The British composer Christopher Fox was 50 in 2005. In a major interview he looks back over 25 years of work with James Weeks.

JW I'm sure you're completely unfazed by the razzmatazz of Significant Birthdays...but has it been a busy and satisfying anniversary?

CF I haven’t really come to terms with being an older composer. I still feel that I’m discovering new things to do and learning all the time from other music and musicians. On the other hand I am enjoying the fact that being a certain age does seem to have triggered some very good projects: NMC’s recording of my vocal music with EXAUDI, the release of the Ives Ensemble’s CD of much of my ensemble music on Metier, and all the performances in the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. The other satisfactory aspect of getting older is the pleasure of working with new generations of performers and enjoying the different sensibilities that they bring to my work.

Do you feel that the ‘second wave’ of performers sees your music differently from the first, then?

This is hard for me to assess, but it does seem that my younger interpreters see my work within a wider context which was less obvious to the musicians who played it the first time. Probably the most important difference though is that the music now has a history – the pieces have been around, been performed and recorded, and I too have been around long enough for performers to have some sense of what they are letting themselves in for.

What about you yourself - have you been tempted into a sort of compositional stocktaking this year?

I think the process of stocktaking happens much more regularly. If I work with performers on older pieces in rehearsal or recording, it's impossible not to consider the difference between those pieces and the music I'm now writing. On the other hand I try not to draw to many conclusions about this difference, although I’m increasingly struck by the consistency of purpose across my output.

Do you recognise crucial periods of redirection or renewal? Have there been major breaks or moments of crisis?

Hindsight does reveal some significant moments of which I think I was only partially aware at the time. I’ve said before that for much of the 1980s I was composing around the fact that I didn’t feel I had yet worked out a satisfactory approach to harmony and I certainly felt that the piano piece More light, which I wrote in 1987, was a breakthrough into a richer harmonic world. But in retrospect there’s nothing in More light that I hadn’t done before; the difference is that in that piece I brought together all the different ideas about harmony I’d been developing up to that point.

What sort of ideas?

I love many sorts of music, some of which use radically different sorts of harmony - Scelsi, Gil Evans, Webern, Stravinsky - and although I don’t think it’s possible to integrate them all I certainly don’t want to discard any of them. The weightless quality of Webern’s harmony. for example, is one of the great developments of western art music as far as I am concerned, but I think it’s possible to combine that quality with microtonal, spectrally-based harmony. Equally I want sometimes to write music that can change harmonic weight as it goes along, so that the gravitational pull of a tonal centre can come and go. At other times I want to make harmonic shifts in the music that will have the same sort of emotional impact as a key change in 18th and 19th century tonal music.

So it’s a question of abstracting different notions of harmony or harmonic qualities and then integrating them on that level into your own music? You certainly don’t seem bothered by the idea of a linear development of harmony into more and more rarefied microtonal worlds…

I am quite sure that there was a linear development in the harmony of Western art music, from Rameau, to Bach, to Mozart and in the last 100 years to Webern, but there are other lines of development too, in jazz, for example. But I think that it’s important to recognise that the cost of any ‘development’, linear or otherwise, is the loss of other modes of musical understanding. I would love to know, for example, how people heard music before the codification of harmony in the early Baroque period and what sorts of subtlety were lost at that point; similarly, the harmonic sophistication of Haydn’s tonal organisation now means virtually nothing to most people who hear his music.

Going back to my earlier question about your career as a whole, do you feel your works of the last decade or so are less ‘experimental’ than the earliest ones? Would you still call yourself an experimental composer?

Certainly when I first started writing the music that I still recognise as really mine I was very much an ‘experimental’ composer. As I got to work with more mainstream performers in the 1980s and early 1990s the look of my scores became more conventional, but the influence of the players in the Ives Ensemble and Apartment House, players for whom graphic or text notations are just as valid as any other, has rekindled my enthusiasm for notational adventure and for a conception of the work in which the performer has a much greater creative role. So I still think of myself as an experimental composer – although I’ve been called other things more often. The works of the early 1990s are no less experimental – they just look more like proper music.

Experimentalism has traditionally foregrounded process in the musical experience, and I always think of your work as processually quite intransigent (though in a good way!). What compositional starting-points and situations do you like to work with, and are there paradigmatic ways of working that you use (for example, permutation systems)?

