An Interview with Ed Bennett

'I enjoy getting feedback from other artists and the discussion that you can have', says Ed Bennett. He talks to Jonathan Grimes about his upcoming projects, the composing process, writing for orchestra, and how he enjoys collaborating with other artists.

Jonathan Grimes: Ed, perhaps you can start by telling me about your current situation: where you’re living, what you're doing and what you're currently working on?

Ed Bennett: At the moment I’m living in Birmingham in England and I’m trying to finish a PhD there, which is funded by the conservatoire[Birmingham Conservatoire]. So I’m living there, teaching a little bit and doing as much writing as possible at the moment while I have the time and space to do it.

JG: And when do you hope to finish your PhD?

EB: Early 2007, within the three years that I’ve set to do it in.

JG: And are you studying with anybody in particular there?

EB: My supervisor is Michael Finnissy. He doesn’t actually teach there but the conservatoire lets you have an external supervisor. So I just go and see him a couple of times a term. We just have a long, long conversation about things.

JG: And how are you finding having those consultations with Michael Finnissy?

EB: I find them very useful. He’s a very interesting person and a very controversial character, so he’s really provocative and makes me think a lot. It doesn’t really matter to him what aesthetic you may have. It’s about thinking about who you really are as an artist, I suppose, as opposed to more technical things.

JG: And was it your choice to study with Michael Finnissy?

EB: Yes, I’ve known people who studied with him. I’ve never really studied with anyone for a long period of time so I thought if I’m going to study with somebody I want someone who will provoke me in some way.

JG: So it’s going well?

EB: Yes, it’s excellent.

JG: And at the moment your piece for percussion is being performed as part of a Music Network tour. Can you tell me a little bit about the piece to start with?

EB: It’s for a Portuguese percussionist called Pedro Carneiro, and Pedro is an excellent performer. He’s primarily a marimba player so the tour is focused around that instrument. The piece I’ve written is called Clockwork Monkey Machineand it’s written for marimba and some other percussion, so it’s got the pedal bass drum, wood blocks and bongos -- things that he can play around a marimba if I happen to deviate from it.

There used to be an amusement dock here in Bangor, Co. Down[Northern Ireland] called Barry’s Amusements. It was an old Victorian arcade with mechanical arcade machines -- long before the new games and digital things. When you went into this arcade it was a spooky place where all these things were happening at once: strange fortune-tellers, laughing policeman, etc. I remember this monkey thing that you put money in and it moved mechanically. So I likened the movements that Pedro has to make [to the monkey in the amusement arcade]. So that’s really where it came from, the title and the extra musical influence.

JG: Is this your first time writing for solo percussion?

EB: Yes. I’ve written quartets for percussion and all my other music features percussion reasonably prominently, I suppose.

JG: And do you enjoy writing for percussion?

EB: Yes, I like banging things. It’s very physical. Percussion is particularly energetic and is associated with many different types of music as well. So I enjoy the ambiguity it can provide.

JG: And you have another piece for percussion coming up next month?

EB: Yes. It's for Damien Harron, who is a composer as well. Damien is an Irish percussionist I’ve known for years. He actually plays in my group [decibel]. He has a percussion quartet called Backbeat, and I wrote a piece for his quartet several years ago [Just As You Have The Impulse To Do Something, (stop).]. He’s doing a solo tour of pieces with electronics -- theatrical pieces -- and he’s asked me to do something for it.

JG: So is it nearly completed?

EB: No, I’ve a lot of work to do on it.

JG: You’re obviously a fast writer?

EB: I don’t know if I’m fast. I work every day unless I've got something else that I have to do. I wouldn't enjoy spending a year on one piece -- I would find that difficult. I enjoy being slightly on the edge and having to keep pushing for something.

JG: So you’re composing all the time?

EB: Yes.

JG: And do you ever feel the need to step back and stop or just recharge your batteries?

EB: Yes. If you do an orchestra piece, it can be such an enjoyable but stressful operation, and you do want to have a bit of release afterwards. Sometimes it’s just being ill for a week because you’ve been working non-stop and all of a sudden you realise that you haven’t slept or eaten properly. But normally I like to begin composing again after a few days because it’s like playing an instrument -- if you don’t play it for a week your chops start to go. My brain is the same with writing. I think it’s better for me to do even 20 minutes in a day than do nothing, because at least psychologically I’ll think I’ve made a dent in a work.

G: So April and May seem like they’re going to be very busy months for you. You’ve got the percussion and electronics piece that you mentioned coming up, and you also have a new work coming up for the London Sinfonietta and Sound Intermedia.

EB: Yes. It’s a small piece for a couple of players, an actor, and live electronics, which is the involvement with Sound Intermedia, who are very much leading this project. So it’s going to be quite a theatrical piece. I’m not sure how much to say about it as I’m still working on it.

JG: And was the idea to use an actor yours or part of the project brief?

