An Interview with Fergus Johnston
Fergus Johnston talks to Jonathan Grimes about astrophysics, the highs and lows of being a composer, and the current state of music in Ireland.
Jonathan Grimes: Can you remember some of your early experiences of music?
Fergus Johnston: There are some that I can't remember that I know about, like sitting on the steps outside a cellist's room when she was playing Bach. I was probably about one-and-a-half or two. I used to go up the stairs from the flat my parents lived in -- this was in London as my parents lived there when I was a child -- and listen to her playing cello. I still like the sound of cello. I used to sing a lot; I still sing a lot. I can remember the neighbours laughing at me because I was singing in bed in the morning.
JG: And what age were you then?
FJ: About eight or nine. When I was about six, I found some manuscript paper and I randomly put some notes on it. My father then played them and laughed at me for putting random notes down because the concept of randomness hadn't quite caught on at that stage. This was in the early 1960s so it was fairly new.
JG: And did you grow up in an environment where music was present or was this something that you just took upon yourself?
FJ: Both. My parents were not professional musicians. My mother was a ballad singer. In the late 1950s she was collecting folk songs, workers’ songs and was part of that whole ballad revival that was then taken up by the Dubliners [Irish folk group]. My father is musical but not a musician; he loves music very much. He used to play Bach on the piano and actually studied with the same teacher I studied with, Joe Groocock.
JG: ... such a dominant influence on so many people.
FJ: A great guy. There was another Groocock influence in that my first instrument was recorder and my first teacher was Dorene Groocock who was Joe's second wife. The Groocock influence is quite phenomenal in my life and in a lot of people's lives.
JG: And when did you first become aware of your leaning towards composition?
FJ: When I started learning the flute. I was about twelve. I had written pieces for recorder [before that]. I can still remember some of them and one was a complete rip-off of the Scherzo à la Russe [by Stravinsky]. Then when I was learning flute I was writing stuff for it. I was also listening to Pink Floyd at the time so there were loads of Pink Floyd-isms, which sounded ridiculous on the flute [laughs]. My sister was also playing the flute and we had only the one flute between us -- she was also bigger than I was! So the flute stopped when I was about thirteen. I tried to play the French horn for a while but, no matter what I did, I couldn't get high notes. I got a clarinet when I was sixteen and I was seventeen before I got any lessons on it, so I was a really late starter. Once I got the clarinet I flew because I found something that I really enjoyed playing. I enjoyed playing that until I got sick of all that clarinet music which Weber wrote.
JG: And I read that you were in a rock band in school?
FJ: Well, it was not really a rock band. It was a classical/folk/jazz rock band. That was fun actually because we were writing our own stuff. We were the kind of band that was guaranteed to fail because we had the idea that no two consecutive bars should be in 4/4 time, which was a challenge. The big hit that we wrote was the Magician Moth, which was a setting of a poem from The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast, a collection of poems for children. I wrote the riff for that in my French class and it was in 23/8.
JG: You obviously remember this very well!
FJ: Yes, I have a recording of it at home [laughs]. We recorded it in Tom Killian's house, the keyboard player. I was the guy who wrote the tunes and Tom had all the harmonic ability because he played keyboard. I never played piano; I tried it several times and never stuck to it. So all my music is actually linear. The harmony, if it happens, happens because of the collision of melodies. Although when I'm trying to create a large section I would have harmonic points that I'm aiming for.
JG: So you went to Trinity [College Dublin] to study music after finishing school. Did you do much composition there?
FJ: That's really where I started. Probably one of my favourite pieces was written while I was at Trinity -- the Three Songs on Words by e. e. cummings. I think they're perfect; there's not a note I would change in them, which is something I can't say about my other stuff. I was very influenced by Webern at that stage and that was largely because I was studying a lot of Webern in fourth year. I wrote a piece that got performed in one of the lunchtime concerts and my single memory of it was of Constance Gardener singing -- I could see her mouth opening but couldn't hear anything because the orchestra was too loud [laughs]. I had this massive fortissimo for brass and she was singing in the middle of all that. I hope nobody ever finds it [the piece].
JG: And did you have a composition teacher at that time?
