An Interview with Paul Roe

CMC Performer of the Month August 2007

Clarinettist Paul Roe talks to Bernard Clarke about his experiences of performing new music, composers writing for orchestra, and his views on how new music should be presented and performed.

Bernard Clarke: The clarinettist is often asked to play new sounds in new performance practices, like flutter-tonguing, key clicks, lip buzzing and vocal sounds whilst playing. Is it getting more difficult for the clarinettist to keep up with the demands of the contemporary composer?

Paul Roe: I don’t look on it as difficult -- I think it’s brilliant. It’s fantastic to be challenged. I’m not interested in just repeating things – it’s just boring. I can’t understand why clarinet players play Weber for example; it just doesn’t make any sense to me playing music that’s 200 years old. I love the fact that composers will say to me, ‘Can you try your hand on the other side of the instrument? Can you take off the bell and bang it off the side?’ We’ve got to explore, otherwise we might as well go to a museum.

There are difficulties. Recently I’ve been trying to sing and play at the same time and I’ve found there are certain intervals I can do quite successfully. Like a fifth and a fourth but other intervals are quite tricky. So you just have to keep on working on that. But I see that as great, I really think that’s indicative of a new music player -- they want to be challenged, they want to be creative in their approach to performance rather than just reheating [old music]. I’m just not interested in reheating at all.

BC: Another challenge for some players today is the advances in multi-media technology. A clarinet quintet by Brahms is wonderful but a clarinet quintet of today can mean five clarinets -- either five live clarinet players or four pre-recorded and one live, and so on. Do you think that’s a potential problem -- getting used to the technology?

‘It just doesn’t make any sense to me playing music that’s 200 years old.’

PR: I think the whole digital medium has exploded in terms of creative potential. We’re in a time of flux and I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. I think we just have to go with it for the moment and see what happens. Not everything will work out. For example, I did some work with Rob Canning a couple of years ago. He was using his laptop and throwing back some of the sounds I was playing but in a new way. So I think there are great opportunities with digital technology but I do think it is in a state of flux. I also think composers shouldn’t feel compelled to use technology; I think they should do what they’re used to doing. There is one other thing which can come about with [the use of] technology, and that is that it can create a certain isolationist attitude or a disembodied attitude in music. For me music is visceral, it’s all of the senses and that’s what is important to me, rather than sounds only.

BC: You were a member and then principle clarinettist of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra for a long time and you’re also a longstanding member of Concorde. Did you think contemporary composers use instruments like the clarinet to their full capacity when writing for the symphony orchestra?

PR: Yes. I would have a little bit of an issue with contemporary music and orchestras. I think some composers, by no means all, when they write for symphony orchestras tend to throw in the kitchen sink and it’s a bit overloaded. When you’re sitting in the orchestra and you’ve all this sound density of texture going on around you, it can be very overwhelming and I think sometimes there’s a lack of subtlety in the way that instruments are used. I think also orchestral musicians tend to have a very poor attitude towards contemporary music and I often felt incredible sympathy for the composer coming in to meet a symphony orchestra because there is often such negativity shown towards composers. I’m not saying all musicians but it ties into the fact that musicians in symphony orchestras are generally trained to be expedient -- it’s about how quickly they can get through as much music as possible, and anything that gets in the way of that process becomes an irritation.

‘Music is visceral, it’s all of the senses and that’s what is important to me, rather than sounds only.’

Getting back to the original question about how they [composers] use the clarinet. I think they’ve certainly explored the various dynamic ranges, the various registers and so on. I personally can’t understand why composers write for symphony orchestras because I think it’s an enormous amount of industry for, perhaps, you might only get one or two performances. The attitude of the musicians doesn’t always tend to result in the best performances necessarily. So I wish contemporary composers the best of luck and suggest they don’t write for orchestras.

BC: When you approach a piece and you’re finding your way into the process that helped inspire the composer would you build the work note by note or phrase by phrase? Or would you bombard the composer with emails or phone calls?

