In Conversation with Matthew Barley

In your opinion, what capacity does music hold to heal?

Many years ago, I had a skiing accident and I nearly lost the possibility of playing the cello completely. I saw sixteen different doctors in six different countries and nobody could fix it, so I was having to face giving up the cello. And at that time I started to think about what music’s for. I’d been playing music my entire life and I’d never had a conversation with anyone about what it’s for. It’s this extraordinary activity that they’ve done all over the world in all eras and all cultures but what’s it for? So, I actually started doing a lot of research and the oldest things I could find that were written about music were essays written by the ancient Greeks and ancient Chinese around two to two and a half thousand years ago and in both of those cultures, they unequivocally stated that music is a healing force. There’s no questions about it. The Greeks and the Chinese went about it in very different ways. The Chinese extraordinarily used music as one of the four branches of government—it was actually a state-enshrined art that was valuable because it helped the population regulate their emotions. It’s just extraordinary! Whereas the Greeks had different modes that applied to different ailments in the body—they were very specific about it as well.

We’ve lost that connection as music has become a performance art and I think that’s really fascinating. But it still has the capacity to heal—even in a concert hall those moments can happen where the communication between the performers and audience is such that you don’t feel that separation and everybody is essentially doing the same thing—just listening and partaking.

So, I don’t know how it does it but, for me, that is a beautiful mystery—that after fifty years of making music, I don’t know how it works really. I know what it’s for but I don’t really know how it works. It’s essentially vibrations colliding with our body—how mystical is that? And so from that point of view, the musician can transmit something from very deep inside them to very deep inside the other person without words and we feel it, we understand it. So it’s a mystical art for me and that possibility of healing is embedded in the DNA of music.

Light Stories is a tale of trauma, recovery and healing through music. How did music and your relationship with the cello help to heal you after the trauma you experienced?

The cello is very centrally placed in the whole story. The cello has this connection with the heart, both in its similarity to the human voice—it’s well documented that the cello covers the full range of male and female voices. It’s also no coincidence that when we play the cello, it rests on the heart.

It’s my rib cage that receives all the vibrations—we embrace it with the legs, we wrap our arms around it—it’s a very close physical relationship that you get with very few other instruments. I’m sure I chose the cello aged seven because something in that voice spoke to me. Fifty-two years I’ve been playing the cell—I can’t quite believe it! It’s so familiar to me, that little ritual of taking the cello out of its case, tightening the bow, settling into it, and I suppose I’ve written the music I wanted to hear. I’ve explored many different sides of what the cello can do and that, in itself, has just been a wonderful, liberating process—to celebrate the relationship with the cello and its sound.

The cello has long been associated with the heart. What part did they cello itself play in your recovery and healing journey?

After I had that very traumatic episode aged sixteen, I was driven back to boarding school the following morning. I should think today I would have had armies of nurses and therapists around me but, funnily enough, for me then it worked really well. There would of course be many other people for whom that would be a disaster. I think response to trauma is very, very individual—different people need different things. For who I was—which was a deeply private person—the opportunity to just go straight back to school and just make music was actually wonderful. Singing in a chamber choir was incredible—as you know from Sing for Happiness, singing with a group of people is extremely profound—singing together, breathing together. In the evenings, I used to lie on the floor under a grand piano and listen to my friend improvise jazz and I was literally bathing in music. And I think one of the very specific things I found deeply healing was just being together with people making music—not having to talk, not having to explain anything. Just being together making music is such a wonderful thing to do. It’s so precious and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to be a musician. The say in India that if you’re really good, you’ll come back in your next life as a musician.

How does the programme – which includes pieces from your 2023 album Electric – and narrative within Light Music present this and tell your story?

I read a book called The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker about the seven sorts of ‘template stories’ that men and women have told ourselves and each other for centuries—the quest, the tragedy, rags to riches and the voyage and return and that was the one that really spoke to me. It’s the protagonist setting out on a journey full of optimism, positivity and ambition to see the world but out on the road things become tricky and there’s a life-or-death experience with great danger and great jeopardy. Then comes a miraculous escape and a healing process after that, followed by the protagonist going home to share the benefits and wisdoms from their travels. And that template really spoke to me and so I tried dividing that journey up into chapters and applied it to my life. I ended up with fifteen chapters and I thought of a piece of music that fitted with each of the chapters—almost as you would score incidental music for a film. So, weaving in and out of the repertoire and my own music, it follows a narrative arc of my musical journey and my whole life—it’s really a kind of musical autobiography.

I’ve always been fascinated by programming and telling stories through music and because I’m a musician and not a writer, I want to tell my stories with notes. In fact, it was Ben Spencer who first encouraged me to be open and tell the story of what actually happened when I was a teenager, which I was very grateful for. So I’ve been telling this story for the first time publicly and that in itself has been a beautiful healing process. However, in the concert, I don’t want to make the narrative verbally clear. I also have this amazing video design by YeastCulture which will help to understand the journey on a visual level, through abstract imagery. There’s also a dancer who will add an element of human form to this story.

