Michael Quinn: Scott, on your CMC profile you say that you've 'fallen out with the abstraction of notes on paper'. Why? What's missing in that conventional method of composing for you?

Scott McLaughlin: I think it's more about where I came from. Being a composer, the necessity [is] to communicate with musicians via notation; that's just the way that the system works. Some composers have stretched that to limits in various directions. I think it's because the musical ideas that I wanted to get down on paper didn't fit in notation; they didn't fit in rhythms, they didn't fit in motifs and melodies and the notational system is designed for that sort of thing. It was when I rediscovered spectral music that I saw that you could just reduce it to frequencies and amplitudes and time notation, and that just opened up a window for me. That was a much more direct communication of what I was trying to get across. So then it's just a matter of putting that into a notation that musicians could deal with.

MQ: What is it that you're trying to communicate? Because the approach you take is quite difficult for a general audience to make a step into because it seems to be dealing with the sub-atomic, what's hidden in the subterranean rather than the surface of music and sound.

SMcL: Some people would probably disagree, that what I do is mostly on the surface, but that's another argument entirely. There's two questions there. There's one about writing essentially difficult music, and there's one about communication. I fall back on the Stravinsky argument for that one: there's nothing emotional or meaningful that is really trying to be communicated. It's almost impossible to talk about that. I think if we could say what we were trying to communicate we wouldn't be writing music.

MQ: When did the urge to compose begin?

SMcL: Before I tried composing on paper, in my teenage years, I just wanted to be in a band. Not for the fame aspect, I just loved the sound of big guitars and whatever bands I was into at the time. It just really grew from that. I found after a while that one guitar or even drums and bass and all that wasn't enough. The ideas were bigger than that, and that's when I did a music degree. I was living in Belfast, I used to go down to the Sonorities Festival [at Queen's University] I knew nothing about classical music or contemporary music but I used to go to see the strange, crazy stuff. After a couple of years of doing that I decided this is for me, I like this.

MQ: Were there particular pieces, particular composers that made a connection with you, that acted as a springboard into something else?

SMcL: I can truly say that I regret not having a clue what I was listening to at any of those Sonorities. It was just all mad stuff. The only one that sticks in me was a year when Rolf Hind played the Ligeti Études but even at that point that was after I'd made the decision. I remember an entire concert of solo Donatoni viola music, which I came out grumbling and screaming about. An hour and a half of Donatoni solo viola music was just too much for me at the time. But at the same time I knew there was something in there that I wanted to get out.

MQ: Is it a concentrated experience for you, writing music? Or an expansive experience?

SMcL: It's a horrible experience! It's both, and that's probably the problem. You're constantly jumping from the macroscopic to the microscopic and back out. If you spend too long in the microscopic you lose track of the macro. It's very concentrated. I can't really do anything else while I'm composing, much to the frustration of everybody around me.

MQ: You describe the elements in your work as 'the maths of frequency and amplitude, the building and breaking of tempo patterns'. Tease that out for me and tell me how that intellectual ambition actually manifests itself in the process of writing.

SMcL: There's a sense in some ways that it's almost automatic writing. There are a few particular processes that I use, definite ones, which I found produced the results that I'm interested in. With the maths of frequency and amplitude, that's largely about figuring out relations between pitches. For example, some of the more spectral things I've done have involved analysing specific types of sounds and creating an archetype from that -- like analysing a creaking door [or] in one case, tin pots and bells and things like that, and then just trying to see what kind of an archetype you can make. So, that's the intensive part. Then you have created an object and you can take that and start freely composing with it. But the other part, about the patterns, that's the most important thing. With the compositional students I have I always try to explain that from my point of view it's just about patterns, everything is patterns. As people, as humans, as sensory animals, that's what we perceive and it's all about just breaking the patterns, building up expectations, breaking expectations. Not quite about the drama of that, but that's how a piece keeps moving.

MQ: Do you recognise where this approach you have to music making comes from? Or what it satisfies in you?

SMcL: That's a very good question. Difficult to answer without going into some sort of pop psychology. On the most basic level, it satisfies the need to create, to do something. I probably got into composing because the music that I saw being written, I thought, 'Yeah this is great, some of this is fantastic, but I think there's something that's it not doing and I think I could do that'. Occasionally I come across composers who do things in a similar way to me and I think, 'Great!, other people are doing the same kind of thing. I feel I've found brethren.' Maybe there is something about that in it, that whatever I'm putting into the music, it's about putting it out there and hoping that other people respond similarly. But that's very pop psychology. I don't think that would stand up under any serious analysis.

