4th December 2003

LU: Jo, when and how did you first meet Alaric Sumner? Can you give me a picture of it?

JH: My first memory is of meeting him twice!

The very first time I met him, fairly superficially, I think, was at some kind of group gathering at Dartington College of Arts. He had lots of hair and lots of beard.

The next time I saw him, he just had short hair, no beard. And I think I probably met him two or three times after that without realising that is was the same person. I had to make that connection.

I got to know him when he started working at Dartington College of Arts. And very rapidly it became clear that he was interested in a lot of the same things as me.

I found it fascinating that we came from completely different backgrounds, and yet met in the middle at this very strong interest in sound and in language.

For instance, I found that he had been a member, I think he was the fourth member, of Sonic Arts Network, a significant organisation for experimental sound works. We used to have endless discussions about electronic music and so on.

LU: How was it that you came to work together [on Nekyia]? Did you first develop the friendship? Did he come to you ?

JH: It was actually the other way round. I asked him, in fact. We’d certainly become fairly close friends by that time. I’d been around, although not actively involved, when he was working with John Drever on a lot of projects in the same sort of area. I’d been very interested in what they were doing. I was of course John’s tutor ? he was doing a Ph.D. at the time - so I knew that work fairly well from a lot of different angles.

We probably had a lot of vague bar discussions saying that we should do something together.

It was quite a specific opportunity that led to us working together properly.

I had a commission I didn’t know what to do with. Someone had asked me to make an electro-acoustic opera. That was the original brief. I didn’t want to make an electro-acoustic opera. I didn’t think it was a very good idea. But I wanted to see how we could treat that term in its widest sense. And I had a hunch that Alaric would be a very good person to involve.

I certainly didn’t want to do the traditional model of working with a librettist.

I could think of ways of breaking apart what one might do with the sound and so on; but I couldn’t think how one might do that with language and I knew that Alaric would be able to. I knew his work quite well by then.

It was actually a very long working process, that project. It probably took getting on for two years. It was hard work; but it was extremely rewarding.

LU: This was Shawford Mill.

JH: Yes. That’s right.

LU: They gave you the commission?

JH: Yes, they did.

LU: Can you say a little about Shawford Mill?

JH: It’s a very particular place. It is an opera house, but it’s home made. It’s run by my great uncle John, who built it himself in the 40s, I guess.

It’s a small disused water mill, sixteenth century; and inside it’s now a complete opera house, with orchestra pit and balcony. But absolutely tiny. It only seats about 40 people. And now it’s also very decrepit. The electrics date from the 1940s and things like that; so it’s probably quite dangerous in some ways. But the thing about it for me, as somewhere to work, especially with sound, is that it’s absolutely filled with this roaring sound of water, because the mill race still runs underneath it. That’s potentially a challenge but we used that, very much, as part of the piece. And it’s actually an important part of the context that’s been lost in subsequent performances: one thing about Nekyia is that it’s made to be performed above a huge body of rapidly moving water. Yet usually it’s the missing element in the piece in some ways.

LU: So that when people are looking at the screen at the rushing water and the performers and hearing the recorded sound of water, they are also actually hearing the water and will have seen the water as they came in. And that was intentional.

JH: Yes. The water is part of the place and part of the piece.

LU: Thanks… So you’ve got a commission to do something with that space and situation; and you know that Alaric’s probably the other person needed to do it.

How did get from there and the idea of not wanting a conventional librettist, but knowing you needed that area of skill, how did you get from there to Nekyia.

JH: We got there by stages. We did a small project first. We did a little thing called Nekyia Study. It was about ten minutes long. It’s fairly close to the central portion of the larger piece, which is very Alaric-centred. There are two performers, as you know. This section is just Alaric, pretty much.

We were experimenting at the time, I remember, around making that piece. We wanted to work together as closely as possible. In the credits for the video that I made afterwards, the documentation video, I just put us both, just our names. I haven’t even tried to separate out who did what. It’s almost impossible. We both had roles to play in all aspects of the project.

