Sarah Bassingthwaighte, composer

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

I’m constantly inspired by musicians and other artists, there are countless influences, including teachers, mentors, colleagues, friends, pets! Composers I have loved for a long time include George Crumb, Igor Stravinsky, Arvo Pärt, Joseph Schwantner, Maurice Ravel, Claudio Monteverdi, James MacMillan, John Corigliano, Lili Boulanger, Dmitri Shostakovich, Samuel Barber, Gustav Mahler, Jean Sibelius, and Pauline Oliveros.  Artists in other genres, including oil painting, hip hop (clipping), French electronic music (klo pelgag), dance (mark morris), and sculpture (brian mock) are fascinating to me.  I am learning from everything that I encounter. I’ve been a meditator for many years, and that kind of focus is much like the focus I have as I compose – receptive, unjudging, open.  I’ve practiced yoga for 30 years, and I find the intuition I have with my body can be the same kind of intuition I have with composing. The natural world influences how I think about how things grow, what shapes they create, how they move, the perceived passing of time, how existence is expressed. All of these things influence my composing – how long should a certain motive or section last? at what rate should it transition to the next? What relationship do the motives have to each other? 

In particular, I learned a lot about understanding texture, color, form, and rawness from the painter Jeff Hengst, with whom I have collaborated, composing as he paints. In the video that accompanies my piece, Let There Be Sparrows, then, the flight of the starlings is a nice example of the lines, movement, density, and so on that are a part of nature. 

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

My experience in the music world is that it’s really helpful to be engaged with performers and composers, go to concerts, present concerts, commission works, and so on.  If you don’t engage quite a bit, then you can become sort of invisible. But, you can’t do everything all the time.  So, there’s a tension between meeting and working with lots of people, and actually having time to do your own work, especially to get better at the work you do.  I find it hard to say no to projects or ensembles, and also hard to know which ones to say yes to.  Do I serve on the board of a performing ensemble and head a composition department at a university and commission composers for my own performances and continue to evolve in my own composing??  The greatest challenge for me is simply having enough time to do all the cool things with all the cool people. 

What are the special challenges/pleasures of working on a commissioned piece?

I love commissions! There’s the discovery of who the performers are, what music they love, what makes their performances unique and personal, who their audience is.  I’ve been asked to write for such a variety of performers – instruments I haven’t composed for before, players that are enthusiastic amateurs with limited practice time, young players that don’t have a lot of experience but will practice the piece every day at school for months.  This year, I have composed for viola d’amore, organ, fixed electronics, and an amateur orchestra. They’re all so different, and so much fun! Getting to know a new instrument (like organ or a particular program for electronic music) is like getting to know a person in a way, every instrument has a personality, and I do believe that each instrument to a certain extent dictates the music written for it. I love the process of learning something new, and also the process of puzzling out how to write a really effective, expressive piece for every type of player. I don’t believe that music has to be virtuosic or complicated to be good music – it’s my job to create excellent music given the parameters of each project. Stravinsky famously said “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.” A commissioned piece is a delicious puzzle that I’m excited to solve! 

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

The most exciting moment in music, for me, is when another person (a performer, a composer, an audience) finds that special place that we meet – the soul of the music, the part that expresses something, the part that is universal.  This ability to experience music in this way might not even be connected with how much musical education each of us has had – it’s much more likely connected to how well each of us is open to what we feel deeply, connected to how we listen with curiosity and yearning. This is the most special pleasure. The most difficult challenge is to spend musical time with people who have no interest in this, who seem to be more interested in themselves than in connecting to each other through the heart of the music. 

Of which works are you most proud?

The Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra was a puzzle that taught me a lot, and I’m really proud of the piece, in two distinct ways. 1) I learned how to write effectively for an instrument that sometimes is dismissed as less expressive. Double bass is quiet, low, and speaks more slowly than other instruments. How to make interesting music? Through painstaking care of layering of instruments, alternating musical material between soloist and orchestra, and trusting the bass player. 2) I am proud in this piece of having enough control of my musical materials that I could build to a climax over the course of 9 minutes (this represented an evolution for me, a moment of better mastery of composition).  

I’m proud of an extension of my harmonic language in Cape Flattery, an engaging use of electronics in Iridium, and an increase in expressive sophistication (if such a thing exists) in Arctic Fruit. Since these are very recent pieces, I’m reassured that I’m still growing as an artist. 

