Purposeful Listening 7

Fragile/strong

It has been a week of thinking about centurions. On Sunday, I was at Kings Place to hear Taylor MacLennan, Siwan Rhys and George Barton launch their new Feldman boxset with a lyrically flowing, flute-forward rendition of Feldman’s For Philip Guston. And then on Tuesday, I interviewed Pierre-Laurent Aimard for a forthcoming piece on György Kurtág – Feldman’s exact contemporary, but a composer entirely unalike in many ways. Yet both men intersect around Schubert (and Beckett, and the pianistic touch, and questions of duration), so I will have plenty more to say about that anon. As well as the Aimard interview, I’ve also been reckoning with a chunky programme essay to accompany this superb-looking concert with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Víkingur Ólafsson, which features works by and around Kurtág. Suffice to say, this has been one of those weeks where the ideas bound far ahead of one’s capacity to write them down. Watch this space; or, better, become a paying subscriber to get monthly excerpts from my book-in-progress on new music’s spectres of Schubert.

At the younger end of the scale, this was also the week in which the Ernst von Siemens Foundation music awards were announced. Congratulations are due first of all to Jordi Savall for being awarded the overall Music Prize for 2026. The Ensemble Prizes went to Canada’s NO HAY BANDA and Estonia’s Ensemble for New Music Tallinn, while the Composer Prizes were awarded to Bethan Morgan-Williams, Hovik Sardaryan and Kitty Xiao.

It was a great pleasure to have been invited to write a short profile of Bethan to accompany her award. I’ve been asked a couple of times to do these before – for Timothy McCormack in 2018, and for Bára Gísladóttir in 2024 – but in both those instances, I knew the composer’s work intimately already, and my task was really one of moulding that familiarity into a new and hopefully enlightening shape. In Bethan’s case, although I had actually written several short programme notes on her music (beginning with the three-minute Scoot, composed for the London Symphony Orchestra’s Panufnik Composers Scheme in 2016), I had no real familiarity with the trajectory of her work, or with its main themes or preoccupations. So while I was honoured to have been asked (with these Siemens texts, it’s often the composers who propose the writer they would like, so it really means a lot to get the invitation), I was also a little daunted. Bethan’s music is fairly widely scattered around the internet, and not always easy to find (her website is currently being rebuilt), so I started with an email to ask her for links to whatever she could send me. Very obligingly, she quickly pinged back a folder full of recordings, scores and notes.

As I familiarised myself with this body of work – a dozen or so pieces, ranging from solos to orchestra and large ensemble – a picture began to form in my mind of an artist both determined and uncompromising, but nevertheless elusive and still exploring. Her music is that rare thing – contemporary music with jokes – but it is also utterly serious. It certainly cannot be taken lightly, by listeners or by players: its surfaces may appear tough and rugged, but there is a brittleness to it that requires a complete giving-up of oneself to the task.

To help me get a fuller picture, I asked Bethan if we could talk about her work. Even though she was in the midst of completing a major new piece for Berlin’s Ensemble Mosaik (the knotty study in emergence and inundation, Digon!), she happily gave me an hour from her study, surrounded by pages of manuscript. Even more kindly, she consented to my posting that conversation here.

Interview with Bethan Morgan-Williams

TRJ: Let’s start with a bit of your back story. I know your father is a composer and a conductor …

BMW: He was a music educator. He was director of music at various schools. He studied composition thirty years before me at the RNCM with Anthony Gilbert. He is a composer, but he’s not a professional.

TRJ: And you also played a lot of folk music when you were young?

BMW: Correct!

TRJ: How do you think those two influences shaped your early development as a musician?

BMW: Well, growing up playing folk music as well as classical music meant that I was always improvising. And I could cross over between genres more adeptly than you might expect a string player to be able to, or at least a classically trained player.

My dad was absolutely my best teacher. I went to Wells Cathedral School from the age of nine, but still, my dad was my best teacher by far. If there was something that I didn’t understand, he was always able to help me figure that out, and quite quickly as well.

We think very, very similarly. So I guess he was well-positioned to explain things to me if I wasn’t understanding them from somebody else’s explanation. He was a massive influence. I remember when he got his first computer, and we had the first edition of Sibelius. For me, that was the equivalent of most kids’ video games. I couldn’t believe that you could sit down at a computer and press notes and hear them! And he really facilitated that early development, providing me with the tools I needed, I suppose, even if it was just some manuscript paper and a bit of encouragement.

