“I’ve never been someone who likes to focus on one thing. It’s always how life has worked out for me — I’ve always been involved in a lot of things and I like it that way.”
Robert Nettleship
Robert Nettleship is a British composer, performer, and songwriter from Nottingham, currently based in The Hague. Robert embraces the approach of “learning through doing”; playing around and doodling with ideas until he stumbles across something beautiful, which he then weaves into his art. Robert has worked with Sean Bell, the London Improvisers Orchestra, Ensemble Klang, orkest de ereprijs, and the Curveball Collective, among others; he also performs in several projects including electronic alter-ego Mr Garagely, as well as in the band rAIN, and free-improvisation duo with bassist/composer Si Paton. Robert studied at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire with Andrew Toovey, Michael Wolters, Joe Cutler and Howard Skempton, where he discovered the British Experimental group The Scratch Orchestra — which he then embedded into his practice when studying for his Masters at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague.
Robert’s music has recently gained notoriety through his work with Sibelius MIDI, with pieces such as ‘10,000 2nds’; Patrick Ellis spoke with Robert about songwriting, composing for Sibelius, scratch lyrics, and “routine pieces”…
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Hello Robert! How are you getting on? I wanted to start this conversation off by asking how/when you started writing music? Was there an impetus that made you want to compose?
Robert Nettleship: I started writing music when I was a teenager; when I was a kid, I used to mess around on the piano. I wouldn’t call that composing per se, but it was definitely expressing creativity. When I got into composing as a teenager, it was because I was never allowed a Playstation or an Xbox, so I was always looking for something to do — and I just happened to have Sibelius Student on my computer. So I just started writing music as a form of playing around really. Then when I started Music GCSE at school and did the composition assignments, it felt like quite a natural thing that I enjoyed doing.
So at first, it was a form of entertainment to help pass the time?
It started like that in a way definitely, especially during the summer holidays when I was bored. I would either just be outside or playing piano, the drums, or messing around on my computer for a bit, which only had Sibelius and a horse riding game on — I got quite bored of that game really quickly… -laughs-
What were those early pieces that you made on your computer like?
Looking back, I wrote things in a very electronic way. My first composition that I felt was good was written shortly after I had gotten into funk — artists like Jamiroquai as well as Earth, Wind and Fire. And I would write these songs where everything was composed in Sibelius; I would give the saxophones chords, and in the horn parts go a bit mad by adopting these minimalist techniques over the top of funk grooves. Then I would hand it to musicians who couldn’t play it because it was unreadable and unplayable… -laughs- So really I wrote it for Sibelius unintentionally.
So in a weird way, this is like part of your practice that you have been exploring in the past few years, and had been somewhat looked at in a more primitive way 10 to 15 years before…
Yeah, in a much more naïve way. The ideas have matured a lot more now after studying composition and learning how to write for instruments. I wrote those pieces with the expectation that the musicians would be able to play the notes — but the material was chosen because it sounded good on Sibelius. I remember giving the drummer a part which had five toms, or something ridiculous… -laughs-
When you did interact with real performers, was there a realisation of “oh, I need to have more input from the performers, or at least have more of an understanding of how their instruments work”?
When I wrote it that way, I had absolutely no idea that people wouldn’t be able to play it. -laughs- So it was a real learning curve for me.
Around this time, were you writing songs as well? Or did that come later on?
I had been writing a lot of lyrics around that time, because I was part of a prog rock band then. So I had gotten quite into writing words, but none of those songs became anything; it was more just having ideas in my head. When I started composing as a teenager, I used to daydream a lot and write a lot of music in my head — imagining pieces and whole albums of material, none of which actually happened.
I can recall that you told me about some short lived bands you were involved with. Would you say that infiltrated how you were writing your songs and compositions at the time?
Not really, I always saw myself as a drummer in those teenage bands; but my friend at the time — Kye [Cree-Voce] — we were in a band together and we got into the idea of trying to become the next Led Zeppelin. -laughs- But then it didn’t really happen because we went and did our own thing.
There’s that cliché of a drummer, where they are in eight bands. Were you someone who was in loads of bands at once?
If you are a good local drummer, then you get invited to play in different projects.
Would you say that has had an influence on how you operate as a creative nowadays? Currently, you compose and contribute ideas with your Sibelius works, your ensemble music, rAin, Mr Garagely, the Si Paton / Robert Nettleship duo, etc.
