Taking 5 with Elena Kats-Chernin

I was brought up in the former USSR in a town on the Volga river called Yaroslavl, not too far from Moscow. I had a piano teacher from when I was four years old. I couldn’t reach the floor and there were many very thick books under my feet to help me feel stable on my chair. One of those books was a biography of Chopin and, when I was not at the piano, I loved glancing at the book pages, mainly marvelling at the pictures (this was before I could read), and later I loved reading the stories about Chopin and Georges Sand. 

My favourite thing to do was to sit at the piano and improvise for hours. I would forget everything around me and just play and play. Sometimes sounds would form into a construction resembling a music piece and from the age of 5 I was able to write them down. The first piece I composed properly was a lullaby, much later renamed Lullaby for Nick, the youngest of my three sons. In my childhood I always had to play it for all our dinner guests and I got really sick of it over time. I only revived this piece when Nick was twenty years old (too old for lullabies), he really liked it and was thrilled to have it named after him.

For many years I’ve used pencil and music manuscript paper to compose. These days I use a thick black pen, rather than a pencil, as I like less resistance from the paper. To become a composer was my dream. I never wanted to do anything else ever since I was very young. 

I compose at the piano while improvising. There is a lot of wild unintelligible scribbling going on, many ideas pass throughout the day, but things don’t always ‘stick’. Often an idea is just a step towards a much better idea. Sometimes a fragment appears, based on two or three notes and I twist it around and change the rhythm or the order of the notes, in a rotating kind of way, trying all different possibilities and sometimes I accidentally strike a note which sounds really interesting in the context of the current material. 

Often imagining a concert situation for a particular piece really helps as I try to think “what would be the first thing I would want to hear if I was sitting in the audience right now?” and “what would be the next thing or the last?” I love the notion of an empty page, it excites me to see an untouched sheet waiting to be filled with notes. The anticipation of what will be written today never loses its wonder. 

My compositional style or sound is varied. I find it difficult to define. It always delights me when a friend calls up and tells me that they were just listening to a piece of music on the radio and were wondering what it was and were thinking that it sounded like my music and then they found out that yes, it was my piece. That is the kind of thing that a composer wants, that the language of the piece is recognisable. I like to create character pieces, with unusual harmonic shifts and melodies that want to be repeated or transformed. Often, however, it is the rhythm that defines a work, in context with the other elements. For example, the piece like ‘Eliza Aria’ from my Wild Swans Concert Suite would not at all be interesting if the syncopated rhythm was not part of its main features.  

In the album ‘Unsent Love Letters’ inspired by Eric Satie’s life and music, I tried to stay away from strong melodies and the aim in this project was to create an atmosphere of calm and longing. Sometimes the word ‘abstract’ was floating in my head while composing this collection.

On occasions I write a piece in opposition to what I have just written and other times I want to further explore some of the instrumental combinations or chords in the next work. This really depends on the work. A different process takes place while working on a commissioned work or my own project. For example, sometimes a commissioner would say that they like a particular piece of mine and might like something similar, though not the same. Or a piece needs to be of a celebratory kind, because it is written for someone’s birthday.

I write short score - a piano sketch - of the whole work first, so that I have an overview of where the build-up of tension is, where the climactic point is, where the calm moments are, and if there is a need for more contrast or if there is too much material already. That is much easier to judge on a piano score, than on an orchestral score. Once the full score with its many instrumental lines is there, it is extremely complex and unwieldy to cut or extend or even change keys, for example, therefore it is also prone to unforeseen mistakes.

In my childhood I worshipped Rachmaninov and his piano concertos and preludes, and Prokofiev with his incredible bright orchestrations in his ballets, the Classical Symphony and Peter and the Wolf.  

As I grew into my teenage years, my absolute favourites became Bach and Ravel. Later I got very interested in Stockhausen and my teacher Helmut Lachenmann with his intensely radical approach to the whole concept of music creation. He motivated and challenged his students to question the usual composing solutions. My homework was to create small pieces according to the tasks he set out for me. What became evident is that the initial material would become the most important vehicle for the rest of the work. The next step was to find ways of upturning material, how and when to disrupt textures, where it might lead to, and to consider the aim of the overall piece. The philosophy behind the piece is very important to Lachenmann and he instilled that inquisitiveness in his students forever.