An Interview with Piers Hellawell

Michael Quinn: Tell me about the music featured on your new disc.

Piers Hellawell: I built it around two orchestral pieces that have come about in the last four years. The first was a third of a series of double concertos that I’d been working on called Cors de Chasse, which featured Håkan Hardenberger on trumpet and Jonus Bylund on trombone. Subsequently I wrote a shorter orchestral piece [Dogs and Wolves] for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (BBCSSO), who will record it for the CD. The double concerto was for the Philharmonia [London], but the BBCSSO are going to record it. So those are the kind of pillars holding it [the CD] up. In between [the orchestral works] I’ve interspersed a number of chamber pieces and the biggest, in terms of duration, is a string quartet, Driftwood on Sand which the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet have very much made their own.

I was really bringing together the main things that have involved me with collaborations recently. The other [group who feature on the CD] is the Schubert Ensemble of London, for whom I’ve written two pieces which they’ve performed an immense amount in the last few years. So it’s [the CD] more or less half chamber music and half orchestral.

MQ: Recordings are an important part of any composer’s life in that they communicate with an audience who wasn’t there on the first night, or the only night in some cases. And they operate quite literally as a record, an archive.

PH: I think that’s important but one of the most important things for me is that the CD is more than just a stream of sound. It’s an artefact in a way because you have all the information that you can put into the booklet and if you have control over that, which a lot of composers don’t, you can make the CD into much more of a record of your work than just the sound. So, for example, you can write an essay about [the music]. In my case you can also create the environment of the disc using photography as well. On the last two discs of mine and this one as well, I used my photography of natural materials. So both those discs have a visual aspect. I think we often overlook those things in CDs. It’s a thing that’s nice to have. I have one or two CDs from the earlier days of the CD era that have fantastic essays and paintings and things that complement the content. So I think that’s why I really like it. But also as you say, we reach so few people with live performances that the CD is a currency.

MQ: Sound Carvings is particularly successful in terms of that notion of the package that you describe, with your own images and with a particularly good and intelligent essay by Steven Johnson. Just over your shoulder, which you can’t see, is a row of old LPs – there’s Tippett and Webern, some Beethoven Sonatas – the size of which gave you room to add documentation to provide context, which is something that a composer’s work is often without when it’s given into the marketplace on CD.

PH: When I did the Sound Carvings disc I was particularly interested in doing it with Metronome, a small company that doesn’t necessarily trip off the lips like HMV or Decca. But for that reason I had this control. I’ve had other experience of things coming out on CD where even the artists have no idea what the disc would look like, as if this is nothing to do with it. To me it’s huge. I guess coming from the LP era, the actual look of the LPs on the shelf behind me is immensely important to me. That’s what I grew up with, there’s a lot of history in album covers, not just the classical ones. I think it’s often overlooked and the lack of control is overlooked. It was wonderful to be able to hone the actual look of the whole thing and to control what goes into it.

MQ: You’re working with quartets, ensembles, orchestras, soloists. Is variety of scale important to you?

PH: Yes, I’ve been thinking a lot about this because there are a great deal of reasons not to try and be an orchestral composer anymore. It’s very hard in various ways and I keep feeling that this isn’t a good use of time. I tended to explain it in the last few years [by] saying that to me chamber music is rather like the composer’s potting shed – it’s the place where you let things hang out, where you do mad experiments that blow up. Whereas orchestral music has something of the public oration about it. To a certain extent, however great the orchestra, it is an inflexible medium. They have more to do with the music of Haydn than they do with the music of any of us today, in terms of how the orchestra is set up, and therefore it is a kind of exercise in writing for an early instrument, however avant garde the things that the orchestra can do. I love the orchestras I work with and I have to pinch myself to think I’m doing this, but at the same time producing the pieces is very, very hard and it’s large scale. To go from that to a chamber thing is exciting.

MQ: At the moment you’re working with formal received structures: you’re writing a concerto for clarinet. Having been handed down a concerto form do you see this as an opportunity to play with that?

PH: Absolutely, yes! The way I approach these things is to say there is an immutable element to this project. Given that it means something, what do I want to make of it for myself? I don’t in any sense feel as if I’m working within a framework, the three-movement layout or anything like that. Nor do I feel any kind of assumptions going more deeply into the music, about for example the relationship between the solo [instrument] and the orchestra. I don’t, for example, take it as being the soloist who leads and the others are just accompaniment, or the fact that they have a more romantic relationship of arguing over material and fighting and struggling, and all that.

