Ivan Moody in interview with Andrea Ratuski,
CBC,
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, October 1999
The following is a very slightly amended
transcript of an interview given at the CBC Studios, Winnipeg, in October 1999.
[Recording Excerpt: Opening of Passion
& Resurrection: Red Byrd, Cappella Amsterdam/Daniel Reuss, Hyperion
CDA66999]
Andrea Ratuski: Composer Ivan Moody has been
profoundly influenced by the spirituality of the Orthodox Church and Eastern
liturgical chant. His deeply rooted faith inspires everything he does, as an
artist and as a person. His music has an emotional quality that seems to touch
listeners to the core. People often remark that they feel transported after
hearing one of his pieces. The Hilliard Ensemble, of England, has championed
his work, and now his music is performed all over the world, but we’ve only
just discovered his music here in Canada. Ivan Moody was born and educated in
England, and now makes his home in Portugal. His most important teacher was
John Tavener, whose music is also based on Eastern Orthodoxy. Moody is part of
a younger generation of composer writing music which is spiritually based and
is rooted in our contemporary musical world. We’ve just heard the first
section, or ikon, Incarnation, from Ivan Moody’s oratorio Passion
& Resurrection. We’ll also be hearing part of the Crucifixion
section from the work. Moody feels that the Passion is the most difficult and
yet the most important subject with which an artist may engage. Composers like
Heinrich Schutz or J.S.Bach might agree, but Moody’s setting is far from the
western European tradition of Bach. It uses Russian Orthodox chant as its
basis. Ivan Moody came to Winnipeg last Fall, to hear the Canadian premiere of
his work for ‘cello and chamber orchestra called Epitaphios. It was
played by soloist Paul Maleyn and the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra under Simon
Streatfeild. That’s when I had the chance to speak with him. I began our
conversation by asking him how he became interested in the Eastern Orthodox
Church.
Ivan Moody: That was a very long process. I
suppose it started with a schoolteacher who was constantly disappearing to
Greece, and gave me some flavour of both the country and the culture, and the
religion. And then later on I came into contact with a lot of Russian people,
partly through an interest in Russian music; and that’s really it – it was a
long process of cultural learning in combination with a spiritual search that
was already there.
AR: What was your own upbringing?
IM: Well, I was brought up in a non-practising
Anglican family. We were nominally Anglican, but nobody did anything much about
it.
AR: How is your faith manifested in your
music?
IM: Everything I write I hope is written to
praise the Creator. I feel that I’ve been given something in that I’m able to
write music, and in actually writing it, I hope that I’m giving it back. So
whether I’m writing a sacred piece or a secular piece, that awareness is always
there. I don’t think that it’s necessary for a listener to believe the same
things that I do, or even to understand them necessarily, even intellectually,
to enjoy my music. I hope very much that that’s the case; and my experience
tells me that this is so. I have had very positive comments from people who
have completely different beliefs from my own and I find that to be very
important.
[Recording Excerpt:Passion &
Resurrection: Crucifixion: Simeron krematai: Red Byrd, Cappella
Amsterdam/Daniel Reuss, Hyperion]
AR: How important is Eastern Orthodox chant
in your music?
IM: It’s very important. Even when I don’t
quote it directly I’m often using the same musical systems, the same modes:
Greek Byzantine music has a very complex system of modes, with microtones and
non-Western tunings - that plays its part. What very often happens is that a
piece will spring from a phrase of chant – a fragment, it can be, it doesn’t
have to be a whole chant – and that will give rise to the musical material for
the whole piece. So I’m not quoting chant all the time, but the piece can
spring from just a tiny fragment. Having said which, that fragment is not
necessarily just even a musical fragment: it can be a text, it can be an
association through something else, through a person, or some event that’s
happened, and then the material will be derived from chant in that sense.
AR: Can you comment on the role of chant as
it appears in Passion & Resurrection?
