By Sam Gillies
Andrew Howes is a Sydney-born composer whose new work Ichirós was commissioned by Richard Gill and Silo Collective for performance by the Alexander Youth Orchestra at the 2014 National Music Camp. Sam Gillies had a chat with Andrew to discuss his perspective on composition in the 21st century.
How would you characterise your music?
I’m very interested in the timbre of instruments. I love the fact that two clarinettists have a totally different sound – and to hear these two different sounds on two different nights, sometimes even playing the same music, is quite amazing. Another thing that I’m very interested in is the way notes function both as individual notes and as streams of notes. So I’m interested in serialism, but not in a Schoenberg, scary, second Viennese school way, as much as seeing how notes work in relationships to one another. Something that interests me a lot about the idea of composing is the fact that you have a wide array of colours and I think that every time I sit down to compose, I get very interested in certain colours and the way they work with other colours. And so, timbre, and colour, and pitch all work in a kind of symbiotic way.
You bring up Schoenberg and the ideas of serialism – is there an influence of the atonal in your music?
There is a lot to be said for the addition of structure, or the lack of structure, that atonality or serialist thought can give a piece of music. The most interesting thing, for me, is to work out a way to keep the rules in play. When you think about classical music – music by Haydn and Mozart – the rules are very clear. Often, it’s really interesting to see the composers break the rules. That can be where the interest in a piece is. By the time you get to Schoenberg, he felt the need to find new sets of rules and, going the direction that he did, first with broader atonality and then into full on serialism, seems totally logical to me.
What rules do you break, considering we are now in this post-serial, post-Schoenberg world, and how does this influence the creation of interest in your music?
I wrote a piece called Rothko, which was nothing but a cycle of 22 notes. They were in groups of three or six notes, in other words, in chords. The best bit in the whole piece, as was told to me by my teacher, was one chord right in the centre of the work. I later worked out that that was because I got the chord wrong – it was a totally different chord that hadn’t been featured anywhere else in the whole piece. I think that the audience can really tell, a lot of the time, what’s going on in a piece of music, whether they know it or not. After building an expectation of what’s going to happen, when something different happens they really do notice. So, I now sort of go out of my way to set up expectations, and then slightly subvert them.
The flip side of conventional ideas of tonality is the use of a more conceptual approach, whereby compositional decisions are based upon the intention to represent an idea in a sonic form. Is there any form of conceptual idea that has underpinned your work thus far?
Every now and then little bits of it do sneak in. Ichirós was based on the idea of resonating notes, and the beginning is kind of a representation of the sound that an echo makes. I did make it by recording some echoes and then finding out where the beats lay. But a lot of the time if I find some sound that I find really interesting, and use technology to analyse it, I don’t often use it. I just prefer the more intuitive approach, or even a more thoroughly structured approach of coming up with a set of notes and using those instead.
New music is often approached with a degree of trepidation. Is there a particular work that you would suggest we listen to that may help explain the phenomenon of 21st Century composition?
What I think it comes down to is the time that it takes for events to unfold. If you wanted me to answer the question with a piece of modern music then it would probably be Asyla by Thomas Adés. It might be a strange choice, but I think that the reason for that is the same as I would give for Mahler, which is that it’s a big work full of so many rich colours. If people could only hear the wealth of amazing sounds that are available, without having to listen to things that they don’t understand because they simply haven’t learnt how to understand it yet, it think that Adés is a good one to start with.
What has your journey so far taught you?
I’m finding out that being a composer is a really interesting way to spend your life. It’s difficult at times, there’s no doubt about that, and developing yourself as a composer is often heartbreaking but it’s also very rewarding. If you can find a way to support yourself then I can’t imagine anything more fulfilling.
Check out Andrew Howe’s new work Ichiros.
Image supplied.
CutCommon would like to acknowledge the Australian Youth Orchestra.
