"I’m interested in the pacing of a piece of music; I’m interested in shifting tension from one moment to another."

For Graham Fitkin, composing offered a novel way for an eight year-old piano teacher’s son to escape what he recalls as, “Boredom with scales.” Some of the repetitive discipline of placing one note after another must have rubbed off on the reluctant student, however. Having so far encompassed composition for soloists, ensembles and orchestras; founding and performing in a variety of groups; collaboration with dancers and multimedia artists and a range of educational work, Fitkin’s music is celebrated both for its restless, driving pulse and its crisp, postminimalist precision. He comes to hcmf// 2010 with his new nine-piece ensemble Fitkin, in which he plays piano, and with an as-yet-untitled commission for Ensemble 10/10, the Liverpool Philharmonic’s contemporary music group.

Born in Cornwall in 1963, Fitkin studied music at Nottingham University with Nigel Osborne and Peter Nelson, “both of them good in different ways, very encouraging”, he notes. “But just as important as the two teachers was the climate at the university, the other students who were there. I happened to be there at a time when there were some really exciting composers around putting things on. We used to put on late night concerts of Cornelius Cardew and Stockhausen, experimental English music which I was very interested in, some Reich and lots of Cage.”

Already his interests were gravitating towards certain composers: “I suppose I do like things which are generally clear in their attitude. For instance, my preferences in classical music would be more towards Stravinsky and Bach rather than Wagner and Brahms,” he says. “So that carried through into my interest in 20th and 21st-century music; I was more interested in what was going with Cardew and Skempton and people like John Tilbury playing his piano music. Steve Reich’s music made quite an impression on me, as did the music of Andriessen, which I came into contact with at 18.”

After finishing at Nottingham, Fitkin moved to The Hague to study with Louis Andriessen himself. He found the composer’s forceful views on music helped him establish his own individual stance. “I think if I’d gone to him a lot earlier, I would have found it quite intimidating,” he admits. “But it was refreshing to have someone who had such strong ideas about what they did and why they did it. We’d have long conversations about why I shouldn’t be writing music a certain way and occasionally I’d argue with him about it. That was actually very positive.”

At the same time, he started to explore ways of working that would shape his career over the next three decades. “Just living in another country for a few years was very useful. I didn’t get so many performances then, but setting up my own group was incredibly useful and since then I’ve constantly been setting up ensembles for different purposes.” He adds, “At that time I was very interested in monotimbres, so lots of people working on the same sounding instruments, such as four clarinets or a saxophone quartet or even strings, because they’re more homogenous than a mixed ensemble.”

Returning to England in the mid-1980s, Fitkin founded the four-piano group Nanquidno and started writing pieces for up-and-coming ensembles such as The Smith Quartet, Ensemble Bash and Piano Circus. “For all of them I wrote pieces which were concerned with clarity, unison to some extent and monotimbre. Even with Ensemble Bash, which is a percussion quartet, they said, ‘You can choose any of these 132 instruments to write for’ and I chose four marimbas because I wanted to do that instead.”

What was it that particularly attracted him about writing for a limited range of sounds? “If I have a mixed bunch of instruments and I write even one chord for them, then your attention is drawn not just to the notes and pitches, but to the timbre as well,” he replies. “And that is very interesting, but often in my music I’ve been drawn to just hearing the pitches and making sure that they’re right. In which case, a mixed instrument ensemble would actually take one’s attention away from what I was trying to focus on. So that’s why I would focus upon similar sounding instruments – not all the same, but similar sounding.

“So it’s still very much in my head to do that, although nowadays slightly less so. I’m still interested in clarity and trying to make things as upfront as possible without any hidden sophistications and I‘m more interested in monody, i.e. single-line stuff, and trying to get as much out of that as I possibly can,” he says.

Over the years, Fitkin has also found focus and purpose in his music by building it mathematically around strict structures and patterns. The urgent, cascading momentum of his double piano concerto, Circuit (a performance of which by Kathryn Stott, Noriko Ogawa and Tokyo Symphony Orchestra was released on CD a few months ago) was created using a grid populated by five musical blocks which affect each other according to certain evolving rules. Although he says he has less need to map out a piece so precisely these days – “because I know what I’m doing a bit more, probably,” he muses – he will still write numerous sheets of text notes in order to make sure he has a clear idea of the direction before starting to pen notation. Yet he’s relaxed about whether or not his audiences are conscious of the music’s underlying structures.

“I’m interested in the pacing of a piece of music; I’m interested in shifting tension from one moment to another. That’s why I use those structures, such as diminishing or expanding amounts of time to create movement towards a point in time or away from it,” he says. “If you’re listening to a piece of music, I don’t expect you to go, ‘Oh, Graham’s done 10 bars there, then eight, then six’, but nonetheless I hope the end result will be that you’ll feel movement towards somewhere or away from it.”

Besides piano and orchestra, Fitkin has also used technology as a means to discover new, hybrid instrumental possibilities. He and his partner Ruth Wall, a harpist, combined plucked strings, electronics and digital manipulation under the name Fitkin Wall, releasing the album Still Warm in 2007 and performing at festivals, in nightclubs and at the Eden Project. His 2008 commission for Powerplant, Chain of Command, meanwhile, used a MIDI-compatible marimba, or xylosynth, to replace the conventional timbres with sampled syllables of politically charged speeches by George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.

“I’ve used technology to a certain limited degree for a long time, but I don’t have the patience or interest in spending days upon days mastering software,” he explains. “In Chain of Command I found it incredibly exciting to be able to work with cut-up samples of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and do what I wanted with them. I learnt that George Bush basically speaks in B flat, and that some people have much more variation of pitch in their speaking voices than others. I was combining syllables from speeches by Bush and Rumsfeld, but at the same time there’s still a harmonic language which is evident, because of the way they pitch their voices. So it was quite complex working it out, and I did spend a lot of time with the software for that one, but it was worth it.”

He continues, “I’m just finishing a piece at the moment which takes that idea on a little further, a piece for MIDI harp and orchestra, for the harpist Sioned Williams and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. I’ve taken similar material, not about the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib but more to do with political machismo, with statements by Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condeleeza Rice, and how they all had absolutely no doubt that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

“So in that sense I use technology and I’ve very happy with that. Other times, when I’m physically composing, I will either use a pencil and a piece of paper or a piano and paper or a computer and software. I try and use all of them so that I don’t get into a rut of composing in one way all the time. Using a computer does speed things up sometimes; it makes things clearer, but it can also get in the way because it’s easy to rely upon certain things with a computer where perhaps you should just rely upon your ears more.”

No-one could accuse the composer of not using his ears enough when it comes to performing with his ensemble, Fitkin, whose concert at hcmf// 2010 will see them airing several new works. “The sort of music that we play is generally fairly upbeat and rhythmic; I am interested in this idea of monody and that’s something I’ll be exploring with a residency we have in the autumn where we’ll be putting some of the new music together. There’s generally a lot of information involved in each piece, so that means there’s a lot of energy and stamina required of the players, and they’re very good at that.”

The nine-piece group features Fitkin on piano and Wall on harp as well as guitar, bass, sax, clarinet, trumpet and two percussionists: a combination of three stringed, three blown and three hammered or struck instruments that he finds particularly pleasing. “I’d worked with all those people before; some of them have worked together themselves and some haven’t,” he explains. “So it was interesting to put these people together and see if it worked as a group. And it clearly does, because they’re brilliant. They’re very positive and committed and they understand what I’m driving at."

Click here to buy tickets for Fitkin

Comments