Hilary Sturt
Hilary Sturt interviewed in Auckland, 16 October 2002
James Gardner: How did The Yellow Shark project arise, how did you get involved, and how did you end up actually featuring on one of the pieces?
Hilary Sturt: Well, as you probably know, Frank had been looking for classical musicians of very high quality for a long, long, long time. And he’d met some fairly major disasters, one in particular in London. And the Frankfurt Festival every other year would do a very big composer profile, and it had been in their mind for a long time to ask Frank. So there was a lot of undercover work done beforehand, I think.
The Ensemble Modern was a natural group to choose because their standard is so incredibly high. Not that I’m biased, but I think they are the best group in Europe. I happen to have played with the rest of them, so I think that’s from a position of knowledge I can say that.
Raising the money to do this project was a vast amount of work, so it’s full credit to the city of Frankfurt and the state of Hess, who raised the money, and the manager – at the time – of Ensemble Modern. And to the members – because it’s a self-governing group – that they persisted in this incredible project.
We flew out for two-and-a-half weeks – I think there were 22 of us in all – just to meet Frank, and to see what happened. We didn’t know how ill he was at the time, so the late starting and early ending of rehearsals was not very good for a group of Germans. Luckily there were a lot of extras, including myself, who were American...
Do you mean late in the day?
Yeah, yeah. And sometimes he’d just pack up and leave and we didn’t know why. But apart from the 17 members who were there, the rest of us were extras, and a lot of Americans, and some of them were jazzers and actors as well, so there were very good links to start out with. We worked much faster with those particular people.
And Frank wrote us pieces like This is a Test, you know he really was…he wanted to know what we could do. And every time, the ensemble never failed in what they could produce. And I think then Frank realised that he could get anything he wanted out of this group. And then he started inviting his friends round to Joe’s Garage and we’d start jamming.
The best bits were – I think a CD that Gail Zappa’s released without any of our permission, which were our recording sessions where Frank was just recording us so he could work from the samples. [JG rummages around and produces Everything Is Healing Nicely] Ah! There it is [laughs] Well what we did during the sampling sessions…because we’d be hanging around for nine hours waiting for two hours’ of this intense sound-making in his studio, people were sort of dying on the floor so we’d just get together and have a jam. And that was when he started developing with us the really intricate hand movements, not just the big “C” but a phenomenal number of signs. We had a great time.
How long did it take the group to respond to the conducting signals that Zappa would give; maybe you could explain a little bit about how he worked in a semi-improvisatory way.
Well to begin with he used the Synclavier and the printer just to give us music which for him...for us the metric timings [rhythmic notations] were completely the wrong way around. You know there’s an easy way of presenting it and there’s a mathematically impossible way and we always got the impossible way. So those that could did, and those that couldn't followed. And that seemed to be convincing. And then we’d start to write little tiny – I’ve still got all my manuscript papers – we’d start to just make up tiny little riffs, and Frank would have a hand position for each of those riffs or he’d point to a particular person – What Will Rumi Do? That was a great example of one of them, so – and because Rumi [Ogawa] didn’t speak any English, he’d just...
She’s the percussionist
Yes, the timpanist – he’d just point to Rumi and we’d all know what that meant, so we were able to move from one little riff to another and then he’d investigate various sounds, be they absolutely filthy brass chords, or the seagull effects we [string players] can get behind the bridge moving the bow at an angle, so when he did a sort of seagull-like hand movement – all the strings immediately knew what that was.
So gradually over the period of two-and-a-half weeks we built up a huge number of sort of memory links. So when we were hanging around during the sampling, we could break into this at any time. But he followed us as well. It was a symbiotic relationship, it was never, it was never dictated. But the best bit was that...when he started laughing, you’d know it was really working, it was really going places. And his laughter was...it really was like a ray of sunshine, the way it permeated everybody and gave us all freedom to move on. It was very special.
And on the other hand he was the most demanding musician I’ve ever worked with. He would not take “no” – musically – as an answer. Nothing was impossible, And if the sound just somehow didn’t fit he’d try and use a word to describe how to make the sound different. Or he’d quote a particular orchestration from his incredible knowledge of twentieth-century music – he knew every single piece there is, and how the textures were built and the chord structures. So if he couldn’t explain verbally he’d say “this piece, this section.”
Can you give an example of that?
There were… a lot of Varèse he knew very well. In particular some of the brass chords he was looking at. It was fascinating, really fascinating.
And once that period of rehearsal was over then you went back to Germany to do the performances – which became The Yellow Shark album.
Yeah, we didn’t see him for virtually a year. He stayed in LA with all the samples and produced a lot of music and then he came over the next summer. So he was able to see where the Ensemble live in Frankfurt which is a five-storey old factory that the city converted from a factory with an oil-eating microbe [laughs] that cleaned up the whole building, and they released this microbe and we were always joking about it, ‘cause there was a petrol station round the corner and we were wondering what would happen if the microbe actually ate its way down to the petrol station [laughs]
And he had his black leather sofa that was imported up to the Dachsaal at the top, which was an open, huge open attic space. Which meant, because there was so much space, we really could bring up all the percussion from the basement so we just had – there was more and more and more stuff. And throughout the second phase of that, Frank was constantly re-writing and trying things out.