EB: There are four composers writing pieces, and this was what they wanted. The context of the piece has been created in a way for us. So they want a concert as part of a day of events in London that is like one thing, although there are four different pieces. It’s going to be one event where everything runs into each other and it’s all to do with the space and the lighting. So it’s quite an unusual approach.

JG: And where is it going to take place?

EB: The LSO Centre in London. It’s in Old Street, which is where the London Symphony Orchestra rehearses -- it’s a very nice venue. But it’s down to the wire as far as the writing goes because it’s quite collaborative. So it probably won’t be finished until two weeks before the performance. And even then there will probably be elements that are finalised the day before.

JG: So are you collaborating with the musicians or the actor, or both?

EB: I'm collaborating with the musicians and with Sound Intermedia. I’ve written quite a lot with electronics but not so much with live electronics. I’m working with a programmer, which is a real luxury because normally I do everything myself, so it’s a learning process. I come up with the concept for what I want the electronics to do, and I work with the programmer to try and realise the program that will execute the things I require. It’s good because it means I get to finally make time to learn about aspects of music technology I haven’t delved into yet

JG: So it’s a good two-way process?

EB: Yes, it’s great. We’ll see how it turns out but it certainly has been interesting.

JG: And do you like the collaborative nature of writing something and sharing it with the performers or discussing it? Or do you prefer to just singly write a piece and wall yourself off from everybody?

EB: More and more I enjoy the collaborative aspects of working with other people, but it depends on the situation. For example, when you write for an orchestra, you’re very limited as to what you can do and you’re probably better just telling them what to do. Orchestras are very institutionalised and normally have their ways of doing things; you get very little rehearsal time, not enough basically. And if you have ambiguity or things you want to try out, you don't really get any time to fix anything; it’s a difficult way to work. Whereas if you’re working with a small ensemble and musicians you know who are more compassionate towards your particular work, you have the opportunity to work with them and see what they can do and see what they like to do, which is quite nice.

JG: Can you remember some of your early musical experiences?

EB: My mother is a folk musician. So I grew up with that in the house, and that was probably the first interesting musical experience I can remember.

JG: And growing up, at what point did you think of becoming a composer or at what point did you begin to experiment or compose?

EB: I didn’t really make a conscious decision to be a composer. I was playing in lots of bands, rock bands, punk bands, pop bands.

JG: Your instrument was guitar, was it?

EB: Bass actually. I played guitar and piano -- I played a little bit of everything, nothing particularly well, probably! When I was fifteen or sixteen, I got hold of a four-track recorder and started creating pieces. I wasn’t really writing songs as such -- I was writing strange pieces of music that were really soundscapes. At around sixteen I went off to art college. I didn’t do music because there was nowhere to do it -- if you wanted to study music you went to university and did a classical degree. I didn’t have an A-level in music so I didn’t have this option. At eighteen a music course came up with Brian Irvine at Bangor College. This was a foundation course in music, which anyone could join. So I thought I’d quite like to do this before it’s too late and before I end up going away and doing something else. I’m glad I did the course because it was very influential. That’s when I started finding out about lots of music I’d never experienced before and got enthused to take it more seriously.

JG: So then you went to Coventry University [in England] and you did composition there?

EB: Yes, for a couple of years. It was quite difficult, actually, to go and study only composition unless you went to somewhere like one of the conservatoires. So this odd course at Coventry was a composition course for people from all sorts of backgrounds. It proved to be a very interesting place because it was full of people from unusual backgrounds.

JG: And then you went to the Guildhall [School of Music and Drama, London]?

EB: Yes.

JG: Who did you study with at Guildhall?

EB: My supervisor was Diana Burrell who was actually quite good for me. She was very open and I think she quite liked the fact that I hadn’t come through the system that students normally come through. She was good in terms of letting me do what I wanted and encouraging me to be more extreme with things, and not to be serious, or anything.

On the whole I would have to say that big music colleges are essentially not quite as creative as I would have expected. When I went to study composition at Guildhall, half the people there hadn’t heard of half the music that you should know as a contemporary composer -- they were still listening to Stravinsky and I was so shocked! But in saying that, it was enjoyable for lots of other reasons -- the exposure to lots of very, very good musicians -- and there were a lot of very good, creative people there as well. I was just a little shocked because I felt somehow they would be advanced but actually they were still very historical in what was going on.

JG: And why was that? Is that just how student composers are educated or is it something deeper than that?

JG: Well, this leads neatly on to my next question. How do you actually see yourself as a composer? Where do you stand? It’s a very loaded question.EB: I think it’s institutions. Basically conservatories are fundamentally based on classical music and they can’t really break out of it. And now I teach in one, which is hilarious because I feel like a bit of a fraud. I see it as a chance to try and change something, corny as that may sound. At least I can go in with my version of history and try and add to it. But everything is very much based on the classical tradition, which for me is completely alien because I haven’t been part of that tradition at all. I’ve nothing against it but if I’m honest, which I think is important for a composer, I didn’t come from there, I don’t know that much about it.

