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Conversation with John Lely, 9th June 2003

Audio excerpts of John Lely's music can be found on the SOUNDS page.

St. James' Park, (in front of Buckingham Palace,) London, UK
Monday 9th June 2003
2pm

(Bad and deteriorating tape quality all the way through. Indecipherable parts of the recording are illustrated in the text by [...])

J: We were talking about all sorts of processes, weren't we.
T: Yeah let's just- shall I just rewind this and we'll start talking about processes-
J: No we can-
T: Um... Yeah ok. Do you- so you use lots of processes to write a piece?
J: Sometimes, yeah. But it - it depends on- depends on the piece, and it depends on... if I wanna accomplish something...
T: Yeah.
J: in writing, but often I just start off with a process to see what happens
T: Oh right, yeah.
J: to see if it makes interesting results.
T: Do you- so- as a kind of not not with any piece in mind, you just um... whilst you're like between pieces or something you'll doodle with ideas
J: Yeah.
T: try something out see what this does see what that does.
J: I?m doing- like at the moment I?m making lots of drawings with um- coloured pencils and numbers
T: What?
J: because... I was interested in the amount of variety you can get from limited means and
T: Yeah.
J: They're not- they're not necessarily, at the moment, musical ideas
T: yeah
J: They're not musical processes but they're kind of- ideas about building blocks and... er.... yeah, just experimenting with forms
T: Mmm
J: And um colours as well cos I- I think there's- for me I definitely relate differences in timbre or sounds
T: Mmm
J: as a difference in colour
T: Yeah.
J: and I think very visually so it's very um- Cos I started off as a- with painting
T: Mmm
J: And then I kind of got onto music. The form of it interested me.
T: How- What, you started off as a painter?
J: Yeah.
T: In general, now.
J: Yeah well I would always- I was always going to paint
T: Well I didn't know that
J: And then I- I um- I realised what Bach was about
T: Mmm?
J: And I sort of... I sort- yeah, I sort of got it and er and since then- and I've never been able to let go of this [? microstructure and macrostructure] idea of form and structure and sort of um internal cohesion. But not that I want to write every piece as some sort of cohesive whole, but it's always fascinated me that sort of attitude to sound. So my ideas about newness are all really visual ideas because I was always painting very repetitive forms
T: Mmm
J: with new colours
T: Mmm
J: basically, and they changed
T: Mmm, like a series.
J: Like a series, and then just making little differences between each
T: Yeah.
J: You know.
T: Is that a way that you work with music as well, like impose a process or do you change the process from piece to piece subtly, or do you just start completely from afresh with everything?
J: I think there's continuity in the processes, and continuity in a sort of fundamental method.
T: Mmm.
J: But yeah like I said before I kind of need to maintain some sort of contradiction when it comes to the actual sounds by making pieces that are very different from each other.
T: Yeah.
J: It seems... necessary.
T: Yeah. Why is it necessary? I mean, it is that you feel- But I feel that um- sometimes I feel that what I'm doing is I'm always writing the same piece because because you change and your life changes and your working procedure changes slightly
J: yeah
T: from piece to piece
J: there's enough
T: things creep in that are different and that kind of is a- there may or may not be an evolution in terms of the way that I'm working. Although, you know, everything by everybody always sounds the same, all of Beethoven sounds the same, but you know there's differences within, obviously, the pieces.
J: Yeah. Yeah.
T: But you're quite um a heterogeneous- you're quite a (laughs)
J: No I?m not...!
T: quite a heterogenic output, oeuvre.
J: [...] (Half sun?)
T: (yeah, half sun? In sun?) Well, I mean, er cos that strikes me- sorry you're speaking.
J: No
T: It seems you're translating things into music sometimes. You know your thing about colours and drawing and also what you were saying about words as well, turning words into musical- turning all the letters into musical notes and sort of discovering this thing, this layer, [...] But is that the end in itself or is it just a means to an end?
J: Um well I think it?s more just to see what happens. To get surprising results.
T: Yeah.
J: Um
T: and then when somebody comes along and says I need a piece for two pianos
J: Yeah.
T: it's channeled in a direction.
J: Yeah it's channeled yeah. I'm keen to make things idiomatic and as clear as possible even if the content is very ambiguous and um even if the.... sound isn't er- sounds aren't necessarily- well, relationships aren't necessarily perceivable. There always has to be some sort of basic um easy way of describing the piece. Like, you know, it's rectangular, it's on the wall, er it's- it goes up it goes down
T: Like your Berlin piece which is all Es.