FJ: I took lessons for a couple of terms with Jim Wilson in the Academy [Royal Irish Academy of Music]. I never got a consistent year; I'm not sure why. He was great because I would come along with something half done and he would hammer it out on the piano. He used to criticise it and say, 'You're very conservative.' I was writing music that was like the stuff I was handing up for Bach pastiche and that kind of thing. I can remember one time I wrote something that was obviously good and he said, 'Carry on and see where it takes you.' I think he knew that I didn't like that idea -- the idea of seeing where the music takes you. I like to be in control: I like to take the music, I don't like the music to take me. When I'm composing I'll plan out the piece, long before I've even started working out what the material will be. He was provocative in that way; he was very good. After I finished college I took lessons with the help of an Arts Counciltravel grant from a chap in Devon called Robert Hanson. I didn't get very many lessons because it was a question of finance.
JG: And what made you choose Robert Hanson? Was he someone you had come into contact with before this?
FJ: It was on a recommendation from Michael Taylor [music lecturer in Trinity College Dublin]. I should mention Michael Taylor because he was a huge influence, not just in my development but I think inKevin O'Connell's also. He started this extra class which wasn't timetabled. You could write something for it and he would get people to play it and it would be discussed. It was a terrific class and it got me really interested [in composition]. When I decided that I'd specialise in composition for my final year, I asked Michael what he thought of this. He said there was only one Mozart born -- or maybe two if you include Mendelssohn -- and he said, 'Look, it doesn't come easy for a lot of composers, so keep at it and it will come.' That was great because that's what a composer needs: encouragement. I never had anybody tell me that I shouldn't be writing music, which was good. If they had, I would have probably told them where to get off because it's something I've always wanted to do.
JG: So that inner compulsion was there?
FJ: Yes, but I never knew about it [composition] as a profession. I was always interested in music as something to do. I think I said in your ‘What’s it like to be...’ questionnaire that I was going to be an astronaut or astrophysicist. I still love astronomy and cosmology.
JG: And I have a question, which I'll come back to, as to how those interests relate to your music.
FJ: I'm not sure they do, but anyway... [laughs]
JG: Coming up to date, what are you working on at the moment?
FJ: Right now I'm putting in all the slurs and articulations into theRTÉ Living Music Festival piece, which I've just structurally finished yesterday. I'm also working in Wexford with the Wexford County Youth Orchestra as a kind of composer-in-residence for twenty weeks, and I'm writing a piece for them. It's not a professional orchestra so I've got to keep everything simple. That's actually the challenge -- to keep things simple. There's another piece that's in the pipeline -- the production process hasn't actually started -- which is a piece for theNSO [RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra] for 2006. It's not going to be a big piece -- it will be part of their Brahms festival.
JG: What can you tell me about your RTÉ Living Music Festival commission?
FJ: Well I haven't even got a title for it; I'm desperately stuck. I have great difficulty with titles. I don't know what I can tell you about this piece... ask me something about it.
JG: Let’s approach it in a more general way: how do you find writing for orchestra?
FJ: I love writing for orchestra; I wish I wrote more for it. Writing for orchestra is one of the things I like to do best. I think the orchestra is such a fantastic instrument.
JG: How has your approach to writing for orchestra changed since writing your last major work, the Flute Concerto of 1997 or even before that, Samsara? Is there an evolution there that you can trace?
FJ: I was actually wondering about this. I have written Two T'ang Poems for chamber orchestra and soprano; Samsara; The Heavens' Embroidered Cloths, a very bad piece which I hope nobody ever plays; the Flute Concerto; and Je goûte le jeu... for string orchestra. In terms of orchestral output that's not large, so I'm not sure if it's even prudent of me to posit any kind of orchestral development.
I know that when I was writing Samsara I was interested in one type of thing and seven years later, when I was writing the Flute Concerto, I was interested in another type of thing. That shows, in that Samsarais pulseless, or at least there are pulses that happen on such a huge scale that you don't actually sense them as pulses, and the Flute Concerto is much more rhythmically complex. The way of writing in the Flute Concerto is more confident. In between writing these two pieces there was a chamber octet I wrote, Líofa, which was recently performed in Temple Bar thanks to CMC. This was a really important piece because I took a huge leap forward in terms of my technique.
JG: And that was written in...?
