“I would say it’s more intuitive than not. Unashamedly emotional music — allowing that sentimentality to come out musically. We’re just so tired of this ironic detachment. It’s something we’ve grown up with all our lives — this postmodernist culture — where to be sentimental about something is to be naive, to be somehow less informed.”
William Gardner
William Gardner is an award-winning composer and performer based in London. William is known primarily for his operas, blending lush liminal textures with expressive vocal writing. His first opera A New England premiered at the Royal Academy of Music’s inaugural Students Create Festival in 2022. His second opera The Prisoner — winner of the Stephen Oliver Award — premiered at Students Create Festival 2023, and is being revived this year at the Britten Theatre (Royal College of Music) as part of Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival 2024. His third opera Time and Tide, with librettist Sara Clifford, premiered in 2024 at Milton Court Studio Theatre. William is currently completing his MA in Opera Making and Writing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, studying with Toby Young, and graduated from the Royal Academy of Music in 2023 with a first-class degree in Composition, studying with Phil Cashian.
William’s second opera The Prisoner is receiving its second performance on Saturday 24th August 2024 at the Britten Theatre (Royal College of Music, London) as part of Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival. Ahead of the performance, we caught up with William at the Hayward Gallery, London, to discuss musical uncanniness, microtonality, metamodernism, composing political opera, and more…
Zyggy/PRXLUDES: We’re chatting ahead of the second performance of your opera The Prisoner, which is taking place at the Royal College of Music as part of Tête-à-Tête on Saturday 24th August. Whereabouts are you with the process at the moment?
William Gardner: We’ve just started music rehearsals; we will be starting on the staging this week. I’m very lucky that the cast, my director, and conductor, are the same as when it was premiered in January 2023 — at Students Create Festival at the Royal Academy of Music — so the production is, essentially, unchanged. We’re fortunate that it won’t take that long to put it together. [In] the first music rehearsal, we sang through it and everyone had remembered their parts very well. It’s shaping up very nicely — I’m convinced that it will be a really good performance.
Tell me a bit about the story of The Prisoner — I understand it brings up quite relevant themes of redemption and retribution…
It’s about a prisoner, who is on death row, and is going to be executed for an unspecified crime (something fairly horrific, but never stated as to what it is). It revolves around the preceding 24 hours up to his execution. It’s obviously about the prisoner and his mental state — the dilemma of what it’s like to know you’re about to die — but it’s in some ways more about the reactions of the three other characters around him: the guard, the lawyer, and the priest. The guard is a fairly sadistic character, who enjoys being what she calls the “voyeur of their darkness”. But it’s really about the crisis of faith that both the lawyer and the priest have.
There’s a counterpoint to their crises. The lawyer is young, optimistic, starting out in her career; and is convinced she can use legal wizardry [and] trickery to get him off death row, and allow him to spend the rest of his life in prison. Subsequently, the appeal fails, and she loses her faith in the law. She begins optimistic and loses her faith; whereas the priest traverses the opposite journey. He is old — he’s been in this prison for a very long time — and has really lost his faith in Christianity by this point. It is the nature of the prisoner’s horrible crimes that are really the catalyst for this big breakdown in his belief. His religion says he has to forgive this man, regardless of what he’s done — it doesn’t matter how awful the crime was — and he finds that really difficult to reconcile. But in an opposite way to the lawyer, [he] regains his faith once the prisoner has been executed; he realises it is not for him, or any other person, to judge.
What is it about the story of The Prisoner that holds resonance with you — whether personal or political?
There’s lots of themes of faith, the law, and theories on whether prisons should be for rehabilitation or retribution — what the function of it is. I think it has particular resonances [now]; after Russia and Turkey, Britain incarcerates more people per capita than pretty much any other country in Europe. I think there is an addiction to punishment. Particularly if you look at polling amongst the British public: they’re actually incredibly authoritarian when you look at sentencing — very “lock them up and throw away the key” kind of thing. Still, a majority of people think we should bring back capital punishment — which was abolished in the late 60s.