J: Or it's just made of Es. Or in fact um
T: So each piece is just one thing?
J: I think that's what I try to do in terms of from piece to piece I always try to make something er sufficiently different. I mean I don't think of them as different I think of them as all basically very very similar in terms of ideas, cos I mean I'm interested in the same things all of the time, I'm interested in in newness, um, and
T: Discovery.
J: Discovery, yeah, and experiment.
T: Yeah.
J: I mean I use processes to make surprising results. I don't have preconceptions, or I try not to have preconceptions with pieces
T: Like what it "should? be?
J: Like what it should be. I try to make pieces- just yeah like nurturing them like eggs. Nurturing eggs. And um spending time with them until they turn into something.
T: So also is it all
J: Monsters. (laughs) New monsters.
T: Er is it all um from you know er... external as well, all thecompositional procedures or do you just think to yourself well I'd quite like it to to- you know like in the two piano piece you've got that refrain, that structure and I though well- I think when I saw that I thought where did that come from? Rather than "oh that's a nice idea he had.? Where did you get that from? I think of you getting material and ideas and procedures you know from outside yourself
J: Yeah in a lot of the earlier pieces, but I've begun to er think more intuitively about what I already have and what I can do with it. And the form of that two piano piece just came in my brain about two minutes before I wrote the front page.
T: (laughs) Oh it looks like it!
J: That seems to be quite- seems to make sense. There's something right about it. Um you know I could probably work out why if I thought about it. I mean I could have applied random processes like rolling a dice. I think um
T: Well it's a very neat structure on this apparent random collection of chords and notes that you've given us.
J: What is it, refrain -
T: Pages one and two played twice
J: Refrain, pages one and two twice, refrain, two and three twice, refrain, three
T: One and three.
J: One and three and then just the 2nd piano repeats. The um I'm keen to make larger things, more ornate...
T: "Works.?
J: Works. Maybe "works?. I don't know. Kind of I kind of go back and forth between um writing a piece or... um
T: Yeah, very clear, one idea.
J: One idea piece.
T: One process.
J: And then I make um [?contradictory decisions?]
T: Yeah it's just a kind of expansion isn't it. So when you- if you started off as a painter and then you- and then that led you into writing music, when did that- when's your- what's your Opus One? When did you begin doing that?
J: I did actually write some actually quite austere systems pieces when I started learning the piano at about seven or eight. I wrote one called "Up and Down?.
T: Yeah (laughs)
J: Which was- it was er C D E F G, D E F G A, E F G A B
T: Oh right yeah
J: Etc. and then all the way up to somewhere and then back down again.
T: Right.
J: [...]
T: Yeah all children do that at that age I think.
J: Yeah I mean that sort of er- that sort of clarity, that sort of idea...
T: I used to have this pupil who did these wonderful things that were like- they were like um symphonic poems, you know cos she'd play this thing, she'd say oh I've written a piece, whether she just improvised it there and then I don't know, but you know it would be very clear, sort of precise and delicate, and then you know some black notes for a bit, and then up here, and then I listened to it and after a minute or two and she'd finished I said er that's very nice what was that called? Or what was that about? And she'd tell me well it was about a princess and then a monster comes along or something, you know, there's a story behind the whole thing. I though how great that is. It;s just um- It's like children draw, and they make music as well, and it sort of gets lost along the way when you start doing physics and chemistry and GCSEs. So yeah-
J: I don't know- there was a big change when I thought about chance. I kind of always had images in my mind that I wanted to make and um the [...] backward turn thinking it was a good idea rather than, and wanting to- I kind of want to maintain that- like have a have a clear thought and that is the thing that I want rather than the result. I used to be very interested in Rothko, but now Im more interested in Sol Lewitt. Where the ideas are coming from back to before the thing was made.
T: Oh I see yeah. Is your painting- was your painting like that?
J: It was getting like that. But I didn't quite work to quite that
T: Kind of monolithic or...
J: Oh no it wasn't. It was um
T: Single- single image.
J: It was minimal. It was trying to be minimal. I didn't quite
T: Reductive.
J: Yeah reductive. So I kind of had like images...
T: So when did you start writing music then out of that?
