Richard Ayres: How and why did you start composing? And how did you end up becoming a composer?

Fox: I started writing music on paper when I was 12 (because the boy who sat next to me in school did - it was a sort of doodling for him, I think, and we certainly didn't do it in what passed for music lessons) and that turned into something like composing a little while later. I played music (piano lessons aged 7-8, not a success; playing the recorder and singing, much better; playing French horn, aged 12 and onwards, good apart from the presumption that I might practise) and listened to lots. Music seemed the most exciting medium in which to be creative. I kept going and 'became' a composer, in that certainly by the time I was about 16 I thought of myself as a composer, even though I had a pretty undeveloped sense of how, professionally, this was achieved. I think I thought you just did it and if the work was good people would recognize it - I don't think I discovered otherwise until I was 20 and went to an SPNM Composer's Weekend for the first time - the piece I'd written, which was selected for performance, wasn 't remotely like anything else being done and everyone else seemed concerned that I didn't think this was a problem!

Ayres: The audible working out of processes and systems is a striking characteristic in a lot of your pieces - from where did you derive this interest - was it the influence of serialism or American minimalist or gamelan or perhaps renaissance Europe?

Fox: Is it really such an 'audible working out'? It seems to me that while the continuity of many of my pieces derives from the permutation of possibilities within musical materials (which often change from piece to piece rather more than is supposed to be good for a composer - unlike desert climates my seasonal change is alarming but my diurnal change is relatively small, maybe?), this doesn't happen in a particularly predictable way. In that sense it's not like American minimalist composition where after a minute or two you can have a pretty accurate idea of what the next five minutes will involve. The processes in my work are much more temperamental and conditional. But you're right, it was minimalism that put me onto audible systems and processes - especially Glass from 'Music in Fifths' to 'Einstein', and Reich around 'Music for 18 Musicians' - and before that serialism had introduced me to systematic ways of thinking about composing. I suppose part of my 'personal struggle' has been to find a way of marrying the audibility of process in minimalism with the potential for complexity of process in most serial music. Gamelan? No. Renaissance Europe? Yes.

Ayres: I agree it's not usually obvious what the process is precisely but I do hear/feel a strong sense of being driven along with great energy and purpose, and the driving mechanism appears to be on the surface, it's the thing to which I'm listening - I hear the act of structuring as an integral part of the musical result - you're not trying to hide anything - it's part of the subject. Would you agree with this?

Fox: Absolutely and it's a quality which I like very much in Beethoven too, and also in Morton Feldman, if linking those two makes any sense to you. In fact I'd almost say that real musical energy can only be achieved when the process does come up to the surface - what passes for energy in a lot of music is just froth (or turbo-froth, to quote my favourite Ayresism).

Ayres: Yes, for some composers the structural element is the thing that should be concealed - it's the last thing they want you to hear consciously when listening.

Fox: Perhaps because the structure they're using is dull, or conservative, or downright reprehensible. Even in Cage, to take an apparently extreme example, you can hear how the piece was made - the structure there completely determines every aspect of the music and can, given time and a sharp pencil, be totally recovered from its musical realization.

Ayres: Well maybe not every aspect - as maybe Cage or Mozart would agree - perhaps the most valuable part (from point of view of the listener) of their music is finished in the head/nervous system of the listener....

Fox: OK. It depends what we mean by structure. I'm thinking of it as the forming principle for the whole work. But you're right about the music being finished in the listener's head - for me it's increasingly important that the music shouldn't be closed off, that it should have an element of irresolution that invites listeners to carry on where I stopped. The new string trio 'skin' takes this to extremes by trying to avoid having a beginning or an end - the players walk on and off playing...

Ayres: Oh I like this idea very much! How do you keep the impression that the music existed and will go on forever - maybe you could tell me a little more about your ideas for this piece...

Fox: Well, it's 'skin' in the sense that skin is a continuous surface which changes its texture over time - I suspect that the beginning and end are different in feeling - in the beginning we become aware that the music is there whereas at the end the only way the music can end is by the players going away - the music doesn't really have a mechanism for making a final cadence!

Ayres: Do you notice the structure in Debussy's orchestral works - take 'La Mer' for example - I must admit that I don't , and it's also the last thing I would want to hear - I'm just swept up and washed around, I feel the structure but it never becomes a conscious subject - I have this a lot with Wagner also... of course I have to find exceptions to our rule!

