Spotlight: Simon Knighton

Simon Knighton is a composer currently living in Manchester interested in blending live acoustic instruments with electronic sounds. We caught up with Simon ahead of his upcoming projects as part of our Associate Composers Scheme to hear about his practice, inspiration and more.

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How did you find your way into composing?

My Mum and Dad gave me a guitar when I was 8 or 9 years old, then a Yamaha 4-track cassette recorder a couple of years later which I used to make hundreds of weird little songs and demos. I recall one of my earliest recordings featured a terrible guitar riff (which I ‘borrowed’ from Smells Like Teen Spirit) mixed with lots of fake helicopter sounds recorded from a small battery powered Casio keyboard. Obviously, it wasn’t good - but it’s a fond musical memory and was probably quite inventive for a 12-year-old! I then played in rock bands throughout my teenage years and eventually went to Leeds Metropolitan Uni at 18 to study Music Technology - before moving to Liverpool and working in a small DIY music venue and music studio for many years. Through this I met lots of artists and creative types, and I began making soundtracks for local theatre/dance groups which were my first steps into creating instrumental music (as opposed to ‘songs’).

In my late 20’s I came across Stravinsky (after reading Barry Miles’ Frank Zappa biography), and after seeing the Rite of Spring performed live by the Liverpool Philharmonic, I was hooked. I went home that night and started trying to make music like Stravinsky – I couldn’t read or write music at that point though, so it was just a case of finding clarinet samples online and playing around with them to see what happened. I then spent three years teaching myself to read and write notation properly, as well as listening to as much classical music as I could (I remember buying a stack of random old cheap vinyl from Oxfam and slowly working my way through it) before going to Amsterdam to study for an MA in composition. Now I'm doing a PhD at the RNCM, researching methods of combining acoustic and electronic sound – not unlike the helicopter/Nirvana rip off from my youth!

What do you think is the most appealing thing about contemporary music?

When I worked in a music venue, I sound engineered hundreds of noisy punk bands who would only use one dynamic (very loud) microphone and would therefore create a wall of sound which more or less destroyed any sense of instrument spatialisation in the room. So I like the sense of dynamics and space that you get from a live concert performance. These qualities are something that can't be captured and reproduced in a stereo recording, so are unique to the live experience – you have to actually be in the room with the players!

How does this influence your work? What are you currently working on?

About three years ago I started working on a series of Sound Sculptures. I originally used the term Sound Sculpture to describe the set-up of the instruments as much as anything else: the first piece of the series was for five clarinets and eight speakers placed around the audience, creating something in between a concert and an installation. The style of the music was also very slow and almost drone like (due to my attempts to seamlessly morph live acoustic sounds into synthesised electronic sounds), which added to the ‘sculpture’ qualities of the music. Since lockdown though, the term Sound Sculpture has come to describe the methods behind the compositions as much as the presentation of the pieces themselves:

The process behind making these sculptures starts off with a recording session with the players, in which we record samples of their instruments. These were originally intended to be used as the electronics parts, though in lockdown I began to compose more with these samples using computer software like Ableton. For Sound Sculpture No. 1 (pre-pandemic), these sample taking sessions were conducted verbally and in person, and as my intention for Sound Sculpture No.1 was to try and blend the electronic parts and live acoustic players as smoothy as possible, the directions that I gave to the players resulted in relatively simple sample material. But as more sculptures were produced in lockdown, I had to come up with alternative ways to collaborate with players – I started using graphic scores for the performers to record guided improvisations from. I then spent months cutting up those recordings, layering, time stretching, pitch shifting, and generally ‘sculpting’ into the pieces themselves.

Examples of Simon’s graphic scores

These graphic score improvisations resulted in some pretty wild and unexpected material to work with – and it is a great way to really explore what these amazing instrumentalists can do. In some ways, I now feel that traditional scores can inhibit players, rather than allowing their abilities and musical sensibilities to truly express themselves. This method has developed into a really interesting and creative collaborative process – and I must give a lot of credit to the performers as the pieces are very much theirs as well as mine.

