["Pomp and Circumstance")
Welcome back to another episode of the Piano Part.
I am your host, Yukimi San.
For this episode, I interviewed Mr. David Hackbridge-Johnson, one of the prolific British composers
of our time, whose piano works were recorded by Mr. Lowell Lieberman, who is one of the
prolific American composers of our time, whom I get to interview last season.
So in the episode with Mr. Lieberman, he mentioned that he was about to release a new album titled
The Devil's Liar under the Steinway and Sons label, and he mentioned that he wanted to
play pieces by contemporary composers, and he stumbled upon Mr. Hackbridge-Johnson's
music.
So Mr. Lieberman chose Mr. Hackbridge-Johnson's piano compositions, including all seven nocturnes,
exclusively for the album, and the rest is history.
Lieberman describes Hackbridge-Johnson's compositional voice as vigorous, unrepentantly melodic,
spurably crafted and orchestrated, and with a refreshing and idiosyncratic harmonic sense.
Since then, I have been super curious about this composer, and since the release of the
album last year, The Devil's Liar, I have been listening to it often, and I absolutely
love it.
It became one of my favorite albums of all time.
So then I reached out to Mr. Hackbridge-Johnson via Facebook to be friends, and finally today,
I got to meet him and interview him.
Just finished the interview session now with Mr. Hackbridge-Johnson, and he's the sweetest
person on earth, and his wealth of knowledge about music and literature, especially the
way he explains with humor, is just so priceless.
So before getting started, I want to welcome everyone who is listening or watching the
PianoPod for the first time.
I'm a classical pianist and educator from New York City, passionate about creating a
thriving and meaningful community of the classical music industry through this podcast.
Please visit ukimisongstudio.com to find out more about my work, and each episode of
the PianoPod, I interview a guest speaker who has been breaking exciting new ground
in the industry before getting started.
I want to thank everyone for tuning in.
Please rate the show and review it on Apple podcasts because every rating review will
help people find my show.
So here we go, dear friends, please enjoy the show.
You are listening to the PianoPod, where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry
about how they are bringing the piano into the 21st century.
I am honored to welcome Mr. David Hackridge-Johnson, one of the prolific British composers of our
time who has written works in all genres.
His name became known to many classical music listeners worldwide in recent years, with
one of America's most frequently performed and recorded living composers and pianists,
Mr. Louis Lieberman's solo piano album under Steinway and Sons label.
The title of the album is The Devil's Liar, which all the pieces are written by Mr. Hackridge-Johnson.
Mr. Hackridge-Johnson has written over 20 symphonies and tone poems, as well as various
chamber, vocal, ballet, opera, and choral music.
In addition, he has written extensively for the piano, including piano sonatas, nocturnes,
and many shorter pieces and piano cycles.
Very recently, Mr. Johnson's newest work, an opera titled Blaze of Glory, was premiered
at the Wales Millennium Centre and presented by the Welsh National Opera and received rave
reviews from multiple publications.
The Opus Numbers to catalogue Mr. Johnson's large-scale works are currently in the 400th
and more.
Unfortunately, however, we get to listen to only a handful of recordings of his compositions
through YouTube and music streaming services.
So here I am today with Mr. Hackridge-Johnson to discuss his remarkable career in compositions.
And I have been a big fan of his music since the release of The Devil's Liar.
So I personally want to promote his music, not limited to piano works, but ranging in
different genres so that a lot of classical musicians, including fellow pianists, will
get to know him and start performing and recording his incredible music more often.
So David, thank you for being here today.
Thank you, Yukimi, for inviting me.
First, I want to tell you, Mr. Lowell Lieberman was on my show and just before he released
his second piano solo album, The Devil's Liar, I loved the album so much.
I've been listening to it since its release in February 2022.
And you know, during the interview session, Mr. Lieberman said nothing but praises about
you and your works.
And out of 70 minutes of our conversation, he spent a good amount, like eight to 10 minutes,
talking about the album, your compositions, and he shared the story of how he found you
and your works in details.
And I just wanted to say to my listeners and fans, if you haven't listened to Mr. Lieberman's
album, The Devil's Liar, Liar as in L-Y-R-E, which is the ancient instrument, U-shaped
harp with piano solo pieces written by Mr. David Hackridge Johnson, please find links
in the description and buy an album or start listening to it via music streaming services.
