Artist Q & A: Lesley Hinger
by Jesse Locke
An interview with Lesley Hinger, in advance of New Works Calgary’s upcoming performance at King Eddy Classical, co-presented with the National Music Centre. For more information on this May 15th event, and to purchase tickets, follow this link.
Jesse Locke: How did you first become interested in music?
Lesley Hinger: I grew up in a really musical household. My dad has been singing and playing guitar in a band since he was a teenager. He played with his brothers, cousins, and friends when they grew up in a small town in northern Saskatchewan. They were the wedding and dance band that would play country and classic rock covers. That was a constant through most of his life, and I grew up listening in on his band practices in our garage.
You had a rock dad!
Yes, I had a rock dad! [laughs] I learned how to play guitar from him, and wanted to sing like he did. So I got into it that way, and the bridge into the classical side was my older sister playing piano. She’s six years older than me, so I saw her getting really good and naturally wanted to do the same thing. I started doing lessons to be more like her, and just kept going with it. I did lessons all through high school through the RCM (Royal Conservatory of Music) system where you do exams every year. I got into doing theory exams as well. It felt like a natural path.
I remember being in high school when everybody’s asking what you want to be or do for a living. The only thing I really liked was music. It was the only thing I was sincerely interested in. I got into the music program at the University of Calgary, and that plunged me into a classical world that I was actually totally new to. I had been doing some of the RCM programs, but I didn’t listen to any classical music at all until I got into this music program.
I’m not sure I even really realised when I was 17 that when you study music in university, 90% of it is Western European classical music training, and nothing else. But thankfully I wound up really loving it. I got into composing while I was in my undergrad, and that’s what I’m still doing now.
Do you play violin as well, or just compose for strings?
I compose for strings, but I don’t actively play them. They are the instruments that I enjoy writing for the most. I feel bad kind of saying that because other instruments are great too, and I’d be happy to write for most of them, but strings are just so versatile. There’s so much you can do with them. There’s a very wide world of sounds when you have the full range of cello, viola, and violin. It’s become a bit of a staple for me, and I come back to strings as the instrument I like to write for quite often.
Which composers would you consider to be your inspirations?
It’s really changed a lot over the course of the last few decades. When I first started out I was very interested in Spectral music. Composers like Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, and Kaija Saariaho were part of this school of Spectral music happening in Paris in the ’70s and ’80s. It comes from the approach of spectrally analysing sound quality. So recording a sound, then doing an analysis of all of the overtones and pitches that exist within that sound, and where the noise lives as well. You base your harmonic world off those analyses.
What you come out with is music that is very harmonically rich, resonant, and complex. You get a lot of subtle microtonal stuff happening in the high registers, and it was a sound that really resonated a lot with me when I was younger. There’s a piece by Grisey called Vortex Temporum, which is the one I always come back to. It’s one of my favourite pieces of all time, and I still use it as a guidepost for how good a piece of classical music can be.
That’s where I started and it informs a lot of what I do today because I still really enjoy that kind of harmony, and that approach to transformation of timbre. A lot of that music is rooted in how it’s going to change over the course of the piece, and how that can be reflected in the harmony itself. However, I also find that as I get older, I’m leaning more simplistic than I used to. Simpler harmonies, simpler material, and more repetition.
Cassandra Miller is one of my favourite composers. She’s Canadian but based out of the UK. Her music is often very rooted in process. She’ll establish a process that will unfurl over a long period of time. She has one piece called About Bach that was premiered and played by the Bozzini Quartet. It’s an unravelling of an excerpt of a Bach transcription that happens over 20 minutes. It feels like it’s disintegrating really gradually over time, but also involves a lot of repetition. The spaces between phrases gradually get longer as you go, as the rhythms get a bit longer and more drawn out over the course of a long period of time.
I’m really fascinated by that so now when I think about composing it’s usually about simplifying what I would have done 10 or 15 years ago. I’m trying to get to the core of what is really interesting or captivating about any particular sound or phrase.
You mentioned that your solo piece from within is quite free and unmetered, with things evolving rather slowly. That piece is from 2008, right?
Yeah, that’s a really old one. I wrote it when I was doing my Master’s, but for some reason it has had some longevity. I think that’s partly because it’s a solo piece, so it’s easy to perform. Any violinist can pick it up and give it a shot. It has a lot of freedom to it, so it’s not an overly difficult piece to learn. It was inspired by the last line in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Something about “consuming itself from within”?
“It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation. Consuming itself from within, ending at every moment, but never ending its ending.”
Amazing.
