richard barrett
in conversation with derek bermel and joshua cody

Richard Barrett was born in Swansea (Wales) in 1959.  As a teenager, he found the local record library well-stocked enough to acquaint him "with everything from Machaut to Globokar."  After graduating in genetics at University College in London in 1980, he started composing, studying with Peter Wiegold, and making productive contact with Brian Ferneyhough and Hans-Joachim Hespos.  His music was quickly acclaimed; he received the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, and has taught regularly at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse.  Dissatisfaction with the opportunities for performance led to the founding of Ensemble Exposé (with Roger Redgate) in 1984.

Barrett’s interest in modern music exceeds the conventional academic brief, and includes live electronics, principally in the duo FURT (with Paul Obermayer) and with violinist/violist Mary Oliver, but also with leading free improvisors George Lewis, Evan Parker and Joëlle Léandre.  Since 1993 he has been active in Amsterdam, lecturing at Den Haag’s Royal Conservatory and researching at STEIM (Studio voor elektroinstrumentale muziek). (Bio by Ben Watson, 1995.)

Composers Joshua Cody and Derek Bermel spoke with him in Amsterdam in February 1996.

Let's begin with Beckett, who we know has been a considerable intellectual influence in your work. What does the famous Beckettian impasse have to do with one of your most famous ideas, that of the "music of failure?" I remember following a course in college in which your music was discussed, and we read an article dealing with this idea.

It's not so easy to talk about that kind of thing these days; I've moved on to different areas since then, and I feel that the connection between my work and Beckett has run its course. The summation of that period was the string quartet (I open and close, 1983-88): one of my original intentions when writing that piece was to have the score virtually covered in small quotations of Beckett. The quotations would have been apposite to various parts of the music in such a way as to form, on the one hand, an expressive itinerary through the piece in the sense of expanded performance instructions, and on the other hand, to make an imaginary itinerary through the Beckett works from which the quotations were taken. The quotes were not in chronological order; they were simply taken from as many of his works as I could muster material.

Eventually I decided against the quotations. As it is, there are a few that remain, dotted throughout the score here and there. The other fifty or so were incorporated into an essay that I wrote later, which was supposed to be about Beckett, but it really turned out to be about nothing as much as the quartet itself. It hasn't been published yet. The essay is a piece that exists on three different typographical levels. One is the analysis of the string quartet itself; the second relates to the particular areas that the analysis is going through. The third distance from the surface, as it were, consists of quotations from other people, and also random notes and jottings which occurred to me tangentially, having to do with things I was writing about elsewhere. Now my literary output is not particularly significant, but I think one of the interesting things about the project, looking back on it, was that the form of the essay was necessarily quite an interesting angle on the form of the piece, in the way that it's constantly switching levels, carrying on different discourses which often run simultaneously. Sometimes, one of them gains the upper hand for a long period of time. The quartet is very much like that: there are always several levels of formal processes running simultaneously, even though you don't necessarily hear all of them. If a material recurs, then it recurs in a form which has become degenerated in the meantime, it's been left out in the cold; the musicians have been concentrating on something else.

My clarinet piece (knospend-gespaltener, 1992-93), too, is quite a good example of this idea. Here it's much more perceptible: it begins with a four-note ostinato which takes in the whole range of the instrument—as I used the range, since I was not particularly interested in the upper regions of the clarinet—and the piece proceeds to trace the course of that original model as it becomes warped into various different shapes. The spaces between the thirty-second notes in the opening gradually open out to reveal a kind of microstructure in the ostinato, as if you're looking at these four notes at a constantly increasing degree of magnification. You find microtonal scales and other features which were implicit in the starting material. The corollary of this idea is that as the material is progressively magnified, you hear less and less of its integrity. The process of looking closer and closer at those sounds is also a process of losing track of the material itself. Forgetting is a very important thing in my compositional structures, and in many cases the music is constantly trying to get back to its original model; in the meantime, a lot of things have been forgotten, and other things have entered the memory—developments and alternatives to that which has already been heard—so that there's always something that the music is failing to do.

Talking of failing in that respect, however, is quite a dangerous thing to do. Obviously the music requires a great deal of application and ability on the part of the player in order to realize what I've written; there is such a thing as an adequate failure, as opposed to an inadequate one. You can imagine that a Beckett play performed badly, for instance, is a seriously inadequate failure.

One of my favorite quotes from Adorno—I don't know where I found it, I seem to remember reading it in Minima Moralia, but I searched through the book last night without success—in any case perhaps I invented it, but it was something like this: every work of Western music is about the end of Western music, even a work of Bach. I don't wish to spend too much time on the "complexity" movement, with which however you are associated, but Brian Ferneyhough also said something interesting in this regard in describing Schoenberg's Second String Quartet as the dramatized failure of a traditional string quartet. The implication is, of course, that every revolutionary piece is a failure from the perspective of the rules which preceded it and which it breaks.

