Composer Julian Cochran on music, maths and method

Com­poser Julian Cochran has two phrases in his pub­li­city blurb which leap out of the page. One, tender and intim­ate, gives a clue to the man:

Hav­ing taken up piano les­sons at the age of 11 at the encour­age­ment of his mother who sadly died not long after, Julian’s gift to her was the abil­ity at this tender age to cre­ate com­pos­i­tions on the piano, set­ting a path for a lifelong pas­sion for com­pos­ing. “I can still remem­ber play­ing a piano com­pos­i­tion to my grand­mother shortly after my mother’s death – so com­pos­ing wasn’t some­thing that was a pro­fes­sional choice or some­thing I decided to do, but rather a way of think­ing or a man­ner of look­ing at life.”

The other, which gave rise to this art­icle, asks:

How does a Cam­bridge born form­ally trained pure math­em­atician find his clas­sical music com­pos­i­tions per­formed on the world stage at Carne­gie Hall?

Indeed! The rela­tion­ship between math­em­at­ics and music is no secret. The 17th cen­tury philo­sopher Gottfried Leib­niz wrote:

Music is the pleas­ure the human mind exper­i­ences from count­ing without being aware that it is counting.

Just open a score of Bach fugues to see how math­em­at­ical struc­tures lie at the very heart of music. So how does Cochran con­nect maths and music?

Math­em­at­ics is beau­ti­ful, any clear thought actu­ally is beau­ti­ful. No-one thinks about the basis of sound, I think, when com­pos­ing in the sense that a ten­nis player doesn’t think about the wind fric­tion over the ball. When I wrote com­puter games some of the math­em­at­ics involved was soph­ist­ic­ated. The way math­em­at­ics is used in even my most abstract music is utterly trivial in com­par­ison. The rela­tion­ship between com­pos­ing and math­em­at­ics is that of tem­pera­ment rather than intel­lect. You are think­ing abstractly and apply­ing logic, you are con­struct­ing some­thing that in both cases really doesn’t apply to the real world, you know, you can’t observe it with a micro­scope, and that per­haps requires a cer­tain kind of tem­pera­ment, per­haps a love of the most dir­ect and eleg­ant solu­tions of logic, com­mon to both math­em­at­ics and com­pos­i­tion. You cer­tainly must be able to think clearly to be a com­poser because a lot of mod­el­ling of ideas have to be held within the mind at once.

Think­ing clearly is some­thing Cochran evid­ently does well: many of his piano works are extremely com­plex and intric­ate. But he is no com­puter churn­ing out music to math­em­at­ical for­mu­lae; hav­ing a mind that is suited to maths means that he is also quick to find order and beauty out of the chaos of musical inspiration.

I think the pub­lic often mis­un­der­stand com­posers as writ­ing the music upon a page while con­ceiv­ing — gen­er­ally the nota­tion is done in a rush as the last step after the work is already con­ceived. The import­ant thing is that the music is con­ceived com­pletely without the lim­it­ing char­ac­ter­istic of mov­ing to nota­tion too early. It is very easy to com­pose some­thing that appears to be won­der­ful by just manip­u­lat­ing sym­bols on the page and this could even have at lot of ingenu­ity — but is com­pletely inef­fect­ive in what is actu­ally com­mu­nic­ated, and inspir­ing to no-one. It is in this way that music is very dif­fer­ent to other activ­it­ies more focussed on syn­tax such as math­em­at­ics or com­puter pro­gram­ming. In fact the very best math­em­aticians often avoid syn­tax and con­ceive objects and rela­tion­ships without syn­tax almost to com­ple­tion before mov­ing to the ardu­ous task of rep­res­ent­ing the ideas with syntax.

In fact, math­em­at­ics touches on philo­sophy as much as sci­ence: thoughts and ideas, not just pre­cise equa­tions. Images of Ein­stein with his violin put paid to ideas of soul­less sci­ent­ists. In fact, Cochran keeps away from struc­tures that might force him to fix his ideas too quickly. The pen, piano and pc are kept at arm’s length for most of the com­pos­i­tional process.

The lar­ger amount of time away from the piano is where the import­ant work is done. This includes repeat­ing the com­pos­i­tion, singing it to your­self within the mind, not exactly, but with enough sense that the struc­ture can be cri­tiqued, the dynam­ics increased, and when return­ing to the piano later sud­denly the music ideas are so much clearer… I have learned by trial and error that the most fruit­ful approach is to leave nota­tion to as late in the pro­cess as you can bear. The music should be highly refined within the mind, you should be deeply in love and des­per­ate to start the nota­tion before a single note is written.

