Martin Iddon's Hesperides is such an album - three tracks of what initially struck me as a kind of 'ambient' music, though with some asterisks about what that rather vague term really means. (Iddon himself, indeed, seems to view it somewhat differently). By any name, though, it's slow-moving, self-effacing music, the work of a composer who keeps his dynamics down not as a deliberate gesture but simply because he doesn't feel the need to raise his voice.
I spoke to Martin about what makes this music tick, and about some of the influences that have gone into the mix over the years. 'Eclectic' is a popular go-to word to describe an artist's background - perhaps over-used - but Martin Iddon draws on everything from the Notre-Dame school of polyphony to the deafening soundscapes of the shoegaze scene of the '80s.
I’m sure you get this a lot, but your observation that ‘it’s a decade or so since I wrote any dynamic that wasn’t ppp’ is extremely eye-catching. What first led you to explore extreme quietness?
The first piece that I wrote that’s still in the catalogue, the string trio …à son dernier soupir, from 2006, was originally going to accompany a video project, by the Irish artist and curator Dobz O’Brien. He’d planned physically to take up Jean-Paul Marat’s pose in David’s painting, The Death of Marat, and maintain it, motionless (in an actual bath full of rapidly cooling water…), for as long as he could. I wanted something similarly static for the music, which I wrote for the most part at the instrument, the viola in this case, exploring what I could find with the smallest and slowest of bow movements: in order to get greater control over the motion of my right arm, I played the instrument ‘gamba’ style, in my lap, which meant the scroll sat very close to my ear, amplifying really quiet materials so that I could hear what I conceived of as their sort of rich, interior life. The first three sections (of five) of that piece are all based on sounds I explored in this way, each of which is a sort of miniature of the quiet, static spaces that dominate my later music. It took a little while for this element to become the central one, as elongated passages dealing with quiet, detailed figures like the opening of the trio gradually expanded to become whole pieces, but it was probably already set by about 2010.
I should add, though, I’ve nothing against louder dynamics! Even though the statement sounds perhaps extreme, it’s not a programmatic commitment to quietude as such; if I were to hit a situation where I thought mf was really called for, I’d definitely write it. It’s just that I haven’t felt the need for a long time. And there’s still, I think, so much richness and vibrancy within this quite narrow dynamic band. And I very much like the sort of attentiveness that quiet music seems to call for.
You clearly haven’t looked back since; given the lack of overt change and the absence of dynamic contrast, which many people might see as two key tools in creating music, what does the compositional process look like for you?
I think, actually, those elements are of really fundamental importance for only quite a small proportion of music, globally speaking (and perhaps even in the West, taking a long-ish historical view). These sorts of ideas—structural development and formal contrast—are really significant, to be sure, for the music of the Western canon, especially in the nineteenth century, but much less so for plenty of other musics, and they’re quite marginal concepts in most of the musics that really interest me. In popular music, too, that sort of fundamental importance of dynamic contrast is quite a latecomer: the quiet-loud song structure only really turns up with Hüsker Dü in the eighties (later popularised by the Pixies and Nirvana).
I grew up singing in church choirs, and the experience of psalm singing—simple, repeated music materials, which are delivered in quite flat dynamic terms—remains really important to me. In fact, when I wrote this, I’d just come back from a Maundy Thursday church service, which culminated in the ceremony of the stripping of the altars to the accompaniment of a unison singing of Psalm 22, something which I find both musically and liturgically enormous moving, and the power of its affect is connected, I think, to its plainness, clarity and simplicity.
I sometimes speak to students about the idea that they, like me, might have a sort of idiocanon, a collection of the musics which are of most profound importance to them, and that that perhaps intersects only a little with the canon of things they could well think, as music students, they’re ‘supposed’ to find important. Putting the Pixies next to psalmody might already be a good example of how personal I think these idiocanons probably are. For me, I’ve realised, almost all the music I really love is concerned with sustaining something—perhaps quite a simple thing, at first glance—over an extended period, in ways that mean that thing becomes more, rather than less interesting (or more intense, maybe, in some cases). That could include, on the one hand, twelfth-century Notre Dame polyphony by Léonin or Pérotin, or Ockeghem, especially pieces like the Missa cuiusvis toni, or Antoine Beuger’s music, Eliane Radigue’s fixed media pieces written with the ARP, Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing, or Annea Lockwood’s Soundmap of the Housatonic River, but equally Fela Kuti’s Coffin for Head of State, Pink Floyd’s ‘Careful with that Axe, Eugene’ or early goth—Bauhaus’s ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, or maybe even better their cover of John Cale’s ‘Rosegarden Funeral of Sores’, fit the bill, as might The Cure’s ‘A Forest’ or ‘Faith’—or shoegaze (Lush or My Bloody Valentine, say) and no shortage of dance music of all sorts.
I realise I haven’t answered the question about process… But it’s to do with all this: for me, most of the process happens before anything that probably looks much like composition. I spend a lot of time trying to think of the sort of idea that seems to can be sustained in this sort of way and for how long. Once I’ve got that—once I know what the fundamental world of the piece is, how it ticks, and what its overall duration is—the rest feels like mere elaboration, almost mechanical, though I do like to work by hand a lot of the time, with the hope that my own physical hand will introduce the sorts of mistakes only I would make into my rigorous process. I can spend a few years slowly thinking through these sorts of questions of what, at the fundamental level, a piece is, but once I know, the writing out of it could happen quite rapidly, over a matter of weeks.
What was it like to compose for the very specific forces of the Quiet Music Ensemble (clarinet, trombone, electric guitar, cello and double bass)?
