Discussions with
Dillon Interview : Abi Bliss
hcmf// in conversation with 2014 Composer in Residence, James Dillon To many listeners, James Dillon needs little introduction. From the boldness and breathtaking scope of his Nine Rivers cycle to the small but exquisitely formed Dragonfly, the music Dillon – winner of an unprecedented four Royal Philharmonic Society Awards – has composed over the past four decades speaks for itself. Neither will he require much in the way of presentation to audiences of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, at which he has been an innovative and stimulating voice since the first instalment in 1978. His appointment this year as hcmf// Composer in Residence follows acclaimed performances of many of his works at previous festivals, including his First String Quartet and Oslo/Triptych. Born in Glasgow in 1950, James Dillon moved with his parents to England aged ten. Spending his late teens immersed in the heady world of late-1960s rock, in his twenties he exchanged it for composition, embarking on a programme of self-led education that included acoustics, mathematics and Indian music. The works featured at this year’s hcmf// reflect his wide-ranging mind, from a new setting of the medieval Latin hymn Stabat Mater Dolorosa that incorporates Julia Kristeva’s feminist philosophy, to the hard-to-translate Greek concept that underpins the two-part Physis. And there’s a chance to savour Dillon’s 30-year collaboration with the Arditti Quartet as they perform all seven of his string quartets in one day.
“In essence I’m still a pretty instinctive musician” hcmf//: Your long association with hcmf// dates back to winning the young composer’s prize back at the very first festival in 1978 – where your prize money went to compensate pianist Keith Swallow for the demands of playing your piece Dillug-Kefitsah. Do you have any other fond memories of your work being performed here over the years?
ones which are a combination of something memorable visually as well as the meticulous detail of the performance. It’s something that has always concerned me: I think we underestimate a great deal how a concert looks. Often what you see with contemporary concerts is music stands, musicians ambling onto the stage, shuffling around, page-turning – things that constantly break that magical web. It’s something that I am acutely sensitive to, but which you’re constantly having to make James Dillon: I have many, one that immediately comes to mind is when Accroche Note came from Strasbourg to compromises over if you’re part of a mixed programme. Which do L’évolution du vol. I have a particular fondness for this is one of the reasons why I started writing cycles in the early ensemble because they pay meticulous attention to not just the ‘80s. It’s that Gesamtkunstwerk idea that I’m attracted to. quality of the music-making but the visual impression they give on stage and the way they conduct themselves. hcmf//: Why did you choose the Stabat Mater Dolorosa as the basis for your new work for London Sinfonietta and BBC Singers? There was a marvellous performance of the complete Book of Elements in a late-night concert in the Town Hall. It was a wonderful concert with Noriko Kawai, just a single Steinway JD: There are dozens of settings of the Stabat Mater, which I piano in the centre and the audience all around, with a magical suppose for me is part of the attraction. The way I’m looking at it is not so much from the point of view of its sentiment, it just feel about it. The concerts which stand out for me are those
Discussions with Dillon opens up a kind of imaginative space. On one level I’m thinking of it more like a Baroque cantata with its multiple movements, digressions and inserts. The Stabat Mater text runs through the piece, almost like a refrain, but there are ruptures in the piece too. I’ve always been interested in discontinuity as a form of continuity. Here I’m less interested in that and more interested in discontinuity for itself. Discontinuity as continuity meant for me a continuous multilayering of things where everything is so much out of phase that the experience of discontinuity itself is continuously subsumed; it takes upon more of a statistical, wavelike motion that feels like a kind of flow made of discontinuous microevents. More recently I’ve become more interested in isolating the discontinuity, allowing it to be. hcmf//: You’ve previously expressed opinions on how certain musical structures carry political implications; for example in critiques of minimalism. Can you explain this further? JD: It’s strange, really; I don’t have the same opinion of the now tired spaces of minimal sculpture or painting – these terms are awful anyway. What grew out of what was called at the time ‘systems music’ in the ‘60s was participating in something that I considered to be anti-art. Part of the function of art is reinforcing a kind of state of positive agitation. A lot of that music just seems to be to be much closer to the orbit of television culture than it is to anything else. It encourages a certain passivity. I’ve said before that I don’t like hypnotics in that sense, it’s something to do with a suspension of thinking. To me, art should open up thinking rather than sending it to sleep.