FJ: 1994, but it wasn't performed until 1997 in Copenhagen. Repetition is something I don't really like in music, although I've been guilty of it on several occasions. In general I don't like the idea of things coming back without them being radically different. I think that[this comes from] my interest in Baroque music, in particular the music of the seventeenth century where you had all these forms that were open. Líofa was written like that: I developed this mad system where I put stuff through this machine and generated loads of material, which was then grouped according to certain types. Líofawas written by taking four of these different types of material and composing four completely different pieces of music that were stuck together, although they used the same material.
This Living Music Festival piece uses the same idea, although there is a recurring idea -- a trill -- and this goes right through the piece. There are sections of music that are self-contained in a certain sense, but they're set up by the music that happened previously. This is the kind of thing I plan out beforehand when I'm writing a piece. I have to know how long the piece that I'm writing is and then I can break it up into sections. Then I know what kind of music I want to write for the different sections.
JG: Do you use this approach for all your pieces or is it something that you do for large-scale works?
FJ: I do it across the board for all my pieces. There are very few pieces that I haven't used that approach in.
JG: Another interesting thing I remember hearing you say before was that you like, where possible, to start a piece in the middle and not at the beginning. Do you ever start writing a piece from the beginning?
FJ: Yes, and usually it turns out that it's not the beginning. I make it not the beginning because it's the only way I can get to the end [laughs]. I just find if you start the piece in the middle, getting to the end is not so difficult.
JG: So it's a psychological thing?
FJ: Yes. A case in point would be the opening movement of the Flute Concerto, which I started writing from the beginning. I got so stuck... I was about two years writing that movement. It wasn't until I realised that what I was writing wasn't the beginning that I was able to dig myself out of the hole.
The whole Flute Concerto comes from a bar in Líofa and bits of Líofaalso occur in the Living Music Festival piece. Líofa is a piece that has a whole lot of seeds in it and I think that I'll probably be drawing on it for a long time. It's a good idea not to throw anything away. I don't think it's stealing -- it's reusing. The other thing I should say about the Living Music Festival piece is that when I'm producing big pieces I tend to have huge amounts of material that I'm working from and I generate all this stuff from this ‘mill process’. I've found that usually I end up writing stuff I could have written if I hadn't put the music through the mill. So with this piece, I've far fewer sketches and I wrote a lot more intuitively than I've written before, which was really exciting because it means that it flows much more easily.
JG: You mentioned earlier about your interest in science. Is this something that has always been important to you?
FJ: I'm curious. I was always interested in stars and cosmology. When I see pictures of nebulae, it just fills me with wonder that the universe is such an amazing place. In a way, every piece of music has its own universe. When you're looking at a snapshot of the Horsehead nebula you're seeing it as it was hundreds or thousands of years ago because it takes the light that long to reach us. Your music is like that too in that it's a snapshot of where you were then.
JG: So that's the only connection you draw between your interest in that field and your music. Do you get some of your ideas for pieces from this area?
FJ: You get ideas from anywhere. I know that Samsara was a mad mix of reading about Buddhism and particle decay. Líofa came from reading about chaos theory and Cusp came about from reading about catastrophe theory. The original idea for Je goûte le jeu... came from reading about supering theory.
JG: Do you normally wait for an idea to strike you or do you always compose or work through a process as part of a daily routine?
FJ: I'm actually a very undisciplined composer. I don't write all the time -- I know I should. I hate writing for the sake of writing. I find that if I write stuff and don't have the impetus, I'm not writing anything that's any good or at least I don't like what I've written. I need a spark that will get me going. Those sparks are few and far between. This is why commissions are so great. You find a spark when you have to. Quite apart from the fact that you get paid for writing the music [laughs].
JG: So in 1997 you went back to college to do a Masters in Music and Media Technology [at Trinity College Dublin]. Why did you feel the need to do this?
FJ: I was stuck. I didn't know where I was going. I was at a crisis point in my own personal life as well with my marriage breaking up. It was a fraught time and I needed something to keep me sane. I was always interested in computers; I had been using a computer since 1991 but only as a typesetter. I had some equipment but wasn't really using it. I learned a huge amount and I've used everything I learned in one way or another. It was also a challenge in humility as well because I was nearly forty, and going back to college to study with people who were younger than you was humbling.
