by Peter Oxley

Peter Oxley: Imagine you can take 3 composers to a desert island. You can bring all of their works, there's a record player and a piano and one of every instrument. Who do you bring with you?

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Connor Fogel: 1: Michael Finnissy. His music is so dense and thoughtfully crafted I can’t imagine ever listening to any of his music and not finding something new. Melody is the most important thing to me in music, and I love counterpoint as opposed to functional block harmonies- counterpoint in the absence of tonality excites me even more, and no one does this better than Finnissy. Finnissy also references and explores the music of other composers, art, cinema, photography, and history. There is a world in every note.

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2: Franz Liszt. One of the most progressive composers- Liszt’s music still sounds edgy today, particularly his late music which surely contain the first fully formed atonal pieces. As with Finnissy, his music is highly melodic, theatrical, and very carefully crafted, his piano writing is imaginative and dangerous. It would be worth bringing Liszt just to hear him play the piano. Also I dream of showing Liszt a modern Synthesiser and Rock music just to see how his brain would process such sounds and what he’d write with them. Such a progressive composer who sounds more modern as time goes by.

3. Difficult, no one obviously stands out to me. Probably Stephen Sondheim. The first writer of Musical Theatre to really specify what makes a musical work and what doesn’t- every detail down to perfect rhymes, half Rhymes, identities, every single word, punctuation mark, note, performance instruction is carefully considered depending on character and narrative. Another melodic composer, and some of the most harmonically adventurous music in Musical Theatre.

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PO: I remember you  talking about History of Photography in Sound. Is that piece important to you?

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CF: It’s hell of a piece. As with a lot of Finnissy, he uses complexity and density as an expressive device, and also sheer length and mass as an expressive device. It’s huge. And not just literally dense, but dense in every sense- it’s a network of musical and non (musical) references and layers of processing and developing, every note is packed with thought, ideas, everything. Just the title alone is packed. Although it’s a piece I’ve never played. Others talk about his music far better than I- the composer himself has given some fantastic interviews that are available online. For me his magnum opus- certainly in his piano music- is his early work English Country Tunes. Discovering that piece when I was 13 or so was like a damn bursting for me. Mind blowing.

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PO: I like how you would show Liszt new instruments and capabilities. Would you show things to Sondheim if you met him?

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CF: There’s nothing I could show to Sondheim. I’d be interested to hear his thoughts on Finnissy. But I don’t think there’s anything I could show him that he doesn’t know.

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PO: What are your earliest musical experiences?

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CF: I remember going to see the Lion King when I was very young and I remember watching the drummer, and really noticing how he was hitting the drums and the rhythms he was playing- I was about 4. One of the first films I remember watching was the Rocky Horror Show, which is still a favourite piece. I was bought a toy keyboard when I was 5, and that got the ball rolling.

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PO: How about Music lessons? Music in school?
When or how did they come in?

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CF: I had violin and brass lessons from year 4-year 12, and had private piano lessons with various teachers.

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PO: Did you enjoy them?

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CF: Yes, especially the piano, as it came very easily and instinctively. No one ever needed to tell me to practice or anything, it’s all I did.

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PO: How did your time at RWCMD affect your performing and your composition?

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CF: I was a different pianist within 3 months at RWCMD. And it wasn’t really until I left school that I had actual friends that I could discuss art with. I started to form a solid musical and compositional philosophy that took about 4 years to settle- I still change thoughts and opinions on things. But I squandered a lot of my time at RWCMD. I’ve been without any guidance or training for two years now, which forces you to really think and work a lot more. I wish I had done that while I was still at RWCMD, but maybe part of the experience is working things out on your own with the help of retrospect.

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PO: How would you describe the philosophy of music that you mention took 4 years to settle? What are the ideas within it?

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CF: My Philosophy is essentially specificity and craft. I am a fairly methodical, systematic composer. Every note should be considered, thought through. There is nothing worse than music that just exists for the sake of sounding nice. It’s like framing wallpaper. Being someone with vastly ranging musical tastes, one of my goals has been to unify contrasting aesthetics of pleasing accessibility and integrity and intellectualism. It took me a long time to let go of harmony and just accept that melodic lines don’t have to be vertically related. Relations and transformations can be more subtle, and a new language can often emerge in the absence of tonal harmony. It took even longer to reclaim back a style of tonal harmonic writing. Because harmony is so familiar to us, I find it difficult to block out every other piece of tonal music I know and use my brain. Thinking only in terms of melody helped. Melody is universal in all music. I am rambling, I could talk for hours about this.