And if you missed Mr. Lieberman's episode with me, which was published in January 2022,
and where we discussed about this album and talked about Mr. Hackridge Johnson, I wanted
to remind you to check it out.
This link is also in the description.
Anyway, so let's start with this.
I know how Mr. Lieberman found you through Facebook and everything, but I want to know
from your take.
One of the positive aspects of the internet is that it can bring people together who probably
would otherwise never meet.
And I got a friendship request from Lowell and I thought, wow, because I'd heard of him
because he's a major American composer.
And I knew he was a fine pianist as well, sometimes playing his own music, sometimes
others.
I thought, oh, that's interesting.
And then, you know, the nature of these things, you just sit there, not really communicating
for months because we're just on the internet as entities.
But then all of a sudden he did write to me and he mentioned that during lockdown he was
playing the piano a lot and he'd already produced an album, a double album actually, of some
of his favourite rather demonic pieces, including things like Liszt's Totentanz.
And we had started a discussion about that.
And he said he was planning another album, which would include another bunch of favourite
pieces, but he'd want to include maybe something by me.
And I thought, OK, so continuing on the devil's theme, the diabolical, I concocted a nocturne
for him, which was based on a very weird dream I'd had about this peculiar devil-like creature
sitting on a rock playing an instrument with very strange tunings.
And I thought, OK, I'm going to write this.
And I sent it to him the next day.
And he seemed to like it.
And then he said, well, you've called it nocturne number seven.
I think it's number seven, isn't it?
Where are the others?
I said, I don't know.
They're around somewhere.
I mean, they could be in piles of manuscript paper in that corner or in that corner or
upstairs in the attic.
I did find the other six and they needed a bit of tidying up because these were quite
old pieces from nearly 20 years ago, at least 15 years ago.
I tidied them up.
I sent them to Lowell one by one.
And then at that point, he decided, you know what?
I'm going to do an album entirely of your music, David.
And I was quite amazed.
And I thought, I didn't know what to think, really.
And I thought, well, maybe he'll go away and maybe he'll change his mind.
Maybe he'll think, actually, maybe this stuff's not so good as I first thought.
But literally within a few weeks, he sent me practice recordings that he'd done in his
own house and then said that he was going to go to a recording studio where Sergey,
who I don't know whether you know Sergey, has a recording studio and he's just going
to do them.
So I think probably within six months of us having any kind of official communication
other than just staring at each other in the ether, he had an album out and Steinway had
agreed to issue it.
OK, that's remarkable enough.
And that would have been fine had he just played the pieces and that's fine.
But there was the fact that the way he played the pieces just so impressed me.
The fact that regardless of what one's opinion might be of the music, I can't say.
Other people have to say that for me as a composer, he got right inside the style, right
inside the marrow of the music to produce these very, very intense, intimate and intense
performances, which I was absolutely thrilled by.
And it was really just one of those strange things where, you know, six weeks after first
speaking, he's made an album of my stuff.
So he's always been a hero, but he's now a double hero for me.
The title of the album is actually the title of Nocturne No. 7.
Did you write the Nocturne No. 7, The Devil's Liar for Loa?
He asked me whether I would like to write a piece.
I wrote a piece that very evening.
I sent it in by probably breakfast time the following morning and said, look, I want to
dedicate this to you.
He'd sent me a hamper of his own music, by the way.
He'd sent me some sheet music and I already had some CDs of his.
So I felt like I owed him something anyway.
And now that we were actually in proper communication, I thought, well, whatever he does with this
piece, I don't mind.
I'm going to write him something just as a greeting, as a sophisticated greetings card,
if you like.
So it's written for him.
And it is an interesting sound world that just happened to be in my mind.
It's not a showpiece.
It's not really even impressionistic.
It's part of my, I have an obsession with the late piano music of Liszt and it's a music
that Lowell loves as well.
So I thought, OK, this is in my head.
So it comes out and I thought it's got Lowell all over it because I knew his Frankenstein,
of course, as well.
The wonderful ballad that he wrote, the DVD of which I bought some time ago.
And the fact that Lowell writes very melodically, but also in Frankenstein, there's this, it's
not just the horrible horror aspect, it's the pathos.
It's the sadness, the melancholy of this creature that's been made and is rejected.
And it comes out of Gothic horror, but also feeds into the decadent literary movement,
all things I'm terribly interested in.
So I think we already had a kind of meeting of minds, not just musically, but also intellectually
and culturally.
Right.
And then also in the episode that I spoke with him, he was very impressed.
