Page 80 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

Tom Coult: Violet in rehearsal with Anna Dennis, Richard Burkhard (Photo Patrick Young / Britten Pears Arts)

It was listening to Jimi Hendrix (on his Dad's tape) when young that made Tom want to be a musician
for a living. He was also influenced by Bob Dylan's approach to being an artist, appreciating the
distance you could put between what you might think and feel as a person and what goes into the
music. This was very much music as a mask. It was the music of JS Bach that first got Tom into
classical music, and Bach remains his Desert Island composer. Stravinsky made him want to write
music down in manuscript; this was the later Stravinsky, not the Rite of Spring, and here again, we
have music as a mask. The Big Bang came when he heard Pierre Boulez' music for the first time;
listening to the exquisitely voiced chords, Tom felt like he new knew that harmony could sound like
that. This experience changed his own music a lot. Another composer he mentions is Elliott Carter.
Whilst Tom does not always like the sound of Carter's music, he enjoys the way it moves intelligently
rhythmically, and Tom's rhythms owe a lot to Carter.

Listening to Jimi Hendrix when young that made Tom want to be a musician

Whilst he wanted to be a musician from being that teenager listening to Jimi Hendrix, he assumed it
would be in a band. In fact, he played in a lot of bands but his idea of the type of musician evolved. In
his later teens, he discovered films and film music, notably the work of Danny Elfman and the sound
of his orchestra. But then Tom discovered that Elfman used an orchestrator, and this was something
of a punch in the gut, a loss of innocence. And this knowledge veered him away from film music and
led him to the less profitable but autonomous world of classical composition. For his first degree, he
studied music at Manchester University, following this with a Masters in Composition. As an
undergraduate, he arrived in Manchester knowing the music of Bach and Beethoven, blues, jazz and
country, but rather hostile to 20th-century music. But he soon got the bug.