Posted 2:46 PM by laura r.
INTERVIEW WITH IGOR KIPNIS

TM: I read recently that your first encounter with the harpsichord was the Dolmetsch that belongs to the Music Department at Harvard.

IK: It was the the 1907 Dolmetsch Chickering, which also was the instrument that Ralph Kirkpatrick
first tried a harpsichord out on, which eventually caused him to go into that area, as it did me, though I certainly didn’t know it at the time. I was taking a course at Harvard with Randall Thompson . It was called “The Age of Handel”. We were to write term papers on various aspects of Handel’s existence, anything having to do with London at that time. I was running around with a girl from Radcliffe, who played the recorder. We got permission to play some Handel recorder sonatas, edited by one Thurston Dart, and that was the first time I had my hands on a first rate instrument, even though it was in pititful condition. I tried it more recently, and I think it’s still in pitiful condition. I don’t know what Kirkpatrick thought of it. Always in the back of my mind I liked the harpsichord. I first heard the harpsichord on recordings, and of course that was Landowska
. I admired what she did and collected quite a few of her recordings. I still admire her, but styles have changed so drastically, and the instrument is no longer considered a proper harpsichord. She was an incredible artist, but the only thing I would admire in her performances at this point is her artistry.That sound snotty as hell, and I don’t like saying that, because she was a great performer - I was lucky enough to hear her once. This was the start - there wasn’t much on harpsichord on records except hers. There was a handful of other but they were harder to come by. At one point after I was out of the army, and was working various jobs, my father, who had given me a TV set, offered to buy me a piano, and I didn’t want a piano. I think he was concerned, because after work, and work at that point consisted of being the art and editorial director for four and a half years at Westminster Records, which was a very intense job, full of stress. I would come back from that in the evening and sit in front of the TV and vegetate. My wife (the same person who played the recorder - Judy) must have talked to my father, and so my parents went off to Europe for the first time since the Second World War, and they asked me was there anything that I would like to have them bring back. I said, “Yes, a harpsichord”. They had a big laugh about that, of course. My father considered the harpsichord to be something that was in the pit for Marriage of Figaro or Barber of Seville.

TM: This was in what year?

IK: In 1956.

TM: You were in the army after you graduated?