He of course himself is a composer and he was very impressed the fact that, you know,
at that point it was Opus 405 and not only the amount, but the quality and the variety
of music that you are making.
And then, you know, let me quote him.
He says, David is a terrific composer.
I am very excited about this release, hoping this album will make many others to explore
his music.
So that's what he says.
So let's talk about this album, The Devil's Liar, now that people have the access to your
music through, you know, streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music and so forth,
then people get to hear your music.
The album includes seven Nocturnes and then Belphan there and Barclaylal LGs and then
Calligraphic poems, which has six different pieces.
So let's start with your Nocturnes, Nocturne number one, Noturno, Spettrale, which is,
I heard a lot of Chopin's excerpt.
It started with a left-hand pattern with, I think it's an excerpt from Barclayl.
Yeah, it's put in a minor mode, isn't it?
So that set you up for what is a parade of Chopin-esque phantoms that haunt the music.
And Chopin is to me always extraordinary.
He's never old-fashioned.
He's always modern.
He's so far from a parlor composer.
There's this mistaken view that, oh yes, Chopin, yes, we should all learn Chopin because we
can just sit in our drawing rooms and play it and it's nice.
And of course, that's fine.
Chopin always sounds nice, but I think he's much more than nice.
I think Chopin is a profound musician because of what he did, not only in terms of piano
texture, but also harmony and counterpoint.
He loved Mozart and Bach.
So it's not this rare if I airy-fairy aesthetic.
It's an aesthetic that's really firmly rooted in classical counterpoint and harmony, which
he then extends using the piano as a palette, like a painter.
So you've got this, suddenly the whole piano is available rather than just thinking in
terms of, well, we have a melody and we'll accompany it.
Suddenly that the hands are more widely spread.
There's interlocking.
There's all sorts of things that I think was probably revolutionary at the time.
Probably Czerny was doing some of that kind of stuff, but in a more, in a less revolutionary
language.
And so I thought, well, I'll pay a little homage to Chopin, whose music is always modern,
always shocks me when I hear pieces.
And I think, oh, I thought I knew that piece well, but something so incredible just happened
there.
And it makes you want to start thinking about music in a different way all over again.
Tell us more about the next one, Nocturno, Misterioso and so forth.
Oh, yes.
Now I haven't got the music with me.
Is that the one I wrote for Michael Garrett?
I can't remember which one that is.
There's another very strange one again, which has its links with decadence and the occult
and mystery.
So again, probably coming from my obsession with the late piano pieces of Liszt, where
you have elements which you could perceive as tonal, but they're not resolved in a tonal
way so that the traditional functionality of harmony breaks down and you start to get
very strange progressions and you can play around with them.
You can start with the whole tone chord and then you can do things with that.
But then you can introduce alien elements to the whole tone chord or you can have the
two different whole tone chords going on at once.
All sorts of availabilities that were explored by Busoni, of course, as well.
So that's the root of that one, I think.
Would you like to show us what that means on the piano?
I mean, if you're thinking in terms of improvising, which of course I do all the time, it's one
of the things that...
Or something, just to get a harmonic flavour of something.
So I like, when I'm composing, I like sometimes to think of two or three different harmonic
strains going on at once.
So an easy way to experiment with it, and you find wonderful harmonies, is to just put
the right hand on the black notes and the left hand on the white notes.
And you suddenly have a harmonic world opening up to experiment with, to experience, and
then see if you can...
And that's just playing chords, but you then have to find the actual material to make a
composition.
But that will inspire you to titillate your ear so that you can get into a harmonic mode
for that particular piece.
I see.
Wow.
That's really fantastic.
Just to know the secret of that particular sound that you create.
And also, like number four and five, I don't know if you remember all these pieces, but
there are some of the nocturnes that have really sensuality, and then some of them are
sweet.
So number five to me sounded more like, reminded me of Eric Satie, like a mood.
Yes, that's the one in E minor, isn't it?
I don't remember the key.
Is it this one?
Yeah.
That one, I can't remember.
I've lost the music.
The music has been sucked back in to the vortex of stuff in this house.
So it would come out again, but it's not on the panel at the moment.
I should have made more effort to find them.
Yes, that has a Satiesque beginning.
I wanted to write something very, very simple and modal, but then I wanted to smudge that
image.
So you can set up something that's nice.
It's got that hypnotic appeal.
It has a pastoral quality to it, perhaps.