TRJ: And then you studied with Gary Carpenter at the RNCM, and with Diderik Wagenaar at the Hague Conservatory. I imagine they were two contrasting experiences! Could you say a little bit about those and what you took from each?

BMW: I had quite a difficult time emotionally during my undergraduate studies, and Gary was very sensitive to that. We spent a lot of time drinking coffee instead of sitting in the room we were meant to be sitting in. Just generally chatting about the industry. He really prepared me very well for what I could expect after college, and he’s also been a massive support ever since. We still meet up for coffee or a meal here and there, and he’s been a great mentor post-college.

Diderik, he is quite a character. He’s quite a quirky person. We used to go to his house for lessons because he’s getting on a bit now, so he didn’t used to come into the conservatory to teach. But he was just a real gem of a man, really.

I suppose he taught me a lot about space – which I was already using in my music – and about the different types of pauses. He was really big on what type of a pause something is; it can’t just be a silence, it needs to have a function. Is it a bridge, is it a stop … ?

And then also getting me to think a bit more systematically about my approach to pitch organisation. Until then, I suppose I’d approached pitch content quite intuitively. I have perfect pitch as well, which probably influences that because there’s no barrier between hearing a note and being able to write it down.

Composition teachers don’t really teach you how to compose. For me, I’d say the music is what teaches one how to compose. It was more about confidence-building and awareness-building. Both of them made me more aware of what I was doing in my music.

TRJ: I first came across your music with Scoot, which you wrote for the LSO’s Panufnik Composers Scheme. I think that’s still quite early on in your career, right?

BMW: Yeah, I was just out of my undergraduate.

TRJ: That’s quite a steep entry into professional composing, as it were. How did you approach writing an orchestral piece so early on? Did your background up to that point help?

BMW: Absolutely. More my playing experience, I think. Because I had played in orchestras all my life growing up: I know how it sounds, how it works.

I had written a couple of orchestral pieces already at that point for the RNCM orchestra. I suppose I was excited by the quality of musician that the LSO brings. I just thought, wow, I can do anything. I remember expanding the string section into about twenty layers and thinking oh, this is getting a bit silly …

I had quite a lot of energy at that point as well, which comes through in the music.

TRJ: It’s a piece that’s got a lot going on, I seem to remember.

BMW: It took me back to the early Ives influence as well. I was fascinated by Charles Ives’ music as a teenager. And I think writing that piece, he was quite present. I think you can definitely hear that.

TRJ: Even though that’s only nine, ten years ago, I think your music has come a long way since then. I remember seeing the score to Gêmdis in 2020 and thinking, ‘Oh, this is a very different kind of music’.

BMW: You think so?

TRJ: I do. It came across as a lot spikier. Obviously, it’s a much smaller ensemble thing, so the rhythms can be more complicated, for example, and the counterpoint is more intricate. But yes, it struck me as a much harder-edged thing.

Maybe you don’t necessarily see it that way, but are you aware of a gradual evolution through your music? Do you see other definite breaks?

BMW: I’m really proud of that piece – it’s rare for me to be proud of a piece that’s now five years old.

I was working with Musikfabrik for a while there. I had a placement with them through The Hague during my master’s degree.

The willingness that the players there have to sit down with you and explain things, and really encourage you to take risks and be daring, a write-it-and-find-out approach – that was incredibly refreshing. It was really the first time that I felt that things were truly engaged with my music and therefore I found it very liberating. Gêmdis is the result of that.

And having more rehearsal time as well. Something that is consistent in my music across the years is that if its rhythms don’t line up, it completely falls apart. Which has often been to my detriment [laughs]. But I’ve stuck with it, and having the German rehearsal time and commitment from new music specialists – who are willing to give so much time outside of those rehearsals as well – that has massively influenced me.

The relationships formed during those years are also invaluable. I can send a question to any member of the ensemble, even though the piece I’m writing isn’t for them. They’re absolutely fantastic in that way. The best teachers you could hope for, actually.

TRJ: There’s obviously Gêmdis and Gêmdisyn that you wrote for the clarinettist Carl Rosman, but I think you’ve written a few other little solo and duo pieces for Musikfabrik players.

BMW: Yeah.

TRJ: Can you go into a bit more detail about how you actually work with specific players? What sort of conversations were you having with Carl, for example?

BMW: Well, in the early days, he quite rightly pointed out that my string writing was much more advanced than my wind writing, and that we needed to sort that out!