IK: I got rid of the army. I have nothing good to say about the army - I was in for two miserable years. All of that time, except for the indoctrination period, was in Camp Chaffee, Arkansas. The only good thing about that was that I was always shy and tongue-tied in high school. If I had to deliver a talk I would say “I’m going to.....talk about.......Shakespeare.....and Romeo and ...........Ju.....liet.” In the army I had to teach the basic trainees signal communications, which consisted of my having to talk to eight hundred soldiers, bored out of their skulls, and say “All right, men, watch the movie.” It was that which got me to feeling that I could talk to a large number of people. That has stood me in very good stead for many years.
My parents came back from their vacation - no harpsichord, but some catalogues. I had to talk my father into getting me the very smallest two-manual instrument. It was a Sperrhake. He didn’t know anything about harpsichords, but then neither did I. By a half-decade later, the influence of the copies of historical instruments - no longer pedals - meant that we were being much more pure -that was the whole idea. The Sperrhake didn’t reflect that because the Sperrhake was exactly like the Neuperts of that time. They basically were a modernized harpsichord. But you have to start on something. So instead of watching TV after work, I sat and practiced. Very peculiar, but it was great. I trotted out all of my old pieces which I had learned on the piano - I took piano from about the age of six on - and I gradually got a modicum of technique for the harpsichord, essentially teaching myself. I did take a few lessons from Fernando Valenti. Those who knew him knew that he could put away a fair amount of alcohol. He would come for a lesson, my wife would fix dinner, that was the exchange, you see, and I would have the lesson. One day he arrived and I was making vodka martinis, prior to the lesson, and he said “how soon are we eating?” My wife said “things are a little bit delayed - it might take another half-an-hour”. So Fernando says,
“Why don’t you play me what you have been working on?” At that point he had had four martinis - up, not on the rocks, just plain up - and I had had only three. At this point we were living in New York, in Greenwich Village, and I had difficulty in finding the harpsichord, then the chair, and my fingers were like macaroni. The disgusting thing was that Fernando sat down and played my pieces for me note-perfect. So he taught me a lesson - it’s ok to drink, but not to drink and play.
I had a side-job at Westminster, in addition to all the art and editorial stuff. I took it upon my self to take people from the various radio stations in New York out to lunch. CBS had an all-night program at the point, NYC had an all-night program, NBC had one and of course WQXR. Those were the principal ones that played a lot of classical music then - how times have changed, right?
I went one day to the municipal building where WNYC was, and I had lunch with Alexander Richardson. He was an organist, and the person in charge of the record department at WNYC. He knew that I had a harpsichord, and that I played it. At this point I was having jam sessions and playing with a whole bunch of people. The name of Zuckerman is fairly familiar. Wally Zuckerman had a shop in the Village - he was also a cellist. We would gather a group of people together including Wally Zuckerman. Seymour Solomon, aside from his connection with Vanguard Records - he was one of the two heads - was a violinist. He would come. And then I had a friend that was a flutist. We would do a Brandenburg concerto, or a Handel concerto grosso. At any rate, I am now having lunch, and Alex Richardson said “Why don’t you do a program on WNYC?” I had to think about that for about twenty seconds, and I agreed. But there was a basic program. WNYC, then as now, had no money. I certainly didn’t have any money, and I couldn’t afford to pay for my instrument to be transported to WNYC. So somehow I conned an engineer from Westminster, who wanted to have the experience of recording, to come to our apartment, which was on 13th Street off of 7th Ave, on a weekend in November. We turned off the radiators, and rolled up the rug, to get better ambience, and hoped that there wasn’t going to be too much traffic, and I made, in a sense, my first recording. That was broadcast, and not very long after that, within a week, in fact, a young conductor called and said “Hello, my name is Norman Masonson. I heard the broadcast. I conduct the Greenwich Village Civic Symphony, and our next program is going to be in Greenwich Village at the Memorial Chapel, and we are going to do the fifth Brandenburg. Would you play the solo part?”
I, in total naivete, said “why not?”

TM (laughs) Had you played it before?

IK I had played it, in fact I had done it at home, with one person per part...yes I knew it.
But I had not appeared live before, and I didn’t know how scary it was until the actual event.
I still remember that you couldn’t walk from your wings to your position on the stage. There were no wings - you had to walk down the aisle, as if you were getting married, and that’s frightening enough, but to have play the fifth Brandenburg, that was asking for too much. I had sent invitations to a whole bunch of people. One of those persons was one of the daughters of Leopold Godowsky, the famous pianist. She was a movie actress, in fact she often played a vamp. There are extant some of the silent movies that she made. She knew everybody. She had affairs with many, many different people. With Arthur Rubinstein - he writes about it in his books. With Charlie Chaplin. With Igor Stravinsky, and a whole bunch of others. She wrote a book called “First Person Plural” - long, out-of-print, and hilarious, and she mentions this story that at a party somebody came to her, and said “Dagmar, how many husbands have you had?” and she replied “Two of my own, and quite a few of my friends.” She was a very witty person, and I had known her practically from the time I was born. In fact, I think she knew me before I was born - a very good friend of my mother. There she was - she had come to this debut performance, and as I walked down the aisle - my face must have been the shade of an avocado - she half-rose in her seat, and went “Yoo-hoo, Igor!” She died a few years after that, but that was not my doing, because if it was me, it would have happened right at that point.
I mentioned mentors. The most important one was Thurston Dart. He was giving a lecture at the New York Public Library. I made it my business to go to the library, to say hello and tell him how wonderful I thought his recordings were, and especially his continuo playing, which was so imaginative, and certainly influenced me. I invited him to dinner. He came, and he listened to me play, and he didn’t throw me out of court, for which I am extremely grateful.