But then it's like you do a watercolour painting, but before the paint is dry, you take your
hand and you go...
And so in the subsequent verses, because I think it's basically in three verses, that
nocturne, the subsequent verses, they get progressively more chromatic.
So that you end up, by the end of the piece, you've moved into a form of expressionism,
so that all of the simplicity of the opening harmonies are distorted to produce something
that's not just wistful and pastoral, but something that is almost agonised in its expressive
content.
That was quite deliberate.
Wow.
Okay.
Beautiful.
What a beautiful, beautiful nocturne.
And very...
I don't want to say strange, but it is like a very strange sound too.
It to me can often hover into the strange.
It might start out perfectly straightforwardly and simply, but it can then change.
I think it's the process of change that fascinates me.
How you get from A to B, where you've got an emotional trajectory that's taking you
away from an idealised form of expression, which you think, oh, that's nice.
That could go on like that for...
That could go on like that for five minutes and everyone thinks, oh, that was nice.
But to then do something else and think, oh God, what's he doing?
What's he doing?
Why is he doing that?
It's almost a challenge to the preconception of the listener.
I like composers who do that.
Yeah, it almost takes us to really the darkness, darkness within us.
We always want to try and be good.
I think most of us want to try and be good, but we also have the capacity for darkness
and mystery, even to the extent that we don't know what we are.
We don't know what's inside us and we don't know what sort of personality we are.
There's a self-questioning, which of course we try and push away because in our day-to-day
lives we just have to try and act as peaceably and as normally as possible in order to...
Negotiate ourselves through life and relationships.
We all have a dark side.
Yes, absolutely.
That's why Lowell's first piano album is The Personal Demon.
And we always battle with that personal demon, right?
Yeah.
I suppose it's a bit of a cliche to say that he's a neo-romantic composer, but he's capable
of writing the most gorgeous melodies and lush harmonies and he's got this virtuosic
piano technique, but where does the gargoyles set come from?
That's his dark side, isn't it?
Those pieces where you...
Oh gosh, you know, it's a bit disturbing.
Speaking of disturbance, The Devil's Liar.
Oh my goodness.
The introduction.
How in the world you were able to create that sound.
Wow.
It really was like The Devil is playing the harp and luring you.
Scary.
I can't remember what scale I used, but it's something like that, isn't it?
That starts the piece.
That's in the dream.
This weird creature, devil-like creature sitting on a rock literally strums the strings.
When I woke up, I was quite glad to wake up.
I thought, thank God I'm out of that.
So yeah, the piano piece really mimics that.
That sound, that weird, strange scale was really as close as I could get to what I was
actually hearing in the dream because I heard that music in the dream.
It was very, very vivid.
So yeah, that's literally what I was trying to do at the start of that piece to create
that same rather oppressive, scary atmosphere.
But yeah, to do with a fairly standard impressionistic piano technique, but then to put it in a rather
mysterious context.
And it's just one of those strange things that the music comes out.
You think you know what you're doing, but sometimes it's a bit strange, the creative
process.
Sometimes you're not thinking.
You're listening.
Oh, I will invert that theme and do double counterpoint with the blah, blah, blah.
And then I'll use, no, I don't have any of those thoughts when I compose.
I mean, it might be that once I've written a piece, you can go back and analyze it and
see that that's exactly what I've done, but I won't be consciously.
I don't know what other composers think when they compose, but certainly for me, I might
discover afterwards that I've done something.
Oh, that was quite clever.
I did a bit of that, but did a bit of a Stretto fugue there or whatever.
But normally it's the listening that dictates the process.
Often the music is already there.
It's kind of up there somewhere so I can see it and hear it, an object.
And all I have to do is bring it down and write it out.
And the writing out is almost non thought.
It's simply this.
Wow, that's you're like Mozart where the music is all inside and then no one's no one is
like Mozart except Mozart.
Yes.
I mean, Elgar said that the music was in the hills around him.
So I don't live anywhere near hills.
So I suppose I could say that the music is on Tooting High Street where I live.
Actually, where are you tuning in from today?
I'm in Tooting, which is a part of southwest London.
It's towards the end of the Northern Line underground.
So I'm within 20 minutes of Waterloo station.
So it's a great place to live.
It's a wonderful community.
If you go into the center of Tooting, you can pick a restaurant from almost anywhere
in the world because it's a tremendously multicultural area.
I love it.
I've been here for over 20 years now and I love it.
