On Revisiting, Revising and Reimagining…

Over the past two years I’ve gradually been ‘revising’ (I’ll unpack that word shortly) my whole catalogue of works, something that began with looking at the odd piece occasionally when I wasn’t busy with other projects and then accelerated to a fully blown appraisal of my work this summer. Much of this was spurred on by a request from the British Library for my scores to be in their collection and this turned what had been a piecemeal approach into something more concerted and wide-ranging. The thought of one’s works being in a repository for the rest of time really concentrates the mind in terms of how and what you want to be represented, especially when you might have shuffled off this mortal coil…

But what do I mean by ‘revising’ my pieces? Often when we think of composers revising their work it is of wholescale changes brought on by a dissatisfaction with an earlier iteration of the composition. Composers that spring to mind are Bruckner, Sibelius or Vaughan Williams, all of whom now have multiple versions of some symphonies in the repertoire. These revisions often led to the ‘new’ version of the piece having a very different character to before – more refined, maybe, but of a different charm and appeal. I don’t think that’s what I’ve done with my pieces, there have been some more invasive moments of change, but often it is something subtler and less deliberate. I sort of prefer the word ‘revisiting’ as I like the idea of returning to a place you have been before, but with a different way of viewing it, possibly through the lens of age and experience. Over the past two years, I have ‘revisited’ over 75 pieces, some from my teenage years, some from less than ten years ago. I chose 2017 as an indefinite end point, mainly as I felt the composer I had become by then was pretty much who I was now.

But why carry out these revisions? What was wrong with the pieces as they were? It isn’t easy to give a straight answer to that, some of the revisiting was purely cosmetic – I tried to ensure that things such as fonts, score sizes and subdivisions of the beat were the same across all the pieces. Some of it was more of a change of compositional philosophy from the 2000s to now, largely manifesting in how prescriptive I was with directions to the performers. It was hard to believe how many dynamics and performance directions littered my earlier pieces – it was so tightly regimented that it left very little space for interpretation from the performer. Honestly, if I see another crescendo from mezzo-this to mezzo-that and back I will weep. I replaced whole phrases that may have had ten different dynamic markings with just one – it was liberating. Less often I made more significant changes, cuts or omissions – sometimes removing repetitive sections, sometimes instruments, sometimes even movements. I also ‘withdrew’ a handful of pieces (thirteen in all) from various points in my career – some that didn’t really speak for who I was as a composer now, some that I had always been undecided on, some that just weren’t good enough. It was strangely cleansing.

It was fascinating looking back at the composer I once had been. I recognised the composer of the 2010s (when I was in my thirties) as being not too dissimilar to who I am now, perhaps a little more austere and bleaker in places, but using the same materials for largely the same purposes. But I found it hard to recognise the composer of the late 2000s – there were some similarities, of course, but much of the musical decision making was different: bolder and less obvious, but also less confident and consistent. I didn’t try to change this individuality, just tried to ensure that everything was presented in the clearest and neatest way possible.

Hopefully I won’t feel the compulsion to do all of this again in the 2030s or 40s, hopefully this is a final revision or revisiting for the ages. But I doubt it. I’m not the sort of person to ‘tinker’ with these things forever, but I can imagine a change of direction at some undefined point in the future when I might reimagine all these pieces again, maybe putting back in all those dynamics. But that is something for another day and for future Phill to worry about, for the moment I’m happy to have spent time with this music and learned a little more about myself in the process.

PAC