I think the sorts of transformations that my musical materials undergo are inextricably bound up with the nature of those materials and with the overall ideas of particular pieces. Making sounds is necessarily a dynamic process because they exist in time, and the way they change is at the heart of what makes music. Indeed a new piece begins for me not with individual sounds but at the point when I can sense its overall qualities - what it feels like to experience this music. On the other hand I do have a repertoire of ways of making hierarchies within a body of musical material, using found objects, using chance operations, using generative systems like permutation or self-similarity, but I choose the systems which to me have the most interesting effect on the material and they have to take on the quality of that material if the music is going to work.

Talking of material, there seems to me a very strong sense of ‘materiality’ in your work, a kind of ‘thereness’ of the material which is overwhelming. Partly I suppose it comes from that sense of dealing with elemental building-blocks, very simple or even crude materials, in many of your works – and of course just having a feeling for sound…It’s interesting that you’ve written pieces connected with artists like Beuys or Schwitters, both of them ‘materialists’, if you like. And indeed one of your Schwitters pieces is a collage of the sound of Schwitters working!

You’re right: this whole question about the encounter with material is crucial to how I work and it’s inextricably linked with how I try to encounter the world - as consciously and presently as possible. Given that approach, everything becomes interesting and vital, and therefore of value as material for art. Schwitters and Beuys obviously had this approach, and it’s there in all the art I love most. In another medium Günter Grass and Charles Dickens have a similar ability to invest everyday situations and commodities with extraordinary richness - I’m thinking of Grass’s descriptions of food, for example…

…and likewise the whole American experimental tradition, of course, which I know is of great importance to you, not least as a sort of ‘art of the everyday’, but also perhaps politically…

Absolutely! Think of the hymn in the first movement in Ives’s Fourth Symphony or the whole of Cage’s Roaratorio. It seems to me that these ideas, of celebrating the ‘ordinary’ with the same delight as more precious materials, are fundamentally both humane and democratic. It’s not just there in the experimental tradition either: I think that the arrival of ‘ordinary’ people’s faces in the religious painting of the Renaissance, or Shakespeare’s amazing shifts in linguistic register are products of similar artistic initiatives. I also think it’s important to question why certain sorts of materials acquire different status within art works. For example, for much of the 20th century ‘serious’ music was characterised by dissonance and fragmented continuity. I would argue that the roots of those musical materials lie in the depiction of emotional distress which so interested the expressionists, but as the years passed and jagged rhythms and major sevenths became part of a musical lingua franca they lost their original significance and their expressive power. That’s what happens over time. I just want my materials to be as fresh and alive as possible and I know too that I need to be alert to the dangers of slipping into my own clichés - so did Cage, so did Schwitters.

Pursuing this question of influences, you presumably enjoy the way your music might be seen to connect backwards, or sideways, with other people’s work: do you see yourself as working within or tangentially connected to a tradition, or several traditions?

I would have said the traditions to which I think I belong in some way included experimentalism, minimalism, Dada, European modernism (particularly in its tendency to abstraction), northern-ness and social democracy.

And what about your dialogue with History? Your pieces may generally sound ‘abstract’ and lacking in specific historical reference but you’re clearly aware of the larger contexts into which your work might be fitted.

I enjoy this dialogue across history enormously, although it’s something different from the dialogue I have with the traditions I’ve mentioned earlier. I certainly wouldn’t say my approach is unhistoricised: for a start, I think if you choose to write for any instrument you are entering into a relationship with the history of that instrument. Similarly if you set a text from an earlier period you are setting up a dialogue between that time and ours. I wrote a piece for The Clerks’ Group last year, A Spousal Verse, setting a poem by Edmund Spenser which includes an invocation to the ‘sweet Thames’ which TS Eliot quotes in The Waste Land. One of the processes in the music is that gradually more and more voices join the central melodic thread and they do so in a triadic formation – a musically literate English audience will almost certainly be reminded of Vaughan Williams even though my music is quite different. In a typical Clerks’ Group programme this piece will then be surrounded by medieval and Renaissance music; the result is a very complex interlocking of ideas from different historical periods both within my piece and between it and the rest of the programme. I could attempt to control this and make some sort of ‘statement’, but I know that I find that sort of thing rather patronising when I encounter it in other people’s work so I choose to trust in my listeners’ intelligence.

