One of the new works commissioned by Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival for 2010 is Naomi Pinnock’s Oscillare, for voices, accordion and tape. Oscillaire receives its premiere on Saturday 20 November in a concert by Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and Frode Haltli that also features Soliloquy, by hcmf// Composer in Residence Rebecca Saunders, and Rolf Wallin’s Seven Imperatives.

Born in 1979, Pinnock grew up in West Yorkshire before moving to London to study music at King’s College, followed by the Royal Academy of Music. She then moved to Germany to study at the Hochschule für Musik, Karlsruhe and has lived in Berlin since 2009. So far, the list of people who have commissioned and performed her work includes London Sinfonietta, Rambert Dance Company, Endymion and Rolf Hind.

For Oscillare, she collaborated with the poet W N Herbert to incorporate two texts into the music: the story of Erigone, the devoted daughter of the slain Icarius, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and a narration based upon an account by the daughter of a Muslim man who survived the Srebrenica massacre in 1995.

hcmf//: What made you decide to become a composer?

Naomi Pinnock: I started writing music when I was 13 or 14 and when I first heard it being played, it was a really nice experience. I think why I preferred writing music to, say, making art, was the interaction you can have with players. The whole nature of music is that you experience it in time and it’s often an emotional experience.

Did any of your teachers make a big impression on you when you were a student?

I definitely would say that Harrison Birtwistle was a big influence when I was at Kings. He was the first real composer that I’d studied with, so he was my first impression of what a composer is and what they can be. I liked his very direct way of expressing himself in music. He was definitely an influence and you can see that in some of my earlier pieces. Then after that, Brian Elias was a wonderful teacher. I learnt a lot from him. Obviously I was then drawn to Wolfgang Rihm through his music as well. The sheer speed at which he writes is impressive, and the way he writes intuitively; I really admire that.

Which works do you feel are milestones in your development as a composer?

The first piece that felt like a breakthrough was a piece I wrote when I’d just started at the Academy, called Obstinare. It was a really short piece, about four and a half minutes long, written for the London Sinfonietta. The way I was thinking in blocks really came out in that piece, and also the rhythmical element, I was really happy with how I’d managed to get that to work, and just the energy in the piece.
I wrote a lot of quite energetic pieces for some years and then I wrote a very, very quiet piece when I went on a course in France in Royaumont, RE-sonare. That was the first time I’d written a really slow piece with lots of long notes. That for me was also a little breakthrough, to realise, ‘Oh yeah, I can actually write slow music’, just realising that the same things that you use in loud and fast sections can work in slow ones as well.

What are the main inspirations for your music?

Often for me the first ideas for pieces are non-musical ideas. With RE-sonare, I was thinking about a gesture, of stones being thrown into water and the ripples and how they intersect and carry on for a long time. I tried to do additive harmony, where you start off with something quite small and then you add more and more notes to it, using exactly the same notes, but spreading them out more. Expressing those harmonies in different ways was my way of understanding this gestural idea.

What do you consider to be the greatest challenge you’re faced so far?

I don’t think you ever really stop learning, and you shouldn’t, really. The biggest thing, and something that I’m still learning to do, is how to communicate the music. I write for myself; I wouldn’t say I had a particular audience in mind, so I am my first listener. And also you have to trust what you’re writing and to write what you want to write and not what you think other people want to hear, or what you think other people find interesting. I know that sounds a straightforward thing to do, but sometimes you can be too influenced by what the fashion is or what new music should sound like. If you want to create music then you have to bring something honest to what you’re writing. You can hear when somebody’s written a piece of music and it’s genuine, there’s something to be said.

Can you tell us about the origins of your hcmf// commission, Oscillare?

Originally I’d wanted to write about Sisyphus and his never-ending rolling of a rock up a hill and back down again. Then I changed my mind a little, although the basic idea of the piece is the same: there’s still this idea of cycles and repetition, it’s just the content, the text that has changed. I was really keen to see if I could have two stories, more fragments of stories, but to have these two elements working with each other. They’re not identical but there are parallels between the stories of Icarius and what happened to this man in Srebrenica.

How did you come to work with W N Herbert on the piece?

I met Bill when I was in Aldeburgh; I went on a course for a week and he was one of the writers on the course. We’d started talking about a piece that we could maybe work on together. We were exchanging ideas and I had this idea of nostalgia that I’d encountered from reading Milan Kundera. So I asked him to collaborate with me for a piece that I wrote for a project in Cambridge [Nostos]. I was really happy with how that worked out.

When I started working on this piece, I tried to put things together myself and I just couldn’t find the right text or the right form of words for the Erigone element. So I asked him if he’d be interested in that. He actually came up with a lot more text than I used in the end. I’ve done a similar thing to what I do with music: I’ve reduced it to the very bare elements.

Did you have any trepidation about approaching such a harrowing subject for the piece?

Of course. I’ve read a lot of the testimonies from the Hague tribunals and it’s not a decision you can take lightly, to use this text. These things can happen anywhere and have happened everywhere and anywhere. Reading it, certain phrases struck me that gave me an immediate idea of repetition. In a way, that’s why I decided to reduce the amount of text that I used of this part of the piece, because I didn’t want it to be about Srebrenica. Maybe it’s more about my reaction to reading this than anything else. These are the things that went around in my head when I read it.

That’s why I wanted to have this mythical element to it, because you have more distance with that, it’s a story, so you maybe don’t have the same emotional response that you would with something that happened 15 years ago. I did want to create a distance, but a similarity as well, that these cycles of violence reoccur again and again.

Click here to buy tickets for Oscillare on Saturday 20 November

Naomi Pinnock’s website

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