The idea I had going into it was creating something cyclical that had no beginning or ending, but is consuming itself in a way. That’s the feeling I was trying to create. It’s completely unmetered, so there is a lot of freedom for the players to take as much or as little time as they want, or to be as dramatic or subtle as they want. It’s got a drone that is maintained throughout the whole piece, so they’re playing on two strings the whole time. That connects to the idea of it being cyclical and constant.
Your quartet piece desolation sound is quite different in its structure. Can you tell me about your inspirations behind writing that piece?
There’s a quartet based out of the UK called the Arditti Quartet. They are quite famous for having premiered and championed the work of a handful of composers who were part of the New Complexity movement. They wrote pieces that were famously extremely difficult to play. That includes composers like Brian Ferneyhough or the Elliott Carter Quartets. The Arditti Quartet have been around since the ’70s, and they’re like the international equivalent of Quatuor Bozzini. They’re just so skilled.
I was attending my doctorate at Boston University and they were being brought in to do readings of student pieces. I was given the opportunity by my supervisor to write for them, and he said “this is one of the only opportunities you’re going to have while you’re in school to write something really difficult that they will be able to play on the first try. You’re not going to have to worry about multiple rehearsals, so don’t hold back.” It was a dream scenario to be working with musicians who can truly do something really hard without any preparation.
I approached the piece with that in mind and decided to go for something really textural. The shape of the piece is being guided by how the texture is shifting throughout. Each individual stringed instrument in it has a huge amount of activity. There are really fast, active lines that are weaving over each other while pausing, breaking, and sustaining at different moments. You hear these subtle shifts in texture as different instruments drop out, or move to a sustain, or a harmonic.
The piece starts to get particularly dense before moving to a violin cadenza, which was also taking advantage of having these amazing players. It’s pretty fun and showy, and obviously hard to play, but to do it well is so impressive. Then at the end it chills into something that’s more of a nebulous chorale. I was working with timbre there as well, exploring how the texture and timbre can relate to each other, and how that can shift over the course of the piece. It starts quite dry and ends more shimmery, resonant, and bright.
You’ve mentioned that it differs from the kinds of music you write now, which is less interested in showiness or virtuosity. Why do you think that change happened?
I was reading the interview you did with Rebecca [Bruton], and she talks a lot about her journey in a way that feels very organic. She always gravitated towards the thing she loved at any given moment. Her education reflected that, and I think she’s very intentional in the decisions she makes, and the music she writes. I think my path was less decisive in that way. I fell into music because it was the only thing I could think of doing, but I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to create, or how I wanted to represent myself musically.
Learning about composition in a strict classical context, where your professors are composers who are going to give you very strong opinions about what they think is right or wrong in any given approach, there’s a tendency to adopt a lot of their biases. Unless you’re brave enough to just rebel against everything they say, but that wasn’t my vibe at the time.
When I think back on it I see the shifts between schools too. I can see how the music I wrote at the U of C has a strong Allan Bell vibe to it, because he was the guy I was studying with at the time. When I was at UBC it was a bit more West Coast, and then it changed again when I went to Boston. Even though I was older and more mature at that point, I still really admired the supervisor I was working with. He would give strong opinions like “You don’t want to do this. You do want to do this.” If I brought him fragments of pieces or a work in progress, he would tell me a part went on too long, and I would just change it. I wanted to get a good grade and for him to like me.
I still like a lot of the music that I made during that time, but there’s a feeling that it wasn’t for or from me. Now that I’m out of school and taking on commissions, or dabbling in writing for myself – not for a specific project or ensemble – what is the music I actually want to hear? I know I enjoy composers like Linda Catlin Smith, so I try to dive deeper into their music and think critically about what it is that resonates. I don’t think I’ve landed in the place of writing just for me just yet, without thinking about how it’s going to be perceived by my peers in classical music. That’s a thing that’s very difficult for me to shake.
It’s a lifelong process!
I have to assume the best art we get is from that, but it still feels a bit distant. It’s like a North Star or an idea that guides me, but I don’t know if there will ever be a moment where I feel like I really got it.
How will the pieces be performed in Calgary?
Beautifully, I’m sure! The quartet is made up of players from the CPO, and most of them are people I know or have worked with before. I’m totally comfortable with them, and am so confident it’s going to be great. John Lowry is playing the first violin part, and he’s a rock star. He’s in the Land’s End Ensemble as well, and he’s the Associate Concertmaster for the CPO, and the others are Lorna Tsai, Jesse Morrison, and Kathleen de Caen.
You’ve got the big guns in your arsenal!
They’ll be great. I’m excited! The juxtaposition between my pieces and Rebecca’s pieces will be really interesting. Her work is quite conceptual whereas mine is much more rooted in sound transformation. I think it’ll be a really nice contrast to hear the pieces back to back in that setting. The brunch addition is unconventional for this kind of music, but I love food, so I’m into it!
