Hi Simeon, I’ve been loving my Remnants CD & zine (and I really appreciated your postcard message) and I’d be very interested to know more about your creative process. When you write, for example, about Inside/Out “I aimed to convey this sense of uncertainty and unsettledness through ambiguity, and a lack of a clearly defined key… to explore the use of inversions and extended chords”, are those plans that you would have had before you started composing the piece or are they things that you have analysed after the piece has emerged? Maybe this varies from piece to piece but I’d be very interested to know how it works for you. Best wishes, Richard
Hi Richard, good to hear from you, and really pleased to hear you've been enjoying Remnants! This is such a great question, thank you.
It definitely varies from piece to piece, depending on how overt or specific an influence or starting point there is - for instance, if there's a specific brief to work towards (e.g. my recent collaboration 'Rise & Fall' with Garreth Broke, which was for the Bigo & Twigetti label, who wanted pieces exploring the idea of scale(s) for a specific Scale EP). This could be imposed by a label/someone else or indeed self-imposed, and I sometimes find that quite a helpful approach...almost setting myself a task/target/focus/commission even.
For example, my 'Four Suffolk Sea Scenes' was extremely responsive to unplanned events, taking inspiration from a lovely moment and then extrapolating it outwards towards something much bigger as a creative response.
In the case of 'Inside/Out', though, this was a really interesting piece to work on, and in this instance, the uncertainty and sense of ambiguity throughout was very much a conscious compositional choice from the outset. It started out purely from thinking about how an open fifth interval (in this case, the first chord of a D in the LH and an A in the RH) is such a clean, open sound whilst not giving anything away in terms of nailing its colours to the mast from a tonal centre perspective. Throughout I play with the use of the flattened and raised seventh when focusing ideas around D minor, before a B-section which finds its way through a number of quick tonal centre changes before coming back around.
All of these choices were things I tried to embed from the outset, although I guess it's interesting to think about how these choices and intentions still get moulded and shaped as the compositional process takes hold.
I actually play 'Inside/Out' quite markedly different to the recording when playing live. I really lean into the dynamics a lot more and attempt to make even more of the moments of tension...the push and pull.
I remember my teacher before I moved to Leeds for university would always talk about these moments as "Musical Corners" - the moments and elements in a piece which create the most overt opportunities for adding interest and involving the aspects of our musicality which make our own interpretations interesting and to some extent unique (especially important when playing other peoples' music).
It's also interesting how extra things can crop up along the way, sometimes years after you've written something, and this is certainly the case with 'Inside/Out' and you see new opportunities to do something which perhaps mirrors an earlier moment or allows for an additional tonal centre shift. I love that this can happen even within ones own music, and I guess the important thing to do is not be too precious about when a piece is "finished", or at least being able to accept it can still develop, even after a released version exists!
Hi Simeon, thank you for your fascinating answer! I’m listening to Inside/Out with a fresh perspective now and love to think of it continuing to evolve as you perform it. It may be my favourite piece on Remnants – there’s so much more going on there than you realise on first listen. More generally, I can imagine how having certain constraints, either internal or external, can help with the compositional process (Brian Eno has often spoken about the creative benefits of musical or technological limitations). You have also reminded me that, for some reason, I never got round to getting your long Suffolk piece so I have made up for that today (along with Rise & Fall) to celebrate Bandcamp Friday!
Thanks for this, Richard, I'm so pleased to hear this.
Yes, absolutely - I think it's interesting how we can often assume that once a piece has been "finished" (at least, enough to release it and feel happy with it), it must remain that way forevermore. I guess a piece of music, perhaps more than any other artform, has greater flexibility and scope to continue evolving if it is being performed on a regular basis, which I find quite exciting! Not even as if it is jazz or improvised, just a gentle evolution of the composition and its performance. Like it!
And yes, love the Brian Eno stuff on this, he has such a refreshing and interesting approach to it all.
Thanks so much for the support with the newer pieces too, much appreciated!
Hi Simeon, you’re very welcome! (The Suffolk beach scenes are superb.) I agree completely with your thoughts about music evolving - I can’t think of any other art form that comes close.
I wonder if there might be some loose parallels between your approach to live performance and Eno’s generative music, whereby the creative process becomes more like gardening than architecture as your pieces respond in subtle ways to the environment, and to themselves, in ways that you wouldn’t necessarily predict? Just a thought - I’m definitely not comparing you to an algorithm, though!
