Philip Venables

A composer of ferocious dramatic instincts
— Alex Ross

Tag: Writing

Profile by Tayyab Amin for hcmf//

I was very fortunate to be featured this year at hcmf// across three concerts of my most recent works: Answer Machine Tape, 1987, performed and commissioned by Zubin Kanga; Numbers 81–100, performed and commissioned by Lovemusic; and My Favourite Piece is the Goldberg Variations, performed and commissioned by Andreas Borregaard. As part of that focus, writer Tayyab Amin wrote a lovely profile for the programme book, which is copied below. Please contact Tayyab here if you would like to license this profile for other uses. The article on the hcmf// website can be seen here.

Philip Venables’ personal, political storytelling

Among the most fascinating of contemporary British composers is Philip Venables, whose flair for the theatrical is matched by a subversive sleight of hand that comes inherent to all natural storytellers. Recurrent themes across their works include politics, sexuality, gender and violence – motifs that do of course intertwine, though more broadly share the quality of relating to whether one lives alongside or against the grain of our society. There are all sorts of tales Venables opts to tell, from maternal memoirs and posthumously performed plays to true-story accounts of runaway teens and the vengeful reflections of world-class boxing athletes. They come in all manner of guises too: operas for adults or for children, site-specific soundworks, concertos and pieces of spoken word. Even shouted word, in some cases.

Based between Berlin and London, Venables nurtured their career as a composer and collaborative artist for several years before their breakthrough operatic adaptation of late playwright Sarah Kane’s final work, 4.48 Psychosis. Since then, Venables has established a trend of preferred elements to focus on in their compositions: working from texts as source material, immersing audiences in a multi-dimensional experiences, and inflicting or at least channelling a certain sense of violence, for example through how abrupt a work’s components are cut together, interrupting or compounding each other. There’s an intent behind such rhythmic intensity, one that Venables admits to calculating formulae for, transposing compositions from numerical spreadsheets onto musical scores.

One text Venables is compelled to return to is Simon Howard’s Numbers, first in 2011 and as recent as 2021. These poems traverse seemingly vivid memories that devolve into onomatopoeic fervour, streams that wander to the brink and back again. Venables has described them as ‘unfussy, evocative, violent and visceral’ – attributes they look for in music too. These qualities are evident in the setting of these poems of course. Take Numbers 91-95, where the speaker’s account is interrupted by their own sudden outburst as harp, woodblock and flute resist interjecting and lucidity slips from view. The text and music aren’t driven by narrative, but their colour and imagery, the political brutality and fractured hardness of them speaks volumes. We’ll see a comprehensive demonstration of the dynamism of verbal expression as Strasbourg-based new music collective lovemusic perform a selection of works from the Numbers series as part of their programme at hcmf// 2022.

Venables’ compositions aren’t always written for typical chamber instrumentation – there’s often a multimedia element to their works. Also appearing at this year’s festival is the recent solo piece Answer Machine Tape, 1987. Teaming up with frequent collaborator, dramatist Ted Huffman, as well as software programmer Simon Hendry and innovative pianist Zubin Kanga, Venables devised a work for piano where keystrokes are detected and input to software through MIDI detection and MaxMSP. This transforms pianist into transcriber and annotator, developing an archival, perhaps parasocial storytelling relationship with recorded and projected source material: the answer machine tapes of New York visual artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. These recordings capture the last days of Wojnarowicz’s former lover and close friend, photographer Peter Hujar, where the banal snippets of everyday life in a setting of artistic vibrancy and gay expression are loomed over by the onset AIDS crisis. Contrast to the technologically mediated interfacing at the crux of this work, Venables presents unflinching intimacy as both invitation and challenge.

Much like Answer Machine Tape, 1987, the accordion piece Andreas Borregaard is due to perform at hcmf// takes verbatim audio material and negotiates the levels of their directness with their conversational quality. Yet in this composition, titled My favourite piece is the Goldberg Variations, interviews come from the personal life of Borregaard’s mother Susanne to more actively explore the accordionist as storyteller.

As long as there are stories to be told, Venables will discern new ways to share them in whoever’s voice they can – even if it takes a full reset on creating abstract music following a stint composing for opera. Their role is to challenge both the politic of the status quo and our intrusive storytelling intuit in one fell swoop.

