The renowned composer sits down with Marcus Wratten to discuss how queer nightlife inspired his latest concerto, the closing down of LGBTQ+ venues, and his own path in classical music.
Gavin Higgins’ latest composition took 11 months to write, but 20 years to come to fruition. Back in 2006, award-winning clarinettist Mark Simpson commissioned Higgins to write “a little piece for clarinet and piano”. It was his first ever paid composition. Higgins promised to one day thank him by writing him a clarinet concerto. “You talk about these things but it’s really hard to find the right place, the right orchestra, the right situation for this thing to happen,” Higgins says. It’s no wonder: since that first paid piece, Higgins has become one of the UK’s most sought-after composers, with his music heard on stage at BBC Proms, the Royal Opera House and Cheltenham Festival.
Finally, the right place, orchestra and situation have arrived, and Clarinet Concerto, a whopping 35-minute nocturne inspired by queer nightlife, will be performed by Simpson at the Liverpool Philharmonic this month. It “feels like a homecoming” for Higgins, who came of age across the way in Manchester, having moved there aged 16 to study the French horn at the prestigious Chetham’s School of Music. It was Manchester that gave the composer his own first taste of queer nightlife (“A lot of time spent on Canal Street!”) and where he sneaked out of school to watch his first ballet, a performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which entranced him into writing his own music. “I have no idea if it was even a particularly good production,” he says now, but back then he “sat through the whole thing mind-blown.” In another full circle moment, The Rite of Spring will be performed alongside Clarinet Concerto.
Today, Higgins is video calling from down south, speaking from a room in Peckham. The wall behind him is plastered end to end with printed photos. In conversation he’s cerebral and warm, apologising instantly for his gravelly, post-cold voice and occasionally darting off screen to scour for books that influenced his latest work. Clarinet Concerto initially began as a piece about ghosts, and then the nighttime, conceived as Higgins read Dancer from the Dance, the 1978 novel by queer writer Andrew Holleran. In it, damaged young men run amok, savouring the debauchery of queer nightlife in 1970s New York. The book got him thinking about the unique opportunity that nighttime culture offers queer people. “It’s historically a place where we could meet other people without prying eyes and fear of repercussions,” he says. “I thought, ‘Maybe this is a piece about queer nights?’”
Gavin Higgins. (Joseph Wong)The finished product is split into four movements, each inspired by a piece of queer literature. The first, with Holleran’s novel as its basis, is ‘We Were Ghosts’, which “builds into this kind of ghostly procession” representing historical queer trailblazers marching onwards. The second, ‘Sawdust and Sweat’, prompted by Jeremy Atherton Lin’s 2021 cultural memoir Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, captures the tensions running through queer nightlife; hypermasculinity rubbing against camp and flamboyance, consensual kink brushing shoulders with unprovoked violence. “It’s very noisy. It’s very aggressive,” Higgins explains of the soundscape. “But there are these moments of flamboyant sort of frippery.”
Movement three ‘And Love Spooled Before Us’ came from David Tait’s poem End Credits, about a clandestine relationship unraveling. It’s depicted with a duet between Simpson’s clarinet and the orchestra’s cor anglais player. “It’s very sensual and a bit romantic and builds to a big climax and then there’s a really long kind of bonkers cadenza.” The fourth is ‘Everyone Moves Their Extraordinary Bodies’ and it’s “super fast, very playful, high energy – not like techno,” Higgins laughs, but “a fast, dancey concerto finale.” Guillaume Dustan’s short 1997 novel I’m Going Out Tonight, in which the protagonist gets progressively inebriated during an evening exploring Paris’s gay scene, formed the basis of the finale.
For a set of stories told not through words but through wood, brass and strings, the imagery Higgins conjures up is vivid. Perhaps it’s because he knows how visceral it can feel being part of queer night culture, as a former Canal Street regular. “This is why I find the closure of so many queer spaces and gay bars quite sad,” he says, shaking his slicked curls. In London alone, more than half of LGBTQ+ venues closed between 2006 and 2022.
