1. How would you describe your music to someone who is unfamiliar with it?

First of all, I must say, for me, and especially at this point, it would be alluding to something that does not really exist yet, I’d say. Because if I were to talk about my music, it would imply the idea or the existence of a particular style or musical language associated to my persona, something I haven’t found yet, or at least I am not aware of. It’s been quite a long time actually that I have been searching for my voice or language, which on one hand has held me back from composing, but on the other helped me find a direction.

As a consequence, during these last years, my music and compositional thinking has been evolving very quickly and towards different horizons; my quest to find my own style or language and a quest to create coherent compositional forms, together with my research on timbre/harmony have certainly played their role in this – someone very dear to me, a composer, a teacher and a dear friend, Wim Henderickx, as we were talking about this told me that maybe it’s better that one does not find it, cause otherwise one might stop looking and fall into a mannerism of sorts.

Thus, more than about ‘my music’, I would be talking about how I have been composing up to this point, as a result of my search for my own musical style or language, or inner voice, as they say. In this sense, I can only talk about what I am interested in. Even though I am not a ‘spectral’ composer and don’t like to be categorised, a great deal of my musical compositional thinking is highly and directly related to spectral practices, and a great deal of its processes are informed by it.

There are many things and aspects of which I could talk about, like my interest in timbre or form and how the former can help in articulating the formal structures that make the latter or even generate it – ‘form’ not in the classical sense (e.g. a sonata form), but form as a process of the materialisation of time through sound; harmony in the classical sense, is sometimes almost inexistent. Almost, for harmony is a very important element for me. Irreplaceable, I would say, for it is one of the best elements for providing dynamism and directionality in music, something that is very important to me.

Time – musical and psychological time, not chronological – or temporal organisation of is also as important to me, something which I have been increasingly working on lately. I have been increasingly interested in white noise and sounds that fall between ‘pure’ pitch and noise and/or even silence. This tendency to integrate this axiom, and noise as integral part of the compositional apparatus, into my music has been growing recently.

Another important aspect for me – something which I have always been drawn to – is the morphing of one sound into another, of one timbre into another, of one texture into another on the one hand, and the possibilities of fusion between these, on the other. Naturally, this leads to a practice of working with harmony/timbre, differentiation / undifferentiation, etc.

The possibilities provided by contemporary extended instrumental techniques, naturally, become mandatory to achieve the sonic results. Therefore, as an artistic necessity, the instrumental playing and their sounds must be pushed, so to speak, to a border where their timbral qualities almost meet each other, abandoning their respective individualistic qualities for the sake of a collective sound, spectral fusion. A collective anonymity which gives rise to a timbral / spectral identity.

2. What is your educational background and training in music composition?

I remember, when I first went to school, being upset because my parents didn’t send me to the music school to study piano. The first four years I went to a normal school, meanwhile I started learning music autodidactically, in those little and poor possibilities I had, and playing first drums, synthesisers and accordion, until the age of 11 when I went to study at the music school in my city, where I studied classical guitar for eight years. I had never thought about studying guitar before, until that moment but now I’m glad I did. The first year there was quite difficult for me, psychologically, but then I started taking some private lessons to catch up and then I quickly advanced. Even though I fell in love with the guitar, I would always dream of the moment I would finally start my higher studies in composition.

In fact, I never thought of composing, in my mind it was as something holy or sacred, something I had to wait to grow up to do it. However, I was conscious that the guitar was only a transition to composition. I remember a moment, during the usual guitar lesson with my teacher as I was playing on the guitar – I apparently must have been playing in a certain nervous and agitated way that made him worry – he put his hand on the strings to stop me from playing and said: “What’s wrong, my son? You seem like you want to devour that instrument. Don’t you like the guitar?” I replied by saying that yes, I liked the guitar, but I didn’t want to become a guitarist, but a composer.

There was a moment of silence, as if he was reflecting on something and then the lesson went on. Just a few days later, on a Saturday morning, much to my surprise, he comes to my house and says that he has something for me: he had brought me a book on harmony, another on orchestration, one about musical forms, another one on counterpoint and an orchestral score, and told me that I have to study them and that from now on, after our usual guitar lesson, we will also learn about those, that he would check up my progress and help me when I need. I advanced very quickly and since then I practically never stopped.