I don’t start with any assumptions at all about it, I merely think ‘Wwell to me it’s still viable to offset one instrument and a group’. So within that, what can we do about it? I’m not terribly interested, well in fact I’m positively apathetic to the legacy of the concerto! I know it’s strange given that I’ve written quite a few but actually that’s why they tend to be for more than one soloist because I don’t really like the overtones of virtuosity and angst and aggression that I find in a lot of modern writing, particularly the clarinet concertos. One of the things I want to do in that piece, which is still in the future, is to try and find a more reflective, more chamber approach. In a sense the attraction of the medium is not the history but to try and overturn the history in a gentle way.

MQ: Are you intentionally a subversive composer? Would you recognise that description of yourself?

PH: I’d be honoured! I don’t think I sound subversive but subversion sounds so conventional nowadays that I don’t think that sounding subversive would be subversive. I think I am. I like to balance the subversion of what you start out with – the history, the background – some obvious making use of it where it will work. Everybody would like to claim that they’re frightfully rebellious and on the edge, but that’s ludicrous for most of us. I actually think you can’t compose in a vacuum and that you have to process where you have come from and new things can feed in and you can make use of them. We’re all actually working out of what we know and I think subversion is something you can take on consciously.

MQ: Do you compose for the sake of it, because the ideas come to you unbidden and need to be written down or because there’s a technical problem that you want to try to solve? Or do you need some other trigger or provocation?

PH: Neither of the first things. I I mean t would be wonderful to be an intuitive composer where you just have to get on with it, but I don’t write a great deal and I don’t write at all fluently. I don’t think I ever have. I’m always amazed when I see a list with lots of pieces on it, and some of which shouldn’t be maybe, but I’m always surprised.. I don’t think it’s the second thing that you mentioned either, the exegesis of technical things. In fact quite the reverse. I seem to be going more and more intuitive, where I really have no idea what’s going on in what I’m writing but I think it’s something else than that, maybe it’s more abstract, that it’s just a desire, given the opportunity of [writing for] an ensemble or whatever, to try to produce something that works and that doesn’t do what every other piece does. If it’s just a clone of something else there would be no point.

MQ: On a brute level you need a commission?.

PH: Yes. I never write anything just for the sake of it. I haven’t done since I was 15. What I really like is collaborating with performers; I don’t really see the point of it unless people play it.

MQ: How does who you write for affect the way that you compose? How involved are they in the process of composition?

PH: It affects it in that it makes it feel worth doing. I have the feeling when I’m working away that there is an occasion, I mean even if it’s only a first performance,, obviously you want multiple performances, but you think of one, and if I can’t think of one I find it quite hard.

MQ: You’ve said in the past that composition found you rather than you finding it. Tell me about that moment or that period in your life and what happened.

PH: It’s too long ago! I mean I was never really going to be able to do anything else. Just from my earliest memories ordering sounds is what I did. Before I had any idea about how to go about this, it just always seemed to be the only thing to do.

MQ: How did you acquire compositional vocabulary? Was there any kind of consciousness that that’s what you were doing or was it simply a question of learning?

PH: I’m still acquiring it. I’m very restless and I think the acquiring of vocabulary – that’s a very good phrase – is actually [a]bittersweet thing. I think it’s not necessarily a good thing. I mean I’m very definitely not the kind of composer who has established a way that pieces happen and how they end up and then you just wind them up and off [I] go. I’m not that kind of composer. I’m extremely restless with what comes out and fairly appalled by a lot of what I’ve written.

Of course worse than being appalled by what you’ve written is admiring it in the past. People tremendously admire pieces from 15 years ago and you go back to them and you admire them. Every composer past the age of, say, 40, with a kind of sustained back catalogue faces this –, that if you have any early successes it’s very, very hard because what do you do then? A lot of composers will recognise this. One who used to be a colleague said this to me a long time ago and I found it to be so, that Wwhen you’re a young composer you’re striving around, you’re searching [for] a kind of groove and when you’ve established that groove in certain pieces the worst thing you can do is work that groove over and over again. Composers who are really good don’t want to do that. So you have to go off and do other things and then people say what the critic says to Woody Allen in Stardust Memories: ‘I especially like your early funny ones’.

