'Resonance and Distance': Simon Bainbridge in Conversation

‘resonance and distance’: simon bainbridge in conversation

Malcolm Miller

Abstract: This interview, based on a conversation with Simon Bainbridge at London’s City Literary Institute in June 2011, presents something of a rounded portrait of the composer while covering a good deal of ground. We began our conversation with a discussion of a recent work for orchestra, Concerti Grossi, going into some detail in matters of scoring and structure. The discussion then broadened to cover such topics as the creative process, formative influences (for example, his parents’ activity in the visual arts, Debussy’s Jeux, John Lambert and Gunther Schuller), instrumentation and the relationship of music and text. This led on specifically to Bainbridge’s settings of Primo Levi, in for example the cycle Ad Ora Incerta, and to a consider- ation of the composer’s relationship with the audience.

The British composer Simon Bainbridge marked his 60th birthday with the world première of his Garden of Earthly Delights, given at the BBC Proms on 18 August 2012. Whilst in the early stages of work on that piece Bainbridge generously agreed to an interview and a discussion on 24 June 2011, in a class as part of my course ‘New Music: Where is the Avant-Garde Today?’ at the City Literary Institute (Holborn, London). I am grateful to all students for their stimulus and enthusiasm in our discovery of Simon Bainbridge’s oeuvre. Since the interview took place, Bainbridge has composed several chamber works and is currently involved in a projected collaboration writing a concertante work for the legendary American-Puerto Rican jazz bassist Eddie Gomez.

Simon Bainbridge (photo © Andrew Palmer) MM: Over the last three and a half decades you have enriched the repertoire with some boldly innovative large scale works for orchestra including concertante works for various instruments. Your most recent large-scale orchestral work, premièred on 4 June 2010 at the Sage, Gateshead, by the Northern Sinfonia, for whom you composed it, bears the intriguing title Concerti Grossi. How did it come about and what were your aims in this work? SB: This was a very exciting commission for me. Some years ago at the Proms I heard the most wonderful performance by the Northern Sinfonia with their Musical Director Thomas Zehetmair, playing the Bach Concerto for Two Keyboards in C minor, BWV 1060 in an arrangement for violin and oboe, with Heinz Holliger as oboist. I remember being knocked side- ways by the strength of all the musicians in that orchestra: there was a sense of a group of soloists at work. Several years later I was commissioned by the Northern Sinfonia, and I decided that

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I wanted to write a concerto for chamber orchestra. I used the title Concerti Grossi in the plural since it was really a collection of different concerti. I took as my starting point the idea of a concertante group and a ripieno group, so there is a sense of solo music which is being commented on by a background ensemble, and it was that sense of distance and perspective that I wanted to bring out. My initial sketch for the piece was a map of metrically related tempi which provided a starting point for articulating each of the instrumental sections. This gave me a means of creating a continuity for the composition. MM: Could you describe how you achieved this? SB: I wanted to establish a very audible difference between foreground and background textures. For instance in the first section, you hear the four solo violins present very busy and active musical gestures, full of complex rhythmic details, which radiate into the rest of the string section. This larger section of divided first and second violins and double basses – there are no violas and cellos – marked ‘con sordino’, provides a type of echo chamber for the solo violins, heard against a further layer of vertical chord structures in the rest of the orchestra, woodwind, brass, harp and percussion. The next movement features two solo horns with a ripieno ensemble comprising a pair of flutes and clarinets, and lower strings, with cellos and violas dominating the texture. A transformation in timbre, a gradual shift into a new world and a new tempo leads to the third movement, in which a multi-layered linear texture for, predominantly, two solo oboes, is reflected by muted trumpets and orchestra, again with a tempo relationship modulated from the previous section. The fourth movement features solo violin and solo double bass, with woodwind and brass creating a reinvented Big Band, coloured by a jazz feel, which emerged from the particular instrumentation and tempi that I was using at this point in the piece. The movement leads into the slowest point of the composition, almost an interlude, a moment of repose, which focuses mainly on solo viola and solo cello, with the rest of the orchestra in the distance as a composite ensemble of blended textures. In the sixth section, a complex harmonic interaction is created through the superimposition of pulsing woodwind and brass chords shadowed by related quarter-tone string harmonics. This leads to the climactic seventh section, where, out of a highly explosive and rhythmically propulsive orchestral tutti, a distant string sextet emerges, sul ponticello, from the background into the foreground. It creates once again a sense of perspective and leads the listener towards the con- cluding section, which is a palindrome of the first section. MM: Why did you use a palindrome? SB: I chose to retrograde the whole of the first movement as a literal palindrome since it returns the listener to the world of the work’s beginning, and thus evokes a sense of memory. Whereas in the beginning the music is gradually evolving, when it is retrograded there is a gradual dissolution of rhythmic energy. It creates a circular journey which indeed could start all over again! MM: I’d like to focus on ‘Beginnings’–when you begin work on a new piece, such as Concerti Grossi, do you have a clear idea of the composition as a whole?

