Telephone Interview 7th January 2019
Charles Hazlewood is an international conductor and musical revolutionary. He has conducted some of the greatest classical repertoire with some of the best orchestras in the world and is a significant presence on British television and radio.
He is the founder of the world’s first Paraorchestra and his critically acclaimed music theatre shows tour the world; his innovations have created new audiences for orchestral music and even reset what our concept of an ‘orchestra’ is. Hazlewood is a visionary with a mission to bring the ever modern joy of orchestral music to the 21st century audience and in doing so, to change lives and communities for the better.
Charles Hazlewood won first prize in the European Broadcasting Union Conducting Competition during his early twenties, and has since conducted many of the world’s greatest orchestras (including The Royal Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, The Philharmonia, London Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, Swedish Radio Symphony, Gothenburg Symphony, Danish Radio Symphony). He has played Carnegie Hall, the BBC Proms, and multiple festivals throughout the world, collaborating with artists as diverse as Nigel Kennedy, Professor Green and Wyclef Jean. Charles has conducted over 200 world premieres and won the Berlin Film Festival ‘Golden Bear’ for Best Film with his South African township opera company’s U Carmen e-Khayelitsha;
Under his leadership The British Paraorchestra became the world’s first large-scale professional ensemble of virtuoso musicians with disabilities who made their debut at the Closing Ceremony of the London 2012 Paralympics and were the first ever orchestral headliner at Glastonbury Festival. Charles has authored, presented and conducted the music in multiple films for BBC TV (on Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, amongst others, as well as The Beatles, and Badly Drawn Boy, and Minimalism); he has won three Sony Awards for his shows on BBC Radio 2, created the score for the South African Mysteries (West End and worldwide) and Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and other love songs), and a new opera The Tin Drum (both Knee-high) and has three TED talks to his name.
Well, I’ve been really looking forward to this! I think the work you’re doing with the Paraorchestra is incredible.
Aaah!
It has been going since 2011 hasn’t it? That was your first meeting with the original members.
Yeah. I suppose the idea started to percolate for me from around 2010- 2011. My daughter’s got cerebral palsy, so she sort of fast-tracked me… I started to think very differently about why I didn’t meet any disabled people in the orchestras I work with around the world. It’s so bizarre, the world is missing out on so much talent that just isn’t necessarily shaped in quite the same way. The nature of the orchestra is that it usually contains people who conform to very specific stereotypes, particularly in terms of the instruments they play. An awful lot of the disabled musicians that I’ve met don’t make music using a conventional instrument – they’re using some form of assisted technology. Of course, orchestras currently haven’t got space for assisted technology – they’ve only got space for people who play very traditional instruments that have always been part of the make-up.
In 2010-2011 – at that point in our culture in the UK – the Paralympics was coming to London. This movement (which was a British initiative) was over fifty years old but had finally come to a point where people were genuinely taking it seriously for the first time. It was like a watershed moment. The Paralympics is now no longer this kind of fuzzy, ‘feel-good’ event: ‘ah bless them, let’s get the poor disabled athletes out the house, give them a chance to do something’. For the first time I think people were thinking, ‘holy shit – this is world-class sport!’ I was looking at all of this thinking ‘well, music is much more universal than sport so what on earth are we doing? We’re missing out. All of this talent, and we’re not making a platform for it, we’re not integrating it’. So I just went with this once in a lifetime opportunity. The eyes of the world were on us with the 2012 games so I thought that something had to be done – we’ll form a new group. That’s how it was born.
I think the world at large is not aware of the fact that there are genuinely no barriers to anybody making music, with any kind of impairment whatsoever. For the first time in the history of humankind that there is genuinely a possibility for anyone and everyone on the planet to make music. That’s a really brilliant place to be. I think the world at large hasn’t really woken up to it, they’re not really aware of it.
That’s fantastic. Has your daughter been involved and come and seen your rehearsals? I imagine she has.
Yeah – she’s a firm supporter of what we’re doing! (laughs) She’s still so little. She watches from the wings and she’s very delighted by what she sees.
So who are the core members now?
I suppose you could say the orchestra is ‘pan-disabled’. There is every kind of disability. There’s hearing loss, visual impairment, paralysis, autism, aspergers, cerebral palsy… Clarence was one of the leading trumpeters in the UK before he had a terrible post-gig motor accident. He now plays a piece of technology called ‘Headspace’ where he blows down a tube and it activates a whole bunch of stuff. It’s an incredibly sophisticated programme on his computer so he can play pretty much anything now. It’s amazing.
