Season 3 Episode 20, Part 1: David Hackbridge Johnson -- Composer & Multi-Instrumentalist

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Welcome back to another episode of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. For this episode, I interviewed Mr. David Hackridge Johnson, one of the prolific British composers of our time whose piano works were recorded by Mr. Lowell Lieberman, who is one of the prolific American composers of our time, whom I got to interview last season. So in the episode with Mr. Lieberman, he mentioned that he was about to release a new album titled The Devil's Liar under the Steinway Sons label, and he mentioned that he wanted to play pieces by contemporary composers, and he stumbled upon Mr. Hackridge Johnson's music. So Mr. Lieberman chose Mr. Hackridge Johnson's piano compositions, including all 7 nocturnes, exclusively for the album, and the rest is history. Lieberman describes Hackridge Johnson's compositional voice as vigorous, unrepentantly melodic, superbly crafted and orchestrated, and with a refreshing and idiosyncratic harmonic sense. Since then, I have been super curious about this composer, and since the release of the album last year, The Devil's Liar, I have been listening to it often, and I absolutely love it. It's became one of my favorite albums of all time. So then I reached out to Mr. Hackridge Johnson via Facebook to be friends, and finally today I got to meet him and interview him. Just finished the interview session now with Mr. Hackridge Johnson, and he's the sweetest person on earth, and his wealth of knowledge about music and literature, and especially the way he explains with humor, it's just so priceless. So before getting started, I want to welcome everyone who is listening or watching The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song for the first time. I'm a classical pianist and educator from New York City, passionate about creating a thriving and meaningful community of the classical the music industry through this podcast. Please visit yukimisongstudio.com to find out more about my work. And each episode of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song, I interview a guest speaker who has been breaking exciting new ground in the industry. Before getting started, I want to thank everyone for tuning in. Please rate the show and review it on Apple Podcasts because every rating and review will help people find my show. So here we go, dear friends. Please enjoy the show. You are listening to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song, where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry about how they are bringing the piano into the 21st century. I am honored to welcome Mr. David Hackridge Johnson, one of the prolific British composers of our time, who has written works in all genres. His name became known to many classical music listeners worldwide in recent years with one of America's most frequently performed and recorded living composers and pianists, Mr. Lowell Lieberman's solo piano album under Steinway Sons label. The title of the album is "The Devil's Liar," which all the pieces are written by Mr. Hackridge Johnson. Mr. Hackridge Johnson has written over 20 symphonies and tone poems as well as various chamber, vocal, ballet, opera, and choral music. In addition, he has written extensively for the piano, including piano sonatas, nocturnes, and many shorter pieces and piano cycles. Very recently, Mr. Johnson's newest work, an opera titled Blaze of Glory, was premiered at Wales Millennium Centre and presented by the Welsh National Opera and received rave reviews from multiple publications. The opus numbers to catalogue Mr. Johnson's large-scale works are currently in the 400s and more. Unfortunately, however, we get to listen to only a handful of recordings of his compositions through YouTube and music streaming services. So here I am today with Mr. Hackridge Johnson to discuss his remarkable career and compositions. And I have been a big fan of his music since the release of The Devil's Liar. So I personally want to promote his music, not limited to piano works, but ranging in different genres, so that a lot of classical musicians, including fellow pianists, will get to know him and start performing and recording his incredible music more often. So, David, thank you for being here today.

Thank you, Yukimi Song, for inviting me.

