“I’ve got this artistic aim where I wish to create music that is both pleasant and interesting, to straddle between that line.”
Ollie Hawker
Ollie Hawker is a composer and community music practitioner based in Glasgow. His recent work combines a sonic arts training in texture and timbre with a love of simple harmony and stillness, striving for a clarity that is both fragile and touching. Ollie studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland with Linda Buckley and Alistair MacDonald, and was awarded the 2020 Kimie Composition Prize. Ollie’s recent works have been performed by Standard Issue, Xenia Pestova Bennett, Marie Schreer (Riot Ensemble), Bergamot Quartet, Megumi Masaki, and Inland Ocean, among others; he has released two albums on record label Why Keith Dropped the S: It’s So Easy Pt. 3: It’s Always This Easy (2022) and Behind closed eyes (2024). Ollie is a member of international artist collective Inland Ocean, and is Chamber Music Scotland’s 2026 Embedded Musician; he plays the singing saw, and is part of audiovisual trio Instruction Manual. Ollie also works as a community music practitioner for several Scottish charities, running workshops for children and adults with additional support needs.
Patrick Ellis dialled Ollie over zoom to chat about singing saws, revising drafts, I-V-IV chord progressions, and the lines between classical and pop music, consonance and dissonance, and pleasant and interesting sounds…
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Hey Ollie, how’s it going? You’ve been described as a “virtuoso” singing saw player as well as a composer; when did you begin playing and writing for the singing saw, and when did that become embedded as part of your practice?
I began playing the musical saw when I was 18. I had heard it first through the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest soundtrack by Jack Nitzsche; the main theme from that has this amazing singing saw in it. The band Neutral Milk Hotel — who were a big part of my life when I was 18 — used the instrument a lot too. Growing up, I played the violin, and so I had a bow already; and I went to my dad’s garage to get his B&Q woodworking saw, and so I went from there!
Why are you drawn to using the singing saw?
It has got a very vocal quality to it, with all of the slides and the microtones that you can produce with the instrument. And the combination between the really screechy, metallic timbres that you can do (especially with the harmonics), and the “pure”, sweet sine wave tones and more melodic stuff that you can get out of it. The combination of the two of those sounds is right up my street in terms of what I like to listen to and what I like to make.
Have you been bringing the saw into your compositions for a while?
No, that actually has been more of a recent thing. I used to only play it in bands — mainly in a group called Neuro Trash. That was in a semi-improvisatory manner. But it wasn’t until a residency that I did near Albany in 2024 where I first wrote a scored piece for the saw with the Bergamot Quartet. That project led me to sit down and work out really basic stuff, such as the range of my saw, which harmonics sat where. Usually I have the saw with me during the process; I play something and then transcribe it, rather than writing material in a vacuum.
Since that piece, I have written a few semi-improvisatory works, which fall more into the “contemporary classical” bucket than I was doing before. And there has also been the piece ‘What I thought I knew to be true was not! But I still love it.’ which was composed for Standard Issue and was another step into the classical direction whereby the writing was more involved with the instrument.
I remember hearing that piece on your tour with Standard Issue last year — it was brilliant! How did you write it? Did you begin with the saw and then orchestrate around that?
Exactly. I knew that the musical saw would be the central instrument and then most of the time during the piece, the other instruments are supporting it. That being said, the writing process did have a weird trajectory. I wrote this whole first draft through a much more conceptual standpoint. I had this whole story that it was going to follow laid out on paper, and then recorded a “demo” version of it using my saw and the violin — with some bad clarinet MIDI tracks.
I brought the demo over to the ensemble about a month before the tour, and we played it through, but I kind of hated it… So I went back to the drawing board and started again. Even though the final version is nothing like that original draft, it was particularly useful — because I essentially listened to that demo, picked out the bits that I did like, and expanded upon those ideas.
I’ve got this artistic aim where I wish to create music that is both pleasant and interesting, to straddle between that line. Looking back, I think the mistake that I made with the first draft was that I had gone a bit too far on the interesting side of things, especially harmonically and timbrally. And so when I went back to the drawing board, I simply expanded the moments that were more harmonically pleasant — and in turn, this allowed the timbral moments to provide the interest that was needed in the piece.
Let’s talk a bit more about that. When you refined the piece, how did you balance between the interesting and the pleasant?
