But I think there are huge things in my favor, definitely, having come from Wellington. You end up meeting people you would never have met in the same situation in the States, or something, because really big soloists come to New Zealand... Evelyn Glennie, for example, asked me to write a piece. If she'd come to even Australia [we may not have met]... It's just so easy in this country, because there are so few people, it's just such a small group and everything's much more intimate. She went out to the pub with us afterwards, and we were chatting away, and she'd heard about my music and me to write her a piece. "Yeh, sure... When d'ya want it - tomorrow morning??!? (laughs) I'll start on it now!" So that's happening this year - and that's another orchestral piece. Apart from all of that - getting opportunities and being lucky and getting [commissioned] - I love writing for orchestra, and it's a real hook. I think it's a lot to do with wanting to get it right, and hearing things and thinking "Damn! I can do better than that. I really stuffed that up," or something. Or thinking (reverently) "Oh, wait a minute!" Because it's such an endless realm of possibilities of different textures.

It really is infinite. I'm starting to play around with my home studio at the moment - slowly add little bits, and buying toys like this (points at TG's MiniDisc recorder) and really starting to wrap my mind around electronic stuff and how equally infinite that is, because I've never done anything like that. I've always been a one hundred percent acoustic composer - and if I can find the On button, I'm doing really, really well. (moans theatrically) "Where is the button, ooh, how do you make it go? Just give me some presets, I don't want to deal with all of the [programming]..." No, no, I'm just getting started.

I think this latest one [Beowulf] will be a lot closer to what I really like. And also, it's massively inspired by Christopher Rouse, who was my teacher at Eastman, who writes the most stupendous, insane orchestral music. He's a fantastic orchestrator, but it's music from another planet. (laughs) It's very violent and forceful and I always liked that. It pushes the the realm of orchestral music to the extreme. I don't think I got that far - I wanted to outdo him, but I don't think I did.

I think that's a general problem with composers; not changing your mind every ten bars or so. That's what students do, and I always used to do it terribly. I would end up with a piece with forty different ideas in it and none of them developed. So I revised the hell out of it, I think it's the biggest revision I've ever done. I was really happy when the APO said, "Yeh, sure, that's fine, send us up some new parts." Because I didn't know whether they might say, "Oh, we really don't want any more work, putting together a whole new set of parts," and they were cool with it. It was such a relief to hear it in rehearsal and think, (sighing) "Oh, that's better." It's nice to have the opportunity of fixing up the past. (laughs)

It's the way everything comes out; if I want to make things get out there and grab you by the neck, usually it astonishes me how over-the-top it comes out. The idea of the drums was definitely a rock-drummer thing. I wanted it to look like the way rock-drummers set themselves up: this sort of huge display of testosterone...

(momentary silence settles, then everyone laughs)

I think one of my favorite experiences is going to a nightclub...for many reasons. (wiggles eyebrows suggestively) "Hawhawhaw." But also I think that some of the most exciting percussion music being written in the last ten years is techno club music - it's entirely percussive. It's all electronic, but there's some really interesing stuff being done, and I'm doing a little bit of that myself. Look, I don't have a bloody clue what the attitude is towards me in general [amongst New Zealand composers]. I think that I've managed to put myself into a pigeon-hole - which it isn't at all, it's completely un-pigeon-hole-able - because there are so many things that they're all scared of. They're all terrified of the drag thing.

I do think that the classical music scene in New Zealand - and I'm not sure that it's a "scene" at all - is very conservative. I know that academically it's as conservative as you could ever imagine. There's a way that you should approach music as an academic. For a start, I've never, ever wanted to have anything to do with the university system, after spending ten years as a student. I used to think "What the FUCK am I doing??" I was halfway to a doctorate at Eastman, and [I realized] "I don't have any interest in doing a doctorate." At that point, the only reason I wanted to be in the States was because the drag shows were so much fun; we were doing them twice a week.

