Can you tell us a little about your musical career to date?

I started singing at Jesus when I was seven: that was basically my musical training. I did some stuff after that at Junior Guildhall, and a place called Aldeburgh Young Musicians. So that exposed me to more stuff: jazz fusion, improvisation, quite a lot of Indian music. My technical musical training comes from being a chorister, but my main instrument is now piano. I did a piano recital last year, and I wanted to play some of my own stuff, but the faculty wouldn’t let me, of course. Singing isn’t my main thing any more but it’s where I started.

What’s it like writing something for an instrument that’s not your own?

I mean that’s what it’s always like, if I’m writing for anything apart from piano. I just have to talk to as many trumpeters as I can; write little pieces for people to play. Then you learn by trial and error basically. Composing is something that people talk about quite often theoretically, but I think the only way to learn is to do it. In terms of new developments, you can’t extrapolate from what’s happened before to what’s going to happen next. It has to be something a little more organic.

Was composition something you were always interested in?

To some extent it’s something that everyone is interested in. I mean, increasingly now, people are pointing out that there’s as much a compositional aspect to playing as there is to actually composing. So when you play a piece you basically make it your own. The idea that a composer puts a piece out there, and after that it doesn’t belong to the composer, it belongs to whoever plays it, is gaining traction in the modern music world.

Is that something you’re comfortable with as a composer yourself?

I’m much more comfortable with that than feeling like I have to control every aspect of the piece all the time. You do obviously have to take the responsibility for some things, but it also means that whoever plays your piece can contribute things to it that you haven’t thought of. There’s a school of composers that think the sign of a good composer is that he knows precisely what he wants in every way, and I have no problem with knowing what you want, but enforcing that on everyone else is a completely different matter. 

Why was it that you chose to come to university to study music rather than a conservatoire?

Well, conservatoires already have a reputation for being very traditional, and one of the largest problems in contemporary classical music is that people don’t play it! People are still playing Beethoven, and Beethoven [Symphony No.] Five is good, but it doesn’t deserve 8,500 performances over the past 150 years. That’s just not something we need. The only stuff that I’ve heard that’s been written in the past year, for example, has been either stuff that I’ve written, or stuff that I’ve commissioned for my own groups. So it’s no wonder that people are not interested in classical music anymore, because most of it’s over 100 years old. 

To my mind, people have lost sight of their priorities. And they’ve subsumed the ideal of moving forward with music, and taking advantage of the current extremely exciting social climate in Europe, they’ve subsumed that beneath the very ivory-tower, narrow-minded aim of producing an alternative version of Beethoven Five.

I just think there needs to be much more of a balance; at the moment it’s about 95 to five percent, old to new. And I think until that ratio changes, people won’t get used to the idea of classical music in general being exciting. Most of my friends who don’t study music would not be interested in going to see Beethoven Five, other than for the novelty value of sitting in a concert hall for an hour and a half in silence which is a totally outdated social convention in the 21st century