Johnny Rodger: Tell me a bit about your background, how you ended up here in Glasgow?

David Fennessy: I grew up playing rock music -- playing in a rock band, playing electric guitar -- and then at the age of fifteen or sixteen I began to play classical guitar. It was only then that I started to read music, and at seventeen I went to the College of Music in Dublin. I spent four years there and then had a year out before coming to study with James MacMillan at the RSAMD [Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow]. At the time, in 1998, he was really someone under whom I wanted to study. I had just finished my undergraduate degree and I only started composing towards the end of it. At that time I was still pretty green [but] the pieces I liked of Jimmy’s that made me come over here, I still have a great fondness for them.

JR: What, like The Berserking and Isobel Gowdie and...

DF: Yes. I came here to study with him, but you realise soon when you study under someone if you’re on divergent paths.

JR: So were you on the ‘new music path’, as it were, right from the beginning?

DF: Yes, but they didn’t teach music in my school, so when I went to college I thought academies of music were all-singing, all-dancing places, you know, like ‘Fame’. I thought all musicians were composers -- and I still do think that all musicians should be composers. I thought all performers were composers and vice versa. I had no idea what new music was, or I thought new music was, say, Prokofiev -- that was the most modern thing I’d heard.

JR: So then you came over here and started studying under MacMillan. How did that go?

DF: Well, it was fine, we got on well, but it’s always difficult to pin down exactly what you learned from any one teacher. But any composer will always tell you they are self-taught, that they learned from listening to music themselves or by studying scores. I think that a good composition teacher is someone who just sets up an environment in which it is possible for you to do things. That’s not even a physical environment, but a philosophical environment, where you try and give them the possibility to do things they want to do. Jimmy provided that, really.

JR: You touched on the separation between composition and performance there, and one gets the feeling that you see that separation as some sort of decadence?

DF: Well, there’s a kind of musical pyramid that is a hangover from the late Romantic nineteenth-century idea of a composer in his ivory tower who emerges every three months with his latest manuscript and gives it to the orchestra. I just think that can’t be viable any more. If you really want to be a relevant artist it’s just not a viable way of working. This piece that I’m doing for Ken [event in December 2004 featuring music by six young Glasgow-based composers including David Fennessy]... I wanted to do a piece where I had people’s names down the left hand side of the page instead of instrument names beside the staves. I wanted to go that far in writing for people and writing for personalities, for people I knew, and also playing myself in the ensemble.

JR: So you completed a master’s degree here in Glasgow, and while you were doing that did you play the music you composed?

DF: No, I’m at a point now where I’ve reached these views with regard to the Ken project, but that’s not to say that in the future I may not still compose pieces for players. I’m a guitarist -- in this piece I’m playing electric guitar -- but every piece I write won’t have electric guitar in it. I want to be involved in all the pieces I play, but in this one I wanted to get to a place where... Well, I have this idea that there are a certain amount of barriers between when a piece of music is conceived by a composer and when it is consumed. So you have the interfaces between when the composer conceives it, and when the music is written down. Then again when the score is picked up by the conductor and when the conductor relates it to the ensemble; then when the ensemble plays it from individual parts, and then again when somebody brings it all together. Then again [another interface] between the players and the audience, and these are all barriers. My basic thinking was if there are, say, seven barriers between conception and consumption, if I can take away four of those barriers I’m sure you’ll have something much more direct and penetrating. So we wanted to strip away these barriers because a lot of them are just constructs of a perceived way of doing things. It seems so unradical a way of doing things.

JR: So is this sense of immediateness that you’re after, something that you see as coming particularly from the rock -- and maybe especially punk -- background?

DF: Well, I think so, yes. As a group of six composers all of us have come to it through what might be termed non-traditional routes. None of us were child prodigies or started to play the fiddle at the age of three or anything like that, yet we are all composers. And that’s like some kind of admission, a coming out of the closet: ‘Yes, I am a composer.’ But the problem is the forum where one can be a composer, or even the perception of what a composer is or ought to be. Or even the fact that people might not know what a composer is or does.

For a composer is not necessarily within the long lineage of the classical composer. Yes, we do write music down. Yes, I compose it, but I’m rejecting to a certain extent the classical construct, the classical way of doing things.

JR: It sounds to me as if you’re saying that the weight of that perceived presumptuousness of being a composer, of declaring oneself to be a composer, is all to do with this separation and the barriers you mentioned. If you talk about a new genre of composer, is what you need then a new kind of audience to which you can have a more direct access?

DF: Well, this is the major point about Ken. Sometimes I’m having a piece played and I look around the audience and see predominantly white, upper-middle class people, aged between fifty and seventy. And I sit there thinking, these are not the people with whom I would normally be socially involved, or with whom I’d be sitting in a pub and striking up a conversation...

JR: ...so why should you want to reach them with your music?