SB: One of the things we are all confronted with, not just composers but any creative artist, is a process of discovery. Finding the grammar and the sound-world for the piece is not something that happens instantaneously. I have to investigate it very thoroughly, and that process can take a long time. It is very important that at this stage of a composition it is a very intuitive experience, of throwing music out onto the page, and beginning to see what it may give. What I am interested in, in the pre-compositional stage, is thinking about the music in a spatial rather than temporal way. By placing musical objects onto an empty manuscript page, and exploring each of them in great detail, I eventually will find connections and indeed discover a formal structure which emerges out of the content of the musical material. MM: In the pre-compositional stage, you have a clear idea of the ending? SB: Successful endings are probably the most difficult part of a composition, and are rarely in my head when I start a piece. When I am over halfway through, I begin to think about how the particular piece is going to conclude. I think that was very much the case with Concerti Grossi,wherethedecisiontogooverexistingmusic in reverse was something I was quite nervous about. I wanted to give a sense that it could actually go on indefinitely. I was a student at Tanglewood in the 1970s and recall how the American composer Seymour Shifrin spent two weeks talking about endings! He would play music ‘cold’ without any of us having heard it before, and say ‘is this a beginning or a middle or an end?’ It is interesting to see how a composer deals with that situation. MM: The Guardian critic noted in Concerti Grossi touches of Miles Davis and Debussy. You did write a piece inspired by Davis, but how important is Debussy to you? SB: It is interesting that Debussy’s name came up, since one of the most important pieces of the 20th century is his orchestral piece, Jeux, which has obsessed me for many years. I am fascinated by its complex form, and how Debussy builds two- and three-bar phrases out of tiny and constantly transforming elements. He is one of the very few composers whose works continue to inform and influence my compositional thinking. MM: You dedicated Concerti Grossi to the memory of your mother, who died in 2010. I wonder whether you could talk about your family background and youthful musical influences? SB: Both my parents were involved with the visual arts. My father1 was a painter, and I remember when I was very young spending hours fascinated by his sketching processes. He also worked with an advertising agency in London, and my mother2 was also involved in advertising and was a graphic artist as well. So throughout those early years of my childhood I was immersed in the visual, rather than the musical arts. I was the only musician in the family. I decided to become a composer when I was quite young, around eight or nine. In 1965 I went to the Central Tutorial School for Young Musicians, later to become the Purcell School. It was located