Amer­ican nov­el­ist John Barth wrote, “My feel­ing about tech­nique in art is that it has about the same value as tech­nique in love­mak­ing. Heart­felt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heart­less skill; but what you want is pas­sion­ate vir­tu­os­ity.” Many of Cochran’s pieces are tech­nic­ally chal­len­ging; but what does he feel when vir­tu­os­ity and pas­sion come together in performance?

I know that much of the audi­ence can be spell­bound by the pian­ist’s tech­nique but I do not think in this way while com­pos­ing nor listen­ing to a per­form­ance. The strongest effect upon the listener is from the musical ideas them­selves. Pas­sion can be thought of as taste­fully exag­ger­ated or cla­ri­fied expres­sion of the musical sub­ject. Vir­tu­os­ity is just the neces­sary task to play the sub­ject clearly. So these two things are still just in ser­vice to the music.

The English-born Aus­tralian com­poser, still in his thirties, is dog­gedly climb­ing the pre­cari­ous lad­der which leads to the small and very crowded niche of clas­sical com­posers who enjoy renown for their work.  Cochran received a stand­ing ova­tion when pian­ist Gil Sul­li­van per­formed some of his pieces at New York’s Carne­gie Hall. As a fine pian­ist him­self, Cochran is known for his impro­visa­tions in front of an audience.

I can give a one and a half-hour con­cert that is one hun­dred per­cent a string of impro­visa­tions. Provided my con­cen­tra­tion remain strong — and per­haps the help of a sports drink — they will sound to the audi­ence as com­pleted com­pos­i­tions… To con­vince the audi­ence that the sub­ject is really being cre­ated in front of them, I would need to give 20 hour con­certs over a series of days. This is still not out of the question.

Cochran’s music is influ­enced by the great piano com­posers — Liszt, Ravel — but also by folk music of East­ern Europe. This began when he fell in love with the sounds of the Rus­sian lan­guage, and his pas­sion for folk music of the region followed.

Folk music is appeal­ing by defin­i­tion. It is noth­ing other than pop­u­lar music of the past that has sur­vived by vir­tue of being appeal­ing — the great time fil­ter. Much of the pop­u­lar music played today will not be heard in 100 years but some of it will and that will be what we call folk music in 2100.

I can remem­ber when I learned to play vari­ous scales aged about 11 and which was my favour­ite scale. It was the har­monic minor. I liked the end of the scale, the semi-tone, tone-and-a-half, semi-tone. This occurred to me just recently — but this is the basis of the Romanian Scale which is in most of my Mazur­kas and some of the Romanian Dances. Des­pite this I only actu­ally heard a lot of 18th and 19th Cen­tury East­ern European folk music in my 20s and was greatly influ­enced by it.

Writ­ing clas­sical music from the per­spect­ive of folk music places greater emphasis on melody, less emphasis on ideas that are not entirely clear to the audience.

He adds,

I see my music as hav­ing a strong semb­lance with dance and ideally would like to accept com­mis­sions to write bal­lets. This could involve new works or orches­trat­ing my Mazur­kas for example.

Listen­ing to his Mazur­kas and Romanian Dances, each three or four-minutes in length, it is easy to ima­gine them being used in a col­lage of bal­let scenes, rather like Roland Petit’s Gym­nopédies or Maurice Béjart’s Isad­ora dances. This could be rich ter­rit­ory for Cochran, and cho­reo­graphy is often maths: the 1–2-3–1-2–3 of the count­ing, the com­plex arrange­ments of the corps on the stage, and Rudolf Laban’s nota­tion sys­tem for dance resembles some­what math­em­at­ical equations.

But then the whole world is math­em­at­ics, from bar codes in the super­mar­ket to the criss-cross of cars on the motor­way. Math­em­aticians see the pat­terns that the rest of us observe as life con­tinu­ing around us. Musi­cians see pat­terns in sound that the rest of us exper­i­ence as waves of emo­tion wash­ing over us.

Russian-born Igor Strav­in­sky, whose pas­sion for bal­let was long-lasting and strong, said:

The musi­cian should find in math­em­at­ics a study as use­ful to him as the learn­ing of another lan­guage is to a poet. Math­em­at­ics swims seduct­ively just below the surface.

Read the full inter­view here: Julian Cochran’s inter­view for Gram­il­ano, 27 Septem­ber 2012

 

Pian­ist Gil Sul­li­van will be per­form­ing all five of Julian Cochran’s Mazur­kas dur­ing his upcom­ing con­cert series:

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