School's out as composer gets serious

By HEATH LEES

David Hamilton doesn't look like someone committing professional suicide lightly. There's plenty of mature grey around his temples to attest to his 45 years on the planet.

He has the careful, feline movements that large-framed people often cultivate. His gaze is thoughtful and arresting over the un-trendy, steel-framed glasses.

You get the feeling he can see outwards and inwards at the same time.

But Hamilton can't see into the future and this worries him a bit. After 21 years of building one of Auckland's most successful school music departments at Epsom Girls' Grammar, he has decided to pack in the steady job, the sure-fire super and the chance to coast a bit while younger colleagues take the strain.

Instead, Hamilton will become a full-time composer of "serious" music. In the small, market-obsessed music environment of New Zealand, it seems a bit like a kiwi leaving a dream patch of ground to try flying.

Politely, Hamilton rubbishes that idea.

"I'll still be teaching, but part-time. Please don't give the impression that I'm fed up with teaching. I like it. It's just that I need more time and space to compose."

Career decisions pressed on Hamilton a couple of years ago when he took a year's leave from teaching to be resident composer with the Auckland Philharmonia.

He loved being around professional musicians, writing music to order, always keeping up with commissions. Flying high, and with a flood of millennial commissions from around the country, he asked for - and was granted - another year off.

"During my first year of leave I completed 23 works. This year, coming back into school again, I realised I had to make a decision one way or the other, so I've opted for composing . It's a leap of faith but one I have to take."

Hamilton's leap is not quite into the unknown. He may already be the country's most performed composer. He hasn't counted recently, but he knows he's got more than 200 compositions out there.

What's more, they don't disappear after the first performance like a lot of composers' works. You hear them time after time. Players, choirs and audiences clearly enjoy them.

Part of the reason for this is that Hamilton is keen to write engaging and challenging music for everyone, professional or amateur. "I think it's incredibly important that composers turn their hand to writing for the local primary school as much as for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

"Quite a lot of my stuff would be called lightweight, but I want people - especially young people - to see that serious composers can write music that draws them in and engages them, perhaps helping to edge them out of the narrow rock genres of today, to realise there's hundreds of years of music to explore."

Does he have an ambition to write the Great New Zealand Symphony? "I wouldn't mind writing the Great New Zealand Choral Work," he replies. "I've found a niche in the choral scene and people expect I'll give them a singable but challenging work.

"I do try to write what they want. There's a limit to what a community choir or school group can cope with, but I always tell the people who will be paying me to set the boundaries.

"Do they want something very difficult, or to stretch them just a little? Do they want me not to split the tenors? Have they got a weak bass line that needs to be shielded? Fine, I'll do all that. And when do they want it?"

Deadlines are a source of pride for Hamilton. "I've got a good reputation for keeping to time, but sometimes I feel like Mozart who once rushed into the first rehearsal with the ink still wet. It's never been that bad, but it's sometimes been close."

Hamilton's music is picked up all over the world, partly because of tours by choirs like the National Youth Choir.

In Singapore, the Czech republic, or the United States, choirmasters go to the choir's concert, hear some David Hamilton, and go and buy. Hamilton likes that.

Sometimes his music suddenly sells somewhere and he has no idea why. "I go down well in Finland," he says with a grin and a shrug. "About 15 of my works have been published there."

Epsom Girls' Grammar headmistress Margaret Bendall regretfully admits to something inevitable about Hamilton's departure.

"A teacher with a national reputation gets pulled in many directions," she says. She has already persuaded him to continue with the school's top choral group, Opus, which has sung so many David Hamilton premieres in the past and, she says, embodies "the essence of his teaching".

Bendall says Hamilton's pull over young people is because he's "absolutely himself; unpretentious and completely direct".

You can hear it in his music too - deep but never extravagant, and always engaging.

You can't help hoping he'll make a success of it.