It’s something that I think about a lot. The modernists in the early 20th Century said “you do have to choose one and if it’s pleasant, then it’s not interesting” and vice versa… I think we don’t have to choose either one. In the past 10 to 20 years, we’ve gotten a lot better at realising that you can have both. In a harmonic context, this is dissonance versus consonance; the original draft of the Standard Issue piece had too much dissonance, and then the final version has a lot of consonance.
Where did this artistic concern originate from?
During my undergraduate degree, we had some composition modules where we had to make serialist pieces. I was quite new to classical composition at the time, and so I didn’t know what was going on. But my career over the last ten years, since graduating, has been to try and rid myself of that serialist education that instills this idea that pleasant-sounding music can’t be intellectual.
In the programme notes, you said that “I wanted to write something incredibly sad and I did”…
Yes, I did. -laughs- The piece is essentially a break-up song. I wouldn’t ever want to put that on the programme itself, I don’t want that to be the defining aspect of the piece. When I wrote it, I was really sad, and it was nice to be able to make music that simply reflected how I felt — that’s why we do a lot of what we do.
I’m not really into pieces that are too explicitly “about” one thing or another. I think the fact that classical music exists almost entirely through the academy has done a lot of damage to how composers approach music. For me, I don’t think that a piece should be too specific. Obviously everything is about something, but I don’t think that it is for me to investigate that. Partially because it’s not that interesting — a guy had a breakup, who cares!
I guess that the programme note could be interpreted as grieving more generally…
The beautiful thing about instrumental music is that everyone can have their own relationship to it. I don’t want to confine the relationship that anyone could have to that music.
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On a technical level, the work has a lot of improvisatory and open-ended moments. Has that been something that you have done for a long time?
That was more of a result of me not being much of a performer. Of course, when I am writing scores for professional musicians, I write more fixed notation. But what is interesting to me is that line between telling someone what to do and improvisation. I think that the place that Western classical scores sit on that line works really well for me, so I don’t feel much need to drag it further towards the “improvisation” side of things.
Most of that semi-improvisatory stuff is in the rhythmic aspect of the saw line, and that’s because the saw as an instrument — and me as a player — are not very good at hitting exact rhythms. That’s one of the beauties of the instrument; this weird gliding-between-notes that can occur really quickly or really slowly.
I am not a professional saw player, especially with anything fast or rhythmic, so a lot of the material account[s] for that. I also wouldn’t be able to follow a very direct score too well. Because it is my piece, and I know what I want, I can try to add that extra level of interpretation. If there was another saw player who wanted to play the piece, then I would be really interested in seeing how they interpreted that.
Did you relate this material to any of the other instruments?
In the violin part, I had these chords that were also sliding up and down. I could have noted it exactly when to slide up and down rather than having these improvisatory cells, but when you are writing something that is timbrally detailed, you are often going for an effect rather than exact moments of harmonic synchronicity.
One of the things that I do really like — which comes more into my electronics practice — is making these systems or patches that have these randomly-cycling moments that sometimes line up and sometimes don’t. That has informed how I deal with these structures; I can be pretty sure that wherever it lines up when the violin slides up to the next chord, something interesting will happen. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it will be cool.
Speaking of electronics, I wanted to know how you used the electronics in another work of yours, ‘The loveliest thing in the world from a quiet train home’, for double bass and electronics…
That piece was written with and for American bassist Zoe Markle, at a residency in Tottenham back in 2023. It’s a culmination of this compositional process that I was really into at the time. I was pointed in that direction by Linda Buckley, my Masters tutor at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Linda would set me these tasks where she would ask me to write a really simple, folky melody; and then take small sections of the material, shift the octaves up and down, flip some of the notes, and add different timbral techniques with each section. So you would have this “ghost” of a melody, which is abstracted enough to be interesting and different to your standard melodic content — but if you squeezed it all back into its original form, then it would sound trite.
I first wrote most of the double bass part in the same way to those exercises that Linda would set me, and then I basically just messed around on my saw with a sampler. I did a similar thing where I loaded up a sampler with different saw pitches that were fairly pentatonic, and then improvised around that with my MIDI keyboard and created this background saw texture.
Then there are these interference patterns, which in the second section of the piece is a MaxMSP patch playing sine tones that are sourced from the bassist, Zoe, who is playing these harmonics whilst detuning one or both of the strings. When Zoe is doing the detuning, it creates this weird rumbly, wobbly interference pattern. At that point, the saw is overpowering the live double bass, which eventually fades away — and then she comes to the foreground with this ghost of a melody.