Higgins suggests that, previously, LGBTQ+ venues may have shuttered as the community became increasingly welcomed into heterosexual spaces. But the tide has turned once again. “We’re not there any more. With the direction of travel it feels like those queer spaces are so important.” He points to Turkey, where dozens of people were recently arrested as part of the country’s crackdown on LGBTQ+ venues and activists. Closer to home, two Brighton gay bars announced their closure within days of each other in August. “I feel like queer people are under attack everywhere again. It feels very reminiscent of the 80s and the 70s, right? It’s a shame that so many of these places are closed down.” Still, Higgins is an optimist: “The places will pop up again.”
Gavin Higgins. (Joseph Wong)Clarinet Concerto is Higgins’ first explicitly queer composition, and even then, with its origin as a piece about ghosts, it’s unintentionally so. Other facets of his identity, such as his working class background, his deep bond with the North, and his lived experience of Tourette syndrome, have filtered into his work on and off the score sheet. Why not sexuality? “I was a horn player,” he offers. I think he’s demurring, but he follows up with an anecdote that makes sense. While at the Royal Northern College of Music, he gave up the French horn to compose, and didn’t write a single piece of French Horn music until he turned 40, two years ago (The piece, Horn Concerto, ultimately won Higgins his second Ivor Novello award). He worried the instrument was too close to his heart. He felt the same about sexuality, wondering whether “somebody else could do a better piece about this than me”. Just maybe, he shrugs, the rolling back of LGBTQ+ rights has played on his subconscious enough for him to finally write a piece on queer culture. Yet he concedes: “It’s sort of out of your control in a way. You’re just like, ‘Oh, this is the piece I’m writing.’”
If Higgins had explicitly intended to write a queer composition, he suggests that the classical music industry would’ve welcomed it with open arms. “There are just so many gay and queer musical composers. There’s just so many of us. It doesn’t feel like it’s this thing. It doesn’t feel like as a gay person, I’m struggling to break into the classical music world. It’s just always been this weird quirk.” He reels off several historic and groundbreaking LGBTQ+ composers: Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Robert Schumann. He believes that in the music of some, like Tchaikovsky, repression can be heard and felt through his work. “These days, it’s different because obviously I don’t think most western queer composers feel like they’re sort of repressed in any way.”
It helps, he says, that the industry is full of oddballs who have gone in search of their people, much like queer folk have to. “I mean, if you spend any time with classical musicians, you’ll realise they’re all complete freaks,” he scoffs lovingly. He should know, having spent the majority of his life around them. Growing up near the Forest of Dean, he was brought up among a family of musicians. His grandfather conducted the local brass band, and Higgins was playing his first instrument, a cornet, at three years old. “It’s just kaleidoscopic,” he says of the “strange collection of weirdos” that inhabit his industry. “And so as a queer person, I’ve never found that it’s been a barrier for me in classical music.”
A glance at his résumé and it’s clear that whatever barriers he’s faced (The economic barrier, he says, is very real), he has overcome. Sitting alongside his Ivor Novellos are a Royal Philharmonic Society award, Sky Arts award, and a Critics Circle award, while some of his symphonic brain space is dedicated to being the composer-in-association with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. A far cry from that first potentially-not-very-good ballet he saw back in Manchester aged 16, his own ballets What Wild Ecstasy (2012) and Dark Arteries (2015) received rave reviews.
Chatting with Higgins, you get the sense that even if the accolades and acclaim were absent, he’d still spend 11 months of his life beavering away on his next concerto. More than any praise, what he appreciates most is hearing from audience members who have interpreted his compositions in different ways. “That’s the amazing thing about classical music for me,” he smiles. “Wherever you are in the world, you’re all reading off the same pieces of music which just have dots on them, and somehow you’re able to convey emotions and feelings through that. It’s amazing.”
Gavin Higgins’ Clarinet Concerto will be performed as part of The Rite of Spring at Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra on Saturday 17 October.
