“Finding out new things, finding connections between things, it’s really fascinating. Look at how we’ve organised societies, look at faith, science, buildings — all of these things change, but they all can tell us who we are as people.”
Sam Buttler
Sam Buttler (b. 1996) is a Welsh composer whose interests lie in telling stories through music, taking influence from cultural histories and mythologies, country music, and community music-making. Sam has worked closely with organisations such as Tŷ Cerdd, Paraorchestra, Ensemble Matters, National Museum of Wales, and BBC National Orchestra of Wales — who performed his piece ‘Stones have memory here…’, shortlisted for Composition: Wales 2022. In 2023, he was selected for the Peter Reynolds Composer Studio at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, and he is part of 2024’s JAM on the Marsh Composers’ Residency, writing an opera with librettist Grahame Davies. Sam is currently pursuing a PhD at King’s College London with Edward Nesbit and George Benjamin, having previously studied at St. Peter’s College, Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London with Aaron Holloway-Nahum, John Traill, and Chris Whiter.
In March 2024, Sam’s debut album and song cycle, To the Waters and the Wild…, was released by London-based group Ensemble Matters. Following the album’s release, we spoke with Sam about the mythology of fairies, Pierrot Lunaire, country music, Mario Kart, and not taking yourself too seriously…
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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hi Sam! Thanks for joining me today. You’ve recently released your album To the Waters and the Wild…, a song cycle you composed for Ensemble Matters — tell me a little bit about how that collaboration came to fruition?
Sam Buttler: Ensemble Matters approached my PhD supervisor, and the King’s [College London] Music Department, wanting to work with some of the composers at King’s. Through discussions with Owen Ho, their conductor… We were talking about what they wanted from a piece. They’d recently done a project all around ‘Pierrot Lunaire’, and wanted to carry that on — new music after ‘Pierrot Lunaire’. What did this ensemble [the pierrot ensemble] look like after that piece of music?
I love history — history and myth plays a big part in a lot of my music. If I didn’t go and do music at uni, I probably would have done history. I’m really fascinated by the history of ideas; the history of how people have come to those conclusions, and how those conclusions have changed. I like looking at lots of different aspects of a certain thing, from various points in history. [So] I thought a five-movement piece really slotted into that. Owen, and Ensemble Matters, really gave me the freedom to have a real play with it; they said “we wanna perform your music, so go and write the thing you want to write” — which is great to hear as a composer.
Of course. What is it about these ideas of history that interested you — and how did you conceptualise those in the piece?
I really struggle to write music that’s abstract; the idea of “abstract” music I’ve found less appealing than music that’s about something. For me, the idea behind the music always comes first; I don’t think of the music and then the idea comes second.
I was doing some research about mythology, and the history of myth in the British Isles — and fairies [kept] coming up a lot. I found it interesting how the idea of a “fairy”, in Britain and Ireland, is very different nowadays to how it was for the majority of recorded history that we have. You have the idea that these fairies are “outside” of our world — in a mirror world — in the example of the tylwyth teg, which is the Welsh [term] for the fae folk. There’s all different varieties of them. For that, I use a poem by Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, in translation.
That was the genesis of the piece. The original plan was that I was gonna have the five movements that [I] currently have, but also have a sixth movement — that would come before the current final movement — that was a setting of Peter Pan. In a lot of peoples’ minds, that [was] the turning point of fairies in British and Irish culture from these shadowy, half-in-the-human-world “trickster” figures, to these benevolent, helpful winged people with wands. But for various reasons, this didn’t happen.
What was it about the approach to fairies in the texts you chose that inspired you? I understand you set a W.B. Yeats poem in the final movement…
There’s a slightly alien aspect to them. I wanted to end with a setting of The Stolen Child by W.B. Yeats — not a complete setting, just bits of it — which is about a fairy stealing away a child, so they never die, but they never age either. It’s quite haunting, but also quite creepy.
There were two things with this last movement that really inspired it. I don’t know if it would be called an inspiration, but [The Stolen Child is] a text that’s been set most famously by Eric Whitacre, where he uses The King’s Singers as the fairy. So you have this slightly otherworldly ensemble against the main choir. [But] always, when I listen to that, I wanted it to go further with that “unease” aspect — to go further with it being [more] creepy.