23 November 2022
Tempo: interaction between music and text in 4.48 Psychosis

An article about 4.48 Psychosis has just been published in the Tempo journal of new music, written by Tom Crathorne, about the interaction between music and libretto. The full article is available here. This is the abstract:

The success of Philip Venables’ opera adaptation of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis is underpinned by its powerful presentation of the play’s text. This is predominantly facilitated by the other musical forces present, rather than through clever text-setting alone. Venables uses an array of timbral techniques, theatrical performance directions, referential sound effects, interactions with literary devices in the text and allusions to other musical genres in the opera to support and supplement his vocal writing. This article argues that the instrumental composition in 4.48 is critical in ensuring comprehension of the libretto and that, because of his working methods, Venables’ adaptation is faithful to Kane’s sensitive play.

20 October 2021
The live Organ component of ‘Venables plays Bach’

This post accompanies the programme booklet for Venables plays Bach, a 42-channel sound installation in l’Église de Saint Eustache, Paris, as part of the Festival d’Automne à Paris. The installation can be heard each day between 2.30–5.30pm, 7th to 16th October 2021. The live organ performances discussed here are at 8pm on 8th and 15th October, performed by Baptiste-Florian Marle-Ouvrard. Entry for everything is free. More information, and prior registration for the organ performances (because Covid) can be made here.

Twenty-five years ago, I learnt to play J.S. Bach’s Prelude in D minor BWV940, and ever since then, almost without exception, I play it every time I sit down at the piano to compose. It is the only piece that I can play from memory, with my poor piano skills, and playing this Prelude is a ritual that I go through every time I sit down to write. Improvisation often grows out of this prelude, from mistakes I make, or repetitions and variations. New music is catalysed from old music. This ritual for me is a way of focusing, shutting out other thoughts, clearing the mind, sparking ideas. Indeed, versions of Bach’s Prelude have appeared in a number of my pieces (Scene 19 in 4.48 Psychosis; the male chorus in The Schmürz).

I was asked by Festival d’Automne to make a sound installation for Saint Eustache, and so I decided to try to capture some of this compositional process. For around 50 days I recorded my daily ritual of playing Bach’s Prelude on the digital piano in my studio, complete with my improvisations, my mistakes, my singing, my tangents, my thoughts, improvisations and repetitions, as I sketched out a new piece (also for the Festival d’Automne) for mezzo-soprano and quintet, based on text by the late British poet Simon Howard. Using excerpts from these recordings, I have moulded a kind of ‘meta-composition session’ across 42 speakers in the church. Wander around and you will find small details of different days, but I hope that the whole effect it creates is an honest and reflective meditation on the act of composing, and my personal relationship to this Bach prelude.

In addition to the speaker installation, I was asked to provide a ‘live element’, and so on two evenings during the installation, the organist Baptiste-Florian Marle-Ouvrard will perform a kind of ‘exponential blossoming’ of the Bach prelude. This taps into another love of mine: the spreadsheet. I use spreadsheets in almost every piece I write, usually to chart some harmonic pattern or musical form or rhythmical change using an exponential curve. It’s an approach that I first started in 2011 with the Klaviertrio im Geiste. So for this live element, I decided to put a spreadsheet to work, to turn the Bach Prelude into a kind of ‘mathematical flower’ gradually opening up and revealing itself over a period of 28 repetitions. The idea was for the music to emerge exponentially from a point of a single note (the most recurring note in the Prelude, F4) to recreate the complete Prelude of 170 notes.

I will write below a brief method for how this was done. Suffice to say, the result is (hopefully) more of a conceptual meditation rather than a piece of music, so to speak. But one that gradually reveals the Bach Prelude over a period of around 30 minutes, emerging from a single pitch. It’s a beautiful instrument and a magical acoustic space to do this kind of thing, and I encourage the audience to come and go as they please, wander round the church and soak it up or sit down and let it wash over them.

A brief analysis of the Prelude

To start, I counted the occurrences (prevalence) of each pitch in the Prelude BWV940:

In the table, the ‘central’ tonic pitch of D4 is highlighted, and the most prevalent pitch, F4. I chose F4 to be the central axis of this performance. In total, there are 170 notes in the Prelude (i.e. the sum of all these occurrences), but adding the Tierce de Picardie in an extra repetition gives 171 notes (more about this later).

