Sun and Moon, Sea and Land: an interview with pianist and composer Robert Sword
“We’re all on a journey – as thinkers, listeners, writers and, for some, artists. These personal journeys are non-linear and sometimes bewildering to ourselves and others. They are influenced by the environment and the people around you, as well as internal cycles of catharsis, reflection, renewal and everything in between. There are so many variables.” —Robert Sword
There are journeys undertaken with fanfare and intent. And then there are journeys embarked on that are restless and wayward. It is the second kind of journey that inspired this album. Drawing from the journey that the main character, Goldmund, undertakes in Herman Hesse’s famous novel, Narcissus and Goldmund, pianist and composer Robert Sword uses notes to bring the story to life. Through the power of solo piano, we hear Goldmund’s restlessness, along with his struggle between spiritual and worldly desires. In these notes we hear loss and joy, hopefulness and sadness. In these notes we hear echoes of our own restless journeys and the ways we balance the many parts of ourselves in our quest for meaning and happiness.
Robert Sword composes soundtracks for film, theatre, television and games, with recent projects including Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles with Chichester Minerva Theatre and 1984 with Theatre Royal Bath. He co-founded Sandtimer, an indie folk band, and is active as an arranger. In 2022 he released Reshaping the Clouds, an album of rerecorded early piano compositions. It is an honor to feature him on No Dead Guys.
I understand you started piano lessons at age 6 and that improvisation and composition grew naturally out of your “accidental misreadings” of the pieces you were supposed to be learning. Did your teachers encourage you in this exploration or was this something you did all on your own?
Yes, my pathway into composition was a bit unusual! I was not the world’s best sight reader as a young child—key signatures in particular were my Achilles’ heel. A misread melody in G major or D minor would sound quite modal (not that I knew that word at the time!) and I often found the misread melodies more appealing than the correct classical ones. I’d bank my own versions of the pieces to play on my own and, sooner or later I realised I quite liked making my own tunes from scratch! I was very lucky that my piano teachers were pretty encouraging about composition, as well as finding repertoire they thought would inspire me. I still remember excitedly bringing a floppy disk loaded with MIDI compositions to school, which my teacher would make suggestions on how to improve as we played it back through the school keyboard.
When did you decide to make music your career and who or what prompted you to do so?
I was very passionate about music of all kinds as a child and listened to a lot of film soundtracks and classical music, as well as pop, rock and folk. Inspired by these genres, I spent a lot of time fiddling around on a digital keyboard, layering up different sounds and making songs and orchestral pieces. Over time, I realised that composing and performing was the thing I loved doing most. Although I fully recognised that music was an incredibly difficult and often uneven path, I was less intimidated by it than by the prospect of figuring out what else to do!
I read that you graduated with honors in music and English literature from Cardiff University. How has your immersion in two art forms shaped your compositions?
Being one of only several British universities offering a combined BA in Music and English Literature, Cardiff University was pretty unique. I felt really lucky to get in on all fronts—it is a lovely city and creatively a very inspiring place. The analytical approach to literature that we were taught has helped when it comes to writing music for film and theatre—there are so many ways of representing subtly different shades of emotion in a soundtrack, and to parse the script or the screen for that nuance or wider context is definitely a useful skill to have some foundation in.
I love how varied your career is—one that includes composing for theatre and film, co-founding Sandtimer, an indie folk band, orchestrating and arranging for multiple artists, including Damian Montagu's 'In A South Downs Way' album which reached No. 1 in the UK Classical Chart, among other things. Did you start out with a master career plan or did it evolve organically over time?
Thanks so much—it’s been a rather rambling but very fulfilling journey so far! Although I do try and plan things quite meticulously, I do find that most of the more lucky breaks I’ve had have just been complete happenstance. For example, my work with Damian on ‘In A South Downs Way’ resulted from a chance meeting with him at a recording session, which itself was an indirect result of another chance meeting. There’s a scary amount of serendipity in all of it!
Congratulations on the release of your latest album, Sun and Moon, Sea and Land which features you as both composer and performer. I understand that these pieces were influenced by Herman Hesse’s famous novel, Narcissus and Goldmund. Why did this story seem perfect for a musical journey?
