Tom Coult on Pieces That Disappear

Pieces That Disappear is the debut album from highly rated composer Tom Coult, recently released on NMC Recordings. In a chat about the album, Coult gives Presto fresh insight into his workings and passions.

Congratulations on the new record. It must be a real tonic to have an album devoted to your music on NMC!

It’s a massive thrill and a lovely thing as a classical composer. In popular music genres you get stuff out quite quickly; you might put out an EP early on in your process, and many of my friends working in various musical genres have done that. It’s lovely to finally have something with my name on the cover, lovely to have a statement of “This is what I do!”

The cover art is very striking and intriguing, and is likely to draw people in...

Good! I told NMC I really wanted to use these images. They are from a catalogue from a Japanese fireworks manufacturer, who produced a series of illustrations showing what each one looks like. They’re gorgeous, such lovely things to use as illustrations. I wanted something that was colourful, and fireworks is nice because it's both colourful and flamboyant, and it's also set against darkness.

Pleasure Garden, for violin and orchestra, has such an apt portrayal of rain I was worried my roof might have been leaking when I was listening! It seems to me an illustration of the natural flair you have when writing for the orchestra.

It's a thing that I really enjoy! I could have got this album out sooner if I’d not wanted it to be a disc of orchestral music. But I’ve written a lot of it: it’s the thing I most love, the place I feel most at home. It’s not to do with making a big sound, it's to do with having so many options and weird collections of instruments that you can use. I think of it as writing music for, for instance, seven double basses, low piccolo and marimba, to composing something for a whole brass section and a wood block. You can make these eccentric groups where it would be madness writing a piece purely for those groups, but they are hugely enjoyable to write for. I really do enjoy it and have been very lucky to have this post with the BBC Philharmonic which means I've been able to do quite a lot of it recently. It's really nice to have some of that on record.

It must be a temptation to turn the music ‘up to eleven’ and have everyone playing everything at once – but with your work I was put in mind of the way Mahler uses his orchestra, at times almost as reduced as chamber music.

He was very, very good at that, with those eccentric little bands that he creates. The more stuff you use, the more you saturate the sound – and the more generic it sounds. If you’re using the whole orchestra, you tend towards the same kinds of balances, of stuff that goes back a century or two. It’s a nice thing to try and find these groups, but then to let rip sometimes, and you've got a hell of a sound that you can make! Three of the four pieces on this album have a soloist as well, so you can't constantly let rip, as it’s not going to work – the voice or violin will be overpowered. You have to keep a lid on it and find different sounds rather than going all guns blazing.

I got an intriguing sense throughout that we were looking simultaneously backwards – on After Lassus for example – while looking into the future as well. Is that a conscious practice in your music?

It is – especially in recent years, since the pandemic, or finishing an opera – they happened roughly simultaneously. I finished my opera Violet and Pleasure Garden, and then all this change happened in quite a short space of time, as well as having a child! I was trying to write a bit more capriciously and quickly, and self-censoring a bit less. That means things have come in from music that got me into music, if that makes sense. By that I mean old American music – vaudeville and country especially – along with English music hall and Baroque music – particularly Italian Baroque.

These are big formative things for me, and I had never quite found a home or a way to get them into my music. In the last few years I’ve become much more open to everything I think, and I've found ways of incorporating those things a lot more. Three Pieces That Disappear definitely has Baroque music in it, and After Lassus has a slightly New Orleans cabaret number, even though it’s still a reasonably strict canon written by Lassus. I have definitely become open to ‘pastness’ more recently.

How did your love of American music manifest itself?

The first music that I really remember enjoying was Jimi Hendrix, because my dad had a tape he would play in the car. After Jimi Hendrix, I went backwards to his influences. I really got into Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley and Robert Johnson, and lots of old blues music. I then got interested in the country and folk music of that period.

Did you realise fairly early on that you wanted to be composing and performing in music?