I think he thought, well, the more I can sort of coax this composer in the direction of what I find interesting, then the more likely we’re going to get some good results, we’re going to get some music that’s fun to play.

So that collaboration … We had a few workshops together as early as 2017. We’re still working together now. I’ve just written a forty-two-minute solo piece [Skyppan] for basset clarinet for him.

Obviously, with Carl being in Germany, a lot of the collaborative discussion or material swaps, let’s say, happen digitally, which does work pretty well. Carl is just so quick to respond to things, which is paramount to the composer. It makes a huge difference, because the conversation keeps up with the speed of thought.

TRJ: And what about ways in which your ideas evolve through those conversations and then through the rehearsal process? Are there points where you’re happy for the players to say, we need more of this, don’t do that … And then points where you’re like, no, this is how I want it to be: this core of the music is fixed?

BMW: [Laughs] I’d say I probably do have quite a fixed idea of what I want, especially by the time we get to a rehearsal. But prior to that … my PhD at the moment is all about trying to bring the performer more into that space and give them more influence, so I wouldn’t say I get too attached to materials early on at all. I want the musicians to be saying those things, and I want to shape the direction of the material very early on, if possible.

Carl has been amazing at providing resources. I’ve got charts and charts of sounds and multiphonics and things like that from him. And then, you know, I might be working with a particular one and I’m thinking, oh, can I do this with it? And I’ll send him a WhatsApp question. What are the other overtones hidden in this sound, for example? And then he’ll send me a recording back that day and then I can work with that.

So I suppose more and more, I’m working very specifically for specific players and specific abilities, and then also specific instruments as well.

I’m currently writing the piece for Ensemble Mosaik, and the clarinettist plays a German system clarinet, which is a total minefield. And it’s like starting all over again. But for me, I’d rather I’d rather be discovering materials than working with things that I’m already familiar with.

TRJ: So very often – like that conversation with Carl – you’re being pulled slightly out of your comfort zone. And that’s the point when your imagination gets engaged.

BMW: Yeah, exactly. And to keep the interest up for me as well, I’m not always trying to write the best, most convincing piece. Of course, that’s part of it; you want to make it coherent, you want it to have an identity and these sorts of things. But ultimately, I’m hoping to push what I can do out of my comfort zone to see what I can discover and what new direction that material can take. Because that’s much more interesting for me than relying on things that I’m already familiar with and simply putting them together.

My voice is still very, very much developing in that sense because every piece is different, every piece I start with a completely different approach, a completely different way in. And I’m always looking to include materials or techniques that I’ve not worked with before. I have no idea if this will continue forever or if at some point I’ll be, ‘Okay, right, I’m doing that’! I rather hope that doesn’t happen because, as I say, I think I’d get bored.

TRJ: I recognise that in my own work. I can write a 400-word programme note on almost anything, but I’d rather do one on a piece that I don’t understand at the beginning, and then we can find out what it means.

You mentioned Carl showing you multiphonics and other extended techniques, but actually, one thing I’m struck by about your music – at least your music so far – is that you don’t make a lot of use of unusual playing techniques. There’s some microtonal stuff in your recent music. But in general, you’re an unusually equal-temperament, pitch-based composer. Presumably that’s a choice, but what is the value for you in staying within a pitch-based environment?

BMW: I think for me, it’s probably the most present parameter.

I wrote this down the other day …

[After sifting through some papers on her desk, Bethan can’t find the one she is looking for. She sends it to me later by email. It reads: ‘Articulating a route through pitch rows’. And she explains to me that for her, this ‘resonates with Tim Ingold’s idea of lines as pathways of becoming, where movement unfolds through continuous attention rather than predetermined structure. Likewise, it aligns with Miyazaki’s method of hope, in which direction emerges through an ongoing, open-ended engagement with possibilities rather than through fixed goals. In both frameworks, as in my composition, form arises from the act of navigating – feeling one’s way forward – rather than imposing a rigid design from the outset.’]

Perhaps I can answer your question more in terms of what I’m trying not to do, because I’m so fed up with hearing all these gimmicks. You know, like string glissandi. Yeah, okay, we know that they can be … I think perhaps it’s time to move through that and find a way of incorporating them structurally rather than falling back on these things as colouristic effects.

