Interview: Peter Gregson

Sanford Baran: Today I’m delighted to be speaking with one of the most innovative voices in contemporary classical music, Peter Gregson. Peter is a British cellist, composer, and producer whose work pushes the boundaries of what the cello can do, merging classical tradition with electronic experimentation to create deeply immersive soundscapes. His latest self-titled album, “Peter Gregson,” which released on April 11th is a defining statement of his artistry recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios. The album explores what Gregson calls songs without words, a modern take on a romantic era concept. Your new album is described as your most personal and definitive work yet. What made you decide to sub-title this album, and how does it represent your artistic vision? 

Peter Gregson: It came about through conversations with my colleagues at the record label, to be honest. I’ve often felt when writing and recording my own music, you end up hiding behind abstractions. We use reverbs to make the room sound bigger or you do something to make it do this or put it this place or take someone this other way. And I wanted this to be much more conversational, much more honest and, peel away all of the abstractions and the titles are very short, they’re enigmatic. It’s not effusive poetry in the title. The artwork isn’t an abstract image. It’s very clear cut, this is what it is. And I remember years ago seeing a double page spread in a beautiful coffee table book. And on one hand there was a photograph, beautifully lit. A very technically beautiful photograph, tech feel and everything, and it said, “this is a photograph of a glass of water.” And on the other page there was a Polaroid of the same water and it said, “this is a glass of water.” And it always struck me, we can over-engineer things to make them anything you want, but actually the real kind of connection is with the music and trying to remove as many barriers to that and make it just like we’re sitting here talking today. Just very honest, direct conversation. 

Sanford Baran: Your sound is deeply immersive. Blending live cello with a custom build, modular synthesizer. Can you tell us about this approach? How does it connect to your goal of creating a more honest, direct conversation with listeners? 

Peter Gregson: The cello fits beautifully into the kind of human vocal range. It’s a very natural sound, but it’s also got an awfully broad harmonic spectrum. It’s got a lot of information in it and I love experimenting in my studio. You can really zoom in to the sound of a cello. It’s got so much depth to it and you can pull things out of it. I love the idea that you might want to create, for example, in the second track there’s a rhythmic element to it, and all of that was created on the cello by isolating little bits of sound and reworking it, repackaging it to craft it into something else. Typically a synthesizer has some physics involved. It’s got an oscillator with sine waves and square waves and things, and you use a keyboard or similar to change the pitch of that. And that’s a beautiful thing and it makes an amazing sound. But on my modular synthesizer, for this record, it’s only off micro input, the only sound that goes into it is my cello. In order to create these textured delays or create this kinda scatter effect by displacing bits of the frequencies, it’s only the cello that goes in and then it’s a really tactile process so you can move the sound from one module to another and it’s all very slow and inefficient and rewards experimentation. It’s like being in a kitchen without having a recipe, you can’t default to muscle memory when all the parameters change every time you do something. And that’s incredibly exciting. It’s incredibly frustrating. It’s all the things that hopefully lead you to question and really have to justify your decisions. If you are writing a piece of music, I don’t want to just hit it and quit it. You want to really consider is this the way I want this to go? Is this telling the right story? Is this the sound I’m hearing? And if you have to interrogate that and really figure out what the sound is you’re trying to create, you explore and you experiment and that leads you to other things. And it’s a constant evolution. It’s also a new thing to learn, and that’s incredibly inspiring in itself. A new instrument, a new way of performing sound. And that in itself hopefully has a kind of excitement and an exploratory nature that hopefully comes through record and it leads one track to the next with those discoveries learned from the previous track. And then it evolves and it develops and it globes that way. 

Sanford Baran: When you go into the studio with this incredible flexibility of your tool and your cello, is it an iterative process? Do you have an idea of what the composition is in advance or do you discover possibilities in the moment? 

