Interview, Dani Howard on writing for orchestra

It was almost exactly this time last year that a sound-engineer friend advised me to keep an eye (and ear) out for an exhilarating album of orchestral music by the British composer Dani Howard, which she'd recently been recording in Liverpool. The results are every bit as characterful and colourful as her advocacy suggested, with Howard drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Shakespeare, the architecture of St. John's Smith Square and time-lapse photography - and making especially vivid and distinctive use of brass and percussion along the way.

In the run-up to premieres of her new concertos for Jess Gillam and Evelyn Glennie, Dani spoke to me about her musical upbringing in Hong Kong and later education at the Royal College of Music in London, conquering her fear of large-scale orchestral writing, and learning to hear music through 'a different set of ears' after taking on producing duties for her debut album...

What's your own background as an instrumentalist?

Drumkit was my first instrument, which I absolutely loved; I taught myself guitar and played in bands, but cello was definitely the instrument I would’ve pursued had I wanted to be a performer. And it was an amazing foundation for orchestral writing: from sitting in a cello section I absorbed so many things that I can apply to such a big percentage of the orchestra. It gave me an instinctive understanding of the physicality of the instruments, the density of the parts and how they intertwine with each other, and even basic things like how frequently certain instruments or sections are typically playing.

What sort of orchestral textures (and which composers?) really drew your ear from the cello section?

I grew up in Hong Kong, and with no disrespect to my school orchestra their programming was quite conservative: I never remember us playing anything that made me go ‘Oh wow, what’s this?!’. But when I was about fifteen I heard the Hong Kong Philharmonic playing John Adams’s Harmonielehre, and it absolutely blew my mind. And I got very excited when my cello teacher brought me Britten’s First Cello Suite – that’s not even new music, but it was newer than the Bach Suites I was used to!

I’d always really separated the popular music and songwriting that I enjoyed from my classical training, and it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve realised that there can be this wonderful space where they can meet.

In your booklet-note you mention your initial anxiety about writing for orchestra - how did you get past that mental block?

I got over it pretty quickly when someone offered me a fee to write an orchestral work soon after my graduation! Orchestra Vitae commissioned me to compose a piece (which became Arches) to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth in 2016, and I just got on with it: I was never going to go looking for orchestral commissions, partly because I didn't think it was possible to be pro-active about it, but I quickly got a sense of the textures and palettes that make me excited. I’m still more nervous at the premieres of orchestral works than I am for chamber pieces, because the audience is just so much bigger – a chamber-music venue might hold a couple of hundred people, whereas for an orchestral concert you could be looking at a couple of thousand.

And then there’s the number of players involved…when you walk into that first rehearsal to see nearly a hundred musicians staring at you, it’s hard to silence the inner voice that says ‘Gosh, what if they don’t like it?!’ But of course not everybody is going to like it, and that’s the case with every type of music: not everybody likes Britten, or Stravinsky, or pretty much any other composer you care to name. I had that realisation years ago, and it helped me to protect my own emotions; if you write something that you like then it’s bound to speak to some other people out there, and that’s half the battle!

Do you modify much once rehearsals are underway, or are things pretty much set in stone by then?

It happens a lot more with chamber music, but by the time you get to the first rehearsal for an orchestral work it’s too late! Dynamics and articulation-marks can definitely change, but not the nuts and bolts of the music. And you have to bear in mind the acoustics of that particular venue once you start tweaking details. I’ve used the vibraphone in all my orchestral pieces, and that can be a real headache – in some halls it’s so loud, and in others you can barely hear it!

Sometimes the conductor will have an interesting idea that you try out and decide to incorporate, so the ‘final’ score that you submit to a commissioner is never really the final one – there’s usually at least ten little things in an orchestra piece that I’ll need to adjust.

Who were your mentors once you started formally studying composition?

Joseph Horowitz was basically the reason I wanted to study at the Royal College of Music. Before I enrolled there I’d never had a composition-lesson in my life; between the ages of 10 and 18 my cello teacher was Richard Bamping (the principal cellist of the Hong Kong Philharmonic), who taught me everything I knew about music up until that point. Through him I got to know members of the orchestra, and when I was sixteen I went to a recital where the principal clarinet played Horowitz’s Sonatina…

It's quite jazzy and quirky, and really got under my skin: I tracked down a recording and listened to it over and over. A few weeks later when I was starting to look at places to study, I saw that Horowitz was on the faculty at the RCM – I didn’t even know he was alive! I’d never heard music by living composers before; growing up in Hong Kong, we didn’t have things like Young Composer of the Year, so when I realised I could potentially go and work with him I was incredibly excited.

When my mum and I organised our overseas trip to explore places where I might study, the clarinettist who’d performed the Sonatina put us in touch with Horowitz and we went round to his house in London for tea; it was the most inspiring thing ever, and it sold me on wanting to go to the RCM.

