Benjamin Dwyer, 2013
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Musical Metaphysics and the Resonance of Tradition: An interview with composer Peter Fribbins – Benjamin Dwyer, 2013 BD: The piano concerto as a form has been enjoying something of a comeback over the past two decades or so - Magnus Lindberg, György Ligeti, George Benjamin and Horațiu Rădulescu come immediately to mind. Did you see your own concerto 1 directed by a desire to renovate the established form or as a continuum of a tradition? PF: In many ways, both of these things: one of the aspects I find fascinating in using old musical forms (and which I share with my old composition teacher Hans Werner Henze), is their historical, aesthetic and expressive resonance: ‘Old forms, like classical ideals of beauty, seem to me no longer attainable, but they still may be seen in the distance; they stimulate memory, like dreams, but the path to them is filled with the great darkness of our age; this path to them is the most difficult and impossible. It seems to me the only folly worth living for.’ (1963). 2 Through my use of these ‘received genres’ I find that, like Henze, I can incorporate my own musical personality and voice, as homage, commentary, renewal, propagation. This is of course the opposite of Helmut Lachenmann’s view, the commonly expressed modernist orthodoxy that adopting the old forms is some kind of ‘tautologous’ expression. 3 BD: Do you incorporate in your work any theories relating to the use of tradition in the arts? PF: British composers tend to be somewhat suspicious of compositional theories and dogma, and in some ways I see this as a strength of British late 20 th -century music. However, I am certainly interested in the metaphysical and spiritual through the ages: for instance my String Quartet No.1 ‘I Have the Serpent Brought’ 4 (2003) draws upon lines by the metaphysical poet John Donne from the early 1600s, just as my piano concerto draws upon lines by Omar Khayyám from c.1100. I suppose if I were pressed on this, I could say that for me there is also a metaphysical aspect signified in this act of using the old forms: it subtly acknowledges our own humanity, and our place in that continuum – after all, we all come from something, and then frame the present and future through our own presence and individual personality, and then go about interpreting and ‘realising’ that inheritance. In this way, the creative process is an isomorphic act; reflective of the way we use what we inherit, consciously and subconsciously. For me, the use of old established musical forms not only formalises that process, but also invokes and evokes resonances and expressive dimensions that I can then work with. Writers like George Steiner articulate something of this sensibility, although from the previous generation, so with rather different resonances: ‘It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility.’ 5 1 Peter Fribbins: Concerto for Piano & Orchestra. Recorded Brekalo, Servenikas, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (GMCD 7381, 2012) 2 As quoted in Music and Politics, Collected Writings 1953-1981(London: Faber & Faber, 1982) 3 Commonly quoted, e.g. Healing the Rift Ivan Hewett (Continuum, 2003) p.66 4 Peter Fribbins: String Quartet No.1 ‘I Have the Serpent Brought’. Recorded Allegri Quartet (GMCD 7343, 2010) 5 In Bluebeard's Castle (Steiner, 1971) BD: As you say, the Piano Concerto is prefaced with lines by the Persian Omar Khayyám (1048-1131) as translated by FitzGerald. To what extent did this external feature impact your creative decision-making processes? PF: The idea of the human continuum, for good or bad, is of course also very much part of the Sufi philosophy, its art and poetry, and is something that similarly resonates strongly in my music – albeit in a western European context – music which also seeks to be part of a tradition, a stylistic inheritance and continuum. The poem’s lines brought something of that sense of continuum more strongly into my consciousness, so the sense of unending journey, the unstoppable inevitability of the progress of the contrapuntal writing of the concerto’s opening, and indeed the length and shape of the first movement’s twelve-minute span, all derive from the intractable resonances of those lines, and particularly: ‘Lift not thy hands to It for help – for It rolls impotently on as Thou or I’. BD: Your scoring in the Piano Concerto (double wind and reduced strings: 8,7,6,5,3) would seem to indicate a concern for clarity and balance. Was such a reduction in forces inhibiting, and were your musical aesthetics set in new directions here? PF: My main interests in using this orchestration were twofold. Firstly, an awareness that all too often in the ‘great’ piano concertos of the past the piano is swamped by the orchestra, especially in its middle register, and I wanted to create more of a ‘concertante’ relationship in which the piano, and