“As a composer, I am not interested in being ‘interesting’ anymore. For me, writing interesting music is not enough; when I go to a concert, and I listen to interesting music, I have a good time, but I want to feel something.”
Patrick Giguère
Patrick Giguère is a Québécois musician and composer based in Montreal. Patrick’s music is simultaneously personal but designed to be shared, meditative but alive and intense, complex but direct, with emphasis on improvised music practices and collaboration in his creative process. His music has been performed across the Americas and Europe; highlights of his career include collaborative work émettre un son, vérifier sa propre existence, featured in the Canadian Music Centre’s 2022 Picanto Festival, and vocal work Lui, performed in 2021 by Ensemble Paramirabo and Vincent Ranallo. Patrick was a London Symphony Orchestra Panufnik composer 2015-16; his subsequent LSO commission Revealing was premiered in 2018 at the Barbican by Susanna Mälkki, and recorded in 2020. Patrick completed his PhD at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, after having studied at Université Laval; his most influential professors include Joe Cutler, Howard Skempton, and Éric Morin.
In April, Patrick Giguère’s portrait album Intimes exubérances, featuring pianist Cheryl Duvall, was released on Redshift Records. Following the album’s release, Patrick Ellis had a discussion with Patrick over Zoom to talk about long-term collaborations, “innovation music”, longform durations, spontaneity, compositional DNA, and more…
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Patrick Ellis/PRXLUDES: Hi Patrick! Earlier this year you released your debut portrait disc, Intimes exubérances; a 57 minute piano work performed by Cheryl Duvall. I wanted to ask how you first met?
Patrick Giguère: Cheryl [is] a really good pianist, and she’s also the founder and artistic director of Thin Edge New Music Collective. They just released a Linda Catlin Smith album, Dark Flower, that had a lot of coverage in the UK. They commissioned me a piece in 2015 whilst I was in Birmingham and that’s how we got to know each other. It was a great collaboration, so she commissioned me [for] a shorter piano piece in 2018 that was around 15 minutes in duration (which ended up being the first track on the album!).
She premiered that in 2020 and shortly after, we decided to transform the shorter piece into a larger scale work — which took about 3 to 4 years. Through the process we really became good friends. We did a tour in the UK and Ireland in 2022, where she performed the piece as well as Anna Höstman’s works allemande and harbour. During the tour we spent two weeks together and we became super close; and I think this understanding and the friendship really helped shape the piece. She really pushed me in a direction that allowed me to express myself more than I usually would.
When you work for an established ensemble for a commission or a workshop, you don’t really know the performers; sometimes you know the group’s reputation, but you don’t know them as people. So often you work on your own, and you are thinking “do I take risks — and if so, what risks should I take?”, which is always hard to negotiate. But with Cheryl we have a working relationship where I could just write what I want and I know that she would really dig it.
At the start of the process we had a lot of back and forth discussion for a few months. But when we started workshopping the piece, I went to Toronto four or five times and she would play and I would take notes, and overtime I would refine it. So the end project is really informed by the relationship that we have.
With that first collaboration that you did with Cheryl in 2015, were there any moments that made you realise that she was an amazing collaborator for you?
For that first commission, it was more of an ensemble piece and the piano part was nothing special. But I do remember that we drank wine, which was a lot of fun… -laughs- However, this is also very important: when you do all of those music academies or seminars or whatever, the beer after is where you make the connections, much more than the actual classroom or rehearsal space. So that definitely helped the whole process. But it’s really when I wrote the whole piano piece for her in 2018 that we really connected on a deeper level.
As a composer, I am not interested in being “interesting” anymore. For me, writing interesting music is not enough; when I go to a concert, and I listen to interesting music, I have a good time, but I want to feel something. Howard [Skempton] used to talk of freshness a lot, which is something that I kept from him — this idea of freshness. I’m also really into sensuality: not necessarily in terms of “sex”, but senses. You know, music that evokes some feeling of texture, of touch, of smell. What I like about Cheryl as a musician is when she performs, she brings this very sensual way of playing with the dynamics, the textures, the tempo. She’s really great at conveying emotions in her playing. When I compose, I never start by thinking “I’m going to explore this emotion” — it emerges from the music, I never really choose it. Some performers have a colder, more cerebral approach to playing, which can be also great, but I don’t really have that as a composer and she doesn’t either. In that sense we are a good match.
