About My Music .....

I read in the New Grove Dictionary that my music is unusually "eclectic". I query that word.

 

Eclectic sounds a bit like the manipulation of off-the-peg styles for their effect. What I do is very different. While my musical nature and creative psychology is pretty immutable, the imagination is engaged by seeking out new situations - just like the architect who is stimulated to original designs by changing usage or hilly sites.

There are many reasons to encourage variety in music. Firstly a craggy landscape is the natural outcome of the geological layers through which I grew as a Western musician - from song to classical piano music to the fault-line of modernism and beyond it; and then there is the widening musical environment of our times - rock, electronics, African and Asian and folk cultures. Then there is the pull of the medium, since the microtonal inflections of my string music cannot possibly be appropriate to my piano music, while the orchestrated polyrhythmic drumming of some of my piano music is no good for wind orchestras, whose timbre-led harmonies are inappropriate for vocal ensembles. Sometimes the special flavour of a piece is obvious, as in its use of African drums or Javanese Gamelan; but more often it is imposed from within, as a "way of hearing" that characterises each of the three string quartets, for example, in quite different ways.

And aesthetically, I can no longer support the closed form, the clear message, because contemporary life is not honestly revealed that way. So the music tends to progress from A to Z, balancing the probablities as it goes. In all, my own penchant for unpredictability (assuming the compliment is justified) is less surprising than the vogue for regressive tendencies in many of our contemporaries - or would be, were it not for the commercial imperative to commodify and therefore fix the product in aspic, so contrary to the condition of art.

For me, like many another independent thinker, every piece demands its own identity, its own space - however modest, however unexpected. I don't have much choice but to give it voice. When my listeners tell me of something special they heard and seemed to recognise even though it never existed before, That, and nothing else, is what validates the idea of art. If you have read this far, you are probably already possessed of an open heart, a lively mind and musical ears, so it only remains for me to welcome you to my music. It does not truly exist until it lives in the minds and emotions of the audience.