Dove Shine A Light

Hi. I'm Jonathan Dove. I'm a composer,
and the wonderful William Byrd Singers
are gonna sing some of my music.

My earliest musical memory is my mother
playing the piano while the children were
drifting off to sleep. So I'm, you
know, really just a baby and my
parents both worked very hard -- they were
architects. But in the evening, to unwind
once she had managed to get us
into bed, my mother would go
and play sometimes Handel's Largo or
Debussy's Clair de Lune, I remember
or his Arabesque. Bits of Oklahoma.

And then the next day I would go to the
piano and try and copy the things I had
heard her playing. So that was really
how it all started.

But the thing was just that lovely
feeling of connection. That even
though there was a very cold passageway
between the living room and the bedroom,
I was hearing this music.
I knew that she was playing.

		

I was singing
in the church choir when I was maybe 9,
but it was a very simple choir, not singing
in harmony.
		

First, singing at school -- that I
remember well, I particularly
enjoyed it. Also in secondary schools where
I most remember enjoying the singing
because then we did sing proper choral
music in four parts, and I
think I had quite a nice voice
as a treble and I remember singing.
the Pie Jesu in the Fauré Requiem.
		

At one point our school choir
was affiliated to the Royal School of
Church Music and that meant we could
take part in sort of massed
choral events. I can remember two of
those happening, where everyone will be
sent in music. So I can't really
tell you how many, 30, 40 choirs all
joined together. And so from being 20
or 30 people we all suddenly became,
you know, a thousand or more.

And that was an
amazing experience to be in, to learn
something, you know: to sing your part
and then feel that you are contributing
to this enormous sound. And I think that
experience led later on to writing
community opera and trying to recapture
that feeling of singing en masse.
		

In my teenage years I was always making
up pieces at the piano, but I would
never really succeed in writing them
down -- or what I was able to write
was always much more basic than what I'd
been playing.

I don't know, I feel
inspired at the keyboard [but] learning to
write pieces it took-- my sort of journey
to becoming a composer, that took quite a
while, but I did write a mass I
can remember for the church choir.
As I recall it was quite jolly,
and it was like a sort of tripping
9/8, no 12/8 Gloria. I could
probably still remember, but I think it
would be too embarrassing.

So you know, when years later I came
to write a Missa Brevis, I had already
had a few goes at writing
a mass for a choir.
		

I started when I left university.
I started playing the piano for opera
rehearsals. And that was when I
discovered the whole world of opera,
really that. So that was kind of in
my early 20s and it was really
almost a complete surprise.

I mean, I had
heard some operas and I had seen one or
two, but I'd really not been
exposed to it very much. And
I couldn't believe how exciting that was
and that I was actually getting paid to
accompany, you know, amazing singers like
James Bowman, their famous counter-tenor.
That was a voice that made a big
impression on me.
		

Gosh, yes, I did some work
for the Salisbury Festival, so I wrote a
few pieces, including a choral piece for
them. And I was asked, following
on from that, to write a choral piece,
which is my earliest published choral
work, Welcome All Wonders, which is a
Christmas piece.
		

And not long after that --
again, it was in connection with Salisbury
Cathedral. The presenter asked me to
write a substantial piece
of music, for an event that was going to 
involve a choir and dancers and steel pans.
And organ. And it seemed
like a large piece of music that had to
be written quite quickly. And I said,
well, it'll depend entirely on how
inspiring the words turn out to be.

And so he sent me the words, which had--
there's a prayer, the Benedicite, a lot of
invocations to bless, but also there
were some passages from Genesis. And "in
the beginning was the word,"
there was a phrase I remember about.
"And the Spirit of God was moving over the
face of the waters." And I found
all this music coming, pouring out. And I
had no idea, I thought where did all that
come from? But I realised that,
those images that I had absorbed, you
know, before the age of reason, were
part of my unconscious and even
though I was not a churchgoer
and not consciously living any sort
of religious life, these words 
and images and ideas still
had enormous power for me, and that was
really the beginning of writing church
music.

And a lot of the choral music
I've written has been for church, but not
all of it. And I have found that to
be a very satisfying place to write
about a sense of mystery, a
sense of wonder: a sense of awe.
		

So before I wrote the Mr Brevis, I'd had
a couple of goes at writing a mass, one
that very early on that I mentioned when
I was a teenager, and then one when I
would say that I was pulling nearer to
finding my voice as a composer. But it's
not a published work. It was a mass for,
as I remember it, for two Sopranos. And,
and it was that particular church that
was the choir they had.

And so I had, as it were, made the
musical journey through the the Mass, a
couple of times. But
those are, yeah, as I said, neither
of those are published or indeed
publishable works.
		