It was really interesting when over covid, I rewatched a bit of the BBC series Torchwood. In the first series, there is an episode about fairies; and the audio ident they use for the fairies is the refrain of [Whitacre’s] ‘The Stolen Child’. But because the fairies in this are aliens, the voice is really warped, and crackly. And I wanted to have that as an aspect of the music. In the fifth movement, the singer is “speaking” for a lot of it, in a really exaggerated way. I was speaking to my PhD supervisors, [and] my secondary supervisor — George Benjamin — said there’s something really unnatural about having opera singers speak; and that, for me, was the lightbulb moment of “just have her talk!” Just have her talk with these really exaggerated consonants, because it’s going to sound slightly strange in comparison with the singing. It’s not meant to sound human. And I think it works really well.
And of course, Ensemble Matters were looking to expand on the ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ repertoire, right? So the connections of uneasiness are very evident.
I think ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ is really interesting. I remember the first time that I heard it, and I absolutely hated it. -laughs- And I now really appreciate what it does — even though it’s nothing like the music that I write. But with this final movement, it was definitely there as a little musical nod; if you know the repertoire, you think “Ah! Okay, that’s where this comes from.” I’m not a composer that shies away from my references. If I’ve been influenced by this, and you go “this sounds like this” — yep, great; it means at least someone is on the same wavelength as me. I don’t see that as a bad thing.
Exactly — if you wear your influences on your sleeve, you can argue it’s much easier to trace where elements come from. You’ve mentioned how you draw from a very disparate array of musical influences; how does this plurality manifest in your work, and is it a conscious decision?
It’s kind of twofold. The first part is — I really see myself as quite a musical magpie. I listen to lots of sorts of music [in] very varying situations. It depends on what I’m doing. When I’m going for a run, I listen to really upbeat dance music; when I’m out walking, sometimes when I’m working, I listen to a lot of country music. I absolutely love country music. Often, composers that distance themselves from popular genres I feel are doing themselves a disservice. There’s a whole swathe of new music that you’re just ignoring.
But also, I listen to a lot of contemporary classical music, I listen to a lot of older classical music. If I find something that I like, that I think I can utilise in my music — I can do something like this, that plays on this idea more — I find that really interesting. That only comes, for me, from listening really, really widely. I don’t get that from limiting myself only to a single genre of music.
Absolutely. I feel like as composers in the twenty-first century, we kind of have a duty to listen to different genres rather than limiting ourselves.
That plays into the second reason: growing up, I was in lots of different stuff. There are some composers who are “just” pianists, or organists — a solitary musical environment — and composing becomes a solitary thing. Whereas for me… I grew up playing in county orchestras where we played new music every week. It would be film music, little arrangements, new pieces people had written for us. It would be big, “classic” symphonies as I got older.
I’ve [also] played a lot of wind band music. When I say to people about wind band music, some people go “Hang on… what?” — because they don’t see it as something that could be included. [But] there is so much good stuff out there. Like, ‘Aurora Awakes’ by John Mackey, I think is amazing — it’s just beautiful in how he structures the ensemble. Or this really fun, but terrifying, piece to play for wind orchestra: ‘Dragon Rhyme’ by Chen Yi, which I played when I was in the National Youth Wind Orchestra of Wales in 2015. It has this humungous cor anglais solo in it; and I was playing it, got to that point, and everyone stopped playing — and it was just me on my own. -laughs- I love those moments in music where the music just falls out, and you’re left with a solitary voice. And I can trace that back to ‘Dragon Rhyme’.
I was a choral scholar when I went to uni, kind of by accident; I thought “Oh, I’ll audition for the choir, see what happens!” — ended up as a choral scholar when I was at Oxford. And I was in a folk rock band when I was in Sixth Form, with some of my friends. We talked about music in a really different way then. It’s that very disparate approach that has coalesced in my music, to instill this kind of storytelling aspect to it. Because I’ve got all of these different musical experiences that are all really important to me, and all have led me to this point — the easiest way I can find to condense them, and crystallise them, is to tell stories, is to write music that’s about things.
Do you feel like your desire to bring together all of your disparate musical experiences factors to your interests in history?
That goes back to the historical aspect. Finding out new things, finding connections between things, it’s really fascinating. Look at how we’ve organised societies, look at faith, science, buildings — all of these things change, but they all can tell us who we are as people and where we’re gonna go.
