PENNY BROADHURST & THE MAFFICKERS

Penny Broadhurst has a word in the ear of the composer and Artist in Residence of the Harrogate International Festival 2001, Michael Nyman. His new work, a fifteen minute orchestral piece entitled A Dance He Little Thinks Of and commissioned by Yorkshire Orchestral Consortium (YOC), was premiered at the Festival. It was performed by the BBC Philharmonic and conducted by Vassily Sinaisky.

You're obviously playing a major role in the Festival as Artist in Residence. How did that come about?

William Culver-Dodds (the Director of the Festival) invited me to become Artist in Residence, Composer in Residence, and I accepted. It's very rarely offered.

Is it something that you've had experience of before?

I feel as though I have in a sort of previous life, but I can't actually remember when it last happened. So this is actually very special, the fact that it doesn't happen as often as people assume, so William nabbed me before anyone else could.

As Artist in Residence you are working with young people. Is that something that is important to you?

Yes. It's something I haven't done before. I pay lip service to working with young people, but I never get the opportunity to do it. Paul Robinson, who I've known for a long time and who is heavily into providing new soundtracks for silent movies, is doing a silent movie project with young students and I see from the description that they've been influenced by me. I hope they're just taking me as a starting point and using it to find their own voices.

Is the new work, A Dance He Little Thinks Of, inspired by the Yorkshire countryside as it says in the programme?

No, it's inspired by the Cornish countryside… no it's not inspired by the countryside (laughs). No, when we talked originally about this commission, since it is being performed in Harrogate by a Northern orchestra, it should have a Northern theme. Obviously the Northern theme became refined down to a Yorkshire theme. Off the top of my head it wasn't going to be something that was recognisably of Yorkshire. I don't know the Yorkshire countryside.

I bought a new biography of Laurence Sterne, who wrote Tristram Shandy, which is a pretty perennial obsession. It's the greatest opera that has never been written, and will remain as such. An opera that I would have written. And it suddenly occurred to me that Laurence Sterne had huge Yorkshire connections; connections with York and various other towns. So it seemed an ideal way of providing the Yorkshire interest and something that actually meant something to me, rather than just making some kind of National Trust, Laura Ashley… worse and worse…

So I bought this book, and I started reading it and flipped it over. I was reading it obviously from page one, but I looked at the back cover and there's a quotation from Tristram Shandy, which actually since I haven't read the book for a long time I hadn't remembered. It is this: "when DEATH himself knocked at my door - ye bad him come again; and in so gay a tone of careless indifference, did ye do it, that he doubted of his commission ... Then by Heaven! I will lead him a dance he little thinks of." [this quotation actually comes from two different parts of The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy, volume VII - Ed.] So the piece, obviously, had to be A Dance He Little Thinks Of, and it has to do with a lot of my perennial obsessions.

It's quite interesting that there's another Tristram Shandy piece called I'll Stake My Cremona To A Jew's Trump, which is another kind of death-defying text by Sterne that I set in around 1983 to some death music from Mozart, Requiem and Don Giovanni. He always has this personification of death so there's this sense of personification and also a sense in which we don't accept death. The orchestral piece doesn't refer to anything; Cremona as I say was a re-writing of some Mozart death music. The two outer movements are dance music, and the middle movement if you choose to consider it as such is kind of death music - but there's no kind of programme that should really be followed.

Are film scores your main focus?

My main focus is not necessarily what the focus out there is. Film is a very public artform and in a way, music is not a public artform. We can go out and play to five hundred people or a thousand people. If we're lucky, four or five times a month, ten times a year. But The Draughtman's Contract and The Piano are out there all the time, all over the world. The whole mechanical reproduction thing is very important in creating its own publicity, so film has been very good to me. The orchestral piece is more representative of what I do than the film music, but I get more opportunities to do film music than orchestral music. Which is why I'm very grateful for this commission. Film music can look after itself but orchestral pieces and string quartets need a bit more fighting for and they're much more fun to write.

I like freedom, but not doing film music. There is a kind of masochistic thing with writing film music in that you do actually get told what to do - you know you should have freedom to do it any way you choose. No-one's told me how to write this orchestral piece, there are no prescriptions, except that the orchestra has to have a certain amount of instruments or can't have more, so I feel free.

You've worked with Damon Albarn and the Divine Comedy. Would you work with anyone else from the rock and pop spectrum?

I really enjoyed that. The two collaborations were rather different. The Divine Comedy I did work with, but they basically took a lot of my things and re-arranged them. Neil Hannon said he spent a very misspent youth listening to my music, but I think he's got over it now.

I did actually write a song for Divine Comedy, that was performed at the Edinburgh Festival three or four years ago which I think is rather brilliant, but I didn't allow them to put it on their last album because I want it - it's my music.

Damon… we collaborated briefly on messing about with a Noel Coward on a homage to Noel Coward album. We did a soundtrack together for Ravenous. But again, that wasn't a true collaboration because we basically worked side by side. He did his music and I did my music and I was sort of responsible for helping to make his music work as orchestral music. We never actually sat down and wrote anything together, but it's quite interesting that he made some decisions about instrumentation and certain colours he wanted which I adopted on mine. So there was a certain kind of textural osmosis I suppose.

Whenever I'm asked for lists of names, the lists are endless. I can imagine working with David Bowie. I worked with Brian Eno in the Seventies and I worked with David Cunningham for a long time. I'd like to work with a serious DJ and do some remixes. Then on the other extreme, last week I was in Italy and I did a somewhat spontaneous live performance of the main theme from The Piano accompanied by a tabla player. That was an extraordinary multicultural cross-fertilization. I may pursue that.

What do you think of modern electronic music, synthesizers and samplers?

There is some amazing electronic music from the Fifties and Sixties, people like Stockhausen. In a funny sort of way, given the amount of electronic music that has been written since the war, there have been very few classics. Classics are quite remarkable in themselves. I mean some of it was phenomenal but sounds old-fashioned now.

On the other hand, there's a whole younger generation, who are taking all those kinds of digital sounds and street sounds and transformed musical sounds and building them into new structures - but I don't think they have the same kind of compositional discipline that Stockhausen has. I suppose as a listening experience none of that really matters.