Simon Bainbridge

Summary

‘It's important to contribute to a culture that survives beyond us.’

There ended up being two interviews with Simon Bainbridge for this book. Both took place at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he has been a Professor of Composition since 1999, and the venue was appropriate because I wanted to talk to him about how he relates his experience as a composer to that of the students he teaches.

The first interview was arranged for a late afternoon at the end of February 2014, and my arrival at the Academy coincided with the interval of a vocal competition and a flood of audience members surging into the foyer. Bainbridge arrived shortly afterwards, and although I remembered him from a meeting many years earlier as having an authoritative presence – he's very tall and has a deep, sonorous voice – he appeared rather distracted, particularly while attempting to summon the Academy's antiquated and cramped lift. When its doors eventually opened, we manoeuvred around students and their instrument cases and juddered to the top floor, where a composition study had been booked for our meeting. It was virtually filled by an upright piano, a round table across which we talked – to piano accompaniment from a nearby practice room – and shelves full of scores against which he stood to be photographed after the interview.

As I’d hoped, he talked in very practical terms and was concerned to explain his composition processes (which he admitted to sometimes finding frustratingly difficult) as clearly as possible. In short, this was a straightforward, businesslike conversation, whose flow was assisted by his evident sympathy for the thinking behind some of my questions. But I wasn't aware of him relaxing significantly once the interview was underway, perhaps because his mind was on the performance of a horn trio (not his own) by students that he’d agreed at short notice to conduct early that evening.

We met again eight months later because, after reading the edited typescript of the interview, he felt that he hadn't expressed himself as well as he’d wanted to. He suggested starting again from the beginning, and this time he was more relaxed.