Plugging into the guitar sound

When composer and piano virtuoso Kevin Volans wrote his first piece for guitars, he approached it with an artist's eye for the minimal, writes Michael Dervan

Kevin Volans first met the members of the Dublin Guitar Quartet when they contacted him about their arrangement of his First String Quartet, White Man Sleeps. It's nearly 20 years now since this work became Volans's signature piece. It was recorded by the Kronos Quartet, as were the two quartets which followed, Hunting: Gathering and The Songlines. The recordings, on the albums White Man Sleeps and Pieces of Africa, were hugely successful, the latter spending 26 weeks at the top of the US classical charts.

But Volans is wary of arrangements, and was prepared for the worst when he heard of a new arrangement of his most famous piece. In the way of the young and innocent, the guitarists had jumped in head-first, rather than worry about possible copyright restrictions or the necessity to clear the matter with the composer.

"I normally hate arrangements of my work," he says. "And they came along saying they'd already done it. I groaned. And then they came to play it for me.

"It was terrific. Somebody had already arranged it at one point for three guitars, and Chester's [ Volans's publisher] more or less turned it down. But the new one was really good, so Chester's, at my insistence, okayed it."

The new piece, Four Guitars, seemed to follow quite naturally. "They were rather hoping I'd write a new piece, and then they eventually asked. And I said I'd love to, because I was really impressed with them."

The work has been commissioned by the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, where it will be premièred next Friday. "The Dublin Guitar Quartet has played here a number of times with great success," explains Mermaid's artistic director, Aideen Howard. "Our audience really enjoys guitar music and so we were keen to provide for that interest."

The major challenge of writing for guitar quartet, says Volans, who's not himself a guitarist, "is that you have no idea what you can do. I worked out painstakingly the first chord that I was going to be using. It was so much work that I figured I would just write whatever I wanted and then get them back and say, 'Is this possible?' They're using two Brahms guitars, with an extra bottom and an extra top string, and I've got two of them playing at once for the chords. I sat up trying to write 14-note chords, which I never realised was kind of unusual, but it worked. The first chord worked, and a lot of the other ones did, surprisingly. They found that they could tweak it."

The other difficulty in writing for guitars "is getting away from the standard kind of guitar music. Most guitar music, because of the nature of the instrument, is written by guitarists. I wanted to try to write something that was not in E minor - because it's so natural for the instrument - and not guitaristic."

He had no difficulty, he says, keeping to that plan, and the piece, he says, is uncompromising. He took it to them thinking they would probably declare it to be impossible. "They didn't say anything. Apparently they had a long debate. But they're doing it. They can play it. It's very structural, and very, very difficult where they have rhythmic patterns in two groups which gradually overlap, are truncated, and cross each other. It goes from 28/16, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23 for one lot, and the other lot stay in the same place. I said to them, 'I'm not asking how you're counting this.' And they said, 'Don't ask.'"

Volans has been campaigning in recent years about the way the music is commissioned for specific durations, paid for, as it were, by the yard. The new piece, he's glad to say, was allowed to find its own length. He's quite happy to work within a time band, and write a piece that needs to be between five and 10 minutes long. But he recalls one bloodying encounter for a solo percussion work in Sweden. "The commission before me was [ French composer] Xenakis, and they paid a lot of money, and got four minutes or something. So they insisted on a piece that was 20 minutes, not less than 20 minutes. And 20 minutes of solo drumming is too long, more than the player can manage and more than the ear can manage. So I ended up with a piece that was 16 minutes, and then had to write a completely separate piece, as another movement, to get over the 20-minute mark. That just seemed a bit stupid to me. We did it. It worked in the end."

Volans didn't actually research the repertoire for four guitars before embarking on his own piece. It's not the sort of thing he would normally do. In fact, the first time he heard the four-guitar repertoire was when he went to hear the Dublin Guitar Quartet play their White Man Sleeps arrangement in concert. But he's got a work coming up where that kind of clean slate is simply not available to him. He's been commissioned to write a piano concerto for Canadian super-pianist Marc-André Hamelin and the San Francisco Symphony. Volans is himself a virtuoso pianist, and "because I know the repertoire, it's going to be very difficult to try to write a piece, ignoring what's been done already.

"I've actually really consciously had to rethink what a piano concerto could be. I'm going to approach it via my percussion music. And I also decided to get the brass writing out of the way first. The San Francisco Symphony have really great brass players, and the biggest problem you have writing for the orchestra is that the brass are not happy. They either have too little or too much to do. It's a very wacko idea, but I thought I'd get the brass done first."

