Chris Swithinbank

[…] and every at­tempt
Is a wholly new start, and a dif­fer­ent kind of fail­ure
Be­cause one has only learnt to get the bet­ter of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer dis­posed to say it. […]

— T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, Four Quar­tets

With re­cent pre­mieres by Dutch ac­cor­dion duo TOEAC, Col­in­ton Am­a­teur Or­ches­tral So­ci­ety, Man­ches­ter Cam­er­ata and pe­riod in­stru­ment trio Spir­i­tu­oso, 29-year-old com­poser Nina White­man has had a busy year, not men­tion­ing per­for­mances as a vo­cal­ist with her flute, voice and cello group, Trio Atem, whose most re­cent per­for­mance was the pre­miere of graphic scores by artist Michael May­hew at Man­ches­ter’s Whit­worth Art Gallery and who make their Lon­don debut in April at Kings Place.

You can cur­rently see and hear Nina’s re­cent Man­ches­ter Cam­er­ata com­mis­sion, Win­dows on the Neva, over on medici.tv [link ex­pired]. Scored for a sin­gle-stringed cham­ber or­ches­tra, the work is an 8-minute re­flec­tion on the river Neva’s in­ex­orable path through the city of St. Pe­ters­burg whose lucid tex­tures and well-con­trolled pac­ing re­veal a com­poser with a keen ear for both sound and drama. In the first of what will hope­fully be­come an oc­ca­sional se­ries of en­coun­ters with mu­si­cians, Nina has kindly an­swered some ques­tions about her music, prac­tice and fu­ture plans, so read on to find out what makes her tick.

Q&A

Chris Swith­in­bank: I re­alise that this is not a ques­tion that you prob­a­bly con­sider every day, but let’s start at the be­gin­ning. What drew you to write music? Is it a vo­ca­tion and if so, why?

Nina White­man: I think I was al­ways in­clined to being cre­ative with sound. I re­mem­ber start­ing piano lessons aged 5 or 6 and want­ing to make my own music to play – these ‘com­po­si­tions’ con­sisted of a se­ries of note names (A E D C and so on) be­cause I didn’t have any man­u­script paper. I also wrote pieces for recorder, and my bril­liant music teacher at mid­dle school would in­vent a piano ac­com­pa­ni­ment for them. So, com­pos­ing seemed to sit nat­u­rally along­side per­form­ing re­ally.

Is it a vo­ca­tion? I was al­ways in­clined to­wards cre­ative ac­tiv­i­ties, and felt from quite a young age that I would like a ca­reer in the arts where I could use my imag­i­na­tion. By my late teens/early twen­ties I’d com­posed quite a lot of pieces and knew deep down that com­pos­ing was some­thing vital to me.

CS: How much do ex­tra-mu­si­cal el­e­ments play a part in your com­po­si­tion process and how much could your works be said to have ab­stract ori­gins?

NW: Nat­ural phe­nom­ena, po­etry, paint­ings, and places have all formed the basis of ideas for pieces in re­cent years. I like to look out­side my art form for in­spi­ra­tion, and hope­fully bring some­thing in­no­v­a­tive and in­ter­est­ing to my music and the au­di­ences that hear it. My cycle of pieces for bass flute and var­i­ous en­sem­bles (The in­ven­tion of clouds, The mod­i­fi­ca­tions of clouds, Night Shin­ing) was in­spired by sci­en­tific re­search into clouds that ranged in date from 1804 to the pre­sent. I re­ally en­joyed work­ing on this pro­ject be­cause I learned a lot about the world in which I live and the sky I look at every day through my re­search processes.

As well as being a way of gen­er­at­ing some ini­tial ideas and bind­ing every­thing to­gether, these ex­tra-mu­si­cal el­e­ments may draw some­thing out of me that I would not have thought of if I was work­ing with ab­stract ideas alone. Some more ab­stract ideas come into play, but I’d say that the ori­gins of my pieces are al­most al­ways from an ex­ter­nal source of in­spi­ra­tion.

CS: With Trio Atem you re­cently worked with artist Michael May­hew in re­al­is­ing a three-part per­for­mance of his vi­sual work. This semi-im­pro­vised work pre­sum­ably re­quired a form of col­lab­o­ra­tive com­po­si­tion with flautist Gavin Os­born and cel­list Alice Pur­ton. How do you go about work­ing in this way?

