Interview, Paul Hillier on Jóhann Jóhannsson's Drone Mass

The late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson is particularly remembered for writing a number of atmospheric film scores, notably Sicario, Arrival and The Theory of Everything. Away from the big screen, he was a highly experimental musician with a particular interest in the relationship between electronics and classical music. Influences from the Holy Minimalists, Morton Feldman and the techno and glitch music scenes come together into a coherent style that is immediately recognisable yet difficult to categorise.

Jóhannsson's Drone Mass is a case in point; combining vocal ensemble, string quartet and electronics, it is a work that almost defies description. Part ambient soundscape, part abstract ritual, it was premiered in 2015 but had hitherto not been recorded. Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices have joined forces with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble to revive the work and record it in an album released in March this year; I spoke to Paul about this incredible work, and his own relationship with Jóhannsson.

Although Drone Mass was premiered in 2015, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s untimely death three years later removed a seemingly vital element from the work – his own participation in its performance. How did the project to record Drone Mass without him come about?

We weren't involved directly in the first performance; it was a couple of years later that we did it, in Kraków in Poland, and then there were further performances together.

There were at least three elements involved in the performance; Jóhann himself, Theatre of Voices and myself, and the ACME string quartet based in New York, with Clarice Jensen being the main person there. There was definitely a plan to record this piece. It was set up with Jóhann, but obviously his death stopped us in our tracks and brought things to a halt for a while. Then various other people got involved, including his family, and somehow the whole thing was brought together.

The ball could have stopped rolling, but between us we felt that we knew enough about the piece – not least from having performed it before – but also from being part of Jóhann's work generally, spread over a number of years. We had the right sound producer, who knew the piece and Jóhann very well. Indeed the only person really missing was Jóhann himself; in one sense of course he's a key element, but I don't think it would have been very different if he had been there. We can't know that for sure; he might have come along with new bits and pieces of material to use, but given that the score was there and we'd already performed it quite a number of times, we felt pretty confident that musically we knew what we were doing; we just had to make sure that the sound involved wasn't just the people on the stage but also had the right sonic atmosphere – which it in my opinion does.

So was the idea that the piece would change as Jóhann discovered new sounds to work into the electronic side of it?

I'm not sure how much he intended for the piece to evolve over time, with the incorporation of new elements in the electronic component; there's no way to know. Jóhann never stopped fiddling with pieces, so it's very likely that there could have been something; on the other hand, I think the material that's there is already totally sufficient. What's important is not just the notes on the page but the way in which the sound is projected. Not from the performers, but (to give an example) when we did it in Athens, we were rehearsing away and the sound engineer was working on the sound, and it seemed like nothing was going right – and then suddenly it was like something clicked and we knew we'd found it, and we knew how to put this music into this large space we were in. It's just a question of doing the same thing in the recording studio or, in this case, Copenhagen's Garnisons Kirke. As to whether or not there would have been some little differences – it's perfectly possible, but I don't think there would have been anything significant. It's definitely a concert work that has a form of its own, even though little details will be tweaked from time to time.

Comparisons with Górecki, Pärt and perhaps Glass suggest influence from those composers on Jóhannsson, but I was struck by the links some have drawn between his musical style and his father’s work for IBM in the early decades of the computer era. Do you think this side of his upbringing was similarly formative?

I think it must have been. I don't know anything really about his childhood. But we did meet his father after Johann’s death. My wife, who is the soprano in our group, went to Iceland to attend the funeral, and got to meet his family and got on with them very well. And then when we performed the piece, which was the first, and so far the only, post-Jóhann performance, which we did in Athens, they all came along and so we got to know them too. And then we – Theatre of Voices – went to do a concert in Reykjavík, which included a small piece by Jóhann. But also we knew that his father liked to play the barrel-organ, he made them himself – it was one of his hobbies. So we invited him to perform a piece in our concert – so having a father like that – an IBM computer wizard who also had his musical hobbies – this must have had a strong influence on Jóhann. I'm sure he then went off and did his own thing independently, and found many new influences, but I think that background is important.

The sonic backdrops to several movements feature deliberate, heavy distortion of pre-recorded sounds. When did distortion first start entering the palette of classical composers as an element to be embraced and used, rather than an error to be eliminated?

I'm not sure - but it must have been in the studios after the World War 2, when electronic studios were established all over Europe, usually in connection with a radio house. They were deadly serious about plenty of their work, and I don't know whether at that point they were inclined to play around with distortion as a technique.

