Alexis Bennett is a London-based composer, performer and academic, who has worked at some of the most prestigious film and recording studios in the world, from Pinewood to Abbey Road, while his compositions have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Channel 4. He is also a practising fiddle player. Will Kemp speaks to Alexis to find out how he manages all these different strings to his bow.
Will Kemp: Alexis, you’ve been working on a lot of different projects recently, from film work to performances and teaching. Give us an idea of how you got to this point in your career.
Alexis Bennett: Yep – I grew up in a musical family. There was traditional music at home, my mother’s side of the family are all from Ireland and we went over there and I learnt fiddle and songs and tunes. But then I took a classical route really with formal education, studying composition and viola and keys but kept doing traditional and folk music. Then I became interested in media music and film music and all that so I did a degree in Music and English literature at Edinburgh University and actually that’s where I started doing traditional again, essentially because I got involved in cèilidh bands. Actually, Edinburgh was a childhood home for me too; I spent my earliest years there. So I feel that my background is a pretty much England, Scotland and Ireland.
Were you doing specifically Scottish ceilidh music then as distinct from more southern forms?
Yes, there is a distinction. The things we were doing in Edinburgh there were a lot mainly of Scottish dances, cèilidh dances with a mix of Scottish and Irish tunes. Personally, I prefer the Irish traditional style when I’m playing the fiddle, that’s what I like to do, the Irish and English with folk – the Scottish thing was kind of incidental. Then when I moved to London and came to the Royal College of Music to do a composition degree, I continued playing cèilidh bands in London and there was a real mix actually, it wasn’t a purist attitude to the music or the dance. It was a real mix of Irish, Scottish and English, mainly Scottish dances of course, but with some English and Irish thrown in. You know you will find online the sort of purists who will sniff at that kind of band, but we found that we got a lot of work doing that because it was fun, you know – sometimes the most fun cèilidh bands don’t have a particularly fixed, regimented attitude to the kind of music and dance. Ever since then, I’ve had three strands to what I do, one is the traditional thing, one is the film media thing and increasingly the academic thing – I’m a lecturer at Goldsmiths in music, (I do some classical performing too still too) so I have a really quite varied career.
I wanted to ask you about your film work in particular. I’ve heard you worked on The Favourite and Mary Queen of Scots films which came out earlier this year.
I was doing a couple of things. On both I was acting as a coach to the playing music on screen. So in The Favourite at one point there’s a group of children playing outside at Hampton Court Palace – they’re all from Purcell School of Music in north London and I was asked alongside one or two other people to coach them in historical. I was also on the soundtrack; we recorded some Handel especially for it, and I was on set for a dancing scene. There’s a big dance in a candlelit room, but you can’t really see me, I’m in the background. In Mary Queen of Scots I was coaching an actor called Ismael Cruz Córdova, who several times in the film is seen playing the baroque violin – I was his violin teacher basically at Pinewood. So I was on hand hanging around at Pinewood mostly reading the newspaper waiting for him to turn up and in between takes he’d come to me and say, you know ‘am I doing this right?’ I was working closely with William Lyons, early instrument specialist of The Dufay Collective and The City Musick – on both films he was the historical music advisor and I was working with Bill on those. I’ve also worked as a composer on loads of low to mid-budget projects that no one’s ever seen, but that’s another thing.
And did that come out of your practice as a composer of media – do you compose at the moment?
I do. I much prefer writing with filmmakers. I’m terrified of writing music on its own – I don’t know where to begin. I like to be told what to do. But it’s really strange which work comes out of where – quite a lot of my film work has actually come through playing baroque and early music through people like Bill. So it requires a weird sideways movement in terms of the opportunities you get.
And almost the last thing you’d expect to go from Handel to modern, contemporary film.
I know. But I think increasingly musicians have to do this – they have to have all these different hats, spinning plates in the air because if you want to make a living, you have to take whatever comes your way really. So my typical week would be giving a lecture at Goldsmiths on writing music for picture using Logic and Pro Tools, working with directors, interpreting a scene production, stuff like that – then the following day a rehearsal for Bach’s St Matthew Passion – and the following day performance of the Bach piece –the day after that a cèilidh in the evening – and the day after that you might be on set in a film coaching someone – and then you might be writing music for something. It’s kind of infuriating really because you don’t quite know what your musical identity is. It’s the only way I can really survive if I take what comes and by being flexible.
What can people expect from your teaching at Dartington?
Well, the beauty of Dartington is it’s an eclectic place. The beauty of the folk course is you don’t have to have any background in traditional folk music, you’re just interested in learning some tunes or finding out about what it’s like to sit in a group of people and play – all-comers are welcome. No expectation. So the wonderful thing that we’ll do is that I’ll be working with Harbottle and Jonas who will be focusing on song and workshopping them so that people can sing as a group but also use their instruments to arrange the songs for performance. Meanwhile, on the side, I’ll be taking people into break-out groups and teaching them tunes, jigs, reels, hornpipes on their instruments. What I normally do – a bit like my own background – I might teach two Irish tunes, two English tunes and a Scottish or even a Welsh tune, and at the end of the week we’ll combine the two so that we’ll have a programme of songs sung groups with solos if people feel confident enough, interspersed with tunes played by the group. I try to encourage – where some people get a bit nervous – people not to read music. We learn the tunes by ear, very very slowly, and I mean slowly, at a snail’s pace, and then at the end of each session I will give out the music and say, ‘here’s the music – if you wish to go away and practice it you’ve got the dots here in front of you’. And so we start traditional and try and maintain that folk music was always a non-written tradition, an oral tradition. It’s important to recognise that because a lot of the people who come to Dartington have a classical background and they’re curious about folk music but they’re a bit nervous because they’ve never played off the dots.
You’re taking them off grid.
We’re taking them off grid – but I think that’s what the Summer School should be about. It should be about firstly welcoming everyone and making them feel safe and encouraging whatever they want to do but also challenging them to an extent because if we don’t challenge they won’t learn anything. And it’s wonderful. We have people of all ages and backgrounds coming and it feels like a very democratic process, learning tunes together.
Alexis will be teaching on the Dartington International Summer School’s Folk collective course this August. He will also be performing in the Great Hall at Dartington alongside the poet Katrina Porteous. Find out more here: www.dartington.org/summerschool