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Oliver Leith cheerfully maintains that he writes music the wrong way. “My approach is totally magpie-ish. Anything goes. Anything that achieves the feeling that I’m after,” says the 33-year-old British composer when we meet, one rain-sodden afternoon, in a central London café. Half the time, he says, his music sounds “wrong”, experimenting “with my thick musical crayon” until it turns into something viable.
Leith, whose 2022 opera Last Days was based on Gus Van Sant’s fictionalised account of the final days of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, has lately been working with some even chunkier crayons than usual. In a new piece, which the Hallé orchestra will premiere at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall in April, he relies on broad blocks of orchestral colour to create something akin to a child’s drawing in music. “It’s called Cartoon Sun, and I’m really focusing on that cartoon element: this uncomplicated idea of the sun’s power as something completely elemental,” he says. “So what I’m going for is this primary-colour, nursery-school version of what an orchestra sounds like.”
But if audiences are expecting a nursery-school harmonic palette to match, they might be surprised. Leith has a predilection for “sad, sloughy and confusing” soundworlds devoid of a clear tonal centre. Cartoon Sun will be no exception, putting a new spin on familiar orchestral sounds through what Leith refers to as “blurred” notes: “[I’m using] many slight variations of the same pitch at the same time that thicken the air . . . giving the notes a sort of halo.”
The tension between familiarity and novelty has long fascinated Leith, who says that he loves to “use and defy” archetypes. It’s a tension that came to the fore in Last Days, where Leith did his best to “slash” preconceptions about what a hero should do: in his hands banalities such as answering the door, putting the bins out and eating cereal became major operatic events. Some have described his musical approach as “trollish”; Leith has another take: “Whenever you see people on the street with a cigarette or whatever, they might be having a completely different experience from what we assume,” he says, “I love using music to reframe that banality and to bring out the magic in it.”
Growing up in north London, the child of two fine-art photographers from Northern Ireland, Leith was never pushed to play a musical instrument. The reason he started learning the classical guitar, aged eight, was that his cousin had one (“I got jealous”). Later, the influence of a “strangely amazing” music department at Enfield Grammar School helped to cement his musical interest.
Then he stopped playing altogether. “Although I still loved music, and I loved the feeling after a concert, I found that I didn’t actually enjoy performing because the nerves beforehand were too bad,” he says. Luckily, around that time, composition took over. “Some people were doing it at school and I thought, Cool, you can actually write music down and other people will play it?” I wrote a piece for nine glockenspiels because that’s what they had in the cupboard. I think it was called Tinnitus or something — such a bad title. But the feeling of having my music performed was superb.” A few years later, aged 18, he won a place to study composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Now, with several major commissions under his belt — not least from the London Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Music Festival — Leith positions himself on the cusp between multiple musical styles. “I’m happy to compose in any form. I don’t think doing orchestral music is better than doing a folk song or an advert. I would do a jingle if it was an interesting thing to do and if I had full rein and freedom.” He has no qualms, either, about reinventing pieces of classical music. “I know that there is a certain world in which that sort of thing wouldn’t fly, where people would say, ‘Oh you can’t do that to this music, it’s too holy.’ But I believe that you can work with anything and turn it into something else.”
Does he see his music as provocative? He words his answer with caution. “My automatic position on some things — without trying — is to be in that provocative camp. For me, what’s important is to have a sense of admiration [for old pieces] rather than reverence.” What does he perceive to be the difference between the two? “Reverence is saying, ‘This is an icon, you can’t touch it,’ whereas admiration is saying, ‘This is great, can I melt it?’”
Irreverent though he may be, Leith lacks the ferocity of the true anarchist. The man sitting in front of me is surprisingly diffident, with a soft voice, an endearing smile and a tendency to speak in hesitant half-sentences. “I’m still not massively confident in some ways,” he admits, before going on to reveal that he “all-out” refuses to give pre-performance talks: “They’re too nerve-racking, but also there is something about spelling out what you’re going to do in your work which I don’t think is helpful.” It’s an attitude that extends beyond the confines of the concert hall: “My girlfriend is not a musician. She’s a high-flying businesswoman; it’s nice not to have to talk about music at home.”
It seems that as far as Leith is concerned, his music speaks for itself. And he trusts it to do a good job. “If I send something out into the world and I love it, that’s always the thing that matters. And people are free to love it too, or to hate it.” He smiles, “After all, if you don’t have confidence about your opinion, then what do you have?”
‘Cartoon Sun’ premieres on April 6, halle.co.uk
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