More personally — I think that we, as a society, have lost our sense of forgiveness altogether. I see this on both strands of politics: there is still a sentiment that some people have done things that they cannot be forgiven from. You obviously expect to see that from people on the right side of politics, but unfortunately, I think you also see it from people on the left side of politics — which I think really goes against what the left is supposed to stand for. It’s tied up [in] the message of redemption and forgiveness.
Of course, that brings up parallels with operas such as Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking and Dallapiccola’s Il Prigioniero — but what I find interesting with The Prisoner is how you’ve deliberately set up the prisoner to be “unforgivable”…
I intentionally wanted them to be a very unforgivable character. I think it’s very easy — if you make it clear that they’re innocent, or they genuinely repent — to get the audience to sympathise with them. I wanted to challenge my audience — I wanted to make it difficult for them to want to forgive this person.
A lot of [the opera] is about juxtaposition. The way we associate people is through contrast. If everyone spoke the same, you would not be able to distinguish how we emotionally respond to people. So that was how I did that compositionally: the lawyer’s music often uses higher woodwinds, more flurried, faster passages — whereas the prisoner, in response to those “provocations”, [uses] low, dissonant strings and brass. The priest has more free-flowing, melodic, “horizontal” music. Only when the prisoner is alone, at the end — contemplating his death before he is taken away — do you have a more lyrical sense of who he is.
In terms of your compositional process — what tends to come first in vocal writing, and where does writing for singers fit into it?
I will often sketch the music, and then impose the vocal line on top of it — as opposed to writing the vocal line, then adding the accompaniment. For me, I want to approach writing an opera from the perspective of: what is the emotional state? What do I want the audience to feel, and what is that character feeling? So the instrumentation, the harmony, for example — that has to come first. What the characters are saying is coming from whatever emotional state they’re in.
I like and prefer writing for specific singers. As opposed to writing for “baritone”, “soprano”, or whatever. These singers are all ones which I have worked with for a number of years before this — one of which had sung in my first opera, A New England. So I knew in-depth what their voices were suited to, what their tessituras were, what notes they preferred, etc. So knowing their individual voices was important to knowing how I would write [the characters].
The Prisoner — as well as your first opera, A New England — were written with librettist Matthew Green. Tell me a bit about your collaborative process; how many elements of these stories were Matthew’s, and how many were your own?
The idea for the plot was very much mine. Once having explained it to him, and talked him through it, what I would then do [would be] a scene-by-scene breakdown: a general overview, then an overview in each scene. And then I would do a breakdown of what would have to happen in each scene. From that, it was up to Matt to write, and to construct — it was up to him to phrase that.
We had a very fluid collaboration, I would say. He’s an amazing writer, but he’s very florid, [which for] the medium of opera is too flowery — an example from the very opening of the opera, “time so thick, time so slow”, were at the bottom of the second page of the first draft. He would print them out, and I would go through it with a red pen… Sometimes, what he would come up with was exactly perfect — sometimes, it took a lot longer to get there. There wasn’t that strict delineation of “he’s the librettist, he writes it, I set what I’m given”; I was able to rearrange, remove. It was a very fluid relationship.
One thing you’ve been starting to explore recently is incorporating microtonality into your operas — particularly with your most recent opera, Time and Tide, with librettist Sara Clifford. What drew you to using microtonality, and how does it affect your practice?
Microtonality is something I’ve been interested in since my first year of my undergrad, really. My use of it has gone through various different stages; I’ve now alighted on something that is very different from how I first started using it. It’s a very tricky thing to use in pieces with a large ensemble.
In terms of how I used it in Time and Tide… The story of Time and Tide is slightly surrealist. There’s a dead son that returns as a sort-of ghost; a spectral figure, I would say. I needed something that really represented that weirdness — that uncanniness, that liminality. To render the familiar slightly off. I mostly used it [by] simply asking the players to flatten their notes a little bit — not to create a quarter-tone, which is fundamentally a different note, but a shade of the note that was “in tune”. An example: if you had a C major — C in the bass, E a tenth higher — I would have a normal C and normal E, and ask another player to play a slightly flat E. So you’re still getting a major chord, but it’s rendered slightly uncanny by that.