Then I calculated the distance of each pitch from this central axis F4, counted in number of semitones. I also classified each pitch with a weighting according to how closely-related each pitch, harmonically, to the tonic D minor. I called this the Harmonic Weighting Factor, and allocated the tonic pitch with a factor of 1, immediately related pitches with 2 (i.e. the pitches in the tonic and dominant triads), lesser-related pitches with 3 (the flat seventh and the sixth), and distant pitches with 4 (E-flat, F-sharp, G-sharp, B). The results are shown here:

Using these three parameters (Prevalence, Distance from F4, Harmonic Weighting Factor), I calculated the following equation:

(Distance from F4)² x Prevalence x Harmonic Weighting Factor

The results are in the far right hand column of the table above, and in this graph:

On this graph, my spreadsheet programme (Google Sheets) calculated the line of best fit, which is marked as a grey line on the graph. The line of best fit had an R² value of 0.97, which means it’s a very good fit to the given data. The equation for this line of best fit is:

The concept of the performance

I decided that the total length of the performance should be about 35 minutes long, which I worked out would be 28 repetitions of the complete prelude at my preferred tempo. Each repetition would reveal a certain number of the 171 notes in the prelude, and sustain those notes until the next occurrence of a pitch in that particular voice (for the most part, there are three simultaneous voices in the prelude, sometimes four or five). By gradually unveiling pitches in each repetition, the prelude would gradually ’emerge’ or ‘take shape’ from a series of sustained notes based around F4. That, in summary, was the concept — the gradual blooming of a ‘musical flower’.

I wanted the unveiling, or blooming, to also happen exponentially, so that very few notes would be revealed at first, and this would increase through to the final repetition. I used the same logarithmic equation that was derived from the pitch analysis to map out the number of pitches that would be revealed on each repetition of the prelude. In this case, the logarithmic curve must be inverted, in order to start with a low number and end with a high one. x becomes (29–x), since I want 28 repetitions. The equation looks like:

And in order to find the number of notes revealed in each repetition, as a proportion of the total number of notes, 171, the equation is:

The table below shows the results, for each repetition from 1 to 28, rounded to the closest integer:

The pitches were ‘unveiled’ according to the chart above. For practical purposes, the value for repetition 1 was switched with that for repetition 2, so that a pitch was presented at the beginning of the performance rather than just silence (consequently there was no new pitch in repetition 2). Thereafter, 1 new pitch was presented in repetitions 3 to 5, and so on, with 17 new pitches presented in repetition 27.

For artistic purposes, an extra complete repetition was added at the end (number 29) to delay the final pitch (F#4) that forms the Tierce de Picardie. Therefore we have repetition 28 with 21 pitches and repetition 29 with just one, the F#. This, in effect, gives us two performances of the complete Prelude, without and with the Tierce de Picardie.

The pitch allocation is show in the following chart. The pitches were allocated by intuition within this chart, but two guidance lines were plotted on it to aid with pitch placement. These were linear (shaded in blue) and the same logarithmic line as found in the pitch distribution (17136-5065 Ln x) (shaded pink). Pitch distribution roughly followed these curves, in a scattered approach.

4 October 2021
Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson

This profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson (pictured above, photo by Anton Lukoszevieze) is adapted from a profile that first appeared in a programme-book for the BBC Proms 2018, for the premiere of Venables plays Bartók. Please contact Tim directly via his blog here if you would like to license this profile for your own programme or website.

Philip Venables’s work has always been concerned with continuity and discontinuity. His works cover subjects such as mental breakdown (the opera 4.48 Psychosis, 2016, after the play by the late Sarah Kane), gender politics (Illusions, 2015–17, and The Gender Agenda, 2018, created in collaboration with the ‘anti-drag’ performance artist David Hoyle) or the postmodern collapse of meaning (numbers 76–80: tristan and isolde and numbers 91–95, setting words by the late Simon Howard; both 2011). He has said that his music engages with ‘politics and sexuality, gender and violence’, yet it is equally interested in historical connections: the relationship of new work to old (Klaviertrio im Geiste, 2011), compositional kinships (Metamorphoses after Britten, 2010; Time Stands Still, 2008, after Dowland), and in his violin concerto for the BBC Proms, the intertwining of life stories involved in learning and being taught an instrument.