MQ: Do you think that’s a response to having discovered very early on that you wanted to be a composer? Whether you were able to articulate this or not, trying to avoid creating your own template too soon?

PH: YeahI think it’s a process of maturing rather than that. I remember working through the canon: you learn the trio sonata on your instruments so then you write one of those, then you learn a classical sonata so you write one of those. Then you hit late romanticism and you need to have a very sophisticated harmonic vocabulary. That was how you did it, you worked through. So when I was 8 I wrote trio sonatas, when I was 11 or 12 I wrote late 18th century, when I was 15 I got up to Delius or something. But in terms of adult stuff, actually formulating a kind of language for a young composer is the biggest thing there is. With my own students that’s what I’m looking for and in a way that’s what they’re looking for.

MQ: The word place and the notion of place seems to be very important to you. The geographical location, the physical and emotional landscape of the world seems to play a significant part in your music.

PH: That’s very true. A very, very strong unlooked for sense of place. When I hear things on the radio I remember where I last heard them, that kind of thing; everything is tied down in a terrible network of references. I think the landscape is just a very useful metaphor for how music works. Language is another one but it’s very complicated for reasons we know to employ that one. Place is very good because none of us sees the same location in the same way and the landscape with nobody in it can lie dormant until it’s visited.

MQ: And yet it is changing.

PH: And yet it can change. It works very well for music actually, yes it does. I’m not very keen on the more romantic idea of, saying this is a piece about place X, that kind of thing although occasionally there are things in my own pieces which have direct, very physical links to them.

MQ: But it’s never directly pictorial.

PH: No, hardly ever.

MQ: And that approach and the repeated use of the title Sound Carvings for some of your works, can we infer from that that you think music is something to be unlocked or released or prised away from the physical world? Albeit perhaps not absolutely literally so.

PH: I think it is, I think that’s a good description. I often think in terms of sculpture; of the shape inside the block of wood or stone that most of us couldn’t release and the sculptor discovers. I think that’s very true. The Sound Carvings title came from something a bit more specifically natural than that. It came from a concern with narrative form. It came from looking at rock patterns of a particular kind. Looking at the lichens that cover these rock patterns, which I photographed, it was the idea of basically an impassive surface of rock, let’s say it’s grey, with these splodges of what I think is actually living organism on them.

In 1988 I took this as a title for a first piece and then the series because it suggested to me the idea of sound against a background of silence and I was interested in multiple movement forms and thought I was going to be interested in them. In the same way as you might have a surface of rock with two big splodges on it, that would suggest one form – two movements as it were against a background. Or you might have lots and lots of little ones, which actually was what I did in the first Sound Carving. It just seemed to me there was a parallel for me in my searching for how to make the narrative of the work be flexible and stand up. There was parallel between that and these natural occurrences, bursts of colour against a grey background.

MQ: Has the experience of parenthood changed the way you compose?

PH: Changed the amount I compose. No, actually I’m quite emetic about that. It certainly isn’t literal green [unclear words: time: 23:22]door, far from it. Although some composers seem to manage that. It’s not that. I think what music gives me is the fact that it doesn’t relate to all that. Because music is not concrete or conceptual in terms of what it says people always want it explained and they always want it explained in terms of something else, in terms of words and feelings and things. Whereas the whole point to me is that you are erecting this edifice in its own dimensions, it doesn’t need any of that. So when I mentioned the natural world I said about translating through the veil to something which works in clearly musical terms. It’s the same thing, I find it’s something very earthbound about those autobiographical projects.

MQ: Even though it’s intensely emotional and a very direct response to something, it’s essentially not autobiographical.

MQ: You were born in the north of England, in the Peak District and moved to Belfast in 1980 and have been here ever since. But you also have a home in the Hebrides, which is very important to you as a composer.

PH: That’s where I write most. I suppose I lead an urban existence here and it’s just very easy to go through not days but weeks without getting anything written. Partly through teaching and everything that goes with it. But also family life. I have family life up there but somehow I seem to be able to integrate the two there, I find it harder in the city. I find it much easier in a deserted place to believe in the point of doing things. I find there’s something very everyday about cities. You’re insulated against things like the passing of time because things seem less poignant in a way.