I love your use of the word “rendering” here — like a Photoshop technique. I’m reminded of composers such as Oliver Leith, or the whole just intonation school…
I think that’s interesting. I admire lots and lots of JI music. I think Catherine Lamb is a wonderful composer, and that Berlin school of JI is fascinating: Marc Sabat, Thomas Nicholson. They all operate under the “plainsound” group of composers, that share a particular form of JI.
I do think you can make expressive sounding JI, certainly. I think the direction that many JI composers go in is more static, “drone” pieces — I think they’re incredibly expressive, but I think not in a “classical canon” expressive. I think when we say “expressive” as classical musicians, we think “pull on the heartstrings” — Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Rachmaninov, Puccini. That kind of sound. I would also say that although I have explored it before, and find it fascinating, I wouldn’t say that I “use” JI. My use of microtones is not system-based; it’s more intuitive, it’s more “we have this chord, how do I thicken the sound by flattening one note — adding, blurring?” So I suppose in that way, perhaps I am closer to the more traditional view of what we would say “expressive” music [is] — as opposed to open form, static [aesthetics] that a lot of JI composers do.
From there — tell me a bit about your relationship to emotionality and expressivity in your music…
It’s interesting — specifically theatre-wise. I’m glad this is now changing, and I do sense a very genuine shift in this — but for many years now, there has been a fear of sentimentality in theatrical pieces, whether that’s straight theatre or opera. I think that there’s almost a sense that there’s a “requirement” for there to be a sort of ironic detachment from what the inner lives of the characters are doing, and feeling. While I’m a massive admirer of George Benjamin’s music, and his operas — I think they’re marvellous — I can never quite emotionally connect with the characters, and I’ve always left feeling slightly cold. I think that is a wonderful thing; but it’s not something I’m interested in doing myself as a theatre creator. I want people to care about what’s happening.
So speaking musically — I am not afraid to use what previous generations [of] composers might call “clichéd devices” to represent that. I am not afraid to, after a fast-moving, angular, dissonant passage, to revert to a stable harmonic rhythm. Very simple chord progressions; with this slightly eerie nature to them, so that it isn’t pure repetition of things that have come before — it’s a genuine progression of them. We have mental associations that have come from works throughout history, about tonality, modality… How we resonate with them emotionally. Going back to context: how to use instrumentation, harmony, to juxtapose the emotional responses to the interior lives of the characters… I use that as well, as a trick to make the audience feel things.
That’s a very postmodern thing; trying to force that kind of detachment. Would you say your characterisations are also in that vein? I understand the characters of The Prisoner are defined by archetypes…
I think it’s interesting that you brought up postmodernism. Whilst I’m not sure that I’ve explored the topic enough to class myself as a “metamodernist” composer… Metamodernism is certainly something that I’m fascinated by; intensely exploring how I can further incorporate that into my work. My tendencies are certainly in that direction.
In say, the works of George Benjamin: the detachment comes both from the music and from the text. In an opera I did really love — Picture a Day Like This — I admired it, but I realised I didn’t care about the mother’s plight; and it’s like I wasn’t allowed to, it was a conscious decision by them. In Time and Tide, only the son has a name, the parents are just “Mother” and “Father”; through that, the parents don’t have names, but that allows you to sympathise more with the plight — because he’s being humanised in a way the other two aren’t.
Do you feel like that kind of metamodern approach is something that’s intuitive for you?
I would say it’s more intuitive than not. Unashamedly emotional music — allowing that sentimentality to come out musically. We’re just so tired of this ironic detachment. It’s something we’ve grown up with all our lives — this postmodernist culture — where to be sentimental about something is to be naive, to be somehow less informed. One of the first people to recognise this trend was David Foster Wallace, with Infinite Jest; that was one of the first [novels] where there was this shift that started to happen. As with all these shifts, they take time.