Venables was born in Chester and now lives between London and Berlin. He studied at Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music (with Philip Cashian and David Sawer), and with Julian Philips and James Weeks as Doctoral Composer-in-Residence at the Royal Opera House in a partnership with the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. This last led to the creation of 4.48 Psychosis and, in the wake of its success, a burst of sudden acclaim that includes a portrait CD for NMC Recordings and revivals of the opera in London (2018) and Dresden (2019).

Venables’s interest in formalised violence – not the blood and guts of Hollywood movies but a cool, aesthetic consideration – can take many forms. In The Revenge of Miguel Cotto, two percussionists create a steady pulse by thwacking punchbags with pieces of wood. In other works, such as the Howard settings or the music-theatre work

Illusions, the music continually cuts into and interrupts itself to throw into question what we think we know. In 4.48 Psychosis, the central character’s psychological collapse is portrayed in a score that jumps from robotic minimalism to waiting-room muzak to Purcellian lament.

Since 2011 the other constant has been text. Like two forebears on whose music he has composed commentaries, Dowland and Britten, Venables is a sensitive and innovative composer in English. For him, this means contemporary British English in all its registers from the street to the academy – the language in which Kane, Hoyle and Howard revel and revelled. Like them, Venables speaks a language that can dance as well as fight, and that reflects (or deflects) as much as it punches.

18 September 2018
Introduction to my work and 4.48 Psychosis by John Fallas

Here’s a copy of the introductory essay to my work that John Fallas very beautifully wrote as an introduction to 4.48 Psychosis. It was commissioned by the Royal Opera for the 4.48 Psychosis programme booklet.

A new kind of opera

John Fallas

Where does a composer begin, when planning a piece of music? With notes, one might imagine – a melody, or a chord – or with an idea about instrumental or vocal sound: the playing or singing that is going to bring the piece to life. For Philip Venables it is different. For several years now he has been concerned less with the singing voice than with the speaking voice, and with finding a place – and a reason – for that voice in contexts which can meaningfully be described as ‘music’ rather than, say, poetry or theatre (though they may be those things too).

This relative lack of interest in the voice as an instrument of song might seem an odd qualification for writing an opera. And yet it suggests a slantwise approach, one without preconceptions about ‘opera’ or, indeed, about ‘the voice’, which resonates with Venables’s chosen text – a ‘play’ with no named characters nor even, for the most part, clear dialogue – as well as with the deliberately blank slate with which he was asked to approach the writing of the ambitious piece receiving its first performances this week at the Lyric Hammersmith.

The project has come about under the umbrella of a joint scheme piloted by The Royal Opera and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Venables is the two institutions’ first Doctoral Composer-in-Residence, a position which builds on the practice-and-reflection-based nature of the School’s existing postgraduate composition programmes as well as drawing on the creative resources and environment of the Royal Opera House. It has meant that he has had opportunities to workshop and experiment over the eighteen-month period leading up to this week’s premiere, as well as time to reflect on what sort of work might enable him best to realise his vision for a new kind of opera.

The question of a libretto – even if it was not going to be a conventional sung libretto – clearly arose early in this process, and Venables was surprised to find his thoughts not going in the direction he had anticipated they would. “I spent a long time wanting to do an original piece and looking for a writer to collaborate with,” he said in a recent magazine interview, “but eventually it dawned on me that Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis had almost everything I wanted.”

