FLA 09: Cheryl Frances-Hoad

LAST: BERNARD HUGHES: Precious Things: Choral Music (performed by The Epiphoni Consort, Tim Reader) (2022, Delphian Records)

Extract: ‘Perhaps’

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

He writes really well for voices so it’s all really singable. I think it’s very original, adventurous but immediate, it can be whimsical and amusing, but also incredibly moving. It has all the things that matter. The first song, ‘Perhaps’, where he writes for children’s voices, it’s a simple tune but it’s a beautiful tune. It’s what I also love about Benjamin Britten – for me it’s emotionally engaging, really well written, idiomatic, and loads of really inventive yet immediate ideas, that really grab you and make you want to listen.

And the Psalm! I love the psalm. ‘Psalm 56’! There’s so many boring settings with psalms that are just so unengaging and dour. But this leaps off the page. I’m not religious myself, but it makes you identify with the text much more than a lot of other [psalms] that are really respected in the canon, you know?

JUSTIN LEWIS

I found a little bit on Bernard’s website where he was talking about the ‘Precious Things’ section, the precious things of which are gold, helium and crude oil. And of course helium is a finite thing, so it ends with this solo soprano who does this sweep to the top of her range as if helium is leaving the planet. It’s brilliant. Not what I was expecting. Classical music can be as surprising as anything.

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

It’s amazing to hear that.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Anything is possible!

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JUSTIN LEWIS

I obviously wanted to ask you about some of your other work. There’s often quite a lot of playfulness in what you do, like ‘Game On’ for instance, which is for piano and Commodore 64. How did that come about?

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

I was a composer-in-residence at Rambert Dance Company, and I got to know the pianist Yshani Perinpanayagam really well. She was really into vintage 80s video games, and I said, Wouldn’t it be fun to do something like that. So we applied for some Arts Council money, and got it!

I mean, I’ve never played video games myself. But there’s something very evocative about it all. We were just chatting, and the first movement (‘Nash’) is sort of based on economics. The Nash equilibrium. I remember watching lots of lectures about it on YouTube from Yale and coming up with these number grids from which I would generate the notes. It’s sort of a fun, different thing to do, really, a different sort of sound world to experiment with. And mainly because Yshani was able to do it.

I wrote the music – she gave me a breakdown of what I could write, but then she programmed it on the Commodore 64. She's such a brilliant pianist, and she’s always so well-prepared – she did that second movement (‘Robots Will Rule the World’), which is really rhythmically complicated, without a click track. It was an opportunity to explore another sound world. I’ve been wanting to do more electronic stuff for a very long time but basically I never learned it at school because I’d been writing other stuff, and I don’t get round to doing anything musical in my spare time. For the third movement (‘Lament’), Yshani sent me some of her favourite video games. There was a game for the Commodore 64 called ‘XOR’ (1987). You chase a thing around a maze, and it has this 8-bit music…

There’s something really tragic about that music, and I found myself cooking and playing this thing on repeat and singing melodies around it, and I thought it was incredibly moving and emotional. I guess that's why I like other kinds of music – you find something that really moves you and affects you.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think on one level, video games (especially old-school ones, for some reason) have these incredibly tragic worlds where the protagonists are just stuck there, forever and ever. It’s ironic that some of them actually use classical themes. ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ being used in Manic Miner, for instance, or Tetris for a while used JS Bach’s French Suite No 3. It’s taken more seriously as a genre now. Did you hear Charlie Brooker on Desert Island Discs a few years ago? He chose some video game music: Jonathan Dunn’s ‘Robocop’.

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Did he? And of course there’s a video game Prom this year.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Of course! That’s right. [Broadcast, BBC Four, 05/08/2022] And another piece that you wrote involving Yshani was called ‘Pay Close Attention’, and that leads us nicely into…

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ANYTHING: THE PRODIGY/Experience (1992, XL Recordings)

Extract: ‘Out of Space’

JUSTIN LEWIS

I remember I was working in a record shop when the first white label of ‘Charly’ turned up. I was listening to a lot of dance music in those days, some of which was getting more expensive and lavish, and then suddenly this guy in his bedroom has made this crude thing – in a good way. When did you first hear this album?

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

When did it come out?

JUSTIN LEWIS

The album came out in ’92.

