Born in Japan but brought up in the UK, Ben Nobuto is an award-winning young composer with a thrillingly individual voice. His music defies categorisation, leaping across stylistic boundaries and creating exhilarating sonic juxtapositions. Nobuto’s Hallelujah Sim receives its world premiere at the First Night of the Proms on 19 July…
‘I was always curious about music, but maybe slightly in denial. I remember my friends saw music as the doss subject at school and wouldn’t take it seriously. But secretly I thought it was really enjoyable! At age 13 or 14 I was improvising a lot on the piano, but didn’t know it was called composition.
‘At university I wrote a lot of music for myself to play on piano with electronic parts. That felt like a really intuitive way of making music, as it was all based in my body and what I know. I studied classical music, composition and the basics of theory, so I’ve had that grounding, but once you have that knowledge it’s about being able to turn it into something that feels natural and authentic.
‘I was listening to a lot of Coltrane, free jazz and electronic producers. I had quite a segregated view of those things, like they were separate things that I wasn’t allowed to mix. But gradually I let myself do whatever I wanted, and it felt more natural. It’s like I was allowing myself to lean in to all those sides of me that I felt I had to surpress. It was a nice process to go through.
‘After finishing university, Manchester Collective offered me a commission out of the blue. I wrote a piece called Serenity 2.0, which is for string quartet, electronics and percussion. They took that on tour and it was quite a big thing for me; I felt like a composer then, but I still feel weird about calling myself a composer, because the word feels quite loaded.
‘A lot of my writing method is based around my fingers and what feels good. Sometimes it’s nice to start off by improvising and lock into a groove that feels right, and then that’s the basis for something you refine later. I prefer to go from moment to moment and ask myself, ‘Is this interesting to listen to?’ So it’s a moment-to-moment feeling, deciding whether it’s enjoyable to listen to, as if I was an audience member, not knowing anything about it but experiencing it on a purely sensory level.
‘I have this weird insecurity about the Japanese side of my identity, but it’s interesting to use in music. Japanese words sound more like sound objects to me; I really like singing in Japanese, because you have that layer of ambiguity – you’re saying something, but it’s not clear what you’re saying. Japanese Pop is an aesthetic I got interested in and lean into – that kind of sparkly, flashy, hyper-consumerist landscape of internet memes and saturation and the dazzling quality of it all.
‘Having my music in the First Night of the Proms is a bit surreal. They asked if I wanted to write a short-ish piece for the BBC Symphony Chorus and said I could add other elements, like electronics, percussion or strings if I wanted. I like the idea of applying structures from videogames or films, narrative ideas, onto the music. So in Hallelujah Sim there’s a voice in the electronics part, sort of like a narrator, telling the chorus to do certain things, like stages of a videogame, and they can only progress through the piece once they’ve completed that task. There are different types of ‘Hallelujah’ and each one is like a different level in the game.
‘I’ve been working on my debut album for quite a while. It’s a mix of lots of different instruments and electronics. I like the idea of applying a producer mentality to classical recordings, so if I can I’ll try to record each person individually and then put it together in Logic, the way pop music is recorded, so you get a really clean, nice-sounding result.’
Photo: Phil Sharp