Photo by Pawel Kopczynski
James Strecker: The Toronto Symphony’s New Creations Festival this year features your Viola Concerto, your Trumpet Concerto, and a suite of excerpts from your 2010 opera Bliss. I’d like to give our readers the special privilege of hearing the composer’s insight into each creation.
To begin, you are a long-established violist, so please tell us how having a profound knowledge of the viola helped you in exploring the creative potential of a concerto form.
Brett Dean: There is, of course, some precedent for the viola/composer link. Mozart, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Hindemith, Britten all played the viola. It’s in the engine room of the music making, an unusually useful position from which to observe music’s workings. That goes for solo concerti as well, albeit a challenge to make the engine room the main focus of attention.
JS: Did the nature of the instrument ever limit your compositional ideas? Did its unique qualities suggest new such possibilities?
BD: It is true that it’s not the natural solo instrument, being so in the middle of everything. But I was taken by the idea of making something uncharacteristic and counterintuitive about a viola concerto: it’s virtuosic, fast and high, skittish at times and even somewhat playful. These are things that one doesn’t normally link to the viola! It’s so often considered mournful and slow!
JS: Your Dramatis Personae for Trumpet and Orchestra has its Canadian Premiere with the TSO. The piece has been programmed internationally and received with critical enthusiasm, so I’d like to hear your own take on it. What is your intention in this work and what should a listener new to it expect to hear?
BD: This is very much a work about personalities. In the first instance, it’s a homage to the remarkable musical personality of Håkan Hardenberger and his extraordinary relationship with his instrument for which he has almost singlehandedly established a new repertoire. But beyond that, the soloist is involved in a theatrical journey, a playing of roles from defiantly heroic and alone through to thoughtful and reflective and finally trying to establish connections with others and within the orchestra, even physically by changing positions and allegiances.
JS: Your opera Bliss is based on Peter Carey’s novel in which Harry Joy dies and then comes back to life and sees much about his existence that is undesirable. I can’t help but suspect that this was much fun for you to compose. Is that the case? Also, what did you learn from creating the opera Bliss that you can take into your future works?
BD: Peter Carey’s Bliss was indeed enormous fun to get to grips with in sound, again an amazingly theatrical experience. It’s a wild tale full of colourful characters and bizarre occurrences. Being my first opera, the learning curve in writing it was of course substantial, especially in terms of dimensions and architecture but also through the experience of working closely with singers, learning about their craft, different voice types and personalities, etc. Invaluable experience for any composer!
JS: What are the events in your past that shaped you into the creative individual you are today? Are there any people in your past who helped to make you who you are as an artist?
BD: Studying in Australia was wonderful in that I was stimulated by people who had an open, undogmatic approach to classical music; inquisitive and not swayed by any particular tradition or the expectations of a particular school of thought. I was very fortunate to receive important guidance from György Kurtag when I was embarking more seriously on my compositional path and of course the fifteen years I spent in the ranks of the Berlin Philharmonic’s viola section were irreplaceable!
JS: You were a violist in the Berlin Philharmonic from 1985 to 1999, first under Herbert von Karajan to ’89 and then under Claudio Abbado. How would you compare the two in how they approached an orchestra and how they approached music?
BD: Wow, they couldn’t have been more different. Karajan was of course quite frail and elderly by the time I started there, though with a galvanising personality and look which could instil quite a deal of fear, even at that age. Music went his way and there simply were no questions about it. Abbado was much gentler, quietly persuasive in his striving for some kind of communal awareness of the beauty of what it was we were playing and achieving unity through that; an altogether different approach.
JS: How did having Von Karajan and Abbado as your conductors later influence your approach to conducting?
BD: Well, one gets rather spoilt in an orchestra like the Berlin Phil. Not only Karajan and Abbado, but also the encounters with Kleiber, Solti, Haitink, and of course the ongoing relationship with Simon Rattle have been constant sources of inspiration, not only as approaches to conducting but their approach to music per se. For sheer organisational skill and virtuosity, Seiji Ozawa conducting Messiaen with us in about 1986 or 87 remains a career highlight. And Claudio Abbado remains the most aesthetically satisfying conductor I’ve experienced and it will probably remain a life-long desire to have anything remotely of his expressive hand movements rub off on me!
JS: You were mostly self-taught as a composer, which is quite an achievement. How did you do it? What were the advantages of doing it yourself? Any disadvantages?
BD: It was really just about keeping one’s ears open and learning from every situation I found myself in, be it orchestral, chamber music, improvising – which is how I got most bitten by the compositional bug. The advantage I’ve felt over the years is through maintaining a performer’s sense for how a piece “feels” to perform. The disadvantage of being an autodidact is that I’m not really up on compositional theories and processes; I tend to do my own thing and find my own solutions and can feel somewhat bemused by the “science” of composition.
JS: I hope this makes sense. A number of authors have told me how it’s almost impossible to take their writing into another language and approximate a work’s original idiom. In this vein, I wonder if you have a similar experience when a work you have created is then taken over by another conductor or musician whose background and sensibility differ from yours. Does a work of yours in this case translate sufficiently true to your intentions for it or do you have to simply hope for the best and live with the result?
BD: Interesting question. I think it comes down to the initial notation of the work and how clearly you can get your intentions across so that it can be understood and realised whether you’re present in the rehearsal room or not. Personally I have learnt much from others’ approaches and questions. Even mistakes or misunderstandings can be enlightening and can open up other possibilities. On the odd occasion I’ve rewritten something because of a misreading which I have preferred to my original thought!
JS: You have said that melody gets “a bad rap in some circles of new music nowadays” and I would love to hear more on this issue. Do we have dictatorships in the musical world that say “You may” and “You may not?” If so, what damage do they do?
BD: I think we live in a relatively open, non-dogmatic time as far as approaches to new music are concerned nowadays. Having said that, I live in Germany which tends in its Darmstadt and Donaueschingen niches, to hold on to certain ideals of what one “may” or “may not”, the other example perhaps being France and whether something is “IRCAM-approved” or not. As far as advancing thought about what music can be, I find these institutions have provided enormous stimulus and technological advancement which is always a good thing. But their “politburo” aspect can have something dictatorial about it which I find somewhat narrow and dispiriting. I like to think music shouldn’t be determined by “rights” and “wrongs” but of possibilities.
JS: In your experience, what are the dangers of using a computer in composition? What are the advantages? How long did it take for you to work out an acceptable relationship with your computer?
BD: Over a period of some years I feel I’ve learnt how to use a computer for notation on my terms, but it took a while for me to be sure of who was in charge. It’s a well-trodden path, that one on which a computer can provide quick fixes and easy solutions, and it can be far too convenient, even seductive to go down. This is something that especially younger composers need to be wary of.
JS: What of Brett Dean do we find in the music you compose? If we hear the music, do we then know the man?
BD: I’m an Australian who has had a largely classical music, performance-based training background as a string player, have lived in Europe for much of the past 30 years, worked in one of Europe’s great tradition bound orchestras yet got into composing largely by improvising and making film soundtracks together with a Sydney born rock musician, mostly in bizarre clubs in West Berlin in the mid to late 80’s. In composing, I draw inspiration from all manner of sources, many of them far of a social or socio-political nature. I think all of these things can be heard in my music!