James Opstad
Drift

1  Nymphaea   (2020)     13:48
GBSR duo         Siwan Rhys, piano     George Barton, vibraphone  
                                                                                                                   
2  Study 2    (2019)    7:04
Apartment House
Mira Benjamin & Gordon MacKay, violins
Bridget Carey, viola   Anton Lukoszevieze, cello

3   Eluvium   (2018)   9:28
for clarinet and resonating tam-tam
Heather Roche, clarinet

4  Study 1    (2019)    3:30
Apartment House
Mira Benjamin & Gordon MacKay, violins
Bridget Carey, viola   Anton Lukoszevieze, cello

5  Drift  (2021/24)   22:36
GBSR duo     Siwan Rhys, piano   George Barton, temple blocks 
with  Heather Roche, clarinet

INTERVIEW WITH JAMES OPSTAD

Let's start with the title piece, Drift, which is the last track on the album, and the longest by some way.  I find it a really strong & engaging work.  How did it come about, and why the rather unusual instrumentation (clarinet, piano, temple blocks)? 

I started working on Drift in 2020 after completing Nymphaea, which is also written for the GBSR Duo. The initial version was just for piano and percussion. This was a time when everyone was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and, for myself, it not only impacted my ability to work with other musicians, but also significantly delayed my chances of having a child (my wife and I were referred for fertility treatment shortly before the first lockdown). For a long time, this piece became inseparable in my mind from this rather dark time and, although I felt it was incomplete, I also found it difficult to contemplate returning to it. This all changed with the birth of our daughter, which somehow healed this association, and allowed me to look at the piece in a fresh and more positive light. So, in 2024, when she was a few months old, I began to reimagine the work as a trio with clarinet. It turned out to be the perfect way for me to find my way back into composing as a sleep-deprived new parent!

In terms of the piece itself, each instrument occupies its own tempo and, together, these tempi all slow over the full duration. There’s often this sense of falling in my work–a sort of gravitational pull–and that’s what is present here. Progressive lowering of the pitch material also leads to a gradual thickening of the timbre that, I feel, enhances this sensation. When adding the clarinet, it was important that it didn’t feel like a solo instrument. I wanted the three instruments to be blended and equal, and for the listener’s attention to be able to drift between them without hearing one as the primary focus.

The oldest piece on the CD is 'Eluvium', which dates from 2018.  Again the instrumentation is unusual (clarinet & resonating tam-tam), but - unlike in the other pieces on the disc - the soundworld changes considerably during the course of the track.  What were you looking for in this piece, and does the development of sounds within the piece date from an earlier phase of your compositional career?

Yes, this piece marked a bit of a turning point for me. In the period prior to writing it, I had been exploring electroacoustic music and the use of live electronics. This had led me towards writing music that was very sound based. I was starting to long for a return to using pitch in a more deliberate way–even just the act of writing one note after another. I was still interested in using technology but was more keen on how it could be used within a primarily acoustic context.

Eluvium involves a live feedback process in which the clarinet and tam-tam are recorded in real-time. The recording is then played through a speaker that is placed behind the tam-tam. This process repeats throughout the piece, leading to an accumulation of resonant frequencies. The sound-world does change considerably but it’s all as a result of this process and the way in which the clarinet part is constructed. So, what I was looking for was this gradual transformation, but also a feeling of erasure. There’s this sense in the clarinet part, resulting from the way that the tempi are alternated and layered, that it sort of wipes itself out. This is heightened by the blurring effect created by the tam-tam, which eventually engulfs the clarinet altogether.

I see this piece as a precursor of the rest of the music on the album, not only because of a renewed focus on pitch, but also because of the layering of different tempi. This went on to become a recurrent feature of my work.

Yes, the layering of different tempi is a really striking feature of the album. Have you a sense of where your interest in this aspect of music comes from? Are there other composers who have influenced you in this?

I think a lot of different interests of mine intersected to lead me in this direction. There are some Feldman pieces where the parts are uncoordinated–I’m thinking of early pieces, such as the Piece for Four Pianos, where the players read from the same score, but also later pieces, like Why Patterns?, where there are separate parts that proceed independently. I think, in this music, I get a sense of the parts coexisting within a shared space that I really like. By layering tempi, I’m trying to capture some of that sense while having a bit more control over the moment to moment relationship between the parts. I also love early music and can trace the prolation canons written by Ockeghem as another influence. In these pieces, mensuration markings indicate that the same part should be performed with different alterations of the durations, so it’s a similar idea of layering and stretching the material. On a technical level, Nancarrow is an influence, though I don’t think anyone would guess that from listening to the music! Some of the underlying principles, however, such as using ratios to establish the relationships between tempi, are similar. And then there are ideas from physics that have affected how I think about time more generally. Carlo Rovelli’s book, The Order of Time, is a great read that I would recommend to anyone.

I should add that it’s not really my intention that these ideas are evident to the listener. It’s more about striving for this slightly elusive quality where some aspects of the music exist on the threshold of comprehension. That’s something that I have come to realise is a common thread in a lot of the music I love.

 
And where do you think the return to using pitch came from?

I’ve always been interested in counterpoint, but around the time of writing Eluvium I became particularly interested in canon. I like the way that writing canonically leads to each note creating a sort of ripple effect. I think, off the back of being interested in process based music, canon was inviting because it brings process into the note to note creation of a piece. So, this gave me a way to reconnect with pitch and immerse myself more in the interplay between the voices, while still exploring more abstract ideas in terms of form and structure.

Could you tell us a bit about your background in music, both as a performer and a composer? 

There was a lot of music around the house when I was growing up; my brothers are both musicians and my parents are great music lovers. I listened to jazz and was also exposed to 20th century classical music, including composers such as Messiaen and Takemitsu. I began to write music of my own and also played cello, piano and bass guitar. I then went to a specialist music school where I studied composition and started to play double bass. During this time, performing became my main focus and I went on to study jazz double bass at the Royal Academy of Music, where I also continued classical studies.

My work since as a performer has been very varied and I’ve been lucky to play with many amazing musicians. It was via performing in freely improvised settings that I arrived at a renewed interest in experimental music and composition. Discovering Another Timbre and listening to Apartment House perform were both highly influential at this time (it was a little later that I started to perform with Apartment House). I think the way I write has grown quite organically since. I have wide ranging musical interests but don’t feel the need to channel them all into my work. Instead, I feel that they have affected my sensibilities in many subtle ways. Ultimately, I don’t believe that there is one way of making music that has all the answers. When I am composing I often want to achieve things that can’t be done through improvisation and the reverse is also true when I am improvising. Performing music by other composers also affects the music I write, of course.

One aspect I haven’t mentioned is my interest in technology, which also traces back to my childhood. I initially found an outlet for this in live electronics but later became interested in other ways of using technology in performance. Much of the music on this album was written during my PhD and as part of this I developed a custom score reading application. This aids the performance of simultaneous divergent tempi by providing each performer with their own pulse that is present in the score.