MQ: You're also a performer. You've performed in bands like Romance and Desert Village Collective. Are there two Scott McLaughlins, the composer and the performer?

SMcL: There are definitely different sides. There are things I do in performance I would never commit to paper and possibly vice versa. But I think it's a different thing. They have crossover points but they are different people who are doing it.

MQ: The titles you use for individual pieces suggest to my mind -- and this is pop psychology, too -- an almost morbid fascination with things away from the centre and with elements on the edge. I'm thinking of works like Inner Shadow, 'the shadow of a shadow' you describe it as. Is your concern when composing with the abstract? Are you wanting to describe or explain something to yourself that you're seeing?

SMcL: In a lot of ways it's about translation and transliteration; explaining something through making models of it. I feel that I understand music in my own way and that it's -- language is the wrong word -- an experience that I can communicate in. So when I see something that isn't expressed in music I tend to think, 'Yes, I could take that and I could express that musically'.

MQ: When did you start to compose?

SMcL: 1999-2000 was when I started putting notes on paper. There was a huge back catalogue of guitar songs and things like that recorded before that.

MQ: Do you keep those two areas of your musical life separate or are they part of a continuity?

SMcL: I think I have to separate them. There are things that I do in what we will call 'composition' that I would never, ever do on pop music. They exist in different domains, I have to separate them out.

MQ: The way we're describing your music can sound quite severe to a general audience. Do you factor the response of an audience into the equation when you sit down to write?

SMcL: Fundamentally, I want people to enjoy it, but I don't want to coerce people into coming. I certainly don't want people to feel I've paid my money, this better entertain me. It's not entertainment; it's not designed to be entertainment. I would like to think that the people who enjoy it will find the same fascination in it that I found in it. Fundamentally, I'm not willing to change what I do to please a group of people I don't know and can't possibly predict what they will or won't like. I'd rather do what I do very well and let people come to that.

MQ: And what about musicians? You have a piece on the latest CMC sampler [Contemporary Music from Ireland, Volume 7], Bifurcations, played by the Dunleavy Clarinet Quartet - tell me how that came to be written and the degree to which they were involved in the process of creating the piece.

SMcL: They were all a bunch of undergrads at the University of Huddersfield, where I'm at, and they formed a clarinet quartet and they just came to myself and Richard Glover, another composer, and said, 'would you guys write us some pieces?' In terms of consultation, it was mostly about technical issues, going through things, making sure things were playable, things of that nature. They were very open to suggestions and they gave plenty of suggestions on how things could be done but they really let us do what we do.

MQ: Did you think of that as a collaboration, or was it a different process to your mind?

SMcL: Definitely! Ultimately I would like to, and I think I need to with my music, find musicians who are completely in tune with it, or at least who think that it's something that they could get into. There's a lot of elements of my music which aren't musical enough for a lot of players! There's not a lot do in my music sometimes, you play one note extremely well rather than a hundred notes. In terms of collaborations, I collaborated with a saxophone player called Ian Harrison who specialises in multiphonics, in extended techniques and how they work. Whitewater, which I wrote with him, is going on now to other players and it's interesting, after working on it for a year with him, seeing how other people tackle it and what they bring to it.

MQ: I may have been implying that your music is rather micro-managed by you in the process of making it, but Bifurcations suggests that's not the case. There's a spontaneity in the sense of the 'nowness' of it in performance. Is that important to you?

SMcL: Definitely, yes. It has been suggested to me before that given that I'm so interested in control of frequency, then why not just do it all on computers, and I have done quite a few pieces using Max/MSP and the like, but it needs the spontaneity, the 'organicity' of live performers. You just can't beat that. I've done my share of taped pieces and some of them sound great, but you just can't beat live players.

MQ: To my ears, Bifurcations sounds distinctively a Scott McLaughlin piece. It does seem to demand or expect the audience to respond to the piece. It's as if a piece isn't finished until the audience itself responds to it. Do you recognise that, is that a parameter that you build in to the equation?

SMcL: I suppose so, to a certain extent.

MQ: Does it matter to you how an audience reacts?

SMcL: Ultimately, not really. Either I'm happy or not happy with the piece. I'd be lying if I said I didn't care what the audience think. I love for the audience to love it, but ultimately I'm more concerned with whether the piece worked or didn't work in my mind. The strange thing, of course, is that I've had a couple of situations where a piece wasn't performed the way it was supposed to be and some audience members have said afterwards, I really liked the way this and this happened. And I thought, well that's not what I intended but I'm glad you liked it. So you don't really have much control over what the audience thinks.

MQ: What are you trying to do in a piece of music? Is there a narrative? Are you trying to tell a story in a piece like Inner Shadow, which has that metronomic tick-tocking, which implicitly is there in the background but we only ever hear at a moment of drama when something else stops?