‘The loveliest thing in the world from a quiet train home’ was written as part of the Ensemble Matters/Equivalentbehaviour 4×4 Residency. How do you think the residency aided the creative process?
We had only a week to write and perform this piece. Recently, I have figured out that I would rather either have a week to write a piece, or two years to write a piece. Anything in between is worse than either of those options. I am writing a piece at the moment, which (I think) by the time it has premiered I would have been working on for four years. I love that kind of process, because I can go back to it so many times, and hear the material with fresh ears. Whereas if you’ve only got one week to write something, you really have to just think, like, “okay, what works now” — and there is this real freshness to the whole process. There’s also zero danger of overcooking it, which is always a risk with contemporary classical music.
Zoe and I went in with sketches with a simple melody that I had written beforehand. At the time, Zoe lived in Chicago, so we didn’t have too much contact time prior to the residency. We basically went in and had a week to work on the material, and it worked out really well because of the limited time that we had together.
You mention that you used the singing saw again in this piece. Were all of the layers stacked artificially?
All of those sounds that come in the second and third sections of the piece are sounds from my saw. Random notes within a fairly simple pentatonic scale, then loaded into a sampler, messed around with some octaves and delays, some EQ alterations… When I listen back to the recording now, it’s got all of these really glassy, overproduced, high-EQ sound — which is not something that I would do so much now. It’s very different to more recent works, where I use the singing [saw] live with no effects, because I am [nowadays] more interested in using it as an acoustic instrument.
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Tell me a bit about your relationship with electronics nowadays — how do you view electronics in your more ensemble-led, or contemporary classical-adjacent, work?
Of course, I’ve done stuff with instruments and electronics before. But generally, I tend not to do much of that these days, because it adds a whole bunch of faff that is often not worth it to me. Sometimes it is — and in that case, I do use electronics — but the larger the ensemble, the more the electronics get in the way of what is actually going on.
I really have this big distaste of a lot [of] music for ensemble and electronics; you’ve got this ensemble creating this beautiful 3D sound that resonates around the room in all of these acoustically interesting ways that are subtle. Every time you draw a bow across the string, it is going to be different; and that’s why we can listen to a violin play the same note for as long as they want, and it’s still interesting compared to a MIDI violin. When you pair that sound with a pair of speakers, even in a surround sound setup, it’s so easy for the playback to sound very 2D and flat in comparison to the live instruments.
But there’s ways where it can really work. Alistair MacDonald, my other tutor at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, did teach me a lot — and so when I do use electronics, I try to make sure that I follow his teachings in how to do that. But it is so easy to completely mess up a really lovely piece by adding electronics and for me, sometimes it isn’t worth the risk of trying to add them.
During a live performance of a piece of yours, what goes through your mind when you are operating live electronics? Do you see yourself as more of a performer during that moment?
Whenever I do use electronics, I try to keep that aspect of it quite minimal. In ‘The loveliest thing’ with Zoe, there is very little agency for the electronics in that piece; it is largely based around samples. The only kind of “live electronics” are the sine tones, and they are hardly exciting — you are just turning them on and off.
During my undergraduate degree, I was very much focused on live electronics, and although I think that really helped inform the work I make now, I’m just less interested in it right now. I guess that the whole effort for result is so massively skewed; I find myself putting all of this work in to get something out that sounds a lot less “nice” than live instruments, so my thinking is, “why not just use live instruments?”.
For me, live electronics don’t interest me too much, because it’s difficult to give any sense of performer agency without a setup and resources that you very rarely get. It also looks boring on stage. I’ve been the guy onstage with the laptop — and I probably will again in the future — it doesn’t feel good, and I imagine that it doesn’t look very good. It’s not an interesting performance visually, which is important — as much as we like to think that it’s not.
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How did you ensure that there was a play and mystery in ‘The loveliest thing’, and your practice on a wider scale?
I think it’s just coming back to that idea of “sweetness” — injecting a sense of that so that there is something for the audience to latch onto. There are a lot of science departments that get some funding and then ask a composer to make a piece about their research; and it ends up being pretty boring, because in order to be effectively conveying the research, you have to limit your artistic voice a wee bit. Obviously, it’s not impossible to do that with a sense of artistry.