J: Late 1980s? No no not 1980s. Yeah 1980s early 1990s I started writing music then. I started playing the piano more because I was ill for a long time.
T: Mmm?
J: And didn't go to school.
T: Why were you ill?
J: I was- I had M.E. from 13 to late teens.
T: Oh right.
J: The first piece- the first piece that I did that I'm still interested in is um- is a Scarlatti Cut-Up.
T: Oh yeah.
J: From about '98. That's the one I'm kind of still interested in underneath the [...] it's very similar idea but it's just more systematic process to make the final thing.
T: Somebody- found object-
J: Yeah.
T: And then submit a kind of thing, procedure.
J: Yeah.
T: I mean I didn't really, I mean looking back on it when I did the Haydn cut-up pieces or the Scarlatti ones, but the Haydn ones I look back at it and just discovered them the other day, you know all I did was chop out whole bars and glue them next to each other, so take all the bars and just cut them out and rearrange them, you know, and obviously if I'd if I'd if I'd done anything serious about it cos you can do any- you can do all kinds of things, I didn't even separate right hand or left hand, um, just actually disrupted the continuity, that's what I was interested in rather than-
J: I actually got somebody else to do it for me.
T: Did you!? that's very very avant garde! (laughs) that's the way a composer should be!
J: I couldn't bring myself to cut it- do it myself because I was looking at it and seeing all these decisions that I would have to make and in the end I got someone who couldn't read music to cut it out and someone else to stick it together again. And then- then as a last resort I did write it out.
T: (laughs) That's great. that's like er- that's simultaneously extremely modern and very very old fashioned. Like Lully. He used to just write a tune and say "go on then, you fill in the rest of it.?
J: Really?
T: Yeah he used to just get court minions to write the harmony, do the orchestration.
J: I need a minion.
T: (laughs) So what's important for you in in music?
(big pause)
J: What do you mean?
T: I dunno, what what- it's like, what qualities do you look for in other people's music, you know, what interests you? (big pause) Like a kind of clarity is it? Or... is it a kind of extra-musical idea or- I mean Im thinking just sort of generally.
J: I mean, there are people I'm interested in, people...
T: Like who? Who's your- who do you feel close to aesthetically?
J: (pause) Some of them are alive and some of them are dead. (laughs)
T: Well there's no category, they could be unborn.
J: Oh the unborn ones?! I can't reveal... Um well I mean the- people like Sol Lewitt, er [...] and Duchamp, Raymond Roussel like I say, Alfred Jarry
T: Oh yeah
J: because they they
T: Perec.
J: Yeah Perec because there's a-
T: And that whole connection with English experimental
J: Yeah the Oulipo and Oumupo. It it it ties in so clearly for me because the sense of just sort of good work, um, just to see what happens, like Jarry's attitude to potential. And there's a [...], a great tradition all the way back to like Raymond Lull in I dunno thirteen hundreds or something, of permutational methods to find potential combinations. You know it's like a big
sort of cabalistic tradition. Giordano Bruno. Yeah I think Duchamp and Satie and people like this are in some sort of way people that I... in terms of finding ways to find new things, rather than you know
T: Rather than it coming out of themselves.
J: yeah rather than it coming out sort of like into thin air directly, finding processes you know, sort of, obscure oblique strategies to find something out. And to not really know what the result will be but to just make something and see.
T: Yeah and see what it is. But it's interesting how there's always an element of the person who's done it
J: Yes!
T: even though it's
J: yeah
T: it's ostensibly coming from external sources. It's all er channeled by you as the- as the creator
J: yeah. They're often very humourous guys.
T: (laughs)
J: You know I mean they're all- they're often- that's the one thing that comes out is that there's an immense sense of humour.
T: It's a kind of lightness isn't it
J: yeah it's a really good kind of [....] lightness
T: Lightness- not in terms of levity but in terms of a kind of- like I like that um you know the Japanese haiku lightness, karumi
J: Yeah.
T: Like, that's not a poem you just said a sentence.
J: Yeah, sort of barely perceivable.
T: Yes. Like that's not a piece- no that's not a sculpture, it's a bicycle wheel.
J: Yeah exactly. The er- the Sol Lewitt wall drawings have you seen them? they're just- they're diagonal and vertical lines on the wall but they're different
T: What? Wall
J: Wall drawings. They're just instructions...