That reminded me of a presentation that you did in 2016, in one of the composers’ seminars at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. I remember a piece of yours that you showed that you wrote in your Masters degree; and you said that it was a “perfect” student work trying to be this innovative thing. But you mentioned that you matured out of that into creating more emotional and sensual work, not trying to prove anything to anyone…
With “innovation music”… this is a very interesting topic, because what is innovation? This is a question that I think about all of the time. I consider myself doing new music and contemporary music, even though it’s not super cutting edge — you know? But I am convinced that this is what I do; this idea of doing something new and fresh is always there, and it is central to what I do. I don’t use recipes, I don’t do the same thing all over again, and I’m always exploring something different from piece to piece.
What exactly is innovation? For me, it’s a very problematic concept. For example, let’s take Sibelius and Schoenberg: they wrote music roughly during the same time, most people will say “oh, Schoenberg is so much more cutting edge than Sibelius” — and it’s like, yes, but no. How do you analyse it? What are your criterias for saying that it’s “new”? You could say “Schoenberg used serialism, etcetc” — which is true, but he’s also using counterpoint and very short phrases, motivic development, and his pacing is very traditional. In the horizontal direction, with harmony, it is very cutting-edge, but with all the things it’s not new at all. But with Sibelius, if you listen to the beginning — I think it’s the First Symphony — it’s just one clarinet solo and it lasts two minutes. Think about it! It’s two minutes and there is barely nothing happening, the pacing is fantastic and it feels very new.
You can use computers, MaxMSP, all of the technology that’s available and still create something that doesn’t question form, that doesn’t question pacing, that doesn’t question texture. So what does this mean, to be new? To be cutting edge? I’m kind of trying to not really think about this. I see it more in the way of freshness and exploration.
Would you argue that what you’ve been striving for in the last ten years has been trying to develop your practice in your own personal way — looking inward and challenging yourself?
It’s not that I’m challenging anybody. I see it more on a personal level, as in: where am I and where do I want to go with my music? You were right about my PhD talking about this; there I talk a lot about spontaneity. By that, I mean having a dialogue with your music. This is something that I think Michael Finnissy said to me a long time ago: you as the composer are the first listener, so when you compose, play, or improvise something, what do you feel inside? In your instinct or whatever. You have to be aware of what’s happening with the music, emotionally and sensually. So when I say spontaneous, it’s in the sense of being in the present moment of being aware of what is happening. So you could start judging: “I wrote this sketch, is it good? Is it not?”
And this is what I mean by spontaneity. You write the music and something happens between the music and yourself, and then you have to be aware of what is happening — and then this is where (for me) it gets really interesting. I’m not saying that I never plan at all; I do plan sometimes, it can be very important and it’s a great tool. But if you plan everything, the danger is that you become more interested in following the plan, than actually reacting to what is happening [in the composition process]. So this is why I try to have an open mind and be very loose with my planning. I mean, I can’t plan what I am going to do in five minutes — how can I plan an hour of music? Every day is a different day: I sit down at a piano, I play my sketch from yesterday, and there I realise “oh, this is interesting, oh this is cool, this makes me feel this, oh this is not so good” — I react to this, and I build it from there. And at the end of the day my sketch is a bit bigger, where I have cut and added things. You have to be aware of what is happening, and I think it’s the best way that I have to judge.
You mentioned there about the duration of the work being nearly an hour long, had you composed any longer form pieces prior to that? What was the longest work you had written up to that point?
In 2020/21, I composed a 45 minute piece for two singers and six instruments with poetry. Actually, that is another album project that we currently have in limbo — we’ve received some of the funding and I would like to share it online, but since we want to make an album of it, I can’t yet. That piece was performed twice, and at the moment it sits on my computer… Very frustrating. It’s not as long, but it’s much bigger because there are eight musicians, so I would say it probably took me much more time to write the vocal piece over the piano piece.
Did you always have an ambition to make a work that pushed for a longer duration? Let’s take Morton Feldman — where as he became more established and confident in his writing, he began to compose larger scale pieces.