What sort of ‘statements’ do you dislike?

I suppose I mean those composers who set up a specific dialectic between music from different periods or genres - for example, I find the Bach chorale reference in the Berg Violin Concerto rather mawkish because it’s being made to carry such a lot of nostalgic baggage. On the other hand I don’t share Richard Ayres’ view that one can use any musical material and not have to deal with the associations that different sorts of music have for people.

No sound is innocent, I guess…The problem with that bit of Berg for me is more that it is being put in such crass juxtaposition with a more ‘difficult’ language, so we end up with a sort of tonal Heaven versus the atonal agonies of real life. But what about a composer such as Michael Finnissy, or indeed the Berg of Lulu, where historicised materials are presented as part of the warp and weft of life itself – so that the past is alive in the present, but not as nostalgia or escapism?

Both those examples are much closer to what I do, I think. I love the way in which in North American Spirituals Finnissy can momentarily touch a much simpler harmonic world but within the context of his own much denser vocabulary.

Could you tell me something about the new pieces you’ve written for Huddersfield?

There are two new pieces, the second and third parts of a triptych which will eventually be called Terra incognita. Terra incognita turns around ideas, both real and mythological, of coldness and cold places and the two outer pieces are ensemble pieces which derive their structure from the journey to and from the South Pole of Scott’s expedition – I’ve quite literally transcribed the distances travelled on each day into durations. The one I’ve written for the Ives Ensemble is called A slice through translucence, and is a gradual opening out of a musical texture. The other piece, the central section of the triptych, is a piano piece called Thermogenesis; it’s a sort of intermezzo based on the obviously ridiculous idea of a pianist trying to keep warm in an extremely cold environment. What sort of music would he play? How long would it be before he could take of his mittens, and then his inner gloves?

So this is another series of pieces – which seem to be a feature of your output! What it is that attracts you about making such groups of pieces?

Some of these series – Everything You Need To Know and American Choruses, for instance – I think of as ‘compendium’ pieces; they grow out of my interest in the multidimensionality of the world. Given a subject I want to know as many things about it as possible and, given a central idea for a piece of music, I sometimes find that I have to present a number of different versions of that idea. So Themes and Variations, for example, turns around the nature of chamber music and how many different sorts of interrelationship there can be within small ensembles. To make something like that audible so that listeners can enjoy it too I thought it was necessary to have a number of separate but linked pieces - they’re very different from one another but once they have all been heard it’s possible to remember all sorts of connections between them.

You've worked closely with the Ives Ensemble for many years - it's clearly important to you to have that sense of collaboration with people you know and trust, though presumably there are many commissions that don't work like that. Do you feel you write differently for the Ives Ensemble or other long-time collaborators? Have their personalities informed your work?

I negotiate my commissions personally - there's no agent or publisher 'protecting' me from the economics or personalities involved - so it's very rare that I end up working with musicians who don't want to play my music. I want to work with the best musicians but I also believe that good musicians need to be in sympathy with the music they are playing. It’s been an enormous privilege to be able to work with some really wonderful musicians over a long period and I think it’s important to name them the most significant of them: Roger Heaton, the players of the Ives Ensemble, the players of Apartment House. Their influence is perhaps hard to locate in specific musical decisions but above all it has been one of liberation, to know that whatever I ask them to do they will do with total commitment. Indeed it is they who challenge me - nothing less than the extraordinary will satisfy them.

To an extent one might regard not just instrumentation but commission circumstances as material - it becomes part of the composition to write for a particular circumstance...

I do like to know as much as possible of the circumstances for which I am making a new work. Like one of my great heroes, Christian Wolff, I believe that composing music is a social act, and it’s important for me to be able to imagine not just the sound of particular players but also to imagine the physical disposition of those sounds in the space where the music will be played. On the other hand I’m not making site-specific works: I love the process of transformation that can take place when music that was written with one set of circumstances in mind is transposed into a new setting. If the piece is good enough it should be just as interesting, although probably in different ways. A good recent example is the ensemble piece Komposition (mit schwarz, rot und gelb). I wrote it for an amazing hall in Hellerau on the outskirts of Dresden and I had even made a special trip to see the space because the commission was for a music-theatre event as part of the Dresden New Music Days in 2003. In the premiere there was a quite complicated staging and lighting, but when the piece was then done a year later in a BBC portrait concert in Maida Vale Studio 1 it was both fascinating and very satisfying to discover how a more conventional concert setting for the piece actually intensified the impact of the piece.

