“When we look to the future of a lot of artforms, it’s going to be about building more experiential ideas; and that sense of worldbuilding within classical music will become really important. We’ll want to create an experience rather than just a concert, a thing that people can feel enveloped in and engrossed by.”
Alex Groves
Alex Groves is a British composer and curator working across contemporary classical and electronic music. His work blends classical instruments, ambient textures, and live-processed electronics to create uncanny soundworlds which blur the line between acoustic and electronic. His music has been presented nationally and internationally at the Southbank Centre, Barbican Centre, Kings Place, Britten Pears Arts, Het Concertgebouw and monom Berlin, and released on Nonclassical and Bedroom Community. Alongside composing, Alex runs SOLO – a performance platform for leading contemporary classical soloists such as Rakhi Singh, Lotte Betts-Dean, and Joby Burgess to explore the music they love in an intimate setting. Alex is currently a Britten Sinfonia Magnum Opus composer 2024-25; other recent projects include commissions for Kate Ellis, Zubin Kanga, and Ben Goldscheider, and performances across the UK, Europe, and the US.
Alex is currently in Massachusetts as a 2024 Bang on a Can Composer Fellow, preparing for the premiere of his piece hottt at Bang on a Can’s Loud Weekend in August. Patrick Ellis spoke with Alex ahead of his travels to Massachusetts to discuss sculpture, artist-led curation, hyperpop, John Luther Adams, and embracing change…
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Lately, there has been a lot of change and development in your practice. I wanted to start off by asking which artists (of any genre or discipline) who are known for changing frequently have inspired you over the years?
Alex Groves: I often get very into specific inspirations. I find out as much as I can about them, and explore their way of thinking about their work as a tool to help me find out how I think about my work. It often happens with visual artists, and people who aren’t making music — because then there isn’t the danger of getting so wrapped up in someone’s musical sound world that you then end up composing in it yourself.
There were times post-university where I did the deep dive into American minimalism — as probably quite a few people have — composers such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros, all the people that were at the forefront of that movement. That was a really exciting time for me. Strangely, I hadn’t been exposed to that kind of music much at university, because of the courses that were on offer and the modules that I took.
Through that, it led me to get interested in Bridget Riley’s Op art and her work with repeating patterns and structures, and playing with perception. That way of creating a work that has to be experienced in order to actually see it. The act of viewing it is as much what creates the work as the act of painting it, and there’s a nice parallel with composing there; I can create a piece, but the act of listening to it is what creates the piece, the act of performing it is what creates the piece. The work itself needs to be perceived by others in order to actually be turned into an artwork. A similar thing with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth: thinking about the ways in which she allowed materials to define the properties of the sculptures. The sculpture already existed inside the block of marble, and it was her work that was following the intrinsic veins inside the marble — exploring the weaknesses and the strengths inside the rock — that would lead to the sculpture that she would create. I love this idea that the tools which you are using and the material you are using can guide the creation of a piece.
More recently, [I’m] being inspired by a lot of pop artists like Charli XCX, Tove Lo, A.G. Cook; they are world building in a really exciting way within pop music that is saying “we are not just going to create music, we are going to create the idea of the persona.” The idea of how that persona is branded, how that branding influences the music video, the art direction… Everything becomes this big exercise in creating a world that is like a hyper-realistic version of the one we live in, which I think is really exciting.
When we look to the future of a lot of artforms, it’s going to be about building more experiential ideas; and that sense of worldbuilding within classical music will become really important. We’ll want to create an experience rather than just a concert, a thing that people can feel enveloped in and engrossed by. And I think drawing on visual artists — drawing on contemporary artists, drawing on classical artists, fashion, theatre, film — will become needed in order to find those touch points. Those sort of ways to build the world around your music, and the world around the experience you want to give audiences.
When you first graduated from university, what was the kind of work that you were making prior to graduation or prior to discovering the American minimalists?
There was already an element of process-based work: the idea of creating rules that I could follow that would guide the composition of a piece. I think when I first started to compose, I needed some boundaries; I needed some things to feel like I was being guided. And I think I never really wanted to follow too many of the “old school” rules. So I saw my role as a composer was to find my own rules to compose within those — then after creating that piece, evaluating those rules and seeing whether I like them or not; whether I wanted to tweak them or change them. And so they acted as the bumper guards on the bowling alley lane… -laughs-
That’s what really led to the Curved Form pieces. That whole series of work was essentially based around creating compositions that had similar musical DNA, but used it in different ways. After I had written a few of them… Curved Form (No. 4) was the piece where I was like, “I did a great job there”. I had composed something that made me feel “that’s really nice, I don’t care if someone doesn’t like it, because I love it” — and that was the first time I had written a piece like that. If someone would have turned around to me and told me all of the ways in which they didn’t like it, I would walk away happy because I knew that I did a good job myself.
