Interview with Composer Lynne Plowman

Composer Lynne Plowman’s operas have won critical acclaim. Her fourth premieres at the Brighton Festival next spring and she is a recipient of an Arts Council of Wales 2012-13 Creative Wales award. The following conversation will be published in Issue 1 of the new Cyfansoddwyr Cymru/Composers of Wales Quarterly of which I am Contributing Editor:

Can you tell me about your current, fourth operatic project?

It’s for Glyndebourne. We are creating an interactive pirates opera for a children’s and family audience [with Martin Riley, librettist of Lynne’s previous operas - Ed]. It’s very fast-paced, with sword fighting, slapstick and spoken theatre underscored by the band, who are on stage and in character; quite anarchic, with an ‘end-of-the-pier’ comedy and a dark edge. The audience dresses up as pirates and the performing space is a pub where they come for a drink; they take part, singing along in places and interacting with the characters. At one point children come up to conduct the band.

This opera is for a professional cast whereas the previous one was for young people to perform. That was The Face in the Mirror for Welsh National Opera Max and written for WNO’s Singing Club, a chorus of 10-15 year olds. But it was for an adult audience and probably the most serious piece of work Martin and I have made, being based on the Second World War.

Your music - including your concert music - is strikingly direct.

Yes, it’s really important for me that the music communicates directly to the audience. But I work so intuitively it takes me a long time so one of the things I’d like to do with the ACW Creative Wales award is to speed up my creative process.

Does that intuitiveness account for some of the freshness and vitality of your work? Your piece Hall of Mirrors, for Piano Circus, was described as “irrepressibly eclectic”. What do you think about that?

I like to use existing musical ideas. By using little moments of pastiche, you can instantly sum up a place or a time or an atmosphere which speaks beyond the music. That’s how music functions theatrically, so I suppose that comes into my concert music too. Six pianos is such a bonkers combination of instruments! So I came up with pianists from six different times and places, throwing them together in a melting pot of fragments. That’s how that piece patchwork-ed itself together.

Is that how you work - in patchwork - or do you develop ideas from a to b?

It depends on the piece. With opera the music has to serve the drama so in some ways it’s written from the beginning to the end although I’ll pick out certain moments to write the music for separately. Concert pieces are more of a jigsaw; I’ll create sections then play with the structure. I find it easier to write long pieces of music than short ones because it’s much freer somehow.

With Martin, do you work together, producing libretto and music simultaneously?

It starts with us together, coming up with the idea and the scenario, then he writes a first draft of the libretto. But section by section so I start writing the music before he’s finished. Once I start composing, I find there are sections where the music leads and I make decisions about what’s going to be spoken, what’s going to be sung, where there might be a song. Then I ask for re-writes so there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing!

We have a lot of joint experience of the audience we’re writing for. We understand how bright children are - that they don’t need to be written down for - and how, if a ten year old enjoys this piece, so will an adult. The music has to tell the story well and if it does that then it’s successful - and kids don’t have those musical prejudices that we acquire as grown-ups; if you get a scrunchy chord that’s fine, that’s the sound.

So how will you take this into your orchestral experiments?

Well this will be a challenge - the idea of Creative Wales is to take myself out of my comfort zone and gather techniques. I’m not intending to write a finished piece but to make orchestral sketches exploring different harmonic and orchestration sound-worlds. I’m not so concerned about structure

because I feel confident with that but I want to push my harmonic and textural languages. And that’s why I’ve chosen to use full symphony orchestra. I probably won’t use the whole orchestra for each of the sketches, but I’ve got that unlimited canvas to work with.

How will the project work?

There’ll be a closed workshop next September with BBCNoW. We’ll record the session, then I can use the material in a piece at a later stage. When I’ve finished the pirates opera, I’ll take some time to do some listening, thinking and reading, then the sketches will gradually emerge. I don’t know what musical direction that’s going to take me in! But if you stand still as a composer it stops being creative and starts becoming a production line, which I don’t want! I think it’s so important for artists to have that breathing space so I feel really lucky that we have this funding scheme in Wales.

Many thanks Lynne.
 www.lynneplowman.co.uk