At that stage we were seeing what you could do with language in the studio, using the studio as a tool. We tried some strange games. For example, something that came from my own interest in phonetics. You write out texts phonetically using the International Phonetic Alphabet, and then ask people to read them.

Of course, most people can’t read the International Phonetic Alphabet. You get something that sounds rather like the text but slightly garbled; and, of course, without any natural intonation or emotional content.

Alaric came up with something where he improvised a text and recorded that. Then he listened to that and tried to repeat it. And listened to that and tried to repeat it; so that there is a progressive degeneration of the text.

So we were finding ways of degenerating text; and I think if you listen to the Nekyia Study, you can really hear that. It’s got a disconnected and disjointed feel, which is one of the key elements of Nekyia, I would say.

That’s how we started and we progressed from there. Even to the extent that by the end of the working process - and this wasn’t just through Nekyia but also through some of the other work that Alaric was doing, particularly with John Drever - Alaric himself was working in the studio on sonic elements not necessarily particularly text related.

I remember there’s one little bit towards the end where Alaric came up with this idea - sonically it’s fantastic.

There was a space at Dartington [College of Arts], a little performance studio. that Alaric and many other people liked for its acoustic. It’s an unusually-shaped room. It had a remarkable pitched echo. He recorded a text in there, with him shouting fairly disjointed words; and then, in the studio, he cut the words out. So every time there was a word the word is missing, but there is the echo of it. And it’s very effective. It’s peculiarly melodic. It must be something to do with Alaric’s intonation. The pitches are quite harmonic.

He was working from language but ending up with a purely abstract sonic motif…

Because it was such a long working process, it was interesting how we both changed and how our skills shifted a bit.

It was something I would have liked to have taken further with Alaric, him working in the studio. He had quite a flair for it, in fact.

LU: I bet.

Am I right in thinking that Nekyia Study was what you showed at as, the memorial at Dartington [College of Arts] after his death in 2000?

JH: No, that was a recording of the whole thing.

LU: A-ha! So Nekyia Study has been subsumed into Nekyia itself?

JH: Yes. I have never maintained it as a separate piece.

LU: But that was video with sound?

JH: No, just sound.

LU: Oh. Is there a shorter video version? Or have I just dreamed that?

JH: I think you have dreamed that.

LU: OK [mutual laughter]

I’ve not spent much time with Nekyia, relatively, because it seemed to me that, at any time, one could recreate Nekyia by asking you to do it.

JH: Yes.

LU: But now and then I find a bit of paper that I believe belongs to Nekyia. Sooner or later I want to see what I can make of those papers. But I am aware already from what I’ve read that when either he was either working with you or in the privacy of his own study, he started out with characters ? for example, a boatman ? and all of that has gone from the final piece. Can you tell me about that?

JH: It was part of this general process of degeneration, though I am not sure that is the right word. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious process; but a lot of the way we made the work was by starting with fairly concrete things which progressively became less concrete.

One important part of the process was information overload. We had a huge amount of ideas and texts and elements that we wanted somehow to include in this work; and Alaric was very keen on an idea - I think he called it doing readings of texts… It’s not specific to this work, but there’s a lot of it in Nekyia.

He would do a kind of rewriting of texts. There’s a little bit of Jung and a lot of other psychoanalytical writings. Unfortunately, I couldn’t give you a list of the authors, but he did a lot of research.

Lots of fascinating things. He was particularly interested in outdated therapy ideas, particularly to do with water therapy, plunging "the insane" into very cold water and that kind of thing.

A lot of the Nekyia texts were made by his readings of other texts. A lot of detail was lost... in a good way. You started out with something quite precise and it became much more ambiguous and fluid through his interpretation.

Also, I think we didn’t decide… I can’t be certain now, but I think we hadn’t decided for sure, when we started, what the physical manifestation would be, that it would be two people. I think initially we thought that it might be more people. And it gradually pared itself down.

