Interview, Cordelia Williams on Nightlight

Inspired in part by her recent experience of nursing her young children in the small hours and dedicated to 'the many people who feel alone in the darkness', British pianist Cordelia Williams's latest solo recording explores different facets of night through a sequence of works by Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Scriabin, Tomkins and Bill Evans. I spoke to her about how motherhood affected her relationships with both music and night-time, the literary and theological sources which inspired her, and her mission to 'to introduce joyful music-making into everyday family life' through her forthcoming book of activities for parents of young children...

How much did your own experiences of sleeplessness feed into the project?

I suppose the recording came out of that surreal experience of being up with a newborn in the middle of the night - you don’t know whether you’re awake or asleep, and it’s almost like a hallucination. I never really had a problem with insomnia until I had children, but I did find the early days of motherhood when you’re totally responsible for that person and everyone else is asleep quite overwhelming; there’s tenderness but also desperation, which is quite an interesting balance.

The first time round I found that adjustment of going from single life to having no control over anything really difficult, and then when I had my second child I thought ‘OK, I’m going to try and make this a bit more special for us both’. So I started listening to music, partly as a way of just keeping myself awake but also to create a sense of positivity so that I’d actively look forward to waking up and feeding. In particular I listened to the Scriabin that’s on this recording while I was up in the night with my second, and somehow I just found it very comforting: there’s a kind of beautiful melancholy to it, in the sense that you’re feeling so alone but at the same time really enjoying it!

So was the Scriabin a piece you discovered for the first time during the night?

I actually knew it before, but I often find this with pieces – suddenly I’ll feel desperate to play something I’ve heard or even worked on a little bit previously, almost like I don’t have any control over it! The same thing happened with the Schumann Songs of Dawn, and it was very sudden; one day I opened the book and played them through and thought ‘OK, this is what I’m going to be playing this year…’. It’s as if the piece decides!

How many different faces of night do we encounter on the recording?

The album is structured as a journey in that you start off in quite a hallucinatory state with the Mozart Fantasia in D minor, which almost hovers between reality and unreality – when you’re half-awake in the middle of the night it can be a beautiful, peaceful experience or it can be a surreal, almost psychotic one. That’s the point of departure, and then we travel through more positive and even more desperate experiences; the simplicity and comfort of the Liszt Consolations is probably quite self-explanatory, but the Schubert Sonata in C minor is really the centrepiece and that is truly dark. You can really feel his desperation in that piece: he’s ill, he’s facing the end of his life, and in the finale there’s this sense of dread and being chased by something fearful. That, I think, is probably the darkest face of night, but in the slow movement there’s this gorgeous glimpse of heaven. To me, that sonata sums up the whole concept of the album.

The Scriabin is very much about the beauty of night, and particularly the beauty of the sea at night: the reflections and the different colours on the water were an overt inspiration for him, so that’s also quite an uplifting interpretation of night. The Tomkins and the Bill Evans make quite a nice pair – they work really well together, because the Tomkins is in C minor and it ends on this G major imperfect cadence which then resolves into the Bill Evans in C major. I like that slight quirkiness, and the sense of crossing the centuries. The Evans is really the most peaceful depiction of night on the programme – unsurprisingly, given the title! – and it’s what I listen to when I need to just be still and get away from everything. Then that leads into the Schumann songs which are full of hopefulness, waiting for the next day and the possibilities that are just around the corner.

Is that idea of ‘crossing the centuries’ by finding connections between classical music and jazz something that’s always appealed to you?

It’s something I’m very interested in and would like to delve into more when I’ve got a bit more time; I’ve always loved listening to jazz so it was a bit of a treat for me to record it. I also love that it’s got this almost Messiaen-like quality to it – I did a big Messiaen project a few years ago, and when I came back to the Bill Evans for this album I thought about all that birdsong in a different light!

How much of an impact did the experience of lockdown have on your programming, and indeed your relationship to the pieces on the album?

It’s quite hard for me to unravel it all, because I feel like I’ve been completely immersed in the concept of this recording for so long. It was so much a part of my lockdown experience, and I feel really grateful to have had something to work towards and occupy me over this difficult year. I’d been working on the idea since 2019, and then about a month before the recording-date my husband got COVID, then the children and I caught it too, and it was an absolute nightmare. That was a really dark period, because I felt absolutely devastated that I wasn’t going to be able to record something that had been occupying my heart and mind for all of that time – it was like being ready to give birth and then being told that you have to hold it in for another year!