There were many reasons why I wanted to write longer works. I have more ideas for at least two or three other projects that are hour long pieces, so it is becoming something that is very central to my practice.
First of all: I think my language takes time. I’ve reached a point where my ideas need time to breathe; I like the little details and the ever changing developments. I like to have one idea and explore it at different angles. So you could argue in the piano piece, there are 17 sections, they are all totally different — but if you actually look at the core material, it’s always the same things, the same intervals.
Also, more on a macroscale and also as a listener myself… I like to go to the movies and see one film that is an experience. I like to go to the theatre and see one production and that is also an experience. I feel like as a listener, I want to go and [feel like] somebody — it can be one person, it can be a team, or whatever — they have one artistic proposition for me. Sometimes, I feel as though [if] you listen to a piece [and] then there is another work after it, the piece that’s around it can influence the way you perceive the other works in the concert. Sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s bad. If you have a very slow piece and then something that’s crazy with lots of things happening and then you have a very repetitive piece, and you are like “oh my god, this was so boring”; but if you had listened to that work in a different context, then maybe you would have noticed the subtle timbral changes and tunings.
So this is why I like to now write a piece that is supposed to be presented on its own. So I can control the listening experience from the beginning until the end. I like to think in terms of the path and the narration and the dramaturgy behind the work, which are all things that I am really interested in and to do that, you need time… -laughs- Do you get what I mean?
Totally! A bad example of curating would be like sandwiching Feldman’s String Quartet, no. 2 with works by Julia Wolfe and John Zorn…
They are all American and from New York, so that would be a way to justify such a program, but what the fuck!? This is just not working… -laughs- For that kind of event, you would have to switch the gears in your brain between each of the pieces.
With the way you describe your composition process, it is something that takes time, because it’s “real time” or in-the-moment composing, doing a bit a day, rather than using a predetermined form. It’s a highly subjective process and your mood each day will be different, so your opinions will be different and that will make the writing slower. If you want to aid that, it makes sense for you to make larger scale works.
I like to compose on one project for a long time. I like to spend four, five or six months on one work, for many reasons. But the main reason is it takes weeks/months for me to start on something; but once I’m in the zone and I know the piece, every day becomes easier and in the end I feel like a rocket. Towards the end of a project, I can write two, three minutes a day easily, and it’s not hard at all, as by then I live and breathe the piece — I just know that what I am going to write is going to work. It takes me months to reach that point; so the longer I have, I can dedicate four months, or six months to a project and the better the result is going to be. I have to trust that it is going to happen. At the beginning I was like “oh my god, how am I ever going to do this?” — but then at the end it’s fun, and in the last couple of days/weeks, I sometimes have a really hard time sleeping because my mind is full of ideas for the piece.
Do you know of Kevin Volans’ keynote speech that he gave in 2016? In it, he talked about a push for longer duration music. When he visited Birmingham, he said that our generation is prone to writing short, 5 minute pieces and instead that we should be trying to push for longer durations. Would you say that writing longer duration music is something that perhaps develops with maturity?
I mean yes, it’s harder. You need to keep going for longer, you need to trust what you do; if you screw up, you screw up a lot, so there is an element of maturity for sure. But I would like to talk about longer duration from another perspective — which is that of people who programme music. I feel like a lot of the curators — not everybody, because there are some amazing artistic directors out there — a lot of people don’t really want to put their trust in one person. They prefer to have four or five composers, and if there is a piece that’s not as good, it doesn’t screw up the whole show. -laughs- It’s as though a lot of artistic directors are playing it safe, and a lot of curators are trying to tick boxes to please different crowds. So they are trying to please a lot of people, but nobody is really satisfied.
I saw your post about [Huw Morgan’s] Mainly Slow Organ Music concert series, I love this! It’s amazing — you know what you are going to get, it’s going to be mainly slow organ music! Absolutely fabulous, I love those kinds of concerts. A few years ago, I went to a Music We’d Like to Hear event in London; and you know, it always has a certain type of music and that’s amazing, you know? I like when it’s clear what it’s about. So I’m not talking about that kind of programming just to make myself clear.