So what I mean by that programme note [ed. “I would hate for this to be a cold, scientific investigation of natural phenomena.”] is: looking at these patterns of two notes when they get close to each other, what’s up with that? The opening of that piece is answering that question in a very dry way. Zoe is playing two different harmonics on the same note, detuning one string which makes a “wobbly” noise, and then she is detuning that string down and it makes a “wobbly” noise. Then at the end you have the exact same sections repeated, but this time there are sine tones underneath doing a I-V-IV pattern — which is my favourite chord progression. So to combine that tech-demo aspect of the piece with an incredibly sweet chord pattern is a fun thing to do. I just like it. For me, that’s enough; if I know in my heart that I like it, then I have to put it in the piece.
Do you think that the use of the I-V-IV is latching onto the “sweetness” of the piece?
Absolutely. It’s not the only piece [where] I’ve used I-V-IV and it won’t be the last. It wouldn’t pass any academic rigour, but I don’t have to deal with that at this moment. So while I can write music with this “sweetness”, it is important to me at the same time that what I am doing isn’t described as “pop music”, where they are using these tropes (especially with the harmonies). I find that middle ground very interesting and fun to work with and listen to.
So there is this idea of walking a tightrope between these two aspects — which I think has been ridiculed for too long — and we’re moving in the right direction, for me at least. I guess that’s what I’m trying to do.
What parameters do you think separate popular music and classical music?
This isn’t definitive, but one aspect that I do find particularly interesting is how much you are considering the audience. Pop music is about mass appeal, you pander to the audience; whereas in some hardcore contemporary classical music, there is almost a disdain for the audience. Perhaps the latter isn’t as present in current circles, but it is still there.
And so for me, it’s about straddling this line between considering a certain amount of approachability; the music invites you in and wants to be listened to. It also doesn’t have this adversarial stance to the listener. That’s important — but if you go too far that way then you start thinking “well, what if people don’t like this music” or “what if not enough people like this music?” and you end up making something very insincere. So it’s hard to define where that line is. But a lot of my work is tasked to set myself that line: between pop music’s mass appeal and hardcore contemporary classical rigour. To see what we can get using the best bits of both.
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Your work ‘The Wasp and the Gibbet’ recently toured Scotland with the Ipsa Collective and The Night With… — I understand the text was inspired from a monument in Newbury, where you grew up?
That was inspired by the phenomenon where you are older and you remember this childhood memory that seemed very normal at the time, but is super weird in hindsight. I had that a couple of years ago. I was thinking about how we used to walk up this hill in Newbury to this place named Combe Gibbet. It was a double gibbet, which is different from a gallow. A gallow is where they hanged people, whereas a gibbet hangs people who are already dead to serve as a warning. So a gibbet had no practical purpose other than to be a warning to people if they mess with the state. As a child, we used to go on these idyllic walks up to a gibbet; that was a part of my childhood. Growing up, it’s something that you don’t think about, but years later, you find yourself thinking “that was actually quite weird”.
After a while, I began to start looking into the history of the gibbet through a museum website. It had this really bizarre story: the tale goes that it was originally erected to display the bodies of a man and a woman, and they killed the man’s current wife by shoving her head into a wasps’ nest until they stung her to death. I just thought that was a really good story — which is likely not true. This got me thinking about why we tell these stories — how does it come to be that this ludicrous story became the accepted version of events? You would hear a story like that from the museum tour guide and everyone knows that it’s not true… But why are we doing it? Because it’s a good story.
My girlfriend at the time was a beekeeper, and she had been telling me about wasps and how they feed a lot of the time. So a lot of the time, the way wasps will get food is [that] they will go and find a source of protein — often a bee — and they attack [the] bee, rip its head and limbs off, bring the thorax (the body of the bee) back to its nest, where the wasp’s larvae will eat the bee and then brew a sweet syrup in their stomach, that they excrete — and then the wasp eats. All of this is a process called proctodeal trophallaxis. It’s similar to what seagulls do, but there is this whole extra level of exchange going on.
I don’t exactly know what inspired it, but I connected these two elements together. What I like about the piece is that it’s left to the listener to make these connections; but to state it very literally, the wasp mother is the storyteller, the bee body is the story, the maggots are the audience, the syrup is the applause. It’s this idea of the mother feeding her kids this story to extract something herself in the form of a syrup that she can then drink and survive off. I thought that it was a cool metaphor — along with the story behind the wasps and the story behind the gibbet.
Musically, how did those ideas get channeled in the piece?
