Jessica Cottis has always had a hypersensitivity to sound. As she walks into the cafe at the British Film Institute cinema to meet me, she is acutely aware of little noisesâlike the man at a table on the right tapping away at his laptop keyboard. She describes this sound to me with a harsh burst of white noise from her mouth. Even as we speak, the sound of a passing motorbike outside the building causes her to stop mid-sentence and wince. âItâs kind of a pest,â she tells me. But if so, itâs a pest that has helped her to become one of Britainâs leading young conductors, with appointments at the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Opera House, and the LA Philharmonicâand thatâs just this season. Born in Australia to a military attachĂ© father, Cottis spent her childhood on bases, the sounds of sirens ringing in her ears. At three years old, she started piano lessonsâfrom her mother, at firstâand by the age of 25 was playing organ professionally, having studied in Paris with Marie-Claire Alain (once the most widely recorded classical organist in the world). But in that year, the onset of carpal tunnel syndrome ended her performing career. After a brief hiatus, she enrolled in conducting studies at Londonâs Royal Academy of Music and has never looked back. On the day we met, she had just returned from wielding the baton at Pragueâs 60th anniversary Kocian violin competition.
VAN: When you conduct, to what extent do you lead and to what extent do you follow?
Jessica Cottis: Youâre always leading. Always. But thereâs that Virgina Woolf quote, in The Waves, when she says, âI am rooted, but I flow.â And itâs the same with conducting. Youâre in charge, but if a player brings somethingâtheir own musicality, their own vision, their own years and years of experienceâthey play something and you listen to it, and actually for that nanosecond, theyâre in charge.
Youâre just about to start work on a new opera, âMamzer,â by the young Israel-born composer Naâama Zisser. What kind of relationship do you like to have with living composers?
I personally like to work closely with composers. Because every time I conduct a Beethoven symphony, for example, I so wish I could go back in time and have a quick chat, over coffee, with Beethoven. Like, what were you thinking at the beginning of this symphony?
Did you really mean those tempo markings?
Precisely! We can read letters and we can follow performance practice. But itâs not the same thing. So I do like having long conversations with composers. Itâs not about, is that note right or is that note wrong? Is this tempo right or wrong? That comes with the rehearsal process. But what is it here, whatâs the philosophy, whatâs the psychology, whatâs the sound and color that youâre aiming for with this? Because even the most heavily marked-up scores donât tell us everything.
Schubert, Symphony No. 8; Jessica Cottis (Conductor), MĂ€lmo Symphony Orchestra. Recorded live in November 2017.
Itâs interesting that you mention âcolor.â I read that you have a form of synesthesia.
Yes.
When did you first become aware of this?
Thatâs a funny question. I mean, I was always aware of it. As a child, I assumed that everybody has this. We donât really realize these thingsâwith any non-neurotypical phenomenaâuntil we start going to school and talking with people and realizing they donât necessarily experience the world in a similar way. So I would have been about seven or eight. And I suddenly felt, âOh! Thatâs a pity.â
How does it manifest for you?
For me itâs harmoniesâand I mean harmony loosely. It doesnât need to be tonal. A collection of notes together will elicit some kind of color for me. I actually find that itâs hugely useful because if thereâs a chord being played, for example, in the winds and the brass, and something is out of tune, the color for me isâŠI kind of see a fuzziness. Itâs very easy for me to hear a 10-pitch chord and I will know exactly where the imbalance is, because the colorâs not right.
This fuzziness sounds almost like a visual analogue to the beat frequencies of closely tuned pitches.
Not dissimilar. Thatâs a nice analogy. I might steal that.
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You learned piano from your mother at first.
She was a very fine amateur pianist. Then I took up organ when I was 18, really just because when I entered to do my undergraduate degree, my head of school said, âOh, thereâs an organ scholarship going at the local cathedral.â So I was given the organ scholarship and it kind of fitted like a glove. I went to Paris and studied there, and worked for a number of years. And then I got carpal tunnel syndrome.
When did this happen exactly?