I guess it’s not even just about style, it’s approach — you’re seeing these things not just in the music you listen to, but in every aspect of society…
I don’t think I’ve ever vocalised it until now. -laughs- Going back to my love of country music… The best country songs are all about storytelling. They might not be the most “musically complex” — whatever that is — but they tell stories, in such a hard-hitting way. I mean, ‘Jolene’ is a great example of that. It’s not a very dense piece of music — in terms of what the notes on the page would look like — but in terms of the story it’s telling, in terms of the emotion behind it, it’s brilliant. There’s a songwriter called Brandy Clark, and she’s got an album called Big Day in a Small Town — which, in my opinion, is one of the best album of the 2010s. It has these songs that talk to the personal, but also talk to how this all [stems from] a certain thing; on the title track, [she] talks about the small aspects of life that then snowball into bigger events. I love the juxtaposition of the personal and the societal that you get in a lot of really great country music; and I think that is what comes [when] I’m taking lots of different ideas from history — because I love how the societal affects the personal.
Something I’d like to pick up on is your mentioning of both science and the natural world as points of interest in your work — particularly in pieces such as your guitar concerto, ‘Water Portraits’…
That mostly stems from my upbringing. My mum is a paleontologist; she is a curator at the National Museum of Wales, in Cardiff. I always grew up around natural science — in particular, [around] fossils. We went walking a lot as kids; growing up in south Wales, we spent a lot of time on hills. -laughs-
The idea of a landscape is so evocative of music. I mean, think about ‘La Mer’, for example; how even though these are meant to be “impressions”, they’re so vivid in how they portray things, certain techniques throughout it. When I’m doing these more “science-y”, or “natural”, pieces, that’s where they come from.
How did ‘Water Portraits’ respond to natural themes — or our experiences of them — within the musical material?
So ‘Water Portraits’ — which is a concerto for guitar and strings — I thought of the idea of the guitar running along the strings, and that led me to the idea of water. [In] the first movement, you’re on a big ocean, with these huge waves — that you’ll see in a documentary, or a film, but you won’t see in real life, because they’re all the way out in the Atlantic or Pacific [ocean].
The second movement, I wanted to do the complete inverse of that; it’s a very small body of water that’s completely still. The guitarist is scratching the strings with their nails, against the string orchestra dropping and bouncing the bow, and then holding the note — you have these drops of water with the guitar rippling out from these chords.
And in the last movement: similar to ‘Short Ride in a Fast Machine’, the idea you are on a river, on a boat, going very very quickly. There’s a moment towards the end, where you feel like you’ve hit the end of the rapids… And it slowly starts to speed up again, as if you’re in a comedy film, and it zooms out and there’s a massive waterfall. -laughs- It was like, this is a bit of an obvious ending, but this is the ending I want to write — it’s big, and it’s a bit silly, but that’s the idea.
There’s something very experiential about how you’ve channeled natural themes in ‘Water Portraits’. Is that experiential idea of nature something you’ve explored in other pieces?
When I did ‘Extend the Dawn’, for oboe and electronics… It was the first piece I wrote of my PhD. It was in the middle of the second lockdown in 2020, I couldn’t have anyone play it, and I thought: “Okay, what have I got in and around me that I can use?” I wrote for oboe, because I’m an oboist — and quite close to my flat, I had the Hampstead Heath extension. I did a bunch of field recordings there, right as the sun was rising; because I couldn’t go anywhere else.
I find places like that really interesting. They’re almost like a “fake” natural world. Hampstead Heath extension is essentially a park, but they don’t want you to think it’s a park. There’s this contrast between the natural birdsong that you hear when you’re there, and just as you get closer to the road, you suddenly hear all these car sounds — there’s a plane going across, there’s a car alarm — I use some of the takes of the oboe parts to make fake car alarms. I wanted the juxtaposition between the natural and the unnatural.
It was maybe about half six in the morning. I was walking up the hill, and then suddenly I saw the palest, purple sunrise I had ever seen. That was the climax of the piece — that pale, purple sunrise. It meant a lot to me — because it was at a time in my life where I wasn’t at my best, for various reasons. Obviously, the world wasn’t either… -laughs- It was the middle of the pandemic, and it was this moment of sudden peace — this stark moment of beauty that I wanted to capture. The oboe reaches the [climactic] point, and then a chord — made up of all these oboe drones — comes out from under the texture and just explodes. That’s the sunrise in the piece.
It was a difficult thing to write, because it was just me, on my own; and I don’t like writing music like that. I’m definitely a collaborative composer — I like writing music for people — or if I have written it on my own, I like workshopping it with people. I think it goes back to my musical background; I’m an orchestral musician, I don’t like being on my own. Which is kind of ironic that I’m a composer… -laughs- But because of the situation that this piece was created in, I’m really happy with it, because it is so personal, because it’s all me. It’s my footsteps that are going through the piece.
