JOANNA: First of all I’d like to ask you both about your own particular strategies when tackling a “solo” piece (by which I mean a piece for any unaccompanied instrument other than perhaps the piano). It seems to me that this form has become rather ubiquitous in contemporary music for reasons that may well have more to do with the economics of putting on concerts than aesthetic necessity. Students of composition are usually encouraged to write them, I suppose with the idea that one solo musical line is easier to write than four at the same time. All the same it appears to be the most unforgiving of musical mediums. Do you find them difficult to write? How do you deal with the limitations of harmony, timbre and texture?

CHRISTOPHER: I am attracted to the theatrical dynamic of a single performer in front of an audience - I think there’s an intimacy, but also a sense of danger, in the relationship between a solo performer and their audience, whether they’re stand-up comedians, storytellers or clarinet players. But I agree that solo piano music belongs to a subtly different genre - the presence of that big black piece of furniture makes the whole thing safer somehow. I like the physicality of wind and string instruments too, the drawing of the instrument into the body. I also thrive on limitations, so I don’t think I find solo pieces harder to write. On the other hand when I’ve had to write a number of solo pieces in succession it has come as a relief to go on to something with more instruments.

LAURENCE: Well, I find all composition very difficult but I find solo pieces particularly hard to write. Although I feel the same way as Christopher in that I do like to have limitations imposed when I start work on a piece the limitation of one solo line invariably seems to me to be a bridge too far, this is mainly because my thinking is so clearly orientated towards vertical harmony and therefore a horizontal solo line seems terrifying. Another thing that deters me from writing for a solo instrument is a certain implication that it should be in some way virtuosic, which I don’t really do. I’m not sure exactly where that implication comes from but I feel it to be there.

JOANNA: Hmmmm. I like Christopher’s idea of there being some kind of inherent “danger” within the context of the solo performance. It reminds me of the danger I sense when any of Laurence’s pieces (solo or ensemble) are played. The very simplicity of texture and clarity of material leave the performers exposed in such a way as to create an oddly tense listening experience. I once remember sitting a few rows from the front at a performance of Bobby J and being utterly terrified that the guitarist was going to blow it at any second. I’d like to ask Laurence to what extent this performative tension is intentional and what he thinks about the notion that conventional virtuosity is replaced in his music with a different kind of virtuosity one relying on composure and concentration rather than “chops”.

LAURENCE: I think the tension in performance that you speak of is a by-product of the general aesthetic of my work. But it’s certainly not my intention to be sadistic to the performer! I want to make people really listen, and to put the audience into a situation where they just have to pay attention to what is going on in the music. As you say, my music is generally very exposed and everything unnecessary has (I hope) been stripped away. The tension that is created from a performer or group of performers playing music in which there is nowhere to hide has, on several occasions in my experience, really caught the audience’s attention.

You make an excellent point about a different type of virtuosity. My answer to your first question presupposed in a rather conventional way that virtuosity equals the difficulty of playing lots of notes with all sorts of other obstacles thrown in. Obviously the way I write music does not connect with this and I readily accept that presenting music to the performer that is stripped away and exposed does require a degree of concentration and fearlessness that definitely could be described as virtuosic.

CHRISTOPHER: I think we should also consider the extent to which much conventional sorts of virtuosity can be a disguise that performers, and maybe composers too, like to hide behind. Laurence’s music is always very revealing of his players and of their musicianship, even if you’ve never heard the piece before, whereas in a fast and furious solo piece by one of those composers I’m not going to mention by name we may come away with no more than a sense of technical dazzle. The same is true of my music, I think, certainly in a piece like Generic #7 where the player has to choose the sounds they’re going to use for themselves - they’re not in the score. I like this sort of intimate portrait of the player and their instrument - or maybe it’s not even a portrait, because in the Generic Compositions I was trying to create scores so transparent that the resultant music was all about the sounds and the player who chose them.

JOANNA: It sounds like you create a sort of tool-kit for an instrumentalist self-portrait. Could you explain in a little more detail how your piece works? Where is the composer in the piece? Are you modestly (in the great Cageian tradition) handing over the control of the piece to the performer?