First, I want to tell you Mr. Lowell Lieberman was on my show and just before he released his second piano solo album, The Devil's Liar. I love the album so much. I've been listening to it since its release in February 2022. And, you know, during the interview session, Mr. Lieberman said nothing but praises about you and your works. And out of 70 minutes of our conversation, he spent good amount, like 8 to 10 minutes talking about the album, your compositions, and he shared the story of how he found you and your works in details. And I just wanted to say to my listeners and fans, if you haven't listened to Mr. Lieberman's album, The Devil's Lyre— lyre as in L-Y-R-E, which is the ancient instrument, U-shaped harp— with piano solo pieces written by Mr. David Hackbarth Johnson, please find links in the description and buy an album or start listening to to it via music streaming services. And if you missed Mr. Lieberman's episode with, with me, which was published in January 2022, and where we discussed about this album and talked about Mr. Hackridge Johnson, I wanted to remind you to check it out. This link is also in the description. Anyway, so let's start with this. I know how Mr. Lieberman found you, and through Facebook and everything, but I want to know from your take?

One of the positive aspects of the internet is that it can bring people together who probably would otherwise never meet. And I got a friendship request from Lowell and I thought, wow, because I'd heard of him because he's a major American composer and I knew he was a fine pianist as well, sometimes playing his own music, sometimes others. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. And then, you know, the nature of these things, you just sit there not really communicating for months because we're just on the internet as entities. But then all of a sudden he did write to me and he mentioned that during lockdown he was playing the piano a lot and he'd already produced an album, a double album actually, of some of his favorite rather demonic pieces, including things like Liszt's Totentanz. And we had started a discussion about that and he said he was planning another album which would include another bunch of favorite pieces, but he'd want to include maybe something by me. And I thought, okay, so continuing on the devil's theme, the diabolical, I concocted a nocturne for him which was based on a very weird dream I'd had about this peculiar devil-like creature sitting on a rock playing an instrument with very strange tunings. And I thought, okay, I'm going to write this And I sent it to him the next day and he, he seemed to like it. And then he said, well, you've called it Nocturne Number 7. I think it's number 7, isn't it? Where are the others? I said, I don't know, they're around somewhere. I mean, they could be in piles of manuscript paper in that corner or in that corner or upstairs in the attic. I did find the other 6 and they needed a bit of tidying up because these were quite old pieces from Nearly 20 years ago, at least 15 years ago, I tidied them up. I sent them to Lowell one by one. And he then at that point, he decided, you know what, I'm going to do an album entirely of your music, David. And I, I was quite amazed. And I thought I didn't know what to think, really. And, and I thought, well, maybe he'll go away and maybe he'll change his mind. Maybe you think, actually, maybe this stuff's not so good as I first thought. But literally within a few weeks, he sent me practice recordings that he'd done in his own house and then said that he was going to go to a recording studio where Sergei, who I don't know whether you know Sergei, has a recording studio and he's just going to do them. So I think probably within 6 months of us having any kind of official communication other than just staring at each other in the ether, he had an album out and Steinway had agreed to issue it. Okay, that's remarkable enough. And that would have been fine had he just played, played the pieces. And that's fine. Great. But it was the fact that the way he played the pieces just so impressed me. The fact that regardless of what one's opinion might be of the music, I can't say— other people have to say that. For me as a composer, he got right inside the style, right inside the marrow of the music to produce these very, very intense, intimate and intense performances, which I was absolutely thrilled by. And it was really just one of those strange things where, you know, 6 weeks after first speaking, he's made an album of my stuff. So he's always been a hero, but he's now a double hero for me.

The title of the album is actually the title of Nocturne No. 7. Did you write the Nocturne No. 7, The Devil's Liar, for Loewer?

He asked me whether I would like to write a piece. I wrote a piece that very evening and I sent it to him by probably breakfast time the following morning and said, look, I want to dedicate this to you. He'd sent me a hamper of his own music, by the way. He'd sent me some sheet music and I already had some CDs of his, so I felt like I owed him something anyway. And now that we were actually in proper communication, I thought, well, whatever he does with this piece, I don't mind. I'm going to write him something just as a greeting, as a sophisticated greetings card, if you like. Yeah. So it's written for him and it is an interesting sound world that I just happened to be in my mind. It's not a showpiece. It's not really even impressionistic. It's part of my— I have an obsession with the late piano music of Liszt, and it's a music.