We were planning to move to Kenya in March, and the recording was the last thing I was doing here; if we hadn’t recorded it as scheduled then we would have had to postpone it for at least eight months. In a way that experience (rather than the lockdown itself) did have a big effect on the recording, because it was almost as if that last-minute desperation really fed into how I played, and I mean that in a positive way; luckily I came out of isolation the day before, and it made me go into quite an unusual creative mindset.

You read theology at Cambridge after studying at Chethams, and several of your previous projects have explored connections between religion and music – was that the case here, or were you keen to focus on night from a more secular perspective?

I didn’t want to make it too overtly theological because I’m aware that that doesn’t appeal to everyone, but it is a part of me and my training and I’ve always been interested in how people think about these things. It started off as very much a personal expression, but when the recording started taking shape I did start researching again and the quotation that I always came back to was the one from St John of the Cross which is in the booklet: it’s from a poem that’s come to be known as ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’, although it wasn’t titled as that originally. He talks about the spiritual experience of having to leave the body and senses and ego behind, and it’s a journey towards truth or what you might call enlightenment if you were looking at it from a 2021 point of view.

It’s a very worldwide idea, moving away from the ego in order to find a deeper truth and unity; that influenced the recording itself because when I was choosing how the progression would work I was thinking a lot about the necessity of those dark moments in life. We all have to go through them, and there’s usually something positive about a very challenging experience, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time. I designed the recording as a playlist of sorts, which is a little unusual, but I wanted to make something that would speak to a certain mood, that someone might listen to in introspective times, when needing hope, comfort or to feel uplifted, or wanting company in the middle of the night. I feel that all these pieces (and the composers through them) really see our innermost worries and experiences, and somehow lift us out of that emotional isolation.

Aside from that poem which you cite in your booklet-note, are there any other works of literature which you’d recommend to listeners who are keen to explore these connections further?

When I was doing that Messiaen project I mentioned earlier, I worked with the poets Michael Symmons Roberts and Rowan Williams (no relation!): Michael wrote twenty poems inspired by Vingt Regards and Rowan wrote one long poem, so they were complementary. Some other things I've really loved on the topic of the renewing power of hope contained within darkness or loss of self: Michael Symmons Roberts's 'The darkness is no darkness' (from Drysalter); Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Henry Vaughan's 'The Night'; Hollie McNish's Nobody Told Me. Also Eckhart Tolle (and Elizabeth Gilbert to some extent!) are examples from popular literature who explore the idea of renewal.

You also have a book coming out next month which focuses on using music with young children throughout the day – did you conceive that as a parallel project to the recording?

The book is much more of a practical expression: there are morning activities for energy, things for meal-times, bath-time and times when you’re really tired, so it’s all organised for how parents would use it. There’s a whole chapter on lullabies with a corresponding online playlist, and a big selection of musical activities and games - all things that I do and which come naturally to me, but which wouldn’t necessarily come so naturally if you weren’t a trained musician. I think lots of people want to have that musical aspect of life with children but perhaps aren’t very confident about how to do it themselves at home – and it’s actually really easy! I thought it would be useful for people to have some ideas written down to pull out when they’re really tired and not feeling very creative.

What specific pieces of music do your own children respond to particularly well, and have they sprung any surprises on that front?

I think it depends on the age-range: my newborns seemed to find Bach’s St Matthew Passion very calming (as do I!). Strauss waltzes are also great for newborns, because you can have them in a sling and sashay around with them. With slightly older children, I’m often blown away by how readily they recognise music which they’ve only heard a couple of times – my elder son is only four, but he’ll hear something I was practising in a totally different context on the radio and pick it up. The other thing that both of my children really love is a CD that I have of Eric Coates, which is a bit of a wildcard. It has things like The Dambusters March and Calling All Workers, so sometimes I use that as our ‘tidying-up song’ and they get really excited and dance around everywhere!

You can watch Cordelia's new documentary 'On Being a Pianist in Kenya' via the link below.