SMcL: The usual models that I use to explain it, when I have to explain pieces to anybody, [is that] it's usually about one object which keeps changing but it's always standing still. That's probably the best way of looking at it: it's the same thing, just looked at from lots of different angles. At the same time, when you ask about the metronome in Inner Shadow, lots of people have asked about that. And I don't know why it's there. I'm not really sure what function it fulfils. I hate to be mystical about describing music but I can't explain why it was there, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I think it was related to the [Samuel] Beckett-ness of the commission. I was told this after the concert by a Beckett scholar who was there: that Beckett used to bring a metronome along to rehearsals to time the musicians, so they had a beat to walk to. I like that, that's good.

MQ: Do you see yourself as being part of a school of thought about music, either within Ireland or in a wider context?

SMcL: The composers around me that I find to be working in the same vein that I am, if anything, were reacting against the control issues particularly coming out of the '70s and'80s. It's interesting that you mentioned micro-management earlier. If anything, that's what I'm trying to move more and more away from. I'm trying to give more freedom back to the performer -- the right performer who is on the same wavelength as me! -- particularly pieces over the last year that I've been writing. I'm much more interested in allowing the performer to work within a limited set of sounds. It's not improvisation, it's bounded improvisation at best, but I want to give it back, to give the performer some control in the piece again.

It's funny because in the history of music there's always been an interplay between composers who pushed performers to do one thing and performers who demonstrated there were possibilities for composers to follow. It comes in swings and roundabouts. I think it's definitely starting to happen now in this country - we're seeing more performers coming up [and] I have to explain myself less. Things that I sometimes think are complex and might be unusual to a performer, they tend to say, 'Oh yeah, I know what you mean; you mean like this', and off they go.

MQ: Touching on orchestras, because that's one of the real problems for young composers, getting the opportunity to work on a scale larger than a chamber ensemble, is that a frustration for you? Is that something you aspire to do?

SMcL: I don't aspire to write for an orchestra or to write an opera. I wouldn't say that they're outmoded institutions but the only large-scale pieces I've written have been for free amounts of players, anything 10 players up, any instruments, but the orchestra as an institution, I don't think I can do anything with that.

MQ: You're taking a doctorate at Huddersfield at the moment [where] the notion of writing the kind of music that you do write in the kind of way that you do for large-scale forces is not so foreign or problematic a notion.

SMcL: When you look at somewhere like Germany, they have these fantastic orchestras who are interested in playing contemporary music. They work with some big composers who are writing really good orchestral music, but it's still within this way of writing with notes and rhythms. It's the language the orchestra speaks. Some composers push that quite far, almost break the orchestra. But even so, it just doesn't really appeal to me. I look at the divisions of an orchestra, the grouping of it, and it just doesn't grab me.

MQ: Tell me about the doctorate you're working on.

SMcL: It's always a tricky business with composition doctorates. You write the music and then you sit down and you think, 'Right, this has to be turned into some sort of academic thing now.' For me at the moment, it's about finding common threads and sitting back and doing the self-analysis and the self-reflection to create, hopefully, some interesting writing about it. It's always difficult for composers to write about their own music. At best, we can describe it.

MQ: What's it telling you about yourself as a composer, this process of self-analysis?

SMcL: That process hasn't quite started yet. I'm shying away from it, I'm doing the big build up. It's more a matter of formalising things that I already knew. I don't think I'll find anything new out, but what I'm really doing is reading around the subjects that I think might be interesting. I'm reading around structuralism and phenomenology issues and things like that, which I think inform the music or could be used to describe the music in some way but [which were] not necessarily there when it was being written.

MQ: What triggers a piece? Is it the same provocation or the same stimulus [for each]?

SMcL: Similar stimuli. I once described how music is scientific music, biological music. I come from a vaguely science background; I started doing a science degree and then found I was no good at the whole being-in-university thing, so I dropped out. Five years later, I was mature enough to go back and actually do a degree but the science part of me is always there; the part that looks and analyses and breaks things down into processes and methods.

MQ: There's a laboratory aspect to what you're describing. Is that how you see it?

SMcL: Definitely. I got into free improvisation through the notion that this would be a good way to explore timbres and sounds and extend the techniques; I just got into the performative aspect of it. But certainly there's a laboratory sound. I can't write a piece for an instrument without sitting down and exploring that instrument inside out to see what it can and can't do.

MQ: Why is that do you think?

SMcL: I just have to know.

MQ: Are there other composers or a particular composer that make a connection for you with what you're trying to do?