1 The artist John Bainbridge (1919–1978). 2 Nan Bainbridge (1919–2010).

at Morley College, where, in those days, all the London orchestras used to rehearse, in the Emma Cons Hall. It was an extraordinary experience to sit in on rehearsals with the LSO, the LPO, the Philharmonia, to see Klemperer one day, Rudolf Kempe the next, Stokowski, Pierre Boulez, István Kertész, all these famous music directors working with their orchestras. I remember hearing Boulez rehearsing Debussy’s La Mer, at the age of 13. I was very lucky to have that experience – my God – it is not something that happens every day! Oliver Knussen was there at the same time as I was and we became very good friends, when we were still in our very early teens. Getting to know Olly was also the opportunity to hear his formidable collection of records. It was through our early friendship that I got to know all the Mahler symphonies at quite an early age, and also the Second Viennese School. MM: Knussen was a pupil of John Lambert, though privately, while you studied with Lambert at the RCM. Can you describe him as a teacher? SB: John was a wonderful teacher. I have taught myself for quite a number of years now and realize how difficult this is, just to inform and guide, and lead students in the right direction. I had two years of rigorous counterpoint, which he insisted I do every week. I well remember the day it dawned on me why he was doing this, and it made perfect sense. Working with the strict structure of species counterpoint gave one a discipline. It was all about seeing a line, how it transformed and how it just took on a life of its own. It offered a way of thinking about form and content, which became incredibly important to me, and indeed to all his pupils! I remember that after his death (he sadly died quite young), we all commented on the fact that we all composed in a very linear way, which was something he had inherited from his teacher, Nadia Boulanger, and she in turn from Gabriel Fauré. MM: Following the RCM you spent the summers of 1973 and 1974 at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood studying with Gunther Schuller. What memories do you have of that experience? SB: Schuller was a completely different person and teacher from John and he opened my ears to many areas of musical composition, like jazz and the Third Stream for example. He was (and is!) an inspirational teacher, a true Renaissance man, equally at home conducting Scott Joplin or Stravinsky, or writing a magnificent tome on the Swing Era. I recall taking him a sketch of a piece I was writing in the summer of 1973, a very unformed piece. I just had some initial sketches, and he had the ability to see far beyond that, and to see what it could be. MM: You have used jazz influences in your own work, in works such as For Miles, for example. SB: It was the late Sebastian Bell3 who introduced me to that wonderful and innovative album ‘Porgy and Bess’, on which Gunther Schuller had played first horn. It was one of a series of classic recorded collaborations between Miles Davis and Gil Evans, surely one of the greatest jazz arrangers of all time. It totally changed the way I thought about harmony

3 Sebastian Bell (1941–2007), Professor of Flute at the RCM and RAM and flutist in the London Sinfonietta from its inception.

and instrumental voicing; the way Gil spaced his chordal writing evolved so much from the timbre of the instruments he was writing for. For Miles is a reminiscence of that extraordinary collaboration, a reinvention for a very different ensemble of solo trumpet, oboe doubling cor anglais, two clarinets, viola, cello and double bass. MM: Going back to the period studying with Schuller, how was he regarded at that time? SB: Most highly: he was as a fine conductor of contemporary music, and a composer of some very important 20th- and indeed 21st-century compositions including Seven Studies after Themes of Paul Klee and his magnificent orchestral piece, Spectrum, for example. Indeed recently, in the Proms only last summer (2010), they performed one of his latest orchestral pieces, Where the Word Ends, which is really extraordinarily well written, a beautiful piece.4 At the same time he is constantly writing books on jazz. He once said to me he spends six hours each day on jazz and six hours on classical music. And he is 86 now and still writing, composing, conducting, lecturing. Extraordinary! MM: Were there other influences on you at this formative stage, for example minimalism? SB: Yes. I went back to live in New York in 1978–79 on a US–UK Bicentennial Fellowship, jointly funded by the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington and the British Council. At that time in the seventies it was very much Steve Reich and Philip Glass who dominated the music scene. I remember going to a wonderful lecture that Steve Reich gave at Columbia University on Music for 18 Musicians, which I still think is one of his best compositions. He talked a lot about processes that could control large-scale transformative aspects of the piece. This was something I found most interesting. MM: Did you experiment with minimalism? SB: Like a lot of composers from the other side of the pond, I did! The pieces that emerged were Concertante in Moto Perpetuo for oboe and ensemble, and a piece I wrote for the Nash Ensemble called Voicing. It was a short flirtation, but ultimately I found it limiting harmonically and rhythmically. Yet it’s taken me further along on my journey and also gave me a way of actually thinking about ‘process’. It made me want to investigate ways of controlling musical structure and direction, and was something I explored in a number of pieces in the 1980s. MM: Earlier on you mentioned Debussy. Which other influences do you recognize as formative? SB: I think the composer I was closest to was Ligeti. Pieces like Lontano and the Kammerkonzert have such a remarkable control of time and a miraculous use of instrumental texture both in those beautiful moments of micro-polyphony and in the way he created his unique harmonies. I was very lucky to have encountered him when he was a visiting composer in Tanglewood in 1973, and for the two weeks he was there, he spoke in enormous detail and depth about his music and