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So you were born, raised in England.
Can you tell us a little bit about how you discovered the love for music?
Where does your musical journey begin?
Well, it comes from my family essentially because my grandmother who was half German,
she sang the Lieder of Schubert and Schumann and Brahms and Hugo Wolf.
So I had that from a very early age.
My mother also sang.
My father played the piano and was a conductor.
I mean, he had a job in the city, but he in his spare time, he was a conductor and he
conducted a church choir, the choir of St. Boniface German Mission Church in Whitechapel,
which is still there.
It's a beautiful building, which if you ever come to London, you must visit.
It's a wonderful church.
And so I was from a very early age, from six, seven, I was aware of the masses of Mozart
and Haydn and Schubert, which my father used to conduct with this choir.
My brother, he was older than me.
He's three and a half years older than me.
He was both the best kind of musical brother and the worst kind of musical brother because
he's a brilliant pianist.
And he was winning silverware at all the local music festivals when I was very tiny.
And I was persuaded to have piano lessons.
And I thought, well, my brother is marvelous because I can just listen to him playing the
piano and it sounds absolutely wonderful.
I'm hearing all these wonderful pieces that he's playing.
Why should I bother learning the piano?
What's the point?
He's done it already.
So that was the worst kind of brother.
He's absolutely marvelous musician.
He actually went into pharmaceutical chemistry, but he still plays, he plays the metanus sonatas.
He plays all the foray piano music.
When he was very young, he was already playing Debussy Preludes and Schubert sonatas and
the Chopin Nocturnes.
So I'm thinking, well, this is lucky.
I don't have to do any practice because I can just listen to him.
So I was actually a very late starter with the piano.
I did have violin lessons when I was seven, but very late starter on the piano.
And I would have periods of flunking out completely where I wouldn't do any practice.
That changed actually a little bit later on when I got into jazz.
I went on a conducting course in Canford, which is in the south of England under George
Hurst, who was a wonderful conducting teacher, wonderful conductor.
But actually after the conducting lessons, we just used to muck around on the pianos
and there was a young student about my age, perhaps a bit younger actually, who was mucking
around playing jazz.
I said, what are you doing now?
What's that?
I mean, I'd heard some jazz, but I'd never tried to play any.
And he showed me the blues.
All I'm doing is the blues scales.
And he was called Tolga Kashif, who is quite a well-established conductor now.
And that was it.
I was off.
So I finally found something I could do.
I found something I could do on the piano.
I didn't have to look at any music.
I didn't have to read and learn pages and pages of piano music.
I could just sit down and improvise using these building blocks that Tolga Kashif had
given me.
So I suppose that's the pianistic side of me.
I was lucky to have a very good violin teacher called Louis Rutland, who was in the Royal
Opera House Covent Garden Orchestra.
I then had singing lessons with Fabian Smith and Arthur Repklus.
I did actually study singing at the Guildhall with Arthur Repklus, who had been the teacher
of Sageraint Evans.
And at the same time as he was teaching me, there was a lad who used to come in after
my singing lessons.
Arthur Repklus was very cheeky, very naughty.
He used to say, oh, look, there's, oh, look, there's Brynn.
Brynn, come and show Dave how to do it.
It was Brynn Snout, Sir Brynn Turfell.
Can you believe it?
Wow.
And he would come in, blast the room apart with this fantastic baritone voice.
He was only 18.
And I thought, oh, why am I bothering with this?
So my early years were slightly checkered because I was always coming up against people
who were so incredibly talented, my brother, and then having Brynn come into my lessons.
I thought, gosh, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this.
I'm not in this league.
So I actually became a professional jazz musician for about 20 years because that was something
that was just me.
I was just working out my own thing and composing as well all the time.
But certainly performance career was almost entirely as a professional jazz musician.
Yes.
And then I watched some of the improvisation that you did on the YouTube.
And also, in fact, I don't know if it's a jazz style, but this morning you composed a
little song for this piano part.
It's not very jazz.
I can't resist envelopes.
I think envelopes are very good.
I don't know whether the camera is able to pick this up, but I find envelopes are extremely
useful as a compositional discipline because you're only allowed to write what fits on
one.
So it teaches you something.
I ought to mention here one of my most inspiring people in my life, Ronald Stevenson, who is
a wonderful, he's passed away now, sadly, but he was a wonderful composer, pianist.
And he was particularly interested in composers like Liszt and Busoni and Edward Grieg and
Percy Granger.