Mmmmm, now that is a really interesting perspective, Richard! Thanks so much. I really like that metaphor of gardening (pruning, tidying etc) in relation to this. Fascinating!
Hey Sim! I was going over some of my sheet music collection and stumbled upon my Howard Skempton books Images and 24 Preludes and Fugues. I remember it was you who had recommended him to me. He hits a target no one seems to even see. Do you have any favorites from these two collections?
Hey Chris, good to hear from you, and great that you've been revisiting the Skempton stuff! What a treat to be reminded and go back over and listen all over again!
I think we might have slightly different books - I don't think I have the Images book itself, rather the Collected Piano Pieces alongside the Preludes & Fugues.
Regardless, whilst I think the Preludes & Fugues are really great, and a nice way of revisiting a timeless approach to composition, I think I probably get most joy out of listening to and playing his Reflections, which I find especially beautiful, mostly quite sparse yet still melodically very focused. I love the width and breadth of the chords and range of the piano of No. 4; the very simple intervallic relationships between the hands in No.3; whilst there's a jaunty, jolliness to No. 5 and No. 7 which is kind of fun, and also, slightly pastoral...really quite English in a way.
The Images are stunning too, though for sure.
I love this quote from a review of Images in Tempo:
"Skempton's harmony is nothing if not explicit, and precise, and he wrings maximum effect from a pared minimum of matter. This music is Irreduciblist. The pieces contain nothing they do not need, and nothing could be subtracted without loss. There's no rhetoric, no bravura display, no smokescreen of Postmodern irony, no false naivety. Skempton composes essences, and they go straight to the heart"
...which I feel really does get to the heart of what he is about as a composer, and also why he appeals so much to me.
I also really appreciated Andrew Eales' review of the Preludes & Fugues:
The one piece that made my head turn for Skempton was Prelude No. 3 from Images. It's written on three staves with three sharps and somehow Skempton manages to not press the A note once. I think avoiding the A note gives the piece it's wandering quality. The form of the piece also reminds me of a palindrome. This part is tougher to explain but I hear the melody in full in the center of the piece while we are fed the melody little by little approaching the center and removing the melody little by little as we leave the center.
On the preludes and fugues, what I admire about them is that you can get so in-depth with each of them with so little. Some of these pieces are only five measures. The fugue in C major is only five measures but goes from C to F minor to Db melodic minor, to... A? You can almost pick the exact note where it feels the key has changed. There are some slow ones too where it doesn't seem like much is going on, but I think the challenge in these pieces is finding that thing you can take from it. I remember in college it was all about how many times you can change the key or writing something in time signatures like 5/8, 10/4, and 7/4... these pieces have all those. If anyone wanted to learn odd time signatures or key changes, this is the book they should get.
I owe Reflections (and Nocturnes) more listens. Listening to No. 5 now I did one of those air-out-my-nose laughs on the last chord.
Lovely thoughts, Chris. So much to delve into with this for sure. And yes, that chord at the end of Reflections No.5 is pretty funny! In interviews, he often comes across as quite dry and droll even (although people say he's very nice and not at all distant as some in his position can be) - sometimes there are plenty of things which you can come across in his work which often make me wonder if they're put in there out of amusement on his part.
It's really interesting you allude to that Prelude and its atypical notation style. How do you find it? From both a compositional perspective and when playing it from the music?
You hit on a really important element of what I think makes him a) a fascinating composer to attempt to engage with; and b) why his approach puts him in such an interesting position in the overall musical canon. His relatively modest background and lack of formal musical education (at academic level at least) means that for someone of his generation, he has had to work extremely hard to get a hearing. I greatly admire his determination to keep doing what he does, and his motivations around it all are very interesting to explore.
He approaches everything with a noticeably understated demeanour and compositional methodology. A lot of what you mention around key and time signatures and how students are encouraged to "explore" these at higher education can often feel very forced, almost as if for the sake of it, whereas I never feel this about Skempton. I think there's perhaps a slight obtuseness to him, but it finds its way out in a very gentle and distinguished way.
I have access to quite a lot of further reading materials (mostly academic papers/journals) which delve into him and his work a lot more. If you're interested, I'd be very happy to send you them!