I feel a lot of creative organisations don’t really want to trust the composers. Think about it, it’s going to sound cliche: but who would have commissioned Beethoven for a 5 minute piece? He [wrote] 45 minute symphonies and 45 minute concertos. For me, if I want to express myself and challenge myself, I need someone who’s going to commission and ideally fund me. So it goes both ways with longer duration. To go back to the Kevin Volans keynote: it’s not necessarily that our generation doesn’t want to do longer pieces, it’s just that the context doesn’t always allow us to do it. If people don’t trust you and give you opportunities, you’re not going to rise up to the challenge. This is something that has been really important for me in the last few years.
When I finished my PhD in 2017, I got some commissions — I got an opportunity from the LSO to write a five minute piece, which turned out to be almost eight… -laughs- I was trying to get as many commissions as I could, but it was a rough period of time for me. It was difficult coming back to Canada. I had felt that my last year in the UK was fabulous; I did this piece for BCMG, I had the LSO commission, I had another commission in Montreal and I was super busy working with amazing people. I had an interview on the BBC for their show Hear and Now, so it felt like “oh my god, I have made it”.
Then I went back to Canada, which I regret sometimes — because I had no money and it felt like everyone back at home had forgotten about me. It took me a few years to figure it out; but I was tired of waiting for people to commission me and work with musicians who I didn’t know. I was also tired of only having 5 to 6 hours of rehearsal time, which is what you usually get. I worked with an ensemble, it was a big show in 8 Canadian cities, and in the Canadian new music world, it’s a big deal to have that commission, and even then the trust wasn’t there.. There was just a lot of disappointment for many years.
So it’s not just about duration. It’s also about having agency to be able to imagine something that’s larger scale; not just in terms of the duration, but also the instruments that you want to work with, the venue, what you want to explore… For me those things are important. If I want to write a piece in a 3,000 seater hall like the Barbican or a piece for a church you know what I mean? Those things totally influence how I write when I am thinking about the piece. All of these factors influence how the piece will turn out.
When you rely on rigid commissions, there are already so many decisions that have been made for you: the duration, the performers, the instrumentation, the location, some artistic direction, accompanying pieces. It’s great but it’s also really restrictive, and I was not really thriving. So this is why in the last few years, I have organised my own projects. This is my third big project that I’m doing on my own, from the beginning to the end. It’s a lot of work and it’s very stressful, but it also allows me to think about this. As well as the instrumentation and the duration, it’s also about the type of collaboration that you want to have: is it going to be written, is it going to be improvised, what collaboration do you want? Do you want it workshopped? It’s all of those things. So it goes both ways — you need to have the resources and people have to trust you.
What made it the right time for you in your development as a composer to work on a 57 minute piece for Cheryl?
We applied for some funding and we got some money, which was enough to cover most of the costs — although I had to invest some of my own money into it. But I think it was worth it. I worked on it for over 8 months; there was a really intense 3 or 4 months where I was working on it every day, and with the other 5 months it was more like sketching from time to time. I was working part time as an administrator for a music organisation; having the money for this project helped me quit my admin job, and so it happened nicely where things finally aligned with each other and I was able to do it. I also did a two week residency where I was working on it like a mad man, and four workshops in Toronto.
You mentioned how you had a sketch phase, followed by a period of writing. Martijn Padding gave me this great analogy once where he talked about how writing a piece of music is almost like a tiger circling close to its prey. So rather than writing the piece, you are almost “finding” the piece. Was this the case for you?
The first thing I would say is that each day of writing is a different bit of photography for who I am on that day. As I told you, I have material, I react to it, I develop it, I expand it, and everyday is different — so the more I add photos, the more you start to realise the bigger picture of what’s actually happening.
There’s a quote from the conductor Sergiu Celibidache, a former conductor of the Berlin Philharmoniker — and he talks about DNA. You know how in your body you have those billions of cells with different functions, but they all have the same DNA, they just express it in a different way. With music, it’s like: what is the DNA of a piece? Sometimes it takes a while to find this — months of sketching, exploring, and trying new things — but once you have it, then everything becomes easy. So this is why at a later stage everything comes together very quickly, because you suddenly have the DNA and you don’t even have to think about it — you instinctively know. And Celibidache says, in the opening gesture, you can already tell the DNA of the piece; you have the whole piece embedded and it’s already suggested by the first few measures. But how do you do that? I don’t really know, you know? And this is why I compose: it’s like magic. I can talk about composition for days, but I will never be able to explain how it really works. When the piece all clicks into place, it is one of the best feelings ever.