Soon after that followed my fist compositions for ensemble, guitar, concert band, orchestra, and also incidental music. Meanwhile I also started performing in different occasions or festivals as a guitarist, mostly solo, but also in a duo, sextet, etc., with other guitarist/friends from the school. After high school, I continued my higher studies in music composition at the then Academy of Arts (now University of Arts) in the capital city Tirana for three years. Unfortunately, for reasons which I cannot say here, I was obliged to abandon my studies and leave (the right word would be escape) for Belgium, where I started everything from the beginning. A new life, socially, artistically, financially, etc., all from the beginning, my studies included.

However, I consider myself lucky, because in the timespan of less than a year I went from the refugee camps to a recognised refugee status to student at the conservatory. I have to say, in a certain way the conservatory has saved my life in those years, as I found a world where I belonged to and was surrounded there by so many talented musicians and made new friends that I would forget about many problems and things that worried me and it became a kind of a second home, since mine was restricted to me. I went on, after being admitted at the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel, to study music writing, composition, conducting and recently music technology.

3. Why did you decide to become a composer?

Oh, it wasn’t a decision. It was something that grew gradually in me. Since very early – I don’t know why – I had a proclivity for the arts, something I still find a bit strange since none in my family is an artist; there was a short period where I didn’t know if I wanted to be a musician, a comedian, a painter or a poet. Until I started taking music lessons officially, there would be every day some time that I would spend painting, sculpting and playing music (especially drums) while in the evenings I would write parodies on a certain popular melody making funny stories out of things that my family did in general or that particular day, a kind of musical caricature, one could say, or just write some comic texts (something characteristic of my city, called ‘bejta’), it became a kind of an evening ritual. Another daily activity for me was going to my father’s or uncle’s working place and look for all sorts of materials that produced different kinds of sounds to play on them. My mother’s kitchen would not be spared either!

My first passion, though, was poetry. My youngest sister taught me to read very early and I learned Italian even earlier and don’t remember how and why but I started reading a book I borrowed from her, a volume of poetry from different Italian authors and was fascinated by the ways of expression and by the way the words rhymed and sounded, even though I wouldn’t understand everything and every word. Since then, poetry has always been a part of me. In turn, as much as I loved literature, I used to hate the ‘poetry lesson’ at school, because I didn’t like most of children’s poems but mostly due to the declamation, since we were instructed to move the hands in an almost standard way and declaim with an intonation that made no sense. And doing it in front of the class would not make it any better!

It wasn’t until a later moment that music became, in a definitive way, my most important occupation. I was born and grew up in Scutari, a city known for his humour, jokes and long tradition in the arts in general but especially music and theatre, a city always considered as the ‘cradle of culture’ – in fact, with all the problems people have, there’s always a merry atmosphere and jokes are not only part of the daily life and conversation but also a way of expression – and there, as in most of my country, you could hear all kinds of music every single day and everywhere. Especially between early spring and autumn, when people would celebrate their marriage due to the better weather, music would be something ubiquitous; in every neighbourhood there would be music being played and it would last for weeks without stopping. One was bombarded every day with all sorts of music or styles, folk music, popular music, urban music, wedding music, serenades, canzonettas, another genre called ‘jare’, a popular equivalent of operatic aria, etc. as regards the Albanian music, and from Montenegro and Serbian folk music, to Greek, to Italian ‘musica leggera’, to Arberesh songs, to Turkish music, etc. as regard our neighbours.

Besides, anytime they could, my parents would listen to classical music, especially my father who loves the Viennese waltzes. And my sister would listen to Italian pop music all the time. Growing up in a city whose main characteristics are especially humour and song, and in that kind of atmosphere – that coexisted besides all the chaos after the fall of the communist dictatorship-system and of the civil war – eventually, at a certain moment it was inevitable that I would take that path.

The most crucial moment, though, that has remained in my memory is the first time I heard music that shook me to my core. I must have been four or five years old when in early January in the morning, as I enter the living room passing in front of the TV where the new year’s concert was being retransmitted. At that moment, I heard music that terrified me. I was in complete awe and paralysed, in the real sense of the word. I stayed glued to the television, until the music stopped. I didn’t know what it was, but I couldn’t get it out of my head and was intrigued to know who was the composer and how could one create music like that. Something that I would later discover to be Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. Even now, every time I hear the piece, I still feel like that little boy in front of the TV with his arms folded.

4. Can you walk us through your composition process, from start to finish?

You are asking me about many things, because the art of composing is never the same. At each work it is different, or more or less different and unique to that particular work, depending on what you want to achieve. Sometimes I might begin with a musical idea which can be developed, sometimes it is a sonority that I would like to hear which as a consequence will bring me to choose a certain instrumental combination, or vice versa. Sometimes it is the morphing of one sound into another, or the continuity between different sound-surfaces, textures or timbral modulations that I would like to hear or work with. For example, with my first and second preludes for piano, which I also consider my first real compositions, I wanted to create music based on fractal geometry, where the musical material is self-identical and made out of patterns that repeat at different scales so that the micro and macro structures would derive from and be just different facets of the same process.

