(Photos by Iga Gozdowska)
“OH NO, NO, NO,” Sean Shibe says in horror mixed with a small sliver of humour. “You are quoting 19-year-old me. That’s terrible. I saw this the other day and …”
To be fair, the 32-year-old Scottish master of classical guitar who won the BBC New Generation Artist award at the age of 19, has a point. Not everyone wants to be held to what they said when they were barely out of school, not least because a good many of us would struggle to remember anything we said then.
However, there’s a reason to remember this for a classicist who, according to Gramophone awards judges, with his take on Pou La Luth O Cenbal was responsible for “the best ever Bach recording” on guitar, someone who when those judges were searching for comparisons was not put against other guitarists but “the violinist Rachel Podger, or the pianist Angela Hewitt”.
He is also an artist who has always been happy to play outside the norm for classical guitarist usually expected to stick to Tarrega or Sor or Guiliani. And as Australian audiences will see, a guitarist comfortable incorporating electric guitar into the classical repertoire alongside the renaissance lute he also deploys, whether playing the baroque repertoire or transcriptions from centuries-old Scottish manuscripts.
Having experienced resistance in the past when playing Bach or Britten or Takemitsu arranged for guitar, does it still happen and does it matter? Or is there is more in what he can do, more in what we are prepared to hear and understand, than what is the “right” way or the “appropriate” way, or the way it’s always been done? After all, that 19-year-old once said “Performers should not be scared of playing complex and good music and listeners should try not to be scared of listening to it.”
Shibe (which is pronounced she-ba) takes his time responding. “Hmm, hmm,” he says, uncertainly. “I was listening to some music with a friend recently and she was finding it really difficult and it made me remember the conversation I’d had earlier about how important it is that that we bear in mind what the composer is trying to communicate, what is their objective when they are creating the sounds.
“Obviously that has a huge bearing on whether or not the piece is successful. We have to be understand the objective to be able to measure the success. But I think programming or choosing who to commission is about trying to provide a space in which everybody is able to communicate what they want to communicate, and often that means being faced with things that you don’t like, or maybe don’t agree with. But I think that’s the cool thing about music, that ideally we are able choose a multiplicity of personalities and viewpoints in a healthy way.”
One of the valuable things that Shibe has done, and maybe explains some of the attraction of the Australian Chamber Orchestra to him and of him to the ACO, is in reminding us that there is a multiplicity of options – personalities, viewpoints, results – when there are still people who work on limitations. That in the end it doesn’t matter how it is done, but that it is done to reflect the objectives of the composer, as you understand them, as well as the emotional and intellectual approach of the performer.
“The classical guitar repertoire has moved on in great leaps at various points in history, but that the been a lot of periods of relative stagnancy as well,” Shibe says. “When I was picking up the electric guitar for the first time, there was a lot of flak that I got from colleagues and friends as well who felt like it was a bit showboating or posturing. In some ways I think that didn’t surprise me at all, and it kind of, to me, summed up the lack of open-mindedness that the guitar, the classical guitar, can suffer from these slightly siloed position.”
It was from his mother’s encouragement that Shibe began playing guitar, initially with a “yeah, sure, why not? attitude”. Interestingly, and at the risk of revisiting the trauma of youthful comments repeated a decade or more later, when he was at the Royal Scottish Academy Of Music And Drama he said that he rejected the growing trend then to develop multifaceted artists comfortable in cross-genre collaborations. Was that the purity of the convert or the certainty of youth?
“When I was going through the conservatory, the gift that they give you is the time to explore really how deeply you can go with the repertoire. At that point it was really important for me to be able to understand how focused you could be on something extremely specific,” Shibe says. “I don’t think I felt able to think about branching out until I sort of dealt with that. I think it was neither uncompromising youthful attitude nor the zealotry of the convert; it was more a structural or timing decision.”
When he branched out from the traditional acoustic guitar basis of classical playing to electric guitar was he saying, I am comfortable with this now so I will branch out? Or was it something else that appealed?
