Reviews
Financial Times September 2023:
https://www.ft.com/content/2cf58987-6926-4581-9115-b1582442018b
Composer Melinda Maxwell: ‘Music is not something that can be nailed down’
Her new album celebrates her fascination with improvisation — and uses an ancient instrument
Melinda Maxwell photographed for the FT by Tori Ferenc
If there’s one thing Melinda Maxwell cannot abide, it is musical complacency. “It’s easy to think, ‘I’m making a nice sound. Can’t I just stay here? This is all I need to do.’ Well, no, it’s not, I’m sorry. Music is not something that can be nailed down.”
It’s a lesson that the British composer and oboist, 69, learnt the hard way, after deciding in 2011 to pursue a masters in jazz performance at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. By that point she had a successful career, performing as a guest principal oboist with the London Sinfonietta, among other ensembles, and teaching at the Royal Northern College of Music, where she was head of woodwind.
But joining the masters programme, she says, began as one of the most humiliating experiences of her life. “We all had to improvise one after the other, and, wow — talk about egg on face. But then I thought, ‘Right, I’d better learn how to do this.’ And I went back for more.”
The fruit of her labour can be heard in Janus, her new chamber music album, which comes out at the end of this month. Featuring a mix of classical and jazz musicians, it alternates passages of densely chromatic composed music with improvisation, the aim being to explore the concept of duality.
The aulos was favoured by the ancient Greeks and Romans . . .
. . . for its assertive timbre, which served to invigorate athletes, for example © Tori Ferenc (2)
“It’s all to do with the fact that, in improvising, you make a different version of the same [piece of music],” she says. “It’s the same idea as having a double. That is where Janus the two-headed god sits . . . and that’s what I’m interested in: how two things can have a different flavour while being based on the same idea.”
Listening to the album, however, you’re likely to notice something else: a strange, slippery sound, almost like a 1940s saxophone, with a high register full of terrifying, shrieking effects. This is the aulos, a double-piped reed instrument that was a pervasive part of ancient Greek and Roman life. It frequently accompanied sporting contests, as well as events on the battlefield, where its assertive timbre served to invigorate the soldiers.
As for the music written for it: that has largely been lost in the mists of time, which is precisely why, in Maxwell’s opinion, the instrument lends itself to improvisation. ‘‘Because there are no textbooks on how to play the aulos, or what the embouchure [mouth position] is, or what exercises you should do,” she has had to rely on “the instrument itself showing me what it is . . . I thought, ‘Fantastic, I can do what the hell I like!’”
Capitalising on the instrument’s “warped tuning”, as she puts it, Maxwell has generated a harmonic no-man’s-land, in which the boundaries between improvised and composed music are impossible to discern. In doing so, she is making an artistic statement: “There was a time when a classical musician could be an improviser as well as a composer and performer. Beethoven was one of the most amazing improvisers, as was Mozart and Bach . . . But nowadays, there is no public forum [in classical music] where you can go out on stage and say, ‘Right, I’m going to play Britten’s Six Metamorphoses and then follow that with an improvisation on number one.’” She continues: “What I’m doing [in Janus] is bringing those elements of performer, improviser and composer together.”
Moreover, in pushing classical musicians out of their comfort zone, Maxwell is exploring a subject that she feels passionate about: the value of imperfection. She cites Julian Barnes’s book A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, which presents us with a description of heaven, but “after a while you get this terrible ennui, this terrible feeling of ‘Is that it?’, because paradise, well, there’s no such thing as paradise. It’s a dead end. There’s no need to struggle. There’s no sense of chance. That’s why improvising is so wonderful . . . you might make a mistake; you don’t quite know where it’s going and that’s the thrill: the thrill of the chase.”
Melinda Maxwell practising on the aulos, exploiting what she calls its ‘warped tuning’ © Tori Ferenc
What exactly is Maxwell chasing? To some extent, she says, it’s self-knowledge as a musician: “Improvisation holds a mirror up to you. It asks, ‘Who am I as a musician? What have I got to say about this simple melody? What can I do with it?’” But she is also keen to learn how to channel the mindset of jazz performers into her classical music-making. “The best classical musicians realise that there is an improvisatory element to all performance, and they pour that into the notes on the page . . . What makes Daniel Barenboim, for example, such a fantastic player is the fact that he always sounds as if he is tasting the music for the first time. It’s such an important aspect of all music-making, but we forget about it sometimes.”
She hopes that Janus’s unusual confection of ingredients encourages that sense of spontaneity. But is there a chance those very ingredients might end up detracting from each other? Maxwell agrees there is a balance to be struck between experimentation and “keeping the essence of a piece intact”, but she also draws my attention to other considerations: “There’s so much music nowadays that we don’t listen to, that is like wallpaper. I don’t want that.”
So what does she want? “I want music you can listen to again and again, that has many layers to it, that can feed me throughout my life. I hope I can write something that interests the ear and makes listeners think, ‘I never knew you could do that.’”
‘Janus’ is released on the Birmingham Record Company label on September 29
“Much more satisfying was Melinda Maxwell’s solo oboe improvisation, which had the poise and sense of exact timing one expects from a composed piece.”
— Ivan Hewett, classical music critic, 13 June 2016
“Richer still was the new work from BCMG oboist Melinda Maxwell; despite the title, Fractures: Monk Unpacked, there was no meaningful aural connection to Thelonius Monk, but that seemed beside the point. The piece is fascinatingly complex, in terms of its ebb and flow, the nature of its melodic tone of voice and its harmonic language. In contrast to some other works in the concert, Maxwell broke free from the fetters of predictability and convention. ”
— Artsdesk 2015
“The performances are well-nigh perfect, but the most affecting of the three is Melinda Maxwell. Her oboe soars and leaps with tragic intensity.”
— Review of CD recording of 26 Orpheus Elegies Daily Telegraph 2008
“…the première of Simon Holt’s Disparate, a terrific emotional rollercoaster of a piece played with seething intensity by oboist Melinda Maxwell.”
— Opening festival concert of Kings Place, London. Daily Telegraph Geoffrey Norris 2008
“And how better to open your beautiful new hall than with a beautiful new piece, Simon Holt’s solo work Disparate, for oboist Melinda Maxwell? This power-packed creation showed off Maxwell’s virtuosity.”
— Review of performance Michael Church The Independent 2008
“Melinda Maxwell is an outstanding musician. The range of colour and expression she brings to this music is phenomenal.”
— 5 star Review of CD MM Vol 2 In Manchester New Music for Oboe . New Perspectives Stephen Johnson BBC Music choice BBC Music Magazine 200
“…the pieces were played with superb musicality and unswerving concentration by oboist Melinda Maxwell”
— Review of performance of 26 Orpheus Elegies Birtwistle Purcell Room London. Andrew Clements The Guardian 2004
“Maxwell’s pieces, all composed in the 1990s, have their own sure harmonic touch, which is especially evident in the little string sextet From Tree to Tree, and the meatier string trio Pelagos, while Songlines and Cadences for clarinet and harp focuses tellingly on long, arcing melodic lines.”
— Review of CD Melinda Maxwell Composer & Oboist 4 stars. Andrew Clements The Guardian 2004