An interesting thing is, with the version that I made after Alaric’s death, it has almost become a three-performer piece, with the two live performers and Alaric, who’s now been incorporated into the video; and there are some strange references to that in the text, to a sort of third character; and I’ve been fascinated by that.

LU: Yes; and I remember our rehearsal of that at The Nunnery where it seemed almost to be about him dying; and that was unnerving.

JH: Yes.

LU: Going back to the concept of his reading of texts as writing, to be sure that you’re saying what I’m saying, and the other way round; and maybe to make it clearer for others ? no offence intended -

JH: No! I am finding it a bit hard to describe.

LU: You’re saying he would take books which either were relevant or sometimes that were completely irrelevant; but in a way there was always that connection…

It would either be a reasonable thing to do or else a completely unreasonable thing to do, not quite random; and he would take things out of context to create ironies or expansions; so that you would begin to get meanings that were unintended by the original author.

JH: Yes. That’s absolutely right. But I think that, in a way, that’s only part of it. He was also being deliberately inaccurate sometimes, writing versions of texts that were wrong in some way, deliberately so, so they’re almost quotes but not quite.

LU: Right. Would you say ? this may be an impossible question ? would you say that the nexus of ideas as we have them in Nekyia came from both of you; or does it come from Alaric; or from you? Or, let me ask, Where did the idea of picking up and using the nekyia come from?

JH: Actually, I think the initial idea was purely mine. I came to Alaric with that idea to start with. And Alaric took it off in other directions. We both took it off in other directions.

It was, I suppose, a slightly obvious thing to do; but it was really just working with the idea of opera; and how I could write something that in some ways could still be an opera whilst being nothing like an opera. And just as many people have done throughout history, I was going back to the Greek Theatre… And looking at myth and the central elements of myth.

A lot of Nekyia was about throwing things away. How much can you throw away and it will still be an opera?

Can you get rid of singers? Can you get rid of the orchestra? Can you get rid of the staging? And will it still be an opera?

I was trying to do the same with narrative.

This is probably where I realised I needed to work with someone like Alaric. I realised that I was struggling with these ideas because I didn’t know enough.

I was reading a lot of Jung, in particular, about myths; and I came across the idea of nekyia through Jung, I think, who used it as a therapy idea, I believe.

His interpretation of the word nekyia was almost a kind of midlife crisis, the mythical night sea journey that everyone has to undertake at some point to find themselves. So I think I came to Alaric with those, as you can tell I expect, slightly unformed and nebulous ideas. And with Alaric’s help, we made it into something far bigger and better.

LU: I don’t mean to sound like a bad reporter, but… Were there any problems in your working together?

JH: Yes, there were; but then really there was only one problem, and that was the difficulty of the project. It was very ambitious.

It’s a difficult work, to be honest, because it’s rather unusual in terms of form. It doesn’t fit with anything else.

If someone asked me to find to another work like Nekyia, I couldn’t think of anything at all. It doesn’t fit into any context.

I think we struggled at times because of that. Neither of us found it at all easy. I’m sure you know this yourself from your own writing, that with some projects you’re just watching it happen.

And some are real fights; and this was a real fight; but not in a bad way.

It was one of those projects that throws up a lot more than there is room for in the result. We developed a lot of techniques and ideas that could have had a much longer life, I think. I could imagine a whole string of other works, whether we were working together or alone or with other people, that would somehow follow up some of the ideas from Nekyia.

LU: I can believe that… But the difficulty, the resistance, was in the material you were working?

JH: It was. I think we got on extremely well on the whole. I’m sure we did have arguments and so on, as one always does, but no more than the regular quota for that kind of thing.

It was very nice to be able to work so closely together. We were both at Dartington [College of Arts] during all that period.

Usually when I collaborate I’ll end up doing some things on my own and the other person will end up doing some things on their own. And I don’t think we did any of that. We were always working together, which is not always a good thing, but it did work well for this project.

Considering the amount of time that we spent together, we had remarkably few arguments. I can honestly say that working with him was an enormous pleasure and an important learning process for me. We became very close friends during this time, and I miss him a lot."