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An interview with Carl Davis, part 2

05 February 2007

So how did the process work?

Well, David presented me with the scenario, which wasn't just a paragraph for each scene, it was broken down into numbers. For example, it might read: 'Four chefs meet up to make a Lyre out of pastry as a surprise for the head chef'. But you have to think, how long does it take them to make this pastry? Is it a minute, or a minute and a half, or two or five minutes? If David says I only need thirty seconds to get this idea across, well that's the length of a commercial, so you know that your ideas have got to be achieved in a very short period of time. But then if you come to the grand Pas de deux, and that needs to be seven minutes, then that’s something else – your musical thinking has to expand and be thinking towards a longer piece and of a different character. And so that is the sort of dialogue that goes on.

Then I will go away on the basis of that and begin to compose. In fact, in this case, because so much of it was made clear to me, I was able to literally begin at the start and keep going until I got to the end, whereas in fact if it's not as fully formed, I will start somewhere where I have a concrete idea, somewhere in the middle. But that didn't happen with this piece, it was very clear right from the start, what was required, which is quite a traditional way of working on a story ballet. We have a lot of models for this – from the time when Tchaikovsky was composing Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker for Mariinsky, there exist instructions in the correspondence between him and Petipa, where Petipa orders things as if he were going to a tailor. He says 'I want 16 bars in two four time, very fast and lively, and then I want four bars of so forth' - as concrete as that. And there would be areas that would be free time, in which he would simply describe the action and he would say 'and then the Christmas tree goes up - a minute!''

But none of this really need be taken very seriously, in that we’re not doing a film, where it's edited, and that is all the time you have. These are generalised instructions and it's all about proportion. It could be that I might have done the amount of time that David asked for, but we might feel in the end that we want a bit more, or maybe he didn't need as much as he originally thought, and there was too much music. The final test of course is when it is being choreographed, and the validity of our decisions is being tested out on other people and danced. And then when the final piece is put together, there will be a further assessment of that as a whole – too long, too short? Tempi? It’s all built in, step by step'.

Click here to continue to the final part of the interview.

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An interview with Carl Davis, part 2

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