David Matthews – composer in residence at next month’s Hampstead and Highgate Festival – tells Gerald Isaaman he is wants to return classical music to the masses

CLASSICAL music has lost its lure for many people, who feel in particular that today’s new music is too difficult to contemplate and even believe that composers themselves are strictly odd people.
That’s the view of David Matthews, the eminent composer in residence at next month’s Hampstead and Highgate Festival, which will be launched with a Hampstead Parish Church concert that promotes the world premiere of a new cello piece he has written as a festival commission.
And it is because he believes that the festival helps to break down musical barriers that he has become an admirer of George Vass, the festival’s energetic artistic director, and his ambitions to provide a meeting place for artistes and public alike.
“The interaction between composers and the public is so important, so vital,” Matthews says. “George has been able to introduce new work without putting people off.
“And that’s why it is a such good idea to make a local festival using local artists. It provides a sense of community. And a local festival like this one is something to which people feel they can belong.”
No fewer than five works by 62-year-old Matthews are being played at the festival, which opens on 12 May.
He will introduce some himself and will be available for people to talk to him at the concerts, something he enjoys.
“Often the public tend to think new music is difficult and that most composers are odd people,” he said. “They don’t understand the process of writing music, though it is a very normal process to me and very basic, going back to tribal societies.
“Music should relate to life but people think that classical music has lost that link, that it no longer relates to life, and it is now very hard to get back something that is, for me and others, an essential part of life.”
Pop music, which now dominates so many young people’s lives, has of course been mainly responsible, the more so because it deals with elemental feelings, in particular love, lost and gained. Matthews accepts and enjoys some of it. He says: “There is a lot of pop music that is doing a lot of harm, basically because it is no real music,” he protested. “So much is commercial and designed only to make money.”
For something dramatically different you will need to hear Matthews’ Journeying Songs, the 10-minute work which the cellist Ralph Kirshbaum will debut at the Parish Church. It’s inspiration comes from a two-day walk of almost 40 miles that Matthews did, from Lowestoft to the ancient sands of Dunwich.
It is an area he knows from his early days working as an assistant to Benjamin Britten at Aldeburgh for three years from 1966, a composer he has also written a major book about, as well as a work on Michael Tippett, another of his considerable influences.
“I find walking very good for thinking out things and find myself very affected by what I see,” he explains. “I carry a piece of paper with me and write the first musical ideas in sketch form. And this walk was very song like.”
He completed the cello work within three weeks at his studio in Temple Fortune Hill, Hampstead Garden Suburb, which has been his home for nearly three years. A few changes have been made following a workshop with Kirshbaum and all now augurs well for the premiere.
That he became such a successful composer seems, in some ways, to surprise Matthews. His upbringing in Leytonstone wasn’t inside a musical family, there was no music teacher at his school and both he and his younger brother Colin, also a composer, gave up piano lessons when their teacher went off to have a baby.
“But suddenly it all came back in an exciting way,” he recalled. “At 16 I decided I wanted to be a composer. And that’s when I wrote my first piece.”
Frequent walks on Hampstead Heath – and even a quick visit to nearby Big Wood, in the heart of the Suburb — are a backdrop to his composition. “I am very affected by nature and affected by landscape,” he points out.
Indeed, his solitary Heath walks are currently playing a part in the composition of his sixth symphony, though he hesitates at the thought that the work will bear the name of Hampstead and its much loved poetic Heath.
But he is equally in touch with reality. “I like cities and I like London but it is horrifying when you come back from a trip and hear all that noise from the traffic,” he admitted.
“I suppose we have to put up with it. But it would be so much nicer if life was quieter.”

• The Hampstead and Highgate Festival runs from May 12 to May 21. 020 7722 1414; www.hamandhighfest.co.uk.