Joby Talbot on Sunstone

Presto are taking tea with Joby Talbot in his West London studio, a chance to talk with the composer about his major new choral work, Piedra de Sol (‘Sunstone’), and its premiere recording on the Divine Art label. Joby’s name will be known to pop music cognoscenti for his work with Neil Hannon on early Divine Comedy albums, since when he has shown his versatility as a composer for short and long form, screen and stage.

Talbot recently crossed paths with Hannon after a long absence, the two working on the score for Wonka in 2023. “It was longer than I remember!” he recalls. “I got him in to do a session on The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy in 2005, which was lovely, but I haven’t worked with him since. It was nice to see him again.”

Talbot’s work with The Divine Comedy is a marked contrast to the substantial Piedra de sol, a 70-minute work for chorus and marimba. Commissioned by Conspirare and the BBC Singers, it sets the surrealist poem of the same name by Octavio Paz. Like the text it sets, Talbot’s music makes an instant and lasting impact. “That’s nice to hear”, he says modestly, “because I’m still in early days with the reaction, and don't know how it's going to land. I'm wondering how it will grab people, and what sort of engagement you need to make it work on any level. Is it the sort of piece where you can be half engaged and still enjoy it, or does it require your undivided attention for 70 minutes?”

From listening, there is room for both – to appreciate the beauty of sound but also engage with the words and vocal techniques with which Talbot responds. “That was my overriding thing”, he says. “I was constantly asking where the text was leading me. It wasn’t until I was living with it that I realised just how random it is! It doesn't obey any conventional rules of narrative structure – it’s like ping pong, with no rhyme or reason. I guess that's why it's a surrealist masterpiece. I was trying to respect the text and go where it wanted to take me and hope I didn’t end up with a soggy musical mess. To keep the soufflé from sagging, if you like, you need clear musical architecture – and how do you find it in a way that remains engaging and stays true to the text?”

His wish to set Paz’s text was instant. “I originally came across it because of the most recent of the three ‘story ballets’ I’ve done for The Royal Ballet with Christopher Wheeldon, Laura Esquivel’s novel Like Water For Chocolate. Chris asked for some vocals at the transcendent ending, where the narrative of the piece is left behind – in our version anyway. The two main protagonists levitate on a pillar of fiery smoke – all very Wagnerian. It seemed right that a voice should come in at this point, and we were looking around for the right text. Laura’s book needs to be verse and not prose, so I couldn’t find anything suitable. A friend, whose family is of Mexican heritage, said, “Have you looked at Piedra de sol?” The bit I set, which isn’t in the choral piece, was perfect for the end of the ballet. I loved setting the language, the music seemed to slide off the words in a very visceral sense.”

The ideas began to germinate. “A little voice at the back of my brain said, “What about the conversation you had with Craig Hella Johnson, to let him know of any ideas for big choral pieces?” I e-mailed him, and it turned out he knew and loved the poem and liked the idea immediately. Then I read it the whole way through, and when the first lines reappear at the end of the poem, without a full stop the entire way through as one flowing sentence, you realise “Wow, it’s a loop, and it’s going to continue forever.” I wanted to write the piece to create the feeling I had when I read it, to be very respectful to the words.”

The cycle passes through a wide range of emotions. “The middle of the poem is very bleak, and the whole middle goes on way longer with the bleakness than in my setting. I cut around a third of it, because at the pace I was going, we would be there all night – and Conspirare wanted a piece that was around 70 minutes long.”

The technical ability of the choir is evident throughout the album. “The one thing I really was gratified with was that that if you compare it to my Path Of Miracles, and how that worked for Tenebrae, and how this works for Conspirare, I knew they had this potential for very striking solo singing that becomes quite un-choral. They have folk and gospel singers and lyrical, English voices, with the potential for voices to come out of the texture in a really interesting way. I wrote lots of solo stuff for them, so I will be really interested to see how the BBC Singers do it in September.”

Did he check in with either ensemble while writing? “Not with the BBC Singers, but I did give Craig the first five minutes. I wrote it with a stave for every voice, so it’s an insane-looking thing on the computer! If you went to SATB, it would be everyone singing the same thing, and I wanted to know what everyone was doing and condense it after the event. I sent Craig the long version to ask if it was singable, and they nailed it. He was very hot on the philosophical meaning behind things, the emotional journey we're all on, where we stand on planet Earth at this moment in history – all that came into it. The choir seriously invested in it. I spent probably a year of my life working on this, and it was everything I hoped it would be, and how they responded to it.”

A year doesn’t feel too long for a piece of this magnitude. “After I finished it, I had to write a short piece for Tenebrae, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, a WB Yeats setting which they are premiering in December at the Wigmore Hall. It rhymes, it’s short and it’s in English – it was a cinch in comparison!” He compares the complexities of Paz’s text. “I don’t speak Spanish, and it was hundreds of lines – and every line has eleven syllables. With Spanish, much more so than in English and French, it’s all about where the emphasis falls in the words. As I understand, from my Spanish speaking friends, it's really not up for grabs."

"I tried to do my own translation of the poem, with an enormous Spanish dictionary and various apps and websites and went through word by word. I got copies of four translations, and compared those with my own literal translation, and I also spoke to Dr. Tom Boll at the University of East Anglia, who is an expert in Paz. He was very kind in helping me get my head around the text. Paz came to Europe and wanted to make a Mexican answer to early modernist masterpieces, and Tom helped it all make sense. I did worry about the cultural appropriation, and trying to do justice to the most incredible poetry I had ever read!”