T: Oh yeah, very very
J: very very thin lines
T: There's one at the Tate Modern
J: Yeah. Done wrong.
T: Have they? Wow!
J: Yeah, I mean it's barely perceivable as a process, it's tremendously transparent and um yeah also someone like Perec has... I mean "Life A User's Manual? is a really good book [...] short stories are made into a sort of mammoth structure [...] that sense the idea of variety [...limitless...]
T: Yes I am a big fan of that. Yeah. [...] I'm reading Henry Miller at the moment and it just encompasses a lot, it feels like it's just one period of work for him and its encompassing you know so much. He talks in "Tropic of Cancer? about wanting to create some massive sprawling work of art that will basically have everything in it, everything, and "Tropic of Cancer? is kind of a bit of that cos it's like a kind of big blob, but it also feels like part of a continuity, like the next day he would write another one, you know, similar but different, because it contains other elements, but still... And Mahler's symphonies wanting to contain the universe, you know "a symphony must contain the universe" or something like that.
J: [...Borges...]
T: Yeah I haven't read any I must read some.
J: Also the- the um
T: There's so much to do isn't there?
J: Yeah, yeah!
T: It's tremendous.
J: There's a... George Brecht [...book of paradoxes...] and um... yeah I think all those people are very... like Escher, where infinity is implied in some kind of visual paradox which allows for a sort of glimpse of a closure and very expansive potential at the same time... [...]
T: I think, maybe I'm just making a leap because we're talking about this but I do think I get a sense of that in your music. Um, because when I hear a piece of yours I think I sort of think um I get that sense of kind of er... you know a kind of limitlessness, something- you know when hearing that "Fall Fresh in the Cloudy Lap of the Messenger", whichever way it was turned into!, In Kettle's Yard, you know, when you changed it and you put the birdsong in instead of the barrel organs, er, that, again it was just a kind of like that is the same piece but with this element now, and it's still open it could go out in this direction. Very um... And I also feel that about the piece that you've just done, this two piano piece...
J: Oh good, I'd like to hear that.
T: Maybe. Well, you know, I haven't really heard it I've just played my bit, I look forward to hearing it!
J: Have you tried it on two pianos?
T: Oh yeah yeah yeah, but you know I was just concentrating on- we only just had one rehearsal- I was just concentrating on what I was doing.
J: The repeats in that... they're strange, they just sort of appeared. Um, I've been very interested in a long time in making quite complex forms which are um, well which [...has repetitions but minor differences so it repeats differently] and then allowing the minor differences to be different every time [...] I'd really love to find a way to do it, for the actual content to be different, [perhaps a means of making the content different, like having the rhythms the same...]
T: but the actual notes to be different
J: well that's just a...
T: It's like a miniature one of my things. It's the trouble with my pieces is that though they're very varied in their performances, in concert, you get one performance, and then I look forward- you know I'm starting to get second and third performances of older pieces and then hearing them again and thinking wow, that's nothing like the recording that I'm used to!
J: Yeah.
T: But it's the same also, it's something it's very similar. I mean obviously the potential is there you know for a huge variety of...
J: I'm reluctant to close off pieces, I don't want to finish them in any definite sense, I always seem to be revising things or just making changes to pieces.
T: Oh right.
J: Particularly if they're not [formally] open... if pieces are closed I tend to rewrite them.
T: Why did you rewrite the "Fall Fresh" dot dot dot?
J: problems arose? um the situation wasn't quite right for er er- there were no tables for the bells and so on, it was due to a practical necessity that it had to change and I couldn't have- I couldn't have planned it...
T: And the title change as well that was
J: That was completely by mistake.
T: That was quite good.
J: And now I know why I called it that. So that it could change.
T: And it's just a line of just words taken from Shakespeare?
J: It was two- two joined Shakespeare sentences that I asked Anton [Lukoszevieze] to find. He liked it.
T: Oh right, oh right.
J: Yeah I was working on- well I still am working on a piece which is a combination of four and a half string quartets [...]
T: Wow that's a lot of work as well
J: It is yeah and it's been going on for ages. I'm just finding ways of combining other people's music. Putting it together. I like the transparency in terms of data because it's easy to separate the pitches [and the rhythms...] You can apply a piece of music to itself as well and you can reverse the rhythms of a piece, like having some sort of um- yeah, use barely any material you do to make huge differences.
