Eric Dolphy and many others), and to experimental music (especially Cage, Feldman, Satie, and his own work). Another permanent member is Jonathan Eato (music lecturer at the University of York), who I first met whilst an undergraduate. It is, and remains his open, caring, honest, probing, supportive, encouraging, and creative friendship that has provided the greatest sustenance to my music.

SC: If you could have a beer and a chat with any composer from the past, who would it be and why?

GB: Does it have to be beer? If it were beer it would be Richard Strauss who has written some sublime music and whose craft is peerless. I have found myself working a lot in Munich in the last couple of years and maybe beer would fit that environment. If I'm allowed to have a glass or two of wine instead then it would be Gesualdo, perhaps along with Philip Heseltine, and perhaps the wine might allow some access into their complex thought processes. I'd love to spend time with Liszt, perhaps the most generous of composers, but maybe that would not involve alcohol...

CV: Does it have to be a composer? I’d rather pick Duchamp’s brains over a beer, or maybe accept an offer for a game of chess.

SC: Now for some desert island discery – please name eight pieces of music you could not be without, and then select just one.
GB: I did record Desert Island Discs in 1998 and so those choices are on record, though I'm not sure that all of them would be completely indispensible. Eight pieces now could be:

Wagner, Parsifal; Strauss, Metamorphosen; Bill Evans, My Foolish Heart (1961 Village Vanguard); Tiny Tim, Tiptoe through the Tulips; Bach, Goldberg Variations; Eric Dolphy, God Bless the Child; Silvestrov, Diptychon; The Who, Pinball Wizard

The Bill Evans and the Wagner were included on my Desert Island Discs.

CV: Sorry to disappoint, but this has changed several times over as many days, and I am going for a cop-out. So long as the tracks are truthful, and meaningful, I don’t mind.

SC: …and a book?
GB: Glen David Gold: Carter Beats The Devil

CV: Donna Tartt: Secret History

SC: …a film?

GB: John Huston, The Misfits

CV: Kill Bill 1 & 2

SC: … and a luxury item?

GB: An oyster schucker.

CV: Having been deprived of all luxuries during my 3 months residency in Antarctica, I craved 2 things: fresh Broccoli and a warm shower. How about a warm broccoli shower? I’ll let you decide what that looks like.