PR: I am very keen on the whole idea of working together with composers. I think a score is one-dimensional way of communicating and if you meet somebody there is a much more visceral connection. You get the personality of the individual when you meet, when you hear them talk and when you see their gestures. I know that can’t always happen. The composers I’ve worked with over the years, I actually know quite well. I know the sound world they have in mind, I know the degree to which they would like you to be very faithful and authentic to certain spots of the music and other bits where they don’t mind a bit of give and take. I think there’s a huge amount to play for in that whole space. I think we as composers and performers should work together to be as creative in that space as possible and not set ourselves apart. I think we should create music and it doesn’t matter whose music it is as long as it’s good music.

BC: One of the fixed forms of music, it’s a curse and blessing in some ways, is recording. If you’re approaching a more famous piece, in other words, not a new piece, like a work by Boulez, or like Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint, would you consult different recordings of the same piece?

PR: Very much so. I’m not one of these performers who says, ‘I don’t listen to anybody else because it might influence the way I would interpret the piece or play the piece or consider the piece.’ I’m keen on hearing as many different recordings as I can get my hands on because it just gives you different ideas.

BC: You’re also very involved in teaching and developing music on the side and in quite a few disciplines and quite a few styles. But how are you finding the students? Are they interested in new Irish music or are they running scared?

‘I think a score is one dimensional way of communicating and if you meet somebody there is a much more visceral connection’

PR: No, I think we have a problem. Young students are interested in contemporary music. Make no mistake about that. They don’t get access to it, they don’t get to hear enough performances of it and the attitude from some teachers and within some institutions towards contemporary music is frankly appalling. They have this 19th century view of music, making up something that as I said earlier, is rehashing, recreating. I don’t think that’s what young people want. My experience of teaching young students contemporary music is they’re very enthusiastic and open to it. And of course they’re going to be influenced in how it’s mediated and if you have a teacher who is teaching you this new contemporary piece because they have to teach it for a syllabus it’s going to rub off on the students. So you get this student who thinks, ‘Do we have to play this kind of crap? Can’t we play Brahms?’ Which is just appalling. But I don’t think that’s a problem with younger people, I think it’s a problem with the training of musicians -- it tends to be stuck in a bit of a time warp.

BC: Do you feel that’s one of the problems that affects orchestras because orchestral musicians are products of this system?

PR: Yes. I don’t want to be dissing orchestras -- obviously it’s not particularly my cup of tea, having done it for quite a number of years. But I think [the orchestra] is a 19th century organisation. And it’s wonderful music, it’s fantastic, I have nothing against it but I just see people who play new music as being more open, more creative and more interesting -- being more imaginative rather than just having a brilliant facility to sight read.

BC: Quite a few people remain terrified of contemporary music. Have you any ideas of how we can all win ears, hearts, minds around to at least trying some of the music?

‘My experience of teaching young students contemporary music is they’re very enthusiastic, very open to it.’

PR: There needs to be a lot more performances; there aren’t enough performances. There aren’t enough performers who play contemporary music. In this wonderful space we have here[CMC’s Library] there are over 3000 scores[4600 scores] representing 120 composers. But in Ireland there are only a handful of players who play contemporary music. We need to promote more contemporary performers to play the music, first of all. Then how we play the music and how we present it to people to listen to… We need to welcome them [audiences]. We don’t want to scare them off by making obtuse announcements about technical details of the piece. We need to mediate the music in a creative and imaginative way, both in terms of our whole gesturing, our whole manner of introduction, where we play the music. For example at Concorde we play music in galleries, we do short little concerts and we base it around certain themes. I think people are open – they want to hear fresh things. I think unfortunately some broadcasters, some stations, some organisations run scared of it because they’ve got to pay the piper in terms of revenue and that doesn’t really help either.

When we do concerts in Concorde, in Hugh Lane Gallery for example, we often get people who just show up. They come up to us and go, ‘God that wasn’t bad, I quite enjoyed that.’ And they’re shocked! I think it’s really important that people see contemporary music, see the gestures, see the involvement -- it’s drama, it’s real-time drama. For example, a fiddle player playing Fratres [by Arvo Pärt]: it’s theatre. It’s that whole theatricality of contemporary music that is very important but we don’t get to see or hear enough of it. Performers have a responsibility also when they’re playing it to bring that element of theatricality to the piece, that essence of creativity.