Hi Simeon, I’ve been loving my Remnants CD & zine (and I really appreciated your postcard message) and I’d be very interested to know more about your creative process. When you write, for example, about Inside/Out “I aimed to convey this sense of uncertainty and unsettledness through ambiguity, and a lack of a clearly defined key… to explore the use of inversions and extended chords”, are those plans that you would have had before you started composing the piece or are they things that you have analysed after the piece has emerged? Maybe this varies from piece to piece but I’d be very interested to know how it works for you. Best wishes, Richard
Hi Richard, good to hear from you, and really pleased to hear you've been enjoying Remnants! This is such a great question, thank you.
It definitely varies from piece to piece, depending on how overt or specific an influence or starting point there is - for instance, if there's a specific brief to work towards (e.g. my recent collaboration 'Rise & Fall' with Garreth Broke, which was for the Bigo & Twigetti label, who wanted pieces exploring the idea of scale(s) for a specific Scale EP). This could be imposed by a label/someone else or indeed self-imposed, and I sometimes find that quite a helpful approach...almost setting myself a task/target/focus/commission even.
For example, my 'Four Suffolk Sea Scenes' was extremely responsive to unplanned events, taking inspiration from a lovely moment and then extrapolating it outwards towards something much bigger as a creative response.
In the case of 'Inside/Out', though, this was a really interesting piece to work on, and in this instance, the uncertainty and sense of ambiguity throughout was very much a conscious compositional choice from the outset. It started out purely from thinking about how an open fifth interval (in this case, the first chord of a D in the LH and an A in the RH) is such a clean, open sound whilst not giving anything away in terms of nailing its colours to the mast from a tonal centre perspective. Throughout I play with the use of the flattened and raised seventh when focusing ideas around D minor, before a B-section which finds its way through a number of quick tonal centre changes before coming back around.
All of these choices were things I tried to embed from the outset, although I guess it's interesting to think about how these choices and intentions still get moulded and shaped as the compositional process takes hold.
I actually play 'Inside/Out' quite markedly different to the recording when playing live. I really lean into the dynamics a lot more and attempt to make even more of the moments of tension...the push and pull.
I remember my teacher before I moved to Leeds for university would always talk about these moments as "Musical Corners" - the moments and elements in a piece which create the most overt opportunities for adding interest and involving the aspects of our musicality which make our own interpretations interesting and to some extent unique (especially important when playing other peoples' music).
It's also interesting how extra things can crop up along the way, sometimes years after you've written something, and this is certainly the case with 'Inside/Out' and you see new opportunities to do something which perhaps mirrors an earlier moment or allows for an additional tonal centre shift. I love that this can happen even within ones own music, and I guess the important thing to do is not be too precious about when a piece is "finished", or at least being able to accept it can still develop, even after a released version exists!
Hi Simeon, thank you for your fascinating answer! I’m listening to Inside/Out with a fresh perspective now and love to think of it continuing to evolve as you perform it. It may be my favourite piece on Remnants – there’s so much more going on there than you realise on first listen. More generally, I can imagine how having certain constraints, either internal or external, can help with the compositional process (Brian Eno has often spoken about the creative benefits of musical or technological limitations). You have also reminded me that, for some reason, I never got round to getting your long Suffolk piece so I have made up for that today (along with Rise & Fall) to celebrate Bandcamp Friday!
Thanks for this, Richard, I'm so pleased to hear this.
Yes, absolutely - I think it's interesting how we can often assume that once a piece has been "finished" (at least, enough to release it and feel happy with it), it must remain that way forevermore. I guess a piece of music, perhaps more than any other artform, has greater flexibility and scope to continue evolving if it is being performed on a regular basis, which I find quite exciting! Not even as if it is jazz or improvised, just a gentle evolution of the composition and its performance. Like it!
And yes, love the Brian Eno stuff on this, he has such a refreshing and interesting approach to it all.
Thanks so much for the support with the newer pieces too, much appreciated!
Hi Simeon, you’re very welcome! (The Suffolk beach scenes are superb.) I agree completely with your thoughts about music evolving - I can’t think of any other art form that comes close.
I wonder if there might be some loose parallels between your approach to live performance and Eno’s generative music, whereby the creative process becomes more like gardening than architecture as your pieces respond in subtle ways to the environment, and to themselves, in ways that you wouldn’t necessarily predict? Just a thought - I’m definitely not comparing you to an algorithm, though!