Fox: Since we're being confessional I have to say that quite often 'structure', in the sense of formal outlines, is something I forget to listen for - being swept up and away is very important to me and the physicality of sound often has such an impact on me that I don't really start to consider how the music is doing what it's doing until some way into the experience. I used to think this was a failing (why couldn't I be one of those people who hear a piece and can then sit down at the piano and play it through from memory?) but I've come to think that it's an advantage - analysis becomes a deferred, later pleasure rather than an extra helping of vegetables with the main meal.

Ayres: How do you see the relationship between the structuring of individual elements and the entire form of the piece?

Fox: Sometimes they're closely interrelated, sometimes the 'form' cuts across the life of elements within the music. It depends on the sort of music I'm trying to create; there's a very different dynamic in a piece where things are interrupted, or where there are many different bits co-existing, from one which unfolds continuously.

Ayres: How do you as a composer understand the act of listening - Which do you think comes first to the someone listening to your music - an emotional reaction or an intellectual reaction or ....

Fox: I would distinguish between a first very subjective experience and a series of more and more objectified subsequent experiences. The same is true of the composing: a piece goes from a feeling to a more and complex series of interlocking ideas. But it's also true of our encounter with the world in general isn't it? that Borges notion that a memory is really a memory of the previous time you remembered the thing that you're remembering...

Ayres: By this subjective experience do you mean that music acts as a trigger for personal memories, experiences and emotions.....

Fox: I mean that our first encounter with music is often almost below the level of consciousness, it just happens! Then it starts to interact with our memories and the way we are as people - that's when the objectification begins. The thing that makes music such a powerful medium is that it can get into our consciousness before we've had a chance to regulate our perceptions through language or any of the other tools we have to screen experience. Music happens to us before we're able to protect ourselves - then we try to deal with what it's done/doing to us.

Ayres: How does the objectification work - is it the recognition of pattern or the sensing of a developing context or narrative ....

Fox: Yes, all those.

Ayres: Could you tell me something about your use of microtones?

Fox: I want to say that I do not write 'microtonal music'. I write the music I need to do at any particular time and sometimes it uses small intervals, but the obsession with microtonal music' as a special case for development within new music is not for me. In the May 7 programme 'straight lines in broken times 3' for solo cello uses scales made up of 3/4 tones, whereas skin and chant suspendu use 1/6 tones, all for different reasons. 'skin' explores the boundary between timbre and pitch that you can open up with a tuning system more refined than semitones, 'chant suspendu' uses small intervals as an expressive, inflectional means, 'straight lines' uses 3/4 tones to sound alien and strange. 'memento' and 'how times passes' are quite content to rely on semitones. I'm thinking of 'composing' all the music in the May 7 concert, including the Cage and Stravinsky, into three big 'pieces' (in which the end of 'memento', for example, overlaps the beginning of 'straight lines'), of which 'skin' is the middle one. What do you think? Maybe: memento - straight - elegy - how time passes; (pause); skin; melodies - chant?

Ayres: Well that would be a great experiment in form and structure, especially with 'skin' somewhere in the middle -in addition it would confuse the BBC, and bugger the PRS at the same time - three interesting experiments - as an idea it's got a lot going for it Chris! When thinking about certain pieces of yours I always find myself thinking about the sculptures of Jean Tinguely - mechanisms that are instilled with such intuitive humanity, crazy, quirky, sometimes peaceful or mesmerizing, sometimes frantic and disturbing. Do you feel particularly close to anyone artistically - do you have creative heroes or role models? And with these heroes, is it the work you admire or the attitude of the creator?

Fox: Tinguely is great (I got that book 'The Bride and her Batchelors' by Calvin Tomkins about Cage, Rauschenberg, Tinguely and Duchamp when I was about 14), but so is John Berger (fantastic clarity), Beuys (great colour), Schwitters (messy and precise), Jenny Holzer (cool), Dickens, Auden, Jane Austen (funny and a moralist), Gunter Grass (another social democrat), Nelson Riddle (great arranger), Cage, Beethoven, Stravinsky (musically my main man), and many more. Of course they're all more or less historical - why don't I mention my fellow composers today? Maybe I'll come back to that... Work and attitude, all together. Does Beuys' work read as Beuys if you don't know his story? And do you extend 'attitude' into life as a whole?