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

I wouldn’t have heard it then. I heard it when I was 16, 17. I don't know how I got into it. I mean, Keith [Flint] lived very near to me in Essex, so maybe I just heard about it in the news, I can’t remember. But really, what I love about dance music is the way that it just takes over your body. I just went to see the Prodigy, for the first time, actually – and it was great in many ways, although it was the 25th anniversary tour of a much later album (The Fat of the Land) and I prefer Experience. I just love the way the music completely absorbs you, the way you can feel it vibrating through your lungs. I mean, I always have to go with the most high-tech earplugs for my hearing, but I like the immediacy and the way it totally grabs you, I really love that about pop music and dance music. To be honest, if I really want some kind of emotional catharsis, I’d probably listen to more pop music than I would when I'm not looking for subtlety or finesse or complexity. I like the simplicity of it as well, the directness, the sort of trance-like state you can get in. I want to be able to grab people in that way with my music. I like the harmonic directness of it, and the rhythm.

JUSTIN LEWIS

It seems that, in a way, the worlds of pop and classical are closer together than they were. I’ve always followed lots of pop people on Twitter, I suppose because that’s my background, but I’m following more and more classical background people now, and Radio 3 people, and I’ve come back to classical music with a slightly greater understanding than when I was growing up because it didn’t feel like you were being taught about it in quite the right way.

 And there was this big divide between pop and classical back then, the two were set against each other. ‘Classical music is staid, it’s slow, it’s for old people.’ And then, from the other side, you got ‘Pop music is tuneless and cheap and meaningless.’ And I didn’t like either stereotype. Those kinds of views seem less common now, or less clearly polarised anyway.

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

It’s not so different. Do you think people don’t think classical music is still old and boring? I don’t know.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Hard to say, but I just think people might be introduced to it in a slightly different way now. You have a situation now where Radio 3 and 6Music sort of meet in the middle at times. 6 will play things that verge on ambient or classical, 3 will experiment with electronic and rock a little bit. And Radio 3 did sometimes experiment with the experimental end of pop music, but it feels like it happens more fluidly now.

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

That’s a great thing about iPhones and Apple Music playlists, isn’t it?

JUSTIN LEWIS

The possibility of chancing on something, yes.

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JUSTIN LEWIS

I’m going to ask you now about some of the specific pieces you’ve written. You’ve just put out the Thomas Carroll ‘Excelsus’ set as a download, which I’ve been loving.

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Oh, thank you.

JUSTIN LEWIS

I discovered that you wrote it back in 2002. I read a quote where you said, ‘I tend to write in the moment’, so how does it feel to revisit something you wrote 20 years ago like this?

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Fine, really! To be honest, I sometimes think the music I wrote back then is better than what I write now! I had been composing for so long by then – I was 21 then, and I’ve been composing since I was eight. So I’m remarkably unworried about my old stuff, it’s so long ago that I can like it for what it is.

It’s very hard [to play], too hard, insanely hard, and I don’t really write music like that anymore… unless it’s for somebody who wants something really difficult. To be honest, that piece is so hard that it doesn’t get done very much. And it sounds amazing on the disc – Thomas just did a fantastic job! But that was back in the day when I thought that performers had nothing to do except practise my music. Then I realised that they did have lives other than stapling themselves to my art! [Laughter] I quite like the seriousness of it, you know. I like it for what it is. Sometimes you just compromise a bit when you’re older, because you realise that something has to be rehearsed in this amount of time, and so you write something that’s easier than it should be sometimes, because you want it to sound good and if it isn’t played brilliantly, it sounds pretty rubbish, right?! I mean, I have had performances of my pieces done which are so difficult, but I sort of admire this sort of uncompromising attitude of that piece, you know?

JUSTIN LEWIS

I think especially when you’re young, it’s about pushing the limits. Which I still think you do, by the way, with music, but there's different ways of achieving this, I suppose.

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Exactly, and you know when you’re young, at that age, you think that every piece has to be your masterpiece. I still think that every piece has to really express what you want to say, of course. But going back to this girls’ choir Mag and Nunc I’m writing at the moment, my primary concern is that they have a good time singing it. It’s not about my grand artistic statement, right? I want them to enjoy it because they might have to sing some rather dour things, and it would be nice for them to have something fun. But I never would have done something like that in my twenties, when it was all ‘my grand artistic statement’. It’s too tiring to do that all the time.

JUSTIN LEWIS

There are a few compilations of your work out there – did you compile the running orders yourself?

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

No, Champs Hill are a charity, and they incredibly generously made the CDs and the promotion of them, they covered that. But I had to raise money to pay for the musicians’ fees and the recording engineers’ fees.

