Blood grew out of a melody by Hildegard von Bingen. What drew you to that work as a starting point, and how did that fragment shape the piece as it grew?
The starting point for Blood was actually the word ‘Blood’ itself; I had known for years that I wanted to write a piece called Blood. I knew that also it would be a concertante piece for violininvolving voices. But that’s about all I knew. Quite a few years ago I’d found this 12th Century melody from Hildegard von Bingen, O Rubor sanguinis. It’s very short, less than a minute long, an antiphon for a solo female voice. And there was something about it that I really connected with.
One of the things I often do with composition is I use the computer to slow things down to analyse them. I find when really stretching them it starts to reveal new intricacies that aren’totherwise audible. Tiny little inflections become magnified and transformed. And with this one I’d ended up stretching it so much, almost by accident, that the melody had grown from less than a minute to nearly half an hour. So that kind of became a bit of a process: listening, copying, notating until I’d absorbed it and it became my own material. So that Hildegard von Bingenmelody is a kind of spine that goes all the way through the work from the first note to the last, and everything else is built around it.
Can you walk us through some more of the techniques or ideas you used to build outward from that original melody?
I suppose everyone is aware there’s a tangible connection between the violin and the voice. And so in writing this piece I wanted to take that one more step and really connect the instrument with the voice from this melody. By stretching it out the sound starts to become multi-layered, then the notes begin to morph into each other, which results in a blurry, slowly-changing melody emerging. At that point I thought about replicating this effect with multiple voices, and that led to the use of eight female voices in the piece, all in the upper range of soprano or alto. They’re all singing the same music which creates a slowly snaking melody all the way through the piece. All the while I knew that the solo violin would be the absolute centre point, the emotional core of that melody. And the string orchestra then acts as the kind of resonator for what’s happening, both emotionally and literally, almost as if they’re a piano peddle on these voices.
How would you describe the sound world of Blood to someone who hasn’t heard it, in a way that gives a flavour without giving it all away?
One of the things from the Hildegard melody that’s interesting, it’s beautiful music, but when it’s slowed down and it’s analysed in the computer you start to get these strange artefacts. A syllable like a ‘tsk’ or ‘chk’. Drawn out over even more seconds and it starts to become more of a hiss, or a breath. So throughout the music there started to be this presence, almost ghost-like. Elements like that, the stuff you’re meant to think is just noise and you can take it out, I wanted to keep it all in. So the strings are playing this beautiful music but there’s also this layer of noise around it too, because I was very conscious that I didn’t want the piece to become too beautiful. It contains this element of resistance. And I wasn’t really interested in writing a violin concerto where the soloist is kind of heroic with an effortless virtuosity. This is hard earned virtuosity – so it is actually extremely difficult to play! But there’s a kind of barrier on the part of the solo violinist which is constantly striving to express something that is always just beyond it. Maybe at the end of the piece there’s a degree of catharsis, certainly simplicity. The last coda of the piece is extremely bald, an exposed and simple rendition of this melody.
Were there any other sources of inspiration or elements that you drew on when writing Blood?
I started writing in Autumn 2023 and it took me a long time. There were also a lot of things happening in the world, conflicts that I was acutely aware of. And for the first time that I can remember writing music, that outside world kind of forced its way through the windows and into my studio. Either consciously or subconsciously I felt that I needed to deal with that somehow. It’s strange sometimes as a composer, you’re there writing hopefully beautiful music while there are terrible things happening that you can’t do anything about; there’s a degree of impotence about it. In a way that’s why it felt wrong to write a kind of heroic solo violin part. So the piece starts quite violently, it’s quite tumultuous and takes a long time to find a kind of inner centre. Generally in my pieces I think beauty and catharsis have to be earned somehow. I find it difficult as a composer to go straight there, there always has to be a kind of journey.
Building from that, what does your process usually look like when you’re starting a new piece? Did Blood follow that pattern or take you somewhere unexpected?
With Blood I had a very fixed image before I started working on what I wanted it to be. The details about how you get there along the way can be quite different. One of the things that’s typical for me in my composition process is there’s a lot of time spent before I get to bar one: pre-composition, finding the material, finding the right entry point into the music, and this piece was no different. In fact it was very protracted; I knew that I wanted to have singers in the piece, but there was a big question about what they were going to sing. I knew that I wanted them to be quasi-instrumentalist but I didn’t just want them to be going ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ throughout. So I had a long period of trying to find texts, reading books, poetry, lots of tangential subjects adjacent to the theme around blood. But in a way it was always right there in front of me with this melody.
Once I find that way in it becomes a sort of circular process, about honing in and magnifying until you get to exactly the right point. I don’t know how many times I must’ve written the first 30 seconds of this piece. But that part is quite typical for me, it helps to really find the right way to set it up, so it then unfolds organically. The part that’s surprising is the further and further you get into the weeds you discover things that you didn’t really know were there. Things that you thought would be simple turn out to be very complex, and vice versa. So there are always surprises.I’m generally trying to realise a very fuzzy image that I have, one that isn’t even always visual, sometimes it can just be a feeling that I’m trying to access. It can take a long time to get there. Blood took me almost a year to write.