Sound Sculpture No.1

The core aim of Sound Sculpture No. 1 was to address a problem that I feel I often see when live acoustic instruments are combined with electronic sound: a kind of unintentional effect of two fundamentally different sound palettes being stuck together. My own early attempts to include electronic sounds in ensemble pieces suffered from exactly the same problems – creating a sense of coherence with these sounds isn't an easy thing to achieve. Obviously, there are many cases of this being done very well, but Sound Sculpture No. 1 was really a collection of experiments that tried to create complete homogeneity between instruments and electronics. 

I met a saxophone player in Belgium called Lennert Baerts who had similar feelings about this issue, and we spent a couple of afternoons trying to make different live saxophone tones blend seamlessly into pre-recorded saxophone tones, which then blended seamlessly into purely synthesised sounds. Lennert would stand on one side of the room, play a tone, then I would fade in some electronic sounds – a kind of live crossfade – and he would walk across the room as I panned the sound to the other side of the room also, where he would eventually ‘catch’ it.

This study led me to research acoustic and psychoacoustic theory in detail, and I then tried to apply everything I had learnt to this first Sound Sculpture. I’m essentially trying to use electronic sound to gently pull at the aesthetic corners of live instrumental sounds, in a real acoustic space.

Sound Sculpture No.2

The main concept behind these Sound Sculptures was blending instruments with electronic sounds in live concerts, so lockdown was really a nightmare! I waited about eight or nine months before starting work on my second sculpture, as I really did believe these pieces would only work in live situations. Eventually, in between lockdown one and two it became apparent that a new approach was needed, and I started working with Erin Bathgate and Jack Sindall – two French horn players from the RNCM – on this project which we conducted entirely online (apart from this filmed recording session, where we actually met in person for the first time). Erin and Jack were amazing collaborators – really open and enthusiastic, and really keen to try weird, silly experiments: they really legitimised this new way of working, of using graphic score guided improv as a composition starting point.

Sound Sculpture No.3

Sound Sculpture No.3 is very much an electronic piece in its current form – there are over 150 trombone tracks layered in Ableton so I can’t imagine how this would work live. The piece was originally intended to be for live trombone (performed by Weston Olencki) and electronics. I think this intention, to some extent, is still audible in the way that the first and third section slowly build one note at a time – the idea was to electronically loop each note and slowly build the chord in real-time. You can also (probably) hear how the second section becomes an entirely electronic piece – this section was composed after it was confirmed that Weston wouldn’t be able to come over and perform the piece, which was actually quite liberating as I felt I could really let go of any technical practicalities relating to performability.

The consuming white noise element which features in all of these sculptures is inspired by the end of ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ by The Beatles – as I’m writing this, I’ve just read that today is 41 years to the day that Lennon died, so I feel I should mention that.

Any other influences? What other kinds of pieces do you make?

At the moment, I'm particularly interested in combining scientific ideas and music. I recently collaborated with a math professor from Liverpool University called Lasse Rempe-Gillen, who got me interested in his specialty: dynamical systems. A dynamical system can be many things – from a pendulum, to the movement of birds, to climate systems, to the motion of planets. Trying to integrate these ideas into musical pieces has become something of a preoccupation of mine!

A piece which embodies dynamical systems on various musical levels by striking a balance between poetic representation in the instrumental parts, and algorithmically created chaos in the electronic parts. 

A collaboration with scientist Dr Freya Mitchison and film-maker Fiona Brehony, the piece presents three perspectives of sea ice: microscopic, human and satellite.

Which part of working with Nonclassical are you most looking forward to?

All of the Nonclassical projects are very exciting. Working with CoMA has been fun, and the Southbank Orchestra commission seems too good to be true. I’ve also been working on my Sound Sculpture No. 4 with two incredible string players – Gemma Bass and Peggy Nolan – and I’m very excited about what the results will be. I will also curate a concert in London next autumn which will explore dynamical systems as they are found in nature in a collection of new and existing works reimagined as immersive installations which ‘come alive’ with performances. Hopefully it will all go to plan!

Photographs by Fiona Brehony

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