And he said, you know something, David, I think it takes as much skill to write a Grieg
lyric piece as it does to write a Mahler symphony.
Now that's a point of discussion, but I knew what he meant.
And I quite like the discipline of the envelope.
I can play this for you if you like.
I reserve the right to make lots of wrong notes.
They'll simply be a new variant, an instant variant.
Sounds great.
So I hope the piano doesn't sound too echoey, just in case it will.
It is quite a slow piece, so maybe the echo will help it.
But I've called it, I don't know whether you can see the title.
It says Piano Pod Prelude.
Oh my goodness.
I want to take this photo of it and I want to play it too.
I will photograph it and send it to you later.
Sounds great.
Thank you so much.
I mean, it means so much.
I feel so special.
And I want that envelope.
Oh, I want the envelope.
Can you send it?
I mean, I better write it out more neatly because it's all terribly messy.
But it's another one of my rather strange meditations.
So it isn't particularly jazzy.
But anyway, here goes.
Is that...
or something like that.
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Let's continue with the episode.
So you mentioned that you you learned to sing.
So you were writing a song cycle or song cycles that set poems in French, German, and Old Norse, Elamite, and ancient Babylonian, as well as English.
Are you also a linguist?
Well, I tell you, I'm a lover of language, but I'm pretty useless at languages.
So I love particularly French and German literature, which I can just about read, but not always translate at sight.
My brain gets too tired. I'm not fluent in either of those languages, and I'm certainly not fluent in ancient Babylonian or ancient Elamite.
But I'm fascinated by the ways in which languages allow you to express things differently that don't translate and never can.
And in translation, of course, you're on a continuum between doing a literal translation of the original or making something slightly different in the in the new target language.
But you can't really have it both ways because there are certain things in a language that obviously don't translate.
First and foremost, the actual sound and I think the actual sounds of words fascinate me and interest me, the colors of words.
And of course, if you if you grow up singing Schubert and Schumann, you learn about the color of the voice, how the voice colors words and how words color the voice.
It's a two way thing. So it always used to interest me when my my grandmother particularly used to sing in German exclusively, although she was an East End.
She lived in the East End of London. She was of German parentage.
So she only ever sang in German. I thought, well, I have no idea what she's singing about, but I understand something of what it is simply from the sounds.
And each language will have a completely different soundscape.
So I'm afraid I can't I can't I'm not like one of these people who can speak 11 languages. I'm very jealous of those types of people.
I struggle enough in English.
No, you're doing great. But this is a very maybe sort of simple question.
But do you think each language, let's say French, German and, you know, these all these ancient languages, do they affect the way you write music?
So let's say if you're writing a music to French poet, poet, poem or German, then does the music come out differently in each language?
Yes, of course. I think it does.
And that's partly because of what I've just said about the colour of language and the colour of word.
Also, it's to do with the fact that you can't pretend to be an island isolated from a musical past where those languages have a body of music attached to them.
So there's an enormous difference between a who revolved from Claudio Bussi musically and in the way that they set words and in the way that words inspire them.
A huge difference, say, between between someone like Richard Strauss and Gabriel Fore.
Again, I mean, you could explain these things technically and we could be here for hours talking about the musical reasons why they're different.
But I think it's plain just by listening to those composers that they have a different sound world that seems to somehow be symbiotic with the language that's being set at the same time.
And it's going to be partly with the word stress and what kind of rhythmic melodic figure will suit.
I mean, a great example is is Janacek, so that when when he's he's setting Czech language, I presume I'm not an expert that has distinctive speech patterns that dictate his rhythmic and melodic shapes.
And it's clear with Bartok's folk music as well. These are rhythms and shapes that you don't find, for instance, in English.
There's a lovely comment by the composer, Louis Andreessen, who said all English music sounds like green sleeves to him.
Because of the way English English people don't know they're doing it, but we all speak we all apparently speak in iambic pentameters.
We speak like that's the way it sounds. I must buy some carrots and bread today.
We speak in these iams, apparently. I mean, sometimes it's quite fun. You get on a bus and you listen to people speaking and they're just speaking about what they're going to do that evening or see you later, darling, or whatever.
I'm on the bus. See you later. But they're speaking in these iams. We don't speak like this. We don't speak like that, which is the sort of rhythm you might get in a in a Middle or Eastern European language.
That's going to affect the music that gets written. I'm certain of it.
