6 minute read
‘I LOVE COMPOSING MORE THAN ANYTHING’
Mark-Anthony Turnage on writing Festen, and 20 years of teaching at RCM
Composing is by nature a solitary activity, but the Royal College of Music Composition Faculty has a strong ethos of collaboration. There’s no better example of this than the enduring friendship between Chair and Head of Composition, Professor Jonathan Cole, and Senior Research Fellow, Dr Mark-Anthony Turnage. Hot on the heels of Turnage’s Olivier Award-winning opera Festen, Upbeat eavesdropped on their conversation.
Mark-Anthony Turnage (MAT) talks with Professor Jonathan Cole (JC).
JC: You’ve been teaching at the College for 20 years, and you’ve taught a whole generation of composers – a very interesting and varied group of people.
MAT: Yes! And it’s noticeable that those who are most obsessed with composing have great success – you have to be in love with it. Sometimes young composers worry about ‘finding their voice’, and I say, don’t worry about that at the age of 18. Composers should be experimenting – and failing!
JC: You don’t find your voice, it finds you. If we’re composing because we love the music, we can never exhaust that interest. It’s a lifelong love.
MAT: I was at the RCM Junior Department and was so lucky to be taught by Oliver Knussen – he saw that love of composing in me and fed it, not just with music but with literature and painting. While I was there, I wrote a wind quintet called When the Winds Cry and Olly even conducted it in a concert – he hadn’t conducted in London for eight years! He was extraordinary.
It was my other mentor, Hans Werner Henze, who persuaded me to write my first opera, Greek, 40 years ago next year. I didn’t have much confidence but he said, ‘I think you’re a theatrical composer. You’ve got a sense of theatre.’ I wondered, how do you know? I’ve hardly written any vocal music! At the RCM I wrote a song cycle for Melanie Marshall accompanied by her brother Wayne Marshall, called To a Black Dancer, but not much else. It was also at that time that I met Martin Robertson [RCM saxophone professor], who’s been in pretty much everything of mine since.
JC: Another example of somebody with whom you built a relationship as an RCM student that’s lasted 40 years.
MAT: It’s like you and me, as soon as we met, we just clicked. We see each other regularly, not just professionally – I was really glad when you got the job here. I feel that way about Lee Hall, who wrote the libretto for Festen.
JC: You have an amazing relationship with Lee; you’re like long-lost brothers, it’s very special.
MAT: He’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life, he’s fantastic. We just really get on. He has a great knowledge of opera and what works, and how to be succinct, which is really important. He has such range.
JC: You’ve come to Festen with a lot of operatic experience behind you – what have you learned in that time?
MAT: It sometimes feels like I’m starting from scratch every time. My first opera Greek is rough at the edges – but I quite like that, and as you get better technically you’re in danger of smoothing off those rough edges. I’m quite instinctive with vocal writing, but probably stricter than I realise. What I have learnt is clarity. I still write in a similar way in terms of how I react to the text, but it’s much clearer now.
One thing that a lot of people said about Festen is that they could hear every word, and I take that as a massive compliment as I’ve worked hard on that. I don’t tend to write very high because words get lost as soon as singers go stratospheric. If you set text, you want it to be clear and dramatic.
JC: I was really struck by that immediacy of communication in Festen. Everything was in real time; we were living it with the characters rather than observing and making sense of it later.
MAT: I’m also very aware of contrast. There’s a danger of an opera being just recitative, and while there are great recitative operas (like Debussy’s Pelléas), it’s hard to do. When I was working with Lee, I wanted something more formal, because if I have something formal to work with I can break out of that.
JC: There’s a lot of song in Festen, in the choruses and in that haunting moment when Susan Bickley sings a melodic song despite the violence going on around her. Contrast again –brutality but also incredible tenderness.
MAT: That’s the thing that most interests me. People ask why I pick these difficult subjects, but Henze noticed that I always write about the family – I don’t do it consciously, but every one of my operas is about family. People understand family; everyone’s affected by it. I have to include at least one character of great sympathy that the audience identifies with. You can’t predict how people will respond, but Festen was incredibly performed by the whole cast. And the Royal Ballet and Opera were magnificent in every way.
JC: There were audible gasps and a sense of concentration – absolute silence. Word got around and it was packed every night. It’s really important that works like Festen are recognised. When a lot of the arts are devalued, having something so powerful that it can be remembered is really important.
MAT: I had people saying to me that they’d been three times, which was amazing. I’m bad at taking compliments though – you’re only as good as your last piece!
JC: You’re very modest. You come back the next day and get back to work.
MAT: I’ve been asked, ‘how do you do it, what’s the trick, what’s the secret?’ The main thing is that I enjoy composing. I absolutely love it more than anything else.
Joanna Wyld RCM Publications & Content Officer