JG: So did this course have a big impact on your composing?
FJ: I don't know. Do you mean did it change my composing?
JG: Yes.
FJ: I think it made me looser, less hung up.
JG: And you've composed a number of pieces with electronic parts since then.
FJ: Yes, but it doesn't come naturally to me, say in the way it would come naturally to Donnacha[Dennehy]. I still speak the language with a very heavy accent and I think I always will because I missed out on doing it earlier. Having said that, I've done an installation that used electronics; I've written Morríghan and Méadúand I've written another piece called Árd Fhearta. I produced some stuff when I was doing the course but I didn't like it. I'm still testing the water with electro-acoustic music. I use the computer much more as an assistant when I'm composing, in that I'm using it to crunch numbers.
JG: So you'd never have the urge to compose purely electronic music?
FJ: I find that using C-Sound is very difficult. I was interested to readGráinne Mulvey in her article when asked to describe her day, she said, 'I get up in the morning and do a little C-Sound.' I thought, 'Wow! I feel so ashamed.' I don't think I'll ever go beyond concrètemusic because I don't have the background in programming for sound synthesis; I know my limitations and it takes a huge amount of time to learn it.
JG: What is it like to work as a composer in Ireland today compared to earlier on in your career?
FJ: Are you trying to get me into a rant now?
JG: No!
FJ: Well, you just did! It's great in a way in that loads of things are happening. We've got CDs and you can now get our stuff out on CD. The trouble is you can't actually get anybody to distribute the stuff so you haven't a chance in hell of selling it. But you can have as many CDs as you want, which is great. I find it really irritating that I can go into a record shop and buy music by English composers on CD; it's much harder to find music by Irish composers because they won't stock it.
One of the big problems about music in Ireland is that the population as a whole isn't musically educated. I don't mean that to sound like 'ivory tower' stuff. Nobody in Ireland gets a decent musical education -- that's what composers are up against. You're always going to be up against the mass media and commercially produced stuff. I find it very depressing that there are only three professional orchestras in the twenty-six counties. Why does Cork, Sligo or Galway not have a professional orchestra? Why are there not several opera houses? Maybe it's a good thing that we don't have these things because not having them gives an opportunity to do something about it and to create something new and to make it exciting.
One of the greatest things to happen has been the Crash Ensemble and subsequentlyVox 21. It's a shame that we've no conservatory of the arts. It's a good place to work from the financial point of view because if you're a member of Aosdána -- which I am -- you can get a cnuas [annual stipend], which is €12,000 a year, which helps you write and keeps you alive. You can't live on it but it's a pretty significant contribution towards an artist's life. I've found that getting big commissions every two to three years -- and when I say 'big' we're talking between €5,000 and €8,000...you can't live on this for two or three years. I found it difficult to make ends meet so I got a taxi licence, which is terrific because it means I can work when I've no money and if I don't need money then I don't drive the taxi. All the taxi drivers in Dublin probably hate me for saying this; I think it's perfect for an artist.
JG: Didn't Philip Glass drive a taxi?
FJ: Bad example, Jonathan! I don't like Philip Glass -- I told you I don't like repetition in music. [laughs]
JG: Moving swiftly on... you've written music for almost every genre. Is there any particular instrumental combination, which you haven't written for, that you'd like to write for in the future?
FJ: Yes, a string quartet. I've never written a string quartet. I've started another opera but I started this about thirteen years ago and just never finished it. Each time I start the opera, I get a commission and then I have to stop. It's reaching a stage that when I want a commission, I just start writing the opera and then a commission comes! I did start a string quartet but didn't finish it. If I was to take it up again I wouldn't be able to pick up the threads; I'd just start a new string quartet.
JG: You mentioned before in another interview that you really wanted to write a cello concerto.
FJ: Yes, a cello concerto would be another [work I'd like to write]. It's such a terrific instrument. I think I'd probably write a much more dramatic concerto.
JG: Like Lutoslawski?
FJ: No, not like Lutoslawski. [laughs]
JG: OK. On that note, I'll end the interview. Thanks very much.
Fergus Johnston was interviewed on video by Jonathan Grimes in the Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin, on 7 December 2004.
The views expressed in this interview are those of the persons concerned and are not necessarily those of the Contemporary Music Centre.