Of course — because that level of independence and control isn’t always a given within our compositional work.
It’s really interesting; because I’ve combined both the historic and scientific approaches, ironically in a piece for myself. This is a piece for oboe and piano, that’s all about rainbows — it’s called ‘Colours in the Sky’. It’s in three movements: there’s an opening movement that [captures] the idea of the rainbow being a message from a divine entity — obviously, the most obvious example of this is the Bible, with the story of Noah’s flood, but it’s not exclusive to that at all. There’s tons of rainbow-messenger gods throughout mythology and history, all across the world. But in the second movement, I wanted to do something that was scientific. [The] whole movement is called ‘Refraction’; the music [consists of] these chords that slowly build up and out, and the oboe bends around these chords. [I’m] trying to represent through music the process that creates a rainbow — which is essentially light bending through something.
And going back to the [more] mythological side, the third movement is called ‘Asgard Highway’. The idea of a rainbow bridge to heaven — [the] most famous example being the rainbow bridge to Asgard, in Norse mythology. There also exists similar ones in Japanese mythology. And then also — very famously — there is a Rainbow Road track in almost every single Mario Kart game. So, I wanted to essentially write what would happen if the Vikings played Mario Kart… -laughs-
Oh my god, no way. -laughs-
So the oboe’s bouncing around, it’s all very fast paced. There’s a moment where you fall off the track, and you float and then land back on — and you’re in a less-than-advantageous position, battling towards the end to finish the piece. When I was looking at this idea… I love the music of John Adams, so ‘Road Movies’ was a big part of the influence for that. But then I thought “hang on — rainbow — Rainbow Road!” Okay great, cool, we’re doing Norse musical Mario Kart. -laughs-
So Norse musical Mario Kart, for oboe and piano… I think I’ve found my favourite genre. -laughs- There’s a real kind of irreverence — or simultaneous reverence and irreverence — to that way of thinking, that I absolutely love.
I often think that music — especially contemporary music — has a problem with looking silly. I think sometimes, you just have to embrace it. I’m really taking this to the extreme with a new piece I’m about to start, which is for a friend of mine — for recorder and electronics. He said “oh, maybe a piece about trains”, and then I just thought: but what [about] a piece about train delays? -laughs- So I’m gonna try and essentially write [about] the state of British railways in a piece, and he seems really down for this idea. I think there’s so often an idea that you have to be very serious — you can’t be seen to be having fun. If we’re doing ridiculous things with sound, why can’t it be fun? Why can’t we embrace the fact that: yeah, this is a little bit silly, let’s make it silly. If it’s about a serious subject matter, let’s take it seriously — [but] if it’s not, it doesn’t have to be.
I very much take the mantra of: take what you do seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously. That’s something I’ve definitely tried to push myself into in the past few years, especially more in my music. If I’m having fun with it, then hopefully the players are having fun with it; they’re not afraid to say “oh, this is a bit ridiculous”, and I just go “yep — that’s exactly what it is!” -laughs- All the music that I love playing is the music that — even though it will have beautiful moments — always has fun moments in it. I want a moment of them going “ooh, this is fun to play.” That, for me, is paramount in my music going forward.
I understand you’re coming towards the end of your PhD at King’s College London, with Edward Nesbit and George Benjamin — how has your research filtered into these aspects of composition and your interests in history/universality?
Going towards the end, yeah. I’m doing it part-time, because I’m working full-time, as well. It’s interesting; my PhD actually has absolutely nothing to do with [these ideas]. -laughs- It was originally going to. I originally was planning on doing something with music and museums — writing around the exhibits within museums and performing around them — but that is a really great thing to propose during a global pandemic. -laughs- Then it sort of changed to the depiction of different viewpoints on similar topics through music, but the issue I ran into — which both of my supervisors pointed out — is that there is a real problem with showing that in the music. It’s all in the subtext, it’s all in the programme note, and if you look at the notes on the page and there isn’t text to it, there’s a problem. That’s always gonna be an issue with a PhD — you have to show [that] what you’re doing is in the music.