So much of the music I hear I just think, ‘Okay, great, loads of effects, but where’s the music?’ And I’ve always been very conscious of that criticism myself. So I don’t want to do that. If I’m going to introduce, let’s say non-pitched elements or things that sit outside of what you usually expect an instrument to do, then it needs to be important structurally. So I’m very careful about how I do this, and I hope I don’t fall back on gimmicky tricks.

TRJ: It puts you in unusual company. The comparisons that come to mind are composers like Finnissy or Ferneyhough, whose music is obviously different from yours, but it’s quite a select group of composers that don’t go down that noisy route.

BMW: It’s not fashionable, I would say, but I think perhaps it will be again soon!

TRJ: You mentioned earlier about Wagenaar nudging you to think more procedurally about your pitched materials and less intuitively. Are you using systems to generate pitches? How are you manipulating those materials?

BMW: I work with pitch rows, but that doesn’t mean that there need to be twelve pitches, and it doesn’t mean there’s no repetition. There’s no direct repetition. There’s hardly ever a direct repetition of a pitch in my music.

I have completely different ways of organising things. I recently acquired a piano, as I had not had a piano for ages – I just write with my pencil. And I’m really enjoying being able to sit down with one voice of material and add a voice at the time – just by ear again – it’s really refreshing.

But I analyse what I’ve already done in order to continue working in the same way. So if something has already been harmonised, that offers a lot of potential for other ways of harmonising it or realising it. I’m quite conscious of economy of material within what I’m doing, even though it might not look like that. Once I have made, let’s say, a fifth or a sixth of the material for the piece, the rest is going to come entirely from that fifth or sixth that already exists. I’ll be trying to find other ways of presenting material, sure, but also during the piece, I’m wondering how I can make this material more like itself. Which means often, something will start with maybe a lot going on, but the material threads are not consolidated. Then gradually, as the piece goes on, they become more coherent, they’ve become more like themselves. To a certain degree, there’s an element of the creative process left in the piece itself, which can be quite satisfying for the listener, I think.

TRJ: That happens on a large scale with the BCMG piece, ILDIO; that’s the structure of that piece.

BMW: Yes. Which is perhaps where things are going now. I’m finally starting to find a purpose for my music rather than the music itself. Because I’ve always struggled with the question: what kind of music do you write, what’s it about? I hate that question. It’s not about anything. It’s about music. It’s music about music.

Perhaps that’s a bit of a cop-out. I had a lesson with Chaya Czernowin in Darmstadt in 2023. It was an incredibly pivotal moment, actually. There were tears [laughs]. One of the things she said to me was, ‘You need to stop being a good girl. It’s time to stop trying to please everybody.’ And she said – not in these words exactly, but she essentially said – that’s a cop out. You need to have an answer to these questions. And the next couple of years are going to be quite uncomfortable for you now that I have told you this. You need to stop being so stubborn that the piece is about music.

I suppose in my twenties – I’m thirty-three now – I was content with the idea that providing depth for people’s lives was enough of a purpose for music. Whereas now I’m looking to draw a bit more on my own experiences, and to offer a bit more of a comment on what it feels like to be alive today.

TRJ: I’ve noticed that quite a few of your recent pieces – ILDIO, Gormod, one or two others – start from or explore quite extreme states of perception or emotion. You have the confusion at the start of ILDIO, say, or the defiant resilience that runs through Gormod.

What is the impulse to put that into the music? Is it coming from this place of trying to find a purpose, would you say? And also, that idea of trying to speak maybe slightly more personally, from experience.

BMW: Yes, I think so. When I had the idea of what I was going to do ILDIO, I was really excited by that, it just seems obvious.

One of the very first things Gary said to me in Manchester was, you need to have a foreground and a background at all times. You can’t be doing all these different things at once. And at that time, my music was quite a lot like ILDIO, or Ives, in that it had several threads of foreground. And I suppose I understood after my time with Gary that it wasn’t reasonable to expect people to be able to put up with this – both players and listeners. I had many failed attempts at it, I would say, as well.

But then recently I thought, hang on a minute, let’s think back to what I really enjoyed doing then. Why can’t I do this? I’ve also become much more focused on process than outcome, perhaps because I take a lot of risks and I’m more interested in finding out what something can do than trying to make it sound good. And that’s my motivation: what else can this material do? And that can carry me through months [laughs]. Months and months!

But I’m also drawing on my own experience of the world. I find twenty-first-century life incredibly overwhelming. I don’t like being in crowded places or places that are overstimulating. I can’t deal with flashing lights – which seem to be coming more and more into my industry. And I suppose I thought, well, I think I can combine these things and show people what it feels like to be somebody who gets very overwhelmed very easily.

