An Interview with Simon Mawhinney

[14.3M; 15:34] mp3 clip

• Recent work
• Virtuosity in composition
• Writing for particular performers and instruments
• Compositional influences

Music excerpts used:

0:15
Flux (Evelyn Chang [pf]) © Simon Mawhinney

5:30
Pot of Pulgarve (BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor James MacMillan) © BBC

10:36
Darby's Loanin' (Endymion Ensemble) © Simon Mawhinney

14:45
Flux (Evelyn Chang [pf]) © Simon Mawhinney

An Interview with Simon Mawhinney

Bob Gilmore: Simon, maybe you could tell us about some of the more recent things you’ve been doing.

Simon Mawhinney: The most recent piece is for violin and piano, which is being performed and recorded by Darragh Morgan and his wife Mary Dullea. That’s a piece which was recorded in June and is 45 minutes long in one movement. So having written that I felt that I didn’t want to write anymore for a while. It was strangely tiring -- a piece written over 2 years. That’s called Hunshigo. It’s in 2 versions. There’s a 45-minute version and a special short version which was made in order to meet the demands of programming, and that’s been performed in London and Washington.

BG: How are those two versions related? Is it more or less the same sort of material?

SM: The short version is highlights and is a stand-alone piece -- it’s not an excerpt. It’s gathered from the material and creates a slightly different effect. The longer version is the proper piece and that’s the one that I’m most interested in. Besides that I have a new piece for Garth Knox, the viola player, and it’s written for viola d’amore and he will premiere that in Paris in November and then in Belfast in December. I’m doing a piece for Ensemble Recherche, the Freiberg-based group, and I’m also working on a cycle of electroacoustic pieces at the moment.

BG: One of the things that seems to be constant in your music is this fascination with virtuosity, both instrumental and also compositional -- playing with very complex materials. Clearly in some senses that’s related to your own practice as a pianist. Is that something that you find fascinating in itself -- the whole issue of instrumental skill? Is that something that excites your compositional imagination?

SM: Yes, I think that I’ve sort of worked out why I have this fascination with it. It’s something that a lot of people might deride. Schumann derided virtuosity and I would like to think that I don’t write pieces as show pieces -- it’s simply that I have an awareness of what performers can do and I have seen the rather banal way they play stuff which doesn’t use their abilities. So I always feel that I’m writing music which is suitable to contemporary technique and I don’t feel that there’s a showy element which could be somehow removed and it would leave a more purer form of composition. It’s really just a sense of natural gesture. The two main inspirations for me with virtuosity would be a human one and an animal one. The animal one is birds, particularly blackbirds, where there is very complex and rapid gestures and a filigree of sound, but it comes very naturally and easily in a self-effacing way. I quite approve of that. The other one is from my grandfather; we would describe him as an amateur musician, although I think his skills were probably much more in league with a soloist. He played the cornet in brass bands for many years and he played all the famous show pieces, Carnival of Veniceand so on. He was always practicing those very rapid pieces when I was young. From 18 months onwards I was probably hearing these very regularly. They lived 2 minutes drive from our house and I was there half the week. So I was constantly surrounded by very, very rapid music and I think that has seeped into my brain and it’s sort of become the natural way to think.

BG: Talking about the song of birds obviously brings to mind Messiaen, something that every pianist who plays 20th century music has to get their hands around. Has he been an important influence in your compositional life?

SM: Yes. I don’t think I write anything that sounds like Messiaen but he would be one of the central figures in my mind. I’m actually going to perform the complete Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jésus on the evening of his 100th anniversary next year. So that’s something that I’m particularly looking forward to. I discuss Messiaen’s work in my lectures a lot. So yes, it’s of central and fundamental importance and I think that his reputation has yet to actually grow as it should do.

BG: Just thinking about something you said earlier about the whole involvement of being a pianist and a composer at the same time: how does a composition start for you? Being a pianist, it must be easy to find something at the piano if you felt like improvising something for instance. So is that the way a piece would start or is it a more intellectual process? How does it work?

SM: I find that sometimes a piece explodes into reality, if that doesn’t sound a little pretentious, but that’s in fact how it happens. If somebody says a piece for guitar and clarinet, frequently I get an awareness of a gesture and a form and a timbre within a second. It’s there. And I use the guitar and clarinet because that’s an example from years ago and since then I’ve had this guitar and clarinet piece floating around, never written and perhaps never will be, but it’s there and I keep thinking about it. So generally they just appear and there’s a sense of what it involves, the effect it creates, the overall length, the style and then sometimes the pieces get written, sometimes they don’t. Then when they do get written obviously they’re worked on and they evolve.