Was this the notated material or the improvised material?
This was the notated material that he’d written from the previous year and from all the improvisations we’d done. Nothing was ever ever safe. There was not one note or one marking that he would agree to a second time around necessarily.
So it’s quite interesting now. It makes me think about Beethoven and Beethoven sonatas for example. You know, for Frank, he’d hear the piece, one of the string quintet pieces played the day before the premiere and he’d say well, I don’t like it, you know – just “style” it, just do anything. So nothing on paper was sacred.
That was “putting the eyebrows on it”, as he would say
Yeah. Absolutely. Which makes it difficult for groups now I hear play various things from The Yellow Shark, you know studiously applying everything they have to the printed page, but actually one needs a completely deranged sense of humour. [laughs]
So to a certain extent the fact that the pieces are now stored as notation has frozen them, interpretationally.
Yeah
The second project after The Yellow Shark, I did...I did that because it was all the same people and it meant a lot to me actually, emotionally, to be involved and that was very important to me. And we did get the same sort of...the same ethos, the same feeling of creativity without Frank, which I thought was very special. It did happen in the concerts [in 2000].
Which project was that?
I don’t know if it was called Yellow Shark II... It was stuff that Frank had been working on when he died and Ali Askin had carried on with. Ali Askin did the transcriptions and arrangements. He was there for the whole series. He worked...he worked very, very hard on this. [Some of this material later appeared on the album Greggery Peccary & Other Persuasions]. And the second project was, you know, trying to recover what had been left, because Frank had been planning on a second complete programme. And there were pieces we discarded from before that hadn’t worked for various reasons and had been slightly rejigged. And we did manage to keep that same crazy sense of humour. But then how can one forbid other groups to play the music? It’s a very interesting dividing line for me, and I have, you know, whenever I look at Mozart now or Bach I think “well, who’s to say?”
…that they wouldn’t have changed it that day, with that group of players.
Yeah, tore out their hair for a bit and said “Oh – just style it, I don’t like the way that bit is.”
Frank was very careful to choose particular players for particular things. Now how did you end up doing your famous poetry reading?
Mmmm. Well he had a rather sick idea of using “the women” to recite something, which didn’t go down well with...well Rumi, who doesn’t speak English … and Cathy [Milliken] the oboist was a little bit dubious about it – she’s Australian – we thought it was a bit too sexist, actually. And it was clear that Frank really wanted to do something and it was obviously clear that I wouldn’t say no, and he liked my voice, I think. You know – he wanted a nice English accent and some rather filthy sounds underneath. He was very... he knew exactly what he wanted and he got there in the end. But it was in a very short time frame. Which was... it was extremely scary.
Give me a violin and 10,000 people and I’ll do anything, but just take away my violin and that’s a different thing altogether
Or give you a piece of paper and say “go read this”
Exactly. Exactly. I had problems with the words as well, because it was so kind of filthy, and I couldn’t memorize it. And I have great pride in my memory, but this I couldn’t memorize. And we didn’t know how it was going to finish. It was completely nebulous, the end of the poem and how we were going to move into the next item in the programme. And we’re talking two, three days before the live European broadcast premiere on TV and all this sort of stuff. Not that it ever really gets to me [with music], but with the spoken word it did. So I had a little parchment scroll which I unwound. And the nice thing for me was the whole of the brass section, including our wonderful tuba player with a wok-top mute, were grovelling around my feet doing various improvisations and filthy sounds, and I found that very comforting, you know they were around me, and I was surrounded. But in the performance I suddenly realised that there was a very strong pro-abortionist appeal at the end of the poem, and I hadn’t realised this. I don’t know if..I don’t think Frank had actually – I’d like to say I got the better of him, on that front, because as it came to me and I shouted it out I sort of flung back the parchment into his hand and he did look quite surprised [laughs].
There were plans to do more. He was writing an opera. And then the second Yellow Shark that’s since been performed, he was working on that then. This is full credit not only to the support for the contemporary arts in Germany, which is fantastic, but also to the audience levels and genuine level of interest throughout German society in contemporary art and music and sculpture and painting which very very high.
Obviously there was a certain amount of having Zappa as a drawcard but even outside that, were the Ensemble Modern’s concerts well-attended?
They always sold out in Frankfurt, in Vienna, in Cologne. We had fantastic audiences.
And that was whether you were doing Lachenmann or Zappa.
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Because there’s this...there’s an edge to the performance. It’s not just the work ethic which I like very much. Personally I think one should do one’s best by whatever’s written on the page and beyond one’s best. And the ensemble also – and this is starting to happen in some groups in London – if the conductor’s not up to it, the group will take over, so we’ll start to say to each other “can you just tell me – is that an octave or should I be a quarter-tone below you?”, you know, let’s really sort this one out
And the conductor gets left behind a bit..
Yes, if the conductor’s not going to do it, the ensemble will do it.