Peter Gregson: Again, I love a good, well tortured cooking analogy, and if you imagine, you go to the butcher and you get a nice steak, let’s say that’s your melody. You thought, I’ve got this really good tune. I think this is gonna be a really nice thing. And then you look through your cupboard and you think “I don’t have this, I don’t have that.” But the other way to look at it is, you look at the state, you think “what would go well with this? What can I create as a sort of proactive, positive thing?” And I think going through and thinking “how do I support this melody?” You follow the tune and this whole song without words concept. They’re not song structures like verse chorus. It’s a through composed idea. It’s one line and you’re following the line. Or what can I do to help tell the story of that? And sometimes you’d go down a whole of days trying to create something that works in service of this. Sometimes you have an idea fully formed and you know you’ve got the ingredients in the cupboard. So you think this is gonna be great. I know I can do this. But being open to listening to that and not just sticking with this is what I wanted to do. Maybe it leads you down a different path and maybe you burn the onions and think, oh can’t use those. So I think having a kind of present approach to it and really responding to what’s in front of you and how it’s cooking, how it’s gelling together, things do change. And actually often when you go in with a preconceived idea, it doesn’t do what you want, but you stick to it because you’re like this is what I’m gonna do. These are the things I’ve got. And so actually affording myself the ability to throw it all away and start again because once you stop with this thing, unless you are recording, you end up recording a lot of things to capture the process. At the moment, it’s all live. And so it’s all about capturing and curating, I think it’s all about listening. Music is all about listening and this whole record, the writing process was very present and very engaged listening to really see, something just happens and then you follow that and it has got to be responsive like that, I think. And then it feels like a modern chamber of music, has that kind of life to it.

Sanford Baran: Your work lives at the intersection of classical tradition and cutting edge technology. What draws you to this balance between organic and electronic elements? 

Peter Gregson: I would counter and suggest that sort of classical music has always lived in that space. Beethoven famously wrote that there’s a piano sonata, which he wrote in partnership with a piano maker. It had a bottom F key on this new piano, so you had to get the piano if you wanted to play the new Beethoven. I’m a cellist. Cellos have evolved that the priority of the cello when Pacbell was writing for Abel’s Canon was to play the baseline and then in order for it to play the melody, they had to put a spike on it. They had to make the bridge bigger. These can leave the mechanics, there’s nothing natural about it. It’s a very involved piece of technology and I think this sort of music is just a very natural continuation of all of the instruments, all the tools we use are highly evolved pieces of technology. There’s nothing natural about a piano, it’s just, we’re very used to it by now. But it is mechanical, it’s a piece of machinery, but people can harness it to create something that wouldn’t have existed without it. I think that’s something to be celebrated. A lot of my colleagues look at electronics with suspicion and that’s fine. But yeah there’s nothing particularly natural about a violin really. 

Sanford Baran: It would be interesting to speculate what Beethoven would’ve done with a synthesizer. 

Peter Gregson: Yeah, I think it would be wild, there was a day before all these instruments existed, and then music was written to satisfy that curiosity. And it’s always exploring, it’s always developing. And then concert halls get bigger, the instruments have to get louder, and everything evolves. It’s right that it evolves and I think it’s exciting to be riding that way, where these things are evolving and living in a time where you can be exposed to so many other people being inspired by things. And it all feeds into this. It’s very overwhelming, I think, but we’re all listening to everything. It’s a wild time to be alive. 

Sanford Baran: I think there’s been this tradition of the classical music camp staying with the canon. But you play all kinds of things, classical film, television, video games. It seems like there’s a greater openness now to embrace it all.

Peter Gregson: I do think the adoration of history is a relatively modern concept. The reason there is so much music of Mozart, Beethoven, Brownsburg, all the big B’s is because it was all being played live, like it was all living. Bach was writing like a weekly deadline. That was his job, to satisfy the demand of the church and now we glorify the recreation of those days. But I don’t think it’s any coincidence that innovation in music is found in other places at the moment. Like we don’t have all the cover bands of the Beatles, like pop music is developing because people are developing it. Whereas classical music, I feel developed slower because there are fewer people developing it. To get from Bach to late Beethoven in what is a relatively short period of time, is a seismic shift. And actually I think the last sort of seismic musical shift might be like the second Viennese school. I think it’s a fascinating time to be alive, but I think it’s important that we remain and retain some kind of perspective that none of this is actually new. People playing music and writing music for themselves to play is as old as time itself. And the quirk of performers presenting other people’s music, certainly from a different century is a very unusual thing. In fact, I think it was Mendelson who brought back Saint Matthew passion, I think one of the passions. He brought Bach back after Bach died. People didn’t play his music, he wasn’t there to play it. That to our modern mind is crazy to think of. But there’s, all hundreds of years worth of people who’ve never heard Bach or Beethoven ’cause they weren’t around to play it themselves. And it’s amazing to think that, to any concert hall now and all these people that represented. And the irony is the people who aren’t represented in the concert halls are the ones living today writing the music off today. It’s a very unusual time. 

