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| Fotó: https://www.paullewiscomposer.com |
In Hungary, many painters and musicians call themselves Freelancers, while they receive their money from the public budget and often appear at party events. What does this term mean to you? What are you independent of?
PL: In the UK freelance means self-employed, working on a job-by-job basis. Very few composers can support themselves this way without regular work such as teaching or performing professionally unless they compose for film, TV or write pop hits. I've been freelance since 1966 when I quit my job as Assistant Musical Adviser to ABC TV.
My career course was unconventional in the beginning. I decided at the age of fifteen to leave school and work for music publishers “to find out the worst about the music world while I'm young enough for it not to hurt”, as I told my astonished parents at the time. This was because I had met disillusioned musicians who had grown up wanting to be composers but had left college without any knowledge of the real world, and decades later were teaching piano, playing in bars and not writing any music. I was determined not to become one of them, and through working for a London music publisher I discovered production music libraries, submitted orchestral scores to them which were recorded, and heard of the job at ABC TV which I successfully applied for.
So I started composing scores for top TV drama programmes when I was only 20 and would still have been at college if I gone down that route. I had taught myself orchestration by studying the scores of my favourite composers: William Walton, Malcolm Arnold, Prokofiev, Ravel etc. and reading books on the subject, though my head was already full of the instrumental sounds of the music I had heard my mother, uncle and aunts who were professional musicians playing throughout my childhood.
You were born in Brighton, a famous city generally known in Hungary. Many visited there and we know it from novels. Would you like to tell us in a few words what your hometown means to you?
PL: For over 200 years Brighton has had a reputation for fun, naughtiness, sexual liberation and theatrical entertainment both high and low-class, as you would expect of a seaside town on the South Coast just an hour by train from London! I love Brighton but prefer not to live there as it is has very few houses older than the 18th century, and mediaeval and Tudor (renaissance) architecture are essential to my spirit and well-being! It was however a marvellous place to grow up in, with theatres, concert halls and cinemas, the sea on one side and the beautiful South Downs – gentle grassy hills - on the other.
We, Hungarians, love English movies and music, but we do not know your name very well. We know that we can hear your music in several great films, for example.in our favorite Benny Hill Show and the Monty Python's Flying Circus. Which of your cinematic works are you most proud of? What would you to those Hungarians who want to get acquainted with your music?
PL: The programmes you mention used my pre-recorded library music; I wrote nothing specially for them, though my name is associated with them. Apart from the many productions that have used and still use my library music, such as the children's animated series Sponge Bob Square Pants, I have composed scores for over 150 productions, many of which ran to multiple series with multiple episodes per series. It's very difficult to single out any but I suppose my work in children's drama is most popularly represented by Woof!, the story a schoolboy who kept on turning into a dog, which ran for ten years and was shown all around the world, winning an Emmy Award in the USA as well as many other awards. The adult drama which best shows my style and approach is probably The Dark Angel, a BBC TV Gothic mini-series starring the iconic actor Peter O'Toole. This was directed by the wonderful Peter Hammond, a visual poet and a friend and colleague since I was 20 until his death six years ago, and was our most colourful collaboration.
Another famous series was Arthur of the Britons, 24 action-packed episodes about the 5th century English leader. The title music was by the great Hollywood composer Elmer Bernstein. I composed all the incidental music as well as orchestrating Bernstein's theme.
We read that you did not write your soundtracks on request. Is there is a database where the composers upload their works, and then the filmmakers choose whichever they like? Tell us how you work. What inspires you or whom do you think of while composing?
PL: This is incorrect! The 150+ productions I mentioned in the biog were all composed to commission. The music was planned in advance with the director and themes and musical styles were sometimes discussed at the piano, though very often my directors trusted me sufficiently to find this unnecessary and simply came along to the recording sessions to hear the music while I was recording it, conducting either to stopwatch timings or to picture, following the movement and action of the film by eye, and always without click tracks. In other words we worked in an atmosphere of mutual trust, which seems very rare these days when composers have to do electronic mock-ups and pitch for work in competition with other composers.
I think this is an insulting process for the composers, the majority of whom – all but the one who gets the job in fact – have to waste a lot of time and often money for no return. It's also very short-sighted on the part of the directors and producers who don't seem to understand that they would get a better result if they actually chose a composer whose work they respected, discussed the film with him or her and listened to his or her thoughts and musical ideas, rather than choosing the best of a bundle of demos submitted by composers who had been rung up or emailed with a vague briefing by a P.A. who possibly didn't fully understand what was in the director's mind.
In addition to my commissioned scores there are a multitude of other productions with which I have had no personal connection but which used my prerecorded library music, that is to say music recorded by publisher/record companies for use in TV, film and on radio. Producers can use recordings from these publishers on payment of the standard fees which are then divided between publisher and composer.
Regarding inspiration, there is a saying that nothing is so conducive to inspiration as a deadline, and film and TV deadlines are very fierce, so there's never much time for second thoughts! When composing to picture I am obviously inspired by the film, that is to say by the actors' performances, the camerawork, the scriptwriter's intentions and the director's wishes, but since my regular directors and producers with whom I had collaborated since the 60s and 70s were mostly 10 to 20 years older than me, they've all retired now and most of them have died, which has given me the opportunity to compose concert works, something I've always wanted to do but didn't have time for during the 45 or so years of my TV career.
Inspiration for concert works can come from friends, loved ones past and present, historical personages, art and architecture, or the instruments themselves, especially in the case of the harp. Luckily I have a very supportive publisher and most of music is printed straightaway, and much of it is recorded. A side from my six single-composer CDs, my works are featured on many compilation CDs of British music, where I often find myself in the company of my musical heroes: Walton, Arnold, Vaughan Williams and Holst etc.