For my first disc, The Glory Tree, which was recorded 2007, maybe 2008, I applied for some funding on a whim and got it – and then I was stuck because I only got half of it, and had to raise the rest of it. Life was a bit hard going at the time, working very hard for very little money, having one performance of everything… I never thought, What’s the point?, but you start to go in that direction. But then, suddenly, the recording was four days of musicians treating my music like it was the most important thing in the world. It was just the most unbelievably affirming thing – and then when the disc came out, it got amazing reviews, back when you got proper broadsheet reviews. And so I became addicted to this experience. But I have spent months and months and months fundraising for those things. I exhausted every funding avenue there was.

JUSTIN LEWIS

You obviously do a lot of background research for your compositions, and your inspirations come not only from history, but art, literature, contemporary events. Do you just get an idea of a story – you read about it, and think, I could write about that?

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Just today, actually, I’ve been in touch with a poet, because I’ve had a little commission for female voices for next year. And I’ve never had the opportunity to set his work before, and so this little three-minute piece has come up, and so he’s stored in my memory bank. I don’t have his books with me here in Oxford, so I just texted him, and said, Do you have any poems that would suit this, this and this? He sent me some, and I really like one, so it’s: Great, I’ll set that!

I wrote a clarinet quintet called ‘Tales of the Invisible’, after I went to this talk at the Presteigne Festival given by this author called Nicholas Murray. He was talking about borders and travelling, and I just had that in the back of my mind.

Often, I just see things on telly, or hear them on the radio. Have you seen that series on BBC, The Art That Made Us? Honestly, that Spong Man at the beginning! I’ve been just obsessed with Spong Man, because he’s just so emotional, right? Looking at that pain in that man, from like thousands of years ago, it’s so striking, and so I have him in the back of my mind. Same with when I went to this talk at the Presteigne Festival given by this author, Nicholas Murray. He was talking about borders and travelling, and that eventually led to me writing a clarinet quintet, called ‘Tales of the Invisible’. And then there was the London Oriana Choir. I was their first composer-in-residence and they wanted to explore the theme of fertility, not a subject that particularly inspires me, so I had to actively try and find poems that inspired me that had something to do with that, tangentially.

Or, for instance, the piece I wrote for the 2021 Three Choirs Festival: ‘Earth Puts Her Colours By’. It was in memory of somebody, a guy who I knew a little about, but had never met. I tried to find a poem that would be suitable, so I got down all the poetry books in my house, and went down a Google trail…. But in the end, the poem I found for that was in the back of one of my mum’s poetry books that she had when she was young. So I do actively search for things to fit certain briefs.

There’s a poster at the train station for the summer exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, and I haven’t been to it yet, but the poster is just incredibly beautiful. It’s a jewel of a mouldy lemon. It’s called ‘Bad Lemon’, by Kathleen Ryan.

Basically this artist has done mouldy fruit, but made them out of opals. Staring at this poster, I really want to write a piece inspired by that in some way. But I find being inspired is really easy. You just have to look at something close enough. If I look hard enough at the wood grain of my desk, and the covering in it, you can do something about that.

JUSTIN LEWIS

You don’t strike me as someone who would ever get writer’s block. Or do you?

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

No, I haven’t had it for a long time. I had it when I was 15 after I wrote my piece for the BBC Young Composer. I decided that I was writing too fluently and so I tried to plot out what would happen in every five seconds of the music and it just completely stalled me for a year.

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, a novelist friend of mine likes starting out not knowing the ending, because if you know too much before you start, part of the fun is gone. Do you find that?

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Yes, I think so. The composer Judith Weir said to me, when she was examining my PhD Viva, ‘Some of the commentary was so pedantic’, because I think I was trying to be intelligent, you know, and prove that I was really thinking academically about all this stuff. And actually, you should just go with the flow of it more. Being here, in this room in Oxford – I’m just writing – and you get paranoid if you’re either not intellectual enough, or not immediate enough. Whereas I’m just writing a hell of a lot of music – I’m very lucky at the moment in that I’m writing full time. The thing is, if you do get stuck, you can just rely on technique for a bit, and then that will inspire you in the end.

JUSTIN LEWIS

And what about ‘One Life Stand’, which was interesting to hear and read about. Which you worked with Sophie Hannah on. It made me think about reinterpretations and new adaptations and also why art continues to be important because you can do something new with it. Because I gather that the original libretto, which I’m not too familiar with, is ‘of its time’, shall we say.

