Andrew Hamilton can’t remember ever wanting to be anything other than a musician. “I’m the son of a Methodist minister, so I was brought up with lots of hymns all the time. Ministers’ sons are always troublesome,” he says, giving Nietzsche as an example.
“My mother says I was always singing. Then my brother got a chance to learn the violin. He was 10 and I was six. He was playing one day, and I said, ‘I want to play that’. I just demanded it. From that point on I was never really interested in anything else. I was obsessive.”
The violin was his initial focus. “I suppose half of me did have these notions of becoming a concert violinist. And then when I was 16, I went to Chetham’s School in Manchester as a violinist.”
Chetham’s is the largest specialist music school in Britain. “I had studied in Dublin with Maeve Broderick. She was teaching at Chetham’s. That’s how I ended up there. And then, when I was there, I realised I was never going to become a concert violinist. The standard was so high. It was a big shock.”
Years before he went to Chetham’s, Hamilton had started composing. “I think I was 10. It was very natural. I just wrote down things. I think the problem was that I was nearly more excited at that stage about writing than practising. And I loved listening to music. I think the first tapes I bought were the four last symphonies of Mozart conducted by Karl Böhm. I would save up and listen to music more than practise.”
As a composer Hamilton says he has been fortunate in his teachers. “I had very strong-willed teachers. My main teacher was Kevin Volans. I learned from him that you had to edit, and I learned from him not to worry about style. And fearlessness. From [Dutch composer and pianist] Louis Andriessen, I think [I learned] attention to detail. He said, ‘If you’re going to write music that’s not so complex, you have to present it the right way, make sure it’s clear.’ I do remember coming out of every lesson in Amsterdam with Andriessen, closing the door behind me, and my first thought was always: I know nothing. I always thought that I knew nothing.”
When he was 18, Hamilton showed a lot of his work to Gerald Barry. “That was when I first met him. He was quite ruthless. He went through all my scores and said, ‘That’s you! That’s not you!’ Which was quite interesting.” And he was right, Hamilton says.
Hamilton comes across as unassuming, almost self-deprecating, although his conversation is peppered with gusty laughter. As a student he didn’t like to wrangle. “I learned by absorbing like a sponge. I was never someone who talked a lot. I was talking to Kevin recently and he said I was very noncommunicative as a young person. I didn’t say very much. I never fought with teachers and took it all.”
A word that crops up a lot in his conversation is “obsessive”. And the quality is to be found in some of his compositions, too, when he latches on to an idea and pursues it with the kind of fixity you can find in Schumann. Think of the relentless ride of Schumann’s Toccata, or the gentler recursions of his Arabeske or Blumenstück patterns, which repeat and repeat. But in Hamilton’s work you need to factor in a kind of creeping corruption that wreaks intentional havoc, as if the music is made to stutter or experience glitches.
The harmonic and melodic content of his music often has an aura of familiarity about it. But traditional chords and straightforward-seeming lines can be minced and reconstituted in ways that are not just unpredictable but can also linger in the mind with earworm-like tenacity.
“There’s a sense of playfulness in it,” he says. “Yeah. I am interested in art that’s playful. When I was younger I used to get upset when people said my music was witty or fun. I found that awful, because I thought I was a really serious artist,” he says, laughing. “And people would laugh in concerts. I would be so upset. But now I’ve sort of accepted it. If you set out to be funny, it would be awful. I would find it easier to write dark, grey pieces. It’s not that hard. People whose writing I love, like Flann O’Brien and Beckett – there is that sort of dark laugh in the background.”
His new orchestral work, C, was commissioned for the Composing the Island festival at the National Concert Hall. The title reflects his current position that “I don’t want any titles to suggest anything. It’s like a frame, to make them abstract, to give them more freedom.”
How does he actually get started on a piece like C? “A lot of mess,” he says, laughing. “Before I was given this orchestral commission for the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, I suddenly became obsessed with Paul Klee’s Notebooks. For the past year I’ve been going through them in an abstracted way. I don’t know if you know them. There are lots of diagrams . . . looking at nature, art that exists in nature, patterns that exist in nature. I think that was maybe the starting point.”
What happens next, he says, is anything but clear or predictable. “My whole process is very messy, I suppose. It’s not a beautiful sit down and we have a lovely clear outcome. I was also thinking so much of this painting by Mondrian, Pier and Ocean. The thing about Mondrian is that people think it’s all so worked out, don’t they? When I actually saw this in real life, I think I was 23, you could see all of his rubbings out, how he was constantly changing the lines. It gave me hope that my process was maybe useful. Because I’m constantly changing. It’s very much intuition-based.”
Stravinsky famously described himself as the “vessel” through which The Rite of Spring passed, as if he was the medium rather than the creator. Does Hamilton find himself surprised when he hears his own works for the first time?
“To some extent. I’m surprised often by the energy from them. I don’t feel they reflect my personality. I don’t try to reflect my inner life, maybe. I don’t know if that makes sense. I’m writing away from life, and trying to find a different quality to everyday life.”
Many people think that when someone such as Mozart was depressed or short of money he would be unlikely to write music that’s exuberant. Surely pieces are more like a character in a novel, with a life of their own? “That’s exactly it. I find when it’s going really well, the music nearly tells you what it’s going to do. I love when that happens. It takes on its own complete, independent life.
“I write to cheer myself up. Because if I wrote about my daily paranoias or how I was bored, I wouldn’t want anybody to listen to it. For me it’s a form of escaping from conventional reality – to get beyond the surface of daily preoccupation. Writing away from life. I think you can divide composers mainly up into composers who write from their lives, and others who write away from their lives.”
The connection of creator to work can even come to seem tenuous. “The piece that I wrote for Crash, music for people who like art, has been played by three groups now. It was done by a group of people in London last December. I have this very strange feeling towards it, that I don’t have anything to do with it at all. I can’t believe that I made it. A very bizarre feeling. It seems to affect lots of people, and I’m just sitting there going, I can’t believe that I wrote it.”
This interview is an excerpt from The Invisible Art: A Century of Music in Ireland 1916-2016, edited by Michael Dervan and published by New Island. The book is published in connection with the Composing the Island festival, which is at the National Concert Hall until Sunday. Gavin Maloney conducts the RTÉ NSO in the premiere of Andrew Hamilton's C on Friday, in a programme that also includes works by Deirdre Gribbin, Donnacha Dennehy, Stephen Gardner and Brian Irvine. nch.ie/online/composing-the-island
