Interview on Testament (London 2006)
Next month Oliver Knussen is conducting the UK premiere of Testament, can
you tell me about this piece?
It was initially a commission from the Ojai festival. It was commissioned is because Sue Knussen, was very connected with the LA Philharmonic in terms of education. I knew her in the last year of her life and she was really sweet to me and very supportive of what I was doing. When she died a commissioning fund was set up in her memory and this is the second piece that’s been commissioned. The piece itself is called Testament and it’s a testament to her. It’s a very quiet, twelve minute elegy and it has a chorale at the end a little bit like Stravinsky’s Symphonies of wind in memory of Debussy. It’s a very formal, ritualistic piece.
How did you feel about the first performance at Ojai?
It was great. The LA Philharmonic were just incredible, their strings sounded amazing. It’s not scored for a very big ensemble so they played it like chamber music. The conductor, Brad Lubman stood in at the last minute for Olly because he was in hospital quite ill so he took over the whole programme and did an amazing job. It was the first time I’d been to the States as well so that was really nice. I got to stay, I don’t know how relevant this is, but I got to stay in some amazing places. I stayed with the Hollywood screen writer who wrote the screen play for the Deer Hunter and several other amazing films and then he decided to quit, he didn’t like the business any more. I had my own swimming pool I mean it was incredible, utterly amazing! From that point of view it was just a holiday! But I shouldn’t really say that! I’ve revised the piece quite substantially from the first performance so I’ll be interested to see how it comes out inside. The stage at Ojai is outdoors in the middle of a wood, it’s very beautiful, so it meant there were rustling leaves and distant animal noises - it suited the piece really.
So what did you change in the piece and why?
There were a couple of moments where I felt the pacing wasn’t quite right. With a really static piece, where hardly anything happens those moments when things do happen have to be timed so carefully. They have to be judged in terms of their weight and how much of an impact they’re going to have. The first time I didn’t judge that quite right, so I’ve moved a few things around. It’s like redoing a jigsaw puzzle with the same pieces but putting them into different places. It’s literally just moving things around. There
were a couple of other very basic things, like rescoring of some chords and some lines weren’t clear enough so I re-orchestrated a few little bits but that’s quite usual I think.
Do you often change things?
Always. It’s a nightmare for my publisher but I want to get it right! I’m not a good enough composer to get it right before the first performance, so I often end up changing things. As far as I’m concerned it’s part of being a composer. I don’t spend years on pieces once I’ve written them, it’s just a case of sitting down in a very matter of fact way and saying, ‘ok this doesn’t work and this doesn’t work’, then sorting it out there and then, and then putting it to one side and getting on to the next piece. Some composers like Boulez, are obsessively going back to pieces and revising and enlarging them and I think it’s quite unhealthy. You have to move on to the next idea.
When did you start composing?
I was about five. I started having piano lessons, but right from the beginning I was more interested in creating my own tunes. I didn’t start writing it down until about seven or eight. I just loved it from the word
go and I composed very fluidly until about the age of eighteen and then I had a complete block for about five years. Now slowly I’ve got back into it but I’ve had to rethink everything. I think it’s partly because I’d done everything without thinking. God knows what those early pieces sound like, probably awful but it’s just a need to get things down on paper or express things in music but without really thinking about how technically that’s achieved. Then I went to university and started thinking about these things a lot and I’m sure that slowed me down. At King’s I hardly composed at all. But I never thought I’d do anything else really, I just trusted that it would eventually come back
Do you get blocks now while you’re writing pieces?
Starting a piece is always difficult. Once I’ve started a piece then it’s fine but it’s the initially decisions. Once you’ve got some material on the page it’s actually deciding that that is going to be it, that’s going to
stay and there’s no alternative. That’s a big psychological jump to make from just thinking about a piece. Once that’s done then it’s usually fine but initially I spend weeks not really doing very much, getting in a tizzyabout it! I’m always thinking about pieces. It’s never something that leaves my mind, it’s always alive. I think if it died then I would cease up completely and I wouldn’t be able to write. I have ideas in my mind about pieces long before I start working on them, often when I’m finishing another piece. A lot of composers say that when they’re writing one piece they often wish they were on the next, and you get very excited about starting the next piece. You finish the last piece and then there’s this space. You have to fill this void and I’m in the middle of that at the moment, trying to get a piece going. It’s difficult because you rely on your instincts all the time. It’s not a product that you can actually judge in terms of how successful it is on paper. It lives in the concert hall. There’s a very big difference between what you’re doing on paper and then hearing it. It’s very abstract and that’s quite scary.
Where do you get ideas for your pieces, how do you develop an idea, do you
take inspiration from something else?
Certain things act as catalysts for ideas. Film, particularly David Lynch’s films, Lost Highway, Straight Story and Mulholland Drive, have been important to me, but more in terms of technique than ideas. The way he plays with time, constantly pushing forwards or backwards, you’re never quite sure where you are and that’s something I’m very interested in musically. If you can at any moment suggest the past, future and the present in a moment of music then I think that’s an ideal. Art as well, painting that is probably more of influential in terms of inspiration. It’s a spiritual thing. Just going and sitting in the Tate where all the Rothko’s are for ten minutes, that puts me in an ideal frame of mind to think about shapes, colours and proportion which are very relevant to composition. And literature. Everything that we do influences us to some extent but with sometimes we decide that influence is going to happen, it’s going to come from a particular area. So if I go to an art gallery I’m subconsciously thinking, ‘oh I need a bit of inspiration’ so I go with that of my mind but it’s usually acting as a catalyst for an image or a particular sound world, or atmosphere that I want to capture. Then once you’ve gone past that everything comes down to the technique of music which is so different from everything else that you have to separate it.
You’re really interested in memory and how that works in time, how do you
put that in a piece?