So in a way, Curved Form (No. 4) was a manifestation of four to six years worth refining your composition processes and tools. What opportunities led you to develop this method of writing?
I graduated in 2012 — and a lot of the work that I did after that was with theatre, opera, and music theatre. I was collaborating with a friend named Rebecca Hanbury, who is a writer and director; we were making lots of work together in music theatre, sound design, and electronic-y stuff with verbatim text. It was after making a few shows with Rebecca and a few other bits of theatre and concert music that I started to find myself musically. So I started the concert series SOLO as a platform to collaborate with people that I wanted to work with, and to showcase my work alongside music that I really enjoyed. That was a nice way to give myself an opportunity to write the music I wanted to write without having to sell it to anybody, or prove myself to an external gatekeeper or someone that was going to commission me. I could just get on and do it, which was a really nice feeling.
I think it can be difficult when starting out to have the opportunity to try out ideas in a low pressure environment; and not in a place where you feel like everyone is going to watch and critique, when you aren’t actually looking for it. So it was a nice way of building a sense of what I wanted to be making [with] concert work, that I could build on and grow.
With your SOLO concerts, what was the collaboration process like with the soloists for each piece that you composed for them? Was there a general process between each that tied them together?
I was choosing people who had a similar sensibility to the way I look at classical music, in that: everything is up for grabs. You can play whatever you want, next to whatever you want; you can bring pop music in, you can play very early music, you can play very contemporary music… It’s how you, as a performer or as a composer, relate those pieces together that makes it make sense in the eyes of an audience.
And so with SOLO: it was one person, one hour of music, and all of the music that has made them who they are today. They can go through their back catalogue and find the pieces that have resonated with them across their career to date; or there may be people that they have always wanted to collaborate with. In the most recent SOLO events, I have done some commissions — and been able to commission composers who the performers have really wanted to collaborate with, but haven’t had the chance.
Other times, it’s about allowing people to programme things together that they would have never had the chance to do so. Curved Form (No. 4) was written for pianist Eliza McCarthy; and she performed Phrygian Gates — which is a big old chunky piano piece — with a bunch of Bach and John Luther Adams, as well as Mica Levi. I think she was really excited to bring loads of different parts of what she does as a pianist to the stage. Because she often has to tailor something to the particular curatorial vibe of what that concert series or venue is looking for, when actually her practice as a performer brings all of those different types of music together.
With each piece I want to create a piece that has a connection to the sensibility and the interests of the artist. Eliza does a lot of mindfulness and trains people in mindfulness practice; so being able to create a piece where you had to play it very mindfully… you have to be really aware of when a note starts sounding, and when it stops sounding, and you have to zone in to the piano sound because it’s never going to be the same every time. [It] meant I was creating something that I knew she would really enjoy playing.
How did you approach the soloists that you wanted to work with? What was the dialogue between the two of you when deciding on a programme?
I was wanting to work with people who had similar sensibilities in terms of what they like to perform. I would always come to them with some suggestions of pieces that I love for their particular instrument — but I wouldn’t say to them “you’re going to play me this!” -laughs- Sometimes they would be like “I love that piece, let’s do it!”, but other times they would say “that composer, I love their work — but actually, I want to play this piece.” Sometimes they would have very strong ideas about what they wanted to do already. But who was going to be performing, where they were going to be performing, the connections between the artists, was more of the programming I was doing.
The platform itself was to give the artist a sense that they could programme anything, so I never wanted to tell them what to perform — because that would defeat the point. So I think it was more exciting to say: these are the artists that are thinking about music in the same way. I’m going to give you the trust to say “what is it that you want to do with this space?” — I’m telling you this space is for experimentation, this space is for doing something you wouldn’t get to do elsewhere. I want you to programme the concert that someone would turn down elsewhere because it’s too eclectic, it’s too this, it’s too much of that, too little of this.
When taking those ideas that you used for the Curved Form solo works, what were the processes that you used to take it into those mediums? Was there a different kind of thought process?
A lot of the time, it was an individual instrument with live electronics. I didn’t realise it at the time, but looking back, you are always composing with a previous version of yourself; because with live electronics, you need to have played something in order to hear it back with the future-you. You are in this constant dialogue of like: I’m both performing music in the present, and generating sonic material that can be used and changed for the future. So the pieces are often very cumulative in nature.