SMcL: The most obvious one is Feldman. I always grab at Feldman because the things he wrote, in purely prose terms, always fascinate me. He always has something interesting to say. You have to really grapple with what he says but it speaks to me, so to speak. And the music… just the way that it's always shifting but never changing. It's the same with Beckett [who] I find fascinating for the same reason. They're different but the same. That, if anything, is my mantra: different but the same. Gérard Grisey of course; a massive influence in terms of technique and in what he does with time. Just how he stretches expands time.

MQ: What's at the heart of the piece that you liked?

SMcL: Relationships. It's all about relationships, some sort of relationship between one or more objects, how they change and they progress, how they're the same. It's always about the relationship between X or Y amount of objects.

MQ: Does it matter to you what the objects are?

SMcL: That's the second part: there has to be the right sound. There are certainly some pieces which could be rewritten with totally different sounds and they'd still be the same piece. For example, Whitewater is all about multiphonics. It could have been multiphonics on pretty much any instrument, as long as they're displaced in the right way (and the relationship they have with the computer part is going to be the same anyway). But a lot of the time, I'm picky about the sounds.

MQ: Are you concerned about commercial viability [or] commercial leverage of your music?

SMcL: Concerned?

MQ: Because it has a material effect on you as a jobbing composer.

SMcL: Maybe not yet, but I'm working towards, if anything, anti-commercial music. There's enough things in the world that can be sold, everything has a price on it. I'd rather make something that can't have a price on it, that can't be sold. Possibly nobody would want to buy it and I'm quite happy with that idea. In fact, I'll sit on that: I will write music that nobody will want to buy and nobody will want to expend money on. I will earn my money some other way. I think once you bring money into music, it's dead.

MQ: So what would happen to those scores? They'd sit somewhere at home?

SMcL: I'm quite happy with free distribution. Most of my scores and music I put on my website for free. Anyone can just download them, I'm fine with that. The idea of somebody ripping me off is pretty laughable.

MQ: Your studies will finish at some point. What will be the next step for you then?

SMcL: I don't know. I've built up a lot of really good relationships in Huddersfield, both in personal and musical terms. I think it's still the best place for me to be at the moment. As for returning to Ireland, it's possible. At the moment I can't see that. It's not particularly because of Ireland, it's just more that what I have is quite good so I can't see any reason to leave it. When I started composing nearly 10 years ago, I didn't know much about the compositional scene in Ireland. I knew two or three composers who I found interesting. I think these days there's a big upsurge of interesting composers. That's not to denigrate Irish composers in the past, there's been lots of fantastic music written but it wasn't particularly interesting for me as a composer. It wasn't what I felt I wanted to do. Now there are definitely a lot more voices around who I'd be interested in working with or working beside.

MQ: That begs the question of whether you think of yourself as an Irish composer?

SMcL: When it comes down to it I suppose I do say 'Yes, I'm an Irish composer', but that doesn't really mean anything for me. I'm a composer who was born in Ireland. I don't think it's possible to construct a national identity on something as modern as contemporary music. I don't think it means much. Obviously we all have a trail of identities and influences but most of my influences came from outside Ireland.

MQ: What's next for you? What are you working on?

SMcL: At the moment I'm working on quite a few pieces that involve text , process pieces. I write the sound world, I write the environment and I write how the relationships are between the instruments and between the players and then I just let them go and see what happens. I've got a large-scale piece which will hopefully be for a large wind orchestra -- I hesitate to use the word 'orchestra'; 'massed wind instruments' -- which is purely text-based and there's no written notes, it's all about listening to the other players and relating it to them in particular rules. I've just finished a piece for 12 saxophones, which was written on a similar principle. The note options were written out, but a lot of what was happening, they had a lot of choice between what they were actually playing. So I'm doing a lot of trying to find ways to free up players more yet still be my music, still get the same sounds. I'm very interested in emergent phenomena.

MQ: So the ultimate aim of composing for you would be to write as little as possible but still achieve the maximum effect by creating the right context for performers to interact with the provocation of what you've provided and with each other.

SMcL: Yes, pretty much. If anything, I'm really composing sound worlds and just inviting people who are interested to come and play in them. I think within my psyche there's a very strong adherence to rule structures, that there are rules in place and they should be obeyed if you are within that particular society. If you choose to enter a particular society -- and you can call a piece of music a society -- then you choose to go with the rules that are within it. If you don't want to go with those rules you don't have to play that piece.

Scott McLaughlin was interviewed on video by Michael Quinn Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin, on 29 May 2008.

The views expressed in this interview are those of the persons concerned and are not necessarily those of the Contemporary Music Centre.