But we are here still talking about an intention, not any concrete musical idea yet, in the conventional sense. Consequently, this intention automatically led me to organising the pitch material in a particular way where the form of the music was almost an automatic result of the inner interactions of the tonal material. In a much later work, to take a completely different example, Instantané, for flute, viola and harp, I wanted to create a musical collage (as it is based on André Arty’s collage with the same title) where different concepts and techniques are intermixed. To keep it short, the idea of a simple musical collage simply made out of juxtaposed or superposed musical materials or sound surfaces seemed too simple and banal to me and it didn’t answer my need for creating a more unified work. Instead of making a musical collage with obvious surface juxtapositions, etc., I decided to create one that is based on the affinities of these different concepts and techniques, like a glue that connects them from underneath. In this case I approached the composition of the piece from a more global perspective.

So, it is not possible to deduce a composition process per se, as an absolute or univocal formula which can be applied universally, but only as related to a particular piece of music. Each work brings up problems, and possible solutions, that are intrinsic to its own material, independently from all the pre-made decisions or foregone conclusions or all the ideas had in advance. And this is something that the practice of sketching or laying down beforehand the structure of the work, cannot foresee. Actually, the most original ideas happen as a result of idiosyncratic solutions to intrinsic problems that rise only during the process of composition – these problems and solutions must be very carefully looked after since they might deviate too far from the initial intention.

Something I became aware of only recently, is that when sitting on my desk, before I start doing any actual work, I need to recreate the feeling of a certain acoustical space in my mind, a kind of mental space where to throw the sounds and where musical ideas emerge. It also made me aware not only as regard the performance space of music in general or of a particular work, but also of the physical musical space and how it can emerge from silence, giving the different sounds that make a piece of music an atmosphere and a territory where to breath, live and evolve, and make that integral part of the composition apparatus of a musical work. I mentioned ‘intention’. I think it describes better the initial phase, since it is due to the intention to make something that ideas are born. Once I have the initial material(s) I can deduce the other one(s).

This is where the more concrete, so to speak, and almost physical part of the composition process begins, since at this point, I have to choose what to do with it or find the best way of manipulating it in order to realise the sonic structures I am looking for or that I want to hear, weighting it against one or more other materials. It is a really long and complex process that includes conceiving, analysing, writing, evaluating, organising, listening, re-evaluating, etc. Even the raw material itself is context-dependent, as the way we experience it depends on the context in which it is perceived and on the other materials that surround it. In other words, it is all interdependent, i.e. the way I go realising certain things depends from a particular process, but the process itself depends on the chosen combination of instruments that provide a certain palette of sounds and who in turn might lend themselves to certain tonal/timbral manipulations, etc. Sometimes the material suggests the use of a global approach, sometimes a cellular one, and it is the materials themselves and the interactions between them in time and space that will create the musical form-content. Although I have an overview, or a clear idea, I never know exactly how I am going to proceed.

Sometimes the way the material gains presence will suggest to change the large-scale structure itself, therefore one is obliged to go back and listen, re-evaluate, weight the different materials against each other and with their surroundings. In this case, therefore, it is the music which will suggest it, and not my pre-designed sketch(es). The long process out of which emanates the musical work, is traceable only post factum, after the work has been completed. Although there are aspects of the composing process that one can describe in words, after all the explications of technique, the compositionally important thing remains untouched and its essence unexplained. And I find it even more difficult, if not impossible, to explain the content of a piece or the meaning of its content. It is precisely this unsayable, unspeakable part of it, this pre-rational dimension of the music that attracts me and I believe, all composers (or music lovers) in the first place. Probably that’s why we become composers. Otherwise, one would simply write a novel.

5. Who or what are your primary sources of inspiration when creating music?

This is closely related to the previous question. There are many things and reasons that can inspire one to create. I don’t think I have a ‘primary source’ of inspiration in that sense, if we are referring to extra-musical domains, and it is also something which differs from work to work and sometimes in the same work there might be even various aspects inspired by different things. For example, in my work Instantané, I just mentioned, I was inspired by a collage, but also – later on, as I was looking for ideas and materials – trance, Indian and gamelan music, hypnosis, painting, spectral practices and psychoacoustics, serial techniques and – I don’t know why the piece made me think of, in a nostalgic way, Anton Webern – quotation.