There’s Lynn Levett, a composer with cerebral palsy, a clarinettist with hearing impairment… but it’s constantly shifting. Actually, we’re about to take on a whole load of new talent in the next couple of months. It shifts and morphs all the time.
You sometimes use able-bodied musicians as well, don’t you?
Oh God yeah. When I formed the group the one negative that came back at us (and it’s quite understandable) was ‘what are you doing? You’re just creating another disabled ghetto, why do want to do that? The whole point is that we want integration’. My response was ‘of course, integration is our goal but first we’ve got to shine a big bright light on the issue as it stands, and more to the point, help people to change their prejudices’. We have to remember that it’s still very hard for most people – liberally minded intelligent people – to put the words ‘disability’ and ‘excellence’ in the same sentence. They find that hard to do. So when I initially put forward the idea for this Paraochestra, there was the assumption that we were just talking about it as a lovely fluffy, feel-good, fuzzy project.
My point was that it’s not that, it’s about creating world-class music. Until we shine a bright light on that first and say that it is possible to be disabled and to be world-class we can’t reach Stage Two. That’s the much more important, long-lasting stage: that there’s no reason why disabled musicians can’t be on a platform on a stage with able-bodied ones, and it still will be world-class music. That’s the goal for all of us here. It’s about creating an integrated world where it’s no longer surprising to be sitting down at the Barbican to watch a world-class gig, and a healthy number of people on the stage happen to be disabled. No biggy – right?
Right! How does it work with notation? You’ve mentioned the assisted technology, but what about the instrumentalists? Is it mainly conventional notation?
We just embrace whatever system or approach is most useful. There’s a lot of experimentation and a lot of music is learnt by ear. Music can be programmed in – there is a multitude of different ways that people can take their part on board. A lot of the music we make is born out of improvisation in any case. I’ll suggest some melodic/harmonic/rhythmic contours (or fundamental bits of DNA, if you like) and then the orchestra goes off into groups of two or three people and they devise episodes based around that material. Then they come back and there’s a kind of ‘show and tell’. Other members of the orchestra reflect back and say what’s worked and what hasn’t, what they got, what they didn’t get etc. Then the orchestra splits off into lots of different groups again, and there’s more of the same process. You see what I mean? So there’s a gradual whittling down to a musical narrative that everyone believes in and everyone’s had a joint hand in the creation of.
That sounds so exciting. And it also leads me into my next question – how do you think it has altered your role and furthered you as a conductor?
Oh, I think it’s just completely reinvented the wheel for me. You have to remember that there’s an assumption with disability and non-disability: that disabled people will do everything they can to join the able-bodied world. Now to a large extent that’s true, because the majority of the world is able-bodied. But in assuming that one-way street or direction of travel, you miss out on something very fundamental. The example I always give is when you sit down and improvise with other musicians (and these can be the most experienced and long in the tooth musicians you can imagine). I’ve done it round the world ever since I started making music. Ironically, you actually get the same upshot – there is a terrible, itchy, pregnant silence. No one wants to be the first to commit, to throw their hat in the ring; they’re always waiting for someone else to do it. Basically people are fearful – they don’t want to look foolish. They wait for someone else to expose themselves.
That awful pregnant silence or gulf lasts for ages until, as if by magic, everyone suddenly jumps in and it’s a terrible mess. It’s takes ages for everybody to start to relax and to trust themselves and those round them. Now, with the first four musicians of the Paraorchestra, that whole process took around five minutes. I think if you’re confined to a wheelchair, you can’t hear properly, or your sight doesn’t function the way another person’s might, you just don’t sweat the small stuff. You don’t have the same petty self-consciousness that’s just about your ego. So in that one small way that’s a fantastically powerful example of how it’s a two-way street. We all have to learn from them – they are super, hyper evolved in a way that we aren’t. It’s quite thrilling.
So by extension to your question, of course it’s stretched me. It’s changed my outlook, particularly in terms of this very collective chipping away, working away, gradually whittling down of the music to some kind of core narrative that everyone believes in. It’s fantastic for me because so much of what conductors do is based on an old (and let’s face it) funky, outmoded model: the model that is a kind of pyramid structure, where the conductor stands at the top and dictates how everything should be. Well, any conductor who has any kind of enlightenment understands that actually it’s not about that at all, it’s about creating an environment within which magic can occur. It’s certainly not about dictating or coercing the musicians to work in one particular way.