4 The première of Where the Word Ends was reviewed in Tempo Vol. 65, No. 255 (2011). p. 45.

Example 1b: Simon Bainbridge, Concerti Grossi. The beginning of the retrograde of the opening section, in the work’s conclusion (score p. 112) © 2010 Novello & Company Limited. Reproduced with the permission of the publishers

compositional philosophy. I have always been impressed with his ability to conceive the temporal journey of a particular composition in his aural imagination, and it is something I strive to achieve myself and indeed speak to my students about. He was a very big influence of my early work, and maybe is still there somewhere, in the background. MM: Are you aware of a stylistic thread linking your earlier period with your more recent works? SB: I remember talking about my music and playing a piece I wrote in 1976 when I was 24, my Viola Concerto, from a very different period of my life. Listening to it again, though stylistically my work has changed, there were certain things in that piece in which I am still very interested today. In fact, in the case of the Viola Concerto it was the way that, in the first movement, I was thinking very much about orchestrating out of the solo instrument. So there was the solo viola line, and the orchestra would gradually comment on it colouristically. For example a tremolo in the viola would transform into the colour of a mandolin used in the orchestra. It was a way of thinking about perspective; I talk to my students quite a bit about how important it is for a piece to work on more than one layer: there needs to be something always behind it, to give resonance and distance. It also allows the composer to turn what could be a background into a foreground, and a foreground into a background, so that what is essential is the contrapuntal concept. We’re not talking about ‘strict counterpoint’ but just the whole process of superimposition, and how important that is for a composition to live. MM: You appear to favour certain types of textural gestures, chromatically rolling phrases which build up contrapuntally, as also in Scherzi. SB: I must tell you a very funny story about musical gesture. A couple of years ago I taught at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, with a group of students who were with me for about two weeks. I talked about my music and compositional techniques, and at the end they all went away with a task of writing a short piano piece. Without exception, every single student, somewhere in this piece, had this little gesture, a chromatic run up going into a trill, and they weren’t copying each other. To this day I can’t work it out: there is this Korean gesture, a chromatic ascent and a trill at the end! MM: Your textures often focus on harmonies built up of a combination of triadic and chromatic intervals. Can you say something about your approach to harmony? SB: In all my compositions I write what I would call ‘timbral harmony’. It evolves naturally out of the instrumentation I happen to be using, and gives me a feeling of the vertical space that the instruments will eventually occupy. Working in a predominantly atonal language, one of the primary means I use to create a coherent and contrasted journey through my compositions is by thinking about harmonic density and particularly harmonic saturation. I am interested in the use of whole-tone hexachords where one hexachord ‘invades’ the territory of the other. So, for instance, one might have a triad with two notes from one hexachord and one ‘alien’ pitch. In that way, my harmonic style arises very much from the combination of whole-tone