BC: A sense of animation.

PR: Very much so. Look for example, Harry Sparnaay [Dutch clarinettist] -- he just encapsulates so many good things about contemporary music.

BC: You do play quite a lot and you are animated [when performing]. You also commission a lot of new music. Are there any set criteria for Paul Roe when commissioning new works?

PR: I would go along with the thinking of the likes of the Bang on a Can group in New York and the likes of the Kronos Quartet, where they commission specific composers that they know they can relate to. They have an understanding. It gets back to this whole idea of collaborating. The composers I want to commission are composers that I like as human beings, as people, because I think the level of communication is going to better the music that you’re going to create together, and that it’s going to have a spontaneity and freshness about it. I also want to play music where I feel I have something to say. I don’t want to play a piece of music where I feel I have to absolutely break my neck spending 500 hours learning and when I play it I go, ‘Gosh there’s none of me in that, that’s just hard work.’ So I think to play music well there’s a level of flexibility[needed] and there’s a level of ambiguity. Where there’s plenty of opportunity for the music to grow, the performances to grow and you’re not kind of nailed to ‘You played forte there when you should have played piano.’ I think for me that’s just the death of creativity for a performer; it reduces you down to being just a cipher. I think you need that sort of flexibility. So with regard to the pieces I have commissioned, two years ago there was virtually no solo bass clarinet music by Irish composers. In the last two years there are now seven or eight new pieces, which I have commissioned. They’re fantastic -- they’re all different. I’ve played them quite a few times and each time I played them I see something different in them because I worked with the composers a lot -- in my mind when I performed them I see the gestures. I see the interactions we had when I played them. So it’s easy for me to bring that liveliness to the performance. It’s not just reading music off a page, it’s representing a process.

‘I think we have to move away from this 19th century musicological idealised performance.’

BC: It really is like drama.

PR: Oh very much so. A composer once said to me, ‘What a performer wants is to get a really good script that he can do something with’. I think we have to move away from this 19th century musicological idealised performance. I don’t think there is such a thing. Otherwise you’re just creating ready made archives. It’s got to be living -- it’s got to move on. That’s why the idea of me playing Mozart, playing Weber. I’m not saying I don't [play Mozart and Weber] and I do love it but it's not something I'd do as an ongoing kind of thing to feed my creative side of my musicianship.

BC: Well Paul, here’s the future. Thank you very much.

Paul Roe was interviewed on video by Bernard Clarke in the Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin, on 2 July 2007.

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

Listen to the full podcast here:

Episode 1:

  • Keeping up with the demands of new music techniques
  • His love of playing new music
  • New music for orchestra
  • Working with composers
  • Consulting recordings for performance research
  • Problems with music education for new music

Music excerpts used:

0:10 Monster, Ed Bennett (Paul Roe [bcl]) © Ed Bennett
3:34 Improvisation IV, Rob Canning (Paul Roe [bcl], Rob Canning [live electronics]) © Galway Arts Festival
6:10 It’s the Hole that Kills You Not the Bullet, Stephen Gardner (Paul Roe [bcl]) © Stephen Gardner
10:04 Earthloops, Eibhlis Farrell (Paul Roe [cl]) © Eibhlis Farrell
12:44 A Piacere, Jane O'Leary (Paul Roe [bcl]) © Jane O’Leary

Episode 2:

  • Ideas for getting audiences to listen to contemporary music
  • Performing in different spaces
  • Commissioning new works
  • Moving away from traditional classical music performance practices

Music excerpts used:

0:06 Earthloops, Eibhlis Farrell (Paul Roe [cl]) © Eibhlis Farrell
2:22 It’s the Hole that Kills You Not the Bullet, Stephen Gardner (Paul Roe [bcl]) © Stephen Gardner
3:59 A Piacere, Jane O'Leary (Paul Roe [bcl]) © Jane O’Leary
6:54 Improvisation IV, Rob Canning (Paul Roe [bcl], Rob Canning [live electronics]) © Galway Arts Festival
8:35 Monster, Ed Bennett (Paul Roe [bcl]) © Ed Bennett
 

Paul Roe was interviewed on video by Bernard Clarke in the Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin, on 2 July 2007.

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