MQ: How do you write? Is there a routine or a set process?

PH: Only in the sense that I think – this is the kind of thing I would say to students – when you compose a work, perhaps rather like the sculptor trying to unpack the thing that’s hidden in the block of stone, you are doing a kind of onion-peeling exercise and there are outer bits that are quite different from the inside. The outer bits often involve generalities, they involve very general questions like ‘Am I trying to write a single movement work, am I going to write?’ What kind of outer dimensions do you want this thing to have? Those are things that I find best sorted out and about walking or travelling or sitting on planes or something. Then there are smaller things: you peel off these skins and you go in and then you’re dealing with harmonic language and how you use the instruments and things. Then you start getting down to pianos and computers and things like that.

MQ: What do you learn about the piece in rehearsal and in the moment of performance?

PH: Well it’s usually a huge gap. I mean I have a horror of being late s Any commissioners please note, I’m very proud of myself on being on time. I tend to write pieces very early. Which often means that I’m working on the next piece before I’ve heard the last one and that’s very annoying because you need to process these things. There is a potential gulf between the stuff you write on the page and what you actually hear. In a sense developing your craft as a composer is to diminish the gap until there’s no surprise.

MQ: Let me take you back to when you first came to Belfast. You were 24, still at a formative age for composing. How did the experience of being here affect the way you thought about music and went about creating your own music?

PH: That’s a long time ago but the way in which I most remember it affecting me was, particularly then, [feeling] I was out of the hot house. I mean things were much more metro-centric than they are now in terms of the UK and in terms of the island of Ireland much much more is going on now. In many ways, probably all ways except financially I’m sure things are much healthier and maybe even financially in some ways. In those days activity was very much perceived to be London-based or home counties-based. I was never going to be part of that, nor intended to be but I found it very hard. I thought it must be very hard for other people of my age trying to meet the right people in London and going to the right concerts. And I had a major crises in terms of my reaction to the music I inherited, which I don’t think I could have worked through if I’d been living in a dreary suburb somewhere copying for one of the big publishing houses to earn a living. I mean everybody has to earn a living and that’s what some people did or perhaps they still do. Whereas [in Belfast] I was moving into teaching things [to earn] my crust. I remember that it was very helpful being somewhere which wasn’t constantly wondering how that person got their piece played by the London Symphonieta Sinfonietta last night. Whether he or she should be writing something like it in order to get theirs played. And[because] I was away from that I could have my crises between about 1982 and 1988, out of which I started to find some quite substantial works from 1988 onwards. I don’t quite know how I would have done that elsewhere. So it was very good. Life is very rich.

MQ: And what about the encounter with Irish traditional music?

PH: It was very important but I do hate the obvious responses to things. Then, as now, I couldn’t think of anything more crass than start filling my music full of jigs and reels and stuff and doing whatGerald Barry called Bord Fáilte music. That for me didn’t seem a positive way forward and I was very concerned to take something from a different language of music and educate myself, but not the surface. The most important thing to me in that time was the fact this was a unison tradition: people sitting in a circle playing heterophony around one tune; the fiddle plays the tune in a fiddle way with fiddle ornamentation, the flute [will] play it [but] be slightly different.

Pipes likewise, whatever else. It’s basically a melodic tradition it wasn’t a harmonised tradition. The harmonies were implied and what you have is a blend of this incredibly rich instrumentation depending on who turns up on the night. Funny enough, I got involved in Balinese gamelan in Queen's Uuniversity as well. Again, it’s a unison tradition with very cyclic structures, it involved the repetition of a very small number of pitches, because these instruments don’t play many notes. That became very influential. So these two traditions had more in common with each other on the kind of level I was working at anyway, the Irish and the Balinese. I didn’t want to turn into a west coast Californian composer with lots of tinkly Balinese sounds [but]people always hear those things in what I write and completely subjectively I’ve been accused of all kinds – Klezmer music and Latin American and Paraguayan things. (I didn’t know anything about any of these kinds of music!)

MQ: It is possible to trace a lineage back though to Cowl and Lou Harris and people of that generation. But I think you employ it, it seems to me, subtly.

