Interview with Richard Ayres

Published in New Music

I'd like to ask you about the importance of memory in your recent works. Is it possible to distinguish between musical material that is, as it were, 'invented' and material that is 'remembered'?

This is a complicated question. Isn¹t the role memory plays in music is as complex as the part it plays in our lives? It seems a vital part of how we perceive our world, how we perceive ourselves and our relationship to everything else.

To try to answer your question: I actually don¹t see any deep difference between the invented and the remembered - I don¹t flatter myself that I am inventing something completely new to the world - I¹m just rearranging what exists - I think we are all busy rearranging what exists - playing around with cultural building blocks. It is how we personally rearrange our vision of the world, what choices we make or don't make, that leads to an interesting and personal musical composition - or a personal contribution to life. We are all unique human beings the results of what we arrange will by definition be unique - never before will things have been 'composed' by that person at that time. In music, something that is somehow structured in time (structured to help us remember?) we are dealing all the time with memory - people chose to do it in different ways.

I was very struck in the Noncerto for alto trombone by the clarity of the formal design of the work although I know from what you've said that this is not something about which you think consciously. Is pre-compositional formal planning something you used to do, never did, or did but gave up on?

I think it would be truer to say that it's not something that I worry about - it is, however something that I think about a lot when making a piece. My compositional system is thinking. I just think - listen and think. I feel one shouldn't underestimate the act of just thinking and listening - especially when structuring a piece - just thinking and listening - very powerful compositional techniques. My one great concern is awareness of what I have - what will it sound like when played by instruments, what does it do to me emotionally and intellectually, how does it work through time and so on. I start with something and it writes itself - I just try to stay aware of what it is, of the relationships it contains, and keep out of the way as much as possible. These days I try to allow myself the courage to let the music roam - if I wake up tomorrow and it appears there should be an herd of elephants running across the string quartet, they will appear.

Working process has always been of great interest - to systematize or not, to plan or not to plan - it has such a great effect on the finished product - any working process can work or liberate or constrain. Perhaps the only rule common rule is that of awareness, if one is aware of the implications of what one is doing then almost any working process can be productive. There seem to be some people that use complex systems or pre-planning because they have a joy in systems which comes across in the music - Tom Johnson or Clarence Barlow spring to mind - they both have a deep love of systems and their music displays this love in an exciting and prominent way. Alternatively, I have also noticed that some people treat systematic concepts as a kind of emotional shield behind which they think that they can hide themselves from displaying their human weaknesses. If people are scared of thinking about the 'why compose' they make a big issue out of the 'how compose'.

Your work is full of dramatic juxtapositions, right back to MacGowan. Is the recent 'opera' a development of this or a new direction? Could you say more about how a piece without words or singers can be an opera?

Well firstly I don't think at all about my music being dramatic - although musical performance is a form of theatre. I'm concerned merely with allowing the music to live, to gain life - it must be something which is physically alive in space, as sound in the air, which transfers to, and transforms itself through, the senses of the listener. In order to achieve this aliveness, the relationships within the piece must be clear - relationships between instruments, sections of music and so on - what is happening must be very clear to me as the composer, and I have to display this as clearly as possible through notation. Of course the 'meaning' will be completed by the listeners in their own personal and unique way, but they should perceive in some way that the piece is made up of certain relationships - I provide a sonic stimulus - that's my job.

The opera 'No.26 (one hundred things)' was a chance to bring to life something which had been bugging me for many years. You see I don't feel close to literature or rather the tradition of literary music - I feel that the two have nothing in common. I personally perceive music as picture-sounds. I hear AND see music - it's indescribable - a combination of the two senses.

When living in London I started watching and collecting people and events. An endless parade of characters filled every second - children playing, old people remembering, worried businessmen. This was for me a form of theatre - a private theatre with an ever-changing, unpredictable, and abstract story-line. A theatre without a text, but a theatre with a narrative. I define narrative as: the fundamental mechanism linking events in time through human experience. It was at this time that I began to realise that narrative and theatre could exist without words and texts - and I became attracted to theatrical forms such as circus, mime, dance, and film and yes, music.

For the majority of western playmakers and directors, 'theatre' is primarily literary - 'animated text' - and the great traditions of non-literary western theatre, or the theatre of other cultures in which the emphasis is not so strongly placed on text, remain at the fringes of European creative vision.

Most composers are no exception to this way of thinking - when I told people that I was working on a piece of theatre for the Maarten Altena Ensemble the question was always 'oh, what's the text' - I found that a strange and limiting presumption to make. Tarkovsky and Fellini were always struggling to free the cinematic image from the 'tyranny of text' or the script-writer - from the tradition of the book - I can sympathise with them. Music is rarely thought of as more than pitches and sounds, but the act of playing a note on the horn has a theatrical and a narrative power, and the violin section is fulfilling a narrative function as well as making sounds, I feel this is something to be aware of when writing music - a musical performance is in every way a three dimensional event.

The opera was actually called 'an opera of instruments'. There is in fact a singer who does lots of singerly things including singing - only without a text. All the other instruments are themselves as well (i.e.. the trombonist is the trombonist, not an actor, but a trombonist). I collect life. All my music has grown from what I've collected or observed; an old woman humming to herself as a car with drumbeat radio drives past, watching the fat trumpetist complain to his colleague between the phrases of a symphony, discovering players mannerisms or technical defects - virtually anything can find its way into the pieces I'm working on - they may be obvious or remain concealed in the final composition. I enjoy playing with the relationships generated by these very different materials - for me this is poetry - I think poetry is the ambiguity of meaning resulting from observed relationships - relationships which are completed by the listener or observer, and these can occur between any objects or sounds - it's my job as a composer to find a context. When Maarten Altena commissioned me to make an opera piece for his ensemble, I was very happy to do so - they are an ensemble in which the differences between players are part of the final product - and the personalities are not covered up or standardised, but contribute to the musical experience. I didn't feel like finding a nice story to set, a text to place on top of the music - I decided instead to take a closer look at the players and the ensemble and play with the relationships I found, musically and socially.

Should I call it an opera? - well - I don't think the gentlemen of early seventeenth century Florence would recognise it as such, but then would they recognise the loud and exaggerated squawking and spitting that also gets called opera these days? - probably not.

© new music, 1999