I’ve never been someone who likes to focus on one thing. It’s always how life has worked out for me — I’ve always been involved in a lot of things and I like it that way. I feel as though in some disciplines, artists are encouraged to be ultra-focused on one thing; but I liked the fact that when studying composition, I was allowed and even encouraged to also perform; you were encouraged to be open minded, especially at Birmingham [Conservatoire].
Touching on Royal Birmingham Conservatoire — when you started your studies there in 2011, what were your musical concerns and interests at the time?
At the time, I was really interested in impressionist composers, particularly Debussy and Ravel; but I didn’t know a huge amount about contemporary music, so [upon entering Birmingham Conservatoire] I didn’t really know what to expect. I didn’t think that I would get involved with all kinds of music, so studying there was great.
When I started my undergraduate degree, I knew that there were things that I needed to work on. Notation was always a big thing for me, as my ideas always ran ahead of the practicalities of the instruments. I remember in my first year when I wrote a string quartet, and I wrote this part for one of violinist where the had to pizzicato demisemiquavers at around 120 bpm — which of course, in hindsight, was completely unplayable… -laughs-
I also wanted to learn more about experimentation, as well. Around that time I was very into jazz, but then gradually over the course of my degree, I became less interested in it and instead became more intrigued by experimental music. However, jazz for me has always been a good point for discovering other genres. It got me into a band called The Bad Plus — an avant-garde trio who do these weird covers of pop songs — and so that led into my fascinations with free jazz and free improvisation. As well as the Late Junction show on BBC Radio 3, which I used to tune into with my radio and headphones on really late at night.
With jazz, a lot of it features open-endedness, collaboration, transcription, and improvisation — which when listing it off like that seems to resonate a lot with your own work.
Definitely. There are certain elements of the Jazz tradition that [are] in my work, but I’m not really [a] Jazz musician, and I’m not really into what comes out of a lot of Jazz departments at the moment. I like to look beyond the whole focus on harmony; I find it interesting, but I also find it limiting. I remember I had a lesson in Birmingham with a Jazz teacher and he said that I knew nothing about harmony… -laughs- But then I guess that’s how rooted in harmony other traditions of music are. For me harmony has always been quite an instinctive thing. It’s never been something that I think deeply about during the composition process; I’m more into texture and material, but I’m also quite conceptual in a way.
Would you say your approach to harmony is more of an emotional response to the material that you write?
When writing, I often sit at a piano and noodle a lot — which is quite a common approach with composers. But when playing, I come across a chord or a melody and think “oh, that’s nice”, but I don’t think too much like, “I [am] moving from this chord to this chord” or thinking about certain harmonic changes. However, I do think about harmony more meticulously — when I am for example making a piece like ‘100 Cadences’, which I haven’t had performed yet, which revolves more around harmony as the main parameter. But generally, if I find something that sounds good, then I try to use that idea and take it somewhere.
With your interests in jazz, as well as songwriting, when you were developing your craft during your undergraduate, did you treat composing, performing and songwriting largely as separate entities? Or did you view it all as quite a holistic thing?
Andrew Toovey encouraged me to be more of a “hybrid artist”, where you take all of those interests and try to bring them all into one thing. Before studying with him, I had these lyrics hanging around that I wanted to use for songs, but I didn’t really see it as part of my work as a composer. It definitely is now — as with free improv drumming — and compositional ideas certainly come from that as well these days. I feel like there is a tendency for people to want to label an artist as one specific clear thing, rather [than] looking at their different interests and activities, which I find quite hard to deal with sometimes. The fact that I do so many other things means that people find it hard to label what I do — and therefore that’s tricky for them. But maybe those are my thoughts in my own head.
At Birmingham, you were involved in a lot of different projects — do you think that had an impact in that move towards being a hybrid artist?
Definitely — those projects gave me a lot more confidence in performing. I find that when you perform your own music, you make your own rules, you could play it any way you wanted to. And therefore if it is a bit sloppy — for example when I sing — my intonation is perfect sometimes, but as it’s my own creation, I can decide whether it’s a bit rough or not. Whereas if I was singing for someone else’s project, it would be up to them.
One of your last projects during your studies in Birmingham was the writing and recording of your debut album, My Sweet Love. Would you say that was the largest culmination point of those different aspects of your work at the time coming into one?
