The Heritage Orchestra

Collaborations don’t come much more intriguing than that of the non-traditional, non-classical Heritage Orchestra and former UK beatbox champion, Beardyman. The two go head to head at the De La Warr Pavilion on Saturday November 14, for an improvised show, where beats, loops and vocal gymnastics will collide with strings, brass and outstanding musicianship. We caught up with the Heritage Orchestra’s artistic director, Chris Wheeler, for a chat about the gig and becoming the De La Warr’s resident band.

E: Can you tell me a bit about how the Heritage Orchestra started out?
CW: We came together through a club night, which was called Heritage, in London, and the orchestra was put together by myself and Jules Buckley, who’s the conductor and head composer and main music director, and I guess I’m called the artistic director, and decide which direction we go in and all that kind of thing.
We were mates from the Guildhall conservatoire, the Guildhall School of Music. We basically, five years ago in 2004, got a rabble of our mates together from music college and decided to put this orchestra together for this particular club night that basically mixed up, I wouldn’t say classical music because we’re not a classical orchestra at all, but definitely mixed up electronica with traditional forms that you might see in the classical world: string quartets, guitarists, solo guitars and harpists and all that kind of stuff. That’s when I started, so we did that and it got such a good response.
I was promoting this night, but jacked it in to follow the course of the orchestra because it was a bit more of an exciting project. And that was five years ago. Since then we’ve progressively collaborated with more and more people, because that’s our remit as an orchestra, to collaborate and create new work. We’ve got quite a big roster of projects under our belt and the De La Warr is the next progression on from that really. Every orchestra dreams of having a residency with a really forward thinking venue, that’s pretty much what they all go for, because that gives you stability and the infrastructure to help support interesting projects and that really is the next stage. And that’s really where we’re at, at the moment.
But essentially the orchestra’s made up from really superb players from London that are all below 30 years old, so it’s all youthful and open minded, which is key.

E: Tell me about the residency at the De La Warr.
CW: Well, we’re not going to reside there, so residency probably isn’t the right word. It’s more like a partnership. We could maybe call it a creative partnership, but then that’s got connotations as well. I don’t know. Basically we will work with them by devising unique projects for the De La Warr and work closely with them and try and learn from their expertise in certain areas, like visual art. We should be able to bounce off each other. With Laura Ducceschi, who’s the head of music programming, there was an obvious synergy and similar train of thought about music. She could have easily have gone to other big orchestras and asked them to do things. But essentially we have a very strong similarity of ethos with the De La Warr, in their modernist approach I guess. What we do as an orchestra is try and represent things that are happening that are of cultural significance now and aren’t necessarily traditional and really that’s what the idea of modernism is as well, so it really kind of suits the building. So there’s a lot that kind of resonates between what the De La Warr is visually, what it presents and where the Heritage Orchestra is heading as well. It was just great that they picked up on that and could see that it was something worth exploring, because it’s down to them really.

E: You’ve collaborated with some pretty diverse names: how have the collaborations come about?
CW: It’s just chipping away really. We started collaborating from the word go and as an orchestra you can’t really just stick in one genre, you have to be flexible. It’s quite a niche thing to be doing and there’re plenty of orchestras who play classical music. We don’t play classical music, you can make a point of that, we’re not a classical orchestra. People expect from our name that maybe we’re going to be traditional and the fact is the name has subversive reasoning behind it and really it’s about reinventing the traditional format of the orchestra and absorbing modern cultural references.
But all these collaborations, they just feed each other. We keep knocking on the door of certain venues and certain producers and coming up with our ideas and presenting them to people. Eventually they say yes and that’s why we got to do the Meltdown Festival with Massive Attack in 2008. Unkle as well. Everything fuels it.
When you’re doing something interesting and alternative and it’s powerful, because an orchestra is such a powerful thing anyway, that once you’ve hit the nail on the head and are able to achieve certain results, word spreads throughout the various networks in the music industry and slowly in the arts world, it filters through. Essentially we have to work with people as well to come up with ideas. Everything is a symbiotic relationship with whoever wants to come and present stuff to us; we’re really an open book. We don’t say no to much really.

E: What was it like working with people like Dizzee Rascal and DJ Yoda?
CW: Well the Dizzee Rascal one is actually a current one that’s happening at the moment, because that’s part of the Electric Proms.
Dizzee Rascal is ongoing, that’s one of our more commercial gigs. As an orchestra we want to be able to get an income and generate profile for the orchestra, that’s one aspect to our work. So we will do recording sessions, we’ve done film sound-tracks; we do large sessions with a big part of the orchestra, or very small sessions with a small part of the orchestra. That’s just our commercial work, and then on the other aspect we have to be very artistic and more creative, more reinterpretations and clever orchestrations and stuff like that. We’re just trying to be as flexible as possible; the modern musician is able to do much more diverse styles of music than 50 years ago. We’re the iPod generation who really absorb what’s going on around us and we should really capitalise on that and do as much of everything as possible.

