Guildhall Questions: Julian Philips answers

On Monday 25 November in Milton Court Concert Hall Guildhall School presents Stories of Sweet Visions: an evening of songs and chamber works celebrating the music of Professor Julian Philips in his 50th birthday year. We caught up with Julian to find out more about the concert’s performers and the inspiration behind the programme. 

This Q&A is taken from our recent Guildhall podcast with Julian. Listen to the full interview on SoundCloud.

Why have you chosen the concert title Stories of Sweet Visions? Where did this come from?

It's actually a quotation of a line of poetry by John Clare – a poet I’m particularly fascinated by and have been for some time, and I'm working on a bigger music theatre project around him.

The actual phrase Stories of Sweet Visions comes from a late poem by Clare called It is the evening hour. The context of it in the poem is “Spirit of her I love, Whispering to me, Stories of sweet visions, as I rove…” – and I thought as a phrase it kind of encapsulated some of the threads in this concert: “stories” because that suggests a kind of listening experience of following through the narrative of the piece; and “sweet visions” because, I suppose for me, in everything I write, I'm taking an imaginative leap into another world of experience. Although the word “sweet” in a contemporary context is quite debased, I think in Clare's context it's a wonderful word that suggests kind of emotional enrichment of something that's touching and poignant.

The penultimate song in my song cycle for tenor and piano Love Songs for Mary Joyce [being performed in this concert] is a setting of Clare’s It is the evening hour, and so that phrase jumped out at me really as a nice title for the event.

And how did the programme come about – what made you pick these particular pieces for the evening? 

A variety of factors. One is a kind of selfish composer thing: that I wrote a piece five or six years ago called Cantos de Sonho which is a setting of poems by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa – an absolutely extraordinary, fascinating figure not only in Portuguese culture but also in European literature more widely … It’s only ever really had one performance, so the one thing I wanted to do was to get this piece into another concert!

Another factor is that when we were planning this event I was working on a composition department project with the Liszt Academy in Budapest, and we were working with a Guildhall piano trio called the Mithras Trio – an extraordinary ensemble, which has just won the Trondheim International Chamber Music Competition.

I suppose my other thread [for this concert] is song, and the interface between song and chamber music which I find particularly fascinating. Even in hundreds of years of Western classical music, I still think there's plenty of scope for composers to think about how to cross-fertilise between abstract chamber music ideals and the idea of song and text … That shift between when the music is being led by text and the voice, and when it's absorbed into a purely abstract instrumental world; I find that super fascinating.

The whole programme has a mixture of pieces for voice and chamber ensembles. It includes a piece that I wrote in the 1990s for mezzo-soprano and viola called Coronach, and then, in the second half, one of the new works is a piece called Turning Fifty which was originally going to be for baritone and cello, but it's now baritone, cello and harp. This is because I wrote a solo harp piece for another extraordinary Guildhall graduate, harpist Oliver Wass (who won the Gold Medal no less) called Winter Music which he's going to play in the concert. And when I was working on this new cycle for baritone and cello I just kept thinking of this harp on the concert stage doing nothing, and thinking I should work the instrument into this piece! So it's turned into a different kind of a trio – a trio for baritone, cello and harp.

What kind of things do you enjoy exploring as a composer and how do you feel that these pieces in particular represent those ideals?

I think I've always been fascinated by text, but it began really with song, and I feel quite a strong connection with the texts that I set in a very dialogic way. The texts in this concert – the Pessoa poems in that piece Cantos de Sonho – I kind of absorb those texts, and thought quite profoundly about them. It's almost a chemical reaction where the images, the language but also the deeper themes invite responses, and then music starts growing out of the text. A rather organic metaphor would be that, for a lot of my music, the texts are like seeds that I have to fertilise and grow into plants. And that is a bit of a thread in this concert, I think.

There are two solo instrumental pieces being performed: the harp piece Winter Music which was absolutely a kind of petri dish for the opera The Tale of Januarie … and a solo piano piece called Barcarola which I'm writing for the pianist of the Mithras Trio, Dominic Degavido – an extraordinary artist and very inspiring person to write for. It'll be the world premiere. 

You’ve collected it quite a distinguished set of Guildhall musicians and alumni to perform on the night. How did you pick them?

I’ve had wonderful help and support from colleagues here at Guildhall, particularly Armin Zanner and Samantha Malk in the Vocal Studies department. We're used to, on almost a weekly basis, having conversations between composition and vocal studies, matching the right singers for the right pieces. And I think at Guildhall we do that with great sensitivity in all contexts. James Newby is now a very successful early career baritone, and he's going to sing the new baritone cycle, and the other singers and performers have just gathered around the concert in consultation with Guildhall departments. And our wonderful colleague Laura Roberts is going to play the Love Songs for Mary Joyce with tenor Liam Bonthrone at the end of the first half. So we've built up this nice ensemble of wonderful Guildhall singers and instrumentalists

What are you most looking forward to about the concert?

I feel as a composer I know what I've made up to a point, but a big part of what you create is kind of unknowable until you sit in a concert hall. And, even more complicated than that, is the fact that actually you don't know until some time afterwards, because when you've finished a piece I think, psychologically, you're still entangled with it – you're still obsessing about one bar which you think is not very good, or thinking 'I wish I'd done this' or 'that should have been a bar longer' or whatever. But then, once the dust has settled and time flows by and you've done other things, you come back to a piece in a much more objective way, almost as if you haven't written it. It's uncanny. So of course I'm looking forward to working with these amazing performers and the two new pieces and just seeing what the whole thing feels like. But [hearing another performance of] the piano trio and voices piece Cantos de Sonho, I’m particularly looking forward to that.

Does the distance of time and mind space you refer to make you happier with the work that you did?

This concert on some level is, as it is for many people, marking a milestone in the sense of having got this far and getting a birthday with a nought on the end, and then you look back and think ‘right, what have I done?’. And for me that involves quite a lot of sifting. 

… The first piece in the concert, Coronach for mezzo and viola, is from 1994 – sort of half a lifetime ago! – but, genuinely, I look through that piece and, although I'm not uncritical of it in many ways, I could have written it yesterday. And that's a nice feeling because you become aware of your own continuity, I suppose. I think you have to be kind to yourself. Everything you create as a composer you're going to have shifting feelings about, which might just depend on the time of day or the day of the week!

For example Winter Music: I've never written a piece that's gone through so many versions, and that has really tested the good nature and patience of Oliver Wass. Of course it is to do with the complexity of trying to write idiomatically for the harp when you're not a harpist. One can understand how the harp functions mechanically quite easily, but actually trying to write idiomatically in the way that I can for the piano is hard. So that piece had a premiere, and then Oliver and I have done a lot of work on it and he's done a lot of amazing things that have helped shape the piece in a better way.

In terms of this dialogue between what you've done in a long time ago in the past and where you might be now, older and wiser, means I've clocked up more experience on a practical level. I've made more mistakes but also, in some ways, learned how to solve some of those mistakes. … Finding that balance between trying to create music that speaks in a direct way that's communicative, that's effective and really works, vs. its technical difficulties is a really hard balance, and I think for some composers like me when you're younger you get that balance wrong. That doesn't mean I can't get that balance wrong now – of course I can – but what I've learned is there are ways of rethinking and revisiting to coax it into a place where it's going to work. And that's been a pleasure.

Stories of Sweet Visions takes place in Milton Court Concert Hall on Monday 25 November at 7.30pm. Tickets available from barbican.org.uk