Jürgen Simpson tells Michael Dervan about the leap from rock music to composing an opera.
This evening a new opera by Irish composer Jürgen Simpson, to a libretto by Simon Doyle, has its première at the Robin Howard Theatre at The Place in London. What's an Irish opera doing having its première in London?
And what's an Irish composer doing being called Jürgen Simpson? The name, first. "My father's Scottish," explains the composer, "hence Simpson. My mother's German. I'm Irish, Dublin-born, with no Irish blood in me, but I consider myself Irish. In fact, I spoke German first, and learnt English in Tallaght, playing soccer, so I had a very, very Tallaght accent, apparently, as a kid." He feels more German than Scottish.
"I definitely have a German side to my personality, I think, and a lot of my friends notice this all the time, and say 'here's the Teutonic German coming out'. I do find I have the ability to be very precise for very long periods of time without losing energy, which I think is possibly a Germanic trait. And I am a perfectionist, and that's also possibly a Germanic trait."
Music was always in his life, not least because his father, Archie, is a piano tuner. "I just ended up using the piano as an improvisational tool from a very early age, and was really just interested in improvising on the piano, although I did all the grades and all that kind of stuff.
"Basically I got more and more into jazz and more and more into that end of things, into composing songs from about the age of 15. Because of my dad's business' from an early age I was surrounded by a lot of people who were composers, or people involved in rock and roll. The Hothouse Flowers, the Waterboys were people I almost knew as a kid, or felt that I knew, because I was in their studios so often. Once a week I'd be in the studio, it'd be U2 or the Waterboys or one of those bands doing yet another album. And I'd always tag along as a young kid with my dad. So I was always in awe of and always aware of that scene, that area. Music was always a very, very big thing in my early years.
"My first foray into writing music outside of the world of improvisational piano was electronic, synthesizer music which would be more on a par with bands like Future Sound of London, The Orb, Aphex Twin, that area of slightly left-wing electronica that I was interested in at about 19, 20, 21." From there he came across names that were new to him, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, Luciano Berio.
"These were sudden revelations to me. My dad was the piano tuner for both Kevin Volans and Gerald Barry. He introduced me to them and both composers took an interest in what I was doing. Gerald Barry, in fact, introduced me to Stockhausen. He was also a neighbour of ours in the west of Ireland, so we saw quite a lot of him.
"I'd built up quite a substantial studio in the west, but it was for more popular types of music. I was actually getting quite disenchanted with it anyway, and the guy that I was collaborating with, we were falling out more and more, because I was spending more and more time listening to John Cage and Morton Feldman pieces. He just didn't get it, and I wasn't interested in writing yet another drum line or yet another bass line to go with the new synthesizer sound.
"I also started de-fetishising the world of electronic music, which I think is very fetishistic. It's all about the magazines and the new equipment and all that. And I was getting less and less interested in technology as a kind of fetishistic object." He went to classes under Kevin Volans, where his fellow students included the likes of Jennifer Walshe and Andrew Hamilton.
He admits feeling a bit daunted, as he had no actual music degree. In spite of that, he later "went straight in and did this Master's in Trinity, in music and media technologies. It was a huge boost, not only in electronic music, but also from a musical point of view. It solidified a lot of things. So it's just been a breakneck learning experience since about 1997 onwards."
Now, with his 30th birthday just two years away, there are moments, he says, when he misses the depth of formal training that other composers have, for instance when he finds himself racking his brains about the technicalities of instrumental transpositions when writing a score. At other times he's aware of being free of the shackles that musical education can impose.
He's quite blasé about never having caught up on the traditional rules of harmony.
"And I've no interest in them either. I've never gone there. But, saying that, I've - I don't want to sound pompous or as if I'm showing off or anything - but I do have an innate knowledge of that area of harmony and counterpoint. I can improvise a fugue. I can parody Wagner, Beethoven. I can do all the styles on the piano. I have an ability to hear something and then I can play it on the piano. I could hear a Chopin waltz for the first time, and then I could play it for you. That has been something which has been a huge weapon on my behalf. From the age of 10 I've just been able to copy everything I've heard."
