For Garrett Sholdice, whose work will feature in a Horizons concert this month, composing was a passion that took hold early
THERE’S SOMETHING switchback about the way Garrett Sholdice has developed as a musician and composer. It all began for him when he joined the choir of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin as a chorister at the age of eight. “That was a fairly intense, early exposure to music and, I guess, to a tradition really,” he says. “There’s so much of the repertoire there that gets in your blood. We were singing Tallis and Byrd, Handel, Irish composers like Stanford. That just kind of took hold. I started playing piano there as well. It was compulsory. That experience shaped things to come.”
It was in St Patrick’s that he wrote his first piece, he adds. “The assistant choirmaster of the time, Timothy Noon, would occasionally improvise processional music. And I twigged to this and I said: ‘If you’re going to improvise, could you maybe play something that I would write for you?’ I was maybe nine or 10 at the time. He very graciously said yes. The piece I wrote was initially going to be a prelude and toccata, but I only got the prelude written. I hadn’t figured out duration, so it was only two sheets of manuscript. He had to play it very slowly to last the length of our processing.”
Music study continued at secondary school, where “it kind of emerged as the singular passion. My only desire after secondary school was to go and study music, and specialise in composition.” The “bits and pieces” he wrote as a schoolboy were mostly choral. But he also played in rock bands, wrote music for them, and was very interested in jazz.
“As a pianist, I got very into Bill Evans,” he says. “I remember trying to work out harmony at the piano quite a lot. Aside from the early organ experience, the first piece that I really had properly performed was a choral piece, not surprisingly, infused with a lot of Bill Evans harmony. I did it as part of a National Chamber Choir outreach scheme. They performed it and I ended up winning a prize, a Gerard Victory Commission actually, to write a piece for them the next year.”
That was in 2002, the year Sholdice turned 19. “I used the prize money to pay for the Irish Composition Summer School, in between ending school and beginning my music degree at Trinity. While I was there I was exposed to a whole new world of post-second World War composition.”
Outside jazz, his classical inspirations at this time were Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich. But when he started studying at Trinity College Dublin, he turned to Steve Reich and Philip Glass and “pulse-based music that gets referred to as minimalism – a problematic term”. The key inspiration at Trinity was the composer Donnacha Dennehy, whom he describes as “a fabulous teacher”. “His opening gambit with us was the classical techniques of minimalism: phasing, construction and reduction technique, these things,” he says. “That just completely captured my imagination.”
It may seem an odd leap from Britten to Reich, but, for Sholdice, the shift was seamless. "The thread was that it was a totally intuitive thing," he says. Britten, Shostakovich, Reich all "hit me on a gut level". He mentions Britten's Rejoice in the Lamband Shostakovich's Sixth Symphonyand Eighth String Quartet.
“It was the same the first time I heard Reich’s Piano Phase,” he says, slapping himself demonstratively. “It was the solar plexus. It was intuitive.”
Trinity was also where he tuned into the work of other Americans: Morton Feldman and James Tenney, composers of quiet music. He liked Feldman because of his philosophy of intuition, Tenney for his clarity.
“It was stillness that I got very attracted to more than the rhythmic excitement of Reich or Glass,” he says. “This concentration. That really took hold in a major way. My experience with Donnacha was entirely positive. He gave me permission, as I think he did for a lot of us, to write music that you want to hear. It sounds like a truism, but a lot of composers get very caught up in intellectualisation. They write the kind of music they think they should write, not really music that they want to hear.”
After Trinity, Sholdice moved to York University, where the contact was Nicola LeFanu, who had been one of the teachers at the composition summer school. In York, where he took his master’s and PhD, he found himself forced to explore styles and techniques that to which he wasn’t particularly sympathetic. “That was good. I look back on it and it really helped,” he says.
But he chose to complete his PhD under William Brooks, one of Dennehy’s own teachers, rather than LeFanu. “The real value of a composition teacher isn’t in the teaching, I think. It’s in the encouragement, getting the composer to be the most themselves that they can be.”
Sholdice is not just a composer, he’s also a musical activist. In 2006, with his fellow composer Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, he curated the Printing House Festival of New Music, which later morphed into Ergodos, first as a festival and now as a production company, record label and publisher.
His choice of music for his free Horizons lunchtime concert at the National Concert Hall includes works by Schlepper-Connolly ( Last Pictures), Feldman ( Madame Press Died Last Week at 90) and Tenney ( Chorales) as well as himself. His new Fall and Disappearis his first orchestral composition and he describes writing it as "a great challenge".
The central theme of the Horizons concert is chorale, “melody with accompaniment. I’m very interested in the idea that it’s like an object and the light in which you view it. The object stays the same, but the light changes, so the meaning changes. There’s a sort of a kernel within it that gets exposed, maybe like a memory of something, that’s completely clear. Then it gets covered up again, and finally disappears.
“Since my second year in Trinity, my music has always been about this calm, this focus, lowering of the heart rate, trying to get into something, really get inside the sound, as La Monte Young said, although I tend to have a little more activity in my music than him.”
And the experience of writing for orchestra? “I still think it’s a very exciting medium. It was a gear change for me. I was incredibly excited to do it. Extremely gratified to have the opportunity. And I would do it again tomorrow in a heartbeat.”
On January 31st at 1.05pm, Garrett Sholdice will be the featured composer in the last of the Horizons Contemporary Music Series of free Tuesday-lunchtime concerts at the National Concert Hall. For details of the rest of the Horizons programme, see rte.ie or nch.ie