There was a guy called Philip Jeck, who made music using LP turntables, adjusting the speeds and working several sound sources at once, all live in concert – we did a piece with Gavin Bryars and Philip (who died just recently) which incorporated this alongside a string quartet, with some very beautiful effects. He was using the sounds on LP – whatever they might be – to create a distortion that usually was very gentle, and in the context of Gavin Bryars' piece actually very moving. There are many things like this but I'm not certain about exactly when it first arose.

Drone Mass uses a wide range of vocal techniques, with sounds ranging from the pure tones often heard in early music to far harsher singing, laden with overtones. How much of this is specified in the score, and how much arose from rehearsing and discussing it?

Basically it's in the score, although often it’s up to us fill out some of the details, such as voice colour and overtones. I think our other work, especially in early music, was something that appealed to Johann, and he wanted to make use of that, and we were happy to oblige. But early music singing is really only one of many ways that we can sing! A lot of people refer to the early music connection, so obviously it’s there, but it’s just a part of what we normally do.

It’s really a very contemporary situation. As a singer I originally sang a lot of early music, and found myself working with other like-minded singers, not just in Theatre of Voices but in other groups. And I think that many composers around the world are drawn to that sound and want to work with in their own music – regardless of whether or not their music style is related to early music. For example with Arvo Pärt - one can see the connections there with early music. But there are other composers who don’t set a foot in early music; they just like this sound, which is not an oratorio or opera sound, but is still the real human voice. So this has become more and more an aspect that you find in contemporary music. And I think Jóhann was part of that. How much he knew about early music itself I have no idea; certainly he must have known some of it, but I don't think it was a big topic for him. I think it was the sound in itself that he wanted to work with; he felt it matched and supported what he wanted to do in musical terms.

The title is ambiguous; the “drone” element we can perhaps interpret broadly in terms of the timeless ambient-style textures used in various movements, but what about the “mass”? Do you feel this is sacred music in a loose sense?

I didn't choose the title...! To talk about the "drone" part first, my first response when people ask me about the Drone Mass is to say that I don't think there are many strong drones in it – but when I look at the score again I realise that actually there are. At the very beginning there's that long low D for example. But when I’m doing it, the drone – as drones do – recedes into the background and my attention is focused on what the other parts are doing above the drone.

There are two kinds of drone – the more traditional one is a low continuous sound, generally of a bass note or at least something in the lower registers. The other kind of drone is created when a motif keeps repeating, as happens in one section of the work. Other things happen around that motif, so it operates bit like a drone too – but it’s placed higher up in the texture.

As for the "mass" component; I don’t find that the musical sections reflect the movements of the Mass in any conscious way. I think that Johann wanted to imitate the seriousness of a Mass, a ritual after all, and so he created a series of relatively static pieces that build and then fall away again; I can see a strong sense of ritualism in it, but not something liturgical. On that basis, I think the title really does work.

That sense of mystery doesn’t end with the work’s title; the individual movements also have evocative titles that invite speculation but offer little clarity. How much meaning should we ascribe to these, and to the texts Jóhannsson sets?

There weren't titles originally. And I don’t think Jóhann had any intention of using any. (I may of course be mistaken, but I don’t think so.) "Drone Mass" really is fine by itself. So, yes, I was quite surprised to see titles on the recording. Titles can be problematic because they lead you to think in a certain way, instead of letting you listen and placing your own meaning and significance on what you’re hearing. Part of the core of this work is its strong abstract quality – just as it is in his film "Last and First Men", which Johann made and composed the music for.

As for texts - there's no text that the singers sing as words. There are certainly vowel sounds – "ee ay" could perhaps evoke the word "Kyrie", but it's a stretch. Else (soprano 1 on the recording) mentions that Jóhann was interested in Coptic Apocrypha texts; I've done other works of his that do use text fragments in a similar way, for example his “Orphic Hymn” where the text (in Latin) is most clearly appropriate to the music, but again removed from our immediate understanding (unless we speak Latin). It's not word-setting in the dramatic sense. There’s no narrative. I suspect that even where there are words, then they've been broken down into their component sounds so that they're no longer recognisable. I don't think they exist in the work as texts for communication, even if they had significance for Jóhann personally. What Johann wanted from us was to utilise the vowels and sometimes single syllables as abstract sounds, to colour the music in a particular way. I can’t say what meaning the texts had for Jóhann, but it's not something that actually projects itself to the listener’s comprehension.