And then in -- I think it's first
performed in 2009, so probably in 2008 -- I
was approached by the Cathedral Organist
Association to write a Missa Brevis.

And Matthew Owens, who's the director of
music at Wells Cathedral, and was in charge of the
commission, gave me a clear brief,
which I cannot right now remember [...]

The model probably was the Benjamin
Britten Missa Brevis, which I'd grown up
with on gramophone record. I don't think
I'd ever heard that liturgically at that
point. But I liked it and I — you know
it moves through the text quite quickly.
So that gave me a sense of the sort
of scale I suppose.
		

But I enormously enjoyed writing
it, and I have a particular fondness for
the Gloria, which I feel has this, it's
got a feeling of a dance and there's
also something maybe a bit tribal. 
That is sort of everything I
would hope that the Gloria could have. I
think it may not be the easiest piece in
the world, but I think it's a fun -- it's a
rhythm that's fun.
		

Seek Him that Maketh The Seven Stars is the first
anthem that I wrote and from what
everyone tells me it is the the work of
mine, or would be called certainly anthem of
mine that gets sung most often.
Was a commission from Saint James's
Church in Piccadilly, who had, and
perhaps still do have an annual
service for artists? And so I'm thinking,
well, what words would be suitable for a
service for artists, and if it was
something to do with light?
		

[And it was actually the quotation
from Amos -- "Seek Him that maketh
the seven stars, and Orion, and
turneth the shadow of night into the morning,"
is that right? I mean, this is a long time,
so there's like, 1995, that was 30 years ago I
guess I wrote that. Um.]

I found that in a an
anthology of religious writings that
the uncle of a friend had written. So
that was just a book that I happened to
have called An Anthology of Hope.
And I thought, well, that's it. That's
to do with light and that that was 
so that was the connection.

And it's interesting that it's probably about
the shortest text that I have set
for an anthem, but it felt very full
and it felt like these were words that
you could explore and that would bear
repetition and investigation, if you like.
		

I had no idea that this piece was going to
get performed after the premiere, but I was
obviously thrilled that it has been. I
think I was given very good advice, which
was that on this occasion the choir was
only going to see it half an hour before
the service, but the organist would have
time to practise and so I could therefore
write a tricky organ part if I wanted.

But the voice parts had to be something
that, I mean, that the professional singers
could sight read because it's a
church where there's a small, like 8-part
choir, but they're professional singers. And
I think just imagining that sort of
situation, I think I ended up writing
something which was not too difficult for
the voices and so I think that has helped.

But it obviously I-- because it
was my first attempt at writing an anthem,
well, I suppose I thought was just, Should
I just let my imagination run free? And
that's what came out, yeah.
		

So Praise Him With The Sound Of
The Trumpet was written as a
birthday present commissioned by
Kate [Young]'s parents. And kept 
a secret from her very skilfully
by the choir of Guildford Cathedral,
where she is a chorister.

So every time that they were going to
rehearse it, they had to find some
pretext to to have her not be in the
rehearsal. And I don't really know
how they managed it, but it meant that
when the day came she was sight
reading, or she maybe saw it in the
morning. But [so] it was
a wonderful experience, for
everyone.
		

I'm not sure that you can tell which
order those pieces are written in just by
listening. I think in my operas you can
see a development, because different
stories make different demands, and
one has to find new sounds to convey
feelings that one hasn't tried to convey
before. But also they're very big canvases,
I mean, and you know, an opera might be a
couple of hours of music, so there are
more telltale signs there.

But I think when I, as it were, found
my voice as a composer -- I can't really
explain it more helpfully, but I feel
that they sound like the same composer.
		

Well, writing community operas, as I call
them, they have been such
an important thing for me, and
the first three that I wrote I also
was the conductor.

And also with those first three, there
was a collaborative process in writing
the piece. So I actually wrote some
of the songs I wrote with groups of
people who were going to be taking part
in the opera. So we kind of, it was co-
creation if you like. I think that
was a formative experience, 'cause I had a
feeling of what ordinary people have in
their heads, what kind of music they have
in their heads, and they might imagine,
but I also discovered quickly what kind
of things would be really tricky.

And what kind of things might be,
as you could call it, expensive in
rehearsal time. And so there are some things...
no, I don't think singers differ so much
from each other, but certainly singers
and instrumentalists differ quite a bit,
and in particular because
instrumentalists are usually playing
with the sheet music in front of
them. But when you're writing for singers
on stage, they've got to memorise
everything. And so there are lots of 
differences in terms of what you think of.
		

I had a sort of Road
to Damascus experience that opened up the
whole world of community opera to me,
which was doing a community opera version
of West Side Story, with
200 amateurs in a disused cotton
mill in Bradford. And around
the same time I was
working as assistant chorusmaster at 
Glyndebourne.