BG: So would you find yourself inspired by the playing of particular individual musicians or would it be more the sense of the instrument and what it can do, or a bit of both?

SM: It can really vary. Sometimes it will be just a knowledge of the instruments, the ensemble that you have. If I know the performer then the performer’s own skills will come to the fore. So the first piece I wrote for Darragh Morgan was called Barcode 3 and that piece was the result of two interests. One was hearing him play Sciarrino and the other one was a longer interest I had in Middle Eastern music where the stringed instruments don’t have a fret, it’s just sort of played onto the string. He was the first person who actually did that technique on a western instrument I experienced. So I wrote the piece with those two interests in mind specifically for him. But in other cases say it’s an orchestra, you don’t know the players so you just work for an orchestra. Sometimes it’s a concept. Or with an electronic piece then clearly you’re working more with your own imagination. I don’t usually write for myself if it’s a piano piece.

BG: Why is that?

SM: Because I don’t want pieces to be just for a performer, I want them to have a slightly longer shelf life than that. And also because sometimes I do have those other interests, as you say, in pushing the boundaries and sometimes it’s better just to work with what’s possible rather than worry too much about the exegeses. I also think that the instruments can evolve and the playing techniques can evolve and the performers I think like to see that evolution occurring.

BG: I was interested to listen to the piece you wrote for Darragh[Morgan], Barcode 3, which is for electric violin. Do you feel the same way about keyboard instruments? In a sense, as you say, the piano is a finished instrument -- it’s perfect, there’s not much needs to be done to it technologically. Do you feel that way about the piano -- that it’s almost a museum piece and is less flexible and susceptible to change than say a violin would be?

SM: Well there are obvious evolutions that should happen with the piano that haven’t yet happened, which are caused by many things -- economic factors, perhaps the fact that in general the musical world has stagnated slightly, such that the new product is such a minority of the entire business of music. But when music was still in a state of constant evolution and composers were themselves central to that tradition there were innovations just before that all went away, where Busoni gave some suggestions to Bösendorfer and they built a 9 foot 6 [piano] that was an extra half foot long piano. This is the Imperial Bösendorfer, with an extra major sixth of bass notes, down to a low C. I tend to write for the Bösendorfer pitches in my piano pieces now because I feel that we need that. There are other things you can do with pianos. There could be different types of pedals. There could be a touch screen instead of a music stand, so that you don’t need to turn pages. Computerised ways of retaining tuning, things like that. And the other thing that’s a great shame, and there’s probably no way around this, but in general my music needs the ability to move beyond semitones. So I tend not to want to write for piano at the moment because I’m trapped into the equal temperament and that doesn’t suit my purposes always.

BG: You mentioned that one of the things you’re engaged with now is electronic music. Tell us how you got interested in electronics in the first place.

SM: It was a completely natural thing for me because the two earliest records that I can remember listening to were both albums from 1973, Tubular Bells and Dark Side of the Moon. I think one of my strongest early memories of music is the opening of the track Time inDark Side of the Moon [by Pink Floyd] with the clocks -- that’s an electroacoustic experience. Then when I got a bit older and heard it again I was very interested in the tracks On the Run and Any Colour You Like, both from Dark Side of the Moon, which are instrumental synthesiser pieces. So for me the use of electronic instruments and electronic sounds was always attached to a concept of musical expressivity. So I came to write for electronics rather late but my interest had always been there.

BG: Some of the titles of your pieces refer to certain aspects of, shall we say, the Northern Irish experience. Although this is a very difficult area to talk about, as a Northern Irish composer you’re one of a relatively rare breed – is it your sense that there is a sort of particular sensibility that you could say is characteristic of the North of Ireland, that somehow has any meaning for you when you’re making music? Or is that 19th century nonsense?

SM: I don’t feel any awareness of being Northern Irish as a composer, in the same way that I don’t feel any awareness of being Irish as a composer or British as a composer. I feel actually so disinterested in national identity that it’s hard to describe. It’s almost an atheism towards nationalism of any kind. However one’s environment is for me an important thing. It’s not so much that it’s in the County Armagh but just simply that my experience of certain places has created certain, well you could call it a memory or state of consciousness. So I have used place names from other parts of the world in pieces as well. Mary Dullea has recently recorded a piece of mine called Batu which is named after famous caves in Kuala Lumpur. There’s another piece which is named after a location in Cyprus, and I’m sure there are others I can’t recall at the moment. So I have an interest in location. My memory of a location in fact -- that’s what’s important. So I happen to live in County Armagh and I happen to have an intimate familiarity with it and that’s the reason for the place names primarily.