CHRISTOPHER: I don’t want to give away too much of what the piece is like before people hear it, but the performer has to choose six fingerings which produce unstable sounds. This will obviously vary from instrument to instrument. I have composed the sorts of patterns that these sounds are grouped into, so actually my control of the overall flow of the piece is pretty much absolute. If there’s a debt to Cage and indeterminacy - and in my music there usually is - it’s more to do with his fondness for prescribing actions rather than sounds in notation.

JOANNA: Our esteemed colleague, Mr Matthew Shlomowitz, is currently working in an area not dissimilar to the one you describe where a (compositionally) undefined series of actions and events take the place of the fastidiously notated sound-world which characterizes a great deal of European contemporary music. He considers his stance to be “anti-preciousness” and although I find his area of research very interesting I can’t help but feel a little insulted by the idea that composers who deal with a precisely imagined sound-world are being a bit precious. Is it wrong to fuss over bowing positions and types of trombone mute? Who cares? Last March when Plus Minus Ensemble performed Laurence’s piece Sparling in Belgium I had to call him up in the middle of the dress rehearsal to ask whether the guitar should be acoustic or electric. For some reason I expected him not to mind, but of course he did. Laurence are you a compositional fuss-pot?

LAURENCE: Well, yes and no. It’s funny you should mention the piece Sparling, as it is one of the few pieces of mine which exists in several different scorings. I had once tried it with electric guitar instead of acoustic a few years ago and it didn’t really work, hence my extreme and total intransigence about this back in March!

For most pieces of mine I am very keen to retain control over instrumentation, as it’s something I think quite hard about. I have sometimes been asked if this or that piece could be done with a different instrumentation; I invariably say no. I am sometimes quite particular about types of brass mute or hard or soft percussion sticks and in all my recent works I ask for the strings to play without vibrato. Also, formal structures; my pieces are fully notated structures which play from beginning to end in the same way each time, I have not so far investigated giving the performer or performers involvement in the determination of structure in a piece. All these examples – and indeed, numerous aspects of my behavior generally - do indicate that I am a bit of a fuss-pot, as you quaintly put it.

On the other hand I would not dream of marking things like, for example, bow directions. I feel that this, among other things, is an area best left to the performer. The clean and uncluttered nature of my scores act partly as an indication to the performers that a pure and unadorned sound is desired. However, I am fully aware of all the variables that can occur in performance, particularly in music that leaves the performer as exposed as mine does. Far from trying to iron all these out I accept that this is part of the experience. So perhaps in these two aspects I’m not so much of fuss-pot after all! CHRISTOPHER: I don't think a composer can be regarded as a fuss-pot when he deliberately puts his music on the edge as you do, Laurence. I suspect (although I've never asked) that performers find my music less exposing than yours in the sense that mistakes are usually quite obvious in your music, less so in mine, unless someone mis-counts the number of repeats in pieces that use repetition. Like you I tend not to mark too much performance detail in the score beyond the specifics of a particular sound. I used to have a very hard-line approach - I left out all interpretative suggestions on the grounds that players should find their own way into the music - but I've relented a little and do add the odd word now and again. But I still think these things are best left to the rehearsal room rather than the score. I like rehearsing! JOANNA: Fair enough. Could you tell us a little about the piece and why the titles of your pieces nearly always dedications?

LAURENCE: I see my pieces as entirely abstract things and on the whole they are not trying to describe, allude to or portray anything extra musical. Using names in my titles, and particular the name of the dedicatee, seems to me to be a way of reinforcing this sense of abstraction. Cello Piece for Michael Parsons, the piece of mine that Alex Waterman will play tonight, was written in 1998 and shares musical material with a piano piece of mine written a year earlier called Chorale for Howard Skempton. Michael and Howard were key figures in the English experimental group of composers that were associated with Cornelius Cardew in the late 1960s and early 1970s and have been friends of mine for many years. The cello piece is five minutes long by the way and is very quiet.

JOANNA: Thank you Laurence and Christopher for talking to me. Before we hear the pieces played we will have a minute’s silence for the English cricket team.

This conversation took place in Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club on the evening of Tuesday 5th December 2006 as part of an event promoted by Rational Rec. The sequence of questions and answers had been developed in a series of emails over the previous few months.

© Joanna Bailie, Lawrance Craine and Christopher Fox, 2006