Part 2

Where do most of your inspirations to create come from – rather from internal  impulses or external ones? Which current social / political / ecological or other developments make you feel like you need to respond as an artist?

I am wary of this question, because I feel like the things which “inspire” me are so specific to my own life: a sentence, a paragraph, a building, a piece of taxidermy, some random chord change in a Meredith Monk piece … I feel like I’m addicted to these things.

Working with text, of course, has a different set of issues and of course a piece like No Resting Place addresses a very specific socio-political situation. However, I wouldn’t presume to demand a specific knowledge of the Windrush scandal for a listener to enjoy, if that’s the word, the piece — so it’s there but not there, sort of like a back-story in a novel which weaves in and out of sight. I also know that that is not my story to tell, so the best I can do is point towards it, rather than narrate it.  

I have so many brilliant colleagues whose music is in direct conversation with matters like the climate emergency, their lived realities as Black people, their own sexualities and proclivities, their afflictions and stories; I don’t really feel as if I have much to offer in that lane and am perfectly happy over here with my loupe, calipers, and sacred music.

I also feel like sacred music is both an internal and external impulse: my job as a “church musician,” if you will, is to help other people look upwards. In that sense it’s closer to being an architect than not: the task is to create a space, not necessarily a narrative.

In the Christian tradition, of course, there is a giant narrative in the form of a creed (born / died / arose), and then nested narratives within that (both individual ones in the form of, for instance, the creation story, or Holy Week, or the annunciation) and then the more Puranic cycle of the church year.

About Recordare, Domine, you write, that “to achieve a sense of desolation” you worked with “extreme intervals and changes of register: leaps of ascending ninths, descending sevenths and other yearning stretches.” I find this infinitely fascinating – how do these intervals, already before the actual scoring takes place, suggest precisely this feeling?

Both Recordare and No Resting Place set the Lamentations, so, the actual literal word desolation appears a fair amount in the text.

I’d argue that the most famous setting of that particular word is to be found in Byrd’s Ne Irascaris which ends with the line “Ierusalem desolata est,” from the Vulgate. It’s a wonderful musical prompt.

The word I would use to describe how the intervals can create that is hollowness — chords without a third in them, octaves with nothing in between…



I do almost the same trick in No Resting Place particularly in the Daleth section, where everything is moving around these hollow fifths.



The wonderful sense of “returning” to the Lord at the end of the text of the Lamentations is meant to be like a vessel filling itself up, outlining a descending minor ninth but with all the pitches accounted for.  

Similarly, for Rough Notes, looking for cold textures you employed “austere pieces of counterpoint, [and] unstable harmonies.” Are these literally synaesthetically “cold” to you?

I wish I could claim a sort of synaesthesia but no, unfortunately it’s just Deliberate Composing.

Here, it’s less about intervals but more about a constant insistence on a minor mode, and a sense of harmonic ambiguity even when he’s describing something as beautiful as the Southern Lights.

There are some hollow intervals in the final bit of text when he knows they’re going to die, and then of course the natural thing is to strip the voices away and end with just one solo voice… it doesn’t get more austere than that!

After establishing a point of departure, how do pieces typically (if there's a “typically” at all) develop?

I don’t have a good answer for this, unfortunately.

The main point of departure is actually a structure rather than a very good first bar. The structure determines everything else, sort of like mapping out how big the garden is and which things will be planted where, and then you see what happens.

Even though these pieces range from 90 seconds to 25 minutes, I don’t find too much structural caprice once I’ve gotten started.

After working with this incredible ensemble on these great pieces, how has your approach to writing choral music changed?

I still draw a distinction between writing choral music which happens in concert (as these pieces do) and pieces which happen in the context of actual worship. There are so many differences both in function and performance practice that it hardly feels like the same phylum.

However,  I should point out that a few months after No Resting Place comes out, an album of all the music I’ve written for Magdalen College, Oxford, is being released. I’m particularly happy that this is happening nearly simultaneously, because I suspect interlocutors such as yourself will be able to detect similarities and differences which, to me, are hidden.

The obsession with intervals does cross over, and a good example is that the Missa Brevis I wrote for Magdalen is subtitled “mass in fifths,” as there are fifths bouncing around in nearly every bar. Formally, the Agnus Dei breaks the mould: it’s all stacked fifths in the lower voices straight through the repeated texts, and then when we get to “Dona Nobis Pacem,” it’s all scales from two solo trebles: kind of erasing the tyranny of the devotion to the interval. I imagine I learnt this from writing for TTS!

Another piece written around the same time is a set of canticles for Westminster Abbey, subtitled “Service in Ninths.” First of all, it was designed so when those kids grow up sing Grimes, they’ll already know how to do it. The boys also love a musical scavenger hunt. But also: a ninth is an extreme interval in the voice, and represents a kind of stretching where you go as far as you can technically but actually only a semi-tone or tone in terms of pitch class, so it’s a so-far-but-so-close situation.

I think of the Canticles as a moment of great transformation and revolution, particularly in the Nunc Dimittis when there is the explicit drama of two lives (being Simeon and Christ, 40 days old) intersecting for just a moment, and acknowledging that we’ve passed through a membrane.

After the text “…and to be the Glory of Thy people Israel,” we get an apocalyptically loud chord from the organ in which all the ninths are filled in and reharmonised. I definitely learnt this trick writing for Peter and TTS — there’s a lot to be done with intervals and harmony when thought about in an intensely biblical way but then left alone to make their own gravy.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing 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 think writing music should be treated with the same reverence as you do anything, really — and the inverse.

I love being surrounded by people who do something very well and keep it simple — I find the hawker culture in Singapore quite moving in this sense, because there are often single-item vendors who have been making the same noodles for 30 years in a space not much bigger than my studio; there’s a kind of expertise and craft which you can only achieve through repeated gestures, which is why I think some composers’ music transforms over their lives.

It’s not so much a giant éclat of stylistic pivot as you see in Stravinsky but a slower, invisible transformation through technique and obsession which brings us from the John Adams of Shaker Loops ...



... to the John Adams of The Gospel According to the Other Mary.



A much larger conversation for another quindecimial interrogation!

Whenever I mentor younger composers, I encourage them to work meticulously on their notation and also to learn how to make a vinaigrette and roast a chicken; it’s all to do with craft and the will to do something well.

That having been said, I think I’ve become too old to make a good cup of coffee. I have broken every cafetière I’ve ever owned, and because I don’t live in Brooklyn or Shoreditch, I refuse to get one of those chaotic science-experiment steampunk coffee machines requiring a Swedish £350 goose-neck kettle and a tiny little scale.

This interview has been brought to you by ninety four Nespresso™ pods and I’m not ashamed.