BG: Tell us about some of the projects you’d like to take on board in the future. What is your ambition for the immediate future compositionally speaking?

SM: I have to find my own solutions for the integration of microtones in instrumental writing. That’s very important I think. That will take a long time. The other thing is whether or not my music would be suited to writing for instruments and electronics at the same time. I expect to continue writing for both solo instrument pieces and electroacoustic pieces. I have a few ideas for pieces which combine the two but when I listen to [such] pieces I’m frequently not convinced, so there’s a big challenge there. The other one that interests me immensely is the concept of a large piece. I don’t mean large forces but I’m referring more to long scale duration.

BG: Longer than 45 minutes?

SM: Longer than 45 minutes. That piece is an experiment in duration. I think 45 minutes is a good length for the moment. It’s only the length of a soap opera episode after all! But for instance, suppose you put three such pieces together -- you’ve got a lot of music. So I have it in my mind, I suppose it might be inspired by the fact that I’m preparing to play Messiaen’s Vingt Regards which is slightly over two hours. I’m really interested in what happens to the mind during that process of listening. I probably will end up doing a piece of a similar size for piano, that’s a few years down the road but I’ve already got ideas about where I will take that. At the opposite extreme I’m doing a piece for a contrabass clarinet and that is in 19 movements but the movements are between 10 seconds and a 10th of a second long. So it’s a large-scale work, but it takes only 4 minutes to perform.

BG: You mentioned you were very interested in microtones. When did you begin to sense that? Does it come out of the frustration of being a pianist and just wishing that there was something in between the E and the F, or where does it spring from?

SM: You might think that it stems from discovering spectralism or perhaps from discovering the untempered space available in electroacoustic music, but if I cast my mind back I think it actually began earlier than that with listening to Middle Eastern music. That was really the start of it for me, I think around 1996. I discovered that one of my favourite musicians in the world is a nun from the Lebanon called Sister Marie Keyrouz. She doesn’t sing quartertones as such but the scale she uses is completely untempered and they do use what sounds like almost quartertones or things like that, for us. The music is very expressive, very powerful and it seems to resonate through the body in a slightly different way. I became transfixed from the potential of intervals beyond the semitone and their power. So that was the start and I think one of my interests in music is its effect on the mind and what it can do. Another favourite composer of mine is Sorabji and in his piece Gulistan towards the end there’s a passage which after something like 26 minutes or 28 minutes of absolutely unbelievable rhythmic complexity you then have 2 or 3 minutes of unbelievably simple music on one line. You get hypnotised by this; you start to drift slightly. Then after a couple of minutes of this simplicity very suddenly it changes into complexity again and goes back to the texture that it maintains through most of the piece. I find that in listening to that my mind starts to drift slightly and I suddenly thought, ‘How can I create that effect?’ So that’s partly my interest in larger durations and quartertones. It’s about the manipulation of the mind and trying to take it into places it normally doesn’t go.

BG: In a little autobiographical note you wrote a little while ago you talk about your interest in “the exultant music” and you give Sorabji and Messiaen as good examples of it, as well as Boulez. Tell me a bit more about that.

SM: Well I think that again explains my interest in blackbirds as well. There’s a sort of explosive quality in the music that I like. When you say explosive it’s not like a human explosion, it’s more of a cosmic explosion and there’s something ebullient about it. I suppose it’s tied up with the fact that, as you mentioned earlier, my pieces are generally quite virtuosic. There’s a certain joy in that and a pleasure in it. So this speed and joy is what makes it worthwhile listening to music. Some sort of grey mulch to me is not interesting, but something which has got that sort of explosive quality I do enjoy very much. So people might be surprised if I describe Boulez as exultant but that’s generally because they looked at his music at university and don’t know everything he’s done since the eighties and his piece from the 90s, Sur Incises, is as happy a piece as you’d want to hear.

BG: So would you go along with Messiaen in the sense that music for him was a search for something transcendent, past the human condition and that partly explains his love of birdsong, that it was something free and not tied to human beings. Is that also your sense?