E: How’s the gig with Beardyman and DJ Switch going to work?
CW: The first half’s going to involve the Concerto for Turntables, written by Gabriel Prokofiev, which we’ve played that before. We did a radio session with the BBC and got a lot of interest, that was with DJ Yoda initially, but he’s not doing it, so it’s with DJ Switch. And that’s just an exploration of notated scratching for the turntablist, sampling and merging it with an amplified orchestra in a traditional concerto format. The second half will be this work with Beardyman, which again is in development at the moment, so it’s not that obvious where it’s going to go at the moment. We’re work-shopping it and having Skype conference calls between various people in different parts of the world to try and figure it out. Essentially what we’re aiming for is a very free and spontaneous, and probably improvised to largely improvised, set which will involve the string section being sampled, and improvised brass and winds and then Beardyman sampling and triggering things and layering the orchestra. It’s very likely that Jules, our conductor, will be involved somehow, but we don’t know yet how. But it’s going to be a very unique and totally new way of working with a vocal artist and an orchestra. Hopefully it will exploit our expertise at working with beats, amplified sound and electronic styles. The open mindedness of our players will really be key for making a unique show.

E: What do you think of him as an artist and a collaborator?
CW: I’ve only recently got to know him briefly and I think he’s perfect. He’s absolutely got the right attitude. He’s musically astute and trained, not maybe in a conservatoire way like our violinists would be, but an expert in his own field, so we’re going to learn from him a lot as well. He might want to learn about how this is going to work with an orchestra, but we want to learn from him as well. He’s obviously got the humour and the attitude and to be honest, we’re a very friendly orchestra and we’re up for a laugh, and Beardyman has got great comedy and musical talent, so I think it’s going to be great fun project.

E: Tell me a little bit about the improvised project with The Bays?
CW: We’re continuing to do this. Basically it’s a small orchestra playing with The Bays, but the music is written in real time by two composers who sit on the stage. They initially start writing at the beginning of the concert and the music slowly appears on LCD computer screens in front of the musicians. They start with a blank score, so there’s absolutely no music, so there’s a bit of pause at the beginning. Then they start writing, music starts appearing, then the musicians start playing. As soon as the musicians start playing, The Bays, who are an electronic quartet, start to improvise against that newly written music and how it’s being played. And basically the composers will respond to them and start writing the next phrase for the winds or the brass, or strings, and that will appear eventually on the computer screens. And then Jules the conductor will eventually structure all of these bits of music that are popping up, because he’ll have a computer screen in front of him as well. So it’s a completely improvised real time composition where the composers respond and the musicians play and everyone improvises and you just never know where it’s going to go. It really is completely up to chance and what the composers do and how everyone responds to one another makes it very unusual and kind of risky.

E: It seems pretty ground breaking stuff. When you first performed it, was it equal parts nerves, equal parts excitement?
CW: I think so. We really do love orchestral music. Don’t get us wrong, but sometimes in traditional concert hall there’s a certain barrier between the orchestra and the audience. It’s very hard; they’re playing music written in front of them and that’s absolutely the way it is. And what we found is that musicians, because they’re sight reading, effectively they’re really psyched up because they’ve got to be on the ball: there’s no run of the mill reading repertoire. So there’s excitement on the stage which goes directly out into the audience, which is quite rare in an orchestral gig to have that spontaneous connection with a crowd. So the players really love that, because it’s not something they get every day in that kind of setting. But nerves, I don’t think anyone gets nervous anymore really. They’re all pros.

E: Have you got collaborations planned for the future and do you have a hit-list of people you’d like to perform with?
CW: We have got a hit-list, I hadn’t thought about bringing that up. We have definitely got a hit-list. There are a few crazy artists that we’d like to work with and we’ve got a few things pencilled in. We’d love to get something going with the Noisettes on a more mainstream tip. We’re good friends with them from many, many years ago, so it would be a good laugh to do something with them. We’re doing a little bit for Spiritualized, which is coming up. I’d really like to get something going with, well, I don’t want to give too much away because if some other orchestra reads this they’ll probably get in touch with them and pay them three times as much as us.

E: Surely it wouldn’t just come down to money.
CW: You’d think wouldn’t you. I really wanted to do this gig with Grizzly Bear, but they ended up doing something with the London Symphony Orchestra. But we’ve got more coming up with Unkle, which is really for next year and beyond, and I think there’s going to be some great stuff there. We might well do something with The Cinematic Orchestra as well. There’s quite a few on the wish list, but I won’t go through them all. We’d love to do something with someone from Warp Records: Jamie Lidell or Squarepusher – something like that would be cool for a really out there gig. We’re going to try and do something with Bat For Lashes as well, which we’re really excited about. I think that’s going to happen but I’m not sure.

E: What can our readers expect from a Heritage Orchestra and Beardyman gig?
CW: I can tell them what not to expect. Don’t expect a classic orchestral gig for a start. It’s going to be a standing room gig, which will be fully amplified. It’s going to start off with some very experimental classical experimental stuff, with the Turntable Concerto. And it’s going to progress into a more sort of full on … I don’t know … the thing is we don’t know what it’s going to turn out like. You know what Beardyman’s like, it’s going to be a really good entertaining front-man beatboxer, with an orchestra that’s ready to rock out. We’re a fully amplified orchestra, we mic up everything. So you’re not going to able to sit down and whisper to one another, it’s going to be up there and lively.