interviews - James Saunders

I have been interviewing composers and improvisers on and off since 1998. Originally these appeared on a website I was running at the time, but subsequently some of them ended up in expanded form in the Ashgate book. Originally it was my intention to make a book of interviews, as I have always found such dialogues to be of great benefit to my own development as a composer. Volumes such as Soundpieces by Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras, Andrew Ford’s Composer to Composer, and Kevin Volans’s Summer Gardeners all contributed to the way I think about music. There is a directness in the way composers write or talk about their work which I have found on occasion can reinforce my own ideas, or to challenge them in a provocative manner. In interviewing composers myself, I focus on how they work: what is it that composers do, or think that they do? I tend not to present a lot of context. It is simple enough to discover biographical and factual information, and I’m not really interested in personal histories in a general sense.

The interviews below are taken from the first group made for the old website, from the Ashgate book, as well as some more recent ones. The interviews with Antoine Beuger and Phill Niblock have been translated into German and published in MusikTexte.

Richard Ayres (March 2004 – early 2005)

Joanna Bailie (06.04.12-27.05.12 )

Antoine Beuger (01.12.03-12.03.04)

Laurence Crane (14.06.07)

Rhodri Davies (09.10.07)

Christopher Fox (05.11.04 – 07.11.05)

Bernhard Günter (02.01.04–10.02.04)

Bryn Harrison (05.01.05 – 16.08.06)

Philip Jeck (13.06.07)

Tom Johnson (May-July 1999)

Liza Lim (May-December 1999)

Alvin Lucier (14.11.07)