“Of course, the electric guitar really is quite a different instrument, and there is a lot more to learn in there,” he say. “What the electric guitar provides is something that, because it provides different musical parameters, it means that you’re able to talk to the composer in a slightly different way as well. There are some composers who would be interested in writing for classical [guitar] but they feel like the electric guitar really does speak to them.
"It’s kind of like an extension of what you’re able to think about with programming, so in that sense it’s more than an instrument, right? It’s like a conceptual broadening which has been totally liberating.”
Recognising the technical knowledge is but one part of what he describes as a different way of thinking when approaching his instrument, the expansion to electric is about much more than projection or topicality and has been a long process for the Scot.
“You are using ideas of colour to communicate a larger than reality sense of volume and projection and sustain. You’re actually able to add-on these things that do create it in a very objective way,” he says. “But it’s not a vehicle of conservatism; it’s something that is constantly being updated whereas the instrument that I’m playing is a copy of a 1930s instrument which is a copy of an 1890s instrument. It’s quite conservative guitar playing and classical guitar is quite the conservative enclave but the electric guitar is constantly developing constantly reiterating and the technology is really incredible.”
If the instrumental variety and adventure he possesses is at one end of the program he will lead with the ACO, at the other is the equally complex and sometimes fraught issue of cultural roots.
The experience of being from a place but yet not entirely of that place, of sounding like, reading like, watching like and eating like most of those around you but still being seen as other because of skin colour or shape of the eyes, is an immigrant experience well understood in Australia as much as in Shibe’s home.
His mother is from a small fishing village in Japan and his father was from a larger fishing village, London, both of them potters, and they met in Edinburgh. That is where Shibe grew up, though he would study in London and in Europe later, and he has said in the past that one of the peculiarities of his childhood was regularly being asked “where are you really from?”, with the answer “from right here”, not being quite enough.
There was a degree of alienation growing up, the young adult Sean not so sure about whether he felt particularly Scottish, though he would he say he was from Edinburgh. This has changed.
“I feel pretty Scottish,” he says firmly. “It’s also a political thing: when I look at the movements in the UK that are shifting things [such as Brexit] and Scotland has been more resistant, it does increase a sense of specific identity. I think also gradually growing a sort of presence in this country has been healthy. I think when I was growing up in the 90s in Edinburgh it was a very ethnically homogenous place and that had an effect. It definitely was not the most racist place and we’ve moved on in some ways as well, but I think those early experiences were quite formative.
“I do feel Scottish. I feel probably more Scottish than European. I definitely feel more Scottish than British, but I think a lot of Scots would say that.”
As a migrant or a child of migrants, it does seem for a long time that your perception of whether you are something – nationality, a local – is based on external attitudes to you, rather than your own. That your sense of being that, whether it is Australian or Scottish, or whatever, is informed by that rather than any sense of connection.
What then does the traditional music of Scotland mean to him now? Another exotic music to find a path through, or something closer?
“It’s the soundtrack to my upbringing and I think of different ideas of home when I hear it,” Shibe says. “I spent a lot of time at Gaelic festivals when I was younger, with folk musicians, and there was a lunchtime ceilidh band rehearsal at school. It’s part of the climate here, as normal as the autumnal cold.”
When music is so clearly of a place, particular when it is ubiquitous, it can lose or not have a sense of specialness. Was there a time when he started to see it as more than just the music of the place, and instead as music that was resonating with him?
“Yes, but also the fact that it is of a place is what makes it so powerful as well. For me that for me is a strength: it is evocative and distinct [and] my relationship with Scottish music is always expanding into different areas that I hadn’t anticipated. So I spend a lot more time with Scottish musicians than I used to and I’ve got a collaboration I’m putting together with Aidan O’Rourke in December after I get back from Australia and it’s been really rejuvenating.