I had written an earlier version of the piece and I had tried to be much more difficult. But even before I workshopped it, I threw away that draft and then basically said “I’m going to write a song, and it’s going to be a Joanna Newsom rip-off” — because I love Joanna Newsom’s music. The storytelling and the folk elements of it all felt very Joanna Newsom.
Although the resulting song doesn’t come across as a Joanna Newsom rip-off, you can definitely tell that the influence is there. But I was perfectly happy going into the writing process thinking, “I’m going to be writing a Joanna Newsom song. Obviously, it won’t come out exactly the same, but that’s my way into this piece.” Even the title is Newsom-esque — it’s “the thing and the thing”… -laughs-
You approach the text in the voice in a syllabic manner — do you see the delivery of the text as being more important than the melody?
I definitely approach text more from a songwriter perspective rather than as a composer. I was writing lyrics for bands before I was ever writing classical music. I think that it’s important to me for people to understand the text without necessarily having to read it. The whole kind of overly-flowery classical way of singing isn’t to my taste; and so it sounds more like a song in the pop sense, rather than a piece of classical music for soprano. Again, I’m straddling these lines.
When working with text, do you aim to keep it all or do you edit it down?
Usually I approach things like a songwriter, whereby the text and the music are written simultaneously, and therefore it is easier for me to find this meld between them. But the very first part of the piece that I wrote is the final section, which is almost a self-contained song; I wrote the text and then composed around it.
One of things that I’ve gotten better at over the years is knowing when to cut and edit down, and it can sometimes be the best way to improve a piece. So I definitely try not to be too precious over my work — whether instrumental or text based — because you will get other opinions that say you should take that section out.
One of my tutors during my undergraduate, Nick Fells, would talk about the economy of material, and aim to get the most out of it without having too much left on the side. What needs to be there is there, and what doesn’t need to be there is not.
Alongside your composition practice, you are also part of a band named Instruction Manual. How does that sit alongside your classical output?
Instruction Manual is a place for me to get my own songs out. Although I spend a lot of my time on composing, I still have these songs that come to me — and it’s nice to have a way to get them out into the world. What I love about Instruction Manual, the whole schtick with them, is that we have this “robot choir”: a very 2000s synthesised choir which we play acoustic instruments around which evokes this digital nostalgia.
There’s the idea that we are mixing the folk with this “2000s-new”; I still consider that “new”, but I’m sure that there are many people who don’t. -laughs- I went through this real barren phase before Instruction Manual, because I couldn’t write lyrics that I was happy with; when I was writing lyrics for [previous] bands that I was singing in, I would feel stupid because a lot of the lyrics were trite or sincere. Whereas when I have the robot choir, there is an inherent humour to it. So I can write these sincere lyrics, and it’s not that we’re being like “wink wink, nudge nudge, isn’t this stupid” — because I mean what I write with those lyrics — but there’s this humorous aspect which softens that edge. I know that I’ve got this veil to hide behind, and it makes me a bit more open in my lyrics.
Would you say that your artistic concerns are slightly different whilst working under the Instruction Manual alias?
I’ve got so much I-V-IV in me and I can’t do it all in my contemporary classical work. -laughs- So Instruction Manual is an avenue for me to get all of this excessive I-V-IV out of my system. I think that my inherent harmonic language is incredibly cheesy. I enjoy writing classical music that takes that and puts barriers on it, resulting in things being taken into a new direction. But sometimes it feels really good to let it out without any of those barriers — and that’s the band where I get to do that.
Is the writing process more collaborative in comparison?
Scott Crawford Morrison and I write all of the music. Scott is a really great composer; he’s one of my oldest friends in Glasgow, I’ve known him for over a decade now, and we’ve always been in different bands together. When working with him, I don’t have to think about how we collaborate, because it just comes together so naturally for us. It’s a nice thing to have in what is essentially a non-professional aspect of my music making. I don’t have to think about any of the concerns that I am preoccupied with my contemporary classical music — I can just write and play shows.
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Learn more about Ollie Hawker and his practice:
- https://www.olliehawker.com/
- https://soundcloud.com/olliehawker
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYTzwc4qWzTqS7tsAAWRMgw
- https://www.instagram.com/ollie.p.hawker/
Stream and download Ollie’s albums on Why Keith Dropped the S:
- https://whykeithdroppedthes.bandcamp.com/album/it-s-so-easy-pt-3-it-s-always-this-easy
- https://whykeithdroppedthes.bandcamp.com/track/behind-closed-eyes
Stream and download Instruction Manual’s debut LP:
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