Generally when working on that album, I was tapping more into the songwriting side — but I was writing it like a composer. I think [it] is an interesting record, because it’s got some quite unconventional songwriting. I always see the album as a set of tracks, rather than songs, because I sort of experiment with them more and treat it like a composition. Whereas if I had called them “songs”, then there are expectations for it to follow a certain form.
I guess the term song leads itself to a limited selection of forms…
Exactly. Whereas if I was making a composition that I can just have whatever form I like.
Tell me about the source material for the lyrics for that album?
It was based around naïve lyrics that I wrote when I was a teenager, which I wrote off at the time as very cheesy, bad love songs… -laughs- But when I started making My Sweet Love, I had made it through the process of composing demos — I used my dad’s multitrack recording device. When it was the process of making the album, I was looking through my drawings for lyrical inspiration and I found those notes; so I just tried that out as an idea really. The whole album was written [in demo form] in my music room at home in the space of a week; my dad would hear my layering vocals and he would ask my mum “what is Robert doing!?” -laughs-
The final version was recorded with Adriana Minu, who I worked with collaboratively on the production of the album. I gave her a lot of creative freedom with the tracks, so it was very much a collaboration; it wasn’t so much me having a set sound that I wanted to emulate. Overall, I think it worked really well with Adriana.
What kind of ideas did she contribute? Were they solely production choices, or were there any suggestions for arrangement?
There were structural ideas that she gave. When in the production phase of the record, she made some changes there with my consent. I think that it would be great to work with her again, like some kind of remix project; that would be cool. Recording was quite hard work for that album, because I played all of the parts myself. I’m not the world’s best keyboard player and I think she got quite frustrated with me. -laughs-
Four years later you released your sophomore record, Embodied, which you started recording in late 2017. Tell me about the process behind that?
I recorded with Luke Deane in Amsterdam at Splendor — which took a long time to make, as I had to take a lot of trips to The Netherlands [ed. from the UK, where Robert was residing at the time]. I had a week where I recorded everything at the venue; I tracked the drums in one day, and then all of the other parts over the course of the other days. We spent in total about two weeks producing it together in the studio. I enjoyed recording that album because it was nice to take trips there. I had also asked Luke to play some tracks on it as well. He did some multi-layered ukulele on ‘Alone Again’ and he also did a beautiful melodica solo on ‘Flower of My Eye’; I also got Chrissy [Christine Cornwell] to play violin on some of [the] tracks as well. It was nice to go to the Netherlands to do some mixing as an escape before I went back to my job in the UK.
I must say that I don’t massively enjoy working in a studio — I don’t really have the attention span to sit for that long. -laughs- In a creative way, I did enjoy [it], but I found it hard to sit and focus on things, because it’s a very intense focus that you need.
Lyrically, the record was written from scratch lyrics; could you please tell me about how that idea to use a limited number of words came from and what some of the subject matter on the record was about?
I was encouraged by Howard Skempton to take that approach, to write one scratch lyric a day — essentially a short paragraph of words, which for me, felt like a really nice process. It didn’t matter whether it was good or bad, because I did it over a period of around a month and then I picked out the best ones. Thematically those lyrics were all about current thoughts and events that were happening in my life at the time; it was quite an introspective album really.
You mentioned doing something every day: that’s a theme that comes up in your work a few times, with your Sibelius MIDI pieces. I remember you writing several bars a day and also things like the Taxi Miniatures; there’s been this ongoing idea of routine.
I like projects where I create something small every day. Like the Taxi Miniatures that you mentioned, where I composed the materials for those on my commute on the way to a school that I taught at whilst I was living in Vietnam. The same is with the works for Sibelius MIDI, where I base them around different intervals — seconds, thirds and fifths — I would write a set number of those in a day and I liked the regularity of that.
There’s also my piece ‘366 Notes’ [2020], where I filmed myself everyday playing a note — again, I quite liked the regularity of the routine. With that work in particular, I did several different edits of the timings of each note; and I found that through the process of making it, I realised that I had to make something that sounded good to my ear rather than having a different interval for a set duration each time. Because if that was the case, then it just felt a bit flat.
That for me is where I have a bit of a disagreement with some parts of the experimental music world. Because that’s where I think the music takes over from the concept. In that piece, I had the concept of playing the notes every day — but then the concept was only the framework, and then I took the music further.
With these routine pieces, would you say that it is an aid to motivate you to commit to creating things?
