Chris Swithinbank writes music.

Recent re­cip­ient of the 1^er Prix Luigi Russolo for his work Gallivanting (now re­titled as The Suitcases Piece), Donal Sarsfield is an Irish com­poser cur­rently studying for a PhD in elec­troacoustic music at the University of Manchester on an Irish Arts Council Elizabeth Maconchy Composition Fellowship. His re­cent tape music demon­strates poignancy and hu­mour in equal measure, with at­ten­tion to the de­tail of even the most eph­em­eral ges­ture. For the second of an oc­ca­sional series of pro­files of com­posers whose music I like (pre­vi­ously: Nina Whiteman), Donal kindly agreed to an­swer some ques­tions about what makes him tick.

Q&A

Chris Swithinbank: I realise that this is not a ques­tion that you prob­ably con­sider every day, but let’s start at the be­gin­ning. What drew you to write music? Is it a vo­ca­tion and if so, why?

Donal Sarsfield: I al­ways listened to music in my teenage years. I learned to play the piano my­self but was al­ways a re­luctant prac­tiser; I much pre­ferred im­pro­vising to learning pieces. It wasn’t until I went to col­lege and at­tended com­pos­i­tion classes that I got a feeling that I could try things out on paper, and so after a few ele­mental ex­er­cises I wrote my first piece when I was 20. I wouldn’t call com­posing a vocation.

CS: Having started out writing music for acoustic in­stru­ments and voices, you are now working on a PhD in Electroacoustic Composition. What was it about studio com­pos­i­tion that you wanted to explore?

DS: After first working in the studio during my MA in 2004 I real­ised that I en­joyed working with sounds as much as I en­joyed working with notes and in­stru­ments. Having been to a re­spect­able number of con­certs in­volving tape or elec­troacoustic works over the years I felt that most of the pieces I heard, though tech­nic­ally pol­ished, were lacking some­thing per­sonal. By per­sonal I mean either a clearly auto­bi­o­graph­ical sub­ject matter or the more stub­bornly subtle, ec­centric or eso­teric side to life. That’s the area that I have set out to ex­plore in my PhD; the sub­ject of the per­sonal through sound.

CS: How do you deal with the dis­em­bodied nature of tape music?

DS: The pho­to­grapher Garry Winogrand often said that he pho­to­graphed some­thing to see what it looked liked pho­to­graphed and I try and apply the same ap­proach to re­cording sounds; I re­cord some­thing to hear what it sounds like re­corded. Even though 99% of my sounds are de­rived from re­corded sound I never con­sider the sounds I use as dis­em­bodied. I think the term pre­sup­poses the “dis­em­bodied” ele­ment in a lesser light and that seems an un­ne­ces­sary weight on the work.

CS: How do you con­ceive of sound in your work?

DS: I usu­ally have some starting point or concept which I try and realise through sound. This seed evolves through a period of broad pre­par­atory re­search into areas which I feel might be useful; pho­to­graphy, painting, American 80’s tele­vi­sion, and that then in­forms the prac­tical con­sid­er­a­tions of con­structing the piece: from how and where to re­cord sound sources, how best to trans­form, or­ganise and com­bine sounds, and most im­port­antly, how to re­solve and struc­ture each sound/gesture within each piece. At the minute I can’t really offer a defin­i­tion of res­ol­u­tion, it’s more an aware­ness that within the piece a sound must jus­tify it­self and, if re­moved, would weaken the equi­lib­rium of the work.

CS: Moving from raw re­corded sound to a fin­ished piece can be a con­vo­luted pro­cess. How do you go about it and what role does the source sound it­self play in a piece’s concept?

DS: I al­ways aim to make some­thing not “fac­tu­ally im­pec­cable but seam­lessly per­suasive”, which is a phrase from John Szarkowski, the man who’s writing I turn to most often when I’m stuck. The first three pieces of my [PhD] port­folio point to an or­dinary sound in an ima­gin­ative, and hope­fully some­what in­tel­li­gent, manner. I try and use the sound source as the sub­ject of the piece, rather than just using the sound ob­ject as a means to create. Matisse said that “The ob­ject is not so in­ter­esting in it­self. It’s the en­vir­on­ment that cre­ates the object.”

CS: In The Clapping Piece (2010) the main ma­terial is the sound of ap­plause. There is a won­derful mo­ment just after it ends where the audi­ence an­ti­cip­ates its own ap­plause, re­cog­nises that this will be in some way a con­tinu­ation of the work it­self and real­ises some­thing of the ri­dicu­lous­ness of the con­cert ritual. Was that a con­scious aim? Is a ques­tioning of the con­cert situ­ation an im­portant part of your com­pos­i­tional approach?

DS: With The Clapping Piece there was an at­tempt to make an audi­ence not ap­plaud after the piece, but I failed in that re­spect. I think of that piece as a rather un­as­suming per­form­ance piece for con­cert hall. More than most pieces it re­wards pro­jec­tion within the con­cert hall en­vir­on­ment more than any­where else (for ex­ample a radio broad­cast, listening at home, or on­line streaming).

CS: What pro­jects have you got in the pipeline at the moment?

DS: Thankfully the PhD will be my main pro­ject for the next 18 months and I am grateful for this time to make the work as strong as it can be. Outside the PhD I have been par­ti­cip­ating in the Jerwood Opera Writing Foundation at Aldeburgh and that course cul­min­ates in a short new piece with writer Alan McKendrick and dir­ector Ted Huffman in July.

CS: What ex­cites you about being an artist today?

DS: Waiting to see what Martin Margiela will do next.