Was that a surprising length of time or is that typical?
I knew when I was writing this piece that it was important to me. I think I was really deeply affected by what was happening in the world around me. I felt a little bit of a crisis as an artist about how I could really go about expressing these ideas through such an abstract art form. I’m sometimes almost jealous of my other artist friends who can make art and have it be very readily apparent what it’s about. Here we are dealing with music, and music’s so bloody beautiful all the time! And it’s a hard line to tread, because sometimes you’re trying to express things that aren’t beautiful, or that have negative connotations. That can take a long time; I never really know piece to piece how long it’s going to take. Sometimes it comes easier. I wrote a piece directly after Blood, which is of similar dimensions, and it took about a quarter of the time. So sometimes it’s there and sometimes it’s harder to find.
You’ve worked with Scottish Ensemble before, most recently on compositions for our Summer and Winter concerts a couple of years ago. What do you enjoy about working with the group?
I think Scottish Ensemble are particularly great at weaving new work into their programmes. Scottish Ensemble played a piece of mine a few years ago called Hirta Rounds and we had a great time, it felt really lovely and easy, very creative and spontaneous. So when the opportunity came to write these two pieces for the summer and winter concerts, then I was able to push things a little further because I knew the players a little more and knew their capabilities. And they were really memorable concerts because of the way new work is positioned in them alongside older pieces. The brilliant thing about those concerts in particular is that they’re almost completely contemporary music. So you have these absolutely full houses in huge venues like Kelvingrove in Glasgow, and the audience is absorbed in this programme. And nobody there is thinking “I’m at a contemporary music concert”, they were just at a concert of good music played really well.
And so it’s a real thrill to take a piece like this which has already had its little life[(Blood was originally written for and performed by the Irish Chamber Orchestra in 2024]. I’m absolutely dying to see how the piece can roll in this new setting. It’s like plucking something out of a garden and planting the seedling somewhere else.
How important is it for orchestras to support the creation of new work?
I guess it’s not surprising for a living composer to say that the music I’m interested in is the music of the time we live in. If I had my way most music in programmes would be new, sprinkled in with older repertoire rather than the other way round. There’s always an element of chance when commissioning new music, because you don’t know what you’re going to get until it arrives. The most valuable thing you can have as a composer is to develop a relationship, and I felt like I’ve developed a relationship with Scottish Ensemble where you get a sense of what the other wants and what they can do. That becomes a genuinely creative exchange, so that it’s not completely terrifying that you’re going to hand this piece over to some complete strangers. There are actual people in your mind when you’re writing it, a cellist, a viola player… That’s very exciting for me.
Speaking of the marriage between old and new music, Blood has previously been performed alongside Mozart’s Requiem (in its World Premiere in 2024), and now sits in a programme with Bach. What do you think a new piece like this offers an audience when it’s placed next to something so familiar?
I seem to be going through a phase of constantly being programmed with the Mozart Requiem, I don’t know what that’s telling me but I’m worried! These happen to be pieces that I’ve got a personal connection to; the Mozart Requiem for instance I’ve sang it loads of times when I was in the college choir. The pieces in this programme I’ve also sung, like the Arvo Pärt Greater Antiphons. And the Bach Chaconne which is just one of the masterpieces of violin music from any period. The Chaconne is actually an incredibly difficult piece as a listener, which you might not want to hear as a sales pitch! But it’s hard work, it’s really serious, long form, no break, you really have to concentrate. And if you give yourself to that piece you’re taken on a journey, which is incredible. The final bars where things come full circle, it’s spine tingling.
I don’t really enjoy being a passive listener in any of the type of music I enjoy; I enjoy some confrontation and stimulation, I enjoy being taken somewhere. And it’s not always somewhere I knew I wanted to be taken, but that’s the journey. So when I go to a concert I try to go in as a naïve listener. I want to give myself over completely to what’s there. And I don’t care what period it’sfrom or what genre it’s from. As a performer or composer you have a kind of contract with the audience, where you’re putting it all out there. Your ideal listener is also somebody who’ll give themselves to that situation. The piece sitting in this programme, it seems to flow very logically to me; they’re all pieces that are somehow to do with the expression of an idea which is difficult to attain. There’s difficulty in all of these pieces, but the rewards are huge.
Do you see contemporary work like Blood as a kind of gateway for audiences into new music more broadly?
A lot of people maybe have pre-conceived notions about what contemporary music is or feels like. If you go to any Scottish Ensemble concert you’re going to hear what is predominantly new music, but it doesn’t always sound like ‘new music’. So I think the idea that new music is somehow scary or awful sounding, I’m happy to say I think those days are gone now. And people know you can go and hear new music that satisfies all the things you look to music to give you.