Sometimes it starts as a reaction to a piece of music, or even as a reaction to an earlier work of mine. At other times it can be a poem or a quotation I come across. Sometimes it starts with a request from a friend who plays a particular instrument, or from an ensemble, or even from a practical necessity to experiment and try new and different things. But these are quite abstract things to me, they are more poetical ideas which can help the imagination during the composition process, they do have a certain value as an analogy or metaphor, but don’t offer a concrete model, since in the end everything can be suggestive, after all.

This is not to say that composers are waiting for inspiration or even for something to happen in their lives to write their music – these are just romantic ideas that still prevail most people’s attitudes towards music. In every composer, as in every creative artist, for that matter, lives or exists a pre-condition that feeds on the urge to create. It is the composer who is the psychological condition which, on the contrary, can be disturbed by external elements or life experiences. I never compose under the impression of something that I have experienced in life. Inspiration serves sometimes more as a starting point or as a limitation, as a way of narrowing one’s focus and concentrate on a limited territory of possibilities so that one can pick up particular elements and have (finally!) something to start/work with.

Once I have an initial material to work with, then I can start to sculpt and give it direction. So, it is not a question of inspiration, but of model. In this sense, my primary model is sound, which serves to inspire the material basis of a work. Besides, the fabric of music has its roots everywhere.

6. In what ways has UE | scodo facilitated or streamlined your creative workflow?

It seems to me that with Universal Edition and its publishing tool scodo starts a whole new era of music publishing. Especially in regards to the composers. Nowadays, everything is getting more and more computerised and as a consequence, fortunately and unfortunately at the same time, the digitalisation is winning more and more ground in every domain. Universal Edition represents one further, positive step towards this evolution.

It is the first time in history that the composer has complete (editorial) control of the published material and is able to update/correct it to the last/correct version instantly, without all the intermediary administration that is (or was) usually necessary (even though, to all plethora of knowledge and skills that a composer must acquire, yet another one is to be added: a good basis of music engraving).

7. Which composer or work is your favourite, and why?

There are many of them and I would not like to mention one and not the others, but I will mention the first one, chronologically speaking: Beethoven.

What fascinates me about Beethoven’s music in general is how the different musical elements or parameters, if you want, synthesise to create a unified whole. If you take the different musical elements that make a piece of music separately, you see that they are very simple, sometimes even naive in the worst cases. Take the melody. If you analyse his melodies, you can clearly see that he is not a great melodist, contrary to what the totality of the music can make one think or feel. Instead, he picks up elements with which he could work and which he could develop into melodies in order to keep the melodic flow ongoing. You can almost hear or feel the composer struggling to find the ‘right’ notes and best melodic turns.

Then you compare it with the elegance of Haydn or the fluidity of Mozart, or the intensively beautiful melodies of Bellini, or the beauty and balance of those of Handel, and realise that you are definitely not dealing with the greatest melodist. At all. If you take the harmony, it too is very simple, any student learning harmony can write. Without talking about his ill-treated obsessive repetitions of dominant seventh – tonic chord progression or even the same chord for pages over and over again. Even those daring harmonic turns that he uses – like starting the (first) symphony with a dominant seventh chord, etc. – are structurally related, not as regard the harmony per se (e.g., certain parts or sections of a certain musical form must be in a certain tonality, etc.). Orchestration is not any better either, when it comes to tonal balance, with the brasses, especially trumpets, drowning all the others, something conductors know very well. If you take these elements separately, they lose their potential, they show themselves vulnerable and don’t stand a high critic.

Yet in every piece of Beethoven’s music there is always a feeling that everything that follows is the right one in the right time and place. If taken separately, the different musical elements don’t say much, to say the least, their constellation creates such a musical form which in turn makes such a fantastic music that seems out of the ordinary. Everything is perfectly imperfect, one could say. So, it is the form of the music. By form I don’t mean the academic or what I call ‘fixed’ musical forms one finds in textbooks, but the form of music as a consequence of the interaction of all its elements; the melting of all the elements into a synthetic musical flux – while Mozart and Haydn try to work in general with the symmetry of the classical forms (sometimes even making musical jokes out of them), in Beethoven’s music instead they are extended, they break out of the mould, as if it is the musical material itself that is suggesting the form and not vice versa. Probably as a consequence of the incongruence of Beethoven’s compositional thinking with the conventional standardised musical forms. It is perhaps the first time that the music is trying to escape the conventional borders of the pre-established musical forms imposed on musical composition by dogmas which go by the name of tradition, or try to hide under its mantel.

