Composer Melinda Maxwell: ‘Music is not something that can be nailed down’

If there’s one thing Melinda Maxwell cannot abide, it is musical complacency. “It’s easy to think, ‘I’m making a nice sound. Can’t I just stay here? This is all I need to do.’ Well, no, it’s not, I’m sorry. Music is not something that can be nailed down.”

It’s a lesson that the British composer and oboist, 69, learnt the hard way, after deciding in 2011 to pursue a masters in jazz performance at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. By that point she had a successful career, performing as a guest principal oboist with the London Sinfonietta, among other ensembles, and teaching at the Royal Northern College of Music, where she was head of woodwind.

But joining the masters programme, she says, began as one of the most humiliating experiences of her life. “We all had to improvise one after the other, and, wow — talk about egg on face. But then I thought, ‘Right, I’d better learn how to do this.’ And I went back for more.”

The fruit of her labour can be heard in Janus, her new chamber music album, which comes out at the end of this month. Featuring a mix of classical and jazz musicians, it alternates passages of densely chromatic composed music with improvisation, the aim being to explore the concept of duality.

“It’s all to do with the fact that, in improvising, you make a different version of the same [piece of music],” she says. “It’s the same idea as having a double. That is where Janus the two-headed god sits . . . and that’s what I’m interested in: how two things can have a different flavour while being based on the same idea.”

Listening to the album, however, you’re likely to notice something else: a strange, slippery sound, almost like a 1940s saxophone, with a high register full of terrifying, shrieking effects. This is the aulos, a double-piped reed instrument that was a pervasive part of ancient Greek and Roman life. It frequently accompanied sporting contests, as well as events on the battlefield, where its assertive timbre served to invigorate the soldiers.

As for the music written for it: that has largely been lost in the mists of time, which is precisely why, in Maxwell’s opinion, the instrument lends itself to improvisation. ‘‘Because there are no textbooks on how to play the aulos, or what the embouchure [mouth position] is, or what exercises you should do,” she has had to rely on “the instrument itself showing me what it is . . . I thought, ‘Fantastic, I can do what the hell I like!’”

Capitalising on the instrument’s “warped tuning”, as she puts it, Maxwell has generated a harmonic no-man’s-land, in which the boundaries between improvised and composed music are impossible to discern. In doing so, she is making an artistic statement: “There was a time when a classical musician could be an improviser as well as a composer and performer. Beethoven was one of the most amazing improvisers, as was Mozart and Bach . . . But nowadays, there is no public forum [in classical music] where you can go out on stage and say, ‘Right, I’m going to play Britten’s Six Metamorphoses and then follow that with an improvisation on number one.’” She continues: “What I’m doing [in Janus] is bringing those elements of performer, improviser and composer together.”

Moreover, in pushing classical musicians out of their comfort zone, Maxwell is exploring a subject that she feels passionate about: the value of imperfection. She cites Julian Barnes’s book A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, which presents us with a description of heaven, but “after a while you get this terrible ennui, this terrible feeling of ‘Is that it?’, because paradise, well, there’s no such thing as paradise. It’s a dead end. There’s no need to struggle. There’s no sense of chance. That’s why improvising is so wonderful . . . you might make a mistake; you don’t quite know where it’s going and that’s the thrill: the thrill of the chase.”

What exactly is Maxwell chasing? To some extent, she says, it’s self-knowledge as a musician: “Improvisation holds a mirror up to you. It asks, ‘Who am I as a musician? What have I got to say about this simple melody? What can I do with it?’” But she is also keen to learn how to channel the mindset of jazz performers into her classical music-making. “The best classical musicians realise that there is an improvisatory element to all performance, and they pour that into the notes on the page . . . What makes Daniel Barenboim, for example, such a fantastic player is the fact that he always sounds as if he is tasting the music for the first time. It’s such an important aspect of all music-making, but we forget about it sometimes.” 

She hopes that Janus’s unusual confection of ingredients encourages that sense of spontaneity. But is there a chance those very ingredients might end up detracting from each other? Maxwell agrees there is a balance to be struck between experimentation and “keeping the essence of a piece intact”, but she also draws my attention to other considerations: “There’s so much music nowadays that we don’t listen to, that is like wallpaper. I don’t want that.”

So what does she want? “I want music you can listen to again and again, that has many layers to it, that can feed me throughout my life. I hope I can write something that interests the ear and makes listeners think, ‘I never knew you could do that.’”

‘Janus’ is released on the Birmingham Record Company label on September 29