Part 2

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

This is an enormous question and impossible to answer in a paragraph without seeming glib.

The American composer John Adams wrote a piece called Naive and Sentimental Music as a response to the 18th Century writer Friedrich Schiller, who suggested that artists either seem to break with the past and start from a clean slate, or they are sentimental in codifying and reworking something that already exists. It’s an attractive idea. Probably we’re all a bit of both in different proportions.

The American Minimalists did start again somehow – La Monte Young’s X for Henry Flynt, Glass’ 1+1, and Reich’s Pendulum Music, for example.



But arguably, they became sentimental when they began to engage with orchestras and opera houses. Early Riley, Reich and Glass rejected all that. Or maybe all that rejected them. Or maybe not, because Reich studied with Berio and Glass with Boulanger – very traditional and European routes to being a composer!

As I understand the idea, Einstein on the Beach is naive as an opera, driven by outsider values and hybrid form. It’s like nothing else. Whereas Akhnaten is sentimental, it uses opera singers and something like a conventional orchestra and was commissioned by a European Opera House.

So, we’re all both naive and sentimental. I taught myself the guitar and bass in the way many rock musicians do but studied the piano with various teachers including Susan Bradshaw, who studied with Boulez. Turn any corner and you bump into tradition.

My relationship to the American, so-called minimal, composers is sentimental. But the problem is these types of explanations suggest that traditions are all watertight. They are leaky sieves. I seem to have a promiscuous approach to tradition. It’s a collage of influences. How could it not be? The information age started a while back with the encyclopedia and then radio and television.

You see it in Basquiat paintings. Information as material. Everyone collages their own tradition these days somehow. Once the tape recorder becomes as ubiquitous as the note pad, any sonic event is capable of cohabiting with anything else.

I think I’ve had an intuitive fascination with technological change. In the 60s I had a portable, battery-operated radio and listened to the pirate radio stations. In the early 80s I bought a drum machine and a synth and started a basic 4-track home studio. I built a mixer and hired the Fairlight music computer. Ending up at Trevor Horn’s SARM Studios wasn’t such an accident. Is that being part of music of the future? It seems a long time ago. The 80s was a decade of enormous change. Many of the things we do today on the computer could be done in 1989 but not 1979.

Looking back, it seems I’ve tried to mess with the accepted way of being a contemporary composer. But I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t think about the consequences. John Cage made me do it.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools – and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

Piano, guitar, voice and electric keyboards. Pencil and paper. Tape recorders. Musical machines and computers.

There isn’t one strategy. These tools are always going quiet and then speaking up. Suggesting new ways of doing something.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

The components come into play at different times of the day. But as a rule of thumb, I’m playing piano and singing something every day, depending on what the current project is.

For a month before a performance, I like to run the set every day in some form or other. At other times, I have things that are a kind of workout – some of Schubert’s Winterreise or the Gershwin song book, and Philip Glass’ 20 Etudes have kept me on my toes the last few years.

Then, if I’m working on a track, I spend time in the studio with Pro Tools. Or maybe work on a pencil and paper score at the desk and the piano before putting it into Sibelius software.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

In some ways the book that accompanies the Ark Hive of A Live is full of answers to this question. The key for me is to keep moving. The process includes lots of different moves: writing graphic outlines or a poem or noting down a general thought. Track 1 of Ark Hive has its origins in Goodbye Mr G on the 1986 album Alphabed.



That track started by lifting just a couple of bars from another piece, The Passage. I saw something in the way the harmony moved that l liked, that could be slowed down and repeated in various ways. It was a dissonant cluster, spaciously voiced, that moves to a more consonant minor seventh chord. A string-like DX7 sound with a very slow attack and decay seemed to determine how the sequence of repetitions could grow and recede. Once this was mapped out, things started to gravitate to the space that it offered – some sampled percussion sounds, a female and male speaker.

Another thing was a piano gesture, based on the simple harmonic shift and shape in the keyboard sound but much faster. I made a performance of this that got recorded to cassette just as a wild idea. Then that part of the process was forgotten about for a couple of decades, until I found the cassette in a box.

Separated by time and its place in the process of making Goodbye Mr G, the cassette music becomes something else. It seems to be some kind of piano concerto perhaps. So, there is a conceptual flip from it being preparatory materials to being a finished thing. It became a new piece. There only needs to be a christening to seal it. Goodbye Piano Concerto seems to connect up the origin and the new arrival. The process was more complicated than that, but they are the main beats of the story.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

The most recent album JELLY is a completely solo project in terms of writing, playing instruments, singing and recording. So that’s solitary studio work.



