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Who or what are the most significant influences on your musical life and career as a composer?

My primary influences are my Catholic faith and the art and folk music of the Slovacko area of South Moravia, to which I am connected through both my parents.

Teachers: the composer Miloslav Ištvan (with whom I studied at the Janáček Academy in Brno) and the way of life of St. Francis of Assisi,

From the European music tradition: Gregorian chant, Moravian folk music, the late orchestral works of Antonín Dvořák and the late works of Leoš Janáček.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

The greatest challenge in my career has been (and continues to be) exploring the possibilities of unison technique since the end of the 1990s. It has also been a challenge to hide away and completely concentrate on composing to the best of my ability and as much as my own character, my family life and my teaching profession allow.

What are the special challenges/pleasures of working with particular musicians, singers, ensembles or orchestras?

Without a doubt a most special experience for me was my collaboration for over 30 years with the Schubert Ensemble – both with the Ensemble as a whole and with its individual members. This collaboration brought me an independence from the music life of Brno; it is a very important thing in a composer´s life to be independent of one’s position in one’s own birthplace.

I should also mention an important collaboration in Brno throughout my whole working life with the excellent percussionist Martin Opršál

Of which works are you most proud?

My proudest creative works are my three daughters, Magdalene, Veronika and Miriam, and, at one remove, my granddaughter Julia.

How would you characterise your compositional language?

It is not easy to answer this question: I try to clear a path from the mess of complexity to the order of simplicity

Tell us more about your 24 Preludes & Fugues for solo piano. What was the inspiration behind this set of pieces? Were the templates set by Bach and Chopin influential at all?

From the very start the inspiration for my Preludes and Fugues was the Bible. From the point of view of the musical form, I was influenced more by the thinking of Anton Reicha than by the counterpoint of J.S. Bach or by Chopin’s Preludes. But everything I have written is strongly connected to the classical European tradition.

During my military service in Prague (1981-2) I wrote a single Prelude and Fugue for piano, which stands alone. In 1989 William Howard asked me to write something for him. I composed two Preludes and Fugues and the cycle continued from there. The inspiration for the cycle from the very beginning was the Bible.

William Howard and Pavel Novák

Pianist William Howard has recorded the entire set. What was the experience of working with William on this music?

My collaboration with William was like my real composition degree course. Thanks to his extraordinary patience in studying and re-studying my endless corrections, I had the chance to pursue and to develop my own musical imagination – and not just in writing for piano. But certainly it also helped me to develop a new feeling for piano composition, which has continued in further piano pieces (a left hand piece for Steve Warzycki and my 6th and 7th Sonatas, both for William), and has influenced other aspects of my composing. William’s experience as both a soloist and a chamber player has given him a sense of colour and a rhythmic precision that you can admire in the recording of the Preludes and Fugues.

As a composer, how do you work?

I try to imitate the great composers of the past, composing every day, but the result is a bit different. They wrote hundreds of fantastic pieces in an extraordinarily short time. I add five bars in the morning and cross out seven bars in the afternoon every day…

As a musician, what is your definition of success?

I remember some successful premieres (my piano quintet ‘Royal Funeral Procession on Iona’ at Wigmore Hall with the whole Schubert Ensemble, the premiere of my Third Symphony for piano and strings at Dartington with William at the piano, the UK premiere of the Preludes and Fugues at St. Giles, Cripplegate in London), some great occasions, friendly audiences, nice reviews, perfect recordings, ongoing collaborations with musicians…. but then I think of Schubert and of Van Gogh and reflect that there are other ways to define success in the world of art. Maybe for the composer success is also the perfect score, the ideal piece, without the need for any response from the world around. And for a painter it is the ideal picture, regardless of how it is perceived in the artist’s lifetime.

What advice would you give to aspiring composers?

1. Write the first version of your pieces by hand. It is all too easy these days for us to become greatly estranged from our own work.

2. Rewrite pieces by classical masters (e.g. Perotinus, Bach, Webern). By following every note of their scores your imagination will develop and you will be able to compare your own solutions and your own ideas with their way of thinking. I am worried that two thousand years of well-tried and tested techniques are in danger of being lost.

