Eivind Buene, composer

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

I didn’t grow up with classical music, so for me, meeting the sound of the orchestra when I was sixteen was a revolution. I did my A-levels at this school that offered specialisation in music, I walked in with my electric guitar and walked out three years later with a classical guitar and a newfound love for the great classics. In my first year, at sixteen, I sang in the school choir performing Brahms Requiem with a local amateur orchestra (which in my mind sounded like the Berlin Phil!), and that experience never left me.

Later, when I was a composition student in the mid-nineties, there was this masterclass every spring in Bergen, in conjunction with the Bergen Festival. We were ten or twelve young students in a room one week with very good composers. One year it was Lachenmann, next year Ferneyhough, then Sciarrino, and several others. In the evenings there’d be concerts where first class ensembles performed their music. These were composers with very different outlooks and aesthetics and meeting them as a student inspired me to find my own way with my music.

From early childhood, however, popular music was my most important influence. The tropes of this music has caught up with me in later years, influencing works like Schubert Lounge, where I transform Schubert songs and perform them myself within the framework of the singer-songwriter (sometimes also with an ensemble and classical singers).

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

The greatest challenge for me is to separate my own ideas from what is in the air, the common zeitgeist we all involuntarily share in one way or another. Not that I believe I can escape it, but still. There is a real work to be done to keep a sense of – let’s call it idiosyncrasy – in artistic work. This is of course nothing new. Then there is the challenge to keep the stamina needed to follow through on your ideas. When a new idea germinates, you know how much hard work lies ahead, and how often you will feel like dangling in thin air. It is tempting to fall back on ideas that are well explored, in order to have a sense of solid ground. But I believe art should be about leaving the ground once in a while.

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

Looking back, I see that my compositional practice is quite responsive, in the way that I like to respond to a particular set of circumstances. Be it an ensemble with a peculiar line-up, a festival with a certain theme or an orchestral premiere where I know my piece will be programmed with this or that repertoire piece. In this sense, a commission is both a challenge and a gift: It can provide a friction, or a framework that help me contextualize my thinking. What is the special quality with this place, this situation, or these people, that elicits some kind of artistic response from me? I did an Artistic Research degree linked to these questions, where I explored the concert hall, the chamber music situation, the house concert.

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

When I started out, in the musical biotope of Oslo, I worked very closely with musicians and ensembles, ranging from school friends in ensembles like Poing, via independent ensembles like Cikada to orchestras like the Oslo Philharmonic. I also worked closely with improvising musicians in this period, in situations where the performers influence the musical result to a great degree (for instance in my Fender Rhodes concerto written for Christioan Wallumrød and Oslo Sinfonietta) . This taught me that writing music means composing for people, not instruments. I have taken this attitude with me in my international carreer, where I try to work as closely as I can with the ensembles and soloists that perform my music. A good example is my new album Personal Best, written for Trio Accanto, a piece which is quite frankly impossible to perform for others than these particular players. In the piece, I work with the performers’ particular biographies, and they partake with their voices as well as their instruments, in a way that has helped me shape both musical substance and form.

Of which works are you most proud?

Pride is a difficult term. I can be proud of an old piece where I have articulated certain ideas in a particular way, although the ideas themselves no longer challenge me the same way. So I think interest is a better word. And like many artists I am most preoccupied with my current ideas and latest work. Right now it’s the album Personal Best that I recorded with Trio Accanto and the German Experimental Studio, which explores some ideas I am very interested in for the time being. My latest ensemble piece, Doubles, written for Klangform Wien a couple of years ago, is also a piece where I hear a lot of stuff that I am interested in developing further.

How would you characterise your compositional language?

Ouch. I don’t think that’s a task for me, you should ask a musicologist… I’m too close to my own musical language to give more than very vague characteristics. But I know what I strive for, and that is to make music that performs a double task: That presents the listener with beauty and challenge at the same time. In the words of Shakespeare: Something rich and strange.

How do you work?

In my working loft, here in Oslo. I don’t work every day, I often divide my time into intense periods of composing and more open periods where I can develop ideas and talk to the birds outside my window. My working methods are wildly diverse: Some days I spend at the piano, other times I can go for weeks without touching an instrument, just working with my interior sound world. I mostly work on a computer, with the usual software, but every now and then I work by hand, just to have that delicious feeling of actually shaping music with pencil on paper. The graphic presentation of music has always been important to me, and when I started out, before software, this was how I worked every day. My generation of composers is probably the last to have started out without the possibility to listen to midi orchestras on notational software, and I believe this was important for me, in order to develop a sense of inner listening, shaping music in my head, speculating on possible sound.

Sometimes when I’m stuck in a process, I like to take my ideas for a walk along the Oslo fjord, and my experience is that you can solve a lot of problems while putting one foot in front of the other, thinking about nothing.

I teach half time as a professor of composition at the Norwegian Academy of Music, which is half an hour walk from where I live. So a couple of days a week I stroll up to the academy and meet students. This has become more important for me than I thought – discussing music and ideas with young people really gives me a lot of energy.

As a musician, what is your definition of success?

I have been able to make a living with and of my music for almost thirty years. To me, that is success. Of course, I enjoy good reviews, prizes etc. as much as the next composer, but real success lies in the everyday work, in the privilege to have time alone for making music. And then to work intensely with performers, travel, meet people, and then to hopefully reach out to listeners, to touch some hearts and minds with music.

What advice would you give to young/aspiring composers?

Learn all you can from history, from your teachers, from your fellow young composers. That last thing is maybe the most important! Keep an open mind, be omnivorous, don’t be afraid of influences – have confidence that some kind of voice will emerge in you. (I know this sound contradictory to what I said about the challenge to sort out you own ideas, but that comes later – when you are starting out, you just have to take everything in, without fear). And yes, don’t let social media define your worth as a composer (or human being …)

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

I’m not sure about the premise of growth. It ties classical music into the logics of market where numbers are so much more important than matter. I’m not naïve, I know that there are no ways of escaping the market in our current political climate, but still, the most important thing institutions and promoters of classical music can do is the believe in its value as a world in itself. I really believe that the community of the concert hall is a sanctuary, also for young people, in a time where big tech is dictating our lives down to the very last minute of waking time. The value of this sense of radical otherness won’t diminish in the coming years. I know that institutions need to deliver on numbers and ‘relevance’, but our true relevance lies in offering the experience of listening as an existential thing, as a way of connecting with ourselves and others.

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

The prices at the box office in the great institutions of music and opera, that prohibits a lot of people in partaking. This has to do with your previous question, of course. It is a political issue when classical institutions are expected to make music accessible to a wider audience, while reductions in public funding force the same institutions to increase ticket prices. It just doesn’t add up.

What next – where would you like to be in 10 years?

This is maybe a boring answer, but honestly I’d like to have more or less the same life as I have now. I hope I can continue to collaborate with interesting performers, ensembles and orchestras, live among my friends and colleagues here in Oslo, travel to premieres and other performances when necessary. And of course, I hope I still have musical ideas that I want to pursue, music to follow all the way from my study to the concert hall.

What is your most treasured possession?

Right now I’d say it’s my old Fender Rhodes electric piano. I use it for performing Schubert Lounge and I absolutely love the sound of that instrument.

What do you enjoy doing most?

Two things: To be alone, and to not be alone. In other words: I need a lot of time on my own, but when I have that, I’m a very social person and love to hang out with my friends and family.

What is your present state of mind?

As most people I am appalled by the war mongering and senseless killing committed by governments East and West. So I try to find joy in the small things: That spring has come to Oslo, the light, the lilacs that soon will bloom all over town.

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