Ayres: I actually think a lot of Beuys does work by itself - the happenings and events maybe not - but the installations and early graphic work - yes I think it does work without knowing about Beuys - what it maybe can't do without is some sense of historical context - perhaps even that's not needed.

Fox: I mentioned Beuys because the imagery of the installations, particularly things like energy storage, is quite subtle and is surely enriched if you know the Beuys-in-a-blanket story?

Ayres: I find my imagination provides the history or character of the maker based on a deeply personal reaction to the work itself - whether it's Beuys or Bach.

Fox: Absolutely - it can be quite disturbing to discover that a maker is not as you imagined them. For example, I tend to think of people whose work influences my own as being like me, to the extent that I imagine them talking with my voice. Imagine my surprise on first hearing Stockhausen's much deeper voice! This is too naive to be made public though, isn't it...

Ayres: Perhaps music or art is at its greatest when the recipient doesn't need to know how it's done or the nature of the maker? Gulp! did I say that!!

Fox: Yes you did and I think you're right. I've said before that I would hope that some of my music might still be around after me, but I don't think it's important that people know it's by me. It's always fascinated me that, whereas we musicians tend to know names, dates, etc for the music we know, lots of our listeners don't - the music is identified as what it is, rather by the names which it's given.

Ayres: What music do you listen to and why?

Fox: The why is easier. I listen to new music (in the sense of music that I don't already know, which still includes vast amounts of 'old' music as well) to be astonished, to become a slightly different person (the same is true about why I compose). But I also listen to music I already know for reassurance - repeated pleasures, nostalgia, all that stuff. To be honest I don't listen by choice to very much on my CD and tape shelves but I do go to concerts, which is still the best way to hear music for me. Is that true of composers in general?

Ayres: I think so - but I must admit that I have my problems with both CD and live performance - I think I'd rather have a great CD recording than have to sit through an half-hearted orchestral concert played by lazy or bored professionals. Back to what you listen to Chris - let me make it more specific - name the last three pieces of music that sent a shiver down your spine - CD or live - old or new?

Fox: Karel Goeyvaerts' 'Litanie 4' played by the Ives Ensemble (heard it early this morning on tape at their house in Reigerstraat); Apartment House recording Walter Zimmermann's 'The Edge' for Radio 3 on the same session as my 'skin' and 'chant suspendu'; Jimi Hendrix singing 'All along the Watchtower' on the soundtrack of 'Withnail and I' which I saw on video a week or two ago. Each an occasion where, more or less, the music got me when I wasn't expecting it.

Ayres: You mentioned at the beginning of this interview that during an SPNM composers workshop at the beginning of your career a lot of people found your work odd. Forgive me for saying so, but the situation hasn't changed all that much has it - I think if you were to be subjected to an SPNM workshop today your music would still be thought of as very unconventional. You must be one of the most frequently performed English composers on mainland Europe, but in England your music is still considered a strange - I have to ask, why do you stay in England?

Fox: Ah, that's a complicated question. I have toyed with the possibility of living in other parts of Europe and I have a rich store of excuses for not having done it - family responsibilities being perhaps the most convincing, alongside the feeling that the 'foreign' artist who brings his work to a different country is more welcome sometimes than the foreign composer who has moved into that country - you must know what I mean! And I stay in Britain because I love the landscape of northern England and the infinite nuances of the language and, certainly since my student days, I've been committed to making Britain a less 'English' place. It delights me for example that the very English-ness (anti-devolution, anti-European integration) of the Conservative Party is currently consigning it to the dustbin of British and European politics - people will one day realize that the English (= London?) compositional obsessions with colour and craft have similarly relegated that music (you and I know who we're talking about) to the margins of public interest.

Ayres: Can you tell us how you see the function of the music you are making - Where does it fit in the world? What purpose is it fulfilling?

Fox: Well, above all I do it because I want to and I do in music the things I'm interested in doing. Any musician who does otherwise is asking for trouble. But the social dimension of music-making is very important for me too - I try to interact with the world in a way which is not destructive - maybe even positive? - and so the music I do is influenced by that too. Does it have a purpose? Perhaps it interests other people - I think any considered human endeavour is always interesting. What I do is music and music is a wonderful phenomenon.

© Richard Ayres  and Christopher Fox, 1999