Composition process: beginning a new work, working to a brief, preferred media, your favourite spot to work…?

Since I moved to incorporate music software into my process, in 2002, I have found the same practice unfolds with nearly all projects. I start a piece ‘on paper’, since it is an exploratory process… I can continue material ‘electronically’, but cannot invent it electronically. Overwhelmingly, I compose in narrative form – from top to bottom. I have in a few works started what turned out to be the middle, and worked back! But that’s unusual.

According to the above practice, I start near the piano – Tippett and Stravinsky needed the specificity of pitches, and if it’s good enough for them… but once the computerised score is up and running, I only visit the piano to ‘check’. I do so in chunks, for example passages where I need a second opinion on my harmony; and I revoice chords frequently, after consulting the piano. I’m a poor pianist, but have always thought of harmonies through my fingers. My usual work-place with a computer is looking out at rocks and ocean – an amazing vista, but a constantly disconcerting one. Eagles and otters are not inspiration but distraction…

Sense of place: does location influence the way you work?

There are positives and negatives about working always in an isolated, rural location, as I do. I can only believe in the process in such places: in a city the multitude of humanity engenders a sense of smallness, even futility, that overfaces me; composition faces so many obstacles already in getting played, and urban buzz for me kills the belief in doing it that I need to muster. However, being far away from all centres of activity means you don’t get to concerts, don’t see ‘the right’ people… and are easily forgotten. There seems no happy medium! A lot of nonsense is talked about composers’ finding inspiration from locations, but the way it works for me is that the arcane struggle of composing feels a worthwhile task in such places; only occasionally does it have a specific connection to a work.

Do you have a favourite set of instruments to write for… or a favourite structure to use?!

I have a deep obsession with outer-frameworks – ‘structure’ in that sense – which composers seem largely to ignore! The first thing we apprehend in a new work is not some motif or timbre but – how many movements it’s got, what shape it is… I go through phases… but most enduring for me has been what I call a ‘Russian Doll’ structure – a series of pieces that gradually expand the same material, or gradually compress it! We apprehend something differently as we approach it from afar, and that has fascinated me in a series of instrumental works with chains of movements, that are longer (or occasionally shorter) treatments of the same stuff…

What is the last piece of music you listened to?

I spend the whole time swimming in the musical soup of Youtube – from Led Zeppelin to the Missa Solemnis; the control you have as a listener, whether to music and speech, is really a delight. My most recent listening as I write was actually the complete Etudes Transcendentales of Liszt, one of the piano’s great mountain ranges…