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Lowell loves as well. So I thought, okay, this is in my head, so it comes out. And I thought, it's got Lowell all over it because I knew his Frankenstein, of course, as well, the wonderful ballet that he wrote, the DVD of which I bought some time ago. And the fact that Lowell writes very melodically But also in Frankenstein, there's this— it's not just the horrible horror aspects, it's the pathos, it's the sadness, the melancholy of this creature that's been made and is rejected. And it comes out of Gothic horror, but also feeds into the decadent literary movement, all things I'm terribly interested in. So I think we have already had a kind of meeting of minds, not just musically, but also intellectually and culturally.

Right. And then also in the episode that I spoke with him, he was very impressed. You know, he, of course, himself is a composer, and he was very impressed the fact that, you know, at that point it was Opus 405, and not only the amount but the quality and the variety of music that you are making. And then, you know, let me quote him. He says, David is a terrific composer. I am very excited about this release, hoping this album will make many others to explore his music. So that's what he says. So let's talk about this album, The Devil's Liar. Now that people have the access to your music through, you know, music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music and so forth, then people get to hear your music. Um, the album includes 7 nocturnes, and then Belle Fanfare, and Barcarolle, Elgies, and then Calligraphic Poems, which has 6 different pieces. So let's start with your nocturnes. Nocturne number 1, "Notturno Spettrale," which is— I heard a lot of Chopin's excerpt. It started with a left-hand pattern with, I think it's an excerpt from Barcarolle.

Yeah, it's put in minor mode, isn't it? So that sets you up for what is a parade of Chopinesque phantoms that haunt the music. And Chopin is to me always extraordinary. He's never old-fashioned. He's always modern. He's so far from a parlor composer. There's this mistaken view that, oh yes, Chopin, yes, we should all learn Chopin because we can just sit in our drawing rooms and play it and it's nice. And of course that's fine, Chopin always sounds nice, but I think it's much more than nice. I think Chopin is a profound musician because of what he did, not only in terms of piano texture but also harmony and counterpoint. He loved Mozart and Bach, so it's not this rarefied, airy fairy aesthetic. It's an aesthetic that's really firmly rooted in classical counterpoint and harmony, which he then extends using the piano as a palette, like a painter. So you've got this— suddenly the whole piano is available rather than just thinking in terms of, well, we have a melody and will they accompany it. Suddenly the hands are more widely spread, there's interlocking, there's all sorts of things that I think was probably revolutionary at the time. Probably Czerny was doing some of that kind of stuff, but in a more— in a less revolutionary language. And so I thought, well, I'll pay a little homage to Chopin, whose music is always modern, always shocks me when I hear pieces and I think, oh, I thought I knew that piece well, but something so incredible just happened there. And it makes you want to start thinking about music in a different way all over again.

Tell us more about the next one. Nocturno Misterioso and so forth.

Oh yes, now I haven't got the music with me. Is that the one I wrote for Michael Garrett? I can't remember which one, which one that is. There's another very strange one again, which has its links with decadence and the occult and mystery. So again, probably coming from my obsession with the late piano pieces of Liszt, where you have elements which you could perceive as tonal, but they're not resolved in a tonal way so that the traditional functionality of harmony breaks down and you start to get very strange progressions. And you can play around with them. You can start with the whole tone chord and then you can do things with that. But then you can introduce alien elements to the whole tone chord, or you can have the two different whole tone chords going on at once, all sorts of availabilities that were explored by Busoni, of course, as well. So that's the root of that one, I think.

Would you like to show us what that means on the piano?

I mean, if you're thinking in terms of improvising, which of course I do all the time, it's one of the things that— Or something, just, just to get a harmonic flavor of something. Also, I like when I'm composing, I like sometimes to think of 2 or 3 different harmonic strains going on at once. So an easy way to experiment with it and you find wonderful harmonies is to just put the right hand on the black notes and the left hand on the white notes. And you suddenly have a harmonic world opening up to experiment with, to experience, and then see if you can— and that's just playing chords, but you then have to find the, the actual material to make a composition. But that will inspire, titillate your ear so that you can get into a harmonic mode for that particular piece.