I could play a Beethoven symphony in London on a Tuesday and then in Stockholm on the Saturday – two orchestras, but it’s still the same me, and the same relationship with that Beethoven symphony. But between those two performances I’ll have two completely different experiences of that piece (if I’m doing my job properly). My job is about creating a framework which is strong and yet freeing and secure, one within which an orchestra of musicians can completely fly and shine. That is the point. In a way the Paraorchestra has been a key part of my learning in that respect.
You’re not always standing in front of the orchestra are you?
No, often they don’t need it, it depends on the setting or situation or context. I’m there when they need me and I’m not when they don’t.
You’ve done a lot of amazing collaborative work – for example with Coldplay during the Paralympics. How did that collaboration work?
It was a gradual, nice, low temperature collaboration with Coldplay for the Paralympics. We had time to work out what it was we were going to do and how we were going to do it. There was time. It was a beautiful process when Chris Martin came round and he met all of our musicians and hung out with them. We took the time that was necessary to be organic and beautiful rather than just stuck together in a rush.
So it’s not like a soloist being flown in for one rehearsal, like you would get with a concerto performance.
No, very different. Of course it can work, a soloist comes in and there’s one rehearsal and then a bunch of gigs. But for something as unusual and as far left as this, the only way it’s going to have meaning and resonance is if you take the time and you really take care with it.
The Nature of Why was a collaboration with dancers, wasn’t it?
Absolutely. An ongoing provocation of mine is how do you effectively remove, or erase, the fourth wall. We conventionalists in live musical culture do it by sitting in a seat in a long shoebox shaped room with an orchestra at the far end, listening to a beautiful and homogenised, perfect sound. This sound – a kind of collective, perfectly balanced sound -emerges and washes over us. That’s great. But when I was six or seven years old I was taken to watch an orchestra rehearse. It was literally the first time I had encountered an orchestra. I was sitting there on my own in a vast empty auditorium watching this rehearsal. The conductor turned round, peered at me and said ‘why don’t you come up and sit in the middle of the orchestra?’
So, I rather shyly walked up the stairs onto the stage, sat down and they continued the rehearsal. I’ll never forget the extreme, extraordinary, blissful tsunami-like experience of all of this melodic and harmonic information fired at me from all directions, and how engulfing and how overwhelming that was. It made such an impression on me that ever since I’ve been looking at ways to recreate that experience for audiences. I think about how we might create something where the audiences are genuinely engulfed and utterly consumed by the experience. The Nature of Why was a very determined attempt to recreate that experience.
What an important moment for you – then you became a conductor!
Yeah that’s right. Conducting was just trying to recreate that experience, that ‘eureka’ moment, for each and every person. Orchestras are incredible things. Let’s just remember that an orchestra is the most evolved form of teamwork that exists in mankind. People complain how football teams don’t work well in teams – there’s only eleven of them. An orchestra can be upwards of a hundred people working with intense, extreme, insane synchronicity, and at the same time there is immense freedom for each and every one of them to express themselves individually. There is genuinely not another example of that in any form of human experience. It’s a remarkable thing. Yet at the same time most people only have a relationship with the orchestra by virtue of either movies or video games. My view is that if you get anyone like that to a room with a real, live red-blooded orchestra, their life will shift on its axis.
I saw that you performed Terry Riley’s In C at one point. In terms of the established repertoire, what works well?
Well In C can work – it’s an incredibly compliant creation in the sense that it can work with a choir of forty, a string quartet, a mix and match ensemble of twenty-five players etc. It’s completely open to whatever you want to make of it. The rules are very simple and provided you remain faithful to those you’ll get an amazing experience from it. It can be rendered by any number of different disparate models or situations, so it’s not like I had to remake the piece. I’ve done it in lots of different environments: the Ulster Orchestra, a group of singers in Cape Town, with an electric guitar orchestra in Poland… I’ve done it in many, many different ways and it always brings a kind of fascinating, interesting yield. It’s beautifully open. It’s an incredible act of love, or an invitation as a piece of music in a way that few pieces of music are, actually.
What about music pre-1900? I know that you did Greensleeves, but how can it work with more conventional repertoire?