It’s exciting to be finally releasing this album. I began reading Narcissus and Goldmund some years ago as part of a drive to start reading more proactively again. Simultaneously, I was ‘improvising with intent’ at the piano and starting to regain confidence in my solo piano music after a bit of a lull. I would read a chapter or two of the novel and, shortly after, sit at the piano and compose with the characters, emotions and landscapes of the story in mind. The novel’s main character, Goldmund, has a deep restlessness and is torn between spiritual and worldly pursuits, and I did feel like this sums up a lot of artists quite well. The story has an anachronistic, mysterious setting, so it gave me a lot of space for interpretation and expression.
How do you feel Sun and Moon, Sea and Land can evoke a universal sense of journey in those who are unfamiliar with the plot of Narcissus and Goldmund?
I really wanted to capture Goldmund’s restlessness, as well as the joy and melancholy of the wayward, directionless journeys he embarks on. I’m a huge fan of chromatic sidestepping and enjoy building a melody around multiple tonal centres. I connect these shifts with a sense of getting lost, or of discovery, which I think is an important part of any journey. I wanted the album sequence to loosely chart Goldmund’s narrative, involving discovery, sadness, renewal, rediscovery… and I guess sadness again!
Given that you’ve written and recorded for many different instruments, why did you feel solo piano was the perfect choice for the pieces included on Sun and Moon, Sea and Land?
Piano is probably the instrument that feels most like home for me. Having already recorded a piano album and EP previously, I had long been trying to compile a new set of piano pieces which I felt made for a valid follow up. Sun and Moon, Sea and Land definitely feels like part of that series. I did actually experiment a lot with adding some additional textures, drones, guitars and electronics for this new album but ultimately realised, via advice from a few close friends, that the original unadorned piano recordings were the ones to proceed with.
What was the best thing about being the pianist on this recording, and what was the most stressful part of the job?
The best part was probably just the routine. I was dog-sitting in a rural music studio for a week and got into a nice pattern of early morning and late afternoon walks, recording in-between. It was great knowing that there was more than enough time to get through the recordings and that made me enjoy the process and relax as I played.
That being said, the most stressful moments were the final 30 seconds of the longer pieces! I found that the closer to the end I got, the more convinced I became that I’d made some subtle mistake somewhere in the recording. Thinking about that would then distract me from what I was playing and I’d make an actual mistake.
The second most stressful thing is listening back through four or five takes of each piece and trying to work out which is the one to take forward. Sometimes there’s just an energy in a performance which subtly marks it out from the others, and I spend a lot of time listening back for that.
One of the things I enjoyed about all the pieces on this album is your emphasis on spaciousness. Who or what inspired you to write music that celebrates not just the notes but also the decay of the sound?
Thank you so much! I’m really pleased you felt that, as creating a bit more space in my piano compositions has been quite an active process for me. As a teenager I definitely crowbarred some unnecessary technical detail into my compositions to show I could ‘play’. The process of maturing as a composer has, for me, involved realising that the music needs to speak for itself, rather than adhere to specific levels of technical prowess! So this album has been another step in that journey of separating out the egos of the composer and the musician, I guess, and just letting the simpler pieces be simpler. I was keen to write with a focus on melody and enjoyed giving those tunes space to breathe.
You have many lovely pieces on this album but a particular favorite is “Improvisation I” which seemed to evoke Vaughn Williams’s hymn-like texture and yearning spaciousness. Why did you feel it needed to end unresolved rather than returning to the tonic?
Vaughan Williams is a big influence on my music and he has quite a unique style of piano writing which I was probably channelling a bit here! I played Improvisation I in the early hours of the morning and quite liked the continually questioning nature of the harmonic movement. Although it was a fairly on-the-fly decision to end the piece on that chord, I think I was trying to emphasise that lack of resolution and restlessness. Generally, I absolutely love albums where a few tracks end on an unresolved chord, because it can then pair, often in a really unexpected way, with the first chord of the next track.