I do think now, in the compositional world, you see young composers returning to consonance in a lot of ways. It’s a point I made in a recent essay I wrote: there’s a difference between the postmodern, reactionary neo-romanticism that came out in the 80’s, particularly in the States — which was essentially a direct return to Late Romantic traditions. This kind of “new romanticism” that we’re seeing is not that. It’s not reactionary — it is progressive. Going back to the idea of rendering the familiar slightly uncanny — I think that is one of the ways it is achieved.
I absolutely love that phrase — to “render the familiar slightly uncanny”. Of course, it’s one thing to realise that in a theatrical context, but how does this manifest for you in your more instrumental or abstract works?
Robin Haigh’s PhD — [he’s] a composer who also operates in this space… He never uses the word “metamodern”, but I would say that a lot of what he’s writing about is essentially metamodernism. He uses the example of vaporwave, which I think is a very interesting analogy. He says that what vaporwave does is takes pop music form the 80s, and renders it slightly uncanny through these post-millennial production techniques. The result is this nostalgia: something that we recognise, we can relate to, it reminds us of the past, but it’s not purely pastiche. His example of that in contemporary classical music is the tonality of the common practice era, basically; and the production techniques that render it uncanny are microtones. I really do subscribe to that. That’s how it is in [my] most recent string piece — ‘⍺ ≈ 1/137’ — definitely. It uses these shifts of plus-or-minus 25 cents (+/-25c): an eighth of a tone. A return to this modal, tonal language that we’re familiar with, but in a way that makes it new.
I think [my] organ concerto is different. It’s significantly less “metamodern” in that way; that was a more unashamedly romantic expression. I think it was important to do that, because that was at the period where I was trying to come back from writing these very abstract, often very dissonant pieces. I was trying to find a way of returning to this expression — and I think I had to write something like that in order to be able to write the string piece.
To talk a bit more about your practice: you’re singing one of the roles in The Prisoner, and you’ve also had an established practice as an opera singer alongside composition. How would you say your training as a singer has informed your compositions?
Particularly when I’m writing for solo instrument and accompaniment, the lines I give often end up sounding very much like they could be sung. A lot of the qualities of lines sound very vocalise, in a way.
I think because I’ve sung so much opera — especially Britten — and a lot of English choral music [as] a chorister, particularly of the 20th Century… I think I have a very instinctive way of setting English text to music. The thing I find easiest as a composer is thinking about how to set text, at least vocally: speech rhythms, intervals, all that sort of stuff. That’s a very intuitive thing for me. My father is a big theatre lover; as a child, we went to loads of West End theatre shows, as well. I loved song and literature, so opera was a very obvious medium for me to align upon.
When it comes to setting English, as a language — what kinds of challenges do you feel the language offers in a vocal or operatic context?
It’s interesting. This is my own personal preference — there are lots of composers who would completely disagree with me, and I think have created brilliant things by not following my preference — I generally think my preference is sung text mimics natural speech rhythms. Both in rhythm, but also intonation. The consonants, the intervals; the rise and falls; the emphasis — when we speak, we emphasise nouns and verbs, we don’t emphasise prepositions. All those sorts of things that to me, are very important when writing. For me, at least, there’s more of an emotional connection with what’s being sung; I think that completely distorting how we would speak something makes it somehow harder for the audience to emotionally connect. If it’s so unfamiliar, so weird.
Having said that, I think there are obviously moments where it should go against [that]. Melismas aren’t anything natural at all, and yet we still need them to emphasise certain words, certain emotions. It’s not a hard and fast rule, I think it’s a general tendency; and within those moments when it is really important to emphasise the weirdness of something, then you can break away from that, for sure. That’s something I definitely do.
What’s next for you — and what’s exciting you at the moment in your compositional practice? I understand you’re working on a number of projects once The Prisoner has been performed…
I am currently working on a small song cycle for baritone and twelve strings — the same ensemble [that] my string piece was. That’s exploring more of what I did in that string piece, but now within a vocal context; combining the ways in which twentieth-century English song — Howells, Gurney, Vaughan Williams — how that can be applied to these principles of microtonality that I’ve spoken about.