Unlike other people who discover that they want to be a composer, he thinks he always identified himself as one. "It was just a case of finding out what composing was, rather than identifying myself as a composer at a certain point. Looking back on it, I've never felt any different, I've never felt, 'Oh my god, this is the area I'm in now.'" He's always felt composition to be an area in which he had something to say. "Most people involved in composition will have had this experience whereby at some point in their life they start hearing things in their head which they've never heard before. These are incredibly exciting moments where you feel that this kind of sound - maybe it's just shapes or graphic objects which are floating around in your head - but you know this is something that you've never heard expressed in any kind of physical format before, whether it be painting or writing or music. From that moment onwards you realise that you either ignore it or you try and find the tools to realise it and make it come true. I don't know if anybody has ever done that, but we all try to."
His first opera, Neshika, was written as his final year project for his Master's at TCD.
"It was to do with the fact that one of my best friends in the class was also doing an opera. If we both did operas, then we could also both put them on in the Dublin Fringe Festival." Neshika began life as an exercise in Bergian expressionism structured in the manner of total serialism, a strange hybrid of 1950s compositional approach and 1920s sound world.
"Then I heard Morton Feldman's Neither, and I scrapped it. Threw everything away, wrote a completely new opera, because I was so in love with this idea of the simplicity. And in fact it suited the libretto far more."
He seems to be most stimulated in opera by the business of collaboration, the element of theatre, and the challenge of dealing with the libretto.
"I came back to opera, because opera is one of the few fields in contemporary music that is so involving for an audience and it's not just about music - one of the things that you learn the hard way is that opera is not just pure music. You have to take into account that this is a theatrical dialogue happening. It's an incredibly exciting dialogue, but sometimes your music suffers, not necessarily suffers in a bad way, but it has to accommodate it, and you have to accommodate the structure of the libretto. You can change the libretto, and you can make your musical statement if you want. But for the most part it's not a purely musical affair, and you are constantly faced with the problems of getting this musical structure in your head into the libretto, and letting the libretto inspire you to do that. In the end what I find so freeing about opera is that you just open yourself up, and you say, 'Right, I'm now going to become this opera. I'm going to throw all my strong, piece ideas out the window, and let the libretto do the talking.'"
Simpson and Simon Doyle, the librettist for Thwaite, his second opera, entered for the Genesis Opera Prize, which whittled a field of over 200 international entries down to nine for a partial, workshop performance, and to just three for fully-staged, professional productions by Almeida Opera this summer.
The libretto, he says, "is hilarious, it's shocking, it's funny. But it all happens within seconds. The delivery needs to be fast, as well. If I tell you a joke, and I speak it to you, that joke is only funny if I manage to deliver it in the correct way, with the punch-line at the correct moment. With opera, what happens is, if you're not careful, the humour of these things gets lost, because they're extended into song forms, voice forms."
In parallel with his composing, Simpson struts quite a different kind of music as a member of the rock band, The Jimmy Cake. I ask if rock band is the right description. "I think you'd have to call it a rock band. Getting involved in a rock band is as much fun as you can possibly have in one day. It's an absolute ball.
"I also play the accordion in the band, which makes for a very strange visual experience. At first people thought this couldn't work, but in fact it does. The accordion, unlike the piano, is a dynamic instrument, which you can hold when you jump around the stage - and I tend to jump around on the stage an awful lot.
"The great enjoyment for me is that interaction between an audience and the performer. Being a performer yourself you become much more knowledgeable of the actual emotion and the emotional content.
"I've found more and more enjoyment and ways of communicating and not just in opera, in classical idioms, but also in other styles as well. The willingness and the need to write music that communicates has become a huge impetus for me."
Thwaite opens at the Robin Howard Theatre at The Place in London tonight, with repeat performances next Tuesday and Saturday. (Tel: 0044- 20-73594404). Opera Theatre Company (01-6794962) brings the production to the Dublin Fringe Festival (1850-374643) on September 23rd and 24th