Joseph was never officially my teacher (my mentor during my studies was the wonderful Jonathan Cole), but he was so wise and generous with his time. I met up with him when I got my first opera-commission because I knew that he’d written a lot of opera and stage-works, and he was incredibly helpful. We had a lovely little relationship which I remember very fondly, because it was the springboard for some many things that went on to happen…

Your writing for brass and percussion is so striking: how did those pieces of the puzzle fall into place?

These days I seem to be more known as a brass and percussion composer, which always surprises me! Brass was completely new to me when I arrived in London to study: I’d heard brass in the Hong Kong Philharmonic, but I didn’t meet anyone who played a brass instrument or percussion till I got to the RCM! My youth orchestra didn’t have any brass or percussion – just two clarinets and two flutes, violins, cellos and double-bass.

When I enrolled at the RCM I made a very conscious decision that I was going to learn everything possible about things that I knew nothing about. I deliberately didn’t write a single piece for strings during that time, but focused instead on percussion music: nine or ten pieces over four years, including one for the whole department of 24 percussionists! Then I wrote a brass fanfare, a quintet, and a dectet…Over time I got really familiar with the nitty-gritty stuff – it takes writing a solo trumpet piece to really understand trumpet, moreso than writing an orchestral trumpet-part..

Sitting in on brass masterclasses at college gave me a really good understanding of breathing, and I studied a lot of orchestral music – Bruckner, Strauss and Tchaikovsky in particular - to understand how block brass chorale music works in terms of ranges and voicings. The friends that I made in London were another fount of knowledge; so many of them have orchestral jobs now, and I regularly pick their brains on passages that I’m unsure about. I still don’t get it right all the time, but that experience has really helped.

How did the collaboration with Peter Moore come about?

He was friends with one of my housemates when I was a student, but we didn’t know each other well at all until he got in touch in 2019 saying he was interested in working together. He wanted something written for him specifically - he was thinking about a solo piece, maybe with visual art or electronics - so we met for coffee and a general chat. At the end of the meeting I said ‘Just out of interest, would you ever want a concerto?’. I wasn’t saying I could definitely make it happen, but was just storing the idea away for future reference!

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect because two weeks later I got a call from Andrew Cornall at the Liverpool Philharmonic…The orchestra had recently premiered Coalescence, and they were keen to commission me again for something bigger. I asked how they felt about a trombone concerto with Peter, and Andrew loved the idea.

I’d never written a concerto before, and if you’d asked me what type of concerto I’d like to write before meeting Pete I don’t know if trombone would’ve been my first choice! But aside from loving his playing and getting on with him really well, I also feel a responsibility to write repertoire for instruments that aren’t often in the spotlight - which also means that the piece is likely to be programmed more. At this stage in my career I feel much better about doing that than writing another violin concerto…

Did writing a trombone concerto present particular challenges in terms of orchestration?

Absolutely! Writing a cello concerto (which I will be doing next year) was always on my bucket-list, and I remember my teacher talking about the importance of leaving space around the soloist when you’re writing for a mid-range instrument. When the trombone or cello are in the upper register you can hear it quite easily, but when they’re in the middle you’ve got to pull the lows low and the highs high to create a space for them to be heard (unless you intentionally want the sound to be muddled, which can be effective in small doses).

In this piece you hear piccolos and high harmonics in the violins for this reason – they’re essential to get things out of the way. I Iove thinking about these things, and the process of writing this concerto has enhanced my understanding of orchestration in general.

You produced this recording yourself - was sound-engineering part of your training?

No, I was very inexperienced: before this project I didn’t even have a clear idea of what a producer actually does! It was Andrew Cornall who suggested it, because he knows that I’m quite hands-on with rehearsals and have strong opinions about how everything sounds: he couldn’t imagine me sitting quietly in the booth while someone else made the decisions…

Producing an orchestral recording by yourself can be a bit overwhelming, so Andrew paired me up with a very experienced assistant producer called Dora Kmezic, and it was so helpful to have her there during the whole process. We made such a great team, because often one of us would hear something that the other didn’t: Dora plays the oboe so she was really focused on woodwind, whereas I was focused on strings, brass and percussion.

From a technical point of view, what did you learn from sitting in the producer's chair?

Dora was invaluable during the mixing-process, which was new territory for me. I’m very focused on the music rather than the sound itself, so if things were in tune and the dynamics were on point I was happy! And if I did notice that something was off with the mix, I didn’t have the vocabulary to communicate it: instead I’d ask things like ‘Why does this bit sound like he’s got a blanket over him?’! But Dora had such a thorough understanding of things like compression, microphone-placement and panning, so I’m definitely way better informed than I used to be.

I genuinely believe it’s a different set of ears, and requires another set of training in itself. My mixing-engineer Olga Fitzroy can hear something and tell you what studio it was recorded in, or whether it’s been recorded in one space and then been fabricated to sound like it’s somewhere else. I would have no clue about that kind of detail, but I might be able to tell you which cellist was playing or who was conducting…

My philosophy is that you should never micromanage big projects: just find the people who are the best at what they do, and trust them to get on with it. Maybe my background playing in bands helped with that, as has working on opera - my job is to write the score, and after that I have to let go of whether I like the costumes or not because the designers know what they’re doing!