In our childhood, our parents often took us to international art and science conferences and exhibitions. We heard once an Argentine professor lecturing about the maths of tango, we danced and she even offered us red wine at the end. We were pleased to see on social media that you also love tango. How can you pay attention to so many styles, performers and works? Does this not cause confusion or superficiality?
PL: Different styles are endlessly fascinating. I listen to a lot of music; I think every composer should in order to recharge their musical batteries, though maybe that's because of my long career composing for film and TV where it's often necessary to compose in a style that isn't one's usual one. Of course I don't like every style I hear but if I am particularly fascinated, as is the case with tango, I might want to celebrate it in a concert work. For example the 2nd movement of my Dances for Guitar and String Quartet is called Tango (Homage to Piazzolla) and the second of my two Études Amicales for cello and guitar is called Tango Érotique.
We've seen that you recommend the music of others on social media often and willingly, for example, the CD Fragment on which a harp flute can be heard from composers who are also our great favorites: Alan Hovhaness or Witold Lutosławski. Who is listening to this kind of modern classical music in Britain, are the composers well-known and popular?
PL: I believe that composers should have the grace to applaud the work of other composers from time to time. Sadly I see it happening very rarely as there's a great deal of jealousy about, especially in the film and TV world where there's so much competition for work.
Both the composers you mention are well known among lovers of “modern classical music”, which is actually a nonsense phrase as it's a complete contradiction in terms! “Classical” correctly refers to the style of art, architecture and music that flourished in the 18th century between the renaissance and the romantic periods, so in that respect it can't ever be modern, but we have no other suitable name to use!
But back to the question! We have two classical music radio channels in the UK: BBC Radio 3, funded by the government and the revenue from compulsory Radio and TV licences, and Classic FM, an independent station that runs adverts to earn its income. Radio 3 plays lesser known composers and modern music in addition to the classical repertoire but Classic FM mostly plays safe with the popular classics. For instance my style of tonal melodic music is thought of as light music by Radio 3 so doesn't feature in their programmes very often, but it is regularly heard on Classic FM who would be unlikely to broadcast Hovhaness or Lutoslawski. Luckily there are many record collectors who enjoy investigating lesser-known composers, and there is a network of Recorded Music Clubs throughout the country who meet regularly and listen to programmes of music presented by their members or by guest presenters. I've been giving yearly programmes to one club for fifteen years and am always surprised by the knowledge of its members, some of whom have even managed to buy my CDs before I've received my own copies from the record companies!
Your latest CD, “Harpscape”, was released in October, with harp soloist Gabriella Dall'Olio. Last year we met Gabriella in Hong Kong and talked with her for a long time, and she is indeed a charismatic person just as you wrote. How was this working relationship created and how did you work together? What did you learn from each other?
PL: I've known Gabriella for several years and have dedicated works to her. She has performed my music, particularly my most popular harp piece, Saturday Night Jazz Suite, all around the world, so it seemed natural to ask her to collaborate on this, the first CD of my solo harp music. We met at her home for rehearsals, in the course of which, with her encouragement, I made numerous amendments to the music. Although I have always studied the harp and its music and have composed extensively for it in my TV scores and chamber music as well as 15 published solo works, I learned a huge amount from these rehearsal sessions. Whether Gabriella learnt anything from the experience I don't know, but I do know that she enjoys playing my music because she has written that my works “step back in time to showcase the harp at its stylish best”, by which I think she means that I allow the harp to sing and rarely find it necessary to use the experimental “extended techniques” that many present-day composers rely on. She loves the Jazz Suite because she finds it “the perfect music to brighten your mood and the mood of the audience” and always has an enthusiastic audience response, which of course is wonderful for a soloist! Here is the CD.
Karl Jenkins, who wrote a cantata on one of the most famous Hungarian poems, came to us in 2011. This elemental poem is about the Hungarians’ love of freedom. It tells the 13th century story where Edward Herbert of Montgomery, Wales, killed 500 harpist Welsh bards because they refused to praise the king. Now we heard that neither the English nor the Welsh people know the story. We know that medieval music means much to you. How can people enjoy and interpret this music when they forget the era when it was written?
PL: That's very interesting as I have always been a mediævalist with a lifelong interest in the period, its art and its architecture, and though I know of the persecution of harpists and the destruction harps on the orders of Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th century and the dictator Oliver Cromwell in the 17th, I've never heard this tale. Suffice it to say that Elizabeth I's father Henry VIII, for whom Herbert was an important officer, was a monster of depravity and in effect a mass murderer who executed an enormous number of people, including two of his six wives, so this story doesn't surprise me.
I think people who know nothing of the period can still enjoy early music for its own sake, it's fascinating instrumental sounds and its general style, just as it is possible to enjoy ethnic music without knowing anything of its origins or meaning.
In Great Britain, a significant part of the population has Muslim or Asian or African roots. What do English history and culture mean to them? What do they think about children's films or Alan Hovhaness or the music of the Renaissance Henry VIII? Don’t we have to fear the decline/collapse of Anglo-Saxon culture? What do you think about Brexit?
Sorry Fanni, I can't answer this as I cannot speak for others, especially those of a different nationality, and I don't wish to be involved in any speculation that might prove contentious in any way, including voicing an opinion on Brexit!
For more details please go to https://www.paullewiscomposer.com
(Interview by Fanni Nizalowski Polish-Hungarian harpist)