14 ★ FT Weekend 19 October/20 October 2019
Arts
A
nna Meredith studied com-
position as a postgraduate
at the Royal College of
Music in London. “Find
your voice!” she was
exhorted. But her tutors surely did not
intend her to locate that voice in the role
of a silver cape-wearing leader of an
electronic rock band singing lyrics to
twisty, voluble songs in venues with
powerful sound systems. “I love playing
loud gigs,” she says. “Though I don’t
want to burst anyone’s eardrums.”
We meet at Somerset House in central
London, a grand neoclassical building
that was formerly a tax revenue office
and now hosts a warren of studios
for artists and musicians — an oasis in a
city where such spaces are hard to find.
The Scottish composer, 41, has a room
in the basement floor, below the café
where we sit.
For the past two years she has been
cloistered in her studio writing music
for an eclectic range of projects. One was
an orchestral piece for last year’s Proms
based on letters sent by soldiers in the
first world war. Then comedian Bo
Burnham asked her to compose her first
film score for his coming-of-age debut
featureEighth Grade, which came out
earlier this year to acclaim. She has also
written the music for a new Netflix sci-fi
comedy series,Living with Yourself. AndAt home
in two
worlds
Composer Anna Meredith|
talks toLudovic Hunter-Tilney
about straddling classical genres
and electronic pop — and why
she doesn’t listen to music
From above:
Anna Meredith;
and performing
at the Bluedot
Festival in
Cheshire —Gem
Harris; Retna/Avalon.redresult is a plangent, low-risk sound-
track, drizzling away politely as though
designed to evoke the vague feeling of
melancholy that comes from looking
out of a window at a rainy day. In con-
trast, Meredith’s sound is bolder and
more dynamically varied. (She shares
this characteristic with Jonny Green-
wood, the Radiohead guitarist who as a
composer has made the reverse journey
from rock to classical.)
“I love pieces of music that feel like
they’re taking you over. I don’t feel thatwith lots of concerts. I feel detached, and
my mind’s somewhere else. So I wanted
to write music for myself that I was com-
pletely engaged with, that felt like it
gave me that visceral feeling of under-
standing what it’s doing, a sense of
transparency which is really important
to me. You have a sense of where this
music is going, the direction of it is very
clear, its intentions are open to peopleto
share in its experience,” she says.
Meredith was born in London but
brought up near Edinburgh — a trans-
plantation for which this newspaper
was responsible. Her father, Mark
Meredith, was the FT’s Scotland corre-
spondent. The house was full of copies
of the paper. “I used to read it cover to
cover when I was three,” she jokes.
It was not a particularly musical
household (her mother restores paint-
ings). She took up clarinet at secondary
school in Edinburgh, a comprehensive
that she found quite “scary”. “I took ref-
uge in the music department,” she says.
As a teenager she played drums fleet-
ingly in two bands. It was the era of Brit-
pop, and she had “extreme loyalty to
Blur and Pulp” as well as liking “trashy
dance music”. But herimagination was
really caught by the experience of play-
ing in youth orchestras.
“On clarinet, you’re right in the mid-
dle of things,” she explains. “Brass andpercussion are behind you, strings are
all around you. It’s the volume and the
feeling of all these people working
together, it’s amazing. I really miss it.”
She has lived in London since moving
there to study at the Royal College of
Music. Her first “proper” commission
came in 2002, just after leaving the
Royal College of Music, when the BBC
Philharmonic Orchestra commissioned
her to write a piece at the request of the
composer and conductor James Mac-
Millan. In a sign of her interest in muscu-
lar musical forces, it was calledTorque.
Wanting to expand her palette,
Meredith taught herself how to use syn-
thesisers and software programmes.
“It’s amazing to be given the chance to
write orchestral pieces but if I wanted to
do something else I was going to have to
take control of that,” she says. “So elec-
tronics made sense because I could ini-
tially do the whole thing by myself, I
didn’t have to rely on other musicians or
a recording studio, anything that
seemed scary or unknown.”
Early efforts included a failed attempt
to sound like singer-songwriter James
Blake (“I didn’t have the production
chops and it sounded shit”). Now she
tries not to listen to other people’s work.
“Depressingly, over the years I’ve
discovered the best thing is to be
rather insular. I never listen to music.
It just distracts me, either in a good
way or I feel really panicked or inse-
cure about what someone else is
doing. I’m trying to avoid touchstones
or comparisons.”The division between popular and
classical music has always been more
porous than factionalists on either side
like to think. The first “pops” orchestras
were set up in the 19th century to play
popular tunes, a forerunner of today’s
orchestras playing 1990s dance hits to
ex-clubbers in arenas. But it is rare to
find a musician able to produce vibrant
and original work in both worlds.
“When I started out, a lot of my com-
poser friends were like, ‘Oh selling out!
You’ll be raking in the cash from com-
mercial music now,’” she says. “But it’s
just not like that. I realise how hard it is
the more I see how bands write albums
compared with how people get classical
commissions. There’s hardly any sup-
port to make an album. Bands are driv-
ing themselves around the country and
setting up their own gear and selling
their merch in a way that would shock a
lot of classical musicians. It’s definitely
not easy to be in a band just now. And
Brexit and the bollocks ahead will just
make it harder.”
She does not give the impression of
being cowed by the challenge. Meredith
has fashioned herself a bold musical
voice, as resonant in classical auditori-
ums and film scores as heaving rock
venues, a world unto itself.‘Fibs’ is out on Moshi Moshi on FridayW
hen members of the
Brexit party turned
their backs on a small
group of young
musicians performing
the EU’s anthem at the opening of the
European Parliament this summer, the
party’s leader Nigel Farage said it was
“irrelevant” that the music in question
was written by Beethoven. But “Ode to
Joy” was composed with the dream of
European peace and unity very much
at its heart.