TM When was that?

IK That would have been about 1960. My debut, by the way, was a year and half after I got the harpsichord. Looking back on that I think that it is slightly ridiculous - how could I have had the nerve to do anything like that? I was an auto-didact - Dart told me what to look at, what to read, and I paid a fair amount of attention to that. When I began making solo records, I sent them to him, and almost in the return mail he would send me a critique. He was a tremendous influence on me. He came to my debut in London in 1967, and sat in the sixth row, arms folded in front of him, grinning at me, which was pretty scary, and when I got back to my hotel there was a note from him which said “Well, Igor, that was a fine concert. Don’t expect too much from my apartment (I was going to visit him that weekend) - it’s not too grand, and by the way, if you think of it, bring the Byrd and Pachelbel with you” (which was a very subtle way of saying he wanted to make some corrections).

TM If one had asked you in 1950 at Harvard whether you would be making your harpsichord debut not so many years later, would you have said yes? Where were you heading as a student?

IK I was not a music major - I took a lot of music courses, but I found the department very dry, at least at that point. I became a Social Relations major, which has helped me, in a rather funny way. There were a couple of areas in what was then the four-discpline system, which involved social anthropology, sociology - those were kind of boring - but clinical psych I enjoyed very much, and social psych. The social psych helped me as far as thinking how you try to attract an audience, how do you promote a concert. Of course I can quip that the clinical psych made me understand why I should do such a crazy thing as taking up the harpsichord.

TM What was the musical environment at Harvard like? Later there was a lof of formal and semi-formal performance within the houses themselves.

IK Not for credit, but even then there was a lot. Now there are harpsichords which you find in the Dunster House library, for example, and some of the students actually have harpsichords. At that point you didn’t have very much in the way of harpsichords - Danny Pinkham had one, but he was already graduated. This was kind of a rarity. There was the regular music series, and there were some incredible things that went on at that point - the Juilliard Quartet on its first season of doing all the Bartok quartets. I remember hearing Arthur Schnabel do a lecture - I was working for the Harvard radio station at that point, I did a lot with WHRB, and I was dying to get him for an interview. He said “I do not give radion interviews.” But I shook his hand, and all I could think was “I shook the hand that played the Hammerklavier!” It made a tremendous impresison on me - I thought was the ne plus ultra, the hardest sort of stuff to play on the piano. There were a lot of things that were going on, and some of them we had on the Harvard radio staion. It was great fun, there was no lack of music-making there. Judy actually sang in the Harvard-Radcliffe chorus. I heard what was probably the last performance of the Beethoven Ninth conducted by Koussevitzky - not at Harvard but in Boston proper - and she was in the chorus. She said that at one point Koussevitzky threw a wrong cue, and the altos came in wrong, and he got totally red in the face with a vein that throbbed noticeably...

TM I am also interested in the early history of early music in Boston. Erwin Bodky was already in the Boston area by the late forties, and I was fascinated to find that there was a recording from that period by Arthur Fielder of seventeenth-century German consort music.

IK Bodky played some of those things. He was certainly a person of note, and the director the Longy school. One of the other mentors that I had, much later, was also a director of the Longy School, Melville Smith. He taught me, within a couple of conversations, a great deal about performing French music.
In general audiences are less responsive even to familiar composers - Couperin, Rameau - I remember in 1977 I was recording the Bach concertos all over again with some pupils of mine doing the multiple concertos, and in between those sessions I was asked to be a judge in the Paris competiton called the “Festival estival”. I played a recital with a Marchand suite. I had been playing the Marchand for most of that season, and this was my first time playing in Paris. I am pretty self-critical, but I played it pretty well - I was not unhappy with it, and the audience was very tepid. I am thinking to myself “What’s the matter with you guys?”
There wasn’t that much early activity in Boston. People played the recorder, Palestrina masses were sung in a very wobbly Romantic manner - there just wasn’t that much involvement - that didn’t come until much, much later. And now look what’s happened in Boston, much more so than New York?

