A day in the life: Jocelyn Pook
Composer Jocelyn Pook (Guildhall alumna, Viola 1982) has written music for stage, screen, opera house and concert hall, and has worked with artists and institutions including Paul McCartney, PJ Harvey, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, the Royal Opera House and BBC. She has won a number of awards, most recently a BAFTA Craft Award for her film score for ‘King Charles III’.
My life is divided into time at home and time away — and time away can be very unpredictable. Earlier this year, I spent a month in Adelaide, working very closely with Chris Drummond, the director of Memorial, a staging of Alice Oswald’s powerful poem. It’s on a huge scale, with more than 200 people on stage. It came to Barbican in September so I had another chance to work on it.
But while it’s always brilliant to be away, it’s great to get home. Having the freedom to shape my own day is a real privilege. In spent most of my 20s and 30s on the road working as a touring musician, so being able to organise my time in a way that suits me is something I really value.
Back in north London, the day starts around 9am, when my husband and I cycle off to the neighbourhood cafe, which has become like a second home. I’ll have breakfast — including, without fail, two cups of their excellent coffee — and it takes around an hour. If I have meetings with directors and so on, I’ll arrange them for 9am but at a different cafe (never at my usual one, that’s sacred), and do several back to back if necessary.
When I get home I’ll go straight to work, but there’s so much admin that I may not get to music until around 1pm, with a break for lunch at around 3pm. My studio is in the house, and I am mostly working at a computer, as well as singing or playing as I try stuff out. Mainly I am on my own, but sometimes I bring people in to work with me.
A sound-engineer colleague quite often comes over in the afternoons, and I also work collaboratively with particular singers, so they’ll come over and we’ll work things out together (though they tend to laugh at my singing because I can sound like Florence Foster Jenkins!). I have to try to fit in some viola practice too, even if only for half an hour.
That’s always been my style — I don’t fit conveniently into one particular genre. Collaborative projects, in particular, can take me in a completely new direction from the one I originally expected. One thing sets me off, but I will end up incorporating something completely different. There may be things I played around with for one piece that never get used and I’ll use them again on a completely different project.
That was how I ended up writing the music which ended up being used as a mobile phone advert, which then, in turn, gave me the opportunity for an album. And then — amazingly for me — a choreographer who was working with Stanley Kubrick happened to have my album playing. Stanley called me, which was a bit of a shock. (Fortunately someone had warned me — otherwise I’d have thought it was friends playing a joke.) He wanted to hear more of my stuff, and two hours later a huge car turned up for my cassette, and the next day, for me. I ended up writing the music for Eyes Wide Shut — a bit daunting, but a fantastic experience.
My daughter comes back from school around 5pm, so I’ll spend a bit of time with her, do some work and then make her dinner. Then I’ll keep going — it’s all a bit interrupted, as I nag her about homework and her own practice, but I get quite a bit done — and when my husband comes back around 9pm, he takes over. I usually get a really solid hour’s work done, and he cooks for the two of us. On an average day we’ll eat between 10pm and 10.30pm. I’ve worked on a couple of Spanish films and spent quite a bit of time in Madrid, and they have the same sort of hours — it always feels so normal to me.
There are, of course, times when this routine has to go. If I’m absolutely pressed against a deadline, I’ll be working constantly and go back to work after dinner. Sometimes I have to go into central London, either to an editing suite for a film or for a recording day for something I’m working on.
I always feel very short of time, and I guess — as my friends will tell you — I’m not the most organised person. I feel endlessly concerned that I’m very distracted by my work, so in the summer I try to make up for it by spending a month with my husband’s family in Serbia. It’s a lovely contrast to our life in London and I’ll do anything to avoid working then. And that’s also when I listen to music most too. It’s a completely different time.
This article first featured in the Autumn/Winter 2018 edition of the Guildhall magazine, PLAY, and was written by YBM for the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
