Web-only — Jef Neve

FT: That was an extremely intense experience. I was as close to you as I am now, and at times it was as if there were only me, you and Maestro Tabachnik in the room. I was conscious that this was almost certainly the only time ever I would hear this work with not only a pianist but also the composer sitting right in front of me. History in the making, not wishing to exaggerate. I'm thinking, I'm one of the few who will ever hear this live, and hear it as the composer himself plays it.

JN: For me it was also a very intense experience, it was as if a work was being born. Composition is a great deal of work, of course, but then at the end of that process you have to start working with the orchestra, with 80 musicians, 80 souls for whom things have to be made to fit, just at the point where you would rather be able to take the time to sit down and work on playing the music. I can work really hard, but I also took the view that once I was on the stage, in front of the public, no matter how hard the preparatory work to get there, I'd flip a switch and I was going to enjoy myself, and I was going to think no more about it, but just let the music flow through me. So I worked so hard in advance so that I was able to just enjoy myself on the stage.

FT: Normally you perform onstage with your trio, or with a small ensemble of musicians. Up there you have total control, but on this occasion you were working as you say with 80 musicians, which is more than 80 times more difficult. An orchestra is like a mountain: very difficult to get moving, but once it does it's a spectacular event. How did meeting them go, because I know from experience that the first rehearsal of any work with an orchestra is always a disaster.

JN: (laughs) I was warned about that by other composers, but they told me to trust the orchestra, because no matter how bad it seems, it always works out all right. The first time I went to listen to the orchestra rehearsing by itself, that was on the Monday of that week [of the premiere], I couldn't believe it. It just came across as a huge pudding of sound. But I'd already decided not to let myself be upset by that, to stay perfectly cool.

Of course at the moment when we were due to come together, the orchestra would be hearing the piano part for the first time, because of course they hadn't heard that yet, nobody had ever heard it in fact, other than me, and that's an essential part. Then there's the difference between the last generale and playing for the audience, that also makes a world of difference. Playing music for a room full of people three storeys high is intense.

FT: I suppose you have to communicate with the orchestra via the conductor, you can't speak to them directly?

JN: I could. I think that's probably not very usual, but in this case, since I'm also the composer, I could have my say. But I tried at the same time, especially in dialogue with Michel Tabachnik, to work things out, and above all to learn, because he has that experience of working with them which I don't have. I thought it was important also to have contact with the leader of the orchestra, so that they felt involved in the idea that we were making music together, and they're not just a band of musicians-for-hire behind me on the stage.

FT: When I spoke to Maestro Tabachnik before the concert [for an article in Flanders Today, see here], he still hadn't got down to the score, I think. How involved were your discussions? Did you have a lot to explain, or is it all written down in the score?

JN: A lot of the explanation is in the score, but at the same time there's a lot of room for interpretation. Because it was a new work, I also had to explain a lot about what my musical intentions were.

FT: He told me he wasn't familiar with your jazz work, which suggests he's probably not a close follower of jazz at all. Was that not a problem for communcation?

JN: No. There was no need for him to be.

Inspiration

FT: Do you need to be inspired, or is hard work alone enough?

JN: Inspiration is absolutely necessary. Inspiration for me is very close to a fantasy world - things or melodies or images that you daydream, or let through into consciousness to influence reality, so it comes as a result at the most unexpected moments. For me it's often a matter of places where I've been, the surroundings, a train of thought, strong emotions of course as well.

FT: But are you one of those who waits to be inspired, or do you sit down at the piano at nine every morning to let it come to you?

JN: I sit at the piano every day, because I like to make music, and that's the way to create the conditions where inspiration can come. The best way to arrive at a good result is to let inspiration create and then for you to eliminate point by point - kill your darlings - that's very important.

FT: The danger is, if you always have to wait for the Muse to come calling, what do you do with a commission? You have to produce something in a given time-frame, no excuses, and the Muse is a fickle mistress.

