Gabriel Prokofiev: From nonclassical and back

When Gabriel first arrived at Tanzania, he was immediately taken aback by the country’s music. ‘Contrary to our usual perception of African music, Tanzania didn’t have that much drumming. Instead, Tanzanian people, especially the Maasai, mainly used their voices to produce vocal polyphony. A lot of polyrhythmic materials were used in Maasai chanting, and it is really interesting.’ It was so inspiring to Gabriel that he returned to Tanzania the following year, this time armed with a field recorder, to record what he heard. ‘I had a letter from the British Library for the recording project, and it gave me an excuse to go to remote places where other people wouldn’t go, and experience music I’ve never heard before.’

The Tanzanian experience proved to be an eye-opener for Gabriel as a composer as well. ‘At university, I was not only discovering new contemporary music, but also music from different continents. This made me realize that in the 20th century, whilst we have the serialist and minimalist revolutions in Europe, there is also this music evolving on the other side of the planet.

Bourges International Electro-Acoustic Music Competition

Gabriel then went on to study a Masters in composition at York University and entered one of his compositions into the Bourges International Electro-Acoustic Music Competition, and won a place in the student residency category.

The Bourges Competition and its accompanying festival were one of the major events for the electroacoustic scene, and Gabriel remembered how hyped up everyone was. ‘Back in York, I had joined the email newsgroup for electroacoustic music, and every week there would be emails on how “the Bourges competition is coming up”.’ Everyone participated – for older composers, there was an open competition with grand prizes, but budding composers competed for the residency category, where the winners were given the opportunity to study as an exchange student in one of the five partnering universities. ‘I was one of the five residency composers of 1998, so they paid for my whole trip to Seattle. We had a wondrous exchange of musical ideas, and I got to see what the other side of the electroacoustic scene was doing.’

For Gabriel though, the prize was worth much more than the residency. ‘The competition was held anonymously, and the fact that I won bolstered my confidence.’ At that time, Gabriel was still conscious of his heritage, and he was afraid that people would judge his music differently when they heard his family name. ‘The anonymity ensured that had I won, it was due to the musical quality of my work but not prejudice, whether more favorably or more critically, on my family name.’

The Bourges music festival gave Gabriel much food for thought, but one thing in particular stood out. ‘The big problem was that the audiences were tiny.’ Gabriel remembered seeing a lot of hotshots in the festival. ‘There were these real masters of electroacoustic music from around the world, and I was dining with them after the concert. They had this aura of being very important, and they are, but just for those sitting in the table together, within this tiny community. There were no fans waiting outside trying to get their signatures.’

This sense of mismatch dismayed Gabriel. ‘They were composing such great music, yet it seemed like there were no audience for it, and they didn’t care about sharing it.’ For them, cultivating an audience was clearly the job for a promoter and not that of the composers.

And the promoters were not doing well either. ‘What I observed was that when they tried to program contemporary music, they only thought from their own perspective, but not enough about how it would sound like to a new audience. For example, if the concert’s theme was to explore the Second Viennese School, most often the program would only consist of works from those composers, or those whose styles were closely related to the Second Viennese School. No doubt it was quite interesting for those who had studied that music before, but except for that small group of experts, it would be a nightmarish concert for everyone else, since there’ll be all this stuff that sounds quite similar. However, had they programmed a Second Viennese composer, then with a Romantic composer who had inspired them, then maybe a Classical composer who had inspired the Romantic composer, and then maybe another composer who hated the Viennese and was the reaction against them, you are telling a much more balanced story, and suddenly it is more interesting to everyone.’

Gradually feeling disenchanted with the contemporary classical world, Gabriel retraced his steps after his graduation from York University. ‘For me, the point of music is communication.’ Seeking to engage with the audience, Gabriel went back to his childhood hobby, forming a local band and performing electronic music in nightclubs, until a couple of years ago, when he started to embrace the classical again with his project, nonclassical.

Nonclassical

The aim of nonclassical, as Gabriel puts it, is to incorporate classical music into the lifestyles of young people. ‘We wanted to present classical music in a non-classical, non-traditional way.’

Nonclassical was not always called nonclassical. Its origins came from a group Gabriel founded in York, Nerve 8, whose mission was to organize electroacoustic concerts in unconventional spaces. ‘We once held a concert in a daytime walk-in center for old-age pensioners. It was normally closed at night, but we convinced the owner to allow us to hold a concert in the evening.’ The concert was a success, and those experiences gave Gabriel the confidence to start the classical club nights under the name “nonclassical”.

Fast forward to 2004, Gabriel met Laura Moody, cellist of the Elysian Quartet, in London. Laura invited Gabriel to write a string quartet for them, and Gabriel took it as his opportunity to go back to contemporary classical music.

‘My grandfather also wrote some string quartets, but I deliberately avoided listening to his quartets during that time, for fear that I would be overly influenced or intimidated by his mastery over the medium.’ It turned out he shouldn’t have worried, for his String Quartet No. 1 was every bit as different from his grandfather’s music as it could be. Taking inspirations from the dance music that he was so fond of, Gabriel used syncopated rhythms and dance grooves as the main driving force of his string quartet, creating a colorful, polystylistic piece that juxtaposed the worlds of contemporary classical and the nightclub.

For the first edition of nonclassical, Gabriel invited Elysian Quartet to perform his latest classical work in the club. Another highlight of the night was a special rendition of Purcell, where the quartet played the whole piece backwards, note-by-note in a slow attack, producing a whispery, evocative sound.

The Turning Point

Gabriel’s career as a classical musician gradually blossomed, but his first breakthrough came in 2011, when his Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra No.1 was performed at the BBC Proms. ‘The concerto was previewed and reviewed by all the newspapers that time, and I even did online twitter interviews. It was a career launch, and a really nice experience with that.’

Before that moment, Gabriel had been living a double life in music – composing classical pieces on one hand, but also playing at the band and producing other electronic music at the same time. ‘I was juggling all these genres, and it was slowly driving me crazy with the hectic demands.’ After the Proms, Gabriel gradually began to dedicate himself to classical music alone, a move that was hastened by an invitation from the Orchestre de Pau Pays de Béarn (OPPB) in France to become their composer in residence.

Gabriel explained his renewed interest in the orchestra. ‘Most contemporary composers were writing for chamber music because it is easier to find performances, but I thought that if I could get into orchestral music, it would be a more interesting career development, because you get to write bigger pieces, the commissions are better, and you can reach a bigger audience.’

OPPB was not a famous orchestra, but it provided Gabriel with a good opportunity to build up his repertoire and reputation, as well as a teaching ground for him to balance the commercial and musical aspects of composing. ‘The orchestra commissioned 5 pieces in total, and for each I am consciously making sure that my commissioned work will fit in the concert program in terms of mood and atmosphere. Even though I would sometimes like to write crazy, unpractical pieces, I refrained from putting those on concert, as otherwise you would be shooting yourself in the foot, disconnecting people from the full concert experience.’

Gabriel thought fondly of his time in Pau. ‘When I was at the Orchestra of Pau, they would need to do every concert four times in a row since their hall could only fit four hundred, and the demand was too high.’ The city of Pau didn’t have a theatre, so the symphony orchestra became the de facto cultural focus.

Gabriel was a francophone, and he would frequently hold pre-concert talks in Pau. ‘The people there are very positive and receptive to my work. My work was often performed alongside famous pieces, for example Dvorak’s cello concerto or Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto, yet usually both halves of the concert would be well-received.’