LISTENER OCTOBER 13 2018Is there a tall-poppy aspect to your
experience?
Absolutely, big time. I’ve had this conver-
sation with a few people who have been
overseas, and done quite well, and come
back. They all say if you do really well
overseas, for example as a film composer,
and come back, people assume you’re
either too busy or too expensive.And are you expensive?
Definitely for New Zealand. But I don’t
have to be, and it’s not all about the
money. I am doing some projects here in
New Zealand for free, or next to nothing,
because I really believe in them. It’s great
having that choice.Is there any speciic future work you can talk
about?
I’m just closing on two multi-year, orches-
tral residencies. One is in New Zealand,
the other in Europe. I have four orchestral
commissions and three are from overseas.
I have managed to cross a line that I don’tPSATHAS’FAMILY COLLECTIONthink many other people
SHELF LIFE
here have yet, where I can live off income
from overseas commissions.Do you get anxious when your work is
premiered?
I have relationships with incredible musi-
cians all around the world, and when they
play my music now, I just sit back and
know it is going to be amazing. So I have
performance pleasure, rather than anxiety.Your work is complex. When composing, do
you take into account how musicians will cope
with it?
Michael Houstoun [pianist] said some-
thing that has stayed with me forever. It
was, “Write what you want to hear first
and foremost, and solve the performance
problems later.” And I say that to my stu-
dents – it’s a great piece of advice and very
simple. I don’t make any allowances, but I
don’t make it unduly difficult, either.Are you concerned about cuts to the arts in
New Zealand universities?
I don’t speak politically but I do think
there is a gradual shallowing of society
going on. It is to do with the
way we receive and relate to
information. There is a great
book called The Shallows,
by Nicholas Carr, which is
about our relationship to the
internet and how it is chang-
ing us. One of the skills that
we have all developed, if we
use computers, is the ability
to quickly extract informa-
tion we need from a screenwithout actually reading what’s on it. It’s
a new set of neural connections that we’re
all developing. If we stop being book read-
ers, we lose depth of understanding, and
that is how we remember things. So, not
great. That is what I call the shallowing of
society.Books are a happy topic for you. What do you
like?
I read a lot. I’ve read all the good science
fiction that’s around. I love it because of
the ideas, even if the writing is not always
very good. In the past few years, I have
read Henry Giroux’s books including The
Violence of Organized Forgetting, which
is very disturbing and powerful, and
Disposable Futures, which he wrote with
Brad Evans. I have read lots of Noam
Chomsky, Robert Fisk, John Pilger. Those
books are very hard going, but I feel
they’re a source of truth. The Mexican
writer Lydia Cacho wrote a book called
Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International
Sex Trafficking. It was incredibly gruelling.
To mitigate those really heavy books, I’ll
read something like Hope in the Dark, by
Rebecca Solnit, filled with reasons to feel
better about things. One of my favourite
books is A Fine Balance, by Rohinton
Mistry. At the moment, I’m reading a
novel called The Doomed City, by Arkady
and Boris Strugatsky.If you could have a wish come true, what
would that be?
My dream, which I joke about with col-
leagues, is to open a small music academy
on a Greek island. Just a few of us would
go there and work, maybe three months a
year, grow grapes and make wine the rest
of the time. Wouldn’t that be nice? lFrom left, with wife Carla in 1991; with
Prime Minister Helen Clark at the launch of
the View from Olympus album; with baby
Emanuel; with the NZ String Quartet.With sister Tania, right, at
their parents’ 25th wedding
anniversary in 1985.