But it would not be what it is, as an album, without the mixes by Dave Meegan. And the CD and album package demand other collaborations – Philip Marshall, Julia Bardsley, John Hollingsworth (designer, visual artist, and photographer), all people whose work I admire and trust.

By contrast the Ark Hive of A Live is full of musicians and has a number of large ensemble pieces. In Ark Hive the many different live situations are documented and represented and written about. I love to work with large forces – the orchestra, the choir, the opera – but the opportunities are almost non- existent. The Ark Hive witnesses the attempt to speak in that space.

People do things in different ways. The composing bit is a solitary one for me, but it wouldn’t come to anything or mean anything without lots of levels of collaboration after that. I’m most happy when I can hand-pick a collaborator or group of musicians and then be very light touch when it comes to direction. There have been quite a few bespoke ensembles over the years. And in the last fifteen years, when I’ve made solo shows, the band has really been the technical team: a sound engineer, lighting designer and video artist / scenographer – Fred Defaye, Marty Langthorne and Julia Bardsley.

How does your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

Everything that is claimed for creative work is true and not true. “You say you want a revolution, count me in, count me out”.

Music plays many different roles. It can be meaningless or life changing. I’ve followed its call to so many different places and I hope this continues.

For what my own work contributes, it’s for other ears to suggest.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others – contributed to your understanding of these questions?

All the rituals of music-making are ways of understanding what it means to be here, alone and with other people. Probably the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, in its various editions, speaks to all the big questions. The Monteverdi opera is an amazing thing. I’m just reading Kaja Silverman’s Flesh of my Flesh. She has lots to say about Orpheus and why analogy is central to the creation of meaning and hope.

I need that flow of experience that comes from music, poetry and performances of all kinds, to help me understand the un-understandable-ness of what is happening now. When I find myself in times of trouble it’s rarely Mother Mary who speaks to me. It’s often Rick and Karl of Underworld.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

I’m not a very practical person. Mathematics and the sciences seem perplexing. But the answers to previous questions, where I’ve talked about engaging with technology, seem a context for this. It was exciting building a short-wave radio when I was thirteen or so, although the scientific specifics of how components work didn’t interest me. But you have to operate in good faith, otherwise you spiral into madness and can’t move. So I accept the explanations about climate change that science is telling me.

Art seems to be the thing that can deal with the madness that is always threatening to drown us. Elizabeth Grosz, in Chaos Territory Art, suggests that art and science are different answers to the same question. The questions are those unanswerable ones that momentarily seem to be answered when listening to a great track.

I’m interested in statistics almost in an aesthetic way. It’s pattern-making. With music that is repetitive or static in some way, the listener needs to find or build a pattern or a logic. But it’s another way in which we engage with the uncertainty of the future, by trying to gauge an outcome. Art suggests that answers are provisional, whereas science seems to want something definitive.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

I love the way coffee can change the course of history. There are as many different cups of coffee as there are new tracks appearing in cyberspace. I suppose coffee is a drug and the relationship between that and cultural experience is the possibility of a change in your state of mind. When I’m making or performing, I’m offering a space or a sonic event that you can engage with. The experience of sound does seem to be magical but the fact that we can get high from a mechanical reproduction suggests that the witnessing plays a big part in what takes place.

Here’s another conundrum. Bird song can be mesmeric. Messiaen built a whole language around it. And still, we have no idea if birds like our music.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it is able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

For me the word ‘captured’ sets off too many unhelpful ideas. Music is the experience of sonic forms that are outside of language. There are no messages, only experiences that touch down into an explanation. Music’s diverse sensations seems to trigger emotions and thoughts that can be superficial or otherwise.

To go back to your cup of coffee idea. I was once on the tarmac somewhere, waiting to get on a plane, and the engines were so loud and the metallic presence of the aircraft so frightening, that I flipped over into an experience of awe. And when I snapped out of it, I really understood what defined an immersive or sublime experience. The extreme awareness of the vulnerable, fragile, short-lived nature of being a human being. Contemplating the starry sky outside of the city can be similar. It’s soooo big.

It begs the question, in what way do words, like ‘sublime’, modify the experience I just had? Do they tame them, make them bearable or do they allow us to talk about them and share our memory of an almost unbearable moment? We love, we “huddle and cling”, as Donald Barthelme once said.