TM You studied piano as a child, with no intention of becoming a performer...

IK It was understood - never clearly stated, but understood - that I was not going to be a perfomer. My father wanted me to have a regular paycheck on Fridays. I thought I would be in radio - I was interested in that and I was interested in records. I wanted to be a producer, an A&R person, the person who would say “Mr. Heifetz, for your next record, how would you like to do the Rhapsody in Blue in the version for violin?”, which I still think is a great idea....At the time that he got me the harpsichord he didn’t know what was going to happen, nor did I. It was just fun and games. When I made a debut my parents were shocked, and they did not give me any kind of support. My father thought this was the stupidest thing possible, to choose an instrument that had no business being a solo instrument. Yes, he knew about Landowska, but that was exceptional.
It was a long time before my parents began to see that I hadn’t done the most stupid thing on Earth. I would go on tour, and drive by myself in a van with my own harpsichord. Now I had a very good Rutkowski and Robinette harpsichord, because I needed something that was going to be reliable, not only stay reasonably in tune, but not require constant regulation in order to sound well I would drive all across the country, and very often at the end of a concert, someone would ask “Are you related to Alexander Kipnis, the singer?” Of course, you are very proud, but when this happens one too many times....this happened to me playing in Prague at the ambassador’s residence. I played a harpsichord recital, a normal two-hour concert, and a wizened old gentleman came up and said with a quavery voice “I remember your father singing in Prague, he sang Sarastro in the Magic Flute, it was unforgettable”, and with that he walked away. I am thinking to myself “What am I, chopped liver?” After a while, my father began to be asked the same question “Are you related to the harpsichordist?”, and at that point the situation seems to have changed. He realized that I wasn’t doing too badly. I was very lucky, I made a lot of records - it’s now eighty-six, or something like that. I was extremely lucky, I got a lot of experience in the recording studio.
Along the way I got a clavichord, in 1963, and in 1980 I bought an antique forte-piano.

TM Did you play the clavichord in concert?

IK The very first time that I played the clavichord in concert was at Rutgers, an all-Bach concert. The first half was clavichord, the second half was harpsichord. Believe it or not, the hall was called Kirkpatrick Chapel. It’s not something that is asked for very often. A week and a half from now I am playing an all-clavichord concert at Brandeis for the Boston Clavichord Society, an interesting program with Bohm, Kuhnau, Bach, Goldberg, Benda, Haydn (the F-minor variations), and closing with something that I have played on the harpsichord, the forte-piano, but never on the clavichord, Dussek, The sufferings of the Queen of France. I’ve killed her many, many times and I’ve always enjoyed it.

TM Tell us about your piano duo.

IK I received the complete Chopin Mazurkas from Alan Silber at Connoisseur Society as a gift, and I was on tour, with a CD player in the room. I loved the Chopin Mazurkas, and I didn’t know who this person was. Her name was Karen Kushner . I put this on, and was bowled over. I had a chance to write about it for Stereophile, and she wrote a very nice thank-you letter.
Later Karen came to a book-signing and we met in person. We became friends, and it turned out that we had the same reactions to music, we loved Brahms, Chopin and Ravel.
I had bought the music for the Ravel Mother Goose suite. I did not touch the piano except once in a blue moon. My technique was not based on the piano at all at this point. At any rate we sat down and tried the Mother Goose suite. We started together, and the interesting thing is that we ended together. The musical rapport was fabulous. We made our debut at the Bohemians Club in New York, and the piano became more and more familiar. In the last several years I have been playing four instruments - the harpsichord, clavichord, forte-piano and the modern piano. I have to stress “modern”, because people don’t think that I have anything to do with the modern piano. My grandfather was a pianist, so was my uncle. I adore piano music, and have collected piano records since I was fourteen, and still do a great deal of reviewing, primarily piano recordings.
In mid-October Karen and I are playing a duo-concert in Carmel for the California Mozart Society. Three days after that we were supposed to play in San Francisco, and Karen had a family engagement, the Old First Church doesn’t have the money to rent a forte-piano, so I will make my solo debut on modern piano. And two weeks later I am doing it in New York.