Talbot’s background as a composer includes choral music. “My school had a really good choir”, he recalls, “and we used to do some quite ambitious things. I wasn’t in the chapel choir, because that involved getting up early, but I played oboe in amateur productions of Handel oratorios and spent a lot of time in the room with choirs. When I first left the Guildhall my first commission was for Crouch End Festival Chorus. Then I wrote Path Of Miracles back in 2005, and that was such an important piece for me. If someone asked me to share one thing from my music, it would be that. I’m very proud of that piece and it’s amazing that it has been performed around the place, by Tenebrae and other choirs. I’ve been wanting to write another big choral piece ever since, and this was the first opportunity.”

Ironically, as Piedra de sol is released, Path Of Miracles will have received its BBC Proms premiere from Tenebrae, at St. George’s Church, Bristol. Talbot agrees that the newer work would surely suit a future late-night Prom and recalls his own experiences at the festival. “Before Path Of Miracles, I was there when Tenebrae did John Tavener’s The Veil of the Temple, in its cut down version. It was one of the great musical experiences of my life – I couldn’t stop grinning for 45 minutes after it had finished!”

Has Talbot’s approach to composition changed in the twenty years between the works? “An awful lot. It was quite a discombobulating experience coming back to the same sized choir and piece of music after all this time. I've learned so much with the ballets and orchestral scores I’ve done and writing for opera singers and choruses. When I look back at what I knew then, it feels completely clueless – but also many things I was instinctively doing back then worked. I wonder if composers feel this, that what I gained in artistic craftsmanship and ability, I took a step back in clarity of thinking. I look back and think, how was I so clear? I guess as you get older the excitable certainties of youth get subsumed into more complex things.”

During the composition of Path Of Miracles, Talbot started to use the computer more. “The second and third movements were written on the piano and with pencil and paper, but for the first and fourth I played stuff in, to hear how the counterpoint was playing out. Being able to listen back was great, to put it on headphones and go for a walk, just to hear it out of context and get a much clearer idea on how it was progressing over time, how shapes feel. Now, having done all these feature films where I have to present sophisticated demos, I’ve got used to playing things and listening back. There is a terrible tyranny in that because the computer is keen for you to go along certain paths. There is a temptation to quantize, press a loop and go to the pub – but the converse thing is that you won’t take the easy option. It's all about second guessing yourself, and I wanted Piedra de Sol to be a palate cleanser after all these film projects.” He laughs. “It wasn’t that at all, it wasn’t safe music – it was even worse!”

The marimba played a key role in his thinking. “The piece can be performed with or without a marimba, but when I was looking with Craig at the density of these harmonies, we thought about a pitch reference. He did not want to influence my decision, but eventually said it would free them up to do other things, to be more musical. I didn’t want a piano or organ, but the tremolo of the marimba sounds so vocal, and I thought that would be interesting to blend with the voices. Craig found the ideal person, Thomas Burritt, in Austin – an amazing virtuoso player and a lovely guy to work with.”

Talbot explains the marimba’s role. “If we're ever aware of the marimba as something that stands outside of the choir, then the spell is broken. It works because it sits in the choral sound. Sometimes it colours or gives more of a rhythmic impetus. Tom worked out special treatments for the mallets, and that became a lovely thing for the piece. Visually it’s lovely, to have it at the front of the choir.”

Joby is planning ahead for major pieces, some in ‘classical’ form. “I have had a slight hiatus from writing music, but I’ve got a ten-minute piano piece to write, and then I’ll make a start on my Violin Concerto.” He has written for soloist before, with Incandescence, a percussion concerto, written for Julian Warburton and taken up by Evelyn Glennie and the London Sinfonietta. “Julian played it beautifully”, he recalls, “but after the event I realised that I needed to be working closer with a soloist. Then I wrote a Guitar Concerto (‘Ink Dark Moon’), but I don’t play guitar, so it was like writing in Spanish! I’m not a violin player either!”

Talbot is used to such challenges. “I don't know what my comfort zone is any more – but there’s that David Bowie quote about when you go out to sea and you can’t quite touch the bottom – that’s where you should be. The key is to write something you like, which will work for the soloist, and then make it more soloistic rather than getting bogged down with virtuoso flashiness. Write the piece first then retrofit the virtuosity later. When I was a student, it seemed to me that most people started thinking of colour when composing. I’m not clever enough to do that – I need pitches and rhythms. I think that’s much the better way, to have the clothesline on which you can hang everything. Then you can do what you like with it!”

Path Of Miracles opened up more possibilities for his work. “It was a great time; I could take on a movie or an arranging job to pay the mortgage and buy myself a few months to write another piece. I felt so energised by that. For Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland I came up with all the ideas in the studio in Shoreditch where we were mixing a film score. Writing music, hearing it quickly afterwards and recording it within days of writing gives a real sense of momentum. I was lucky enough that these big stage pieces, especially the ballets, mean I don't need to do films unless it's something I really want to do. There are a couple of directors I really like working with, but I'm not making myself available to do anything new unless it’s amazing. I’m not knocking on doors reminding the executives that I exist, but that’s fine for me”.

He has found the time constraints of movie scores problematic – but is now planning in advance. “You sign on to the movie and you're still working on it until the day they finish”, he explains. “That could be six weeks or six months, two years even! I don't know how people who do it full time actually do it because they have to move on to other projects while making every director feel this is the only thing you’re doing. I’m a fretful person at the best of times, and the last movie I was doing I was getting further behind. I had other things to move on to, but I just couldn't pretend and had to give my all on the movie until it was done. I should be doing another big animated movie in about twelve months’ time, so need to get ahead of the game and move these concerti on!”