Especially with the two later pieces — Trace I for Rakhi Singh [violin and live electronics] and Trace II for Kate Ellis [cello and live electronics] — they became these sonic sculptures where I felt like they were chiselling out this piece of music. The whole thing revolved around itself so much that when they got to the end of the piece, the first notes of the piece were still sounding and it was almost like they were leaving this trace in the air. But at the beginning, we are just seeing the very first moments of it and gradually as they build up, we start to see the whole thing. That’s a nice way of conceptualising the work using electronics — because you are having to compose in two different temporal statuses at once. -laughs-
I am always thinking about where that material is going to go: is it going to be recorded, is it going to be played back, do you want to capture this bit and bring that back? What does that mean if you’re letting parts of the material go, what’s the reason behind that? It was quite a nice thing to find new ways through each of those pieces as to how they work.
You obviously got to a point where you had established a very consistent aesthetic and approach with your works, for example Curved Form (No. 4) being the first perfect manifestation of this four year process. What was the point where you started to think, “I’ve achieved what I wanted here, but how do I go somewhere else?” Was it a sudden realisation or more of a slow thing that was bothering you in the back of your mind?
It was both of those things. Leading up to the pandemic, I had been writing the Curved Form pieces for a few years. But over the course of the pandemic and coming out the other side of it, I started to realise that I was feeling like I had to do something because it was “expected” of me — or I knew working in that way would be successful, and therefore I was kind of falling into it by accident. I was going back to my comfort zone because I knew there were tools that I knew would create a piece that I would enjoy.
So I started a Masters at Guildhall in 2021. I had always wanted to do a Masters at some point. But I also knew that I wanted to know more about myself first, and what I wanted to be doing, before I went back into an academic setting — and [have] people poke and prod me, and ask lots of questions. I think after the pandemic was a really nice time because I felt like I was creating music that I really enjoyed — but I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t missing anything, that I wasn’t not taking risks, not allowing myself to try out new things in a way that allowed me to make a progression and make a change. It’s important that you have that self-evaluation and self-reflection, and you think about what has changed in your circumstances. It had been nearly ten years since I had left university, what had changed in my life?
I wanted to go to Guildhall as a place to create away from the public eye, in a way — a way to try things out and fail, but learn a lot from the process. Looking back on it now, the majority of the work that I was doing pre-Guildhall was public facing, and was often work that I had invested a lot of time and energy in to produce, put on, and fundraise for. I didn’t want to take too many risks — I didn’t want to put all of that time and energy only to have it not feel successful or feel like I could have done better. And it’s a tricky position. Back then I was freelancing — I was having to take on lots of work in different places in different mediums in different ways in order to make enough money. Being in that headspace can result in you not wanting to take risks. So it becomes tricky to actually feel free as a creative person to work when everything feels like it’s putting pressure on your future income.
What was it like going back into academia after so long?
Taking time out of that headspace and just creating music for the sake of creating music, trying things out for the sake of trying things out. Having so many conversations with so many new performers, composers, and teachers; and reconnecting with what I love as a musician or what I love as a person — outside of being a composer — has been really exciting.
Then after finishing last year, I needed to get a job. I now have a full time job working for a university and actually, I feel what that has given me is the opportunity to be like “you know what? Fuck it, I’m going to write that piece that I want to write”. Being able to feel like my creative risk taking doesn’t impact my future financial stability is hugely freeing when it comes to sitting down and writing a piece of music — because I’m not worried and stressed about the idea that if this doesn’t go well [then] that’s it.
How would you say working a full time job has impacted your composing?
Of course it has its downsides, working full time. I have very little time left to do other things and I have to squeeze it around a social life, seeing friends and family, and doing all the other things that I want to do. But actually from a creative point of view, I found it really liberating to be able to say “I’m going to put myself in a really scary situation” — and say that I’m going to write a piece of music that no one is expecting me to write, work in a way that I have never worked before, on a platform that is public, where I know people will come to and I’m going to invite them to it… -laughs- I wouldn’t have been able to do that had I not felt secure in other aspects of my life.
I think especially now with the cost of living crisis, with so many things up in the air around the election [ed. this interview with Alex Groves took place prior to the 2024 UK general election], global events, politics and political changes… It can feel really scary if you’re finding yourself in a precarious situation. And then you are trying to put yourself in an even more precarious place by doing something creatively risky — it can be really stifling and blocks you from doing anything, because you don’t have that freedom to open up and change the way you are composing.
So it’s been a lesson learnt by necessity in a way. I wouldn’t have chosen to do it, but actually, by giving up some of my time to create a more stable work/life balance, it’s been able to free up that creative side of my thinking. [That] has allowed me to really make the most of the things I was learning at Guildhall — the ideas that I was throwing against the wall to see if they stuck. That’s been a really interesting change that I didn’t see coming, but am really glad that has happened.