3. Maintain a basic classical music education; play a string instrument and sing in a choir. When composing you can easily lose connection with live instrumental and vocal performance.

4. Do not interpret your own music! Sit in the audience and listen. Players have quite different worries from composers.

5. Sit at home and work every day. Do not organise performances of your pieces – they will come by themselves.

What do you feel needs to be done to grow classical music audiences?

In the Czech Republic, programmes for bigger ensembles and for orchestras could be improved – they repeat famous pieces from famous composers again and again. They should play more early works by well-known composers (e.g. the early symphonies of Dvořák and Ives…..) and they should perform more early music on modern instruments (e.g. Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Bach…..). Glenn Gould showed us how to play this repertoire on a modern instrument in his recordings of early music.

What are your most treasured possessions?

My faith, my family, my musical gift.

Pavel Zemek Novák’s “dazzlingly original” 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo piano is now available in a newly published edition, available as a digital download from Music Haven Ltd. Find out more

Pianist William Howard has recorded the 24 Preludes and Fugues on the Champs Hill Records label

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Contemporary music publisher Music Haven has launched a new digital download service for its sheet music collection. Available via the Music Haven website, this service will initially offer digital downloads of piano music, the centrepiece of which is the first published edition of Czech composer Pavel Zemek Novák’s 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo piano.

William Howard and Pavel Novák

Described by British composer David Matthews as “one of the finest piano works of our time, a worthy companion to Ligeti’s three books of Etudes”, Pavel Novák’s 24 Preludes and Fugues were composed for pianist William Howard between 1989 and 2006, and were recorded by Howard on the Champs Hill label in 2011. But like much of Novak’s music, this work has remained unpublished until now.

Peter Fribbins, composer, writes:

“Music Haven Ltd. is delighted to announce the publication of Pavel Zemek Novák’s 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano. An ambitious and important contribution to the contemporary piano repertoire, they are written in a musical language that has immediate connection and expressive presence. We are also pleased to be able to make Novák’s work more widely and easily available around the world by launching this work via our digital publishing platform.” 

The new edition has taken several years to prepare and the process has been extremely challenging. Painstakingly typeset by composer Cydonie Banting from a hand-written manuscript replete with complex and idiosyncratic notation, and edited by Pavel Novák and William Howard, the work is divided into four books, which reflect the evolution of Novak’s musical language.

Excerpt from score, before & after typesetting

Now for the first time, pianists can explore this remarkable music in an accessible and beautifully typeset digital edition, available from Music Haven. Pianist William Howard says: “I am confident that other pianists around the world will now take up this powerful and dazzlingly original work.

The complete score is available to purchase as a digital download from Music Haven’s webshop

Music Haven Ltd publishes and promotes new classical music in all its manifestations. At its core are the works of a number of established contemporary British composers, including James Francis Brown, Peter Fribbins and Alan Mills, whose music is complemented by exciting new discoveries, or reconstructions, of lost classical works of the past. Scores are beautifully presented and edited to the highest standards.

A key part of Music Haven’s mission is to foster meaningful collaboration between composer and performer, and in doing so, bring fine music to a wider audience.

Music Haven website: musichaven.co.uk

 

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Guest article by William Howard

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Howard Skempton

Howard Skempton is one of the UK’s most engaging and distinctive composers. Now in his seventies, he has produced a large and varied body of more than 300 works. Amongst these are over 100 pieces for solo piano, which he describes as the ‘central nervous system’ of his work. It is a treasure trove for both amateur and professional pianists, in which most of the pieces are very approachable from a technical point of view (in contrast to a great deal of contemporary piano music) whilst being at the same time hugely rewarding to explore and perform.

Almost all of Skempton’s piano pieces have been written for friends and colleagues or for special occasions. They are predominantly short, tonal and sparingly composed, with very few notes to the page. Many of them look very simple and are, in fact, quite easy to sight read, but, in my experience the only time these pieces are ever easy is when you are sight-reading them. As soon as you start practising them the challenge begins. Their apparent simplicity is deceptive, a conclusion reached in an excellent programme on BBC radio 3 recently called The Simple Truth, in which Tom Service explored the subject of ‘Simplicity in Music’. Commenting on one of Howard Skempton’s short piano pieces, he said “Simple, isn’t it…well, you try composing it!”. I would add “try playing it!”.