2004 to 2005, building up to a point where I did a recital and I was playing a big piece by Franz Liszt, and the fingers in my left hand just stopped working. Of course, itâs Liszt, it was fineâyou can just play some funky harmonies! Just play B-A-C-H and some diminished chords for a while and then I got back into it. I laugh about it now, but actually it was quite traumatic at the time. Something that normally came unconsciously suddenly just didnât work.
So how long did that process takeâgoing from âI canât be a musician!â to âI could be a conductor!â
Actually, not that long. I studied law for a little bit. But I kind of knew in a way that having effectively been a musician since I was so little, it would be almost impossible to continue without music in my life in that really significant way. So it was in 2006 that I auditioned for the Royal Academyâwithout really any technique. But with a knowledge of how I would like music to be in my head. I spent three years learning my technique from Colin Metters and Colin Davis. And that made me.
The thing that underpinned all of the philosophy there was the sense that sound is an entity. We think of sound as something that happens to just pass by our ears and then disappear. But itâs as tangible as you or I sitting here right now. And in that process of working with sound, we need to look after it. We need to carry it. So what weâre doing when weâre conducting is not just about beats. Itâs what happens between one and two or between three and four and how are we taking sound on its journey throughout an entire piece. And then through the silences as well. Because silence in itself becomes a kind of sound. The lack of sound becomes something to listen for.
That was the really core philosophical understanding of music that underpinned the whole three years. And then of course, how to actually show that in a physical way, in front of an orchestra, which is very different from playing piano or organ, where youâre just by yourself. Itâs an individual pursuit, whereas conducting is all about inspiring people to play their best.
So to what extent are your gestures just for the benefit of the orchestral players themselves, and to what degree are you also performing your gestures for the seated audience?
I think if we become conscious of what weâre doing for the audience then weâre doing something that is egotistical. I think our job is very much to serve the music and the amount of time weâve spent being with that music and then being that, a physical embodiment of that, so that the orchestra can play together and get those shapes and colors and all of the shadows and the light. Now, once that happens, if the audience pick up on that, then itâs sometimes a lovely way for them to be more attuned to whatâs going on.
For example, if youâre playing a big symphony by Mahler and thereâs a wonderful theme in the double basses and the conductor just makes a small gesture over in their direction, those people who are watching will probably turn their attention to the double basses, whichâof course, because our senses are so linkedâleads them to hear more clearly the double bass theme, because we see them doing it. Itâs a kind of weird psychological thing going on. Would I do that actively and consciously to help the audience hear? No. I think itâs a pleasant byproduct of what we do.
Recently youâve been involved in setting up the Glasgow New Music Expedition. What was the aim of that group?
Me and the other co-founder, Richard Greer, wanted to set up an ensemble in Scotland with younger players to do music only by living composers. And to take risks. To try out composers who arenât published and who donât have wonderful CVs. And we also wanted to do things where we would collaborate with different art forms.
Why âexpeditionâ?
Expedition was because both Richard and I have a fascination with all things outer space. So it was a sense that we wanted to not feel constricted by earthly confines, that we could use the imaginative realm to see whatâs possible.
So itâs like an âArkestra,â in the Sun Ra sense.
Yeah! Exactly! Very much so.
A while ago I read John Szwedâs book, Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, and thereâs an interesting quote from one particular Arkestra member, trumpeter Phil Cohran, where he says, âYou had to think space. Had to expand beyond the earth planeâŠwe didnât have any models, so we had to create our own language.â You get a clear sense, I think, that all the astro-mythology in Sun Ra was actively pushing the musicians to play more out there.
We canât possibly develop creatively if we donât allow ourselves the possibility to think in different ways. We did one piece, actually, by Jay Capperauld. Heâd written on the score, quarter note equals 7.5. I had to conduct as though I was in zero gravity, which was incredibly difficult. The piece was 15 minutes long, and it was like doing some sort of tantric yoga. Everything was suspended. I looked at the score, and I said, âJay! Surely we could have done this in a way that you could have the same effect with me beating⊠a little faster, at least so itâs not tai chi or something.â And he said, âNo, this is very importantâitâs part of the way of looking at the piece.â It was about some Russian cosmonauts who had suffocated in space. And it really didâit somehow changed really deeply the way we felt about playing. Even just basic things like time signatures and pulse. What is time in zero gravity? How does one breathe in zero gravity? ¶
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