I see. Wow, that, that's really fantastic, just to know the secret of that particular sound that you create. And also, you know, like number 4 and 5, I don't know if you remember all these pieces, but there are some of the nocturnes that have really sensuality, and then some of them are sweet, almost like a number 5 to me sounded like more like reminded me of Eric Satie, like a mood.

Yes, that's the one in E minor, isn't it?

I don't remember the key.

Is it this one?

Yes.

That one, I can't remember it. I've lost the music. The music has been sucked back into the vortex of stuff in this house, so it will come out again, but it's not on the piano at the moment. I should have made more effort to find them. Yes, that has a Sarti-esque beginning. I wanted to write something very, very simple and modal, but then I wanted to smudge that image So you can set up something that's nice. It's got that hypnotic appeal. It has a pastoral quality to it, perhaps. But then you— it's like you do a watercolor painting, but before the paint is dry, you take your hand and you go— and so in the subsequent verses, because I think it's in basically in 3 verses, that nocturne, the subsequent verses, they get progressively more chromatic. So that you end up— by the end of the piece, you've moved into a form of expressionism, so that all of the simplicity of the opening harmonies are distorted to produce something that's not just wistful and pastoral, but something that is almost agonized in its expressive content. That was quite deliberate.

Wow. Okay. Beautiful. What a beautiful beautiful nocturne and very— I don't want to say strange, but it is like a very strange sound too.

Music to me can often hover into the strange. It might start out perfectly straightforwardly and simply, but it can then change. And I think it's the process of change that fascinates me. How you get from— how you get from— to— How you get from A to B, where you've got an emotional trajectory that's taking you away from an idealized form of expression, which you think, oh, that's nice. You know, that could go on like that for 5 minutes and everyone thinks, oh, that was nice. But to then something else and think, oh God, what's he doing? What's he doing? Why is he doing that? It's almost a challenge to the perception of the listener, and I like composers who do that.

Yeah, it almost takes us to really the darkness, darkness of within us.

We always want to try and be good. I think most of us want to try and be good, but we also have the capacity for darkness and mystery, even to the extent that we don't know what we are. We don't know what's inside us, and we don't know what sort of personality we are. There's a self-questioning, which of course we try and push away because in our day-to-day lives we just have to try and act as peaceably and as normally as possible in order to negotiate ourselves through life and relationships. We all have a dark side.

Yes, absolutely. That's why, you know, Lowell's first album is The Piano Pod with The Personal Demon. And we always battle with that personal demon, right?

Yeah, I suppose it's a bit of a cliché to say that he's a neo-romantic composer, but he's capable of writing the most gorgeous melodies and lush harmonies, and he's got this virtuosic piano technique. But where does the Gargoyles set come from? That's his dark side, isn't it? Those pieces where you— oh gosh, you know, it's a bit disturbing.

Speaking of disturbance, that Devil's Liar. Oh my goodness, the introduction. How in the world you were able to create the sound? Wow, it really was like the devil is playing the harp and then luring you. Scary.

Well, I can't remember what scale I used, but it's something like that, isn't it, that starts the piece. That's in the dream. This weird creature, devil-like creature sitting on a rock, literally strums the strings. And I thought when I woke up, I was quite glad to wake up. You know, thank God I'm out of that. So, yeah, The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song really mimics that. And that sound, that weird, strange scale was really as close as I could get to what I was actually hearing in the dream because I heard that. Music in the dream. It was very, very vivid. So yeah, that's literally what I was trying to do at the start of that piece, to create that same rather oppressive, scary atmosphere. But you had to do it with a fairly standard impressionistic piano technique, but then to put it in a rather mysterious context. And it's just one of those strange things that you— Tyler Reddick here from 23XI Racing.

