INSIDE THE ART - Neil Thornock
The Season: You have a new album called Spring. It popped up—I’m avoiding saying it sprang up—after a physical injury. Can you describe how it came to be?
Neil Thornock: Having spent a lot of time the last while on the bicycle and in the gym, trying to get a handle on some health challenges, I suddenly found myself with a boon of time when I broke my shoulder blade last January. The prognosis was at least three months with very little physical activity. The injury coincided with another circumstance: I changed offices at work. I normally do most of my composing in my office, but I found the office change to be a challenge, so I started doing my creative work at home. With my normal routines gutted, I was feeling down, and I was casting about for creative enterprises that I could do with very little equipment at my home desk. An album of electronic music fit the bill.
Meanwhile, I fell down a couple of YouTube rabbit holes that took me to ambient music, including New Age classical piano and the ambient music of 1980s and 90s Japanese composers, atmospheric, calming stuff. Initially, I was intrigued at what made this seemingly "empty" music tick with so many people. I spent a lot of time listening and thinking–and then I got bitten. In the end, it calmed my mood during a depressing winter and simultaneously got me thinking about how the harmonic stasis inherent in this style would be a perfect fit for the tuning system I have gravitated to the last few years. So the project had the inception, rationalization, and time I needed to move forward with it.
The Season: Say a bit more about your tuning system explorations. For somebody like me who likes music but doesn’t exactly understand what’s inside it, can you offer a description of your tuning and how it might differ from traditional systems?
Neil Thornock: I've long been enchanted by alternative tuning systems, in which the pitches lie between the ones we are used to. One set of pitches is particularly special, and that's the overtone series. You hear the overtone series when you hear a pitch from a clarinet, a violin, someone speaking -- you are actually hearing many pitches at once, but it sounds like one pitch. Our brain processes the pitches of the overtone series in a special way, fusing them into one pitch, even though many pitches are present. The tuning of this album uses pitches that all belong to one overtone series. I'm mostly sticking with familiar-sounding harmony, but there may be a note or a passage here and there in which the tuning sounds unfamiliar. But because those pitches belong to the overtone series, they cooperate with each other to make very pure sounding, stable harmonies. The more I work with this tuning, the more harmonically static my music becomes.
The Season: Many composers make music targeted to public opportunities. They have a commission or a chance to be on a concert program. Your music making includes those things, but you also compose works—including ambitious, big projects—that seem unencumbered by commerce. Do you approach that spectrum of compositional motivation differently?
Neil Thornock: Well, yes, which I think is unfortunate. When I compose music that will be performed by other musicians, I find myself balancing my creative impulses against the artistic preferences and technical abilities of the performers, potential venues or events, my own lack of experience with various instruments and ensembles, and the academic peer review process. Sometimes the piece I would rather write gets stifled as a result, and I've had a number of public performances of pieces I'm not proud of. My greatest sense of artistic liberty, of taking big risks, comes when I compose for myself to perform (or nobody, in this case). At the most fundamental level, I want to compose as a way of exploring what it means to create divinely, discovering the beauty and meaning of God's universe, glorifying God and contributing something beautiful to the world. I find the most beauty when I take the biggest risks.
The Season: The title of the new album is Spring. On the bottom corner of the album cover is the name, “Happy Plant.” How are the concepts of rebirth, spring, a new beginning, and even religious interpretations of resurrection and Easter present in this music?
Neil Thornock: I find this question delightful. The simplest answer is that those concepts are only present if you, the listener, decide that they are.
As a deeply religious person, all the music I write is infused with my religious convictions in some way. But I'm not usually setting out to do so explicitly. I live my faith, I live my art. What happens to my art is what happens. Music is so abstract that listeners can infer meanings the composer didn't intend. If I do my best to make something beautiful--as beautiful as I can possibly make it--someone is bound to hear things I didn't think I put there. The way you worded this question is evidence of that. It's one of the great beauties of music. So I'll leave my answer fairly open-ended.
This music is such a departure from the more academic stuff I normally write that I decided to assume a stage name (or a DJ/producer name), which is Happy Plant. I did it mostly as a bit of fun. I wanted a stage name that was simple and memorable, and maybe quirky. But beyond that, plants are powerful symbols. The idea of the name Happy Plant reminds me that this is meant to be happy music, and that the music grows out of a life--my life--that is happily planted in Jesus. I'm also happily planted in my place. Provo is my promised land, at the moment, where my family is planted to grow and flourish. Importance of place is reflected in the water sounds recorded near my home, and the leaf rubbing on the cover of a leaf I picked up right here. The arc of the album is nocturnal. The tracks start with bright afternoon and then mellow toward dusk, then through night. By the end, things have brightened again, but in a confident, content, peaceful way. The last title, Mountain Dawn, might bring camping to mind for some. But I see the mountains looming over Provo every dawn, and while I don't see sunrise, I often see spectacular displays of sky and cloud and mountain and concealed sun. The sun goes to bed, it wakes up again. The whole narrative of the album leads through nighttime to sunrise.