I’m also quite fond of “Improvisation III” which evoked a sense of liturgical chant with its searching single-line melody and almost-dry texture. What inspired this piece and why was it so different than the other tracks on this album?
I’m really glad you enjoyed this one! I find that when I compose at the piano I can easily fall into certain habits—specific chord voicings, hand shapes, melodic ideas. These habits can occasionally become traps; I am continually trying to challenge or subvert them in some way. Rainy Island Blues started out as an exercise in limiting myself to two notes at a time, and Improvisation III was one step further into pure monophony! I also avoided using the sustain pedal and instead put a heavy book across some of the black keys to create at least a bit of resonance. It was heavily inspired by the shakuhachi playing of Masakazu Yoshizawa from his album Zen Garden and the way he subtly shifts between modes.
Will you be selling sheet music for the pieces on Sun and Moon, Sea and Land? If so, where might we purchase it?
I have transcribed all the pieces into sheet music and am looking into the best way to share them! To get them properly printed, along with the album’s artwork (by Yuka Matsuhashi), is obviously the dream but is a big commitment! I suppose I’ll need to wait and see what the demand is like. In the meantime, I will probably try and sell them on digital sheet music platforms. It’s on the to-do list, for sure!
What current and future plans are you most excited about?
Currently, I’m just really excited about releasing the album! It’s always nerve-racking not knowing how it’s going to pan out, but I’ve been delighted so far with the response to the singles from listeners and radio DJs. I’ve been contacting a lot of college radios in the US and Canada with the album as I wanted to try and shake up my usual promotional approach (and I also just love tuning into random college radio stations sometimes). It’s been lovely to see the music being playlisted and I hope it reaches people it wouldn’t otherwise reach.
Beyond this album, I’ve been working on the music for an as-yet unreleased ‘rhythm game’ by an indie developer and I’ve found it one of the most creatively stimulating soundtracks I’ve ever had the privilege of working on. I’ll be looking forward to sharing a bit more about this as the game development progresses.
What advice can you offer young pianists and composers seeking to create a career in music?
I’m still very much learning the ropes myself, but on an existential level, I think the main thing is to have a sense of what you’re doing it for, whether it’s moving and inspiring people, the thrill of performing live, catharsis or anything else. A career as a pianist and/or composer is a very difficult and frequently dispiriting endeavour. Setting some kind of intention or principle with which you approach the work can help ground you in those more difficult moments.
On a practical level—and at the risk of sounding cantankerously Luddite—I’d always advise those pianists and composers starting out to be wary of how much stock they put into social media and various online platforms. Getting on an official Spotify playlist or a viral TikTok can feel like an end in itself, but what do you do when the moment’s passed? And, if either of those companies collapsed, how do you avoid going down with the ship? When people connect with the artist rather than a specific viral video, relaxation playlist or whatever, they’re more likely to stick with you when everyone moves to a different app.
It’s all easier said than done, though, and the above are perhaps mantras to self more than outward advice! Ultimately, if you’re making and playing music in any form and enjoying it, that is a noble end in itself.
Robert Sword is a composer and pianist from southeast England. As a musician he has toured in Canada and Germany as well as performing at the Dora Stouzker Hall, the Wales Millennium Centre, Glastonbury Festival and Wilderness.
As a composer he has written a variety of solo and ensemble music for performance. He also composes soundtracks for film, theatre, television and games, with recent projects including Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles with Chichester Minerva Theatre and 1984 with Theatre Royal Bath. He has also previously arranged strings for music by Diane Warren and Damian Montagu, including Montagu’s collaboration with Hugh Bonneville, In A South Downs Way, which reached No. 1 in the UK Classical Chart.
In 2022 he released Reshaping the Clouds, an album of rerecorded early piano compositions. On 29th November 2024, he released his second solo piano album, Sun and Moon, Sea and Land, inspired by Herman Hesse’s novel ‘Narcissus and Goldmund’. His compositions and arrangements have been played on a variety of BBC Radio stations and in their popular BBC Sounds playlist, The Sleeping Forecast.