IM: Passion & Resurrection I could
describe as paraliturgical. That’s to say, it couldn’t be used liturgically in the
Orthodox Church, but everything in it is derived from liturgical material. So
it’s a retelling of the story of the Passion and the Resurrection, using the
Gospel texts, which are sung by a narrator, an Evangelist, and the piece is
divided up into a series of what I’ve called Ikons, because I’ve not chosen to
see this dramatically, but as a stylized narration, in the sense that an ikon
is a stylized painting. You don’t see the figures depicted naturalistically;
what you see is stylized, with the intention of revealing their inner reality
and not their outer aspect. So that’s my reason for using the word ikon. The
Gospel narrations are separated by liturgical texts from the services of Holy
Thursday, Holy Friday and the Resurrection, on Easter Day. And when I’ve used
those texts I’ve used chant, both Greek and Russian. I’ve also deliberately not
used chant: in fact, this hymn, which is sung by the bass soloist in Greek and
quotes the chant directly, is followed by the same text in English sung by the
full choir, not quoting any chant at all – it’s just me –and then the soprano
soloist comes in. So there is, I hope, a fusion between the traditions I’ve
chosen to work in and my own creation within that spirit.
[Recording Excerpt:Passion &
Resurrection: Today is hung upon the tree: Red Byrd, Cappella
Amsterdam/Daniel Reuss, Hyperion CDA66999]
AR: The Crucifixion, Ikon V, from Passion
& Resurrection by Ivan Moody. That Crucifixion hymn, which we heard
earlier sung by the bass soloist, holds a special significance for Ivan Moody,
because he used it again in his work for ‘cello and orchestra called Epitaphios.
[Recording Excerpt from Epitaphios:
Paul Marleyn, MCO/Simon Streatfeild, CBC live recording]
IM: Epitaphios is a meditation on the
burial of Christ. There’s a ceremony which takes place in the Greek Orthodox
Church on Holy Friday, which is called the Burial – Epitaphios; the word
taphos in Greek means tomb. It’s a very beautiful ceremony, in which the
icon of the Crucified Christ is brought out in procession round the church. The
priest comes out with the icon and goes back into the middle, and places it on
the epitaphios, the symbolic representation of the tomb, covered in
flowers. This is a very dramatic moment liturgically, and this piece is really
a meditation on that ceremony. It’s based on a piece of Byzantine chant, the
crucifixion hymn Simeron krematai.
AR: Did you have the text in mind when you
wrote the music?
IM: Very much so. In this piece I had very
much in mind the idea of the ‘cello soloist as the voice of Christ. The hymn
has very beautiful words. It says "Today is hung upon the tree He who
suspended the earth above the waters", and it insists on this contrast: He
Who created the entire world being humbled, being treated in this way by
mankind, being tortured and hung upon the Cross. There’s this contrast between
the greatness and the humility, which is very impressive. Having said that, in
Orthodoxy, during Holy Week you never lose sight of the Resurrection. There’s
this feeling that everything is black but you always see the light at the end
of the tunnel; all through Holy Week you sing "Alleluia". So in this
piece, apart from the fact that at the end of the text is says "We worship
Thy Passion, O Christ; show us also Thy glorious Resurrection", in
addition to that, I’ve quoted the Resurrection hymn "Christ is risen from
the dead". This is played near the end of the piece, so just at the moment
of greatest despair you see the light.
[Recording Excerpt from Epitaphios: Christos
anesti: Paul Marleyn, MCO/Simon Streatfeild, CBC live recording]
AR: Why did you want to study with John
Tavener?
IM: I’d known his work since I was at school;
I had recordings of the Requiem for Father Malachy and Canciones
Españolas, which I liked very much. So I wrote to Tavener, sent him some of
my pieces, asked if he would take me as a pupil, and he said yes.
AR: What was it about his music that
attracted you?
IM: Well, one important thing was his
preoccupation with religious themes and how to deal with that as a contemporary
composer; the other thing was the transparency of his music. Most of the music
that I’d been listening to up to that point was very dense. I’d been very much
exposed to serial and post-serial music, and my slightly older contemporaries
at university were writing minimal music. I didn’t want to do either of those
things, and so the themes that I gravitated towards made me naturally
interested in Tavener’s work.
AR: How did he influence you? What did he
teach you?
IM: The one great thing I remember that he
taught me was to throw out notes…
AR: What do you mean?
IM: Well, I found that up to that point I’d
been working too hard at a piece, and that there would very often be a piece
hidden underneath all the notes I’d put into it. There’s a very good analogy:
if you paint an oil painting, you can spoil it completely by just putting too
much paint on it… you try and improve things to such an extent that the whole
thing is covered up with paint, and you can’t see the outlines of the drawing
any more. That’s very much what I felt, and I discovered how to be economical
with notes – which is something I’d actually also learnt from looking at serial
composers, except that I didn’t want to work in that way. I admired their
economy, but I wanted to work in a more spontaneous and melodic way… so I think
that’s really what I learnt from him.