What were some of the things that you learnt at Guildhall that really resonated with you?
I was 31 and most of the other people on the course were in their early to mid 20s. Some of the people that I was collaborating with were finishing their undergraduate degrees, so younger still. It was actually the first time I had worked with a different generation — collaborating really closely with people who see the world through the lens of someone who grew up 10 years after I did.
It was really nice to be around people who are so open to change and growth. It was really nice to just be surrounded by people who are taking risks, surrounded by people who were really being very experimental with the approaches they were taking to composition, to dance, to performance, in a way that I really hoped I would get out of Guildhall when I went back to academia. I also really hoped that my presence at Guildhall — as someone who has had a bit more life experience, and has been through the machinations of the arts funding landscape and has lived in that space for a bit — was able to impart a few bits of learned wisdom that I felt that I was able to give from my perspective. But I was also receiving so much back from this very unjaded, unblinkered, really freewheeling point of view. That’s what I took most from Guildhall: that sense of just being able to say “if I’m enjoying what I’m doing, if this is something that interests me, then I should do it!”
On a musical level, when you were embracing these new techniques and approaches, was it a case of being incredibly meticulous with what you were doing (i.e. questioning every decision in your compositional arsenal) or was it the opposite (i.e. loosening up, being less formalised, etc.)?
I was quite deliberate in trying [to] follow my gut instinct more than trying to plan it and over-analyse it. Before the masters, I felt like a lot of my music was very intended for cerebral listening. It was music to lose yourself in; to kind of go on an internal journey, on an isolated journey, in a way that you would have a different connection to the music to the person sat next to you. You would have a different experience of music depending on how you were feeling at that moment. I’ve listened to Curved Form (No. 4) so many different times, and depending on how I’m feeling, it can feel very different. It can feel really ecstatic and jubilant, and it can feel very sparse and austere — depending on what my internal mindset is as I am listening to it.
That was one of the reasons why I loved making that music. Because I enjoyed the sense of giving people ownership over their own experience of it, rather than saying “this is how you’re going to feel and this is how it’s going to be”. I think post-pandemic, I was thinking about the musical experiences that I was really enjoying. I was saying to myself: “Do I love sitting in classical concerts on my own? Not that much. Am I loving really cerebral, intellectual music at the moment? Not really.” The times where I was absolutely loving life [was] listening to music on dancefloors, parties and raves, late at night, early in the morning; having a great time, losing myself and my body in the music.
Classical music, for so long, was dance music. So many of the pieces we look up to as “great works” have their origins in dance music of the time; yes, some of it was extracted into a more formalised concert setting, but so much of it would have still resonated as a form of dance music. So I was like: “Well I listen to a lot of dance music — why am I not letting that into the weird soup of inspiration?” Why am I shutting that out, why am I saying that isn’t part of my experience as a composer — when actually some of it’s some of the most exciting musical experiences that I’m having.
What galvanised you to start incorporating influences from dance music into your work?
John Luther Adams said something around the lines of: as everything becomes more interconnected — languages and cities and cultures and completely different ways of seeing the world become more readily accessible to everybody — there becomes a monoculture that pervades the consciousness. If you travel the world now, if you want to find a hipster coffee shop, you will find one in every city in the world; they will have the same branding, they’ll sell the same products. It’s pervaded our consciousness as a harbinger of “cool” and an aesthetic “taste”. What John Luther Adams was saying was [that] he was trying to write music that spoke directly to his experiences — that only he could have as a person living in Alaska and now the New Mexico desert. He was trying to connect with those experiences and bring a very specific vision of the world he lived in to a much larger audience. So he was trying to combat this sense of monoculture, this sense of creating something that blended into one state.
When I was composing the Curved Form pieces, they were inspired by his soundworld; these lush, open ended things. In my head, they were inspired by an imagined freedom and an imagined expansiveness. Living in Zone 2 in London, I was writing these pieces to escape the world that I was living in and escape the claustrophobia of the city that I’ve felt sometimes. I wanted to create pieces as big and as expansive as possible to counteract the actual lived experience I was going through, but in the back of my head, I was thinking “that isn’t combating monoculture — that’s taking John Luther Adams’ idea of the Alaskan wilderness and putting it through my own idea of running into a sonic wilderness”.