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Music comes out, you think you know what you're doing, but sometimes it's, it's a bit strange, the creative process. Sometimes you're not thinking, you're listening. Oh, I will invert that theme and do double counterpoint with the blah, blah, blah. And then I'll use— no, I don't have any of those thoughts when I compose. I mean, it might be that once I've written a piece, you can go back and analyze it and see that that's exactly what I've done. But I won't be consciously— I don't know what other composers think when they compose, but certainly for me, I might discover afterwards that I've done something. Oh, that was quite clever. I did a bit of that. I did a bit of a stretto fugue there or whatever. But normally it's the listening that dictates the process. Often the music is already there. It's kind of up there somewhere. So I can see it and hear it, an object. And all I have to do is bring it down and write it out. And the writing out is almost non-thought. It's simply this.

Wow. That's— you're like Mozart, where the music is all inside and then No one is like Mozart, except Mozart.

Yes, I mean, Elgar said that the music was in the hills around him. So I don't live anywhere near hills. So I suppose I could say that the music is on Tooting High Street where I live.

Actually, where are you tuning in from today?

Well, I'm in Tooting, which is a part of southwest London. It's towards the end of the Northern Line Underground, so I'm within 20 minutes of Waterloo Station. So it's a great place to live. It's a wonderful community. If you go into the center of Tooting, you can, you can pick a restaurant from almost anywhere in the world because it's a tremendously multicultural area. I love it. I've been here for over 20 years now and I love it.

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Well, it comes from my family, essentially, because my grandmother, who was half German, she sang the lieder of Schubert and Schumann and Brahms and Hugo Wolf. So I had that from a very early age. My mother also sang. My father played the piano and was a conductor. I mean, he had a job in the city, but he, in his spare time, he was a conductor and he conducted a church choir, the choir of St. Boniface German Mission Church in Whitechapel, which is still there. It's a beautiful building. Which, if you ever come to London, you must visit. It's, it's a wonderful church. And so I was from a very early age, from 6, 7, I was aware of the masses of Mozart and Haydn and Schubert, which my father used to conduct with this choir. My brother, who is older than me, he's 3 and a half years older than me. He was both the best kind of musical brother and the worst kind of musical brother. Because he's a brilliant pianist and he was winning silverware at all the local music festivals when I was very tiny. And I was persuaded to have piano lessons. And I thought, well, my brother is marvelous because I can just listen to him playing the piano and it sounds absolutely wonderful. I'm hearing all these wonderful pieces that he's playing. Why should I bother learning the piano? What's the point? He's done it already. So that was the worst kind of brother. He's absolutely marvelous musician. He actually went into pharmaceutical chemistry, but he still plays. He plays the Metzner sonatas. He plays all the Fauré piano music. When he was very young, he was already playing Debussy preludes and Schubert sonatas and the Chopin nocturnes. So I'm thinking, well, this is lucky. I don't have to do any practice because I can just listen to him. So I was actually a very late starter. With the piano. I did have violin lessons when I was 7, but very late starter on the piano, and I would have periods of flunking out completely where I wouldn't do any practice. And that changed actually a little bit later on when I got into jazz. I went on a conducting course in Canford, which is in the south of England, under George Hurst, who was a wonderful conducting teacher, wonderful conductor. But actually, after the conducting lessons, we just used to muck around on the pianos. And there was a young student about my age, perhaps a bit younger actually, who was mucking around playing jazz. I said, what are you doing there? What's that? I mean, I'd heard some jazz, but I'd never tried to play any. And he showed me the blues. All I'm doing is the blues scale. And he was called Tolga Kashif, who is quite a well-established conductor now. And that was it. I was off. So I finally found something I could do. I found something I could do on the piano. I didn't have to look at any music. I didn't have to read and learn pages and pages of piano music. I could just sit down and improvise using these building blocks that Tolga Kashif had given me. So I suppose that's the pianistic side of me. I had very— I was lucky to have a very good violin teacher called Louis Rutland, who was in the Royal Opera House Covent Garden Orchestra. I then had singing lessons with Fabian Smith and Arthur Reckless. I did actually study singing at the Guildhall with Arthur Reckless, who had been the teacher of Sir Geraint Evans. And at the same time as he was teaching me, there was a lad who, who used to come in after my singing lessons, Arthur Reckless was very cheeky, very naughty. He used to say, "Oh, look, there's Brin! Brin, come and show Dave how to do it!" It was Brin Snout, Sir Brin Turfel. Can you believe it?

