BY SAMUEL COTTELL
William Gardiner crafts his own worlds of sound. Through influences from Bach to electronic music, the composer’s works inhabit many different soundscapes.
Born in Sydney in 1986, William studied law and arts at Sydney University while taking part in composition classes in the music department and Conservatorium of Music. He went on to study a Bachelor of Music at Yale University and is currently undertaking a Doctorate degree at the same institution, under the tutelage of David Lang. The composer talks about his recent works – and shares the three most important things he’s learnt from Yale.
How did you become involved in composing and what music influenced you along the way?
I became involved in composing when I was in high school. I grew up playing the violin and played in a lot of classical music ensembles while I was young. However, I think it was playing in rock bands that really made it apparent to me that music was something that you could get your hands on and create yourself. I was really inspired by a concert I went to when I was in high school which featured music by Alfred Schnittke. It was a concert by the Australian Chamber Orchestra featuring photographs by Bill Henson. A little later I delved into music by groups like Animal Collective, Sonic Youth, Do Make Say Think. I thought what they were doing was incredibly imaginative and sincere.
You started off studying law. How did you discover composition? Was it something you always did, or something that emerged while studying something completely different?
It was something I did before, during and after I studied law. I think I realised it was a really big part of me, and that I couldn’t be happy if I didn’t give it a chance—that’s why I started searching for music schools while I was studying law.
Why did you decide to study at Yale?
The main reason I wanted to go to Yale was to work with David Lang, who has been my main teacher there. I discovered the whole Bang on a Can movement, which he co-founded in New York with fellow composers Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon. I found out that David Lang taught at Yale, and that all three of the founders of Bang on a Can had studied at Yale under Martin Bresnick, who is still the chair of the composition department. It just seemed like that place to be!
What are the three most important things that you have learned there?
1. Each really devoted musician is a story unto themselves, and lives out a personal answer to the question: What makes art worthwhile?
2. Understanding music is not just about form and harmony. Music has relationships with language and with all other art forms which are just as significant.
3. Composing is mostly about having the fortitude to see your ideas through to their conclusion without allowing anything to cave them in along the way. Creating the conditions for this to take place is a huge logistical and personal challenge.
You recently composed a piece for Lisa Moore, ‘Little Room’. Tell us about how the project came about.
The work with Lisa is still ongoing—there are several other young Australian composers involved now, and I anticipate another phase of work on it in the near future. Lisa wanted to explore her Irish heritage and more broadly the issue of Irish-Australian identity. Lisa is known for her legendary career as a pioneering pianist in New York’s contemporary music scene, but she also has the ability to act/sing while she plays, which opens up dramatic possibilities. We’re working on developing an evening length performance involving spoken and sung text, Lisa’s piano playing, and electronic media exploring this Irish theme. The piece I worked on with Lisa so far has an electronic prelude and coda which I made, and in between Lisa performs a piano/vocal composition I wrote for her. Lisa wrote the text, and I set it to music.
One of your latest pieces ‘Hedgehog’ is scored for chamber ensemble electric guitar and electronics. It’s a kind of unusual ensemble. Was there a reason for this? What’s the piece about?
The electric guitar has a prominent part and in much of the piece. It is the ‘soloist’; ‘Hedgehog’ is almost like a mini electric guitar concerto. I think it fit the role partly because of its chameleon-like ability to change its sound, through its customary range of effect pedals. I did have some conceptual ideas that went into the piece. Maybe they helped me write it, more than anything. I think I had several types of music that fascinated me here: music that blurs the line between harmony and timbre (cf. Spectralism); very old-sounding note-against-note counterpoint; later, busier, freewheeling counterpoint; and heavy rock music. I wanted to do my very best to show the commonality between them. I was also interested in concepts like harmony vs. timbre, and purity vs. distortion, and wanted to do my best to elide these differences. This tendency towards reconciling seemingly incommensurate things reminded my of Ronald Dworkin’s philosophy (see e.g. his book Justice for Hedgehogs). That’s where the title comes from. At the end of the day it’s a piece of music, though, and I would like to think that most of the meaning of the piece is carried in the music itself.
As a young composer, you have this rare ability to draw on a wide range of influences and include these in your music. But we can still hear the ‘William Gardiner’ sound – is this something you actively think about, or is it a subconscious action to composing?
It’s something I think about a lot, but I wonder how much good it does. Often it seems that the things that identify you the most are things that you do almost subconsciously, whether through instinct or habit. I do think that ‘authentic expression’ is difficult these days in ways it hasn’t been before. Obviously the universe of musical ideas out there has exploded spectacularly, which is wonderful. But in the age of the internet, mass media, the ‘global village’ . It becomes a real challenge to find a habitable place in between the following extremes: on the one hand, just peddling clichés that fail to say very much about you, and on the other hand, just saying ‘I can’t deal with all this’, losing touch, and thus failing to engage with the experience of your fellow human travellers.
How important are composer-performer collaborations, for emerging and young composers in particular?
I think they are very important. Aside from the importance of understanding the technical idiosyncrasies of the instrument, I think it’s important for composers and performers to understand one another as human beings, too. Each takes a huge commitment and it pays to understand what motivates the musician in each case; what they care about. Something I would stress about the experience is that it takes twice as much time and effort to prepare a new piece of music. When a performer prepares a piece of music that has been done before, they know roughly how it will come out, and they already have some idea whether they like it or not. When the piece is new, you have to pour a huge amount of energy into it even get the piece to a level where you can begin to respond to it musically, even to know whether you like it or not on a basic level. I hope this experience will become more and more a part of the educational experience of performing musicians.
Any plans to return to Australia when you finish your studies?
I would love to. I am going to live in New York next year, but I hope to live in Australia at some point in the not too distant future.
Keep up to date with the composer at http://www.williamgardiner.com.
Image supplied.