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PO: What do you mean when you say "It took longer to reclaim back a style of tonal harmonic writing"?

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CF: I just love so much music. This week alone has been filled with Bizet, Chopin, Marvin Hamlisch, Sondheim, Ligeti, Pasek and Paul, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Dolly Parton, various club bangers- and I love them all. Melody connects them, which helped me write in a tonal style. So much “atonal” music is pretentious and by its nature difficult (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing), and so much “tonal” music is thoughtless and dull. Likewise so much of the former can express thoughts through density and complexity and abandonment of harmonic function, and the later talks to us on a primal, accessible level- I wanted the best of all worlds. Melody has been a foot in for me. And music can be both dense and complex and contrapuntal and tonal and atonal and accessible and difficult and so on and so on. I’m trying to remove words like tonal and atonal from my vocabulary. I like the idea that melodies simply have different relationships to each other in different pieces. I used to feel guilty writing “tonal music”. Funny.

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PO: What do you mean by 'Melody is universal in all music'?

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CF: Well, melody is at least a pathway between vastly differing aesthetics- Byrd to Wagner to Schoenberg to Fleetwood Mac to Lady Gaga. Do the inflections of rap music count? And noise music, or drone music (both of which which I love), I don’t know how they fit into the equation at this precise moment. Maybe it’s more something to do with linear shapes as opposed to vertical shapes? I certainly love melody, and it’s often a nice substitute for harmony, and something we can all enjoy, that exists across most styles. Once again, I ramble. Music is full of contradictions- something I’m slowly getting more comfortable with.

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PO: What do you think of the state of contemporary art music?

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CF: State of art today? Well, about 99% of the people I’ve studied with at during my degree and masters possessed a passion that was trapped within the confines of education, which always made me sad. So few people think, I mean really think way below the surface. Question every detail, explore everything. It’s in a bit of a sorry state. YouTube has spoiled us a bit- now everyone is a published artist. It’s been a while since something new grabbed me. Some wonderful new musicals appear off west end occasionally before disappearing again. And I have some very talented friends who are creating exciting things, hopefully in the very near future things will get better.

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(on YouTube having spoiled us)

...It’s this generation. I know it’s a cliche now but we have such a short attention span, anything is readily available, and anyone can make any old shit heard on a large platform. If something doesn’t grab us within seconds we skip to the next track, the next composer. We don’t really listen any more, we just hear.

PO: Can you expand on your feelings regarding peers possessing "passion that was trapped in the confines of education"?

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CF: In the conservatoires I teach at, and when I was studying for my degrees- the vast majority of kids learn what teacher gives them, don’t really know what the music is about, don’t like any composers other than what their presented with, have no initiative, no desire to learn or broaden horizons, no desire or ability to begin forming a personal artistic philosophy. It makes me sad that people that are training to be performers and don’t have that passion and fire and brimstone in them. It’s not fair on the audiences. It’s not fair on composers. It’s not fair on music and art. We are f***ing blessed to be able to create. How dare people take advantage.

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PO: Is there an endgame to Composition? A theory of everything?

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CF: Endgame to composition? I don’t think anything has an endgame. It’s essentially a pointless activity. The piece changes with every performer and is perceived differently by every listener- music constantly recomposes itself. There have been a handful of pieces I’ve written that I am pleased with, I don’t feel like I’ve done my job. Almost the opposite- I become paranoid and see if I can do it again. Maybe even better. There’s no endgame. It just relentlessly whirls by until death.

PO: Some people I don't get along with outside contemporary music/art have suggested that their children could write a contemporary piece. Do you agree or disagree, and why?

 

CF: A child could indeed write a contemporary piece. I probably wouldn’t enjoy the piece as I would suspect the child wouldn’t consider issues such as melodic construction, formal issues etc. But with an eloquent enough program note I’m sure it would convince a huge amount of audience, critics and composers. Good luck to this child. 

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PO: You talk of letting go of harmony. Was or is that a challenging process?

 

CF: This is a really interesting one- something I’ve really started reconsidering since Christmas. For a long time I believed musical notes cannot be justified unless they mean something, try to say something- and I don’t mean programmatic music! That’s a pet hate- e.g this is a piece about hopping cue staccato violin pizzicato or whatever. You get what I mean- it’s so one dimensional. I thought music should express an idea, a thought, e.g isn’t war awful, isn’t this composer great, here’s my thoughts on existence, or whatever. As Sondheim said- "Content dictates form". Without content the piece or formless. Wallpaper.