AR: And to what extent would you say your
style is linked to his?
IM: There are certain pieces, particularly
those I wrote when I was actually studying with him, which have a lot of Tavener
in them, and I’d be the last person to deny this. Now my music sounds, I think,
quite different from his; it’s gone in a different direction harmonically and
rhythmically. I have an interest in rhythmic activity which I think he doesn’t
have. You can’t necessarily detect that from listening to Epitaphios,
which is a very static piece, but even so – and it’s difficult to illustrate
this - if he had written a work on the same theme, it wouldn’t sound the same
as this. I can "hear" my own fingerprints in this work. Of course, if
you’re working with similar materials, if you’re working with Byzantine chant,
for example, there are bound to be similarities. You can hear Eastern-sounding
scales and say "Oh, that sounds like Tavener"; it doesn’t sound like
Tavener, it sounds like Byzantine chant. We happen to be working in similar
areas, so there’s that correspondence as well.
AR: We’ve talked about John Tavener and the
Church; what other influences have you had?
IM: I learnt a lot from looking at all sorts
of music, even when I didn’t like it… I think you can learn as much negatively
as you can positively. However, if I were to think of positive influences
rather than negative, I’d have to say that, as much as any contemporary music
that I heard when I was studying, early music had a huge influence on me. It
was just as exciting to me to hear a new recording of an Obrecht Mass or a
Josquin Mass as it was to hear the latest piece by Berio, for example. I
certainly learnt a lot about choral writing from this kind of music, and even
more so when I began to conduct it. So I augmented my knowledge in both
directions: I learnt more and more about contemporary music and more and more
about early music, and I found when I began to investigate other contemporary
composers that they weren’t known, and then they suddenly became known when I’d
already discovered them, which was bizarre… I can think of two examples of
this: Pärt and Górecki. When I first became interested in these two composers,
nobody knew anything about them. I remember going to the Universal Edition
showrooms in London, scrabbling around in these piles of dusty scores and
asking for tapes to be made of terrible performances of both these composers.
And then they caught on, and now everything’s in print and recorded and I
wonder what my effort was for! Perhaps it was part of the spirit of the time
and everyone was working towards this, and they were just waiting to be
discovered…
AR: That makes me ask you what you’re
interested in now… perhaps that’ll be the latest trend a few years from now!
IM: Well perhaps I daren’t say what I’m
interested in now! Actually, what interest me now more than any contemporary
classical music are various kinds of world music… I’m very interested in
Flamenco, though I don’t quite know how that might effect my own music! Folk
music from various countries – Greece, Turkey, for example, and Arab music:
North African, Moroccan music… I find this very fascinating.
AR: The Hilliard Ensemble is an early music
group from England. They sing contemporary music as well. In 1987, they
performed Canticum Canticorum by Ivan Moody. It was enormously
successful, and they have since performed it around the world and they have
commissioned more works. Ivan Moody subsequently became composer-in-residence
at their Summer Festival in Cambridge, England. The Hilliard Ensemble has a
certain empathy with his music. Ivan Moody says this special relationship is a
gift to a composer. Here is the first motet from Canticum Canticorum I,
performed by the Hilliard Ensemble.
[Recording: Surge propera from Canticum
Canticorum I: Hilliard Ensemble, ECM New Series 1614/15]
AR: Ivan Moody spoke about the influence of
early music in his own compositions. I wondered where early music and new music
meet in his work.
IM: If you look at my scores, they look very
white. I tend to write in a minim pulse…
AR: Meaning?
IM: Meaning, er, ah…half notes…
AR: Oh, OK [laughter].
IM: …yes, as opposed to… quarter notes. Got it…
So instead of very black pages full of small note values, you tend to see very
white pages full of larger note values. Epitaphios, for example, starts
in 4/2, so the whole page is white: there’s nothing smaller than a quarter
note.
AR: It’s almost all whole notes, actually.
IM: Yes, exactly. It’s just a matter of
moving up the scale a bit; I don’t see the need to use extremely small note
values when you can think on one level higher up and use larger notes. So
that’s one thing that’s immediately obvious on looking at the score. There are
other elements, of vocal phrasing and articulation, for example, which I tend
to think of in early music terms rather than contemporary music terms. Again,
that’s to do with how you mark up a score. Some things I wouldn’t think to
indicate because I would expect them to be performed in the way a group like
the Hilliards would perform them, or a viol group like Fretwork, for example.
