Interview, Will Todd - Lux et Veritas

Perhaps best known for his hugely popular Mass in Blue, British composer Will Todd has a wide and varied output including the recently-commissioned The Call of Wisdom, which received its premiere at the service in St Paul's Cathedral celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of Her Majesty the Queen in June 2012.

His latest disc, Lux et Veritas: Music for Peace and Reflection, is a collection of meditative works characterised by shimmering choral harmonies. I caught up with Will via email to quiz him about this apparent change of course.

You seem to have left far behind you the angular jazziness of the Mass in Blue that was your first big smash hit, in favour of a more ethereal, uplifting sonority; is this a sea-change in your compositional style, or was it just that the texts on this album suggested a different approach?

>I've always had a more lyrical and lush aspect to my writing and I've adored the sonorous textures of choirs from my earliest memories - strings too. But it's true that the sound world of this CD is rather different to the energetic joy of Mass in Blue. The focus of this album was on making the music more sensual and intimate and the texts I've used reflect that. A lot of this music is very personal in its inspiration and association.

Speaking of texts, many of those on this disc are of your own composition. From a composer’s perspective, do you find it easier to set your own words, or someone else’s? Does the process feel very different when both the words and the music have come from your own mind?

>I don't find it easier to set my own texts, but the way it happens is very different. When I'm inspired by a text from somewhere else, I focus on those words and think deeply into their meaning and then I find the music starts to flow from there. When I write my own texts, the words and music seem to arrive almost at the same time in a kind of words and melody explosion so it's a very different creative experience.

The subject matter of the words you set varies from the obviously religious (eg the last two tracks and the Mass extracts), via quasi-religious sentiments like the Celtic Blessing, to non-religious texts. It's interesting that you juxtapose the sacred and the secular. Do you feel there’s a great distinction between these two kinds of music, and do you approach the setting of a religious or sacred text differently to a secular one?

>I think the key for me is that the texts are in some way passionate and yearning - those are the elements which inspire me. I like texts which are emotive. In that way there is little difference between the sacred and secular texts I have used because they are all strong and emotional texts. I certainly don't consciously write differently between setting religious and non religious texts. My aim is always the same: to make the singers deliver the lines with as much love and emotion as possible.

How far do you feel you’re influenced by other contemporary composers? Is there anyone to whose style you feel particularly indebted?

>There are plenty of composers I feel affinity with, and there are all sorts of way composers styles are bleeding into each other, either directly or via other shared influences. I was interested when the clustered chord music of composers like Eric Whitacre burst on the scene because I wrote a lot of music like that in my early 20s long before I'd ever heard his (wonderful) music. When I was still at school and singing in all sorts of choirs my big hero was John Rutter, so it's been amazing to work with him at Oxford University Press. Other influences from my early days would be Puccini, Sibelius, Poulenc, Shostakovich, The Who, Yes, Andrew Lloyd Webber, John Williams, Elgar, Dave Brubeck to name but a few!

Other works by Will Todd