JG: Country and western?EB: It is a very loaded question. I don’t see myself as part of any particular school. If I have to see myself as something, it would be as someone who likes to make things with whatever components are available to me. For a while I thought about style and where one fits in. But then I realised it doesn’t really matter because you can’t contrive these things, and if you do it probably wouldn’t be you anyway. So I think that I have a lot of influences and that the influences from different musics come into what I do, somehow, whether it's from contemporary classical music, electronic music, jazz, country and western, whatever you like.

EB: Johnny Cash is very cool again, isn’t he?

JG: Oh, yes!

EB: I don’t mean that I would necessarily use things in a superficial way, I just mean that everything I personally find somehow aesthetically pleasing influences what I do. So I can’t imagine saying I’m a minimalist or I'm into new complexity, and just do that for the next 20 or 30 years. I don’t think you can contrive those things and I think someone like Steve Reich or Brian Fernyhough didn’t just contrive their styles. Steve Reich was around 35 when he wrote the first piece that he’s known for, so he didn’t just arrive [at his style]when he was 18. I think sometimes we can forget that.

JG: You’ve been involved in a number of collaborations -- cross artform collaborations. Do you enjoy that challenge of working with different artforms?

EB: Yes. I’m going to push a little bit more in that direction. Looking for a new way to do things and to work in a different context that isn’t a concert hall, for example, is quite important to me. It doesn’t always work and it's more of a gamble, but when it does work I think it can be very rewarding. So this piece we talked about earlier for the London Sinfonietta will be a piece that’s more collaborative. I’m also hoping to do some more work with a couple of the video artists that I’ve worked with in the past. I would be keen to explore more work with choreographers; I haven’t done that in a couple of years. I enjoy getting feedback from other artists and the discussion that you can have. When you’re sitting in a room by yourself it’s so solitary and it’s not always the most enjoyable experience. Actually, sometimes I find it quite a boring experience [laughs]. It depends how you go about a piece, but a lot of it is just work.

JG: It’s the old cliché, 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration...

EB: But when you collaborate with another artist it becomes more exciting because you don’t feel so alone -- you don’t feel like you’ve got to climb this mountain by yourself. Of course it has to work, you have to relate to the person and you have to somehow get on and want something similar.

JG: And do you have to be very disciplined when you’re composing a large-scale piece -- for example a piece for orchestra? Do you have to really map out your time?

EB: I have to be, yes. My girlfriend is a composer as well and she is different from me in her working methods. She’s quite erratic. She can go in and do a bit and then go on and do something else. Whereas I’m a bit nine to five, I’m a bit boring actually. I get up in the morning and I’ll do four or five hours and if I can I’ll do four or five hours in the afternoon. With an orchestral piece for me it’s the only way to get it done; I have to keep that momentum. And physically it’s so much work. I think anyone who is self-employed has to be quite disciplined and most composers are [disciplined]. So I teach about a day a week and the rest of the week I have to be disciplined. You have to put the hours in and treat it like a working week.

JG: You’ve written quite a number of orchestral pieces in the last year or so -- All This Used to Be Trees, which you wrote for the Ulster Orchestra; White Lines, which you wrote for the Sheffield Chamber Orchestra; and also a recent work [Ausland] for the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. That’s quite a lot to get through in a year.

EB: Last year was chaotic, as far as work goes. White Lines was finished at the end of the year before. That was for an amateur orchestra, although it was, in a way, more problematic because you had to be careful what you wrote and not compromise your aesthetic. The Trees piece for the Ulster Orchestra I think I wrote in about two and a half to three months, working every day. Then the BBC Philharmonic piece I wrote in two months, which was a bigger piece again, actually.

The problem with an orchestra for me is. what do you do with it? Because it has all these historical connotations. Where do I fit into that and how can I make it sound any different? So for me, with All This Used to Be Trees, I was able to use some electronics. So I thought, 'Well there’s a way of me getting around writing for orchestra.' So that was my idea for that piece -- to incorporate electronic sound.

I make a form sketch of the whole thing and try and do it as spontaneously as possible and then try and refine it. And that can be fun actually, it’s just trying to visualise a piece as much as possible before you even put a dot down. You know what pictures are in it and the stuff you’re going to use. With Ausland, the last orchestra piece for the BBC Philharmonic, it’s probably the quickest piece I’ve ever written. I had an idea of what it was going to be, which was basically one large crescendo for 15 minutes, and that was enough [laughs]. I talked to Michael Finnissy about it, because I was panicking -- I didn't have much time -- and he said, 'Yes, that’s it, that’s the piece, so do it.' That just gave me a little confidence to do it.

I think if you’ve got one idea that’s quite clear, it’s all you need and you can surprise yourself with what you can do within that. If you can create the canvas that you can do work on, and the right colours, it just comes out. I’ve spent nearly three months on this piece I’m writing for London Sinfonietta for one cello, keyboard, actor and electronics. Months, because I just had difficulty trying to visualise the piece, whereas the orchestral piece, which is very detailed as well, I did in two months.