Celibidache also talks about how the creative brain is working so fast that you cannot retrace how it happened. Sometimes people call it inspiration, but what is that? It’s nothing magic, it’s just your brain making connections so quickly that you don’t remember how it happened. But actually, you realise [that] if you go back to your sketches, it’s all there; your brain just found a way to combine them in a way that just works and that’s great. But you can’t retrace how that thing happened.
In terms of the process of writing Intimes exubérances, it was based a lot around improvisation; was that all done on your end in your own home?
I am a pianist, so I always improvise when I compose. It is a very important part of my process. But my fingers have a specific way of exploring the piano, and they sometimes came up with things that I was sometimes surprised by myself. The physicality of performing at the piano has been very central to my piece. It’s very physically driven — which was something that I realised later on. For example, the first section has a lot to do with the touch, the dynamic markings are very precise with the layering of the voices. It needed a very specific way of touching the piano. The fact that I know how to do this is like physical empathy. For example, when I hear somebody who sings and they don’t have a good technique, I can feel it hurting in their throats, I can almost feel it myself… -laughs- It’s the same thing with the piano. Because I’m a pianist, I kind of know how it feels in their body. So when I was writing, sometimes I had ideas that were really physical, but it wasn’t about the movement — it was about the sensation of the movement.
When it came to fleshing out and refining the material, how involved was Cheryl?
It is a written piece and Cheryl performs from the score, but she still did collaborate a lot; some rhythmical things, sections we reshaped a bit, dynamics, pedals, tempo, phrasing… These are all things that we worked on together. Whilst I was really specific in some sections, I was also really open in other parts. For example, the third track is kind of intense — there were no dynamic markings at all — and when you listen to it, there’s a lot of differences between one phrase and the next.
When tweaking the piece, it was rarely technical things. It was mostly the pacing and the dynamics: “This could be longer, this could be louder, I could push this more, this is a bit too much, I’m repeating this material a lot already” — it’s more in that sense. To have someone play it for you live, it is actually very good to be more objective and make those adjustments.
Could you tell me about how the overall form was shaped? You talked earlier about the analogy of the snapshots being taken each day and realise it’s more of an arc material? Or was there always a vision, even if vague, that came out of exploring?
I knew that there were some things that I wanted to explore. The first sixteen or seventeen minutes were [already] written. I see the piece a bit like when you write a university paper, [and] you put in the beginning what is going to happen — you want to have a rough idea [of] what the paper is about. So I like to think the first track has its own little journey. It moves quite a bit in five sections; there is a lot of contrast between each one, and it works well with nothing else after.
So when I knew that I had to do forty-five minutes or more, I was like, “how do I approach this?” — so I decided to re-explore everything that had been explored before. As I explored those things, I discovered things, had new ideas, and it ended up finally having 17 or 18 sections. I keep every four to five minutes of changes, and I also had ideas of what I wanted to do; I didn’t want it to be meandering forever. I wanted at one point to have some kind of pulsation, so that’s the second track. Another thing that I wanted to explore was the lower register and low intensity.
The fourth track came a bit out of nowhere: I was watching Stranger Things and there’s the Kate Bush song ‘Running Up That Hill’ which was on the radio for a few months. Everybody was crazy about it, and I really got into Kate Bush. One day I was playing the song on the piano just for fun, and I got the idea for one of the sections at the end and it grew out of there. My point is that I did not formally plan everything, but there were things I knew that I wanted to explore.
In the autumn of 2022, you toured with Cheryl in Cork, Birmingham and Huddersfield. Was the work completed by that point — what elements of performing in the tour helped solidify final ideas? Were there any adjustments that you made on the piece prior to you going into the studio to record?
