 Going back to your childhood, how did your musical journey begin?
That’s a good question because I don’t really remember very well, but I have pieced things together from what people have told me … I was unusually musical, I had a clear singing voice from when I was about 18 months – I know this because my mother actually wrote to a magazine about it – and as a child people were always saying ‘sing us something’ and I was very, very shy so it used to be really nightmarish! My father was a good amateur pianist, so when I crawled up on the piano he taught me first, though I never was very good at lessons and really taught myself the piano more or less. Apparently, I started composing when I was about four – that’s what my mother said anyway – but I remember making things up all the time and playing whole pieces to people that were just in my head, although I didn’t write anything down until I was about 11.
When did you decide to be a composer – was it a conscious decision, given you were writing pieces from such an early age?
I always thought I would be a composer, although it got mixed with different things. For a while, I thought I’d be a composer and an actor because I did a lot of acting in my teens. Sheffield Repertory Company had a very good youth theatre called the Pegasus Club and I was part of that for about five years. I was very stage-struck and went to every production about 20 times so I really can recite the whole of Hamlet because I saw it so often! I was convinced I was going to be an actor until I was about 16.Then I think you just realise you’re not going to be able to do it temperamentally and singing had started to take over by that point, so I settled on that – on singing and composing.
How did you become a member of the BBC Singers?
I bluffed my way in really … I can admit this now because it’s a different management. I had done a bit of ad hoc singing, probably only about five jobs, and I was doing little bits of singing but really hadn’t done very much at all, but I lied on my application form and I said I’d done a lot more than I had. I had a good teacher at that time, David Mason, and he had got my voice to a good place. I felt very confident, I knew they liked me in the section and that they would speak up for me and I did a good audition … Sometimes in life things just happen naturally, it’s the right moment, and that was the right moment for me to join the group. It was wonderful, a complete lifesaver and also a great education. I learnt so much about the psychology of performers, the psychology of the way people react to notation and I met huge numbers of people, so it was a great career move and a great morale booster.
You write music for lots of different forces but what is the particular attraction of writing for voices?
I like the element of drama in writing for voices – I like creating dramas or things which have a drama in them. I also think there is something really wonderful about a whole group of people singing really, really well together. I know from my own singing that when you are performing, you completely put yourself on the line. You don’t have anything to lean on, you haven’t got an instrument, it’s just you and your body and you are so vulnerable in a way. Whenever I used to sing, I always felt a terrific sense of camaraderie with other singers. I think singers are very like actors in that respect: they rely on each other and there is a tremendous respect for what each of you is trying to do because it is just you and your voice and nothing else. It makes me feel quite emotional just thinking about it. When you hear people singing beautifully, it’s almost a primal experience.A group of people listening to another group of people just singing, with nothing between them but the music, is very, very powerful. It’s a different experience with instrumentalists.
What is the attraction of writing for a group like the BBC Singers?
Well, there are the obvious ones – the fact that they tend to get the notes right, for example! You can quickly start to work on the other things and that’s a tremendous treat. It’s also the fact that I was in the group and so I feel at home working with them.The obvious thing people often do, I think, is write a very difficult piece because they think, 'this is my opportunity to write something really difficult, because no-one else can do it in the same way', but I feel that I have slightly got past that. What I like is that you can ask them to do very colouristic things with their voices, they don’t just have 'one voice', and that’s a skilful thing – you’ve got to have tremendous technique. So it’s about writing pieces which need a good technique and a very high level of intelligence and understanding of the music from the performers.
Having been a member of the Singers, has it affected the way you write for the group?
Well I try never to write anything that is unintentionally funny, as I know that they have a very strong sense of humour! Obviously, I know them very well so that does affect me, but I always think of the character of the people I am writing for. I like people to engage with what I am doing – maybe that’s a bit narcissistic of me but I really like people to feel that they are involved. One way to do that is to actually write for them, as opposed to thinking,'I’m going to write my choral piece now' and actually think, 'What is this group like? How do they relate to each other?' and try and write that in, in some way.
Can you tell us a bit about the compositional process? How do you start writing a piece for the Singers, say?
I suppose I would start with an idea. For example, with the piece I did recently for the Wilfred Owen week – An Ancient Music – you start reading about Wilfred Owen, thinking about what sort of take you want on that, then find the text and become really acquainted with it. (One thing I find is that it’s very easy to think you’ve read a text and when you finally sit down to set it suddenly all these problems appear!) With any piece, I like to spend a long time thinking about it before I even start thinking about the music and I would be doing that at least during the period of writing the previous piece. If I don’t do all that preliminary thinking, I find it takes a lot longer to write the music.Writing is really a dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious mind.Your conscious mind feeds lots of data in and then you wait for your subconscious to come up with some musical ideas. Having done all that, I roughly think of a form but I tend to work quite intuitively and often change the initial plan around. I work very much note by note, bar by bar – I crawl along.
Two of your recent choral works, My Heart Strangely Warm'd and An Ancient Music, have incorporated various dramatic elements into the music – they have had a specific setting, characters, the choir have had to move around the performing space. How did this 'new take' on choral music come about?
It’s partly because I have just written so much choral music. I am desperate not to repeat myself and I want to keep reinventing things but it’s also because I think there is a drama inherent in a choir. I don’t like it when people treat a choir as one big thing, when they say, 'I’m writing a piece for choir'. Like a repertory theatre, a choir is a group of people who are interreacting with each other, there is a drama going on within that group. If a group of people came out onto a stage you would expect to know who they all were, they can’t just be one thing and speak with one voice. I know from having been in a choir, there is dramatic tension there all the time and I think it’s an attempt to just inject that into the music. It’s also not just about what people feel comfortable with, it’s about what maybe they will feel a little less comfortable with which is interesting. For instance, in My Heart Strangely Warm'd the choir are the London crowd and I wanted them to stand randomly at the beginning and also walk on and walk off and behave more like a crowd of extras in an opera or a play, and I knew the Singers wouldn’t really like doing that very much.
So you are trying to challenge them as much as the audience …
Just sort of stretch things a bit. Given that the Singers do incredibly different things the whole time, and the most difficult and outrageous music, I don’t think there is anything new I can do in that way. But I feel that I can treat them more like a repertory company, like a bunch of actors than just simply like a choir …
You are the BBC Singers’ Associate Composer. Do you have particular ambitions in mind for the group?
I want to do a really big piece at some point and I’d like to do a big piece which really was a drama – maybe I should do some sort of an opera for choir! One of my initial ideas was to write London pieces, about different eras in London and about two people who never met, imagining they did meet. So My Heart Strangely Warm'd was a piece about the possibility that William Blake and John Wesley might have passed each other in the street and then with An Ancient Music it was Wilfred Owen and Guillaume Apollinaire, who were both in the First World War and, who knows, may have had a drink with each other at some point. I feel I would like to do another of those and maybe a female one. I’d like to do a Victorian London one, with Mary Shelley or somebody like that, but still using the idea of the choir as the London backdrop to it all.
Is there any kind of music you haven't written so far that you would like to?
I haven’t written a string quartet and I’d really love to – I’d love to do more chamber music. I love the organ so I’d like to do a lot more organ music too, but really I’m up for anything, I’m an all-rounder, but the string quartet would be nice – if anyone is reading this article, please, a string quartet commission!
Judith Bingham was talking to Lottie Fenby. |
Listen to R3