NW: Re­hears­ing for our per­for­mances of The Alchemy Col­lec­tion was an in­ter­est­ing process, and as you sug­gest we spent a lot of time as a trio fig­ur­ing out how to re­spond to Michael’s ideas and in­ter­pret his im­ages. Each of the graphic scores had some writ­ten notes that ei­ther ex­plained the sources of the shapes/lines in the im­ages, or sug­gested prin­ci­ples for in­ter­pre­ta­tion, or both. We worked closely with Michael in the ini­tial stages of re­hearsal, so a di­a­logue was set up be­tween him and the trio and cer­tain shapes began to mean par­tic­u­lar sound char­ac­ters to all four of us. For one of the pieces we worked out a se­ries of struc­tural sign­posts in order to travel to points of con­ver­gence as a trio that we felt were ne­ces­si­tated by the score. Lis­ten­ing to each other and being imag­i­na­tive were prob­a­bly the most im­por­tant fac­tors in a suc­cess­ful per­for­mance.

CS: To what ex­tent does this type of col­lab­o­ra­tive work feed­back on your ‘solo’ com­po­si­tion?

NW: It’s a kind of lab­o­ra­tory re­ally: dis­cov­er­ing the po­ten­tial of in­stru­ments, and find­ing in­ter­est­ing tex­tures, sound char­ac­ters, and modes of in­ter­ac­tion be­tween sound­ing bod­ies can all feed into my own music.

CS: You wrote The mod­i­fi­ca­tions of clouds for your own group, Trio Atem. How im­por­tant is this kind of di­rect col­lab­o­ra­tion with per­form­ers to you? Equally how does your own role as per­former in­flu­ence your work?

NW: The mod­i­fi­ca­tions of clouds is based on a piece that I wrote for Gavin Os­born called The in­ven­tion of clouds, which I de­vel­oped with the help of some ex­per­i­men­ta­tion ses­sions with Gavin: I would take him some music, he would play it, I’d make changes, we’d talk about how it could go fur­ther/be more in­ter­est­ing. So when I came to write The mod­i­fi­ca­tions of clouds, I had some clear ideas of where to take the flute writ­ing. The ‘cello part for this piece wasn’t sub­ject to as much col­lab­o­ra­tive work, but know­ing Alice’s ca­pa­bil­i­ties and ap­proach to per­form­ing cer­tainly helped me to write it, and I didn’t need to worry about it being un­playable! As for the voice part in that piece (which was writ­ten for me), I was able to sing to my­self whilst writ­ing it, and of course knew the voice I was writ­ing for pretty well.

Being a per­former as well as a com­poser is re­ally ex­cit­ing. I know how it feels to per­form music, which I think in­forms my no­ta­tion in par­tic­u­lar, and I’ve learned to play a num­ber of in­stru­ments, so have a great sense of the phys­i­cal de­mands I’m plac­ing on the per­former.

CS: How do you con­ceive of sound in your work?

NW: This re­lates to the ex­tra-mu­si­cal ori­gins of my ideas dis­cussed ear­lier. Most re­cently I’ve been draw­ing on a lot of vi­sual stim­uli to gen­er­ate sound ma­te­ri­als: in my piece for Man­ches­ter Cam­er­ata Win­dows on the Neva I took a num­ber of old maps of St. Pe­ters­burg and traced the line of the river onto a grid of notes/pitches. I was then able to ma­nip­u­late these raw ma­te­ri­als to draw out par­tic­u­lar sound char­ac­ters by mak­ing choices about or­ches­tra­tion, pitch cen­tres, and tempo, for ex­am­ple. As well as mak­ing all these graphs and plot­ting se­quences of notes, I re­sponded to im­agery in poems de­scrib­ing the city by Anna Akhma­tova, where I was re­ly­ing more di­rectly on my sonic imag­i­na­tion – hear­ing a tim­bral qual­ity in my mind and find­ing a way to cre­ate it with the in­stru­ments avail­able.

CS: Com­po­si­tion can be a soli­tary ac­tiv­ity. How and where do you spend your writ­ing time? Do you have spe­cific rit­u­als, habits or spaces that stim­u­late the cre­ative process?

NW: At­tics. I com­pose most of my music in two spaces: the attic in my house, and the roof space in the stu­dio I share with my part­ner. It’s a com­plete co­in­ci­dence that they’re both in the roof, but I rather like the prox­im­ity to the sky and the strange an­gles, and feel both spaces en­able me to imag­ine freely.

And I drink lots of tea (es­pe­cially when stuck).

And I like to draw plans on huge pieces of paper, and then scrib­ble things on them.

CS: What pro­jects are in the pipeline for you?

NW: I’m com­pos­ing a piece for viola and ‘cello for Quatuor Danel, who are string quar­tet in res­i­dence at The Uni­ver­sity of Man­ches­ter. My pro­vi­sional title is Wag­gle Dances and I’m re­search­ing the ac­tiv­ity of honey bees (specif­i­cally the dances per­formed by bees to lead oth­ers in the hive to­wards good food sources). The pre­miere will take place along­side Lachen­mann’s sec­ond String Quar­tet on 17 Feb­ru­ary as part of the uni­ver­sity’s free lunchtime con­cert se­ries.

