Adrian Sutton on his Violin Concerto

With credits including the scores for War Horse, Coram Boy, Murder on the Orient Express and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Adrian Sutton had firmly established himself as one of today's leading composers for the theatre when a terminal cancer diagnosis prompted him to channel his energies into concert music - including a new violin concerto for Fenella Humphreys, which was premiered at the South Bank Centre last June and features on the recent album of his works for both the concert-hall and stage (released on Chandos earlier this month).

Adrian spoke to me last month about how his career evolved, the literary and musical inspirations behind the Violin Concerto, the creative processes involved in writing for the stage and compiling concert-suites from incidental music, and how his illness has led to a shift in focus and priorities...

(Photo credit: Robert Taylor)

Was there a strong visual or literary inspiration for the Violin Concerto?

Yes, although I am at pains to stress that it isn’t 100% programmatic: it’s what you might call guided by Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which came out in the early 1970s and became a kind of cult novel. It’s a very short simple book, but essentially it’s the story of a seagull who decides he’s bored with his flock and wants to leave to perfect his flight technique on his own, and that is depicted in the concerto.

The early seeds of the concerto were sown when somebody asked me if I’d ever considered writing a response to The Lark Ascending. My initial reaction was ‘Well, Vaughan Williams has already said it all’, but then it occurred to me that The Lark is about a bird flying over the land and so perhaps my piece could be about flight over the sea…

You can view the opening as a portrait of Jonathan Livingston Seagull himself. It’s quite pictorial, depicting a seagull high above the ocean with rippling currents below: it’s about the vast expansiveness of the sea and his pure enjoyment of flight. That first movement is called 'Thermals', with lots of long buoyant lines: Fenella very sweetly said that it’s the closest she’s ever felt to flying! What then happens in the book is that his pursuit of excellence develops into a sort of quest for transcendence: it’s difficult to describe, but it’s a story of personal development.

The middle movement ‘Far Cliffs’ depicts a faraway place that nobody ever sees, and it’s about him coming to terms with his own existence and mortality. You could argue that up to this point it’s fairly programmatic, but it’s not following the story slavishly: it’s using signposts that guided me as to how the material might develop into its own musical narrative. The final movement ‘Lifeforce’ is full of joy and energy: as if we’ve had our moment of repose and self-reflection, but realised that the thing to do is just get on with life and go out with a bang!

Did you start working on the concerto after your diagnosis?

I’d had a few fragmentary ideas, but that was the point when I started in earnest. Receiving a diagnosis like this is a very focusing thing, because you suddenly realise what you should be doing with your time. The first thing that my partner and I decided we’d do was to put on a concert of my music, which was a massive administrational challenge and a very expensive one - but it was worth doing, because I suddenly realised I’d spent so many years writing music for applied purposes. I loved doing that but all of those scores are part of something else, and this was an opportunity to say ‘Well now it’s all about the music: this is the real me’. I’ve included little chunks of my music for theatre on the album, but the Violin Concerto, Short Story and Fistful of Fives are ‘pure’ music.

At what stage in your career did you gravitate towards theatre?

Theatre had always been in my blood, and drama was something I loved at high school. As far as composing was concerned, I’d spent quite a lot of the early part of my career in applied music fields - TV, radio, ads - where you’re being paid to write music in different styles. Then in about 2005 an opportunity came along via a personal connection. I’d been working with [satirist and radio presenter] Chris Morris for about three years, and one day when we were in the studio I played him bits of my concert music; he was particularly taken with a double piano sonata and suggested I play it to his brother Tom, who then ran the Battersea Arts Centre.

Tom asked me to get involved with a project he was working on called Newsnight: The Opera, where transcripts from news programmes would be allocated to four composers to set verbatim - you had to include every 'Er...' and 'Um...'! I drew the lucky straw, because I was given the Jeremy Paxman/Michael Howard interview from 1997, with Howard refusing to answer a question fourteen times! That’s just a dramatic gift on a plate for a composer. Tom loved it, and when he moved to the National Theatre he put my name forward to write the score for Coram Boy: I was essentially plucked from obscurity and dumped on the South Bank in the Olivier Theatre, so no pressure! It went very well, then the rest is history because the next thing to come along was War Horse…

Which composers have particularly influenced your writing over the years?

Essentially, composers of the early to mid-twentieth century, British ones especially. The core of it is people like Walton, Tippett, Britten, Holst, Vaughan Williams and Elgar, so I suppose that feeds into a certain ‘English’ sound in my own music. My parents played a lot of music at home when I was growing up, but my stepdad was conservative with a small ‘c’. He’d been brought up on a diet of the classics - Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn etc - and Elgar was about as far as he would go in terms of expanding his palate.