It’s interesting. When we did the tour in October 2022, I had done some sketches, but not many. I had a rough idea of what I wanted to explore, but it was still very vague; and then we went on tour and she performed the first part five or six times. It was very inspiring to hear her perform, hearing the same pieces over and over again; I could spot the differences, I understood the depth of her playing. We also hung out a lot and had a fabulous time drinking in restaurants. I think it was in Southampton — where she was really on a roll and was super intense — and I thought that it [Intimes Exubérances] had to be a virtuosic piece. It’s not virtuosic in the sense of “I made it difficult for the sake of it”, but I know she has a lot to offer.
This idea of writing something “difficult” is that it’s not this idea of it being difficult — it’s the fact that it’s not easy to perform. That it creates some kind of edge to bring the performer outside of their comfort zone and give something more intense to the table. I knew that I wanted to go there. The fact that the piece is not a walk in the park, that it is a challenge; I could see the effect that it had on her. How much more intense the performance was and how exciting it was as a listener. So to receive that intensity, I really needed to exploit that… -laughs- So I would say that the tour really influenced the piece in that way.
With a lot of solo music, the best compositions — at least in terms of the collaboration process — are often the projects where you really bounce off of the performer multiple times in the process. I guess that the tour was the final stage of collaboration for you?
I did work on my own for four or five months when we started doing the workshops; so when we started working together the piece was kind of written, almost. Then the rewriting and editing took a few months. If there is one thing that this process has taught me, it is that I want to do it again with Cheryl, but also with other people — I want to have a long duration work where I work with somebody that I know, or somebody that I like. And it’s not just about me; it’s about them liking what I do.
Cheryl has always been encouraging. She’s always been passionate about what I do and she’s always given so much of her time to do this; so it takes away some of the self-doubt that we have as artists. Every time I was having those doubts, and I told myself that Cheryl decided to work with me for a reason; because she trusts my instincts. Yes, it was a collaboration formed from our previous work together, but it is my most personal work ever. It’s a truer picture of who I am than anything else I have done and that’s because she enabled it with her trust.
Trust is the important word there. They are not only trusting you to write a great piece, but they are also trusting you to take risks and bounce off of them to create the best thing for both of you.
Exactly. It’s not like if there is something broken in your house and you pay somebody to come and repair it, you know? It’s not like that… -laughs- You are building and exploring something. As I mentioned at the beginning, I am not interested anymore in being “interesting” — and this is true. It’s not about writing a piece for her; it’s about making something special. It’s about making something rewarding for me — but mostly for her, and more importantly for the people that we are sharing it with. I want to do things that are magical; I want to do things that are intense, tasty and colourful, I want to make something that really sticks with you after you finish listening to it. I want you to finish the CD and then for you to listen to it again. This is what I’m striving for. I just don’t want it to be interesting. Hopefully it is interesting as well.
More than a decade ago, I had a conversation with Cassandra Miller where she mentioned that “people are interested in people.” People are interesting. We watch reality TV — I love [RuPaul’s] Drag Race! People are gossiping, because people are interesting. If something can be rationally interesting that’s great, but it’s not enough for me. I am interested in you. For example, when you release a track, I want to listen to it because it’s you. We start to follow musicians or other artists because we get to know them, right? And we are interested in them, so in a weird way, I think that we are enough. I’m enough, you’re enough, we don’t have to do more. Obviously, if we start repeating ourselves, and doing the same shit all over again; then we are going to get tired of it and I’m going to stop listening to it. But I am interested in people, how their brains and heart work, and how their instincts work. This is why I listen to your music. I also see it the other way around: sometimes I’m thinking “is this enough?” — but I mean, yes, I think it is. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than this.
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Patrick Giguère and Cheryl Duvall’s Intimes Exubérances is available now on Redshift Records – you can stream and download the album at:
- https://redshiftrecords.org/new-releases/tk545/
- https://redshiftmusicsociety.bandcamp.com/album/intimes-exub-rances
Learn more about Patrick and his practice at:
References/Links:
- Linda Catlin Smith & Thin Edge New Music Collective – Dark Flower (2023), Redshift Records
- Anna Höstman – ‘allemande’ (2011)
- Anna Höstman – ‘harbour’ (2015)
- Sibelius – Symphony No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 39 (1898-99)
- Morton Feldman – String Quartet, No. 2 (1983)
- Sergiu Celibidache and the Berlin Philharmoniker, Berlin Philharmoniker
- Kate Bush – ‘Running Up That Hill’ (1985)
