Creative craftsman

Chris Cree Brown has forgotten I am coming to interview him. He emerges from the side of his house, wiping his hands on his cords. He has been building a chicken coop, but he is quick to stop and invite me in. His wife makes us a pot of coffee and home-made biscuits miraculously appear on a plate. This is Canterbury hospitality after all.

Soon we are sitting in Chris’ studio as he plays fragments of his electro-acoustic music through the massive speakers attached to his computer. He talks me through Icescape and Under Erebus, fascinating compositions that emerged from a two-week stint in Antarctica as a result of the Artists in Antarctica programme in 1999.

Despite the bright sunshine and the tui in the trees outside, the drums, cymbals and bells transport me to the coldest continent. Chris has mixed ‘real’ sounds of footsteps crunching through the snow and the raucous aggression of skuas with the almost unbearable pitch of strings conjuring daggers of ice plunging into the frigid sea.

He takes pity on me desperately clutching my coffee cup for warmth and we turn our attention instead to Pilgrimage to Gallipoli. He worked on this during a sabbatical in 2008, but the original sounds were collected on his trips to Turkey in 1994 and 2001. It is a highly-charged piece in which the sound of a camera shutter clicks between interviews, battle sounds and speeches from a tour guide showing them around the former battlefields.

Flies buzz, soldiers cough, shots fire and Abide with Me blends seamlessly into a muezzin’s prayer. It’s all incredibly evocative and was premiered a month before our interview at a cinema in Christchurch. Chris explains that he thinks of himself as a New Zealand composer and as such, he makes work about New Zealand themes. “I guess it’s an interest of mine to find out who I am and where I belong and that is in New Zealand so that’s where I work.”

Chris lectures in music and composition at the University of Canterbury School of Music, and he was able to work on this piece due to a research grant. Having spent his formative years living on porridge, he is extremely grateful to be the recipient of a steady income and these grants, but he is slightly wary of the way they are awarded. You get ‘brownie points’ if your work is played overseas, but as a distinctive Kiwi composer, Chris isn’t sure how much foreign interest his compositions will garner.

As we ascend to the kitchen and a blazing log-burner, Chris explains his theory on composition. “Composing is about finding out more and developing; getting an idiosyncratic voice. You create a personality in sound, but it needs developing.” His eyes light up as he explains his latest project – a piece for clarinet and tape.

“I’m getting the clarinettist to take the bell off the instrument which slightly alters the pitches, so it’s not a true scale. And then in another part she’s taking the clarinet apart and putting it together again without one piece so there is a whole series of different notes. The challenge is to try and get to know those notes and try and find out what works and what doesn’t, but that’s very interesting – that’s developing and learning.”

Electro-acoustic music has come a long way since Chris started out 30 years ago. Back then he says there were probably fewer than 20 people doing it. “I started out with tape recorders before there were computers, and you had to use a razor blade to cut these things and press them together, so technology has altered particularly electro-acoustic or sonic art immensely.”

I am a bit baffled by the whole concept, but he patiently explains it to me in simpleton’s terms. “Electro-acoustic music means you use any sound source at all – usually one from the real world rather than an electronic synthesised one – and you use the computer to manipulate that, so you can get down to a pure level of sound – a bit like a biologist getting down to the cellular DNA in a molecule and seeing why someone might have red hair rather than brown.”

Just as I think I’m beginning to understand how all this works, Chris introduces another string to his bow, if you’ll pardon the naff musical metaphor. He also likes to design and construct sonic sculptures, such as sea tubas, which produce sounds in reaction to the waves. His brother, a civil engineer, helps him with the drawings, and then he likes to build the prototypes.

There is interest from the Dunedin City Council in his sea tubas, but they have not been built as yet. He worries that part of the problem might be the current economic downturn. “Even if they had the money to build it, or to raise the money for it, they might not like to be seen at a time where people are losing their jobs, to be building expensive artworks.”

Chris is most proud of his Aeolian harp (which makes music when the wind passes over the strings). He drew the line at the plastering, but he enjoyed learning to weld and is happy to do these things himself. “I like to think that I’m hands-on. If I’m going to do something I’ll do it if I can. Not only do you save money, but by doing it you get better insights into what you’re trying to do, and you’re more likely to come up with something that will work.”

I ask him if he likes the contrast of the very practical side with the more creative aspects of his job and he smiles ruefully, “I think I would have to say yes. I mean if you asked me halfway through building a chicken coop, using wood that had built a cubby house that was hardly ever used and trying to get nails out, you might not get a positive answer”.

He is practically bounding with eagerness to show me the prototype of the harp so we head out to the paddock where it sits curved and beautiful and, unfortunately, silent. There is no wind today. Perhaps Wellington City Council should install one.

In 2002 one was displayed in the Christchurch Botanical Gardens as part of the Urban Arts Biennial. “I was scared it might not work. But when I put it in there and heard the sounds they were just beautiful. I knew that the whole thing, sonically at least, was going to be a wonderful success, and I was just over the moon.”

On his website, Chris explains the physics that make this instrument sing, which is probably just as well. In the Middle Ages several people were burnt at the stake for witchcraft as a result of making these magical instruments that played by themselves. I think we’re all grateful that those times are behind us – none more so that Chris Cree Brown.