hexachords and chromatic additions. There are times where I have used a twelve-note chord, as a total chromatic saturation. A good example is the introduction to ‘Buna’, the fourth song of my song cycle Ad Ora Incerta, and at the start of my Fantasia for Double Orchestra. In general, I believe that the quality of the harmony should come from its acoustic resonance and propensity to vibrate! MM: Apart from the 12-note chords you mentioned, do you use serialism structurally? SB: I have embraced serialism but never to control every aspect of my music – rather, as one element. For instance in my Piano Trio, the whole of the second movement is made out of a sequence of eight 12-note chords, which never vary; only the rhythmic articulation and tempi vary. I constantly cycle the music through those eight chords, and without any octave transposition, so the same intervallic elements appear within that 12-tone chord, but heard constantly in different ways. It is almost like a set of variations on those vertical structures. MM: So was it giving you a framework? SB: It was a fascinating way of composing. It gave me a strong harmonic framework on which to invent constantly, and to embroider, using those restrictions that I imposed on myself. MM: To what extent do such complex harmonic processes also provide aural landmarks? SB: What is very important for me is to give the listener, who is actually receiving the work, points of reference which accumu- late to create a sense of unity. I used a particularly strategy of devising a framework of sequenced harmonies in my spatial piece Music Space Reflection, which was in effect a collaboration with the American architect Daniel Libeskind. As the title suggests the piece was a musical reflection on a series of extraordinary architectural spaces, using an ensemble of 24 musicians, divided into four identical instrumental groups, combined with a complex use of spatial electronics and sound transformations. I, together with my colleague, the sound engineer David Sheppard, created what was in essence a live installation, which the listener could walk around and explore whilst hearing the music and seeing the building as a simul- taneous experience. It is one of those pieces which only works in surround-sound, three-dimensionally, so it is quite hard to understand in a stereophonic recording. What I wanted to do in that piece was to superimpose into the existing archi- tecture a kind of musical commentary. I had to impose some kind of time frame, a mechanism within its 25 minutes whereby the listener could perceive moments of repetition, intervallic or chordal. Hopefully this would operate on a subliminal level through a constant process of cycling, projected into a three- dimensional space, making what the piece is about come across. MM: Have you written other spatial works? SB: In 1999 I began work on Chant, commissioned by the BBC for a series of concerts called ‘Towards the Millennium’. Each fea- tured composer was given a particular building in the UK to work with and I was lucky enough to be given the Minster at York. It was a wonderful opportunity to write a piece for

such a magnificent building. What an extraordinary acoustic! I remember just walking about the Minster for half an hour, feeling that space, because it has got something like a six-second delay. So the choice of compositional material derived very much out of the acoustic, and thinking about acoustical space was very important for me. The piece was created out of a hymn monody by Hildegard von Bingen, called Ave Generosa. I transformed this into multi-layered 7-part vocal and orchestral polyphony, the monody presented heterophonically in many different tempi simultaneously, and spatially projected into the different areas of the building. MM: That leads us to another aspect of your music: your choice of instrumentation. You have sometimes used striking sonorities based on a clash of old and new as in Tenebrae, composed for the Hilliard Ensemble and Arditti Quartet. Your 1997 Grawemeyer award- winning setting of Primo Levi’s poems, Ad Ora Incerta, features a solo bassoon, while in the subsequent Primo Levi songs you give clarinet and viola significant roles. They seem to be characterizing something strongly, as does the bassoon again in Voiles. Is there any symbolism to your choices? SB: The reason there is a bassoon in Ad Ora Incerta is my meeting with the American bassoonist Kim Walker, who gave the première, and was taking part in a summer music festival for voices and wind players just outside Manchester. Her agent at the time, Head of ENO John Berry, asked me if I would be interested in writing a bassoon concerto for Kim. The idea didn’t immediately knock me for six, as the bassoon wasn’t my favourite instrument, and for many years I never knew quite what to do with it other than use it in the lower timbral register of the woodwind family. I remember that when I went to meet Kim, I also met Brigitte Fassbaender, the German mezzo-soprano, and they decided what a wonderful idea it would be to write a piece for mezzo-soprano and bassoon, two timbres which are so close to each other. So the instrumentation for Ad Ora Incerta really grew out of the cir- cumstances. Yet once I knew that the piece was commissioned and that’s what I had to work with, it was wonderfully exciting to work with those two beautiful sounds, and to use them in many different ways so each movement has its own way of dealing with their relationship. The bassoon is predominantly in the higher register as well, where it has a wonderful sound. MM: How do you respond to the challenge of texts, especially those as intense and harrowing as used in Ad Ora Incerta? SB: Working with texts is a very different process altogether, and one difficulty is how to pace the text in time. One of the things I am very obsessional about when I get to the stage that I start thinking about music in a temporal way, is how to pace the ideas relative to the duration of the composition. If it is a 6-minute piece, the way that happens is very different from a 20-minute piece. One is almost controlled by the word. An example is the first Primo Levi poem I set, ‘Buna’, which provides the longest text. I was very aware of the duration of the poem – which to read straight through would take no more than 45 seconds to a minute – and how to structure the piece