CS: What ex­cites you about being an artist today?

NW: The stan­dard of music mak­ing in the UK is very high, and I think there are lots of per­form­ers and com­posers of ex­cep­tional abil­ity, so there’s a buzz about my pro­fes­sion and a lot of peo­ple with real en­thu­si­asm in­sti­gat­ing mu­si­cal events and hap­pen­ings.

I feel both for­tu­nate and daunted to live in a world where tech­nol­ogy is such an es­sen­tial part of our lives: I’ve worked with elec­tron­ics for a num­ber of pieces and can also see that tech­nol­ogy could play more of a role in my com­po­si­tional processes, so I feel the 21st cen­tury is an ex­cit­ing place to be in that sense.

I’m also re­ally en­joy­ing work­ing in the com­mu­nity and in ed­u­ca­tion on one-off pro­jects or through reg­u­lar teach­ing. It’s so im­por­tant to stay con­nected with peo­ple around you, par­tic­u­larly as com­posers spend a lot of time on their own!

Links

• Nina White­man’s web­site
• Nina White­man on My­space
• Nina White­man on Sound­Cloud
• Trio Atem on Sound­Cloud

The bian­nual MANTIS Fes­ti­val at the Uni­ver­sity of Man­ches­ter pre­sents fixed media works and works with live elec­tron­ics, per­form­ing these over a large sound dif­fu­sion sys­tem that com­prises around 40 loud­speak­ers. The con­certs over the Hal­loween week­end show­cased the work of stu­dents at the uni­ver­sity, that of in­vited guest com­posers and in­cluded the first col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween MANTIS and the uni­ver­sity’s newly ap­pointed Con­tem­po­rary En­sem­ble in Res­i­dence Psap­pha.

As often at these fes­ti­vals, it was stu­dent works that stood out. The dron­ing, care­lessly as­sem­bled am­bi­ence of Do­minique Bas­sal’s fes­ti­val-open­ing por­trait con­cert on Fri­day night was quickly over­shad­owed by the work of stu­dents at the NO­VARS Re­search Cen­tre that dis­played var­ied but con­sis­tently crafted ap­proaches. It is not often that peo­ple laugh at the wit of elec­troa­coustic music, but Donal Sars­field’s Of Noise Alone achieves this with a lit­tle gen­tle sub­ver­sion. The work takes the sound of ap­plause and clap­ping as its source ma­te­r­ial and, as the au­di­ence put their hands to­gether, the piece seemed to reignite acousti­cally, briefly il­lu­mi­nat­ing some­thing faintly ridicu­lous about the rit­ual of per­for­mance and ap­plause.

Irma Catalina Álvarez’s Wind­sl­ley Street achieves a re­mark­able steadi­ness and long-breathed form as nu­mer­ous, seem­ingly au­tonomous lit­tle mech­a­nisms each fol­low their own grad­ual de­vel­op­ment. In stark con­trast to the ten­dency for a ‘whizz bang’, causal lan­guage, this work’s qui­etude and rep­e­ti­tion man­ages to never seem rep­e­ti­tious while never break­ing from a sense of steady pro­gres­sion.

The lat­est and longest work by Sam Salem, Dead Poets, fur­ther ex­plores his in­ter­est in using a spe­cific city or place as the acoustic ‘sub­ject’ of a work with a 20-minute, 4-part re­flec­tion on New York. Per­haps Mor­ton Feld­man’s title ‘The viola in my life’ — much loved by Hel­mut Lachen­mann — should be adapted to this kind of work. Far from being a por­trait or doc­u­men­tary of New York this work is per­haps ‘New York in my life’. Again wit was in ev­i­dence as the story of a tramp un­folds to end with his sorry pro­tag­o­nist being told to ‘Go fuck your­self’. Some re­mark­able, omi­nous sounds taken of the wind howl­ing through the shut­tered and derelict fair­ground rides of Coney Is­land com­ple­mented more fa­mil­iar sounds like sub­way trains in what seemed an al­to­gether darker work than its ex­cel­lent pre­de­ces­sor Pub­lic Bod­ies.

As well as other stu­dent works by Oliver Car­man, Mark Pilk­ing­ton, Josh Kopeček and Richard Scott, we were given the chance to hear El Es­pejo de Ali­cia by 47-year-old Chilean com­poser Fed­erico Schu­macher. Sub­ject of a — by all ac­counts ex­cel­lent — por­trait con­cert at this year’s Fes­ti­val Acous­ma­tique In­ter­na­tional in Brus­sels, Schu­macher is not some­one I had come across be­fore, but this work was crisp, del­i­cate and ten­der, ex­hibit­ing both the tech­ni­cal pre­ci­sion we’ve come to ex­pect of this music and — more un­usu­ally — an ear for af­fect­ing and mu­si­cal ideas. A lot of his music, in­clud­ing El Es­pejo de Ali­cia, is avail­able for free as mp3s here. I’d rec­om­mend a lis­ten.

