Oliver Leith
I used to be a guitarist and I’d geared everything towards a performing career. My school had two composers in the music department who made me think that perhaps that was a thing I could do. I started off writing weird things for the kinds of ensembles you get at schools, like ten glockenspiels. Then one of those teachers gave me the opportunity to write a tiny thing for the Handel Festival.
The feeling of other people playing your music well on real instruments was irreplaceable. It’s hard to put my finger on what I do. It’s experimental music that eventually gets written down or recorded. ‘Experimental’ is a loose term in that it’s mainly because I experiment with it for so long. I repeat things for hours and hours, and often grow so attached to those repetitions. Sometimes the outside world suggests something more imaginative than you can come up with. It can be anything. For example, this morning I was writing something and a car went
past which was blaring something very loud – I live in a basement, so the bass really came through, and that made me think it would be wonderful if something humongously horrible rolled in at that point in the music. will o wisp is me attempting to grapple with something to do with Englishness. It uses an old English-irish-scottish folk theme – nobody knows quite where it’s from. The piece sort of tears it apart and it’s as if it has been left in a vat of something for a long period. It should sound both rather beautiful and scary.
I’ve fallen in love with writing opera. There’s something about keeping all those elements spinning. I use real domestic sounds in my music generally, and opera seemed like a good fit for that. We recorded a whistling kettle; it sings a note, but if you use electronics and samplers you can get it to sing all sorts of notes. I thought, if everyone is singing why isn’t everything musical? It’s probably going to be a nightmare for the director!