In terms of dramatic works: there are two operas currently in the pipeline. One is written with Alexia Peniguel. That’s about a god who creates another Garden of Eden, and wants to create the perfect society. And so drags a philosopher from Ancient Greece, an industrialist from the Victorian times, and a government minister from around 2070 — and asks them to create a perfect society. And obviously, they inevitably fail.
That sounds incredibly exciting — and Alexia Peniguel would be the perfect librettist for that kind of project! I understand you’re also working on another political opera, as well?
Yeah — written with the fabulous Jessica Walker! That is based on an experiment done in California in the 1960s, where a history teacher was teaching about Nazi Germany, and was struggling to answer [the] question of how ordinary Germans become complicit, or perpetrate[d] atrocities — the banality of evil. What is it about human nature that corrupts people to do [these] things?
So he devised an experiment. He came up with this movement called the “Third Wave”. He wrote “strength through discipline” on the blackboard. It was very basic things: you had to sit with your tailbone against the back of the chair, you were to greet him by standing up and saying “good morning, Mr. Jones” when he entered the classroom. It was an experiment that was supposed to last a day; but to his surprise, when he came into class the next day, they all stood up and said “good morning, Mr. Jones”.
Oh, damn — so what happened then?
So he continued the experiment. Soon, it had grown, so that 200 students in the school were demanding to be part of this organisation. It’s fascinating, because what he noticed was that social hierarchies within the classroom [were] eradicated — bullies and their “prey” became friends — because they were now part of this ingroup. Similarly, quiet children who weren’t speaking up in class felt much more confident in speaking up. Over the course of five days, it was getting so out of hand — it was becoming so dangerous — that he realised he had to shut it down.
On Friday, he gathered all 200 students in the auditorium and said: “Oh, the Third Wave is a national movement — and there’s somebody who’s going to announce their presidential campaign as the Third Wave candidate.” He then put on the TV and it was static for ten minutes. The tension in the air was palpable. And at ten past, I believe, he then switched to videos of Hitler rallies, and he said: “To answer your question — this is how Germans became complicit in Nazi crimes.”
That’s an incredibly powerful story — and I can absolutely understand why yourself and Jessica feel the need to set this as an opera.
I think there’s an awful lot of relevance there in today’s world. Not least in the rise of the far-right in America, with Trump; and in Europe, in Germany, France, Hungary, etc. Obviously, what’s been happening over the past two weeks in this country. I think there was a poll which showed that in the West, over a third of people aged 18-25 believe that we should get rid of democracy altogether and have a strongman leader — the highest of any age group. So Gen Z is the most likely to support authoritarianism, as opposed to democracy. But also: how easy it is for people to be swept up into groups. To be banding around people, and justifying violence and atrocities in the name of their cause. It is particularly pertinent on the right, but there are also groups on the left that struggle with that same thing. There is an ingroup and an outgroup — and no-one [in] the outgroup is to be trusted. Going back to The Prisoner: I think society, more than anything, needs more compassion and more forgiveness.
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William Gardner’s opera The Prisoner is being performed on Saturday 24th August at the Royal College of Music, London – you can find tickets at:
Learn more about William and his practice at:
References/Links:
- Highest to Lowest – Prison Population Total, World Prison Brief
- Mike Underwood, ‘Almost 60% of Brits back the death penalty, new poll shows’ (2023), Omnisis
- Jake Heggie – Dead Man Walking (2000)
- Luigi Dallapiccola – Il prigioniero (1948)
- George Benjamin – Picture a Day Like This (2021-23)
- Robin Haigh, ‘Composing Millennial Nostalgia: Microtonal Techniques as Tools to Express a Twenty-first Century Malady in Tonal Music’. PhD thesis, University of York
- Ron Jones, ‘The third wave, 1967: an account’
- ‘Why are there riots in the UK?’ (2024), BBC
- Open Society Barometer (2023), Open Society Foundations