So what my topic is now about is voice-leading. Using voice-leading to construct your harmony, your underlying harmony. Because that’s how I construct my harmony in my pieces; I have a chord, and I slowly move the notes away from it to the nth point, and it stretches and constrains the harmony as it goes along. How that process is affected based on what you’re writing for — if you’re writing for choir, what are the limitations there, if you’re writing for orchestra, what are the limitations there? Can you use it as a strictly motivic device, as well? Can you use it as a thematic underlay? In my piece for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales — called ‘Stones have memory here…’ — I use this technique to show the slow passage of time. The harmony is moving a note at a time, but it’s slowly shifting as the piece goes along. That’s what I’ve come to. It is connected to my practice, but it’s not connected to my ideas — in a way, once I’ve got the ideas, this is how I realise the idea.
What kind of ways has the PhD, or your experience of it, has helped you realise your musical ideas on a more holistic level?
I think I had a real lack of confidence going into it. I didn’t really compose at all during my undergrad; I then, very last minute, changed focus [in] my Master’s degree from doing musicology to doing composition. Arguably, the best decision I ever made; I would not have made a very good musicologist. -laughs- But I’ve always felt like I’ve been playing catch-up. I was three to four years behind where everyone else was in terms of training. Doing this has given me the confidence to be like: no, you do know what you’re doing, you do have a voice — it isn’t just necessarily where other peoples’ musical voices come from. I think that’s something that all musicians go through. Your experiences are shaped by the things you have been exposed to, the things you get involved in.
I definitely had that going to [Oxford]. I was not a chorister, I was not a pianist, I went to two state schools in South Wales and [I] played in county orchestras. I didn’t have this stereotypical “Oxford music student upbringing” in a lot of ways. But actually, because of that, I had a whole other raft of experiences that maybe [some] other people don’t have. Not to say that one is better than the other — it’s just acknowledging that not everyone’s gonna know where you’re coming from. And if they don’t, it’s your job to be like “this is where I’m coming from — where would you get a similar idea?” Because then you can both grow as people.
That’s something I really feel like the PhD has helped me do. It’s exposed me to a lot more music, it’s exposed me to a lot more ideas. [It’s] also exposed what I look for in music — the confidence to write the music that I want to write, not the music that I think someone else wants me to write. Which I think is something that all composers have to get over, at some point.
I’d say there’s likely a lot of established composers that still haven’t figured that one out. -laughs-
Exactly, exactly. -laughs- I recently did the Vale of Glamorgan’s Peter Reynolds Composer Studio — if you haven’t applied for it, apply for it, it’s amazing. The course director there, Rob Fokkens, said “if you aren’t writing the music you want to write, what is stopping you?” — or something to that effect. And for me, it was an affirming moment to go “Yes! I am writing what I want to write.” I felt a little bit nervous going to that; because [with] the two pieces I’d written [for the course], one was an idea I had sat on for years, and never managed to make it work, and finally got it to sort of work… And the other was a silly little piece about a pterosaur. -laughs- (It’s not a dinosaur!)
I presented this to quite serious musicians. In the concert the day before the workshop, they played some serious but really amazing and beautiful new music — Sarah Lianne Lewis, Lynne Plowman, Steph Power — and I was there thinking “they’re gonna play my silly little pterosaur piece, tomorrow…” And then just seeing them really light up playing it made me really happy. They were clearly engaging with it, and they were engaging with the fact that I was also engaging with them playing it.
For me, there’s absolutely nothing better than when the performers just say “let’s do it”; let’s embrace this idea that you’ve had that you’ve turned into music. Even with all the historical stuff, all the myths, all the science that is the important thing. If the players are open to it, they like where the influence is coming from, [and] they are enjoying the end product, there’s nothing better for me.
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Stream and download Sam’s debut album To the Waters and the Wild… with Ensemble Matters:
Learn more about Sam and his compositional practice at:
References/Links:
- Arnold Schoenberg – ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ (1912)
- ‘Tylwyth Teg Are The Welsh Fairies From British Legend’, Wales Culture
- J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (Hodder & Stoughton, 1911)
- W.B. Yeats, The Stolen Child
- Eric Whitacre – ‘The Stolen Child’ (2010), performed by National Youth Choir and The King’s Singers
- Torchwood (2006-2011), BBC
- John Mackey – ‘Aurora Awakes’ (2009)
- Chen Yi – ‘Dragon Rhyme’ (2010)
- Dolly Parton – ‘Jolene’ (1973)
- Brandy Clark – Big Day in a Small Town (Warner Bros. Nashville, 2016)
- Debussy – ‘La Mer’ (1905)
- John Adams – ‘Short Ride in a Fast Machine’ (1986)
- ‘Bifröst – Mythological Rainbow Bridge’, History of Bridges
- John Adams – ‘Road Movies’ (1995)
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