Getting back to the here and now…what are your particular focuses today? I've noticed a few recent pieces with political themes - Rendered Account, Partition, Republican Bagatelles – is this a conscious thing or a coincidence?

I think my interests are much the same as they have ever been, but obviously the world changes and my work responds to those changes. I want the world to be organised more justly and equally; in fact I think those ideas recur in all my work, although they become more explicit where there are texts. They were very evidently there in the early 1990s in A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, which uses the words of people involved in the struggle towards a just society in the period of the English Civil War; similarly both Rendered Account and Partition relate to the struggle of the Palestinian people for some sort of justice. I am under no illusion that these pieces play any significant role in effecting change, but the alternative - ignoring these subjects in my work - is unthinkable.

Religion has appeared a few times too – you wrote a carol last year, for example – how does that fit in?

In my life I have spent many Sundays sitting in church services; I am interested in theology and comparative religion, but I think that organised religions generally cripple people’s aspirations. I wrote the piece for the chapel choir of Winchester College because I knew it would be performed in wonderful buildings by enthusiastic young musicians and because I found a text which portrayed the arrival of Christ as a liberation of the human spirit.

So music-making is first and foremost a social, human act, whatever else it may be… What sort of role do you feel the composer can play in our society?

I think that one of the characteristics of composers like Cage or Wolff, but also perhaps of Beethoven or Wagner, or Kurt Schwitters or Joseph Beuys, is their refusal to accept the status quo. If you question the way society is organised then it should be inevitable that you will also question ways of making art. And if you want to make art in new ways then you do have to be pragmatic because there are none of the ready-made solutions which life easier for other artists. I think artists, like any other class of people, play many roles in society. Some are iconoclasts, some are leaders, others are primarily entertainers…

You yourself play many roles – composer, teacher, animateur, writer – it’s clear your commitment to ‘getting it out there’ is total! Do you feel that this is a good time for contemporary music (or art in general) in our culture, and if not, what can be done?

I do the work that I can do best and that I enjoy. I like writing words occasionally, and teaching university students is often wonderful, but these activities would be impossible if I didn’t compose every day. As for music today, all times are good and bad in more or less equal measure, I think. There is a lot of wonderful music being created right now, although probably less of it now via notated scores than 20 years ago and much more through other media. And the level of performance among those musicians who do play from notation has never been higher. There is also a considerable audience for music that is genuinely attempting something new. Being a certain age means that it is possible to observe a recurrent tendency for the gradual atrophying of types of music once they have lost their capacity to re-invent themselves; the same is true of their audiences.

What do you think is in danger now?

Ever since I was a student I have been predicting the demise of the symphony orchestra, and although it’s still some way from happening I continue to believe it is an institution in permanent decline. Orchestras and their audiences generally don’t like new music but often they don’t play old music well either. Most of the least interesting musical experiences I’ve had have been at orchestral concerts, the most striking being a concert at the Edinburgh Festival two years ago by a ‘major’ American orchestra under a ‘major’ composer/conductor (not Boulez, I should quickly add) which was not just dull but seemed wilfully careless of musical sense.

I also wonder what sort of future there is for ‘contemporary classical music’ – the term itself has the whiff of the mortuary slab about it and certainly doesn’t describe the music you or I are involved in. ‘Avant-garde’ is a term with which I am much more comfortable, to the point of regarding it as a badge of honour. Of course both the orchestra and ‘contemporary classical music’ have powerful institutional support within the music business which will ensure their continuation well beyond the end of their useful lives. What for you is the aim of composition?

We live at a time when being a composer can seem like a rather old-fashioned occupation. Anyone can compose using sequencing and notation software, and the sonic results of improvising musicians or sound artists are every bit as interesting as anything a composer might imagine. But I do believe there are certain types of music-making that are best done by composers, in particular the deployment of extended bodies of musical material across physical and temporal spaces. It takes time to make people hear differently and for me that’s what a composer must do.