Oliver Leith Interview: Last Days

Oliver Leith's music is a hazy blur of the familiar and the strange. Everyday sounds develop curious new resonances. Emergency sirens (in ‘Honey Siren’ for string ensemble) transform into musical globules of honey; gently obsessive repetitions (in piano/percussion duet good day good day bad day bad day) become an unexpectedly moving tribute to ‘the simultaneously debilitating and beautiful irrationalities of our everyday lives’. 

Here, he explains to Paul Kilbey how he brought his fascinating, experimental sound world to the operatic stage for his largest-scale work to date, the outcome of his position as Composer-in-Residence at the Royal Opera House and Guildhall School of Music & Drama. 

PK: How did Last Days come about? 

OL: Matt Copson and I had an initial meeting pre-pandemic, and then everything shut. We had talked about Gus Van Sant’s film Last Days as a reference for this sort of everyday lull. Everything in the film is heightened, no matter how mundane it is, because we know that Blake will kill himself. After a long time, climbing the walls to find an analogy for it, we knew that we needed to adapt the film. I emailed Gus and he said ‘Yes, it sounds good to me – Let me know what I can do’. 

PK: One striking thing about the film is how sonically rich it is: sound plays a big part.  

OL: Yeah. When you watch the film, you’re quite aware that everything’s louder than it should be. You hear crunching leaves at the same volume as the voices, things like that. I’ve ended up using a lot of real sound in my adaptation. For example, the sound of pouring cereal into a bowl: I’ve made a kind of electronic chorale out of that. It’s almost like Disney, where every single element of the real world is musical. 

PK: You mean like in Beauty and the Beast with the singing teapot?!  

OL: Yes! Different objects have their own little tunes. Not musical motifs, exactly – it’s just that the real sounds become musical, everything’s scored. The stage directions in Matt’s libretto are really important – the opera’s a lot less open to directorial interpretation than others might be. There are certain actions that need to happen because they have music. 

PK: Are you a Nirvana fan? Has that been an influence on your music? 

OL: I am; I was in bands when I was younger, and Nirvana were a reason why. One of the things I took from Nirvana and grunge music is repetition. I like the stubbornness of staying on an idea, with other things going on top. 

Another thing from that music that’s influenced me is the interval of a fifth. Those two-finger power chords that you can play on a guitar, even when you’re half-cut – they’re built around fifths. And when I’m experimenting with unusual tunings – and I’m also influenced by the slovenliness of the tuning in grunge music – the thing that supports them is always a fifth. My music is over-emotional sometimes, too. 

PK: What about this opera specifically – how much grunge is there in it? 

OL: There’s no real attempt to engage with grunge in the music, apart from a small bit where Blake plays guitar. I wouldn’t touch that music – I love it too much, and I can’t think of anything worse than ‘1994: the musical’. 

I guess grunge might be there in the character of the opera: the language is not florid and delivered in smudged lines and mumbles. 

PK: How have you found writing a dramatic work? 

OL: Strange. It’s always a problem with my music: some people find bits that I find quite sad, quite funny, or vice versa; it’s always very different. But when you’re writing an opera, you have to sort of lead or control how these things are perceived. 

So the experimenting I’ve done for this opera has been experimenting to an end; trying to find out what might create the right effect – rather than presenting the experiment, which is what I might do in a concert piece. I’ve always thought, what a great thing opera is, a feast of elements – it has everything. 

PK: Are there any particular operas that you’ve been inspired by? 

OL: I avoided listening to almost all music while I was writing this. It wasn’t that difficult – it was mostly composed in my basement during lockdown. But I did feel so sponge-like, and because I had such a huge canvas to fill, I felt like I might just absorb anything that came my way. So I stayed in a vacuum. 

PK: How has it felt coming out of that vacuum, and having other people bring the opera to the stage? 

OL: Fantastic! Ceding control was the best feeling in the world. Handing it over could have been very frightening, but I feel very blessed with my collaborators. I knew it would look how it would sound because that was how we’d made it – holistically. 

We cast the singers at the end of the writing process: they auditioned with bits of the score and did some workshops. But with every single one of the singers we cast, we all knew straight away that we wanted them. 

It’s been nice to work with these instrumentalists again, as well. There’s a sort of haze in my music that I’ve worked on in depth with all of the players before, in two works that are quite important for me – I wrote 'Honey Siren' for 12 Ensemble and good day good day bad day bad day for George Barton and Siwan Rhys. There are a lot of things in my music around tuning, for example, that they already know how to do. Basically I think they’re all the best in the business. 

PK: How would you describe your music to a newcomer? What’s useful for them to know? 

OL: Ah, it’s a difficult question. I think I accidentally play with familiar materials – I don’t really mean to, but everything I do comes from a place of familiarity. 

Someone said to me, the other day, that an old piece I’d written sounded like a Purcell chord sequence. Which was a funny thing to say, because – well, there are only so many chord sequences…but of course she was right. What else? It sounds bittersweet. 

PK: That’s interesting – is it the emotional impact that’s key, for you? 

OL: I think so – sensation, viscerality. For example, a lot of the things I do with tuning are about pulling things towards other things, unsettling things. Some composers use extra accidentals to show microtones, like a half-sharp symbol, but I’ll write, for example, +10 cents – a cent is a hundredth of a semitone – so that you can see the pull away from the initial note. 

It’s like feeling a pushing away from the real world. There’s a link between tuning and temporality, like speeding up or slowing down a record. If you touch a record, it’s as if time slows down.