How would you characterise your compositional language?  

I try above all to be expressive. Sometimes it comes out in wildly experimental electroacoustic music, and sometimes in tonal-leaning orchestral music.  In the album with the London Symphony Orchestra, I would consider the language to be a modern aesthetic with an extended tonal language, informed by music of other cultures and genres, including jazz harmonies, punk rock energy, and late romantic Western art music. I learned a lot from a collaboration I did almost 30 years ago with an oil painter.  I was trying to figure out how to make his paintings, which were all portraits of 2 or 3 people, into music, and my first thought was to try to compose the subject of the painting.  I struggled for weeks, making no headway.  And then I realized that the place where painting and music meet isn’t in the people in the paintings – it’s in the colors, textures, lines, form, it’s in the contrast of dark and light, clear and obscured, even temperature. This is now what I try to express, regardless of medium – how does it feel? What’s the texture? What motion does this feel like?  In my piece Weather: Smoke, the instruments use tools like distortion or looping pedals, crumpling paper, improvisatory sections, with the primary objective of expressing the feelings of a forest burning. In Cape Flattery, the orchestra uses large melodic leaps, dense harmonies, or lonely solo lines to evoke in the listener the sense of being in the woods or in the water. There are many ways to communicate, and I hope above all that I’m communicating something and engaging with the listeners. I love it when people tell me that they felt immersed when listening to my music, or that they were taken on a journey. This to me feels like I’ve found a way to connect with others on a level deeper than words. 

How do you work? 

I start the process with two tools that help me a lot: a “brain dump” and a “time line.” The brain dump starts as a blank document and I just throw every crazy idea I have about the piece into it? What interesting sounds can each of the instruments make? How can an orchestra sound like crashing waves? What are some little musical tidbits that I want to include somewhere in the piece, but I don’t know where?  So, the brain dump is like a holding place for all of the ideas, so I can remember them and so that I can figure out where they best go, rather than using them right away.  The time line is just a line, with 0:00 at one end and 7:00 minutes (or whatever length the piece is) at the other.  On it, I sketch a loose picture of what I want the piece to be like at certain moments.  Do I want to start loudly or quietly? Do I want to end loudly or quietly? Where is the climax to the piece? What instrumental solos do I want to include, and where would they go in the piece? The two tools work well together – when I’ve got a solid idea on the brain dump that I know I want in the piece, I drop it onto the time line (usually using a nickname like “violin oboe duet”, and then refer back to the brain dump when I’m ready to notate. I also add the large-scale dynamics to the timeline, and this makes it easier to choose the textures – how many instruments, how complicated a rhythm, and so on. I use an iPad, and so I also color-code all of these ideas, and after a few weeks of work, both of these documents begin to look like pieces of art. 

The third tool that I find really helpful is the voice memo app on my phone.  My best ideas tend to hit me when I’m out on a walk, or driving, or listening to other music and a compositional device pops out at me. In those moments, I speak or sing the idea into my phone, and then when I have a chance, I add it to the brain dump.  I’d say that a huge percentage of the process is collecting and developing ideas, and probably 70-80% of the composing happens before any notes go down on paper. For me, if I try to sit at a piano or through-compose in some way, the result isn’t as good – I end up with a meandering, disorganized piece of music.  So these organizational tools really help me to express myself the best.  Every composer finds their own way to get their ideas out, and I think everyone should do whatever works for them! 

As a musician, what is your definition of success?

Well, composing is hard (for me), so composing something that expresses something, and especially something that connects with other people is a pretty sweet measure of success.  Having recognition is mostly helpful in that it brings me into contact with more wonderful musicians, and more chances to collaborate. For me, I don’t see much of a connection between effective composing and making money, which is nice because it takes that particular pressure off (I make more money teaching music). The greatest moments in my life are when I play a piece and connect with something deep that it communicates, or when someone is having that experience with a piece that I’ve written.  Connecting with more people makes these experiences more common, and a life full of collaborations is surely a rich life. 

What advice would you give to young/aspiring composers?