Wow.

So he would come in, blast the room apart with his fantastic baritone voice. He was only 18. And I thought, "Why am I bothering with this?" So my early years were slightly checkered because I was always coming up against people who were so incredibly talented. My brother, and then having to— having Bryn come into my lessons, I thought, oh gosh, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this. I'm not in this league. So I actually became a professional jazz musician for about 20 years because that was something that, that was just me. I was just working out my own thing. And composing as well all the time. But certainly performance career was almost entirely as a professional jazz musician.

Yes. And then I watched some of the improvisation that you did on YouTube. And also, in fact, I don't know if it's a jazz style, but this morning you composed a little song for The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song.

It's not very jazzy. I can't resist envelopes. I think envelopes are very good. I don't know whether the camera is able to pick this up, but I find envelopes are extremely useful as a compositional discipline because you're only allowed to write what fits on one, so it teaches you something. I ought to mention here one of my most inspiring people in my life Ronald Stevenson, who is a wonderful— he's passed away now, sadly, but he was a wonderful composer pianist, and he was particularly interested in composers like Liszt and Busoni and Edward Grieg and Percy Grainger. And he said, you know something, David, I think it takes as much skill to write a Grieg lyric piece as it does to write a Mahler symphony. Now, that's a point of discussion, but I knew what he meant, and I quite like the discipline of the envelope. I can play this for you if you like. I reserve the right to make lots of wrong notes. They'll simply be a new variant, okay, an instant variant.

Sounds good.

So I hope the piano doesn't sound too echoey, just in case it— well, it is quite a slow piece, so Maybe the echo will help it. But I've called it— I don't know whether you can see the title— it says Piano Pod Prelude.

Oh my goodness. Oh, I want, I want to take this photo of it and I want to play it too.

I will photograph it and send it to you later.

Sounds great. Thank you so much. It means so much. I feel so special. And I want the envelope. Oh, I want the envelope. Can you send it?

I mean, I better, I better, I better write it out more neatly because it's all terribly messy. But it's another one of my rather strange meditations. So it isn't particularly jazzy. But anyway, here goes. Or something like—

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Hey, TPP friends and listeners! The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song is in its third season. Thanks to all of you for watching or listening to every episode since its launch in 2020. I started this show with a simple question I had in mind quite some time, which is how can we as classical pianists and music educators present the beautiful classical music tradition to the 21st century audience in a fun, contemporary, and engaging way. It's been an incredible journey for the last 3 years. I love what I do through this podcast, providing a platform for pianists and educators to reflect and discuss freely how we can keep the classical music industry thriving and relevant in this rapidly changing world. Now more than ever, I need your support so that I can continue my work by bringing you highly valuable content biweekly by interviewing groundbreakers in the industry. Your support will go directly to all the costs of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song, such as a yearly subscription to the podcast hosting platform, the software I use for high-quality recording sessions, and tech gear as well as all the hours I spend researching and audio and video editing. You can make a one-time donation or monthly pledge by clicking the PayPal link in the show notes or going to TPP's website at thepianopod.com. As a thank you, you will receive The Piano Pod's fun logo sticker in the mail. So please support my show today and don't forget to subscribe Continue listening and tell your friends and colleagues about The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. Let's continue with the episode. So you mentioned that you, you learned to sing. So you were writing a song cycle or song cycles that set poems in French, German, and Old Norse, Elamite, and ancient Babylonian, as well as English. Are you also a linguist?