No, it was generally good. But apart from that, it was the experience of going overseas and finding out what the world's all about. And that was a HUGE change for me, it was a huge step in my career. I didn't need to go any further than that, because it wasn't an academic thing in the first place. The only paper I've done towards that degree was an ethnomusicology paper [in] which I managed to [examine the subject of drag]. It was a great course; the ethnomusicology teacher at Eastman, Lynn Koskoff, is as mad as a snake. She's a wonderful woman. We were doing this paper called 'Ritual in Music' and we were talking about rituals and Catholic religion and African religions and all sorts of things, and well, how there's sort of like a real dictionary meaning of how rituals go. It's reasonably generic: there's often a shaman, they often go into a trance, they're often leading a group of people into some sort of ceremony. I thought, 'this is amazing!'- every single thing I read about it, sociologically speaking, I could draw so many analogies to a drag show! And I was thinking, 'I've got to do it, I've got to do it!'

And I said, 'Do you think I could do the paper on the drag show?' And she said, 'That's fan-TAS-tic!' And look, I mean, if you look at it technically, there's no difference. And she LOVED it. And I thought, 'I'm doing a doctorate in music, and I've managed to do my fucking first paper on drag! RRRH!'

Actually, I still really like it as a paper. I think I want to look at it again and take it a bit further, [especially] the whole aspect of a drag queen going into a different personality. I interviewed a few of them and I [asked], "OK, JUST,- out of drag, if I put you on stage, what would happen?" The response was, "Oh, forget it." No self-confidence, nothing. A different person.

I don't think I share that with any of them, because I think I'm... a little bit...(dissolves into laughter.)

Anyway.... (goes into Scots accent) Ehh,, I got a bit off the topic a liddle bit din't I? Talking about academic stuff....

But then again on the other hand it's one of those things: it depends on whether you write music absolutely straight from there (touches his chest) and I think you've just talked to two people who do. They're two of my favourite New Zealand composers without a doubt. And David Downes. He is, I think, the most under-rated New Zealand composer ever. He's fanTAStic! He's written a lot of music for Michael Parmenter, who probably has the biggest dance company in the country. I was going to say 'the States!!' (laughs) Oh, where am I?
That's an amazing colour behind you, by the way!

But um, yeh yeh yeh, John and Eve - that'd be a really interesting study, I think. So many things I want to study! I'm just going to have to wait til I get sick of music and I'm 86 and I've got nothing better to do.

Exactly. I kept an answerphone tape from Rochester. I just found it a little while ago. (laughter) It was a wonderful thing to listen to!

(Looks out window) It's getting really purply out there! Wow.

One of my favorite parts of DrumDrag, my drag show, is the stand-up comedy bits. I love them! I think there is nothing more gratifying or terrifying than doing stand-up comedy. The gratification you get from a whole crowd of people wetting their pants laughing at some dumb thing you've just said is wonderful, and it's because of that absolutely instant response. I think it's not necessarily the humour that's the key to what I like about that. It's the response. It's like talking to somebody that just goes (blank look for a few seconds). I'll last about ten seconds, if I'm not getting any response from them. Which is why there are good interviewers and bad interviewers. There are people who can't get me to talk for longer than 30 seconds, there really are! (laughter) I get very monosyllabic, 'Well, do you want me to talk or not?' A backhanded compliment there.....

We're just very different. We have very different styles. John's music, it can completely overwhelm you because it just seems to be an endless source of [ingenuity]. He doesn't repeat himself. Never! I do. I love repeats. I love getting stuck in a groove. (laughs) That's got to be a personality thing as well.

And Eve, Eve is also a very visually dynamic person. She wears really bright clothes - she'll turn up wearing a BRIGHT pink beret or something - and she's a graphic artist as well, you know, she is interested in that. And I think that if there's anything you can do to excite those people during that period of time, you've got to do it. And that's visual stuff as well.