In what way does the powerful interaction and interplay of music and visuals aid this narrative?

We’re very visual creatures and there’s a visual vocabulary in the same way as there’s a sonic vocabulary—the energy of storytelling. I think some people have even tried to map elements of stories onto sonata form. There’s an understanding that the way music developed is very similar to that of stories. And I think we understand this imagery of good things turning into bad things, danger and coming back into good things. This is the kind of transition we know in stories so deeply. The basic thesis in Christopher Booker’s book is that there are not really seven basic plots but actually only one that is viewed from seven different angles. It’s simply the story of how men and women grow up and turn into rounded individual adults and that’s so universal. But those templates can work in sound, in word, in imagery and in many different ways.

Throughout your career, your music and performances have consistently pushed the boundaries of both classical music and the cello itself, incorporating electronics and instruments from around the world. What are some of your favourite instrumental partnerships and what makes the cello such a versatile instrument?

I think I’d have to pick out Julian Joseph—with whom I did a recital at St George’s—who is an incredibly talented jazz pianist. We first met twenty-five years ago and we’ve toured the world a lot, we’ve done two albums with my wife—Through the Looking Glass and Peasant Girl—and Julian and I did a project together called The Dance of the Three-Legged Elephants. I learned so much from Julian because, in those days, I was still quite a fledgling improviser—even though I was mad keen—and Julian is a proper master. We would play together and practice together a lot. He’d come round here on his little moped and we would sit down in the music room and play for hours. I would occasionally play a solo that I knew was really bad—my rhythm was off, my harmonies were off and, in the end, Julian would say ‘that’s fantastic, Matthew!’ It’s so different from classical music when we practice we spend the entire time saying no. You play something and analyse all the reasons why it’s wrong—it’s so negative, it’s extraordinary! And here was this master improviser with the patience and big-heartedness to spend time with me, and I understood a very key lesson about improvising that there’s a way of listening that is very different and in the act of listening like that, you can bring out a different quality. I’m forever grateful to Julian for that.

The cello is so versatile. You can play both very high up and very low down so they can work with any other instrument. You can bow it or you can pluck it so you can provide a bassline in a jazz context, you can provide middle harmony notes with the bow. There are also several techniques I’ve developed working with tabla players where you bounce and splash the bow on the strings so you push the strings against the fingerboard and it makes this very percussive sound and you can make incredible fusions with the percussiveness of table. There’s a whole range of contemporary extended techniques as well—it’s inexhaustible really!

You’ve spoken about the important role of electronics in the future of contemporary classical music and your excitement at the idea of using it more. How can electronics bring fresh perspectives to classical music?

I first came across Kaftwerk in the late seventies and was listening to a lot of Stockhausen in the mid-eighties and from both of those artists you could feel this excitement at the richness of sounds available—what colours, what effects you can make with electronics. Obviously, there’s been a gigantic revolution over the world in the last fifty years and I think it’s contributed to one of the biggest revolutions in music which is that the presence of computers and digital audio workstations has enabled untrained musicians to make sophisticated music. It was Karl Marx who said ‘To liberate the working people you must take over the means of production.’ And they have done! That’s happened in hip-hop, in dance music—in all sorts of different types of music. Untrained musicians can now express themselves and how beautiful is that?

The two composers who have made advances that have touched and influenced me the most are John Metcalf and Nils Frahm and both of them have brought in a very human quality to their electronics which I feel has been the missing piece over the years. There were an awful lot of straight edges in this digital world but those two have brought in an amazing human aspect—Nils with his touch-sensitive keyboards and the way John uses strings and processing. So I think that’s heralded a whole new dawn. Anna Meredith is making some seriously exciting sounds and there are a couple of pieces of hers in Light Stories. We’re in an exciting age and a lot of these people are interested in the power of music in bringing us together in a good way. We’re well aware of the difficulties of the times we live in but what a beautiful response to make music, to share music, to celebrate music and give that important nod in the direction of music’s healing capacity.

We can’t wait to welcome you to St George’s this October. What can our audiences expect on the night?

The honest answer is… I don’t know yet! You don’t actually know the effect you’re going to have until the performance—that’s one of the most exciting and scary things about developing a new programme. My hope is that everyone will be able to hear the music in the way I do—I want to be able to share the way I hear music. I think that’s maybe what we all do as performers—try to open our hearts and share that. If I manage to make that connection and bring the audience with me on that journey, we should all have a good time! St George’s is also one of the best places to come to as a performer. Every time I get my cello out, I can’t believe how much my cello loves the room—it’s so grateful to be able to make a sound in that space and it’s such a special experience.

As we light the fires and begin to look ahead to 2025, what can we expect from you? What are you most looking forward to?

I think that having started composing is just the beginning! I’ve learned so much over the past months writing all this music. I’m an obsessive reviser as I’ve found throughout the whole process. Composing has been so joyful for me—it’s the beginning of a whole new adventure.

If you could choose one desert island track what would it be?

Castor et Pollux, RCT 32, Acte I, Scène III: Prélude – Air accompagné “Tristes apprêts”.

Words by Louise Goodger