Revelations of a bold composer

By WILLIAM DART

The 26-year-old seems almost embarrassed to tell me about it, but Wellington composer Chris Watson's first big musical experience was as a schoolboy in Tauranga. "Michael Houstoun played the Moonlight Sonata in a venue called Baycourt. It was pretty exciting at the time."

At Victoria University in the late 90s Watson spent his undergraduate years in "total shock at the sort of music I was played. I was disgusted at this awful dissonant stuff," he remembers.

"John Psathas said I should listen to music and think about things like texture, while Jack Body said that if I didn't like a piece to listen to it again and again and again. A few things like that slowly turned me around."

It was a radical turnaround when it came; Watson is now one of the most adventurous of our young composers. A new clarinet concerto, Nacelle, is being premiered by 175 East on Sunday; other scores have been performed in Seoul and Perth while there will be another Watson orchestral piece played in Tokyo later this year.

Vacillations, the first New Zealand piece to be chosen for the Australian Composers' Orchestral Forum, was given the "incredible luxury of two and a-half hours of rehearsals before being recorded by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra".

" I wanted it to be uncompromising. It's very difficult and the main thing I learned was dealing with practicalities - there are certain limits you have to stay within. The bits that didn't work taught me the most."

Nacelle is still pretty uncompromising but, with Gretchen Dunsmore as soloist, the stratosphere's the limit and for Watson, a concerto is basically "an opportunity for one person to let their hair down and really go for it".

"The clarinet's an ideal instrument because it's fast and can really dive all around the place, with an amazing colour palette and a huge range of extended techniques you can draw on."

As has happened before with Watson, the inspiration for the title was a machine. A chamber work derailleurs, performed at the Asian Composers' League in Seoul, had been inspired by the mechanism that changes the gear on a bicycle; Nacelle took its name from a section of the wind turbine up on the Brooklyn hills.

"The nacelle judges the wind speed and directs the propeller," Watson explains. "I thought it related nicely to the way the clarinet leads the ensemble through a lot of tempo changes."

Watson is daunting when he explains the complexities of metric modulation, but it's comforting when he admits to writing in "an extremely loose 12-tone style with a lot of chromatic saturation".

There is a lighter side to this serious young man who plans to study the effects of music notation software on composition. He's a great fan of the Mutton Birds, particularly of A Thing Well Made and White Valiant. "This is direction-oriented music," he says. "The songs have a goal and at the end you have a little revelation that puts everything else in context."

While Watson's musical language might be different and he's not trying to compress his message into the rigour of a three or four-minute pop song, he could be talking about his own music.

Performance:


* What: 175 East

* Where: Hopetoun Alpha

* When: Sunday May 18, 8pm