TRJ Yes.

BMW: And with ILDIO, there are several prongs to it because it genuinely does sound like what it sounds like in my head when I lie down to go to bed at night. There are just so many different types of material or different areas of my life that are present and fighting for my attention. I’m sure that many people have this experience. Life is too busy now, and I don’t think many people have quiet space in their brains. They need to rest. So I suppose I’m looking to comment on that.

Some people – like my tennis coach, for example, who went and listened to ILDIO – she’s completely the opposite. She actually doesn’t have any noise in her head when she sits down at night. But she played it to a group of friends whom I’ve not met. And none of these people are musicians either, which I’m really happy about, and they all loved it.

They all said, ‘Oh my goodness, this is me. This is how my brain works! I don’t have linear thoughts … .’ This isn’t really intentional, but I’ve had this feedback on several pieces now, which is that I seem to be doing something that’s approachable for non-musicians as well. The harpist who played Trying to Use Words has done it several times, and she has had feedback from members of the audience saying they found it really engaging, even if they don’t really listen to classical music.

TRJ: Obviously one of the features of ILDIO is the harpist with the megaphone, who seems to be voicing your internal critic as you are composing. And that translates the metaphorical confusion that’s going on in the music into very real terms. I’ve written down one of the lines she shouts out: ‘It’s not working. It’s not a draft. It’s avoidance with a time stamp.’ I just think that’s very funny. I really relate to that.

Humour is a big part of your music, I think. You once described the bassoons at the end of Scoot as having a funny dimension to them. What is the role of humour in your music?

BMW: That’s something I’m tapping into at the moment, because it is naturally a part of who I am and all my music as well. And coming back to the first question, it comes from my father. I’d say humour was very present in the house in which I grew up. And it’s also a coping mechanism. It has naturally always been present in my music, and I don’t know if it should be …

In ILDIO, I’m dealing with the creative process, and essentially, it’s a bit like inviting the listener backstage, as it were, and letting them into the creative process. But it’s also dealing with themes that are not comfortable at all, and yet the humour still creeps in.

It’s perhaps a way of balancing depth and making it more palatable. And that’s exactly what I’m questioning. Like, why do I need to keep making things palatable [laughs]? I’m not sure I do gain from it. I think I need to push through this. That’s not to say that humour won’t make any appearances as such, but the moment I think it’s wrong is when it is balancing the depth of other experiences within a piece and giving a sort of reprieve.

TRJ: That makes sense.

BMW: I’m not sure how much sense it makes to me!

TRJ: But your music also has this very confrontational dimension. There’s a description of yours about Devil’s Elbow being ‘not kind … but also somewhat farcical and sometimes even playful’. That combination of confrontational realism undercut with a sense of humour seems like a recurring theme.

BMW: Yeah, for sure.

TRJ: I also love the marking at the start of Gormod: ‘No forgiveness’, which also seems apposite. I wanted to talk to you about your use of texts within music. There may be more, but I’m aware of two different ways in which you use them. The first, I think, you’ve been doing for a bit longer, which is to insert kinds of expressive markings that are also little fragments of a story.

BMW: Dog in the Moon.

TRJ: Yeah, Dog in the Moon is the obvious one. Can you just say a little bit about where that idea comes from, and also what you want to what you’re trying to convey to your performers?

BMW: Well, often in rehearsals, I would find people asking me what sort of character or emotion they should be aiming for; could I tell them a little bit about it? And I’d be really struggling to do that because, as I’ve already said, it wasn’t about anything. And so I thought, well, what if I sort of pre-empt these questions and write something that’s a little bit poetic instead of the tempo marking, which gives the player an insight into the mood or whatever it is that they should be focused on.

With Dog in the Moon, it’s the first time there’s a narrative, like there’s a thread through the piece within the markings. It just kind of emerged, and then when I cottoned on to it, I went with it. Again, making it more like itself, because all of those directions were something to do with dog. And so a story naturally emerged, which also highlighted a little bit about the musical structure that I wasn’t really aware of until I had pinpointed with the text what was happening.

I don’t know that I’ve fully realised this idea yet. I’m still figuring it out, but I do find it very useful because players don’t ask those questions as much anymore!

TRJ: Do you write those texts after the music’s written?

BMW: During. Yeah, with.