PH: Well I love to think so because I’m interested in extracting something that isn’t the surface thing. I mean the behaviour of Irish music or Balinese gamelan – I used actually the gamelan notes, the recurring notes, I used them in a kind of total serialism actually because I took the recurring patterns of notes in the tunes that I knew and converted them into numbers and then used them as random number codes so that my materials came back in a similar way. 1 3 4 2 5 2 3 1 4, whatever. Once you convert that into 1 2 1 3 1 2 2 1 2 3 you can then make that a cipher that governs the sections of a piece or something. Nothing to me could be more banal than taking that. I just don’t have the alchemy to turn that into something. But I quickly thought that you could actually take the behaviour of the music. I wanted the fact the same number of materials kept coming back, so there was a great limitation which gave a stylistic framework, I wanted that, I didn’t want the sound of it, I wanted the sense of identity, to find a way of creating one of my own.

MQ: In one of the Gresham lectures you gave in 2003 you said that the composer firstly discovers materials from within a musical medium and in doing so inevitably conditions his stylistic development. Do you think this has happened to your music at any point? Particularly in relation to what we’re just talking about.

PH: Actually, I was going to come back to that point – it was quite an important theory that I expounded in that lecture. It occurred to me a minute or two ago when I was saying that I felt that it’s a good starting point for a composer to discover some things in the language of a piece actually from the medium that he’s working in. In other words, what goes in to a string quartet should be discovered from the fact that it is a string quartet. Certainly for students I think that’s a good training. I think one should discourage too much abstract importing of stuff; an awareness of the medium is likely to bring the instruments and the medium to life.

Obviously as you get more experience there are other ways of doing it. There are some very distinctive composers who discover a lot in the medium that they write for [and]there are other composers who very strongly carry around with them a set of apparatus and visit it on to each medium and are none the worse for that. Stockhausen has shown a great propensity for discovering – and Berio, maybe, as well – what is in a medium, whether it is the electronic studio in the Dwei Studien or the sound of a boy’s voice as in Gesang der Jünglinge. Discovering it and the sound world and the style of the piece – really, the language of the piece – is very much geared by what was possible within that medium. The reason I advance these in this lecture was really because I was becoming almost homicidally fed up with people just dividing new music into minimalism and very avant garde complexity music. This strikes me as the most banal, witless shorthand. As far as I’m concerned, I’m somewhere in the middle of that. I do have concerns but I set a great deal of store by trying to condition the piece according to the boundaries of the particular forces that it’s for.

MQ: It seems to me that you’re making quite direct statements in your music but what you enjoy is disguising the directness of that statement and encouraging listeners to work a little bit harder in order to get to it. Do you recognise that in your music?

PH: Yes, I do. Something I come back to over and over again is that I’m not trying to make something which gives up all its information straight off. Increasingly we all operate in a world where that is the only thing that people expect and it consigns us to being a minority operation for exactly that reason. Most people do not have time in their lives. Well, we say that but we see an awful lot of people reading very difficult novels on trains and in airports and I think music is particularly ill favoured in this way. Seamus Heaney [is] a household name but not because his poetry gives up its secrets. If anything it’s getting more elliptical. There are many artists working in the visual medium whose work has a sense of universal ownership without any accessibility and that often doesn’t work in music. By rights, if Damien Hirst’s work is a household name then so ought [Harrison]Birtwistle’s to be, but I don’t think it works like that. Music is ill favoured in terms of that partly because it requires a dimension of time; a large-scale orchestral piece may take quarter of an hour to listen to but also whichever point you’re in it you have to retain some grasp on the other parts. People seem to manage that with novels in particular and the theatre seems to be lively. I find it frustrating because I know as a listener that when I listen to something the first time I get very little, I only really get a sense of whether I need to go on. It’s a great luxury to record some piece off the radio then listen to it over and over again, but I don’t think people do that very much. What I’m doing is simply not about producing something for the most rapid consumption -- that is the making of a product. There’s an entirely respectable process going on where you make something so that it would be easily consumable, but that is something different from what we are doing. At the same time of course we do want that impact. Nobody wants their piece to be the one that somebody listens to and perceives only greyness. Nobody wants that. We do want to make an impact.

Piers Hellawell was interviewed on video by Michael Quinn at Queen's University, Belfast, on 21 March 2007.

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