And then there’s the question of accentuation, particularly the case in vocal
music. In vocal music I tend to write as few barlines as possible, and not
write a time signature, and just divide the piece at the end of a phrase, or
the end of a section.
AR: Are you intending a freer kind of
expression?
IM: Yes, and also accentuation according to
the text, rather than according to any preordained scheme of division into
bars. I’ve seen that this disturbs some conductors who’ve never conducted a
piece of Palestrina or something, and they have to make a rhythmic scheme with
little diagrams for conducting the beats.
AR: [laughs]
IM: So in that sense I create problems. On
the other hand, they are not insuperable, and I’ve found this to be an
advantage, because it creates the kind of rhythmic flow that I want.
[Recording: No pueden dormir mis ojos
from Endechas y Canciones: Hilliard Ensemble, ECM New Series 1614/15]
AR: How important is melody to you in your
music?
IM: Melody is absolutely fundamental. This
was one reason why I had such problems trying to write serial music. I wanted
to find a way of being similarly economical and rigorous, but to be able to
write melodies. The melodic strand for me is the most fundamental thing,
because in melody you have all the other parameters. You have rhythm, you have
pitch, obviously, and without some kind of melodic arch I find music is usually
dead, and it’s certainly the most important element for me when I’m actually
writing a piece. It has to have a melodic logic, a melodic cohesion.
AR: Can you comment on melody in terms of
tonality or modality as opposed to more abstract forms of expression?
IM: Yes… it is possible to write melody in
all three of those ways. My own approach is, I would say, modal. That doesn’t
mean that I stick to pre-ordained modes; I often invent modes, but I feel that
I’m working modally rather than tonally. Writing a lot of choral music has had
an influence here, because when I was trying to write a very complicated kind
of music, I realized that it simply wouldn’t work for choirs and vocal groups,
that they couldn’t sing certain kinds of things and that anyway they didn’t
work. So I came to a kind of tonality/modality as a result of that, but I’d say
that my basic thinking is modal rather than anything else.
AR: How important is text to you as a
composer?
IM: It’s very important. Most of the music
I’ve written has been for voice or voices, so text of course assumes a huge
importance just because of that. I find that most of my pieces, whether or not
they have a text, are structured according to a text.
AR: And this goes for instrumental music as
well?
IM: Yes. Epitaphios is a case in
point, because it was structured around a piece that was originally vocal, of
course. The kind of text that would appeal to me structurally would be the kind
of poem you find in 16th century Spain – I’ve set some of these poems in Endechas
y Canciones - you have a highly structured poem with a refrain; I’ve done
this with early Portuguese poetry as well, and the musical form can exactly
follow the textural structure. That might sound like a cop-out, but it’s not really
because you’re under considerable pressure, by limiting yourself to that
structure, to create musical sense and variety within that framework.
AR: Would you say that the text is more
important for you as a composer than for the listener? Does the listener need
to know what text inspired your piece?
IM: No, I don’t think so. I hope the music
works on its own. I don’t even think you need to know the title of a piece. I
think it’s far more important for me to know that, and that goes for the title
as well: I need to have a title in order to compose a piece, because I need to
know for myself what the piece is about. That doesn’t go for the listener, who
can hear the piece completely abstractly. If it doesn’t work simply as a piece
of music, then it’s failed.
AR: We’ve just heard the first of your Endechas
y Canciones, and we’re going to close with another. Can you tell us more
about the set?
IM: That’s a cycle of renaissance Spanish
texts. They’re basically love poems. I’d already set some earlier texts in a
cycle called Cantos Mozárabes, which were poems written in a mixture of
Spanish and Arabic, 10th century texts. I wanted to continue working
in that direction, and I wrote the first of those songs, which is No pueden
dormis mis ojos (My eyes cannot sleep) as an encore for a Hilliard Ensemble
concert. I then expanded it into a cycle. So they’re basically love poems – the
canciones – and endechas: an endecha is a kind of lament;
structurally the poem gave me the form, and the images gave me the music.
AR: Ivan, thank you very much for talking
with me today.
IM: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
[Recording: Ojos de la mi Senora:
Hilliard Ensemble, ECM New Series 1614/15]
© 1999, 2002 Ivan Moody
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