JN: The Muse just has to come on time, which I must say has always been the case for me, I don't think I've ever had a period when nothing would come, a sort of writer's block. Maybe you make your own inspiration, in fact, by exposing yourself always to new impulses. I don't sit in a corner waiting for something to happen.

FT: That's the point I was trying to get at. Thomas Edison said genius was one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

JN: That's a very good way of putting it.

FT: So you're busy composing this concerto, which you've decided to give a very classic classical form, and you have some ideas, but a concerto contains a great deal of ideas, there's a lot of material being used up. How do you decide what idea to use where?

JN: In my case I think I always work to a logic, so that one idea follows logically on from the last in the discourse you're engaged in, and that gives rise to the next one and the next one and so on. With that concerto I literally started at the beginning, with the introduction by the flute (hums melody) and logically there then has to be an antithesis. In that way I'm different from a more technical composer - I never studied composition, by the way - who knows how and why that subject has to come back, and here we have a set of variations, and who begins to construct something almost architectural. In this case, in the case of this concerto, that's not how it was done. I was telling a story, based around the idea of the question Benjamin Britten used to ask: what would I like to hear now? That's the fantasy part, if you like. And for me that was the thread running through this whole composition, okay, place this idea here, play it, let it rest, and a little while later you think (snaps fingers) that's the next part.

And then I looked at the whole thing to see if it was even possible, can we do that here? and to pay attention to the thematic work, the solo parts and so on.

Massed forces

FT: Having an orchestra at your disposal is a whole different thing from a band. You have many more possibilities.

JN: A lot more colours, of course. It's a very rich instrument - I always try to regard the orchestra as one gigantic instrument.

FT: I mentioned the sheer weight of ideas a full-length work like that requires. What composers frequently do is to quote themselves, taking phrases and whole passages from their own existing works, sometimes to rework them from another point of view, sometimes frankly not. Do you do that too? Inspiration is after all not infinite.

JN: I think so. I think there's a sort of musical logic that's mine, so the ideas all tend to fit within that system, and it might sound as if you're quoting yourself when all you're doing in speaking in your own language.

FT: Each composer has his own vocabulary, which is how you can tell a Bach or Beethoven piece even if you've never heard it before.

JN: Of course. Whatever it is I'm playing, whether it's a jazz piece or like this, something a bit different, it all comes in the end out of my head.

FT: Looking at the question from the other side: the quoting of other composers. The piano concerto doesn't cite other works that I know of, but it does have passages where it very clearly pays tribute to the likes of Rachmaninov, Gershwin and Beethoven, to name three.

JN: That was a conscious choice, as I explained before [in the article mentioned above, which you can read here]. I wanted to pay tribute to other composers, who I had admired all my life, and who were in my head every minute since accepting this commission.

FT: That's what you explained, and that's the way I took it in the performance. I could hear a bit of this composer and a bit of that composer not being quoted as such, but being referred to in a sort of honorary way, a bit like the way everyone in the band is called out by name at the end of a concert. However I saw other critics [including the reviewer in The Bulletin] who seemed to see those gestures of homage rather as a lack of originality, or a desire to play it safe. As if you ran out of ideas and just went back to the 19th or early 20th century hoping nobody would notice. It's a point of view that mystified me, as if the idea of tipping the hat to one's illustrious forebears was one they'd never come across before.

JN: Everyone is free to write what he thinks. I don't have any feeling of responsibility towards those writers. I can only explain why I wrote what I did.

People go with their own expectations to a concert, I think. For example, after the end of the first concert in De Bijloke in Ghent, a friend came up to and said, quite literally, "I'm angry with you". And I was thinking, "Uh-oh, what have I done?" And he said, "Yeah, there weren't enough jazz elements. You were given that chance, and you didn't include any jazz elements, you can't really be serious!" But really, I don't have the feeling that I'm obliged to include jazz elements just because I'm a jazz musician. But yeah, he really had a problem with that. Everyone has his own expectations.

More interview with Jef Neve here.