Tom Coult, composer

Who or what are the most significant influences on your musical life and career as a composer?

In recent years I’ve been learning more from artists and writers in other disciplines – I love hearing practitioners of different art forms talk to each other about their craft.

In particular I look to artists who, like composers, shape and sculpt time. So: playwrights, screenwriters and filmmakers, choreographers, stand-up comedians. Most of these people tell stories with words – this is directly useful for opera for example. But it’s often transferrable in interesting ways to more ‘abstract’ pieces – your 15-minute piece for orchestra etc.

Artists who think deeply about form and structure: when and how to seed information and develop it, how finding the perfect ‘phrases’ can fit into larger shapes, how one might avoid conventional shapes or how one might lean into them, how one might manipulate an audience’s expectations and how one might pull the rug from under them etc etc. And, in addition: lessons in shaking up one’s work process to come up with unexpected things.

Recently, I’ve enjoyed learning from:

> playwright Mark Ravenhill’s ‘101 Notes on Playwrighting’

> Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris’ ‘Rule of Three’ podcast

> Bridget Riley’s collected writings ‘The Eye’s Mind’

> Stanley Fish’s ‘How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One’

> Simon Stephens’ conversations with theatre makers for the Royal Court

> Matthew Frederick’s ‘101 Things I Learned in Architecture School’.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

COVID felt particularly brutal at the time. 2020 was to be the biggest year of my career – premieres of Violet, my violin concerto, a piece for the Hermes Experiment, plus some tasty repeat performances of various pieces. None of those happened obviously, and I was very down for a fair while, and didn’t really write anything. Violet in particular was a big blow – wondering if it would ever happen, or if its square peg would have to be crammed into some diminished round hole (filmed for the web, staged outdoors, with reduced orchestration etc), and indeed if any of the institutions and venues that were putting it would even survive etc.

However – I didn’t lose any loved ones to the virus, I don’t have Long Covid, and most of the biggest things of my intended ‘big 2020’ were rearranged, sometimes in different ways, in 2021 or 2022. Also, my mood picked up a fair amount when my partner and I had a baby in 2021, so all the other stuff seemed much less of a big deal after that.

What are the special challenges/pleasures of working with particular musicians, singers, ensembles or orchestras?

In recent years I’ve had lovely collaborations with two performers – violinist Daniel Pioro and soprano Anna Dennis (who are both extraordinary). They’ve both performed a lot of music of mine, both existing stuff and things I’ve written especially for them. That’s a real treat because you know their sound, you know their style, and where their musical lines want to lead to…you can picture them and hear them whilst writing.

With orchestras it’s a different kind of familiarity – I’ve worked plenty of times with BBC Philharmonic, a few times with London Sinfonietta, Britten Sinfonia, BBC Symphony etc. Orchestras do have personalities and sounds, but by its nature it’s not so much a personal relationship…it’s less like meeting up with a friend, more like visiting a city you’ve been to before. You have a sense of it, and the more you go the more things you can explore, but you are just a visitor, and you’ll never know every corner. You also have a different tour guide each time (i.e. the conductor).

Of which works are you most proud?

I’m particularly proud of the pieces at various stages where I tried something different in my music, and which in retrospect pointed towards subsequent developments. For instance, Four Perpetual Motions of 2013, and my String Quartet of 2017/18. I think Three Pieces that Disappear from earlier this year will probably join this list, as I develop things that I found with that piece.

I am proud of Violet – for the scale of it, as it is by a very large margin the longest and most ambitious piece I’ve ever attempted. But also, like a parent, I’m proud that it’s spreading its wings and going on elsewhere beyond the first production where I was holding its hand a lot more. Also, more than any other piece, the responses from audiences and performers has been very warming.

How do you work?

I work three or four days a week depending on childcare, and mostly at my desk using the computer, with a piano next to me that I use for checking things. I’m not very efficient and I procrastinate a lot to avoid writing notes – either by doing potentially useful things (listening to lots of music, researching Victorian horror fiction), or, less productively, by watching old episodes of TV I like.

I am quite efficient when it comes to the notes that I do write. I don’t scrap a lot – if something doesn’t fit in this piece, it often turns up in another later one. I also re-use chord sequences, ideas, textures etc between pieces, as I often feel like there’s more to be squeezed from them. Plus: nobody really notices apart from, at the very most, my publisher and my parents.

Tell us more about the work which has been nominated for an Ivors Classical Award this year?

Violet is a one-act opera I wrote with Alice Birch, about a woman who lives in a village that begins losing hours from its day, until there is no more time remaining.

It was first done in Summer 2022 at Aldeburgh Festival and on tour in the UK, directed by Jude Christian and produced by Music Theatre Wales and Britten Pears Arts. It has since had productions in Germany by Theater Ulm, and in Paris by L’aurore boréale.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Mary Poppins (1964, dir. Robert Stevenson, music by the Sherman Brothers, screenplay by Bill Walsh & Don DaGradi)

Tom Coul is nominated for an Ivors Classical Award in the Stage Work category for Violet. The Awards ceremony takes place on 14th November at BFI Southbank.

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www.tomcoult.com