Everybody’s memory, to an extent, works in a different way. It’s not about trying to translate what happens psychologically or physiologically in our minds onto paper, it’s more the idea of referring back to something within a piece. When we hear something repeated we listen to it in a different way. Some composers change it the second time to take that into account but then we hear that as a secondary layer of difference. Some composers leave it the same so you just hear it in your own way as different from the first time, you’re familiar with it so you listen out for different things. I think playing with that idea of recalling something and how far you can go in terms of changing something and yet still being able to refer back to something else, that sounds like everything in the piece is looking back, but its more like a flow of consciousness in the sense that everything is always evolving in it’s own right, always moving forward and transforming. Ideally I want my music to transform all the time and reinvent itself constantly but at the same time that linear journey is going across, marking out time. Its very important that the piece refers back because we will always refer things back in our minds to past experiences, so it’s not something the composer is putting on to the listener, it’s a way of counterbalancing the idea of moving through a piece in a linear way. I also think memory is a very special way of thinking. If we think back memories are often very different from how things actually happened, often magical, nostalgic or dreamlike and I think that’s a very enticing area for a composer to play with his imagination. I’m not really interested in trying to express reality in music, I prefer to try and express something in a dreamlike or subconscious state. Music doesn’t express anything, so why try and make it directly relate to something? I don’t quite understand composers who try and do that.
What do you hope your audience would get from listening to your work?
I hope very much it will affect them on some emotional level and that it will be something that stays with them for longer than the duration of the concert. My ideal would be for people to not quite understand the music when they hear it but then for things to gradually fall into place afterwards - for it to actually stay in their memory. I’m not interested in dazzling audiences with musical tricks. I think that’s quite patronising to an audience. It’s impossible to judge what an audience wants from a piece or what they can take from a piece because everybody’s so different. Everybody’s experiences really change the way they listen to music. If you arrive late to a concert and you run in, physically your heartbeat will be faster and you will actually be experiencing that music in a different way, in terms of time passing it will appear slower than if someone’s been sitting there for five minutes before the concert. So there’s no point trying to be too specific about what you give to the audience, but hopefully it’s something that will stay with them, it might be a chord, a texture, part of melody but hopefully something to do with the whole - but nothing more specific than that.
Going back to when you started to compose, you’ve had various teachers can
you tell me a little about them and how they’ve affected you and what
you’ve taken from them?
My first proper teacher was Malcolm Williamson an Australian composer who died 3 years ago. I loved his music when I was growing up and I wrote to him and asked him if I could show him some of my pieces. Very kindly he said yes and Eventually I ended working for him, copying out scores, in return for lessons. I
was at a very impressionable age, a teenager and I got from him a strong sense of how composition is a profession and to be a composer you have to be very practical you can’t wait for inspiration. In terms of actual music I think I got from him various formal techniques about how to deal with and present material in a clear way. I spent a year with David Lumsdaine, who used to be at Kings College, and that was just fantastic. That was right at the end of the time when I really felt I hadn’t been able to write anything and he said ‘ok well lets just go back to square one and start again’ and we just dealt with ideas about pictures work and he built up some sort of technique which I still fall back on, the way that intervals work together and how you can suggest things in music without actually doing them. Also he’s another Australian and he loves to go to the outback. His own music is like these huge landscapes and very wide spaces where not very much happens so when something happens it has a huge impact and it can be quite violent in the way that nature is. So that was that whole idea of filling out a canvas I think that’s a very useful thing that I took from him. Simon Bainbridge at the Guildhall, he was great because he’s able to sit down with a score a formally tell you whether the proportions and amounts of energy within a piece are right. He would often say ‘look that bit needs to be longer or shorter’, and he was always right. You take different things from different composers. I think what a lot of composers want from teachers and need from teachers is just reassurance that what they’re doing is of some sort of value and isn’t just a complete waste of time. It’s really important because if your teacher’s against you as a student composer then you really are on your own and its such an isolated thing to do anyway you need as much support as possible. I still show pieces to Simon now and to other composers. My friends, we often look through each others works, it provides reassurance but it also provides a sort of support network between people because it is such an isolated occupation that it means that we are connecting up in a useful way.
Which other composer’s music do you take inspiration from?
I’m interested in people like Stockhausen, Nono, Helmut Lachenmann and Xenakis, people who are reallyprepared to take risks and try out things that haven’t been done before and not worry too much about whether those things succeed. By just doing that they’re opening up all kinds of doors - that’s an incredibly generous thing for composers to do. Stockhausen - it’s going to take us a very long time for us to get to grips with what he’s doing and a lot of people have written him off as insane, some of the recent music isn’t that great but I’m sure there’s incredible things and there’s enough early work there for him to be remembered as a great composer. What I like about Nono, Stockhausen, Lachenmann and Xenakis is that they are composers who are prepared to explore areas of our imagination in a very personal way which maybe Boulez doesn’t. I think Boulez’ music is quite cold. It’s incredibly sensuous on the surface in the same way that Ravel’s is, but I think that a lot of that is costume on the music, where as with Stockhausen, the music’s really inhabited. It’s actually an internal, imaginative streak that fills the music. Nono’s music is extraordinary. I find it so ghostly and haunted, it really feels like you’re listening to something very ancient or very futuristic. I think primeval and futuristic are probably very close in terms of time, if that makes sense. With Stockhausen, Xenakis and Nono it’s timeless music. Boulez’ music - it’s incredibly beautiful but it’s a bit like the latest Porsche that everyone wants to buy! It’s immaculate, it’s Mr Sheen music in effect and I think music has to be more than that. Debussy always said you need the grit and the oyster in music and I think you do. Without the grit it becomes meaningless. I don’t know where the grit is in Boulez anymore.
London 2006