Another aspect of Beethoven’s music is a sense of the universal that you don’t find in any other music – every time I listen to Beethoven, I always have the impression that all of humanity is listening with me.

8. What advice would you offer to aspiring composers who are just starting their careers?

You are asking someone who needs advice himself! Something one realises at this stage (and that one might tend to neglect in the beginning) has nothing to do with composition as a craft itself, but with promotion and the establishing, so to speak, of the composer-figure. In this sense, my advice would be to find opportunities for promoting yourself and your music. Sometimes one has to look for them and some other times to even create them. To keep working and maintain the same focus and enthusiasm, as well as self-esteem even when things don’t go as one would want them to.

9. In your opinion, what are the greatest challenges facing composers in the present day?

Trying to find a place as a composer in a society at a time when the contemporary art music is being pushed to the margins is not easy. Even more so if you consider the ever-growing number of composers faced with the ever-shrinking budget and ever narrowing territory of this art. We spend so many years studying, most of us since an early age and suddenly one finds himself forced to learn other skills that have nothing to do with the artistic domain itself whatsoever, but with administration, organisation and management, etc. Problems of a world that nobody tells that is waiting you.

10. Before becoming a composer, one should know that …

...it’s a highly demanding kind of art/act.

I mean that in every aspect of life., social-, financial-, mental-, energy- and time-wise. And it doesn’t get any easier with time. On the contrary! I recall the moment when I first became really conscious about how a life dedicated to art would be…quite frightening I have to say. So, before entering that temple, ‘know thyself’! As the oracle of Delphi would say. And, something that took me a while to realise, understand that different conservatories or universities, no matter how good they are, they don’t teach you what you need to know, but what they think you should know, and that doesn’t always coincide with your artistic evolution and development. So, the sooner one understands what one wants to do, the better it is. Once you know that, take every opportunity to and invest in the development of your person.

11. Every concert goer should …

…listen more to contemporary music.

Be open to new ways of expression in music. Conscious that there is no such thing as an absolute way of making music, or an absolute compositional system. Every single new work establishes its own system of values, and it is our moral duty to at least listen to and get acquainted with. Without prejudice. As if nothing had existed before it and nothing afterward. Unfortunately, most people listen to one kind of music or musical ‘language’, and whatever music doesn’t fulfil their expectations – which are fostered by the musical tradition most of us grew up with – is perceived as something alien, heretic. Cacophony.

Be that as it may, it is in our nature, once we fall in it, to stay in the comfort of the accessible, because it doesn’t require any effort, physically or intellectually. But if one lingers too long in it, one will certainly fall into past-ism, if such a word exists. It is only outside of the comfort zone that the real growth happens, where one can really learn from and where the real treasures are to be found. But that is not something that happens overnight. One must have or develop the discipline of doing it regularly – one cannot just decide one day, after a life of listening only to, say, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin or Rachmaninov, to listen to contemporary music and wonder why doesn’t understand it; it’s like someone, who believes that painting should represent nature, being exposed to abstract art for the first time.

One cannot understand or identify Haydn’s musical jokes without a proper musical background. It is all a game of/on expectations. It is a question of familiarity and of context, something that has to do with the two dimensions of musical perception. There is first a gradual perception and then there is a global one, both of which make one want to go back and listen again, in order to have a better picture of its evolutional aspect and of its global aspect, which is related more to the idea of a static form in the sense of an image of the music’s peculiar structure than one can recall. Once one has listened to enough pieces, one starts to become accustomed to the style, language or that particular way of music making.

Only when one has listened thoroughly enough to be able to recall the different aspects or certain pieces and is able to compare them in his mind, then that is a big step toward a greater understanding of the music. I personally learned more from works that I initially disliked and didn’t understand than from works that I liked and was accustomed to. Every piece of music that challenges our attitudes toward it and our understanding of it means that we have moved in to another territory of expressions. It is a new horizon that opens and that we must conquer. No matter how much we might love and appreciate the music of the past, or aspire to that of the future, it is one that belongs to another time with other customs and philosophical ideals, that has no specific relation to ours. In the end, no other music belongs more to us, and we to it, than the music of our time.

12. Best pop song ever?

Haven’t heard it yet.

13. Dream venue and performers for a world premiere?

If it was something for solo and/or orchestra, Isabelle Faust, Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle. If for ensemble, Ensemble InterContemporain.

14. Work for piano or work for orchestra?

Orchestra.

15. Composing on paper or composing digitally?

Paper.

16. Coffee or tea?

Depends on the time and moment.

 Evans Koçja is a Universal Edition composer – discover his music here→.