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

Of its time, yes! That was with the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston. There’s this beautiful music, by Robert Schumann, from 1840, based on these poems by Adelbert von Chamisso called Frauen-Liebe und Leben (Women’s Lives and Loves) (1830) and I guess what you have to do is believe in the feeling. Because in the last one of the songs, her husband dies, and she says, ‘Well, my life is over’, and obviously nowadays that is old-fashioned, but one can identify with that. But Jennifer was annoyed by singing that song cycle with this beautiful music but the whole focus of the original libretto was getting a husband and having a baby. [So we used the poetry of Sophie Hannah instead.]

JUSTIN LEWIS

In the time you’ve been a professional composer, I’m assuming things have got better for women composers in this country?

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD

It’s definitely got better. I was really lucky, right? Because I went to the Menuhin School. I was like a chubby ginger kid who was into music and was composing, and it didn’t even occur to me that I was a woman composer. My idol was Benjamin Britten. I just wrote music, I didn’t hear music by a woman composer until I was… twelve or thirteen. But I was in a very specialised environment, so if I could be helpful to teenage girls who feel they need to see somebody who’s like them, that’s great. I’m totally fine with that, and I can see how if you’re not in a music school, or from a minority, that becomes much more important. I’ve certainly benefited from being a woman composer – sometimes with funding that’s only open to women. There are lots of women composers now, and you know there's so many initiatives to make people more aware of women’s music. I mean, there’s nowhere near equality, but we’ll get there.

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FLA Playlist 9

Cheryl Frances-Hoad

Track 1

Cheryl Frances-Hoad: Katharsis: I. Prelude

David Cohen, Paul Hoskins, Rambert Orchestra

Tracks 2–6

Benjamin Britten: Cello Sonata in C Major, Op. 65

(Dialogo / Scherzo-pizzicato / Elegia / Marcia / Moto perpetuo)

Alexander Baillie, John Thwaites

[NB As mentioned above, Cheryl’s first purchase was actually a disc of Shostakovich and Prokofiev by Alexander Baillie and Piers Lane, but unfortunately, this isn’t currently on Spotify or indeed YouTube, so Cheryl chose another recording by Baillie.]

Track 7

Benjamin Britten: Tema “Sacher”

Julian Lloyd Webber

Track 8

William Byrd: O Lord, Make Thy Servant Elizabeth

The Tallis Scholars

Tracks 9–13

Bernard Hughes: Precious Things

[Perhaps / Psalm 56 / Precious Things: I. All the gold in the world. II. Helium. III. Crude]

The Epiphoni Consort, Tim Reader

Tracks 14–16

Cheryl Frances-Hoad: Game On

[I. Nash / II. Robots Will Rule the World / III. Lament]

Yshani Perinpanayagam

Track 17

Cheryl Frances-Hoad: Pay Close Attention

Yshani Perinpanayagam, Christopher Jones, Gemma Sharples, Kay Stephen, Anna Menzies

Track 18

‘Out of Space’

The Prodigy

Track 19

‘Charly (Trip Into Drum and Bass Version)’

The Prodigy

Tracks 20–21

Cheryl Frances-Hoad: Excelsus

[I. Requiem Aeternum / II. Kyrie]

Thomas Carroll 

Track 22

Cheryl Frances-Hoad: One Life Stand

[VIII. The Cycle]

Jennifer Johnston, Joseph Middleton

Much, much more about Cheryl, her career and her music at her website: www.cherylfranceshoad.co.uk

You can follow Cheryl on both Twitter and Instagram at @cherylhoad.

The download of Excelsus, performed by the cellist Thomas Carroll, is available from Orchid Classics.

Although the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis we discussed in our conversation is still work in progress, you can hear an earlier set of Cheryl’s at the following link [Choral Evensong, 28/04/2022, the Merton Canticles, performed by the Merton College Choir]. The Magnificat begins at 15’40”; The Nunc Dimittis at 21’25”.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9PmyCrtCN0

Cheryl’s ‘Your Servant, Elizabeth’, while not yet commercially available, was performed and broadcast at the BBC Proms concert event A Royal Music Celebration, live on BBC Radio 3 on 22/07/2022, and televised on BBC Four and iPlayer on 24/07/2022. The whole concert is available to watch here, and it’s well worth watching it all, but Cheryl’s section runs from 1’41’35”, beginning with a short feature on how she composed the piece, followed by the performance, as sung by the BBC Singers and conducted by Barry Wordsworth.

Gaming Music at the Proms was broadcast on BBC Four on 05/08/2022, and you can watch the whole thing on iPlayer, here.