“Ode to Joy” appears like a burst of
sunlight in the fourth and final
movement of Beethoven’s stormy
Ninth (and final) Symphony. The
composer’s decision to bring a choir
into the piece was revolutionary, giving
soaring voice to a poem that had
thrilled Beethoven as a young man:
Friedrich Schiller’s “An die Freude”.
Written in 1785 — on the brink of
the French Revolution — the popular
poem expressed a yearning for peace
and egalitarianism: “All men will
become brothers... Be embraced,
you millions!”
As soon as he heard Schiller’s words,
the young Beethoven imagined setting
them to music. Like many liberal,
cosmopolitan youths of the time, the
German composer and pianist was
excited by the ideals of the French
Revolution and dedicated his Third
Symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte
before scratching out the name of his
former hero on learning that Napoleon
had declared himself emperor.
Beethoven was disappointed by more
than politics in a life that included an
abusive musical education by his
father, a series of romantic rejectionsand the almost complete loss of his
hearing by the age of 44. The Ninth,
completed in 1824, received a standing
ovation at its premiere in Vienna but
Beethoven — still flailing his arms at
the silent orchestra — had to be turned
around to face the applause.
Since then, the powerful emotions
aroused by the symphony have been
harnessed for good and ill. Hitler had it
played on birthdays and included it in
Nazi propaganda films. Japan’s
imperial government used it to raise
morale during the second world war.
Beethoven’s melody was reworded
to become the Republic of
Rhodesia’s anthem towards the end
of Ian Smith’s racist
administration.
But it has also given heart to
protesters. In 1957 miners in south
Wales invited black American
socialist singer Paul Robeson to their
annual Eisteddfod, but the US
authorities banned him from
travelling. In a deep, beautiful voice,
he sang his own version of the
song as a kind of hymn down the
phone to them.
During the Pinochet regime in
Chile, women sang the “Himno
a la Alegría” (“Hymn to
Happiness”) in the streets
outside prisons to give hope to
prisoners inside. Chinese
protesters played it over
loudspeakers during the
Tiananmen Square protests in- On Christmas Day 1989,
Leonard Bernstein conducted a
performance to celebrate the
fall of the Berlin Wall. The
orchestra was drawn from East
and West Germany as well as
the UK, France, the Soviet
Union and the US. The lyrics
were changed from a
celebration of “Joy” (Freude)
to “Freedom” (Freiheit).
“Ode to Joy” was adopted
as the organisational anthem
of Europe — not to overrule national
THE LIFE
OF A SONGODE TO JOY
anthems but to celebrate shared values
between nations — in 1972. In 1985 it
became the official anthem of the
European Community, then the
European Union, from 1993. In 2008
it became the temporary Kosovan
anthem because of the EU’s role in its
independence from Serbia.
It’s had quite the ride in pop culture
too. It backs the sociopathic violence of
Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 filmA Clockwork
Orange as it does in Anthony(
Burgess’s original 1962 novella).
The film’s synthesiser and vocoder
version was played by Wendy
Carlos, whose Grammy-winning
1968 Switched-On Bach lbuma
began the 1970s vogue for synth
versions of classical music. In the
film, the anti-hero Alex is
conditioned against Beethoven’s
Ninth when he is exposed to it
during his “Ludovico” treatment.
There’s a sweetly silly comic version
by Rowan Atkinson, in the role of a
baritone who has forgotten his music
and is forced to freestyle a series of
popular German phrases:
“Achtung, Liebfraumilch im
Porsche, oompa, Vorsprung
durch Technik.”
Rock and pop musicians
haven’t been so engaged. But
it’s worth checking out the
New Order’s dystopian
electro version (1982) and
the fist-pumping rock-out by
Stranglers bassist Jean-
Jacques Burnel (1980). The
best indie version is Bright
Eyes’ “Road to Joy”: an
uncharacteristically noisy
blast of disillusionment
with the state of the world in
lyrics that run: “The sun came
up with no conclusions...
Let’s f*** it up boys, make
some noise!”
HelenBrownFor more in the series go to
ft.com/life-of-a-songBelow: Ludwig Van
Beethoven, whose ‘Ode
to Joy’ theme is used as
the EU’s anthem
Getty Imagesthen there is her new albumFibs, which
she wrote and recorded with her band.
Fibsbuilds on the robust, dramatic
sound of its acclaimed predecessorVar-
mints, which won the 2016 Scottish
Album of the Year Award. Tuba and
synthesisers create stomping but frolic-
some beats, like a giant playing the
game grandmother’s footsteps. Vertigi-
nous electronic peaks are ascended in
double-quick time, artfully embroi-
dered by guitar solos and drums. A more
contemplative mood arises when
Meredith or one of her bandmates sings.
“For me the thing I think I do best —
and I do lots of stuff badly — is pacing. I
love the sense that you’re getting from A
to B and contrasting it with C,” she says,
semaphoring each movement by lifting
imaginary building blocks in front of
her. “So that sense of growth is what I
enjoy in any type of music. Big builds,
contrasts, odd switches in fields.”
She moves with ease between classical
and popular music. “I feel like there’s
not much of a sense of a classical-pop
divide,” she says. “I don’t think that
exists. Within both of those terms there
are a million subsections and genres and
problems and rivalries.”
The hinterland between contempo-
rary classical and electronic music has
become crowded in recent years. Mini-
malism predominates. All too often the‘When I started out, a lot
of my composer friends
were like, “Oh, selling out!”You’ll be raking in the cash’
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