Oh, I think the sky’s the limit. For me, all roads lead back to Mozart. Mozart is more important to me than any other composer that’s ever existed. I’ve spent a lot of my time performing Mozart and that informs and grounds me in terms of everything else I’m doing. For instance, there’s a chord sequence called La Folia which has been used (last time I checked) by over three hundred and fifty listed composers as a basis for composition. That’s a good example of something that can be very open ended. You can take a Bach fugue, or some slices of Harry Partch or Conlon Nancarrow. You can look at what is going on in Russian polyphony in the Seventeenth Century or polyphony in the Nineteenth Century. There are so many starting points, an infinite number actually.
That’s fascinating. Obviously the Paraorchestra has commissioned new pieces. Do you collaborate with disabled composers?
Yes absolutely. The composer the Paraorchestra has probably commissioned more than any other is Lloyd Coleman. He’s an unbelievably talented broadcaster, composer and clarinettist. We’ve worked with him extensively since the conception of the group. He’s one of the founding members and he’s just astonishing – words can’t really describe how much of a virtuoso he is. So we continue to work with him extensively, but there are many others besides. It’s about getting balance – creating the right narrative that’s needed at that moment in time. It might be by using a disabled composer; it might not. But of course at the same time you find yourself wondering, where’s the grey area? We’re all kind of disabled, aren’t we?
Yes!
So where’s the line? Of course, many, many musicians would not wish to identify as disabled, even though they do have disabilities in technical terms.
Yes exactly. I actually prefer the term ‘differently-abled’, because that’s exactly what it is.
I agree, I agree.
I remember seeing an interview with Evelyn Glennie – she said being deaf was way down on the list of adjectives describing who she was. And that’s how it should be for everybody.
It is.
What about disabled (or ‘differently-abled’) conductors – have you had anyone assisting you?
No, I haven’t spent any time with differently-abled conductors as yet but you know, it’s only time!
Yes, I wonder how that role could be adapted as well.
It could absolutely be adapted. There is no rule, no ‘this is in, this is out’. I don’t believe in that kind of binary notion we have. Interestingly, we’ve just been working in a sort of lab situation where we had an amazing guy called Vahakn Matossian who’s developed a piece of kit called a ‘haptic baton’.[1] The whole purpose of this kit is to see if it can transform the experience and the response of visually impaired musicians. At the moment, if someone visually impaired is in the orchestra they’re always going to be on the back of the experience. They can’t see the body language of the people around them, and crucially they can’t see the body language of the conductor. Imagine if you’ve got a piece of kit which is effectively sending out a radio signal to sensors, little buzzers placed on the body of a visually impaired musician. You can feel not just where the beat is but you feel the space between the beats, so the visually impaired musician can be right on the front of the action, rather than reactive of the back of the action. That is a really exciting innovation that we were working on a month ago, which could change everything for visually impaired musicians working in professional orchestras.
That’s incredible. So do you often enlist specialists to assist you?
Yeah, absolutely. We’ve also got lots of ongoing dialogues with people who are exploring music and deafness. How you might sign music is a really interesting dialogue that we’re having. More to the point – how a hearing impaired person might experience a performance of a piece of music. Of course, to some extent they’ll be getting vibrations up through the floor but there are really simple low-fi things. If they’re holding a balloon they get a more heightened sense of not just the low and high end of the sound spectrum but crucially the middle. That’s one of many experiments we have undertaken to see how we can enhance and develop the experience of music making with people who can’t hear very well.
Yes, I used to work with deaf students, and I knew a guy who went to his friend’s concert with an empty plastic bottle. I’ve noticed that they can vibrate differently with the depths of people’s voices as well.
Yeah, I get that.
Yes, right!
So… if a student in a different country is reading this and feeling inspired to set up something similar, what would you advise them?
Oh
gosh – well I just think how beautifully pluralistic the world is, full of almost
limitless possibilities. No-one should feel restricted by what they perceive
their limitations are or what the world has put on them as their limitations. I
think anything and everything is possible. Music is the most universal language
we have, as a species. You can play a tune to a child in Sydney and the same
tune to a child in Paris, and despite the differences in background and
collective experience the same two children will draw some of the same truths
from that melody – that’s how universal it is. Anyone with anything to say has
a place and a space to say it. So for me it’s about getting out there and
seizing your dreams and pouring oxygen into them. That’s all it’s about! It’s not
about conservatoires, or about perceived skills or accomplishment. If you have
something to say people will listen.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/15/hi-tech-batons-allow-blind-musicians-follow-conductor-first/