TRJ: So it’s not that you have a musical structure and then put the text on; and it’s not that you have the text, and then you write the music to fill that programme?

BMW: It’s at the same time.

TRJ: The other way that I think you’re using texts, which I know happens in say, Devil’s Elbow, is using the actual text as a kind of source material, a way of generating rhythms and things. How does that process work? And was that just a one-off thing?

BMW: It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, I suppose. I thought, rather than relying on my ears, let’s take the challenge of forcing certain pitch relationships to work that have been arrived at by a text that the listener will never hear, or never be aware of. And I found it amusing that maybe in the future somebody might sit down and try to work out how I had come up with the pitches, and might therefore be unable to unlock some of the text that it’s structured on [laughs]. It’s not something I’ve taken forward. I think it failed!

TRJ: Okay.

BMW: But I suppose it’s sort of influenced by Bach and Shostakovich, those little motifs that are their name, but it was much more convoluted than just a little motif. It was entire conversations or phrases.

TRJ: But again, it’s starting out with a risk and saying, okay, let’s see if we can resolve this or survive it …

BMW: And I do that with pretty much everything. Like, okay, what can I use that’s not me to generate material or that I can then compose with? And the harder it is, the better, in a way, because then it’s going to require more of me as a composer to make it work. I suppose I just want to find out if I can make it work.

TRJ: That brings me quite neatly to Trying to Use Words. In your note to that piece, you refer to the necessary entanglement of meaning between past and future and between people – and this idea of a continuum between effort and surrender, which I think speaks to that idea of taking a risk and then seeing how it goes.

To me, that brings together several aspects of your work. I mean, ILDIO means surrender, after all ... And maybe it even goes back to your folk music background, of music being a collaborative endeavour? It inverts some of the more confrontational aspects of other pieces, too, this idea of kind of trying to connect people.

But it seems also that this piece is opening up some things for you. It’s the first piece that I’m aware of in which you have a vocalist …

BMW: I don’t like working with voice very much.

TRJ: … And you have much more instrumental preparation going on with the tuning. How do you see your work going on from that piece? I mean, has it opened up new things for you that you’re going to follow through? And how do you see it in terms of your wider work?

BMW: It was very, very hard to get going with this because there were several media to think about. And I was also given several themes to think about – one being interdependence, which resonates with me anyway.

Maybe we’ll talk about that for a minute, because this work … I hadn’t ever stipulated how a dancer should move, for example, and I didn’t feel I had the authority to do that.

So once I finally arrived at the text – I actually wrote several myself before realising that the Eliot would be perfect – I think the order in which things happened was interesting. Because I pretty much wrote all of the harp material before I wrote any of the vocal part. I had a few ideas, roughly, for what the dancer might do; I knew I wanted it to be quite angular, the movement. But other than that, I didn’t have much of a concept of how they would relate. I only knew that the space needed to be sufficient for there to be time for movement to evolve. So thinking about that other medium while writing the piece did affect the type of material that came out, at least the spacing of it, for sure.

That could be something quite interesting to take forward into another piece that didn’t even have any movement in it – allowing that potential to affect the direction, the time things need to be themselves, could be an interesting dimension to take forward.

TRJ: There is a lot more space in this piece than in some of your others.

BMW: Yeah, and I think that’s a good thing [laughs]!

It’s very difficult to write for one performer in two media [voice and harp]. The way I dealt with that was to have them rhythmically very distinct, and essentially never have them moving at the same time. But a lot of the rhythmic complexity is written into the harp part, not the vocal part, which makes the vocal part easier to grasp, I think, and it perhaps holds the material together in some way.

I suppose I’ve always been conscious of not leaning too much into narrative, and then here I’ve been given permission to do so. And it does work.

I really like the way that I’m dealing with rhythm in this piece. I like the fact that these rhythms all have to exist within a certain space. Each bar is the same length; it’s very rare that the bar length changes. And if it does, it’s usually silent. For bridges, as Diderik might call them. But then, for the rhythms themselves, I think I’ve managed to find things that sound very organic. That’s through using prime numbers, really, more than anything else. I think I will be using that again. In fact, I’m working with Richard Craig, the flautist, at the moment – that’s as part of my PhD, so we’re working towards a co-authored piece – and a lot of these rhythms are coming back in the flute material.