Whilst that is a completely valid thing to do, it doesn’t really speak to my experiences as a composer. What I hope to do as a composer is synthesise the very unique things that I have come across, that I have enjoyed, that I have trained myself in, that I have been questioned about — and create music based on that. And so more recent pieces have had a big injection of house and techno influences, pop cultural references, as well as PC Music and hyperpop style songs — because that’s the music that I’m actually surrounded by. It’s unlikely that John Luther Adams would write a hyperpop song, because it’s not something that he’s experiencing. I’ve enjoyed throwing myself in the deep end — shunning all of the tools that I had before — and say[ing] “what happens if I go all the way to this side of the room, what’s over here? How does that feel?” It feels like all of those ideas and experiences are there somehow, but in order to be able to synthesise them, I need to know what they are in their totality.
Tell me about some of your recent works where you have brought in these new musical perspectives? I understand you’re a Britten Sinfonia Magnum Opus composer and a Bang on a Can composer fellow this year…
With the Britten Sinfonia scheme, I had to write a shorter chamber ensemble piece first. When I heard the news that I had got onto the scheme, I had recently just started a full time job, and there was quite a quick turnaround to get that piece written — I was really freaking out. It was the first piece I was writing post-masters, and I felt like I needed to bring all of that learning into this piece. I was thinking “this piece is the first work that people are going to hear post-masters and it must be a triumph”… -laughs- And I was just completely drawing a dead end.
So one night, I sat down in the kitchen and just made myself a little house track that I could bop around the kitchen too. I did that, danced around the kitchen for a couple of hours, went to bed, woke up in the morning and was like: “I need to write five minutes of music for Britten Sinfonia; and last night I wrote five minutes of music. What happens if I take that track and I turn it into a piece for chamber ensemble?” This is a really exciting challenge that’s going to push me to translate one type of music into another type of music — to translate synthesised sounds into acoustic sounds, things performed by machines into things performed by humans.
Actually, it also really challenged me to think in ways that I would never think before. There’s way more use of instrumental techniques and colour in very quick, changeable ways when previously, it had always been about these very slow, gradual processes that see themselves out over the course of 10 minutes. Whereas this is quick, punchy, rhythmic stuff… It’s fun and it’s a challenge. I was putting myself in that uncomfortable space where I didn’t know if it was going to work. But now, having done that and having seen the reaction to it — people within music and my mates who came to see it, the people I sent the recordings to — it has been really exciting. Being brash about the music and not apologis[ing] for the very contemporary, electronic music-based world that I live in, and saying that I’m a classical composer that is surrounded by pop music — why would I not let in? Why would I keep that out of the world that I’m working on?
Your piece hottt for Bang on a Can is being performed soon in Massachusetts – how did you approach those influences with that work?
What I did with the Bang on a Can piece was instead of creating an entire track and trying to translate that, I created a sonic palette for a track — an idea of a track — with loads of different layers and loads of different versions of things, but I deliberately didn’t turn it into a structured piece of music. Instead, what I made is the idea of experience; how it feels to be on a dancefloor and to be able to tune into the hi-hats, the snare, the tiny changes that are happening in the synth line, the variations that are occurring in the bass. You don’t hear [it] in its totality all of the time, you’re selectively listening — and at points you let the whole thing overwhelm you.
Your next project is a concerto you’re writing for Britten Sinfonia – where would you say your work is evolving now? Tell me how you are bringing your changing influences together…
There’s so much classically loaded information in that word [concerto] and I don’t really write multiple movement pieces, but concertos are typically multi-movement pieces. And so I’m thinking: I want to create something that will have this big brash energy, that can [also] take some of that very quiet, expansive energy from pre-Guildhall. It can mash those two things together. There can be moments where they [are] superimposed, they’re juxtaposed, everything is fair game. With longer pieces it becomes easier to do that, because I want to set something up, exist within it, feel really comfortable in that before I move on.
Pre-Guildhall, I would have tried to have paired it back to such a singular idea that happens over the course of that duration. But now I’m more interested in where I can take the piece and what sort of influences I can bring in. We are oversaturated in our stimuli, in our inspirations — in the amount of new creative material we are seeing and hearing every single day. So in order to reflect that very twenty-first century experience of being alive right now, you need to find ways in which you can balance opposing and different angles, and see things from multiple perspectives. So I am looking forward to that piece as a way to synthesise a few different things. My challenge for that work will be to say: “how do I bring high energy, percussive material in combination with lyrical, drone based material, in combination with something else” — how do I create a world that is cohesive even though I’m doing really different things?
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Alex Groves’ next premiere is his piece hottt with Bang on a Can in Massachusetts – more info can be found here:
Check out more by Alex Groves at:
- https://www.alexgroves.co.uk/
- http://instagram.com/alexgroves_
- http://www.alexgroves.bandcamp.com/
- https://www.patreon.com/alexgroves
References/Links:
- John Adams – Phrygian Gates (1978)
