November 2020: on the 25th I am taking part in the launch of Composing the Historical. This is a collection of interviews with myself, Judith Weir (CBE), Shirley Thompson (OBE), Roxanna Panufnik, Ed Hughes, Evelyn Ficarra, Rowland Sutherland, Kerry Andrew and Martin Butler that explores composers’ experience of writing through the past – using models from history not to evoke nostalgia (or not only that) but to circle back to the present. The interviews (that include scores and audio recordings) will be published online in REFRAME, the University of Sussex’s journal for research into media, film and music. The project was instigated by Ed Hughes, Professor of Music at the University of Sussex, and someone I have known for many, many years (in fact we had the same piano teacher when we were kids in Southampton in the 80s!). I enjoyed being interviewed by musicologist Mimi Haddon back in the summer of 2019 and talking about the borrowing practices that have come to play such a large part in my recent music. Mimi and I discussed JPR, Tänze and Distant Beauties as well as Christian Wolff, Webern, nostalgia and ruins.
