The BBC Music Magazine Interview
Composer Roxanna Panufnik tells Kate Molleson about the challenges and joys of creating her own style
Roxanna Panufnik’s house is piled high with birthday cards. She offers me a slice of a once-enormous cake, the remnants of ‘130’ still visible in the icing: a joint celebration for her 50th and her mother’s 80th. Through an airy kitchen and into the leafy West London garden, she directs me to a wooden love seat which we share for the next couple of hours, undoubtedly the most romantic setting in which I’ve ever done an interview. The whole scene radiates domestic snugness. The seat was her gift to her husband for their tenth wedding anniversary. Panufnik’s eldest daughter is at the kitchen table studying for a maths exam. The middle child arrives halfway through our interview and announces her latest results (dazzlingly good) while the youngest child is a boy chorister at Westminster Abbey. The afternoon is hot and breezy. We drink elderflower cordial and Panufnik kicks off her silver trainers to tan her feet.
At 50, Panufnik declares herself content. In the past she has experienced painful self-consciousness – about the weight of the surname she inherited from her celebrated composer father (see p33), about her style of lush, heart-on-sleeve post-romanticism whose perceived guilelessness enraged her composition teachers at music college. Now she says she’s found a way of embracing what she is, and this year marks a concerted consolidation. She has a new album coming out – a choral retrospective sung by Ex Cathedra under Jeffrey Skidmore. There’s also a new oratorio premiering in November, co-commissioned by the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to celebrate 100 years of Poland regaining independence.
And there’s a big BBC Proms commission. A new work for the Last Night, no less, called Songs of Darkness, Dreams of Light scored for double choir
and orchestra. ‘I had a really detailed brief for that commission,’ Panufnik enthuses, nestling herself into the love seat. ‘The two choirs will be the BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Chorus. They should act independently of each other but they should also sing together. They wanted something that commemorated the centenary of the end of the First World War, but at the same time looked positively to the future.’
She chose two texts. One is Isaac Rosenberg’s 1913 work In The Underworld: ‘It’s actually about having a broken heart, but in quite a spooky way it anticipates what it would be like to be in the trenches. It talks about terrible darkness, breathing breath impure. I’ve set it using a really lovely Ashkenazy prayer mode.’ For the more positive part of the piece, she quotes lines from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet:
‘He was a Maronite Catholic in Lebanon. I’ve got an amazing Syrian Mater Dolorosa for that. It sounds Middle Eastern, quite highly ornamented.’
Panufnik describes the work in detail: how it ‘starts out slow and quiet and dark, then gets brighter, happier, lighter’; how ‘at the beginning the choirs sing in conversation then at the end they join together’; how the instrumentation includes multiple harps (‘I’m an ex-harpist; I try to get a harp in everything!’) and a celeste (‘providing the light at the end’) and ‘textured winds, slightly anxious’ as well as warm strings and Sufi rhythms on the drums. ‘I’m really hoping that bit doesn’t come over as soft rock…’
Her account of the piece sounds epic, but it all takes place within a nine-minute span, and that concision suits her well. ‘I don’t like writing long pieces,’ she says, ‘I like writing that is intense and instantly gets its message across.’ She’s also grateful for the specificity of the Proms brief. ‘There’s nothing more terrifying than a blank sheet of paper. I once spent three weeks with a blank piece of paper trying to write a harp concerto and it wasn’t funny.’ Her solution? ‘There’s a wonderful nun at Stanbrook Abbey where I used to go on retreats before I got married and had children. She unlocks me. She’s amazing. I just have to start talking to her and my ideas get flowing. She’s over 80 now – she’s been my muse for about 20 years.’
Panufnik first went to Stanbrook – a Benedictine abbey of enclosed nuns – in the late 1990s when she was writing her Westminster Mass. ‘I wanted to clear my head of the outside world,’ she recalls. ‘I was living in Shepherd’s Bush at the time. The abbey was at the foot of Malvern Hills, cut off from the noise, the traffic,
‘I spent three weeks with a blank piece of paper, trying to write a harp concerto’
the television. It got me into an amazing mental space. Every time I make a start on a new piece I have to go back to that place in my head – I just can’t go geographically anymore.’ She points behind us to a spacious wooden hut at the bottom of the garden. Inside is a happy jumble of scores, portraits, framed magazine cover features, reference books, instruments, memorabilia. The space is her surrogate Stanbrook. ‘I’ve got three children,’ she shrugs. ‘There’s no time to go wafting around on retreats. Having kids really helped me to focus. I can’t work at weekends because I’m with my family, but on Monday mornings I write my best music. It’s as though I can fast-
track a retreat mentality. It sounds a bit brutal and not very artistic, but there’s a composing muscle in my brain, and by this point it’s very well toned.’
