Classical Notes: Hugh Shrapnel shares thoughts on his music, influences, and life as a composer

Hugh Shrapnel

Having reviewed three albums of composer Hugh Shrapnel’s music now, it was a pleasure to have the opportunity to sit down with him recently and discuss his music, his influences, and his life as a musician and composer.

We began discussing what pointed Hugh in the direction of music and composition in the first place. He was born in Birmingham in 1947, but grew up in Stockport (as, coincidentally, did I). His father Norman Shrapnel was a journalist with The Guardian, his older brother John an actor and their mother Myfanwy an artist. Norman Shrapnel was a great music lover and good amateur violinist, often playing chamber music with friends. Hugh began playing the recorder aged seven, went on to play the oboe from the age of 13, and then began to play the piano in his mid-teens.

Hugh Shrapnel
credit: Phoebus Apostolide

Composition came early - he was inventing tunes as a boy, and he remembers a marching tune that he used to sing all the time, driving his mother mad! He started composing seriously at around fourteen, and was fascinated by modern music, inspired by hearing a performance of Schoenberg’s Serenade on the radio and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. So he already knew he wanted to be a composer at that time. His father, and Mary Stott, a musician friend and fellow Guardian journalist (the founder of the paper’s women’s page) encouraged him, although initially, academic studying of music took a back seat to his keenness for listening to new music and writing. He went to the Battersea College of Technology for a year, studying with Hans Heimler, the Austrian composer and musicologist, who had studied with Berg and Weingartner. From there, he went on to the Royal Academy of Music, where he initially studied composition with Norman Demuth, whose main interest was French music. Shrapnel’s interest lay in avant garde, serial music, so he moved to study with Cornelius Cardew, and this was a better fit, opening many opportunities for him in experimental music. He joined Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra, and they took their experimental music out of the concert halls, touring in the North East, Wales and Cornwall. ‘What they thought of what we were doing is something else!’, says Hugh, but he says that their mission was partly to rebel against the musical establishment of the time.

Collaborating with other musicians has always been important for Hugh, from those early days with Cardew and other important British experimental composers such as John White, Chris Hobbs and Alec Hill, with whom he formed the quartet, the Promenade Theatre Orchestra, right through to more recent piano duetting with fellow composer John Lewis. This led to Elements of London, the first recording of his work (and Lewis’) by the Ivory Duo Piano Ensemble. It’s also worth mentioning that Cardew directed many of those early experimental pioneers, including Hugh, in the UK premiere in 1968 of Terry Riley’s In C. Along the way, Hugh’s compositions have often been for the musician friends around him, and unusual combinations of instruments have always interested him. On mentioning in conversation that I had played the euphonium at school, Hugh immediately referred to his piece for euphonium and two electric keyboards, West Pier, and he’s currently working on completing a long cycle of pieces for accordion, trumpet, piano, percussion and cello. Other collaborators include the BBC Radio 3 presenter and pianist Sarah Walker and composer pianist Robert Coleridge (who passed away in 2019), who recorded his South of the River suite of piano duos in 1998, and have been great supporters of his work. The Cornelius Cardew Concerts Trust, led by composer Michael Chant has been also very significant, with Hugh’s compositions receiving frequent performances at their Morley College concerts.

Promenade Theatre Orchestra, 1972

Aside from the South of the River suite, and a 1972 Promenade Theatre Orchestra recording, the more recent Convivium Records albums are the only available recordings of Hugh’s work. However, there are a number of performances of some of the earlier experimental works on YouTube, including several of Raindrops, a work ‘for any number or kind of tuned and untuned percussion, guitars and other plucked strings’. These include one for flutes, guitars and keyboards, as well as one for glockenspiels. Following those early experimental years, like a lot of other composers, Hugh gradually moved towards more ‘conventional’ music, as he describes it. ‘It (experimental music) had run its course, and I wanted to write tunes again. Looking back on the experimental music, it was a short-lived phenomenon’. Whilst he has still performed such works more recently, it now somehow ‘feels like going back in time’.

Raindrops (1970) by Hugh Shrapnel

performed by Jost Nickel et al.

Hugh says he rarely starts from a purely musical idea when composing, but often more of a poetic image. He describes such pieces as ‘descriptive, of a mood - poems in music, if that’s not too pretentious’. It is that ability to capture this in small form, distilling an image, a thought or an idea, that is so impressive in his work. There is a clear thread of connection with local environment, community and political issues in much of his work. ‘During the experimental time, it was all to do with concepts, in its own little world’. That’s not to say that politics weren’t important then too. Hugh played oboe in the Peoples’ Liberation Music, a political music group in the 1970s, playing folk and ‘agit-pop’, and they often played on demonstrations against cuts, supporting the miners’ strike, the Irish Struggles and anti-fascism.

Hugh feels rooted in the geographical area of South East London, where he has lived for most of his life. He moved from Stockport to Blackheath when he was 12, and apart from a few years in Birmingham, he has remained in the area. Why? ‘Well, force of habit. But I like it – there are lots of parks and open space, and I’ve always loved the countryside and nature’. Oxleas Wood, the first piece in South of the River, was written in support of a successful local campaign against a motorway being carved through this ancient wood. Like many, composing has not been his sole profession from necessity. In the 70s and 80s he taught music in schools and further education colleges, but then spent many years working part time in a council housing department. Teaching was demanding, with marking and preparing eating into his time. The housing job, whilst demanding in its own way, it gave more free time for composition, but it also brought him into the outside world. New music circles can become somewhat isolationist, whilst Hugh feels that music is very much ‘to do with everyday life’. He thinks more and more about the idea of music being expressive, in contrast to the earlier experimental view of music as pure sounds. In essence, he is ‘more and more concerned with melody’.

With three recordings of his music on Convivium Records under his belt, a fourth is on the way. Following on from piano duos, solo piano works and wind chamber works, the new album will be music for strings, including a new work for string quartet. He’s also working on orchestrating some of his earlier works, including the South of the River piano duets. So there’s still more to come, and I for one will be looking forward to hearing more very soon.