So I was going from working with
a professional chorus who were fantastic
and could do everything to an amateur
chorus for whom everything was really
new and who had no training at all.
But they had this look in their eyes,
they were just so excited to be doing
this, to be singing this music.
And to be allowed to sing this music. And
there's also this excitement of doing
something that wasn't what they normally
did. And maybe something
they hadn't even expected to do.

And I happen to enjoy both of those
enormously. And that has carried on. But
that feeling of the hunger and the appetite
that an amateur group can have -- it's
very special. And the excitement that
they had of discovering, wow, we could do
that! I didn't know I could sing like
that or I didn't know that if I joined
forces with other people we could make
this sound, that we could do something
that I would be proud of. It
has felt like, I suppose, the most
unquestionably worthwhile thing that I've
done.

And so I find it
enormously satisfying now to find
opportunities to bring together
professional and amateur because I think
both sides gain so much. And I've
done that several times in community
operas where there are maybe
a handful of professional
soloists and as many people as we
can fit in, which might be hundreds
of untrained or at least non-
professional singers and I
think being next to a professional
singer, you know, who spent their
whole life training, that's very
inspiring. For anyone.

But it's also
very inspiring for the professional to be
reminded of the joy that they felt, you
know, that that made them want to be a
musician in the first place. But that also
applies to instrumentalists working side
by side. So that has been a real joy to
write works where you can bring all of
these together.
		

I think you
can tell from my music, many of the
composers that I'm fond of, you could
possibly tell any piece of music which
I've heard from from it. I always
try to avoid actually copying
anyone else and particularly
because I'm writing essentially tonal
music: that there
are only, maybe 7 notes in a scale, the
chances of accidentally reinventing
the wheel are quite high. And every so
often I find myself thinking, why is that
particular piece of Ravel going round and
round in my head today? I think, oh,
because I've just written it. And so well,
if that happens, then
obviously I change it. I think I better
have a better idea or just a different
idea. But it's something I have to do,
I don't worry.

There was a moment of illumination when
I'm starting out, when I realised that
being deep or being original, when things
that you could achieve through an effort
of will it either you have those things
or not. So I thought, well there's no
point in worrying about
that. I'll just write the music I want to
hear, and other people
can decide whether it's deep or original.
		

The feeling of timelessness is something
that's certainly very important to me and
something I love in great works by
other composers.  One piece that I hope I haven't
copied, but I think of having that
is actually Stravinsky's Symphony of
Psalms, in the last movement.
You just have to listen to it to
to find that which is...it
seems to be music, music from space
sounds too glib, that's not quite what I
mean, and just, just to listen to it.

Arvo Pärt I feel has that quality very much and
it's new music, but also feels like
it connects to mediaeval music and so
it's new and yet old at the same
time.

Those are, yeah, those are the first two
things that spring to mind.
		

I hope to
write music that needs no introduction,
music that you don't have to do any
homework before you hear it. And I want
people -- I mean, this is about opera
particularly -- I want them to be able to
hear every word. And to get what's
happening first time, because there may
well not be a second time, you know, it's
expensive to go to the opera. So
certainly I want -- I hope -- the
audience is going to connect with the
music straight away. I don't want it to
feel difficult for them.

I don't mind if
it's difficult for the performers or
that they have to practise a bit.
But I don't want it to be a struggle to
listen to. Uh.
And obviously, particularly with the
pieces that we're talking about, I
hope that people feel transported or, you
know, carried away somewhere, yeah.
		

I've been asked that lots of times.
The most helpful thing I could say to you
young composers is: just write the music you
want to hear. And in my experience, it's
very easy to worry about what other
people are going to think, but actually, if
you can, probably your hardest critic
will be yourself. So if you can
actually satisfy yourself, if you can get
it good enough, a piece that you're
imagining, to please yourself...probably
other people will enjoy it too. Maybe not
all of them, but enough.
		

CATS OR DOGS?
   I grew up with cats, but actually probably
   nowadays I prefer dogs.

STILTON OR BRIE?
   Both.

LENNON OR MCCARTNEY?
   Go with with Paul McCartney for longevity.

BACH OR HANDEL?
   Oh God, that's hard. I -- yeah,
   I want both.

BYRD OR TALLIS?
   So that is a long answer for me because
   the church to which I wheel my father
   has a strong association with Thomas
   Tallis. And yet they do often sing Byrd
   masses in this church. Yeah, you've
   gotta have both.

GILBERT OR SULLIVAN?
   Actually, one without the other
   you're really lost.

MARMITE, Y/N?
   Yeah.

EARL GREY OR LAPSAANG?
   Earl Grey.

JAM OR CREAM FIRST?
   Yeah, cream I think works better.

SCON(E) OR SCO(H)NE?
   Scon(e).