in relation to those words. It was both a setting of that text, and at the same time a planting of that text into the context of a large symphony orchestra, and the solo bassoon and the orchestra as an emotional commentary on the text. That’s how that movement gradually opened up to last about 15 minutes. The most complex thing actually was finding the world for the text to exist in. One of the aspects of Primo Levi’s work I have always admired is his way of distancing himself from those terrible scenes that he experienced, a remarkable feat which eventually killed him, years later, as he couldn’t live with the guilt of having survived. To have written those poems on his repatriation to Italy, about a year after having left Auschwitz, is quite extraordinary, and it’s almost as if one is observing those words from a great distance. MM: In ‘Buna’ what is so effective is how you have placed it, and paced it, at the end of the cycle, as a climactic gesture. By contrast the second song ‘Il canto del corvo’ is completely shattering in its bareness, and without doing anything you suddenly manage to evoke the horror without using the full orchestra, but just with a sense of nothingness. So when you use the big climactic aura for ‘Buna’ at the end, within the larger structure of the piece, it gains greatly in impact. SB: The model for the cycle was Das Lied von der Erde, where you have six songs, with the first five of the same duration as the last one. So similarly I wanted the piece almost to grow towards ‘Buna’; I don’t think it could have begun with ‘Buna’, it needed to be the dramatic climactic point of the composition. MM: On a more intimate scale you do a similar contrasting reduction to two elements in the second song of the subsequent Four Primo Levi Settings of 1996. Can you say a little about your choice of the chamber medium? SB: My original idea had been to write a cycle for viola, piano and voice, which could be played with those wonderful songs by Brahms, the Zwei Gesänge, op. 91. It was only later that they said, ‘Well, why don’t you put a clarinet in there as well?’ I knew I wanted to write one movement for just viola and mezzo, and I think they work very beautifully together in the second song ‘Attesa’ (Waiting). MM: Apart from songs, you have composed several choral works, such as Eicha and Chants – can you say something about your use of texts in your choral works? SB: One of those is Herbsttag, based on a Rilke poem, which Primo Levi reworked. I set the Primo Levi poem first (the final song in Four Primo Levi Settings) and then I came across the original, which is an extraordinary poem, which became a composition for choir lasting much longer, 8–10 minutes. Eicha was a commission for the New London Chamber Choir, a group specializing in contemporary vocal music, and I decided early on to use very much the same instrumentation as the Stravinsky Mass, namely double reeds and brass, so they could be performed as a pair. I have always been fascinated by the text Stravinsky uses in Threni, and indeed Leonard Bernstein also uses it in the Jeremiah Symphony. It is the beginning of Lamentations, all about the destruction of Jerusalem. The piece was composed, coincidentally, around the time of 9/11, and those horrific images of lower Manhattan were very