Sanford Baran: In this new album, it’s pretty much just you and the synthesizer present a solitary experience. Do you also like playing in chamber settings where you collaborate with others? 

Peter Gregson: I, funnily enough, say 90% of my career is very collaborative. I love working with other people. And I don’t particularly love my own company. This record in that respect actually represents quite a significant change. And, it’s not like I locked myself away in a garage and hid away from the world to do it, but there was definitely a kind of intensity to that sort of experience. And I have friends who do lock themselves away and the isolation is their norm and they find collaborating incredibly refreshing. I think it’s the change that makes it for me. And my engineer and I went out to this beautiful residential studio to record the record once it was all written or structured, and then after that I brought in a string quartet for the back of the record. But by that point, the kind of solitude had happened. The original idea was that the whole record would just be made with the cello, but it felt like I was artificially restricting the gene pool. It felt restrictive at a certain point and let go of that. And when that happened it all felt much more natural and it felt like it could breathe again. But there was a definite kind of month or maybe two months where I was stubbornly holding myself to account that it was all gonna be just me, just the cello and this synthesizer. It stopped having its mojo at that point, and then by letting it breathe again it came back together. 

Sanford Baran: For those of our listening audience who don’t know, your music has been featured in Bridgeton, the New Pope, and apparently major fashion campaigns. Do you approach composing differently when writing for film or brands versus creating a standalone album? 

Peter Gregson: Again, a great question. The honest answer is no, I don’t approach my process differently. The difference in a film or TV is, when you’re writing a record, it is a hundred percent music. The whole story is music. In a film, at best you are maybe third. In that hierarchy of narrative. So you’ve got the picture, you’ve got the script, maybe then you’ve got music. So you have to know your place, but that’s all part of the collaboration. Sometimes the scene needs music to lead, sometimes the music needs to listen and that’s all part of the collaboration. So I think, no I try not to approach it differently. I think maybe in practice, you have to be more responsive to other people’s timelines and things, and that often will impact your day to day workflow. You’re still trying to tell a story. It’s just whether you created the story or if it’s someone else’s story. I suppose 

Sanford Baran: Any new projects, collaborations, or ideas you’re excited about moving forward? 

Peter Gregson: Yeah, I’m just about to start on a full length ballet. A big orchestral ballet project which will be over the next couple of years. So I’m very excited to start on that when I get back to London after this trip actually. Yeah, very excited about that. 

Sanford Baran: And lastly, for someone new to your music, what’s the best place to start? What do you hope listeners take away from your work on this new release? 

Peter Gregson: I hope they can find a space to have a developing relationship with it. I don’t like to tell people whether a piece is happy or sad. I want it to be something that does have kind of an enigmatic space to it that allows you to change your mind on a positive day, to hear the optimism in something or on a sad day hear the introspective or the pessimistic or whatever. I think that’s important, and that’s always been important to me is to allow people to have a kind of living, breathing relationship with music rather than pigeonholing it straight off the bat. If someone’s new to listening to my music, I think I would say start recently and work backwards. I think that I’d start with the latest stuff. It’s the stuff I’m excited by. 

Sanford Baran: Peter, it’s been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you for sharing your insights, your creative process, and of course your music with us. I can’t wait for our listeners to experience Peter Gregson. And everything you have coming next. Wishing you all the best. 

Peter Gregson: Thank you so much for having me. Nice to chat. 

Sanford Baran: This is Sanford Baran for KGNU.