Styles in early music have changed so much and so quickly that even recordings from twenty years ago can sound dated, belonging to their age rather than to the ages, and it can take a certain amount of chutzpah for a record company to reissue recordings of early music from the seventies (these sessions date from 1973 and 1976) - the opposite of the situation obtaining for most recordings of standard repertoire, where it is the nth recording of the Beethoven symphonies that is the glut on the market, rather than the reissue. Igor Kipnis’s Bach has aged extremely well, sounding remarkably contemporary.
His Bach playing is wonderfully free, combining technical brilliance with a willingness to inflect, to experiment, to make the music his own, that is rarely found. This is especially the case with the Goldbergs, where the monumental character of the architecture, and the sheer size of the work, may inhibit lesser players from departing one iota from the printed score. This is not the case here. Kipnis, it seems, declares his intentions from the start, in playing the aria’s first appearance with Bach’s ornaments stripped away, to reappear on the repeat, and he is not chary of adding his own ornaments throughout. Even the layout of the piece on the Cds is thoughtful, with the Goldbergs divided between the two discs so that the significant juncture between the fifteenth variation and the subsequent French overture lies between them. Kipnis’s playing of Bach’s figuration in these variations captures the innovative spontaneity of Bach’s character, rather than his pedantic side, with fizz and pizzazz.
The tone of Kipnis’s Rutkowski and Robinette, patterned after the large Hass harpsichords from Hamburg, is grand, and even after three decades the recorded sound is impressive, thunderous in the tuttis of the Italian Concerto, and lyric in the solos. Warmly recommended to all lovers of Bach and the harpsichord.



BACH French Overture in B Minor, BWV 831; Goldberg Variations, BWV 988; Variations in the Italian Style, BWV 989; Italian Concerto in F, BWV 971. SERAPHIM CLASSICS 7243 5 74501 2 6 (144:00)

Posted 2:36 PM by laura r.
INTERVIEW WITH PAUL HILLIER


TM: You visited Stanford University in 1980. Was that your first step towards moving to the U.S.?

PH: No, I did teach a year at about that time at UC Santa Cruz, as a visiting lecturer, and though I could have stayed on, at that time I opted to go back to Europe.

TM: Was that when you got your taste for California?

PH: It's the West Coast, I like the West Coast in general , all the way up. Also, my wife is from Oregon, so it's not such a strange move as it might seem for an Englishman. Half of our marriage was brought up here.

TM: What's the Chicago connection? How did you get hooked up with His Majestie's Clerkes?

PH: That's just an occasional thing. I've been invited to work with them three time altogether, just as a guest conductor. The invitation came just like any other concert engagement, if you like. I was still in England at the time, and I was looking to do some early American music with an American choir, so when that invitation came, after we did one project together, I suggested that we work on American music for a recording of Billings, and as one of their own directors was extremely keen on the repertoire that pulled together quite neatly.

TM: Anne Heider is the early Americanist there. That's a continuing relationship?

PH: From time to time, every other couple of years or so. My main work now is focused here with the Theatre of Voices.

TM: Usually the musical brain drain goes to the U.K. from the U.S.. There aren't so many Britons that have made their career in the U.S.

PH :Actually I know quite a few English people who have moved over in music, doing a similar sort of thing to me, making a career and then deciding to move over, mid-career or even later.

TM:American musicians, most of us, who haven't been to England, have perhaps a distorted view of the British early music scene. We only see the recordings, many more than come out of the United States.

