Gabriel Prokofiev
With a career as a dance, grime, electro and hip-hop producer running alongside his life as a composer, Gabriel Prokofiev has developed a distinctive voice in today’s musical world. He also founded the Nonclassical record label and club night. His latest disc, featuring a selection of his concertos, is out this September.
The concerto is a particularly powerful format. When you have just an orchestra and a conductor whose back is turned to the audience, it’s physically less approachable. Add a soloist, and there’s a human connection. The listener can identify with the individual and follow their adventures or struggles, and the orchestra can represent the world. This metaphor sets up a lot of di erent possibilities.
The social and human aspect of music is so important. The more I can imagine the circumstances of the performance and the people doing it, the better. There is the hope, of course, that a piece will have a life beyond one musician, but generally there’s better direction if you write for one person. Saxophonist Branford Marsalis was inspiring to write for: he has an incredible old-school, classical jazz sound. Contemporary music has shied away from melody. It’s strange, as it’s an important part of music. With the Saxophone Concerto I thought, ‘Here I am going to be
melodic’. I wasn’t afraid to look back across the last 100 years and to be nostalgic with the instrument. Part of me thought of it as the saxophone music that should have been written but never was.
The first stage of composing is sketching. I get myself into a really relaxed routine where
I’m doing lots of short one- to two-minute sketches of potential ideas, reassuring myself that they don’t have to be in the piece. Then a er a couple of weeks I’ll go through them all. I make demos and MP3S, and I try to listen to them really critically.
The magic of creating something drove me to become a composer. I don’t know, if he had been around, whether my grandfather [the composer Sergei] would have been encouraging or critical. Although I’m inspired by him, there was a long period where I felt intimidated by his success. The solution to creative doubt is to work every day. You develop as an artist and hopefully some good stu comes out of it.