Quotes

The truth is, I'm not such a great singer, and so my whole harmonic language developed - and I think still exists - in a very pragmatic way: which is that the singers start either on a major or minor triad; half of them hold it and half of them move somewhere else - so there's an established tonality. As a singer, if you're on a G Major chord and then move to an A Major chord, suddenly you find yourself in the middle of this quite complex, shimmering cluster.

With vocal and choral music, first and foremost it's the text. Not only do I need to serve the text, but the text - when I'm doing it right - acts as the perfect 'blueprint', and all the architecture is there. The poet has done the heavy lifting, so my job is to find the soul of the poem and then somehow translate that into music.

When you look back on music history, it falls into these neat periods, but of course the period you yourself are living through seems totally scattered and chaotic. Music right now seems to me formless, in a very exciting way. Something's happened over the last year. I've been pushing my harmonic language a little harder. it's getting thornier.

The Brits are super-eloquent. I spend a lot of energy trying to raise the level of my own discourse. They're so polite, and they use 120 different adjectives where we just say everything is 'amazing'. And it's such a complex society, so much more subtle. Someone responds to my suggestion with, 'Well, I'm not sure if that idea is entirely quite the thing, you know', and what they mean is, 'That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!'

I'm a self-confessed geek, and my whole concept of music at first was entirely electronic. In many ways it turned out to be an advantage. I was so green, so utterly naive about the nature of classical music, that I did things that made me look totally, deliberately unorthodox.

There's a certain kind of thing that I write, clusterly pieces that breathe harmonically, and for those there is nothing like the pure British sound, with that perfect diction. In contrast, other works require a real, lusty sound. Italianate, almost like Monteverdi, which seems to work best with American singers. To be totally fair to both sides, Americans seem to be better at massive stylistic changes: they can move from Bach to a jazz standard with relative ease. In the U.K. they have all been singing since they were seven, and singing every day, but it's mostly the same repertoire.