I went on to study music at Goldsmiths, and one of the great things about doing a music degree is that you’re exposed to a whole range of repertoire that you might not have noticed before. I got very into Stravinsky and other modernists, but I could never buy into the more formulaic ideas of Boulez et al: by the time we get into integral serialism, I think ‘This is just a maths game’.

That ‘English’ sound comes through in the War Horse score, particularly in the early scenes: in many ways that play was a perfect fit for me. War Horse starts off in this bucolic peaceful world of Devon, but then the First World War arrives and men go across the Channel to fight in Europe. Everywhere is being consumed by the horrors of war, and the music reflects that. I started to take in things like Stravinsky and Honegger, who of course aren’t contemporary with the First World War - they’re very much a Second World War sound-world. In something like Honegger’s Third Symphony or Tippett’s First, there’s a world-weariness to the effects of war, and you hear that in a lot of composers of the 1940s. 

How do you go about arranging stand-alone concert-suites from incidental music?

With the exception of the excerpt from Coram Boy, none of the theatre-pieces on the album originally existed in that form or length. Obviously theatre cues are often written to serve things like scene-changes, so a lot of them can be very short and get cut down even further once you get to the tech rehearsal. And irrespective of their length, theatre cues have a different musical logic to a standalone piece - the trick with compiling suites from incidental music is to decide whether a particular cue has enough basic musical character to be developed in some way. 

'The Departure' from Murder on the Orient Express is probably the maddest one; it certainly wasn’t in that form in the show, but it was a big scene-change for the train leaving the station so I threw caution to the wind and went hell for leather. The idea of it being palindromic came to me (ironically enough) halfway through – I thought it might work if I just reversed it...

With something like Murder on the Orient Express, where there are existing film-scores, do you avoid or engage with them?

Everyone knows the Richard Rodney Bennett score, which is amazing: for that scene with the train leaving the station he comes up with this brilliant waltz. But in general I try not to listen to other scores, because you don’t want your ideas to be unnecessarily steered down the route someone else has taken. Sometimes you can’t avoid it because the rest of the creative team might bring it up, in which case you need to be as musically intelligent as possible about realising how those ideas were generated. 

People often ask me if I start with the rhythm, the melody or the orchestration when I’m writing theatre-cues. None of those things: you start by reading the play! There’s a lot of dramaturgy involved: it’s only by understanding the dramatic arc that you understand what function the music might have. You have to talk through those things with the director in advance, and it’s only after that stage that you can start thinking about the musical material itself. That sort of inoculates you against the way other people have done it, because you can say ‘That worked for the screen, but we are doing this!’.

How have you managed your workload since your diagnosis?

A lot of the Violin Concerto was written in the chemo suite: you’ve got to sit for three or four hours having your infusion, and as long as you can blank out the background noise it’s actually quite a good place to get work done. I’m a terrible procrastinator sometimes, and being in an environment that’s free from the usual distractions helped me to focus. I have noise-cancelling headphones, which dampens things down even if you have nothing playing through them. I wouldn’t have wanted to sit there developing musical ideas and structure, but I was able to get on with the orchestration just fine.

In terms of managing your energy, have you set yourself certain goals or rolled with the punches?

Very much the latter. That’s the thing about cancer, chemo and a lot of other health conditions: you have to accept that you can’t control how you’re going to feel from one day to the next. Whilst the diagnosis itself is not very happy news – it’s Stage Four, so it’s not curable – the main side-effect for me was fatigue. In terms of setting goals, I’ve long since accepted that saying ‘Today I will write X number of bars’ doesn’t work, even when I’m in good health. Some days you can end up rubbing out more than you actually wrote. And of course it does help to have a deadline: I’m the kind of person who only gets music written with a gun to my head.

Did you draw inspiration or support from other composers who continued working through terminal illness?

Not consciously, apart from a general awareness that there have been composers throughout history who carried on writing until the bitter end and produced some of their finest work: Schubert and Bartók come to mind. One ponders whether that activity was what enabled them to carry on functioning, because they felt that they were doing something good or necessary. And of course there were composers who weren’t particularly well throughout their entire careers: Holst had various health issues going on, but you deal with what you’ve been given. There is no other way to carry on.

What else are you working on at the moment?

I’m just finishing the orchestration on an orchestral-choral commission for the Macmillan carol concert at Cadogan Hall on 3rd December. It’s an annual star-studded affair, and this year it’s being hosted by Joanna Lumley. And I have three other commissions in the pipeline, including a song-cycle for mezzo and piano quintet. In my situation it’s important to have something on the desk in front of you, to keep doing things that you know are having a positive impact on other people’s lives in some way. Working on something not just for yourself but for others is a great way to focus and feel good, and that holds true whether you’re ill or healthy.