I just enjoy the habit of making music. If I get a bit depressed during unproductive creative spells, then what often helps me is to do a small bit of writing every day which helps me get back into the routine of making things. But then I find once I’m back into the routine, then I end up making too many things… -laughs-
In that period of time you had outside of education between Birmingham and The Hague — what were some of your most important artistic discoveries that you made?
I learnt to just enjoy the process of making music, and also to appreciate that it is a part of the art. I also learned to accept the process of things sometimes not being good, despite putting a lot of time into something — and it turning into that something that you just don’t want it to be. But I also found that I liked to rework older material. A lot of the things that I write [that] haven’t been performed have made it into my electronic MIDI works with Mr Garagely.
One of my interests at the moment is to make my Sibelius software glitch quite a lot by having different tempi play at the same time on the same Sibelius file. For example, I’ve made a Mr Garagely tune where I have a disco beat at about 100 bpm, and then wrote this cyclic pattern on another instrument at 160 bpm — and then what I would do is double the tempo and then double the drum beat note value so it was double tempos playing together, which for me is an interesting process that I want to explore further. Taking some material, then doubling the speed, tripling the speed and quadrupling the speed, then have them play all at the same time and then maybe make a piece out of that. I quite like to make experiments on Sibelius and then make works out of that.
So in a nutshell, it’s about being less precious with the material and instead seeing if the material has potential? Then you will find some way to have it housed into a project…
Even if the material isn’t that good, I find it more interesting to see what I am doing with the material to transform it into something else. It’s funny, because I’ve almost gone full circle in a nice way — from starting out writing on Sibelius trying to write for instruments, but not knowing how to write properly for them, to knowing how to write for instruments, but actually preferring to sometimes write for Sibelius… -laughs-
What attracted you to write for Sibelius again?
I know how to use it. And my version is glitched up so much that in itself, it creates interesting things. I’m in the habit of plugging it into a Zoom recorder, pressing record and then seeing what happens that way — which to me is an interesting process as well. Some things I might not even make it into a piece, but I’ll keep it for later; I will store it away, and then maybe I might draw from it in five years when someone asks me to make a ringtone or something.
With the series of interval works for Sibelius [‘1,000 Thirds’, ‘2,000 Fifths’ and ‘10,000 2nds’], what was the writing process behind each of those?
I had the habit of writing the material every day. It was almost like a process of collecting and then drawing things together over a long period of time. Then like I had with the thirds piece, it took a long time to copy it into Sibelius as I wrote it all out on manuscript first. I used different Sibelius instrumentation as a way to explore different timbral colours with the different MIDI sounds: on the fifths piece, I just stuck with the bad electric piano sound as I found that quite fun, but I actually wrote the different ideas by hand and then numbered it all, afterwards I copied it into Sibelius to digitise it. So there were ideas where it jumps from material in the lower registers to the top of the keyboard sound — essentially randomised arranging… I quite enjoy doing things like that.
Then with the ‘10,000 2nds’ piece, I wrote half of it in manuscript and half directly in Sibelius. Largely because there were so many notes that I had to write; but I also used developmental techniques like inversion, where I would take a whole group of notes and invert them. But they were grouped into thousands — so I would take one thousand seconds, and then another thousand seconds. I didn’t really think about it harmonically that much. During the process of writing, I don’t think through much, but after it’s down [that I can] I reflect on what I have drafted. One comment I got from someone was “what kind of sorting algorithm did you use?” — I just wanted to point out that I did it all organically. I don’t do AI.
Inevitably there will be patterns you notice in your work, and you might feel compelled to alter something consciously anyway as you develop.
We, as composers, are always drawing upon our subconscious, which takes from the things that we have learnt as well as our influences. So when I am doodling ideas, I’m taking ideas from other people’s work that has inspired me; The Beatles is still a big one.
One of the best things about studying in a conservatoire is that you are also studying alongside your friends who are always around you, and in a way, they are more influential than your teachers — although my teachers were also great. However, they [teachers] were perhaps more critical than my peers, which I think you need. I do miss those days of hanging out with composer friends, where we would have our laptops out and show each other what we have been working on.
There are also some newer works of yours which utilise MIDI — such as Pisheltten [2024] for live drum kit and MIDI. What made you decide to marry those two facets of your work together, and what were some of the main challenges as a drummer to perform along with a fixed media part that features dense material like that?
