Dominic Muldowney is one of Britain’s most versatile composers. His career includes many notable concert works (including the Sinfonietta commissioned Saxophone Concerto for John Harle in 1984), a spell as the National Theatre’s music director and the music for popular ITV drama Sharpe starring Sean Bean. When it came to discussing a new commission for the London Sinfonietta it’s not surprising that he was keen to do something different.
“I suggested that rather than doing something for 14 players I’d like to write something involving actors, something theatrical. I think this then got linked with the Sinfonietta moving its offices to a building with a newspaper in. So, I gave them half an idea and they gave me half of one.”
The outcome is that Muldowney will be curating a three-day event with the London Sinfonietta at Kings Place focusing on the use of newspaper stories to create music, songs and indeed poetry. The culmination will be a new song-cycle created in collaboration with the poet Graham Roos, that turns the hot topics of the day into art almost before our eyes. The opening concert will feature settings of Brecht by Kurt Weill, Hans Eisler and Muldowney, whilst on the Friday evening the Carbon Copy Cabaret will feature a suite of new songs by composers from Royal Opera House’s OperaGenesis initiative. After each evening performance there will be three poetry platforms, featuring a multitude of voices from the elegiac to the searing comedy of John Hegley.
Any project examining the history of news and reportage in art is inevitably going to turn to the 1930s, when Weill, Brecht and Eisler were at the forefront of the artistic movement resisting fascism (all three later emigrated from Germany). Eisler’s Newspaper Cutting Songs (which will be performed on 23 January) was the work that brought him to international prominence. These songs are in a distinctly Schoenbergian style, but shortly after Eisler was to meet Brecht and his musical language changed.
“The last years of the Weimar Republic were very brave” says Dominic. “I think it is the closest that music, or art, has come to actively campaigning against and attempting to topple a right-wing political movement.”
The struggle against despotism, oppression, imprisonment or social injustice certainly seems to have produced more substantial art works than attempts to push any single political agenda. In the closing concert on 24 January Muldowney’s new work will be preceded by music from composers who take that message of awareness through the latter part of the century; Berio’s paen to Martin Luther King, O King, the egalitarian voices of Louis Andriessen and Hans Werner Henze, and Frederic Rzewski’s remarkable Coming Together which sets the letters of a prisoner in New York.
Is it this lack of struggle in Britain today which has meant that contemporary composers and musicians have less of a cutting edge in a political sense?
“It’s too big a question,” muses Muldowney, “but I think it is sometimes easier to be creative when you don’t have a grant to be comfortable on.”
“Headlines are headlines because they affect us all”, adds Graham. “That’s why we’re doing this project. But it’s always been there. If you look at the work of Benjamin Zephaniah, Billy Bragg or Kirsty MacColl in the 1980s it was because they were angry about what Thatcher was doing.”
“I think it’s just that composers who write for the London Sinfonietta are quite a narrow segment of all musicians. 15 years ago, “ continues Muldowney, “I wrote a song about Tiananmen Square. James Fenton did the words, and they were so simple that when you added the music it became a song about all protests, all students in front of tanks. I think that is what we can express now even without the personal experience.”
What subjects might we expect them to be tackling in the new work then?
“I gave Graham a list of all the things I was upset about or interested in”, says Muldowney. “Obama (it’s like a beautiful Italian word to sing with all its vowels), binge drinking, trains, religion and war, Dawkins versus Creationism, CCTV, bees…”
Bees?
“Yes, all these honey bee communities are just collapsing” interjects Roos, “and they think it might be something to do with the microwaves from mobile phones”. I mention that disappearing bees were a motif in the last series of Doctor Who too; Roos smiles at this suggestion.
Dominic is particularly enthusiastic about the possibilities that the project offers for using sound effects, likening the challenge of composing effectively with them to an exotic percussion instrument. “I’ve got bees in E flat, G, A flat and so on, and train announcements, but then the clarinet can take over and it becomes a musical idea. They are like banners that when combined with a musical event put you in a specific time or place. What I’ve learnt from theatre, my secret weapon, is how musical sound effects can be. That’s why I call it music theatre. You can’t say it’s song or text, music or theatre, it’s something new.”
The idea of breaking new territory is important to Muldowney. There may be no political agenda to this week of events, but what they hope to discover is a different way of creating an effect by filtering facts through poetry and music and seeing what comes out. One aspiration is to create a Ticker Tape Template, a song that Muldowney will write in advance and will be performed daily with Roos writing new words based on that day’s news.
“Music has a three dimensional quality that no other art has”, says Roos. “One question we faced is how close it is kept to the original ‘journalese’ and how much is poetic. In the bee and train songs 70% of the words are from original articles, but I think the binge drinking song is from about three different papers so I’ve had more input.”
“Song can put a dangerous spin on a subject”, says Muldowney. “Composers so often reach for the Faber Book of Love Poems or Emily Dickinson. But that’s safe because it’s obscure. We should stick our necks out a bit. We have to find a better balance between music and text. Here we have words because they’re about current affairs, even events of the day, and it’s a million miles from Tennyson.
“If people come out of the bee song thinking ‘I have no idea what that’s about’ I’ve failed.” Which is not something you often hear from a composer.
Dominic Muldowney and Graham Roos were talking to Doug Buist.