Going back to Adorno for a minute: of course, on the one hand, Adorno can relate what he said in this little quote to everything going back to the beginning of the eighteenth century. But the interesting thing is that nobody said it until Adorno said it. One of the things that characterizes twentieth century culture as a whole, the post-Darwin/Marx/Freud culture, is being able to look at things in a different way—not necessarily in a deeper way, but in a more self-reflexive way. It has become possible to not present a piece of music as a successful working-out of its first principles. One of the last people to have disagreed with this, I suppose, was Schoenberg himself: there's some point in Schoenberg where he says that the process of composition is the realization, as precisely as possible, of the original idea which first struck the composer's imagination. I'm not so interested in Schoenberg, I have to say, I never have been; but a composer I am very much interested in, in this respect, is Beethoven. I think Beethoven was probably the first composer to write pieces which were quite obviously not intended to be a successful realization of their material. The Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony are very good examples of that, I think.

You believe this was Beethoven's intention?

Yes, certainly. The finale of the Ninth Symphony gives a fairly undistinguished piece of thematic material such enormous psychological and expressive weight that I'm never quite sure whether he means it or not.

It's ironic?

Ironic on several levels. You have irony in Mozart's operas, for instance, but I think Beethoven takes irony to a different level of complexity in his late works. Some of them are so inscrutable that it takes me very close to what I feel most affected by in contemporary music. The first contemporary music I heard excited me because of its inscrutability; its formal attributes were not accessible in the way that they were in the music of the eighteenth century, or in jazz or pop music. A piece of music becomes a world in which you can completely lose yourself. In a way, the technical fluency that I've tried to amass around myself during the last fifteen years has been oriented towards grasping that ungraspable idea of something which cannot be understood, but which is nevertheless the product of an intelligence, something which encourages listeners to create a significant experience for themselves as a result of hearing it. I don't know that I want to say a lot about Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, because it's not a piece that I know at all; the moment of change in the early twentieth century between tonality and atonality, to put it in the most blatant way, is not something that really interests me. What interests me is something that happens a bit later: the crisis of that very material, the situation of composers like Scelsi and Holliger. The traditional way of looking at musical material as something which is stated, developed, repeated, and has an integrity of its own completely falls down. It is no longer possible to look at things in that way. Beckett expresses this situation. Things are breaking down all the time; as soon as a character makes a statement, the imagination of the audience member, processing in the background, realizes all the qualifications and alternatives and mitigations that are possible to make. Against that, the idea of musical material as something memorable in itself begins to look like so many empty words.

You've noted Holliger and Scelsi. Xenakis?

I would mention him as well. Xenakis is a composer where the idea of process and pattern is much more in the foreground than the idea of kernels of material. Another way to look at the whole issue is to say that such music is conceived of as a gradual focusing down from a global apprehension of the whole to its details, rather than thinking of the details first. In this respect, the techniques of Xenakis are very interesting to me. Discovering this way of thinking was my first real impetus to writing music myself; at that point, in my teens, I had been listening to things and had acquired a relatively wide knowledge of twentieth century European composition. I had some idea of what I might want to do if, by some chance, I could actually do it myself; discovering the techniques of Xenakis actually made me think, for the first time, that there was a way of doing this, that I could develop my own techniques from, for example, Xenakis's statistically-oriented ways of thinking. I think it is a much more significant revolution than serial music.

The movement away from what one might call positive material?

Specifically, using statistics to get away from traditional musical material; being able to codify something which is not strictly predictable.

Could you be more specific by "not predictable?"

For example, I enjoy setting up compositional processes which will give me surprising results when they run their course. Of course I'm free at any time to reject results that don't interest me; I'm not a slavish follower of my own deterministic constructs. That's to do, I suppose, with retaining that feeling of excitement that I'm doing something even I don't quite understand. I can look at it afterwards and rationalize it to a certain extent, but during the process I like to preserve a state of tension between knowing what I'm doing and being lost. It's not possible for me, nor for anyone else, to know at what point I'm in control upon listening to the music; I might be in control to differing degrees at the same time, according to different parameters.

You thereby purposely jeopardize a strictly determined aesthetic framework. How do you balance the desire to hold on to a positive aesthetic system—one which aims for an intentional, as opposed to unintentional, failure—while still taking authentic risks?

I don't think the aesthetic framework is destroyed. On the one hand, any material is possible; one can't be moralistic about this and say that one type of material is right, another wrong. I wouldn't want to go too far along this line, however: there is probably such a thing as truth in one's dealings with the imagination. A characteristic of life in general is that things are not resolved, things do not end, or if they do end, they do so for no apparent reason. I think of composition as a realistic art, in that something holds true to the structure of the imagination, something that is trying to find out what that structure actually is. I conceive of it in terms of trying to reflect and to respond to one's experience, not necessarily just of sounds or of shapes, but of everything else as well: I am the kind of person who is always thinking of qualifications of any thought I might have at the beginning.