the individuality of the performer, could be heard clearly in the performance, rather than the kind of ‘duel to the death’, which you sometimes seem to get between soloist and performer in concertos in the 19 th -century tradition. Secondly, I suppose a personal challenge, which in a sense was a deliberate critique of the modernist tradition that is central to the generation of composers who come before me, was: could I write a large orchestral work that still had contemporary value and resonance without the mid to late 20 th -century extended techniques, instrumental doublings (e.g. bass or Eb clarinets, alto flute, cor anglais, etc.), or colouristic extensions to the traditional instrumental pallet (e.g. multiphonics, sound effects, unusual percussion instruments), which form so much a part of the contemporary compositional sound world. BD: So you distrust effects, colouristic techniques, extended techniques, etc., that take the musical material away from what you consider the more valid processes of melody, harmony, counterpoint? Intriguingly, your position here would seem to contradict Christopher Dromey’s ‘neomodernist’ theory, if I read it correctly. 6 PF: Not entirely, since I still feel there is great excitement, colour and energy to be gained from the use of some of the modernist mid 20 th -century techniques. But I do find, at least in my own work, that they seem insufficient to carry and articulate the meaning and expression that I am seeking. Let me return to Lachenmann again: in 1999, I went to see him in Dresden, and he seemed, momentarily, quite confused by my work, since its reliance on some of the older techniques was obviously so far from his own aesthetic. At that time, I deliberately sought to meet composers who would challenge me in some way, or provoke my thinking, just so I could resolve, in my own mind, that my creative path was the right one. Contradicting the rather severe image that he often seems to have in the musical literature, I have to say I found him to be respectful, urbane, insightful and supportive, and he seemed to make no particular claims for his own modernist path. Indeed, he was complimentary of my 6 Christopher Dromey, Prospects for Neomodernism in the Music of Matthew Taylor and Peter Fribbins (International Journal of Contemporary Composition, Vol. 7: 2013). own work, and than asked me, quite directly, why I had come to see him. I said I had an interest in incorporating greater colour and extended technique in my music, and that his expertise in this domain was well known, and he commented: ‘Peter, extended techniques are dead.’ He suggested I would be better back in England refining my own path, working through, and from within, my own tradition. He was also very positive about the burgeoning new music scene in Britain in the 1990s. This became, curiously, one of the most positive and affirmative meetings of my musical creative life. BD: Surely this is closer to something that defines your music and aesthetics, and especially the use of tonality. What might the justifications be of renewing a tonal system that was dismantled at the beginning of the 20th century? Are there examples in history of such renovation? Do you consider elements such as colour or extended techniques to not have sufficient weight to carry musical semantics? It all seems somehow to be underpinned by a belief that functional tonality needs to be reinstated. PF: I don’t feel that functional tonality needs reinstatement, since it never disappeared. In the mid 20 th century, as diatonic tonality mostly disappeared from western art music, it emerged even more strongly in popular music, and arguably to a much larger audience. Some of the more positive effects of post-modernism in art music, I think, derive from popular music (although superficiality has been an unwelcome by-product too). Its potency can hardly be ignored, and one of the interesting features of the popular music canon is that an almost limitless variety is achieved through diatonic tonality via the personality and personal signature of the artist. I should also say that in my own work I came to the classical tradition only through personal discovery at the age of 11 or 12, after having been brought up in a British household in the 1970s in which popular music was all that was played. So tonality was everywhere around me, with its clear expressive power. Then when I studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London in the late 1980s, the use of tonality, or at least extended tonality of my own music, implied something of a provocative, even polemical act: that is to say, in contrast to many of the stylistic orthodoxies of the mid-late 20 th -century lingua-franca in western classical music, musical content – melodies themes, ideas, harmonies, counterpoint and discourse – could still be centrally important, relevant and potent in our time, and that colour could be a secondary resource.