No. I started playing the violin when I was six, and played various bits of Baroque music, as you would, but I just got more into it. It was the sound that appealed to me, rather than later classical music. It’s why I wanted to go and study music at university, as I didn’t really know how this music worked, and I wanted to go and pick it apart. I was mostly a songwriter on the guitar, and played in bands, so I couldn’t imagine myself being a composer of notated music. I didn't have an interest in twentieth-century classical music, but I quite quickly gained that interest after going to university. Baroque music was the notated music that really made me want to do something.

You wrote Pleasure Garden for violinist Daniel Pioro, who is also a good friend. Did you find common ground in both Baroque and new music?

Daniel is such a fantastic violinist and has such a distinctive feel and sound. I could picture his sound very clearly, and because I know him well, I could picture his reactions and how he might go about things. Anything you write for anyone is a little gift for them, and like a Christmas gift you hope they're going to like it. The better you know someone, hopefully the more you'll be confident that you've given them something that is suited for them – but maybe they wouldn't have thought of themselves. It was a lovely thing to write for Daniel, I did think of it as a gift and a treat. He has a particular type of playing that I get excited about, because I'm a former violinist, and I have a physical sense of what’s involved.

A lot of his expression comes from his right hand, the bowing hand, rather than the left hand, which is the one that does vibrato. The locus of expression is to his right-hand side, and that’s how I think of the string playing I really like. It's not about him, but if you know who a piece is for, you have them in the back of your mind. If it’s for a particular place – a concert hall – you might have that in the back of your mind too, and picture it.

Was it similarly a pleasure to write for Anna Dennis?

Yes. Anna's unreal! Before she sang either of the pieces on the disc, she played the title role in Violet, and she performed a song cycle that I wrote for voice and piano. Again, a bit like Daniel, I have a sense of her sound. The opera wasn't written for her, although she had sung an early workshop of bits of it, so I think I probably did have her sound in mind. After Lassus was written for her, while Beautiful Caged Thing is a much earlier piece, way before I met her. I thought it would be really fun to see what she could make of it. She’s extraordinary and has such a sense of character and expression. Daniel and Anna are my two most regular trusted collaborators, so it makes sense for them to be on the album.

Three Pieces that Disappear strikes me as a brave thing to write, because you have been honest about how the COVID era made you feel, and that was your reaction to it. Do you think we have become too conditioned to listening to music that gets louder? To me the piece represents how music went silent for a while in 2020...

I keep a little Word document of ideas for pieces, and ideas for titles. For ages I've had this thing of ‘Four Pieces That Disappear’, or eight, or seven. Music always disappears – every piece disappears – and sound dies. I like that idea, and the confluence of things in 2020-21 for me, and for everyone, meant that it became a real thing, an immediate consideration, that music was literally disappearing. Like everyone else I had a list of engagements and pieces that were going to be premiered or played, and you’d strike them off one by one. That was upsetting, and then later on, when you’d gained a bit of perspective, that becomes an interesting image. I like that piece, and it was the first time I used ‘tech’, as well, with fixed audio.

When we came out of lockdown was it tempting to go for broke, in a compositional sense?

At the beginning of lockdown I couldn't do anything. I had a lot of stuff that was meant to be performed and premiered in 2020, including Violet and Pleasure Garden, and 2020 was to be an exciting year. It took me a long while to do any composing, and the things that got me out were quite simple things, more tonal and unpretentious. In certain ways those became a model of the music I've written since, and I think my music has got a bit simpler in certain ways since COVID. I’m a bit more open to be a bit ‘scavengy’, with things that are lying around the room or the world!

There is also an element of humour running through your music – which is relatively rare in new music.

That’s good. In general, I don't like music that is very that is po-faced, but there is also music that is trying to be funny, and that can be excruciating. I aspire to wit, which is not making jokes, but it's having a lightness of touch and a tone that can accommodate lightness and élan. Sometimes I will try to make music that is very dark or affecting, but I agree there is not enough music that is fleet of foot.

Will you be continuing to work with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra?

I’ve got one more piece that I'm approaching completion of, quite a substantial piece for voice and orchestra. That will be my last thing with them. I've got other things that I’m working on. I feel fortunate in all sorts of ways!