PH: If the U.S. was as centralized as England is , and the big record companies were busier, you'd see a different scene. It's very much the layout of America which determines what people can do as a career. If you're starting out, it's very difficult to pull things together if all the people you want to work with are in different cities. At least I, coming here, I have an ongoing web ofconnections which I can use. Certainly it's much easier to launch a career when distances are smaller and activity is more centralized in a few cities, which is of course what happens in Europe. There are other factors - radio stations in Europe are very forward-looking, they support interesting programs, it's professional work.

Here with just a few exceptions, radio can't afford to do that. It's very useful stage, perhaps more in contemporary music than in early music, but nonetheless it's there. I think that's what helped a lot of people move toward recording.

It's also true that there are a lot of record companies farming the talent in cities which are very close together in terms of miles - London, Amsterdam, Paris - you're still within the size of one state, and that makes it much easier to get things off the ground.

TM: How far back does the Theatre of Voices go - 1990?

PH: As an idea it goes back a year or two earlier. I gave a couple of concerts and made one or two recordings loosely using that name. Once I moved over her I started making definite plans, holding auditions, and so it started moving about 1990-1991. The first concert I gave with any recognizably American group was in 1992, so it's still all fairly recent, actually, just three years or so. Again, I was able to build on connections I had with Harmonia Mundi, the USA branch of Harmonia Mundi France. We have a very good working relationship - in fact just a few moments ago I signed an exclusive contract with them for the next three years or so.

TM : You have fifteen singers - have they been with you since 1992?

PH: In fact the Theatre of Voices is very flexible in makeup - I intended that. It can vary from just two, or three or four singers - a consort - and the largest formation I would have would be about fifteen singers. As far as possible I draw on the same personnel - I vary the format depending on the music, rather than having a fixed personnel and making the repertoire conform to that, which is what I did for fifteen years before.

TM: Many vocal ensembles have younger singers - your singers seem perhaps older than usual.

PH: There may be a couple over forty - the majority are in their thirties. Some who have recently joined are in their mid-to-late twenties - the ages reach across the board. I like the mature sound - especially in the male voices.

TM: It's a sound that differs from the usual British singing style. Is that a concious decision on your part? the background of your singers in California?

PH: It's a bit of both, actually. It certainly is a conscious decision - I don't see the point of coming over here, and trying to recreate a British sound -I mean, it's not going to happen.

TM: You'd be surprised...

PH: Those groups that attempt it I don't really think are successful, because they're aiming at something over there, rather than finding out what they can do. We have a lot of very good English groups - I don't see the point of trying to go that way.

I am interested to explore a different kind of sound, a different kind of stylistic approach. It's not radically different - there's no way that I can shed my own heritage just like that, and actually one or two people singing in the group are English.

TM: My impression is that of a stronger, fuller tone...

PH: Definitely. More rhythmically defined perhaps. It's hard to put these things into words, because it makes them seem more black and white than is actually the case. For some of the music that's exactly what I was aiming for - I like to think that we can be flexible and adapt the sound to the music.

TM: A commonplace in criticism these days is praising "national" ensembles doing their "national" heritage.

PH: With Renaissance music it seem to me not the most interesting way to

go. If you look at the makeup of the major choral foundations in the Renaissance , they were international. National styles did play an important role to the composer - but Italy, for example, was full of singers from the North, and we have no way of working in what way they adapted their style, or their view of music as they moved south.

For later music - I look at the work that William Christie did in Paris, exploring French baroque music with French singer- it was through the language that he achieved so much, and that couldn't really have been done any other way. But then perhaps French is a special case. I'm not sure that only English singers can sing English music, or only Italians Italian music.

For the early American stuff I've been doing, there were obvious advantages to using American singers. The funny thing is that one reviewer actually got mixed up, and thought we were an English choir pretending to be Americans, and criticised the fake American accents, which produced a huge amount of amusement amongst the singers.

TM: As a New Englander, I'm very well aware that today's pronunciation is not even what you would have found seventy-five years ago. In the last two generations there's been a radical shift in the New England accent, which is where the earliest American choral music comes from, Billings etc. How far can you go in recreating a vanished accent?

