The following is an email interview with Howard Skempton (HS) conducted by Malcolm Atkins (MA) between November 2002 and February 2003 ( Howard will be running an open workshop in Oxford on May 15th at Oxford Brookes University ) :

MA (19/11/02)

Unlike many of your contemporaries who began by using minimal means of expression but have since expanded their techniques to employ a more extended sound world, you have continued to exploit the possibilities of an extremely pared down style. How have your attitudes to this approach and your reasons for employing it changed over the last thirty years ?

Aspects of your music seem to have evolved from a tradition which started with Satie. Of music that undergoes minor modification but does not develop in the traditional teleological sense of much from Baroque through to modernist work. Why is this a-teleological approach important to you ?

HS (20/12/02)

I concede that I'm still attracted to a pared down style. That comes from
Webern and Feldman, and even Britten as I see him. Cardew was infuriated, he
told me, by my fastidiousness, which is what it is. The fact is, that what I
put on paper is what I want to listen to. The lack of complication must be
due to a need to reveal shape or structure.

I admit that, although I toy with the idea of development in larger works,
my music is essentially contemplative. Feldman has written very beautifully
about what he calls the Abstract Experience (in an essay called "After
Modernism") and I suppose I aspire to that. The problem is that I write
accordion tunes, which are clearly not "abstract" - or are they? The aim is
a combination of immediacy and timelessness, and development is surely about
something else.

MA (07/01/03)

When you talk about your 'fastidiousness', was that denigrated because the
dominant motivation of Cardew and most experimental musicians of the time
was the exploration of process whatever the tonal outcome of its
instigation? Do you feel that the abstract can ever be explored in music
through process alone (except by a very lucky coincidence) or can it only be
discovered through the careful consideration of tone and timbre, especially
in a minimal or dynamically soft context ? Ultimately is the real break with
modernism the rejection of process as a deciding factor - in which case is
much of the music that was ostensibly anti-modernist (especially that of
early Reich and Glass) just a continuation of the modernist tradition in a
different guise ?

Can a piece of music be simultaneously abstract but derived from a clear
functional musical form? In the Two Highland Dances in your collected piano
pieces you seem to have extracted the essence of a functional dance form and
rhythm to create an abstraction (almost like the Platonic idea of form),
just as much as in other works you have created an abstraction by
highlighting a particular set of tones with no predefined template or
structure (September Song with its limited pitch set would exemplify this).
Apart from the resonance of the form from which the Highland Dance is
derived, is the aimed effect of the two approaches any different? Or are you
in both the Highland Dances and the September Song aiming to encourage a
contemplative state in the listener?

HS (11/01/03)

I think that Cardew used "fastidious" in a normal sense. He thought that I
was too careful, too concerned with perfection and probably unwilling to "get
my hands dirty" as a composer.

I see immediacy as a key to Feldman's Abstract Experience. Guston stayed
close to the canvas. Morris Louis poured paint over canvases draped in
various ways. He had the flair and judgment to devise a process almost
guaranteed to produce abstract works of great beauty. Cage was also
sufficiently disciplined to be sure of his results: there was nothing
careless in his attempt "to imitate nature in the manner of its operation".
Early Reich and Glass were no less experimental in their controlled search
for new experiences.

September Song is more obviously "Experimental" in its controlled
timelessness. I'm still astonished by Two Highland Dances. They were
composed almost instantaneously and reveal a rhythmic impulse that my
"fastidiousness" might normally have kept at bay!

MA (21/01/03)

Following your recent responses I have spent more time looking at your work
and viewing it in the light of Feldman's observations about music. It does
seem to me that Feldman was concerned to use intuitive methods (perhaps even
intuitive processes) to devise his work that stand in opposition to the
demonstrable processes that are evident in so much contemporary music
(whether open in minimalist works or concealed in modernist post-serialist).
It seems that if someone is concerned with sound as sound then the intuitive
process of discovering which tone or tones should sound for how long becomes
paramount.

Does this bear any relation to how you see yourself composing?

I feel that much of your music works - like Feldman's - at a pre-cognitive
level such that a range of tones is explored and repeated with no strictly
discernible pattern and structure. But the listener feels there is a unity -
perhaps because the broken symmetry of what you use is discernible outside
of rational measurement. This would apply to 'May Pole', 'Riding the
Thermals' or 'senza licenza'.