Alongside the incorporation of spoken voice, another recurring concern in Venables’s work to date has been violence, whether directly thematised or more oblique. At perhaps the most literal end of this spectrum are the percussive thwacks which impel much of The Revenge of Miguel Cotto (a 2012 piece for two male singers and nine instrumentalists), though even this vivid musical present tense gives way to a vein of reflective sadness as the work’s narrative – a true story of revenge and honour between boxers – turns from action to contemplation and consequence. There is the submerged, sometimes surreally flaring violence of Simon Howard’s poetry, which Venables has set three times, for a variety of ensembles mixing voices, simple instrumental accompaniments and, in numbers 91–95, two tape recorders (here, the echo-chamber of memory is a feature right through the piece). The same combination of qualities recurs in an earlier operatic project, The Schmürz, after Boris Vian’s 1959 play Les Bâtisseurs d’Empire, which Venables describes as “a violent, surreal comment on war and colonialism”. (This project is still in development, but has a first visible trace in the short instrumental Fight Music, written in 2009 as a thirtieth-birthday present for the Endymion ensemble, of which Venables was artistic director from 2004 until stepping back in order to concentrate on the composition of the present opera.)

Does he see Kane’s text as violent? “Contrary to some readings of this piece we feel that it’s not about blood and guts,” he says, “but about inner conflict. […] That huge conflict between wanting love and wanting happiness and not being able to find it.” He also stresses the way the body is constantly implicated in the struggles voiced by the text: the body as another site of conflict (both ‘internal’ and ‘external’), of feeling not-at-home, of discomfort and confusion – about gender, for example, clearly a key concern of the play.

In terms of the transition to the opera stage, the six singers do not represent separate characters but might be understood as externalisations of the text’s consciousness – of what Venables and director Ted Huffman call the ‘hivemind’, the simultaneously plural and divided protagonist of this polyvalent, often disconcertingly borderless text. In the four scenes where the presentation of text on Kane’s page does imply dialogue, Venables avoids operatic convention in a different way, and dissolves the text/‘character’ nexus even further, with the speech rhythms ‘performed’ by two percussionists and the words themselves not heard but projected visually. (There is a visual similarity, at least, to the two percussionists in The Revenge of Miguel Cotto, stationed at the back of the stage with punch-bags.)

On both counts – the splitting/recombining of an indeterminately single/multiple character and the voiceless embodiment of dialogue – the work seems concerned to make something as new, authentic, and both thematically and formally uninhibited out of opera as Kane did out of theatre. It also recreates on its own terms the variety of register manifested by the original play text. “Nasty fucked-up computer game music: you lost,” while others just prefer to play video games to learn the overwatch team composition and improve their skills. Asking a patient to count down in this manner is a standard test for depression, but Venables treats it in TV gameshow style, with buzzers/bells for ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers. To listeners familiar with Venables’s previous work, these passages may also recall two of the three abovementioned Simon Howard settings, numbers 76–80: tristan und isolde and numbers 91–95, both with texts drawn from a single long poem in 100 numbered sections. In Kane’s text as in Howard’s poetry, abstract frameworks summon forth and keep company with shards of vivid, sometimes unbearable reality.

Radical/experimental poetry has appealed to Venables consistently in recent years. The Revenge of Miguel Cotto was developed in collaboration with the poet S J Fowler, and another work – Socialist Realism, for speaking choir, ‘newsreader’ and solo violin – sets a text by a third London-based poet, Sean Bonney, whose fierce post-punk, post-Rimbaud intelligence informs this furious/sad meditation on what the government and mayoralty have wreaked upon our city in the name of profit.

All of these pieces include elements which draw them away from the conventional ‘setting’ of text, so that in Venables’s output to date the division between staged and concert music is not rigid. In other works different variables again are in play. In Unleashed, for example – a music/theatre piece for singer, five actors, tape and two instrumentalists, based on documentary recordings of gay men describing their sex lives – the instruments follow the rhythms and verbal cues of the spoken text, rather than having notated beats and barlines. In the numbers pieces, by contrast, the spoken and theatricalised elements take place against the background of unobtrusive yet tightly controlled harmonic and rhythmic set-ups, whose simple, pragmatic effectiveness perhaps reveals the guiding influence of Venables’s first composition teacher, Steve Martland, as well as Venables’s own practical experience working with chamber ensembles as a programmer and artistic director. 4.48 Psychosis finds an intuitive middle way between these two approaches – the primacy of the musical and of the textual framework – just as it also dissolves the distinctions between spoken and sung voice which might have appeared central to Venables’s earlier experiments in combining text and music. It is a brave and inclusive vision of opera, and an authentic staging of a brave and – for all its horrible intimacy with despair – richly textured, endlessly rewarding play.

© 2016 John Fallas

6 July 2016