One of my favourites is Solitary Highland Song, which he wrote in 2017 for a collection of love songs for solo piano that I commissioned. When the piece first arrived, I immediately read it through and found it deeply moving. In fact, I couldn’t get it out of my head for days. It consists of a simple and haunting eight bar tune, repeated six times, each time slightly differently. The dynamics start at pp, progress to mp and return to pp. Nothing complicated here. And yet I remember practising the piece for hours and hours before I gave its first performance, and I still practise it a lot before a performance. Why? The simplest answer that I can give is that it takes time to really hear the music. Skempton’s musical language is so distilled and pared down that every note, chord and musical gesture must be perfectly calibrated. Quite apart from the question of mastering total control of touch and voicing, the performer must seek out the essential character of each piece by learning to be open to what is interesting within the music, rather than trying to make the music sound interesting. There are no short cuts in this process. Skempton deliberately gives only minimal performance instructions, so that performers are invited to participate in the music and develop their own awareness of subtle changes and shifting patterns. The more I play Solitary Highland Song, the more I become aware of the genius behind every choice the composer has made: the subtle changes of register, for example, or the distribution of notes in chords and unexpected changes of harmony and rhythm. For me the piece is an enduring delight, and, I think for others too, since it has recently achieved the wonderful landmark of being heard over a million times on streaming platforms.

An example of an even sparser piece would be the third of the Reflections, a collection of eleven pieces that Skempton wrote for me between 1999 and 2002. It consists of four two note chords, a ninth or tenth apart, which are repeated in a different order eight times. The only performance instructions given by the composer are that the chords should all be played approximately two seconds apart, ppp and pedalled throughout. Where is the challenge here? Well, for a start, it is not easy to sustain molto pianissimo playing with a consistent sound, even for just over a minute. The more you play the piece, the more your listening becomes tuned in to the slightest blemish, or bumped note. And the more you listen, the more you start to become aware of the harmonic resonance shifts in different ways as the order of the chords change. By the time I came to record this piece, my ears were highly sensitised to the point where the tiniest imbalance in a chord would sound like a catastrophe. But it became very clear in the recording sessions that what brings a performance to life for the composer are the tiny unexpected or unplanned things that happen and the way a performer responds to them. In his characteristically gentle and encouraging manner, Howard Skempton decided that what we might have called ‘blemishes’ should be referred to as ‘involuntary refinements’! For him, the most important thing is to keep the music alive at every moment rather than aim for clinical perfection.

I recommend this repertoire strongly to fellow pianists at every level of ability. You will find pieces that are hauntingly beautiful, others that are quirky and playful; they are always imaginative, beautifully crafted and unpredictable. As well as giving a huge amount of pleasure they can teach us a great deal about our relationship to the keyboard and about how we listen to ourselves. Having totally immersed myself in Skempton’s music recently, I find that all the other repertoire I am coming back to sounds new and refreshed to my ears.

Scores are easy to obtain. Oxford University Press have published three volumes of Skempton’s piano pieces, which are reasonably priced. Most recently Howard Skempton has taken on the challenge of writing 24 Preludes and Fugues, an intriguing cycle of miniatures covering all 24 major and minor keys, written last year and lasting barely 23 minutes. These will be published by OUP in the coming months.

William Howard’s recording of Howard Skempton’s 24 Preludes and Fugues (2019), Nocturnes (1995), Reflections (1999-2002) and Images (1989) will be released on Orchid Classics (ORC100116) on 14th February. Pre-order here.:

Anyone who pre-orders the album can enter a prize draw to win one of five copies of Solitary Highland Song, signed by the composer. Please forward your order confirmation email to mail@williamhoward.co.uk before 14th February.

The album will be launched with a recital by William Howard at Kings Place on Wednesday 12th February at 7.30pm in which he will play works by Bach, Schubert and Howard Skempton. Tickets and further details here

Meet the Artist interview with William Howard

williamhoward.co.uk

orchidclassicsorc100116