What can you do? [If] an orchestra asks you to write a piece, you can't build in a whole visual display with it, because they haven't got the budget for it and they'll yell at you.! And that was a sneaky trick of mine, to have the drummers really be a visual part of that. And it's a very different experience listening to Sea Gongs on a tape than it is watching it live, just because of that. I made sure the drums were way up on risers and there's this huge line of rototoms gleaming silver. The drummers don't do anything for the first minute and then they do a big cymbal roll, 'oh look!' Even in bloody any old classical symphony percussion part, usually the percussionists sit down and don't do anything for a long time, and then often they'll all stand up together to do the big climax, and someone's going to go 'tang!' and someone's gonna go 'boom' and someone's gonna go'ksssh,' and it's not really that interesting. But nevertheless, the slight flicker of movement from the percussion section and the whole audience is like 'gasp!' (laughs) 'Are they going to do something?' And it's '- Oh cool, that was cool!' Then back to the music. And it's the only time that anyone ever moves onstage. Nobody else does unless the horns are sticking their bells up in the air or something. WHOOH!

Eve wrote this fantastic 'percussion all over the place' piece [for Strike] with these huge white screens behind me. At certain points in the score there was a little pause mark and I turned around [where] there were three pots of paint in primary colours, and I just picked up a brush and [went] 'Whhhhhshh!' on my screen. It was specified that it had something to do with what I had just done rhythmically and the great thing was that it actually made a sound, as well. So there was this little bit that had the two metronomes going at different speeds, 'tu-tu-tu-tu-tu' and the temple blocks, 'po-po-po' with the paintbrush....and the ....Oh! The very opening of the piece is 'BRRWAAAAH!!!!' y'know, huge sort of thing, and then just 'pwkkkwh!' a bright-red stroke, and people were just like 'Fuck, that's amazing!' cause you actually associate all of those strokes with [musical moments]. You'd remember what I'd done and they stay in the air, they sort of stay there throughout the piece and the great thing is you end up with two paintings. Which you can give to people in the audience.

I mean, it's an amazing sight, but it's very very funny. Especially in canon.....(demonstrates) [The piece] was a first experiment into that area. It's got a lot further to go. In fact Murray, the guy who runs this percussion ensemble, has totally taken it on as his mission in life (which means that I don't have to do it now and I can get on with writing something else). It's good, I've found a keeper of the, whatever, the choreographic mission, and he's doing great now. He's written a piece called 'Cube' which uses these 3mX3m scaffolding cubes - really really big, basically one of them would fill this room - and the inside of the entire cube is covered with percussion instruments. It's an extension of 'Vixen' which was my piece. But it's more extreme - hanging upside-down from things and really climbing up onto it and I think going even further in the dance direction than mine. Mine was just kind of arm movements and things.

My first idea was that she would have bells on her feet because she was just so good at walking onstage and that's so hard for most musicians - just to walk across the stage.... 'Oooh, everyone's looking at me!' It is very hard to walk across the stage. I remember even having to go and play second timpani in the middle of a piece (and it was just bloody Elgar or something ridiculous!) and it was so difficult to do. It's like, 'OK, I know people are looking at me' because that, if a percussionist moves, the whole audience is wildly excited, something's going to happen.

Oh, she's very good at it. Very good. She just does it very slowly, she knows people are watching her, she knows she's gorgeous - she's wearing PVC pants, for Christ's sake!

But this extravaganza was beyond any proportion I have ever been involved with before. It was just HUUUGE. The guy who produced it and I have just put in an application for an opera because I think he's the only person who has come close to doing something that I consider to be what I would want an opera to be. No holds barred, AT ALL. You know. Not a producer saying 'OK, that might be all right for an event in the park, for the general population, but this is ART music we're talking about here, something ... (makes rude sound and gesture) If I want lasers and fireworks, I'll have them!! He had these HUGE BEASTS, coming up onto the stage, like HUGE, walking out into the audience, like giant moas and wetas. It was fucking amazing. And we in the percussion ensemble were suspended probably 100 feet in the air on a crane in a metal cage with pyros going off and the orchestra playing and....it was just fantastic. He's a wonderful guy. And so we've GOT to get that going because that will be the SCARIEST opera ever!