Live Wires: Psap­pha & Mad­Lab

The Sun­day gave us a chance to hear MANTIS’s large rig of loud­speak­ers pit­ted against the live in­stru­ments of Psap­pha’s Tim Williams and Richard Casey in three works for per­cus­sion and piano with elec­tron­ics. Manuella Black­burn’s Cajon and Joao Pedro Oliveira’s Mael­strom are both ac­com­plished works — the for­mer for the epony­mous cajon and the lat­ter for cim­balom — but they were hugely (and per­haps un­sur­pris­ingly) over­shad­owed by Stock­hausen’s Kon­takte. I heard Kon­takte per­formed by Nico­las Hodges and Colin Cur­rie at the Proms in 2008 and found my­self rather ir­ri­tated by it — un­like my re­ac­tion to Grup­pen, which was ex­hil­a­rat­ing — but on Sun­day the work’s in­cred­i­ble, in­ef­fa­ble logic and scope re­ally drove home how short-sighted or sim­plis­tic much music for in­stru­ments and elec­tron­ics is. There is at no point a straight­for­ward con­cept of in­ter­ac­tion to grasp hold of. Rather, the three parts — piano, per­cus­sion and elec­tron­ics — are al­lowed to cir­cle each other, find­ing points of con­tact and drift­ing apart in a shower of sounds. This is no sound­world piece, it em­braces count­less sounds — with the pi­anist equipped with a per­cus­sion set-up al­most as large as that of the per­cus­sion­ist — and all the sounds co­ex­ist un­seg­re­gated. It is hard to spec­ify how this work holds to­gether. There is some­thing still very con­tem­po­rary about the con­struc­tion of meta-in­stru­ments out of col­lec­tions of per­cus­sion so that a sin­gle ges­ture can begin on a guero and end in wind chimes, giv­ing those sounds an or­ganic, phys­i­cal logic that some­how trans­mits to the acoustic. Casey and Williams’s per­for­mance was grip­ping to the last and it was ex­cit­ing to hear so clearly how im­por­tant this music is.

Sun­day evening brought the usual re­laxed fi­nale to the fes­ti­val, this time re­lo­cated from Nexus Art Café to Man­ches­ter Dig­i­tal Lab­o­ra­tory (Mad­Lab). After a se­ries of fixed media and au­dio­vi­sual works, we moved onto live per­for­mances with the cir­cuit-bend­ing of Ro­drigo Con­stanzo and Mauri­cio Pauly, fol­lowed by the synth and video ef­forts of Mark Pilk­ing­ton and Thomas Bjelke­born. Re­flect­ing Mad­Lab’s remit of pro­mot­ing com­mu­nity dis­cus­sion and shar­ing tech­ni­cal ex­per­tise, the evening ended with a pre­view screen­ing of a rough cut of Ri­cardo Cli­ment’s doc­u­men­tary film VIP Lounges Are For ALL about S.​LOW Pro­jekt, which he ran in Berlin this sum­mer and I wrote about here. A si­mul­ta­ne­ously hu­mor­ous and se­ri­ous look at the para­dox of work­ing in both aca­d­e­mic ‘cen­tres of ex­cel­lence’ and ‘low’ are­nas in Berlin’s can-do arts scene, the film poses ques­tions about the qual­ity of art­work and what con­sti­tutes value as well as giv­ing an in­sight as to how this some­what ad hoc, im­pro­vised fes­ti­val that in­volved around 40 dif­fer­ent artists ran. Here’s an ex­cerpt to fin­ish off with:

I’m very ex­cited to be able to an­nounce that this year I will be tak­ing part in the Adopt a Com­poser scheme, funded by the PRS for Music Foun­da­tion and run by Sound and Music, in as­so­ci­a­tion with Mak­ing Music. The scheme pairs up com­posers with am­a­teur en­sem­bles to col­lab­o­rate on new music and I am de­lighted that I will be work­ing with the or­ches­tra of King Ed­ward Mu­si­cal So­ci­ety in Mac­cles­field.

In the com­ing months I will be get­ting to know the or­ches­tra and work­ing with con­duc­tor Tony Houghton and my com­po­si­tion men­tor for the pro­ject, David Horne. This col­lab­o­ra­tive process will re­sult in a per­for­mance on Sat­ur­day 18 June 2011 at St Michael and All An­gels Church, part of the Mac­cles­field Barn­aby Fes­ti­val and the cel­e­bra­tion of the 750th an­niver­sary of the town’s royal char­ter. It will be my first work for or­ches­tra, an ex­cit­ing learn­ing process — quite pos­si­bly for the or­ches­tra as much as for me — and I’m look­ing for­ward to it im­mensely.