Mmmmm, now that is a really interesting perspective, Richard! Thanks so much. I really like that metaphor of gardening (pruning, tidying etc) in relation to this. Fascinating!
Hey Sim! I was going over some of my sheet music collection and stumbled upon my Howard Skempton books Images and 24 Preludes and Fugues. I remember it was you who had recommended him to me. He hits a target no one seems to even see. Do you have any favorites from these two collections?
Hey Chris, good to hear from you, and great that you've been revisiting the Skempton stuff! What a treat to be reminded and go back over and listen all over again!
I think we might have slightly different books - I don't think I have the Images book itself, rather the Collected Piano Pieces alongside the Preludes & Fugues.
Regardless, whilst I think the Preludes & Fugues are really great, and a nice way of revisiting a timeless approach to composition, I think I probably get most joy out of listening to and playing his Reflections, which I find especially beautiful, mostly quite sparse yet still melodically very focused. I love the width and breadth of the chords and range of the piano of No. 4; the very simple intervallic relationships between the hands in No.3; whilst there's a jaunty, jolliness to No. 5 and No. 7 which is kind of fun, and also, slightly pastoral...really quite English in a way.
The Images are stunning too, though for sure.
I love this quote from a review of Images in Tempo:
"Skempton's harmony is nothing if not explicit, and precise, and he wrings maximum effect from a pared minimum of matter. This music is Irreduciblist. The pieces contain nothing they do not need, and nothing could be subtracted without loss. There's no rhetoric, no bravura display, no smokescreen of Postmodern irony, no false naivety. Skempton composes essences, and they go straight to the heart"
...which I feel really does get to the heart of what he is about as a composer, and also why he appeals so much to me.
I also really appreciated Andrew Eales' review of the Preludes & Fugues:
https://pianodao.com/2021/03/09/howard-skempton-24-preludes-and-fugues/
How about you? Which ones appeal to you?
Hey Sim!
The one piece that made my head turn for Skempton was Prelude No. 3 from Images. It's written on three staves with three sharps and somehow Skempton manages to not press the A note once. I think avoiding the A note gives the piece it's wandering quality. The form of the piece also reminds me of a palindrome. This part is tougher to explain but I hear the melody in full in the center of the piece while we are fed the melody little by little approaching the center and removing the melody little by little as we leave the center.
On the preludes and fugues, what I admire about them is that you can get so in-depth with each of them with so little. Some of these pieces are only five measures. The fugue in C major is only five measures but goes from C to F minor to Db melodic minor, to... A? You can almost pick the exact note where it feels the key has changed. There are some slow ones too where it doesn't seem like much is going on, but I think the challenge in these pieces is finding that thing you can take from it. I remember in college it was all about how many times you can change the key or writing something in time signatures like 5/8, 10/4, and 7/4... these pieces have all those. If anyone wanted to learn odd time signatures or key changes, this is the book they should get.
I owe Reflections (and Nocturnes) more listens. Listening to No. 5 now I did one of those air-out-my-nose laughs on the last chord.
Best,
Chris
Lovely thoughts, Chris. So much to delve into with this for sure. And yes, that chord at the end of Reflections No.5 is pretty funny! In interviews, he often comes across as quite dry and droll even (although people say he's very nice and not at all distant as some in his position can be) - sometimes there are plenty of things which you can come across in his work which often make me wonder if they're put in there out of amusement on his part.
It's really interesting you allude to that Prelude and its atypical notation style. How do you find it? From both a compositional perspective and when playing it from the music?
You hit on a really important element of what I think makes him a) a fascinating composer to attempt to engage with; and b) why his approach puts him in such an interesting position in the overall musical canon. His relatively modest background and lack of formal musical education (at academic level at least) means that for someone of his generation, he has had to work extremely hard to get a hearing. I greatly admire his determination to keep doing what he does, and his motivations around it all are very interesting to explore.
He approaches everything with a noticeably understated demeanour and compositional methodology. A lot of what you mention around key and time signatures and how students are encouraged to "explore" these at higher education can often feel very forced, almost as if for the sake of it, whereas I never feel this about Skempton. I think there's perhaps a slight obtuseness to him, but it finds its way out in a very gentle and distinguished way.
I have access to quite a lot of further reading materials (mostly academic papers/journals) which delve into him and his work a lot more. If you're interested, I'd be very happy to send you them!