In fact, I don’t remember thinking all that much about instruments as such, but rather about people. I’d heard QME play John Cage’s Ryonaji, perhaps my favourite Cage piece, beautifully in Cork a few years before writing in’ei and I thought I had a sense of the sorts of things that might interest them as musicians. I certainly knew John Godfrey, of QME, very well, since he teaches at University College Cork, where I had my first academic job, so we’d worked together closely for a year and we share a lot of musical interests. I reckoned I might have a good sense of the sort of language (words, that is) I might use that would speak to John, a sort of mixture of the technical and the poetic. That’s not to say that I didn’t think about the instruments at all! But in in’ei all the performers play from a single-page score which is largely written in the form of text and in Hesperides itself there are five parts, and any one of the performers can play any one of those parts: as such, they needed to be written such that this would be possible, using—as is the case in a great deal of my music—very simple materials, like elongated fixed pitches, glissandi, and pulsation. Of course, the instruments do these sorts of things in different ways, which means that, almost by definition they connect timbrally, because of the similar materials, but in different ways, with different weights, which leads to a good deal of the local shape of the piece.
On a personal level - you describe yourself as shy, quietly-spoken and wary of change. In today’s bustling world of networking, where extroverts largely rule the roost, how easy do you find it to forge a career as a composer?
I’m fortunate in that I’m also a university academic (and also a musicologist, as well as a composer), which means I don’t have to earn my living purely from writing music and, in fact, part of what the university expects me to do with my time is, precisely, to write music, a luxury I very much don’t take for granted (though of course a great many composers also have ‘day jobs’, especially in the earlier parts of their careers). This means I’m able to write directly for performers who are already interested in the sort of music I want to write, and it turns out that there are certainly enough of them to keep me going! That also means that I’ve ended up having ongoing relationships with particular performers: there are two pieces for QME on this disc, for instance, but also multiple pieces for, say, Heather Roche, Jeffrey Gavett, or Geoffrey Deibel. Inevitably, many of the people I end up writing most for are also good friends, so these pieces tend to be about those relationships too, trying to find a point where the things that I’m interested in and the things they’re interested in meet. I imagine this is, somehow, about introversion too, a sort of continuation of long one-to-one conversations by other means. None of this is to say that I wouldn’t be thrilled if a big orchestra came calling wanting a piece (call me!), but I really love these long collaborative relationships which, in important ways also operate outside the machinery of the business end of making music.
Similarly, is ‘quiet music’ – whether it’s the concept or the ensemble – a hard sell to concert promoters?
Just like performers, I think there are some promoters who are really interested by the idea and others whom it speaks to less, though I think I’ve been pretty fortunate in having people who are happy to give the music a shot, or who trust those sorts of performer collaborators I mentioned above, who are of course some of the best advocates for the work anyone could ask for.
Listening to In’ei the word that kept springing to mind was ‘ambient’. Ironically, it reminded me of when I encountered the deafening drone-metal soundscapes of Sunn O))), and deliberately listened to them with the volume turned right down to enjoy their slow-moving murky textures without losing my hearing! Do you see yourself as an ambient composer?
I love the Sunn O))) comparison! And it doesn’t seem ironic to me, actually: I think there’s a closeness between just those sorts of very loud musics and very quiet ones: I mentioned both My Bloody Valentine and Fela Kuti already, but a lot of La Monte Young’s drone music is, or certainly was, extremely loud, and that’s music which stretches out simple forms—whether twelve-tone ones or the blues—so that their formal properties dissolve. Maybe even closer is Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio, which sounds as if La Monte Young has met the Ramones, more or less literally what actually happened, in truth.
Personally, though, I don’t think of my music as ambient as such, or not in the Eno sense that it might be ignorable. But I’m definitely gesturing towards ambient musics in the use of simple materials, repetition, and field recordings which often evoke the natural and in ways which almost suggest that that sort of ambient listening would be okay. I also hope that it’s not as sweetly beautiful or calming as at least some ambient music is. I certainly do hope that it’s beautiful—beauty is absolutely what I’m going for—but in a way that isn’t straightforward or unambiguous. If I’ve got it right, I’d like the beauty always to be in question, just enough that it seems to be asking you to keep listening or, if you do drift off and think about other things, that it also calls you back at some point to that more attentive state. I think there are some dark ambient things that I very much admire that do this sort of thing really successfully, like Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy for Lilith or The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time project.
How do you envisage your music being listened to, in terms of the role taken by the listener? Do you favour live performances over a more ‘background’ kind of listening?
I’m uncomfortable with the idea of telling someone how to listen, to my music or anything else! On the one hand, then, however someone chooses to listen to my music is fine with me. But I do think that there seem to me to be environments and situations in which the sort of thing I do is likely to speak better than others, to be sure. And I think there is something rather nice—maybe even formally dynamic—that happens with an audience that’s listening to something finely detailed, but more globally rather static with ears that expect something to happen, when it isn’t going to: I quite like the change in attitude that happens over time, as a listener might move from a sort of expectation that the sustained timbre in a particular piece is a kind of set up, that it’s going to frame some musical event and make it speak in a particular way, to the acceptance that that event is almost certainly not going to come and that, in fact, if there’s change it’s going on at a much more finely-grained layer of detail.
I think the music may have a sort of drama that comes from that listener experience, as the nature of what they expect the piece to be changes, even while the piece doesn’t. If I’ve done my job right, mind you, even once you know what the piece is going to do (or isn’t going to, rather), and you’re listening to it in that knowledge, I probably hope for the situation I describe above, where the drama comes from a music which seems to demand a sort of intense focussed listening, which can’t quite be sustained, where you might find yourself moving between sharp focus and fuzzy flow, but where exactly when the music calls the listener to attention changes on each hearing.
Martin Iddon, Quiet Music Ensemble, Jack Adler-McKean
Available Formats: CD, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