Listen to lots of music, all kinds. Compose with abandon, let your creativity go wild. Learn about tools that will help you say what you want to say. Talk to other creative people about what excites and inspires them. Be open-minded – being inclusive will feel better than excluding ideas (and in some academic institutions, I had the experience of being taught to exclude certain types of music), and you’ll get more ideas, more fuel. Compose the way that works for you, and make it easy for yourself: sing into your phone, write bad music, engage with people and ideas. You’ll grow if you’re willing to put in effort, and if you worry about creating something bad, you won’t learn from it.  You’ll learn as much from a failed experiment as a successful one, just like scientists do. And have fun doing it – no need to take it too seriously. 

What do you feel needs to be done to grow classical music’s audiences? 

I’ve sometimes thought that when classical music moved away from tonality in the early 20th century, changes happened really quickly, and there were some possibilities in the post-Romantic tradition that were perhaps not fully evolved or realized. I think in a way, the classical music world is still trying to find its way, aesthetically. Is new music abstract? Is it world music? Is it weird? Atonal? Is it minimalism? When people go to a classical music concert and see an unfamiliar name on the program, people truly don’t know what to expect, and many are pretty sure they’re not going to like it, and I think that decades of favoring extremely academic atonality has contributed to this. Sometimes the blame has been put on the audience for not being sophisticated enough to keep up with changes in the industry. Having spent many, many years in academia, I can attest to experiencing an atmosphere of arrogance and condescension by musicians toward music that they feel isn’t complex enough, is too tonal, isn’t cutting-edge enough. Honestly, I do still experience this in the music world sometimes today. 

This isn’t how I personally feel about music, though.  I think that music does change and evolve because people change – that joke that was funny 20 years ago isn’t funny anymore; that piece that made me cry when I was 20 years old somehow is boring now. The way people responded to Mozart or Stravinsky in their times are not the same as the way people respond to that same music now.  So, if people evolve, then I would like to be composing music for at least my own generation’s aesthetic, composing in a way that feels meaningful and expressive to me. Not because it’s an edgy new compositional technique, but because I’m trying to be in touch with what moves me, and trying to communicate that with other people in the language that moves them today. It is different than what spoke to me 30 years ago, and my own emotional responses will, hopefully, continue to evolve as I continue to have human experiences. I’m very interested in compositional tools, but only if they help me to communicate really well. 

What’s the one thing in the music industry we’re not talking about but you think we should be? 

Cross-genre music! Classical music is evolving more slowly than culture is evolving.  Music has changed a lot in the last 20-30 years. I’m learning that my composition students are interested in classical music, but also in video game music, in movie soundtracks, rock bands, in music from many different genres. They weren’t raised with the same bias I was, the bias that classical music is separate from (better than?) all other genres, and that if you go to a concert it needs to be defined by a certain genre, with all of the trappings of that genre. I often go to rock, hip hop, or jazz shows, and I’m noticing that those musicians often include music that sounds genuinely classical, or even an entire song that could be considered classical, or jazzy, or some other genre (this may not apply to the most popular music).  They mix it up, happily! Classical concerts seem less welcoming of other genres – classical music is evolving more slowly than culture is evolving.  I don’t think this is a given (although it is a habit) – very often when I play modern classical music for my non-musician friends, they totally love it! They’re very open-minded, and if it feels good, they’ll happily listen. It’s my thinking that classical music concerts could have the same experience in engaging their audience in new music, but it takes work and they’re not in the habit of seeking these out. Engaging pieces that the audience would love are out there.  Most of the time I’m at symphony concerts, the new piece on the program is a short opening piece, chosen as a token modern piece, rather than because it’s great music. Little by little, people programming the concerts are learning more about new pieces that exist, and there are some great resources for finding excellent new music, so I think this will change, but it’ll be slow, to the detriment of the organization.  It takes more work on the part of the performing organizations, but will be necessary for long-term survival. 

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

A day of spending time with my son and my little dog, hiking out in the mountains, and coming home in time to do a little gardening and a couple of hours of composing. 

What is your most treasured possession?

My quiet time

What do you enjoy doing most?

Being out in the mountains or swimming in the ocean with my son

What is your present state of mind? 

At the moment, I spend most of my days feeling curious and interested in things, generally feel cheerful and appreciative, a little anxious about having too much to do, and grateful to be around people I love, and grateful to live in a beautiful place and have the privilege of writing, performing, teaching and listening to music with lots of people. 

I feel a tension of wanting peace and quiet, and also wanting to collaborate and create new projects with people. It’s a challenge balancing the two.

Sarah Bassingthwaighte’s new album ‘Orchestrating the Wild’ with the LSO is out now