Yeah, interesting, because I live in New York City and then each, you know, we have five boroughs here, you know, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx.
And I mean, it's all, you know, here in America, we say melting pot. But however, you really hear specific accent the way they speak in specific section of the town.
Well, I'm sure that's right. I mean, as a family, our favorite show on TV, which we used to sit down Saturday nights was Kojak. Do you remember Kojak starring Telly Savaris?
I'm not really familiar.
You can watch it on YouTube. And if I remember correctly, it's set in Brooklyn. So when they go into they go into a bar and they they order a cup of coffee, I want a cup of coffee.
So it's like this. We thought this was brilliant. We thought it's absolutely brilliant. We were sitting there watching this.
And my father would turn to me laughing. He said, I've absolutely no idea what any of them are saying. I said, no, dad, neither do I. It's brilliant, isn't it?
Because we couldn't quite catch that the accent was so strong, but you could you could still work out what was going on because it was so expressive.
It was so it was so musical. So I love that. Now I'm addicted. My opus numbers are ridiculously high.
But believe me, they'd be a lot higher if I was able to suppress my addiction to American B movies and film noir.
Accents are really fascinating. I mean, I don't want to stereotype anyone, but stereotypes, you know, some it does exist.
And then, you know, let's say, for example, if you go to the borough like in the Bronx and that's where the hip hop music was born, basically.
So obviously, their language, the way they speak really is does affect the music.
Yes. And what I what I don't like is language totalitarianism, where somebody is saying, oh, you shouldn't speak English like that.
You should speak it like this. I don't agree with that. I think if you start to suppress people's natural way of speaking, you can end up suppressing their culture.
So don't think it's a very good idea. And I think what what allows us to live together, even though we're different, just recognizing difference and celebrating it.
I mean, we've had this terrible problem in this country. I don't know whether it's quite as bad now.
But certainly when my parents were growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, we were a class ridden society.
And one of the ways in which class you gave yourself away class wise was through language, through your accent, so that people literally had a scale of accents.
And the more posh your accent was, the better you were.
But if you went down the scale and you like all my my mother's side, they're all companies, they're all from.
So they talk like that, you know, I mean, it's all like that.
I'm going down the shot. I'm going to get a bit of butter and a bit of bread.
Now, if you spoke like that, people would make automatic assumptions about your your intelligence, your abilities, your cultural position in society.
And they can be completely erroneous. You can make all sorts of wrong assumptions about people just by the way they speak.
I don't think we should make assumptions in that way.
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. Well said. Yeah, I agree with you.
I want to specifically ask you about the calligraphic poems in the Devil's Liar album.
So what are those pieces? Well, those pieces were inspired by a book I have again buried upstairs somewhere, which was a calligraphy.
It's the catalogue of a calligraphy exhibition that, if I remember correctly, was held in Washington, Washington, D.C.
I think that is in the 1970s somewhere.
It's something I picked up in a in a secondhand shop or I should say thrift shop for American listeners.
I brought it home and it's got these fantastic reproductions with just the ink brushstrokes.
And I thought they were like musical compositions because they have line and they have form and structure.
And it suddenly occurred to me that I could write a set of pieces that was inspired by that.
They're not inspired by individual drawings or paintings, but just the idea of creating lines.
You'll notice that most of those pieces have quite a simple texture.
It's almost as if there's a single line being drawn across the piano to make a shape.
So it's really a form of translation from the look of a painting to the sound of a short piano piece.
And so I did six of them.
And, yeah, I sent those to Lowell and he thought they fitted well with the idea of a recital.
And I was interested at that time.
And again, it was part of this rather maverick exploration that I go on.
I thought, well, you know, I was exploring.
Also, I wrote a piano sonata based on Korean ceramics at around the same time.
And that was a rather interesting project.
Again, that was from stuff that I'd seen in museums.
How many piano sonatas do you have?
Well, there's 18 in total.
And to my knowledge, none of them have been performed in public.
I mean, where can we have the access to scores?
Well, I don't have a publisher.
This is another aspect of my life that I've been particularly lazy about is actually finding one.
And I don't have one.
So it's all buried there in corners.
So at some point I have to get it out and disseminate it more effectively, I think.
That concludes the first half of this fun episode of the PianoPod with David Hackerich Johnson, composer and multi-instrumentalist.
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Tune in this Thursday, June 22nd at 8 p.m. to hear the rest of the interview with Mr. Hackerich Johnson.