Located in the UK
Located in the USA
Located in Europe
- Michael Nyman
I was a Total Virgin (2006)
- Chester Music Ltd (World)
Commissioned for FuseLeeds06
- 1(pic).1(ca).1(bcl).asx.1/1110/perc/pf/egtr.bgtr/str(1.1.1.1.1)
- 32 min
Programme Note
From the first moment I sat down to write, in my bedroom in the suburbs, I would listen to music as I worked. I had a record player on the floor, with a speaker attached by wires. The radio was always on. Sometimes I think writing is an excuse to listen to music.
Having been unable to participate in actually making music, yet with a taste for the unusual or avant-garde, when this project came up I began to think of how storytelling and music could be combined in a new way. I’d worked with the journalistic theatre group ‘Joint Stock’ in the early 80s, and had become interested in what people would say if you asked them quite basic questions about their lives. Where were you born? What did your parents do? What is your work like? What is love, for you?
The subjects I chose were people I knew already, including my children. However, when they began to speak in this particularly concentrated way, they were surprised by what they said; their voices carried an authentic emotion. Several of the subjects found themselves saying things they’d never told anyone.
I wanted to know if these ‘real’ voices – as opposed to the trained voices of actors or singers – could be combined with music. Michael Nyman, who I’d known and admired for a long time, said they could. I was amazed by his ability to find music in these honest confessions, to take something so simple and find the universal in it.
Hanif Kureishi, April 2006
Hanif Kureishi conducted interviews with a number of people of different ages, different social backgrounds and with whom he had different relationships – colleagues, acquaintances, relatives. Of these I chose three – Bill Payne, Jeremy Trafford and Didi Kureishi – and edited their personal narratives into comprehensible narratives to which I’ve added my score.
The voices of Bill and Jeremy, with their totally different vernacular deriving from opposite poles of the English class system, are crosscut with one another in their ‘duet’ while Didi, Kureishi’s cousin, has a 15 minute ‘aria’ entirely to herself in which she exposes her astonishing life as the only Asian woman in a small West Country town. Spread throughout the work are textures built up from Bill’s ruminations on his problems of remembering.
Michael Nyman, 2006
Having been unable to participate in actually making music, yet with a taste for the unusual or avant-garde, when this project came up I began to think of how storytelling and music could be combined in a new way. I’d worked with the journalistic theatre group ‘Joint Stock’ in the early 80s, and had become interested in what people would say if you asked them quite basic questions about their lives. Where were you born? What did your parents do? What is your work like? What is love, for you?
The subjects I chose were people I knew already, including my children. However, when they began to speak in this particularly concentrated way, they were surprised by what they said; their voices carried an authentic emotion. Several of the subjects found themselves saying things they’d never told anyone.
I wanted to know if these ‘real’ voices – as opposed to the trained voices of actors or singers – could be combined with music. Michael Nyman, who I’d known and admired for a long time, said they could. I was amazed by his ability to find music in these honest confessions, to take something so simple and find the universal in it.
Hanif Kureishi, April 2006
Hanif Kureishi conducted interviews with a number of people of different ages, different social backgrounds and with whom he had different relationships – colleagues, acquaintances, relatives. Of these I chose three – Bill Payne, Jeremy Trafford and Didi Kureishi – and edited their personal narratives into comprehensible narratives to which I’ve added my score.
The voices of Bill and Jeremy, with their totally different vernacular deriving from opposite poles of the English class system, are crosscut with one another in their ‘duet’ while Didi, Kureishi’s cousin, has a 15 minute ‘aria’ entirely to herself in which she exposes her astonishing life as the only Asian woman in a small West Country town. Spread throughout the work are textures built up from Bill’s ruminations on his problems of remembering.
Michael Nyman, 2006