I think I like the fact that these rhythms are unlikely to be realised completely accurately, but what is consistent is the bar lengths, so there is a certain element of predictability or familiarity within them – reassurance, let’s say. But the way that they rock and move is very human or organic. Rather than being highly structured. So it’s opening up perhaps a bit more freedom for the player. That’s something I’ve been hoping to lean into for a long time, but unfortunately, I’m not very good at relinquishing control.

My ideas come to me quite … the material is very, almost over-articulated sometimes, and there isn’t much space for interpretation. And I suppose I’m trying to tackle that at the moment. Even to the point of perhaps leaving certain structural transitions to the player in the moment within a piece, and starting to incorporate some improvisation into pieces. But it’s quite scary [laughs]. I’ve liked this idea of giving the performer more agency for a long time, but in practice, it’s quite a big step, let’s just say that.

TRJ: Sure. But it’s interesting you say that because I’m thinking back to your very first answer, which was how, as a player who’s worked in classical and folk realms, you’re very comfortable with improvisation. And yet as a composer, you’re resistant to relinquishing that control to other performers.

BMW: Maybe it feels like it’s cheating a bit. That probably would have been my initial thought ten, fifteen years ago. Whereas now that I’m working with specific players, I’m aware of what their abilities are, and I know that before this piece has further life – with another player, for example – it is going to exist in some form with the person it’s written for. Therefore, there is a bit more capacity to introduce some of these elements. Of course, it depends on how many plays are involved as well. And on rehearsal time and these sorts of things.

I think I do perhaps consider the practical implications of what I’m doing a little too much. Things need to fit into the boxes that function well. And I think, unfortunately, that’s a result of being a musician in this country [laughs]. You know, the old ‘no ambiguity’ – that means that you’ve got less time for people asking questions and more time to be rehearsing. Yes, that’s great advice, but it can be very limiting as well.

But this harp piece is ultimately about sharing a narrative and about how the different media influence one another. My focus at the moment is very much on trying to relinquish part of what makes me a composer so that a player has a bit more creative input. So this theme of interdependence is becoming more and more relevant. It’s something I want to communicate because I believe we are through the age of the self. I don’t think any more good can come of that way of thinking. I think the more focus we have on diversity and these sorts of things, perhaps that might eventually lead to the diversity that we can’t see as well as the diversity we can see.

I think a good message for people who are struggling in any way, whether that be with the overwhelm of life or finding a parking spot or whatever it is, is that it’s not strong to be independent. Such a belief in that ableist ideal of being able to exist independently; it can be very harmful. Not that, again, I feel I necessarily have the authority to speak on such matters, but I do have my own experiences to draw from, and I can offer those to the world as an artist.

TRJ: Do you feel that that path towards interdependence is one that you’ve also found and pursued yourself? This idea of relinquishing little bits of control to the player seems symptomatic of a kind of move towards your own interdependence rather than towards – and I’m not saying this is you – but that composer who sits in an ivory tower and writes a piece and says, ‘Right, I’ve done it this way, this is how you do it’.

BMW: Yeah, there are still instances of me sitting in my ivory tower. But I’m hoping that that’s not going to be the case most of the time. And sure, I mean, we all grow up as kids and teenagers, especially, thinking we are already strong and immune to all the difficulties of the world. And then at some point, we realise that that is so far from the truth, and we do need support around us.

I would not be where I am today without my partner at times like this. He can make sure that I’m not cooking any meals or doing any of the practical things around the house, and I’m spending as much time at my desk as possible. So yeah, I really do believe that interdependence leads to better results.

Words elsewhere

On Feldman, I’m really happy with how this essay for VAN came out … there were also sleevenotes for Riot on Eden Lonsdale, Eric Skytterholm Egan, Kaija Saariaho and Bernhard Gander, and a short programme note on Lonsdale, Corie Rose Soumah, Anna Meredith and Alex Paxton … a programme note for the LSO’s premiere of Colin Matthews’ new Oboe Concerto for Olivier Stankiewicz … and sleevenotes for two new albums on Dacapo Records: a recital disc by cellist Alexandra Hallén, and Ælta’s recording of Adrianna Kubica-Cypek’s Månen for vocal consort. In addition to the Kurtág and Aimard items mentioned at the top, on my desk are also several notes for this year’s Aldeburgh Festival; a couple more for the Salzburg Festival; a short one for the Philharmonia around the music of Gabriela Ortiz and her Mexican colleagues; and my first contribution to the brilliant Norient publishing hub, riffing of the thoughts of Moroccan composer Ahmed Essyad.