Well, I tell you, I'm a lover of language. But I'm pretty useless at languages. So I love particularly French and German literature, which I can just about read but not always translate at sight. My brain gets too tired. I'm not fluent in either of those languages, and I'm certainly not fluent in ancient Babylonian or ancient Elamite. But I'm fascinated by the ways in which languages allow you to express things differently, that don't translate and never can. Translation, of course, you're on a continuum between doing a literal translation of the original or making something slightly different in the new target language, but you can't really have it both ways because there are certain things in a language that obviously don't translate. First and foremost, the actual sound, and I think the actual sounds of words fascinate me and interest me, the colors of words. And of course, if you, if you grow up singing Schubert and Schumann, you learn about the color of the voice, how the voice colors words and how words color the voice. It's a two-way thing. So it always used to interest me when my, my grandmother particularly used to sing in German exclusively, although she was an East End She lived in the East End of London. She was of German parentage, so she only ever sang in German. I thought, well, I've no idea what she's singing about, but I understand something of what it is simply from the sounds. And each language will have a completely different soundscape. So I'm afraid I can't— I can't— I'm not like one of these people who can speak 11 languages. I'm very jealous of those types of people. I struggle enough in English.

No, you're doing great. But this is a very, maybe sort of simple question, but do you think each language, let's say French, German, and, you know, these, all these ancient languages, do they affect the way you write music? So let's say if you're writing music to a French poem or German, then does the music come out differently? In each language?

Yes, of course, I think it does. And that's partly because of what I've just said about the colour of language and the colour of words. Also, it's to do with the fact that you can't pretend to be an island isolated from a musical past where those languages have a body of music attached to them. So there's an enormous difference between Hugo Wolf and Claude Debussy musically and in the way that they set words and in the way that words inspire them. A huge difference, say, between someone like Richard Strauss and Gabriel Fauré. Again, I mean, you could explain these things technically and we could be here for hours talking about the musical reasons why they're different. But I think it's plain just by listening to those composers that they have a different sound world that seems to somehow be symbiotic with the language that's being set at the same time. And it's going to be to do partly with the word stress and what kind of rhythmic melodic figure will suit. I mean, a great example is Janáček, so that when he's setting Czech language, I presume, I'm not an expert, that has distinctive speech patterns that dictate his rhythmic and melodic shapes. It's clear with Bartók's folk music as well. These are rhythms and shapes that you don't find, for instance, in English. There's a lovely comment by the composer Louis Andriessen who said all English music sounds like greensleeves to him. Because of the way English— English people don't know they're doing it, but we all apparently speak in iambic pentameters. We speak like this because that's the way it sounds. I must buy some carrots and bread today. We speak in these iambs, apparently. I mean, sometimes it's quite fun. You get on a bus and you listen to people speaking and they're just speaking about what they're going to do that evening or see you later, darling, or whatever. I'm on the bus. See you later. But they're speaking in these iambs. We don't speak like this. We don't speak like that, which is the sort of rhythm you might get in a Middle or Eastern European language, that's going to affect the music that gets written. I'm certain of it.

Yeah, interesting, because I live in New York City and then each, you know, we have 5 boroughs here, you know, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens and the Bronx. And I mean, it's all, you know, here in America, we say melting pot, but however, you really hear specific accent the way they speak in specific section of the town.

Well, I'm sure that's right. I mean, as a family, our favourite show on TV, which we used to sit down on Saturday nights, was Kojak. Do you remember Kojak starring Telly Savalas?

Okay, really familiar.