PH: It depends. In that case I didn't and I wouldn't, because the music originated in New England, but just a few decades later it migrated elsewhere, or was writtten elsewhere. Maybe we're kidding ourselves, but in fact this tradition has never completely died out, and is enjoying quite a resurgence today, so that maybe historical performance is a misnomer when you're talking about this particular repertoire. It doesn't need to be brushed with the early music approach. At the same time it's worth doing with trained choirs, attuned to using their voices in different ways.

TM: Let's talk about your new recording of Cantigas. Is this the first time that these Cantigas of Dom Dinis (King of Portugal in the thirteenth century) will be recorded?

PH: Yes. This project came about as an invitation from the musicologist Manuel Ferreira, who had been editing them.

TM: Have you done Portuguese repertoire before?

PH: No, I haven't. We spent many hours going over the pronunciation, working on a reconstructed historical Galician Portuguese.

TM: You've done Occitan songs in the past.

PH: Yes. I was quite early on interested in the historical pronunciation of English. It was in the mid-1980's I attended a medieval lyric institute at Mt. Holyoke. There were language as well as music specialists gathered there. That was a wonderful period of absorbing a lot of different ideas - I'd already worked on Provençal a little bit, but that sent me into a new gear and led to my first record of that stuff, a record called Proença. The Cantigas will be only the second record I've made of medieval lyric, but I have actually performed a lot of that repertoire in various languages. I still do troubadour song, and am working on a trouvere project. I'm first performing it this September at the Utrecht festival with Andrew Lawrence-King, quite a well-known medieval harp player, and plan to record the music sometime next year.

TM: Tell us about your other projects.

PH: That could be long or short.

TM: How about a half-dozen or so?

PH: In the past few months I've made four records, two for other labels (I was conducting a piece by Steve Reich called The Cave, and a record of Cage vocal music), two of them forHarmonia Mundi. For Harmonia Mundi we made a record of Tallis, and just last week we made a record of Notre- Dame-period repertoire. That's four projects just completed, and I'm recovering from that. As always I'm making plans for new recordings.

The Notre Dame starts out from Perotin. There are a couple of pieces which are anonymous, but which I'm convinced must have been by Perotin. Then it goes into other music of that repertoire - the St. Martial polyphony, and also some lovely monodic monastic songs. Leo Treitler edited a number of them. They're lovely songs, and quite unusual. The main difference is that while troubadour songs tend to begin in the lower or middle part of the range many of these begin at the top with a big statement and then unwind, which is very attractive.

TM: Let's return to the Theatre of Voices? What does the "theatrical" quality of performance involve?

PH: It's got nothing to do with the conventional idea of theatricality at all. One way of explaining it is the way in which voices have been used on the radio, not just in music, but in speech. Disembodied voices - you can create with them a very full sense of theatre in the broader sense of that term. To use a non-musical example I can think of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, which is a radio play for voices. Just listening to that you can feel a whole world being invented. I like the idea that you can create a world with just the sound of voices, maybe just a single voice sometimes -there's so much one can do. Theatrical in that sense - not in the overacting sense.

TM: A character or character being defined by the sound of the voice...

PH: Yes, but it doesn't necessarily involve impersonation. I suppose it goes back to (to bring up medieval lyric again) the idea that a single voice is enough to present that music - it doesn't need to be dressed up with instrumentation. One might do that in a concert to provide aural contrast and to give the singer a rest, but I'm interested in what can be achieved with a single human voice singing unaccompanied, particuarly in that medieval repertoire, and then by extension I take that and look at other kinds of music with the same idea in mind. I'm not necessarily talking about acting or theatre in the sense of impersonation...

TM: but of drawing people into the experience..that's something that's quite rare - how often does one hear a solo voice.

PH: Exactly. My interests related to that idea are not just in early music, but I also listen to non-western music, where there are examples of unaccompanied vocal music which are really quite interesting. Some composers have used the voice in interesting ways- they go inside the sound of everyday language, and yet they leave everyday meaning behind in going much deeper into it. That also is a kind of vocal theater, but you can't necessarily explain what it's about.