much in everybody’s mind. Linking that with the very powerful imagery in the Lamentations, of the destruction of Jerusalem, I decided to use that text, sung in Hebrew rather than in Latin. What I wanted was to treat the text in two different ways, firstly fragmented, with certain words given to the choir as choral textures, secondly, as a gradual forming of the text by solo mezzo-soprano. MM: Do you think younger composers, your students, have similar aesthetic preoccupations? SB: We’re living in a world where everything’s possible and I think that’s really exciting. The younger generation of composers is embracing everything. I was very much in a generation that was immersed in, predominantly, the European avant-garde. That’s the music we were listening to when I was a student – Stockhausen, Berio, Boulez, Bruno Maderna: it was very important for us but we all had these hang-ups about 12-tone music and not writing octaves, and things like that. Times are very different now, the world is much smaller. Composers become aware of different musical ideas, much quicker than they did in my early days, actually. MM: How would you describe the current audiences for new music? SB: There has always been, particularly in London, the musical elite, publishing houses, critics, composers: you see the same faces. And I think in some cases that probably is not a very healthy scene. We don’t get that many people at contemporary music concerts! I think the numbers are dwindling, but there have been recent efforts to put music into different venues, which helps the music. Some of them I have been to are not ideal for contemporary music, but at least a new audience is engaging with it. One example was a wonderful concert in Spitalfields, for which a couple of my students were commissioned to write pieces for solo instruments. They were played all round the area, and the audience was taken on a walking tour! We started near Christchurch and finished at the Great Eastern Hotel, near Liverpool Street. MM: Is emotional expression important in your connexion to your audiences? SB: I think some composers have succumbed in the postmodernist age by going back to tonality but not really using it in the most interesting way. But I think emotion is a very important aspect of my work. In the Primo Levi settings it perhaps comes out more strongly than in some of my abstract compositions. I get incredibly moved by harmonies which have a very strong effect on me. But getting back to that point about the audience: I do think as a composer the most important thing for me is to take the audience on my journey for however long that lasts, whether a 20-minute piece or a 10-minute piece. I talk to my students a lot about how important it is to communicate, and so often the listener is not given an opportunity to get involved because pieces are not very well written. I am sure you’ve been at concerts when you hear a piece of music and you constantly look at your watch: ‘How long is it going to go on for?’ We as composers have our musical time, which is removed from ‘real time’, and I think it is very important to be able to take some- body into our world and bring them out the other end. I think

music that doesn’t allow the audience anywhere near it is very difficult to understand, to interpret, and to comprehend. MM: Are there groups you have a close connexion with? SB: Yes, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, who have played my works for nearly 30 years, and for whose 70th anniversary in 2000 I composed Scherzi. I love writing for musicians I know. MM: You are married to the singer Lynda Richardson. Have you composed for her? SB: I wrote Landscapes and Magic Words for her, which was premièred at the Edinburgh Festival many years ago, based on Eskimo poetry, and we’ve performed it a couple of times with Capricorn. MM: What are your current projects? SB: I am currently working on a very exciting project involving a narrative. It is a BBC commission, for mezzo-soprano, counter tenor, 8-part chamber choir and chamber orchestra, based on Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, which is the most wonderful and extraordinary painting.5 The well-known choreographer Martha Clark made a 45-minute dance piece from it many years ago which was recently revived in New York. The text for our Garden of Earthly Delights was written by a painter, who is also a very good writer, called John Ross. His angle is very visual. He loves working with words and so is producing a very interesting text. The painting’s Triptych structure lends itself to be drawn out and recreated musically, and I am very immersed in it, as you can imagine. It could be staged, and we are looking at ways it might be put on as a multi-media event. MM: Thank you very much for illuminating and deepening our appreci- ation of your music in its many engaging facets. We look forward eagerly to the new première, as part of your 60th birthday season, and to your future projects.

5 The first performance of Garden of Earthly Delights was reviewed in Tempo Vol. 67, No. 263 (2013), pp. 76–77.