In her late teens, Panufnik’s father, Andrzej, gave her a book of folk music from the Tatra mountains. The gift kickstarted in Roxanna a lifelong curiosity for traditional music from around the world, which in turn has provided the basis for many of her works. She acknowledges that her love of ‘every faith music’ is ideological as well as purely musical; she says she wishes ‘we as a people would look more at the things that we have in common than obsessing over our differences. We all started from the same place. We diverged like a beautiful tree. The messages we get about faith from the media are always negative ones, but I want people to hear the beauty of the culture these faiths can inspire.’
There is a determined egalitarianism to Panufnik’s faith-based sourcing – she doesn’t even differentiate when she’s writing music of her own religion.
‘I’m a practising Catholic, but I’m quite universal,’ she stresses. ‘My son goes to an Anglican school. And remember, I wasn’t always a Catholic.’ Panufnik become religious at the age of 21. She was attending Polish evening classes and had befriended a fellow student who was marrying a
Polish woman. ‘He asked me to find him some Polish hymns for his wedding, so I went along to a Polish Catholic mass out of curiosity. I didn’t understand a thing, I didn’t find any hymns, but when I came out I felt amazing. Happy, calm, at peace with everything. So I kept going to mass.’ A couple of months later her father was diagnosed with cancer. ‘The bottom fell out of my world. When I went to mass, I
‘The Proms, the oratorio, the CD – it’s a cracker of a year and I feel so blessed’
felt like I could cope. It’s almost as though it had been put there like a safety net.’
Andrzej Panufnik never spoke Polish at home – ‘he’d had such a traumatic time when he left Poland’ – but in her twenties Roxanna began taking Polish classes in secret. She wanted to surprise her father by speaking to him in his own language. He died before she had learned enough for a conversation, but it was a turning point. She says the bereavement of her father’s death expanded her emotional boundaries. ‘Having felt sadness so deeply, I suddenly felt as though I could feel happiness more deeply, too. It pushed me further with harmonies and dynamics. I wear my heart on my sleeve — I’m very Polish in that way!’
She also felt a new kind of urgency to pursue her own convictions. She had stopped playing the harp because of tendon troubles, and as a composition student at the Royal Academy of Music she had been led to believe she was useless. ‘I frustrated my professors terribly because I didn’t want to be as experimental as they thought I should be,’ she rolls her eyes.
‘My end of college report said I had a gift for melody but that my music was naive. I thought I was never going to make it.
That was in the 1980s, when there was only one “good” type of new music. I knew that I didn’t want to write like that, but my confidence went downhill. I got engaged to a chicken farmer.’
She laughs as she looks back on how her life could have gone ‘in a very different direction’. After college she got a job in television, but her musician friends kept asking her to write pieces for them. And then came her father’s death: ‘It made me appreciate the briefness of life. That if you can help it, you should avoid spending years doing something you don’t want to do.’ She called off the engagement and launched her career as a composer.
Twenty-five years later, she says turning 50 feels like an energiser. ‘The Proms, the oratorio, the new CD – it’s a cracker of a year and I feel so blessed. It feels like a diving board. I worry less about what people are going to think. I used to spend a lot of time thinking, “you can’t do that!” Parallel fifths, that kind of thing. Now I realise it’s all completely possible.’
Was she really so worried about parallel fifths – a compositional rule invented in the 18th century? ‘Of course, it matters to me what people think of my music. It would be incredibly arrogant if it didn’t. I’m writing this music for people to listen to. When I was writing the Proms piece, I was aware that it’s going to be under huge scrutiny. Everyone is going to have something to say about it. But in the end, I’ve got ways of dealing with that pressure. And I think I’ve written something very true and quite powerful.’ She stretches her bare feet in the grass. ‘Turning 50? I’ll eat that cake. I’ll write those parallel fifths.’ Roxanna Panufnik’s Celestial Bird is released on Signum in September; Songs of Darkness, Dreams of Light premieres at the Last Night of the Proms on 8 September