“In Scotland, in these manuscripts that hold Scottish sources, Scottish versions of Dowland’s lachrimae for instance, there were also folk, what we see now as folk tunes, and it was really that recently, in the 1800s even, that we did not make these distinctions [between] folk music and ‘higher’ music. It was really seen as pretty one and the same and when you come into contact with the lute manuscripts that is crystal clear.”
The idea maybe that traditional airs were things you played in the parlour rather than the concert hall lasted for a while in certain quarters?
“A lot of the sources in the lute books, a lot of the time this music was played privately and there wasn’t an audience in the way that we think about it: it was still essentially salon music.”
Does this traditional music come with vitality, discovery and freshness for him rather than the fustiness some see in tradition?
“I don’t see the traditional necessarily as fusty. It depends how it’s treated: we can’t help but treat these pieces as contemporary things, that’s what we are always doing as performers, contextualising them.”
One of the contemporary pieces in the program, Julia Wolfe’s LAD – written originally for nine bagpipes – is an American take on Scotland; the piece by James McMillan, From Galloway, is an English perspective on Scotland. These are an outsider perspective on what Scotland sounds like or feels like, or is.
“I think all of these pieces are just good pieces you know. It’s interesting to me that they come from this specific point of view and I think what Julie has done, in using the bagpipes, making this amazing bagpipe music, is music that when you hear it on other instruments is almost immediately identifiable as bagpipe music,” Shibe says.
“I think that says something about the strength of the diaspora. It says something about the spirit of the pipes. It is also piece that as a guitarist is so seductive because it has a forcefulness that the guitar is rarely able to muster.”
LAD is anything but gentle guitar music: it feels imposing, it cuts through and is a demanding piece because of its forcefulness. This has clear appeal for some, maybe generationally, though that same thing can trouble.
“I feel like some of my favourite performances have been when you’re on the stage but you can feel it vibrating. It’s a thrilling experience if the audience are in the state for it, which is not always the case.”
Much the same could be said of the work of Martyn Bennett, a Canadian-Scottish composer who, until his early death at 33, melded Celtic traditions and contemporary formal music with an electronic base. There is more than a shared expansive view of what music can be that draws Shibe to Bennett.
“I went to the same school as Martyn did, albeit he wasn’t there when I was there, and his presence was really deeply felt. We would play his compositions in the orchestra, as cellists,” Shibe recalls. “For example the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 2001, one of his pieces, Mackay’s Memoirs, was played and I remember when we recorded that in a studio in Glasgow, it was a couple of days after he passed away, it was a very powerful experience.
“As I got older I got more interested in what he was doing musically with those albums like Grit and Bothy Culture and I recognised that what he was moving towards was more what we think of as traditional classical composition. So that was interesting that he was moving through all these different phases relatively seamlessly.”
Describing Bennett as “an EDM [electronic dance music] artist who was way ahead of his time”, Shibe concedes some of the musical innovations may sound a bit dated now but “that fusion of tapes from the ‘50s of Wee Free preachers and beats and bagpipes is just as heady as it was then. And actually, just as unique.
“Nobody has really done it with the same vigour since.”
If there is an element of the time-stamped about some of Bennett’s work it probably can be put down in large part to us being more familiar now with the combinations and the sounds so the shock is less immediate – we can forget how startling and must have been at the beginning. But there is still a thrill in the way he brings these elements together, viscerally and intellectually, being of Scotland and beyond, both challenging and inviting.
Remember, as a certain 19-year-old once said, “performers should not be scared of playing complex and good music, and listeners should try not to be scared of listening to it”.
The Australian Chamber Orchestra and Sean Shibe will perform the Scotland Unbound series:
QPAC Concert Hall, Brisbane - November 11
City Recital Hall, Sydney - November 12-13
Llewellyn Hall, Canberra - November 16
Arts Centre, Melbourne - November 17-18
Adelaide Town Hall - November 19
Perth Concert Hall - November 20
A version of this story was originally published in the Australian Chamber Orchestra program.
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