Does this reflect at all how you wrote these pieces ? Are there processes
that you use to initiate these works which like September Song are using
'controlled timelessness'? Or do you devise processes to guide your initial
tonal explorations ? Do you take conventional structures and repetitions and
subvert them or do you arrive at the irregular patterns of repetition
spontaneously ?

HS (02/02/03)

Sorry to take a few days to reply but these are questions of central
importance. The crucial fact is that I am committed to an intuitive approach
which means that I am inclined to operate initially at a pre-cognitive level
(your use of "pre-cognitive" is impressively apt!) and it strikes me that
there is a small family of composers - they tend to be labelled "originals" -
who work in this way (Feldman certainly, and probably also Górecki and
Messiaen (inevitably, since he "suffered from" synaesthenia)). In the case
of Feldman (and me), this goes hand in hand with a concern with "sound as
sound". Which comes first (intuitive method or concern with sound) is
difficult to say. You're right to conclude that a concern with "sound as
sound" should lead a composer to regard pitch (which includes colour) and
duration as paramount.

Early pieces of mine ("May Pole", "Riding the Thermals" and "September Song",
for example) owe much to Feldman but the sequence of chords was determined by
chance. Unity and broken symmetry were ensured through the uniform character
of the different elements and a careful consideration of the proportion
between the number of different elements (4 in "May Pole") and the total
number of elements (16 in "May Pole"). "senza licenza", one of my
"chorales", was composed entirely intuitively except that I made a decision
to use all 12 notes in the last 4 chords.

MA (10/02/2003)

I have phrased this last question on another aspect of what I see as the
core subject of the interview which is the nature of your inspiration to write
music.


In contrast to your works which explore a timeless abstraction of tones and
groupings of tones that we have discussed so far, a significant part of
your work seems to be driven by the construction of simple and evocative
melodic line, often resonant of folk melody. This not only applies to your
word settings, but to many instrumental works, such as Saltaire Melody,
Tender Melody, the Three Pieces for Oboe and Under the Elder. Much of this
cantabile work is still extremely pared down but it is inevitably linked to
specific moods of the genre or the words being explored. For example, Fire,
The Gypsy's Wife Song and the Tree Sequence all appear to me to be markedly
different in mood in a far more definable way than your more abstracted
works.

Does the inspiration for this work come from a different place to that of
the works which question a specific verticality of tones - perhaps being
driven by the communicative aspects of language as opposed to the resonance
of colour and visual stimulus?


HS (10/02/20003)


I used to say that the spacious, experimental "landscapes" led to the
chorales, which led to the melodies. The early melodies, however, are very
different from the later. Saltaire Melody and Tender Melody, for example,
sprang from the keyboard as "naturally" as Two Highland Dances. The method
was no less intuitive and the pieces were composed almost as quickly. There
was a conscious aim to "come full circle": many of these short melodic
pieces are cyclic.

The difference between the earlier and later melodies is almost painfully
clear when I practise a sequence of accordion pieces, as I did this morning.
Those of the Seventies (Ada's Dance, One for the Road, Summer Waltz and
Gentle Melody) were composed "at the instrument" whereas more recent pieces
(McMullin's Waltz was composed last month) are likely to begin with a line of
written pitches. This change of technique is the result of writing a great
deal of vocal and choral music in recent years. I myself wrote the brief
texts for Tree Sequence and the piano is clearly of central importance. In
setting "real poetry", however, my respect for the words and the need for
extended (rather than modular(?)) melodies leads me to work more
systematically. In most of my vocal and choral music, I begin by printing
out the text and working on the rhythm (usually additive - just crotchets and
quavers). Melodies may start as dots on paper but these are "shaped", and
the harmony "discovered", intuitively. The music is governed primarily by
the meaning of the words.

The techniques acquired through setting texts have clearly influenced my
purely instrumental music. What has not changed, and will never change, is
my intuitive approach to pitch and harmony. I was not surprised when a
recent choral setting of mine, written for amateur choir, was described as
"artless". To be anything else would be unthinkable!