If the idea of percussion and piano playing brings Bartók to mind, that's not at all the way Volans has been thinking. "It's not that kind of banging the piano, but the kind of things you would do with percussion, very high speed, patterns, repetition, the kind of thing you wouldn't normally do on the piano. Marc-André Hamelin is probably, I'm increasingly convinced, the most virtuosic pianist alive. You can't write an easy Baa Baa Black Sheep piece for him. It would be a waste, like driving at five miles per hour in a Lamborghini."

Volans the performer has been re-emerging of late, and he's even recorded a disc of Liszt on which he performs "my version of Horowitz's version of Busoni's version of the Mephisto Waltz. I've actually just finished writing that up, as it were. It's fun to look at that kind of craziness."

He's under no illusions about the challenges facing him in the new concerto. "It's very difficult to write good piano music, as opposed to good music, because the piano really responds well with doubling at the octave, multiple doublings, patterns that go up and down that are the same in each octave. None of that is not part of contemporary music language. Doubling things at the octave is 19th-century. So it's hard." His greatest musical preoccupation at the moment is at the opposite end of the scale to the virtuosity which will feature in his piano concerto.

"Since 2000 I've really tried to simplify, really get involved in minimal art and architecture, and by that I don't mean minimalist." At the same time, paradoxically, he's become interested in that minimalist trademark of repeat patterns, though in the case of his latest string quartet, he points out, "there's almost no two bars which are the same".

His concern is with "eliminating content. I just realised that 20th century music is so busy. All this busyness, throwing all these millions of ideas, it's almost this kind of guilt thing, if you don't have millions of ideas you're no good. There's another whole but very suppressed strand to the 20th century, of trying to eliminate ideas. I love really minimal painting, and I love minimal architecture. And I just want to concentrate on the quality of the material."

It's easy to imagine what this will mean to a lot of people, I point out. "Yeah. Emptiness," he replies, and he struggles with a question about the distinction between the lack of content and his highinterest in the material. He jumps backwards. "I spent the 10 years in the '70s trying to eliminate style. You know the style police say you have to write in this kind of way, you must be atonal, you can't use octaves . . . breaking through that kind of prejudice.

"Then, with the African music I was interested in its absence of form, not formlessness, but no form, because the music was not conceived formally in any way. It begins and it ends, and when it begins and ends has nothing to do with a formal structure. That interested me a lot.

"The content thing. It has to do with being friends with minimal painters and being interested in minimal art. Gerald [ Barry] and I have often had these discussions. Gerald's music is so different from mine, but we agree aesthetically on a lot of things." He recalls the two of them looking at one of Fergus Martin's paintings, a brown painting with a white stripe around the edge, saying, "If only we could do that. I've really been trying to do that. We write very, very different stuff, because Gerald's music is very intense, and full of life, there's no repetition, there's as many ideas as possible." He sees the connection in the shared concern to allow the material "to speak for itself, to eliminate the composer as much as possible". He draws an analogy with the way that "minimal architecture is large, empty spaces, and it's just volume, and you have to fill the space yourself, emotionally. It's sort of what I want to achieve, that the listener has to go into that space, and occupy it. But there's no point in just big empty space. The way that the space is presented has to be very beautifully done, and the materials are usually, in really good architecture, exquisite; not lots of them, no clutter, no ornaments. I'm going to get rid of all the ornaments, all the junk, all the mantelpiece trash, no paintings. I have friends who have houses who won't have paintings in them at all, because they interfere. I'm trying to shift away from music, and into visual art, really."

What the listener will notice, he says, is that "I am trying to simplify the pitch structure to as little as possible, so that you then listen to the colour". He talks about "really looking at what's in the bar, not what's happening on the surface. It's meditative, obviously, but it's very much on the lines of Matisse saying that a metre of blue is bluer than a centimetre of blue. Which was one of his overriding principles. And Morton Feldman using repetition to get deeper into the thought, and quoting Proust on that, so that you're continually re-examining the same thing but you're trying to get closer and closer or to alter the meaning of it very slightly.

"It's very easy to shorten those pieces. It's very easy to come up with new ideas. It's the easiest thing in music to come up with a new idea. The hardest thing is to sustain one idea, without being silly. At a certain point you're trying to persuade people to listen beyond the anxiety for change. The whole of pop music is based on rules about change. There must be a change every 20 seconds, or else. The orchestration of pop music is continuously adding to the background, layer added upon layer, and other things taken away. It's produced a lazy form of listening, because you're permanently being entertained, and you're not having to drop your preconceptions. This kind of music does mean that you have to stop sitting there, demanding 'Thrill me! Thrill me! Give me a sensation!' You then have to begin actively listening to see if anything is happening that you might have overlooked."