Steve Crowther: Can you tell us something of your background?
TA: I had classical piano lessons from the age of 7 but things really took off when I changed teachers at 10. Then I started composing at around 13 maybe (Sky and Mike Oldfield were big influences!), going on to do a pre-professional music course at Peter Symmonds’ College in Winchester and from there to York University where I stayed for six years for my undergraduate and doctoral studies in music. My supervisor at York was Roger Marsh. Whilst at York I became a member of Icebreaker and much of my PhD there was concerned with reconciling the post-war avant garde composers I’d been brought up on with the post-minimal music I was hearing and playing in the band. I think, in the end, I succeeded but it took a while!
SC: Can you describe the programmed works to us?
TA: Brontë Antiphons is a setting of Emily Brontë’s No coward soul is mine for SATB choir. The sources of the piece are entirely borrowed: I use music from David Power’s setting of the same poem (specifically the strikingly austere opening of his piece) and antiphons (plainchant melodies that precede the singing of psalms) from the Whit Sunday second Vespers service which recounts the moment that the Holy Spirit entered the bodies of the disciples. This moment in the Christian liturgical calendar seemed of a piece with the fervent language in Brontë’s poem. The antiphons are presented directly and with little alteration: we hear them as single lines, superimposed on each other and as self-harmonised (heterophonic) melodies.
SC: Do you write at the piano, do you pre-plan? Can you describe the compositional process?
TA: a bit of everything basically! I can imagine music in my head and spend time doing so when composing but I need the piano to really ‘get amongst’ my materials. If I use the piano too much though I can stop really thinking about what I’m doing and this can lead me down dead-ends. So, when composing, I’m (literally) shuttling between my desk and the piano. I pre-plan to an extent but I also work in quite a myopic fashion; I enjoy playing around with notes and rhythms on manuscript and in the last few years I’ve started using A4 sized pages for this which seem to give an appropriate frame and focus. I enjoy the process of starting from something that seems unpromising and gradually finding ways to turn it into music I can use. The risk with this approach is that the resultant piece can grow in rather uncontrolled, haphazard ways.
SC: Is it important to know the performers? Do you write with a sound in mind?
TA: no, I don’t think it is important to know the performers and with this particular commission I had no contact with the Elysians when writing the piece – which was fine! Sound has never been something I compose with and it generally tends to be a by-product of my interest in pitch and rhythm. That said I also work with indeterminacy frequently these days, setting up situations in which performers can (broadly speaking) ‘improvise’; I like, in such pieces, to leave the performers to bring all their impressive ‘sound-making’ creativity to the notation I have provided.
SC: How would you describe your individual ‘sound world’?
TA: It has changed a great deal over the years. If you had asked me this question fifteen years ago (which I think you might have done!) I’d have answered: rhythmic, motivic, lyrical, strongly profiled. At this time I might almost say the opposite although Brontë Antiphons does contain some of those elements; words like sparse, fragile, silence, textural and layered also come to mind.
SC: What motivates you to compose?
TA: Writing music is the best medium through which I can express my ideas about this art form. Composing is how I do my thinking about music. As a composer working in a university I also have to pick up a pen and write words fairly often but I am never really at my most creative when doing this.
SC: Which living composers do you identify with or simply admire?
TA: Impossible to really say – these days I will give any composer a go and I’m often surprised at what I like.
SC: If you could have a beer and a chat with any composer from the past, who would it be and why?
TA: From the recent past it would be Franco Donatoni (although my Italian probably isn’t good enough); I’d just want to know how he composed as I find his music endlessly inventive and joyous. Going back a bit I think a composer such as Orlando Gibbons or Purcell would be interesting – both probably very practical and, of course, excellent vocal composers!
SC: Now for some desert island discery – please name eight pieces of music you could not be without, and then select just one.
TA: This is pretty much off the top of my head: Donatoni (Spiri), Reich (Different Trains), anything by Randy Newman and likewise The Divine Comedy, Weil (Threepenny Opera overture), Cimarosa (any of his overtures – they’d cheer me up!), Stravinsky (Symphony in Three Movements), Elliot Carter (Boston Concerto)
The Carter probably as it’s incredibly witty but also makes you listen hard.
SC: …and a book?
TA: The one I’m currently reading – Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light.
SC: …a film?
TA: 2001: A Space Odyssey – a bit of a cheat really as it provides extra music!
SC: … and a luxury item?
TA: A bicycle.