You can watch it on YouTube, and if I remember correctly, it's set in Brooklyn. So when they go into a bar and they order a cup of coffee, I want a cup of coffee. So it's like this. We thought this was brilliant. We thought it was absolutely brilliant. We were sitting there watching this and my father would turn to me laughing and he'd say, I've absolutely no idea what any of them are saying. I said, no, Dad, neither do I. It's brilliant, isn't it? Because we couldn't quite catch that the accent was so strong, but you could still work out what was going on because it was so expressive. It was so musical. So I love that. I'm addicted. My Opus numbers are ridiculously high, but believe me, they'd be a lot higher if I was able to suppress my addiction to American B-movies and film noir.

Accents are really fascinating. I mean, I don't want to stereotype anyone, but stereotypes, you know, some, it does exist. And then, you know, let's say, for example, if you go to the borough, like in the Bronx, and then that's where the hip-hop music was born, basically. So obviously their language, the way they speak, really does affect the music.

Yes. And what I don't like is language totalitarianism, where somebody is saying, oh, you shouldn't speak English like that, you should speak it like this. I don't agree with that. I think if you start to suppress people's natural way of speaking, you can end up suppressing their culture, which I don't think is a very good idea. And I think what, what allows us to live together, even though we're different, just recognizing difference and celebrating it. I mean, we've had this terrible problem in this country. I don't know whether it's quite as bad now, but certainly when my parents were growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, we were a class-ridden society. And one of the ways in which class— you gave yourself away class-wise was through language, through your accent, so that people literally had a scale of accents. And the more posh your accent was, the better you were. But if you went down the scale and you like all my, my mother's side, they're all Cockneys. They're all from— so talk like that, you know what I mean? We talk like that. I'm going down the shop. I'm going to get a bit of butter and a bit of bread. Now, if you spoke like that, people would make automatic assumptions about your your intelligence, your abilities, your cultural position in society. And they can be completely erroneous. You can make all sorts of wrong assumptions about people just by the way they speak. I don't think we should make assumptions in that way.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. Well said. Yeah, I agree with you. I want to specifically ask you about the calligraphic poems in the Devil's Liar album. So what are those pieces?

Well, those pieces were inspired by a book I have again buried upstairs somewhere, which was a calligraphy— it's a catalog of a calligraphy exhibition that, if I remember correctly, was held in Washington, Washington, D.C., I think that is, in the 1970s somewhere. It's something I picked up in a secondhand shop, or I should say thrift shop for American listeners. And I brought it home and it's got these fantastic reproductions with just, you know, the ink brush strokes, and I thought they were like musical compositions because they have line and they have form and structure, and it suddenly occurred to me that I could write a set of pieces that was inspired by that. They're not inspired by individual drawings or paintings, but just the idea of creating lines you'll notice that most of those pieces have quite a simple texture. So it's almost as if there's a single line being drawn across the piano to make a shape. So it's really a form of translation from, from the look of a painting to the sound of a short piano piece. And so I did 6 of them and yeah, I sent those to Lowell and he thought they fitted well with the idea of a recital. And I was interested at that time. Again, it was part of this rather maverick exploration that I go on. I thought, well, you know, I was exploring also. I wrote a piano sonata based on Korean ceramics at around the same time. That was a rather interesting— again, that was from stuff that I'd seen in museums.

How many piano sonatas do you have?

Well, there's 18. In total. And to my knowledge, none of them have been performed in public.

I mean, where can we have the access to scores?

Well, I don't have a publisher. This is another aspect of my life that I've been particularly lazy about, is actually finding one, and I don't have one. So it's all buried there in corners So at some point I have to get it out and disseminate it more effectively, I think.

That concludes the first half of this fun episode of The Piano Pod with David Hakeridge Johnson, composer and multi-instrumentalist. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review it wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also watch this episode on The Piano Pod's YouTube channel. And don't forget to follow The Piano Pod on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The links are listed in the show notes. Tune in this Thursday, June 22nd, at 8 PM to hear the rest of the interview with Mr. Hekrich Johnson.

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You're listening to a podcast right now. Driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and hundreds more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads like this, even with just 10 listeners a month. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start free at RSS.com.