It’s very hard to play in time with a Sibelius playback like that, because it glitches so much. When you are trying to play a set pattern, sometimes it jumps slightly ahead, which is a bit frustrating at times. But it’s interesting from a compositional perspective. There is a lot of push and pull when the MIDI goes out of time for me. It was also quite hard to write the piece; I remember writing it in three or four blocks of material, and with each different block, I would have an idea of what I would play on the drums, but that would vary on the day/the performance. So the drum part was half composed and half improvised, but keeping the material fresh [for each performance] can be quite challenging. Another challenge when working on it was that I didn’t want the material to fall into the trap of being like noise music, because that would be like the material I write for Mr Garagely — I wanted there to be an element of glitch, but not so much that it was noise.
Have you had ideas to compose pieces for other instruments paired with glitch MIDI?
There are plans to work with Kali Ensemble. We’re looking at the how’s and when’s at the moment, but writing a piece for ensemble and MIDI is something that I have wanted to do for quite a while. I’m also trying to do a project with a football skills piece — which is like mickey mousing with a football. But it was quite challenging because the rhythms are quite tricky; so I’m considering whether I just do that for MIDI with maybe just one performer, because I feel like it would give it another layer. It’s a piece that I’ve been wanting to write for a long time, but finding a way to do it has been a challenge; there’s not yet been a realisation where I feel 100% confident with it. But I do want to do it — combining experimental music and football.
When you moved to The Netherlands in 2020 to start your Masters in The Hague, it was in the middle of the pandemic, so it was difficult to get involved in these communities. How did you navigate to build new communities in a new country whilst everyone was socially isolated?
I found it very difficult at first, but I found out that a lot of student colleagues were into improvisation. Every Sunday, some of us would jam at KonCon [Royal Conservatoire of The Hague]; that gave me a lot of confidence with my drumming, and it was quite sociable. I met quite a few friends that way. I still work with some of those people that I played with to this day.
It’s worth mentioning two collaborators that you’ve been working a lot with recently: Pietro Frigato and Sean Bell. Could you tell me how you met Pietro and what you have been working on together?
I met Pietro through my friend Chrissy [Christine Cornwell]; I believe Chrissy was playing in this festival that Pietro was at and after meeting him there, we started jamming together and then I started playing gigs with Pietro, Chrissy, Luke [Deane] and Lucija [Gregov]. After that, Pietro and [I] did a gig as a trio [with Carla Genchi] and that’s how my band rAin came about.
Another collaborator of yours is Sean Bell , what have you done with him?
We performed in a mutual friend’s opera — Petra Cini. Sean and I just hit it off really well. Sean is a countertenor who was singing in the opera, and we just started hanging out a lot. We decided to make a collaborative project together; he recently performed my piece ‘Shakespearean Tales of Woe’ in The Hague and also in Oslo, but a lot of that piece I left quite open so that we could collaborate on it together. We wrote the last half of the last movement together — as a cheesy Disney-like song about being a flat earther, basically.
In that piece, are the other subject matters?
It’s about all sorts of things. I’ve been writing a lot of text recently and I was vaguely influenced by Shakespeare when writing for it; I would occasionally throw in the odd Shakespeare reference. It’s sort of like a mock Shakespearean style of writing. “One was about starting a joust on a plane because they were playing Peppa Pig too loudly.” -laughs- They are all basically exaggerations of things that have witnessed or heard on flights and other travel experiences. They’re all just quite absurd really — they are very much tongue in cheek — but there is also another layer to it. Instead of it just being just funny, there is a strangeness to it and I like to explore that feeling within my work.
What other collaborative projects do you have in the pipeline?
Myself and another composer Niko Schroeder were thinking of making a collaborative piece. He’s a composer from the US who makes a lot of cool audiovisual work; so we are thinking of me making an electronic piece that he then messes it up somehow. I have a record label named Pineapple Records [founded in 2020], which largely focuses on working collaboratively with different people, but just sort of semi-casual; it’s not a serious label with funds.
Most of my creative life has been working with friends or doing things by myself. That I do take it seriously, but it’s not like my income depends on it. For me, it’s important that there is always an element of play when I make my work; it has to be fun for me to enjoy the process of it. I think artists forget sometimes that part of making your work is to enjoy making it — and that if you don’t enjoy it, then what is the point of making it?
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