JONATHAN WOOLGAR

Can you describe your music in three words?

Fractured symphonic feast

What first drew you to composing, and what keeps you curious now?

I started composing as a child because I wanted to somehow recreate the amazing musical experiences I’d had (especially in the realm of musical theatre). That’s still what drives me now. By writing music, I want to share what I love about music and how I feel music with other people. It’s an act of communication.

Which non-musical influence has shaped your work the most?

There aren’t many non-musical influences that directly shape my music, but I love to read and write fiction and often reflect on the similarities and differences between structure and development in a novel compared to a piece of music. I’ve toyed with the idea of some kind of musical equivalent to Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a piece which sets up different realities and comments on itself, but for the moment I can’t see how to make it properly work.

What are you most excited to explore during Magnum Opus?

As well as getting to know and writing for amazing musicians, of course, I’m most excited to really get under the skin of how the Britten Sinfonia works and deepen my understanding of that side of things. It’s a rare opportunity for a composer to be embedded with an ensemble like this and I want to experience every aspect of it.

Is there a composer or artist you return to again and again?

My musical pole stars are Mahler and Kurtág. Though they might seem like polar opposites, I think that both deal with the struggle to speak musically, and the gulf between eloquent triumph and ineloquent failure. I never run out of riches to discover in their music.

How do you like to begin a new piece?

There are always scraps and fragments of ideas floating around in my head (some new, some remnants from earlier pieces which still have some juice left in them) and usually I’ll home in one of these to get things going at the start of the process. I play around at the piano but also try to work material through away from it, so that by the time I properly commit music to paper it’s already quite developed in my mind. This stops the notation from fossilising ideas too quickly before they’re fully ripe.

What do you hope an audience feels when they hear your music?

As long as they feel something except boredom, I’m happy. To provoke any kind of reaction at all is better than indifference. I wouldn’t presume to know what an audience will feel when they hear my music, but I suppose my hope is that they will have a sense of emotional identification with it, or else the sense of experiencing things from a new perspective through the workings of someone else’s musical brain.

Tell us about a recent musical discovery you’ve loved.

I heard Grace Williams’ Elegy for Strings on the radio for the first time not long ago and immediately needed to see the score. I think it’s perfectly realised and full of treasures worth studying. In terms of live concerts, Liza Lim’s cello concerto A Sutured World made a big impact. The piece really cast a spell, and the joyful energy in the concert hall and rapturous audience reaction felt very special.