Heard anew: James Dillon

When it comes to classical composers, most people think of old masters such as Beethoven and Mozart. But the »Elbphilharmonie Visions« festival demonstrates that contemporary music can also be »just as rich and diverse as humanity itself« (Alan Gilbert). The festival’s programme features only music by contemporary composers. Not only is that musically very exciting, it also offers an amazing opportunity to ask the composers questions about their works and the process of creating them. How do you go about composing? Do you have a concrete idea of the work before you sit down to write it, or does it emerge only when you start? What role do your surroundings play? And what are your hopes for your music?

The Festival composers talk about this in short interviews. In this case with James Dillon, who pursued an unusual path for a contemporary composer: the Scot with many interests had a background in rock, blues and folk when he embarked on studies of art and design, linguistics and maths as well as Indian rhythms and computer music. As a composer, however, Dillon has always been self-taught, and goes his own way without inhibition…

Do you already have a strong vision of a work before you set about writing it?

Embarking on any new work means for me to re-enter the labyrinth, it may for example begin simply with a sensation which demands form.  What is form »beyond« the results of arranging material, it’s an adventure, a pursuit full of risk, a search for the ontological breath of the material. The effects of a musical language escape conceptual determination and cannot be reducible to a concept, occasionally there may be a glimpse of »clarity«, but more than often entering the maze enforces a letting go, a letting go of concepts. 

What role do non-musical factors play in your work?

Since we can't escape language at a certain level we cannot escape the extra-musical. Musical processes with or without direction, explicit or hidden, with or without purpose, aim or meander, suddenly combine like windblown sand that leaves a patterned trace, the memory of an encounter with some natural force. The structure of form and how structural processes relate to shape become self-reflecting. 

At the »Elbphilharmonie Visions« festival, contemporary orchestral music plays a more prominent role than probably at any other concert hall in the world: 18 works by 18 composers are being performed on nine evenings. Do you think that's a good idea, or is it the wrong strategy?

I applaud the commitment, the intention but what is the significance? To place new work under the banner of »visions« is however to suggest that all new work fits the status of visionary, which is patently not true. I'd prefer a concert season which »invokes« the visionary, a deep connection between the old and the new through an intelligent interpenetration, considers  for example the relation of the musical work to time, to history, to death.

What does contemporary music need to win the public's favour?

Unfortunately there are no simple answers to this, not without first confronting the content and aims of our educational systems, which have become dominated by the utilitarian and superficial. 

What improvements to concerts would you like to see  – today and in the near future?

When concert life becomes another commodity it becomes irrelevant, it has lost intensity, to quote Guy Debord, the condition today is »the historical in which commodity completes its colonization of cultural life«. The challenge for cultural bodies today is how to reach an active comprehension of this state.  An understanding that first recognizes the futility of chasing the disposable, and embraces both stability and rupture as mirrors for change. Western cultural bodies need to transform the pressure to satisfy an appetite for the new, for the novel, which often simply takes the form of the latest gimmick and enter into a deeper relationship with its own tradition. 

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