“Part of the function of art is reinforcing a kind of state of positive agitation” I think it’s burying your head in the sand to deny that there’s a political component to things like style. I’ve always found the whole notion of so-called style incredibly problematic, because it has always seemed to me to be secondary and derivative. It’s something that music theorists identify and label after the event. If you take the early to mid ‘60s music of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, La Monte Young, there’s always an experimental component to it; eventually by the time we begin to call it minimal music in the early ‘70s, it’s gone through a kind of reductionism whereby certain features such as repetition and permutation dominate. So repetition becomes the defining feature of a style. The experimental aspect has been removed; its internal vitality has gone from it. By ‘political’ I’m clearly not speaking of agitprop, or so-called ‘political’ music. I don’t think it’s interesting, in the naïve way that, for example, Cardew was working. Cardew was undoubtedly an interesting musician but I think his attempts to integrate his social concerns with music itself were naïve. hcmf//: What ideas did you connect with when you were growing up? JD: One of my strengths is something that I suppose could also identify a weakness, is that I’ve always been interested in far too many things. From my early teens a lot of things have existed
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alongside each other in my head. I was interested in multiple things: I was interested in photography, painting, I wrote a lot of poetry. Music was something that I just did for fun. Getting together with schoolmates and forming a band was part of my teens. At some point by my late teens I began to distil a lot of things into music. Music is a very technical art; it involves a lot of hours of practice and study; at some point I realised that I was going to have to do more work on it. But I was also becoming more and more interested by the whole relationship between music and subcultures. It just coincided with that historical moment in the late ‘60s. I suppose this is where my gradual awareness of the relationship between politics and music comes from. I was always fascinated by that transgressive moment and the possibility of it. It could have been any of the arts, but it so happens that music blossomed at that time, not just in popular music but also with people like Stockhausen. The idea of postmodernism really comes from the late ‘60s and ‘70s as well. I mentally – in an instinctive way; I could not have articulated it to you – really felt a resistance to this kind of supermarket-style mixing and matching. One of the things I become concerned about was the dilution of certain aspects of music. I remember seeing people like Hamish Imlach or Duster Bennett, who were never interested in selling records, but had this enormous power of performance, this concentration which was creating a kind of forcefield around them. I could see how quickly those things are dissipated when that forcefield is interfered with by commercialism. hcmf//: So you went to study acoustics... JD: I became fascinated by the sheer number of ways that one can look at sound, the ways we can measure it and look at how sounds interact. From there, the way that I think about music in general began to emerge, because I realised that time is a plurality, that it’s omnidirectional and multi-experiential and, of course, music is the art of time in many ways. So what I decided to do was a combination of that and – I didn’t know the work of Adorno at the time, but in retrospect some of these things are what interested him – a carryover from my interest during the ‘60s in transgression. There’s always a transgressive potential in
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Discussions with Dillon sound. I have been accused over the years of being engaged with Of course one of the things that you’re given licence to do when you write for the Arditti Quartet is that you know they’re a certain complexity but I think in essence I’m still a pretty fearless. It really is a truism to say that you don’t have to worry instinctive musician. about how difficult something is for them to play. So that’s already unlocking a degree of freedom. “I realised that time is a plurality,
that it’s omnidirectional and multiexperiential and, of course, music is the art of time in many ways” hcmf//: Although when you moved more deeply into composition you took a conscious step away from that late ‘60s realm of rock bands and LSD experimentation, many of the ideas in your work – heightened details, making connections, questioning the perception of time – seem in tune with a psychedelic mindset. Is it fair to call you a ‘post-psychedelic composer’?
hcmf//: At the other end of the scale from the intimacy of the string quartet, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra will be giving the long-overdue world premiere of Physis I & II at hcmf//. What can you reveal about these two large-scale pieces?
JD: I realised I was interested in the whole notion of a kind of reflection or otherness of itself. The form emerged into these two large, symmetrical parts and the title itself emerged in the process of working. Physis has various meanings within a very small orbit of meanings. It’s often translated from the Greek as meaning ‘nature’ itself, which is not quite the way I read it. One JD: According to Phil Lesh I am! You’re always touched by certain of the things that runs through a lot of my work is an interest in the pre-Socratic philosophers – for example, Nine Rivers was things, and it’s partly to do with the age you’re at when they based upon certain writings from Heraclitus – and I think a more touch you. We are heavily shaped in our teens. But I found myself to be an outsider as a teenager; even though I was part of accurate way of looking at the notion of physis is the notion of something becoming into being. It’s to do with the essence of this larger subcultural world that psychedelic world of taking trips and going to free festivals, reading the Tibetan Book of the something. Dead lay slightly uncomfortably with me. It seemed to me that a The subject of the work is never actually presented; what is lot of the people I was mixing with were no different from the presented is a set of variations upon an inaudible subject. So I people I was trying to get away from, except that they had long was more interested in the notion of how something becomes hair. from another. It’s constantly giving birth. The form then became something about the otherness of the reflection, a tension When you take psychedelic drugs you make weird connections; that aspect fascinated me because it was already how I thought. between repetition and change. The reason I walked away from that life, apart from being worried about my health, was because it was not something that hcmf//: How much expectation do you have that audiences will grasp the underlying structure? I thought I needed. JD: I think the bottom line is there has to be a sensuality of material where it’s immediate. It doesn’t matter what sophistication has gone into the organising of the piece, if you’re not feeling something, forget it. The actual ‘erotics of the material’ for me are fundamental. It has to have that sensual JD: I was fortunate enough to work with the Arditti Quartet appeal for you to get into deeper listening, as then you’re when they were establishing their identity. I met them in the early ‘80s and the last thing on my mind was that this was going motivated, or captivated, or enchanted. Our listening is not to be a long relationship. When I was asked by Richard Steinitz to uniform. We drift in and out of works. But I’m not a formalist in write a quartet for them, I began to think much more about the that sense, because I think there are multiple things that one’s history of the genre, and so the first string quartet comes out of experiencing in any work of art. listening to a lot of the Mozart and Haydn quartets. To me, this chronological notion of the history of music is nonsense. I don’t think things change that much. What makes a Thinking about the string quartet has stayed fresh for me in a great work has not changed. The notion of the great work is curious kind of way because members of the quarter have changed over the years, but with this ‘phenomenon’ called Irvine always a problem, of course [laughs]; is it still possible? But if it was impossible, I wouldn’t bother. Arditti always at the heart of it. It’s like a new planetary system each time, and one of the things that has been a constant is not only the ‘virtuosity’ but the ‘individuality’ of the players that Dillon @ 2014 Irvine surrounds himself with. My particular attraction to the Sunday 23 November London Sinfonietta + BBC Singers string quartet is in part to do with the fact that it’s this and pre-concert talk homogenous sound world, its intimacy and chamber music Monday 24 November hcmf// shorts: Diego Castro Magaš potential. Do you work against that or go with it? This homogenous soundworld means that you begin to experiment Saturday 29 November BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra: on other levels. Dillon Sunday 30 November Arditti Quartet: Dillon I and Dillon II hcmf//: Your association with the Arditti Quartet is nearly as long as the one with hcmf//. What do you value about writing for them?
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