(Pause)
T: Yeah it's interesting, I was just thinking about the- I was just thinking about the- that we both did- those cut-up pieces from Scarlatti, although cos I didn't do it for any- I didn't turn it into a piece, I think I was just doing something investigating continuity in some ways. I dunno it was just an experiment that was interesting for me to try out... I should go shortly, I've got lot of questions but I've
J: [...]
T: Well not those questions
J: Did you type them?
T: What?
J: They're typed?
T: No these are from previous interviews.
J: Previous.
T: I was just
J: Re-using material.
T: Do you re-use material? Where's that written?
J: You're re-using material.
T: Ah yeah. (laughs)
J: You can actually just include anyone else's answers.
T: For the questions? Can I splice together several different interviews.
J: Yeah, you can put the nouns from Bryn's, verbs from Laurence's
T: Ok. I was gonna say who's interviews would you like joined together. Um... What motivates you to write music, that's my first question
J: Oh yeah, that one
T: Why do you write music?
J: See what happens.
T: Cos it's just
J: Um if you're gonna-
T: Cos you can do anything.
J: Yeah, I mean you can- you know it's just what you choose really isn't it? I mean... music is a... interesting... medium as...
T: [...]
J: Well I've started doing these drawings now
T: Mmm yeah.
J: I've been keen to get back to actually just drawing cos I like the process of sitting down for a long time and concentrating on um- like a visual form, letting something appear. So yeah. And they also might turn into pieces- might turn into- cos they're basically just lists of numbers at the moment, and then might turn into pieces.
T: Yeah.
J: Which just use the numbers. But you know it?s back and forth, I don't have any...
T: I used to do- I used to paint a lot when I was a student. Then slowly just sort of didn't. I was looking at some things the other day.
J: What did you do?
T: Um, I dunno it was all very intuitive and childish stuff in the sense of like just very simple drawings of houses and stick figures and using lots of paint. Combination of that and also elements as well.
J: You still do it though.
T: Not very often no.
J: There are those three pictures on your website. Repetition of-
T: Oh yeah. Well that was years ago, that was about 2001 when I had to- there was just a sequence of events for each one I kind of write a statement about my music. You know where you have to write an "Artist's Statement" [...] and um- I did it and then I thought- well I dunno I wrote it out in pencil and thought it looks really nice instead of typed and then I just went down that line of making you know [...] ended up with these three you know- sets of words written out in pencil with paint, and I just liked the look of it really. And that ended up being- you know I sent one to- James was doing- lecturing about my stuff and [he was one who asked me for an artist's statement] so instead of writing it out I sent him one of these. I don't know why I did that, it just looked very nice to me. And you know the
presentation says as much as the words, this refers back to what we were talking about notation. It's a way of- it's a way of bringing about the essence of the [thing], what it looks like as well as [the content]. But I don't do that very often.
J: I'm really interested in this idea of what we do as a science. A form of science.
T: It's very scientific in the way that you work in a sense.
J: Probably why I'm quite interested in it.
T: I mean like experimentation is a...
J: Yeah. In my lab. Portalab.
T: How has your music changed?
J: Um. I dunno.
T: I don't think it has actually, it seems as though it's the same after what you've been saying.
J: Um. Some pieces have changed. There are one or two pieces which are- which are still just too vague. And I might go back to them. Because I've just put them away in a drawer because they just didn't seem to take shape. And er
T: They were completed?
J: They were completed but they didn't seem to have er- they didn't seem to be successful whereas at the time [...]. But I'd quite like to see what they were because I don't really remember.
T: Oh right, that's exciting.
J: Um. The er... Continuity in science experiments. Just trying to maintain some sort of constant process and observing. But on the other hand, a lot of it is quite irrational. Very
T: [...]
J: Yeah it's just my brain doing things- the third page of the two piano piece is just I mean just writing fragments of what I could see from the other page, cos that's- that's as much of a process [...]
T: So it's continuing... It doesn't- it doesn't- it's not progressing
J: That's a good point isn't it.
T: What?
J: Woops. (laughs)
T: (laughs) No it's progressive!
J: Well, I don't know. I feel like- i feel like I'm trying to progress. I mean I know that there are particular things which I [...return to...] but that's just work... I mean I like to have I dunno like months of intense work on something and then forget it and then suddenly remember it a year later

(End of tape)