TM: What sort of non-western music did you have in mind?

PH: Various kinds of religious chanting, from sources as diverse as Buddhist, Indian, Tibetan chanting - these are all the rage now, but I've been interested in that kind of singing for many years. The Inuit breath technique, the use of fast breathing as a vocal color in itself - the use of harmonics in Mongolian singing....

TM: These are what many people would call extended vocal techniques..

PH: That's we call them in Western music, but they've existed for centuries in these

contexts...Any other kind of singing that interests me is Native American singing, although they < use a drum as well.

TM: In looking over your discography, the greatest portion of it is sacred music.

PH: Yes, I've noticed that too.

TM: Is there a reason for that?

PH: Most of the music I've done is drawn from the medieval and renaissance periods. While there's a lot of wonderful secular music,I would say that the greater number of great pieces are in the sacred music realm. I'm sure many people would disagree with me, but I think it's true, until you get into the sixteenth century, anyway. Even though I'm busy working on medieval lyrics, in polyphony the substance lies in the sacred repertory.

When you're making records it's nice to have pieces that are more than two minutes long. That's another reason. It's easier to build meaningful and satisfying programs.

TM: From the sixteenth century onwards there are plenty of satisfying, larger pieces, and you've done some of those - Rore's Vergine, for example...

PH: I think I must also have a personal preference for sacred music- the influence of chant thatpermeates so much of it as well has got something to do with it as well.

TM: You've been quite involved with the music of Arvo Pärt ...

PH: In fact I've just finished writing a book about his music, which should be published next year by Oxford.

TM: He's most well-known for his later works with an explicitly religious tinge, although his earlier works are not that way at all - the listener approaching the works of twenty-five years ago would be disappointed...

PH: if they expected them to sound like the works of ten years ago. I'm interested in both ends of the spectrum.

TM: What religious tradition does he come from?

PH: Essentially Russian Orthodox. He wasn't involved with religion in the 1960's when he was writing those pieces - he became dissatisfied musically and at the same time religiously involved - those two things blended and led him in the direction in which he has now gone.

TM: Estonia is predominantly Lutheran...

PH: but it's always had an Orthodox church, just as the capital of Finland has an Orthodox

Cathedral. You can't escape the influence of Russia.

TM: You come from the C of E?

PH: Yes.

TM: Is that still part of your life?

PH: No. I drifted away from that after singing in cathedral choirs as a young baritone, almost on a daily basis, because that was my work...I felt I'd put in enough - just last year, after fifteen years of steering totally clear of the Anglican repertoire, I finally did a concert which was built around English cathedral repertoire, not just the early stuff, the whole business...

TM: Gore Ouseley...

PH: I enjoyed it immensely. It was like going home again.

TM: Last year?

PH: With the chamber choir in Davis. I interspersed that with readings from English literature, reading from religious diaries.

TM: Was this music unknown in Davis?

PH: There are quite a lot of C of E type institutions around, which use the Anglican repertory, but there's not one in Davis. It was very well appreciated - Elgar, Wesley, Gore Ousely. But as a daily diet I found it too much.

TM: For musical reasons? Liturgical reasons?

PH: The whole thing really - I'm not sure. I used to think it was musical reasons, but I think it's not just musical reasons.


Some listeners (including the undersigned) may wonder why Hillier moved from an ensemble of solo male singers (arguably closer to the original sound of the bulk of the renaissance reperotire) to a larger ensemble of mixed voices. His reasons for performing a cappella are not musicological in origin - he was happy to be performing a cappella when the musicological fashion for it came in, and will be continue when the fashion changes again, one presumes. Hillier says that he's "not interested in recreating an historical snapshot. I'm interested in performing music that means a lot to me - what it comes down to is the fact that I enjoy working with the sound of unaccompanied voices".