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However, this doesn’t explain why I love Mozart, Rachmaninov, Chopin- music that has no obvious 'meaning', but is simply beautiful for unknown reasons. Cue the great composer and good friend Lewis Furber, with whom I spent this Christmas with. He believes that music can not express anything other than its own existence. Literally a polar opposite to what I had previously thought. At first I thought this mindset is bizarre, but it’s really not. Art is pointless. So let’s just have fun and f*** about. He’s freed himself from pretense and justification, as I had freed myself from harmony years before. I continue to battle with these to contradicting ideas. Maybe in a few years time I’ll have a more definite answer.

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PO: That's a cool conclusion.

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CF: Letting go of harmony was very difficult. I listened to a lot of Finnissy and Erber and various complex music in my younger teens, and became frustrated when I know I liked what I heard instinctively, but couldn’t understand the language. Composers Michael Finnissy and James Erber helped me a lot. James talked to me a lot about thinking vertically and melodically, listening to counterpoint and how lines interweave- layers of activity. Michael once said enjoy light and shade, loud and quiet, high and low. Sometimes it’s that simple. We don’t get angry at a Jackson Pollock painting because we don’t know what it’s a painting of- we see the energy, the colours, the form, the mood. Huge amounts of research into many composers’ processes and writing (well, at that time, imitating) a great deal of music helped. It’s all melody. You listen to Perotin or Ockeghem- that’s completely atonal counterpoint. There are no functional chord progressions, just beautiful beautiful moving lines, 600 years ago. Letting go of harmony was like freeing myself from chains. Then you can begin filter in harmonic aesthetics and more familiar sounds and create something for more interesting. So many composers let the harmony compose their music. NO- you compose your music, use your brain. You are not a master to harmony. Use it knowingly.

 

And yes at the end of the day- who f***ing cares. We’re going to die soon and it’s all meaningless. So let’s do it as good as we can and have a blast doing it.

 

PO: Do you feel too many composers let something else write their music for them?

 

CF: Yeah serialism and systems have been done a lot now, I like how Ferneyhough uses systems that decay. And I like how Xenakis writes. But yes when people select a note just because it’s in the chord and that’s how that chord goes there, it’s just so one dimensional and not thought through. And you can hear it! I won’t list composers that I feel so this, but it’s a pandemic. Let’s use our brains and a little bit of heart and instinct. Like I keep saying, it’s all pointless, and I think some of it should remain a mystery. Music is magical. And weird. I still don’t really understand it. Ockeghem is fucking outstanding

Listen to his requiem masses, all his masses.

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PO: Do you think the average person understands Ferneyhough?

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CF: I had to read and research a lot to understand it. Understanding music and liking music are different things. And shouldn’t really be linked maybe? As long as one has an open mind and can share opinions with solid constructive foundations.

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PO: What extra-musical things influence your musical life, and how?

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CF:  I love art- my favourite artists include Beksinski, Frank Auerbach, Richard Wilson, the Saatchi lot from the 90’s- you know the sensation exhibition? Damien Hurst, Tracy Emin, Marcus Harvey. What a thrilling time for art that was. I love plays too, I’m reading a lot of Sarah Kane right now. And cinema of course- I’m interested in story telling through colour at the moment. And long shots I love. I'm trying find ways of using ideas like that in my music in a non literal way. Also random things in life. I was walking through the underground the other day, and noticed the sound of everyone’s footsteps going at different speeds. And for about 2 or 3 seconds I swear 100 of us walked exactly in time. The sound was deafening- a sense counterpoint suddenly became unison before quickly dispersing again. I looked around in amazement. Nobody else noticed or cared.

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PO: Final question; Brexit or Remain?

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CF: Remain. But other people know more than me. I don’t think any of us really know what we are doing.

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Performed over Facebook messenger and compiled from the resulting conversation

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Tags: Connor Fogel, Michael Finnissy, Franz Liszt, Stephen Sondheim, History of Photography in Sound, English Country Tunes, Melody, Bizet, Chopin, Marvin Hamlisch, Ligeti, Pasek and Paul, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Dolly Parton, James Erber, Brian Ferneyhough, Iannis Xenakis, Damien Hurst, Tracy Emin, Marcus Harvey, Brexit, Remain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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