DF: Exactly. But the channels have been set up such that the gramophone is pointed in their direction. It’s about swivelling it around and pointing it in another direction. And that’s why Ken could only happen in Glasgow because it’s just teeming with creative and discerning young people. There’s the Art School, there are three universities, there’s the Academy of Music and piles of further education institutions. The amount of underground music and arts that takes place in Glasgow is not like anywhere else. Like nowhere else in Britain anyway, I know that much.

JR: So if there is this attempt to move on it seems to me that new music, rather than go along with the old class-based or institutional basis, has found itself an intellectual basis. There’s a lot of new music that has a difficult intellectuality to it. But it seems to me that that’s not especially what you’re trying to do?

DF: This is a key issue, because I never wanted to change the music I write to suit the needs of a perceived audience. What I wanted to do was find an audience for the sort of music I wanted to write. I’m not going to suddenly start writing beautiful, tonal, easy-listening music, although much of my music is very tonal.

People who listen to music want to be challenged, they don’t want it to be handed to them on a plate. Some of this music is not easy to listen to, but I think rejecting the intellectual element is a dangerous path to go down because you’re presupposing that your audience is not as intelligent as you [are], that they won’t get what you are trying to present.

We are saying there is a massive audience base out there who are intelligent, who do seek out things that maybe they’ve never experienced before. But we’re not going to wonder, ‘What is it they want to hear?’ Because then you might as well go back to your concert hall and write a nice Vaughan Williams pastiche -- with a couple of wrong notes in there, of course; a couple of trumpets blaring perhaps...

JR: I want to ask you about Ken. You are the prime mover, as it were?

DF: It was a kind of Blues Brothers beginning. I’d talked individually over time with all these composers. We’d go to a concert and see our work performed and then we’d talk and say, ‘Yes, I liked the piece, but Jeez that was depressing’.

JR: In what sense depressing?

DF: When you come out of a concert hall and you say, ‘Is that it?’ You spend four months working on a piece and you come out and you go, ‘Well, people applauded but nobody really got it. Is that it?’ I talked individually to all these composers and at the end of last year I had a few commissions fall through, because often as many commissions fall through as actually go ahead. So I had decided I was going to stop writing for a couple of months, and then that became a couple of more months, and there’s nothing like looking down the barrel of having no commissions and having no work coming in, to really make you think, ‘What do I do?’ Not just, ‘What do I do now?’, but actually ‘What is it that I do, what kind of music do I compose?’ So there’s a strange kind of abyss where you have no commissions, nobody asking you to write for a certain number of musicians. So you ask yourself instead, ‘What instruments do I want to write for? Who do I want to write for, where do I want it to be played?’ So I decided I want to form my own ensemble -- that was my initial thought -- to play my stuff.

JR: A banal question: the word ken? Why do you call it this?

DF: Two things. I wanted something that was intrinsically Glaswegian [the verb ‘to ken’ in Scots means ‘to know’, so ‘ken’ heard almost as punctuation in Scots conversation means, ‘you know’.]. And also something that was very short and says nothing about being a composer, about new music. It’s totally neutral and it goes easily on posters and publicity. I wanted something that eventually you could just put that one word on a poster with the date and people would know what it was.

JR: Sorry, I interrupted you there but you were talking about the formation of Ken and how it came about.

DF: Yes well, the immediate thing that occurred to me was that all these other guys felt the same. The composers who were getting the commissions with the big orchestras were not necessarily the people who I personally thought were doing the interesting stuff. None of us are happy with the institutional situation the way it is. So we decided to put on a big exhibition of our stuff. We didn’t even want to call it a concert. Each of the composers gets a space, as it were, a 45-minute room in which to hang their work, their music. You can dress this space as you like. This is not actual physical space we’re talking about, although they have that too. Being given a ten-minute space in a normal concert and being told the instruments you have to use is just simply not enough space and time for you to do what you want to do. I felt a kinship with the Brit Art project, no matter what they eventually turned out as or what people think of them. Yes, they were all basically art school educated people, but they all thought, ‘We don’t want to hang our stuff in those established galleries.’ Aesthetically, all the individual artists were very different but they were united by certain feelings about the way they wanted to go about presenting their art, and I feel the composers that form Ken have something in common with that.

JR: I see that, but earlier when you spoke very convincingly about breaking down barriers, I was wondering whether you would go for a rock format. Without conductors, for example? Is the composer the conductor? Will the musicians, who are playing here for nothing after all, have a chance of an input?

DF: Yes, all these things are connected. OK, talking about my piece, there’s no conductor: I’m playing in it. The players we know and trust; their personalities are such that we know they can impose the things that make them musicians onto the music as well, so that it becomes so much more than the sum of its parts. And yes, they’re playing for nothing. But believe it or not, there are musicians out there who are really interested in playing new music, and they have an opportunity here to have a creative role too.

Dave Fennessy was interviewed by Johnny Rodger in August 2004. The interview was originally published in New Music News, September 2004.

Johnny Rodger is a writer and editor of the Scots magazine, The Drouth.

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