Interview with Jonathan Morton, Artistic Director/Leader of Scottish Ensemble

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Jonathan Morton

By Sarah Walters

Q: What can you tell me about the production you’re bringing to the RNCM as part of our Inspirational Artists and Dance:Music seasons, on Fri 2 May 2025?

This work has come out of a long-term relationship that we have with Örjan Andersson, a choreographer based in Stockholm. We first collaborated in 2014, when we explored bringing together dancers and musicians using JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations as the seed for the project. The new project we are bringing to the RNCM is called Impulse – Music in Motion, and for the first time Örjan is working with Scottish Ensemble musicians only, without any professional dancers.

Örjan and I have become very close collaborators, and we came up with this idea of a concert experience that also had movement in it, but not really from a dance perspective. We wanted to highlight and emphasise the natural physicality that musicians bring to their work, which is something that is not often explored. I suppose we all know implicitly that making sounds on acoustic instruments is a physical activity, but we wanted to make it a lot more explicit for an audience and for the musicians, and really focus on it.

Downstream from that, I took the decision that we should memorise the entire programme because, obviously, being fixed in one spot with a music stand imposes relatively strict physical limitations on what you are able to do. From the beginning, we decided there wouldn’t be a music stand or a tablet anywhere on the stage, which then allows the choreographer to really play with us. There are always practical matters you have to take into consideration: cellists have to sit down, the double bass is a big heavy instrument so it’s hard to move with it, and of course we’re not trained dancers – and it’s important for the audience to realise that we’re not trying to be dancers.

If you take your typical music audience, they probably think of choreography as dance, but really choreography is movement. It starts with moving in space; move an arm and a hand, and that can be choreography already. Örjan starts with that, with quite simple concepts, but the way he structures the different elements and the way he relates it to the music is really exceptional. It’s what has made these collaborations so powerful – and that’s not a given, because these are two very different disciplines: performing music is one thing, and choreographing people in space is a quite different thing. We’ve developed this very fruitful way of working together over the last 10 years and we’re all absolutely thrilled – we can’t wait to share this with audiences. It’s a very exciting proposition, it’s not like a concert that anyone’s experienced before in terms of the energy, the way that you can relate to the music, and the way that the audience can relate to the performers.

Q: How have audiences reacted to you taking classical music out of its seat?

I think audiences go to concerts primarily to listen to great music and that’s wonderful – long may that continue. But there’s always space for musicians and audiences to experiment, to test boundaries and parameters and look for new information. I feel that, at Scottish Ensemble, that’s what we like doing the most.

For me, the challenge is finding the artistic sweet spot between tradition and innovation. There is always a risk that a tradition can become stilted and ossified, but innovation can also go so far into the unknown that it becomes unmoored and meaningless. So, for me, it’s very much about finding that equilibrium between the two, and I think that’s when things become very exciting. That sweet spot moves with time and trends, and it’s not a fixed point; right now it feels important to take another look and shine a light on the physicality that’s involved with playing classical music and acoustic instruments.

There are other groups that play with these ideas: for example, Aurora Orchestra – they memorise a lot of their music to allow this extra communication between the players and with the audience and to free them up physically. It’s a way to explore something that has maybe been implicit but not particularly focused on in classical performance for a long time. I don’t want people to think that we’re saying the future of classical music lies in movement and memorising the music; the question might be, ‘Can you bring the experience of that memorised performance back into the more traditional concert format?’.

For me, it’s very much a sort of conversation, about going out there, finding out information, and bringing it back into the fold. Just having that exchange continually. At Scottish Ensemble, we found that all this work that we’ve done with choreographers, with theatre directors, with visual artists, with amplified music and acoustic music, we really bring that back into our concert experience. What you want as a musician and as an audience is to have that connection in the live moment. Whatever we do in our work to enrich that experience and make it more intense, more meaningful, more beautiful, more memorable, that’s what fuels us – be that working with a choreographer, or just as four people in a room sitting down and playing to 50 people.

Q: What for you has been the value of letting that cross disciplinary collaboration into your art?

Many, many positive outcomes have resulted from these collaborations. If I had to summarise it, I might say that this kind of work forces you to re-examine what you’re doing from a different angle. When you’re working with an art form and you bring another art form into the room, that other art form is going to make their perspective very clear – and that will challenge your own perspective. If you’re just working within the art form you know, then you know what other people are thinking in advance – you know because you work in that world. So, it can be very refreshing, and a humbling experience, because there are things that you take for granted, that you think, ‘Well, of course this is how it is’. When you work with another artist who doesn’t know much about your art form, for whom it is not really obvious to them what we’re doing and it doesn’t automatically communicate, that’s a very, very interesting position to be in; it can be quite fundamental because it can make you reassess principal elements of your artistic practice.

For example, early on in our work with Örjan, I re-examined how we as classical musicians regard our music with a certain amount of reverence. We started working on Bach’s Goldberg, and as musicians we assume that everybody loves this incredible work of art as much as we do. Örjan’s initial approach was, ‘I don’t want to treat it like that. I think it’s kind of off-putting. I just want to bring it down to an everyday level’, and I remember I didn’t sleep for two days in Stockholm because I was battling with what he meant. I was thinking that this wouldn’t work with the audiences because the audiences see the piece how I see the piece. We all have biases, but it was extraordinary to realise that, actually, audiences really were ready to go with his vision – a revolutionary moment!

I think it was the same for Örjan; over time, he came to appreciate how we valued the music in a completely different way. Having that viewpoint diversity, having people who have a completely different perspective on what you’re doing every day, that’s a very precious thing and I suppose it doesn’t really happen very often because most of us are probably surrounded with people who understand what we are doing. It’s very rare that somebody comes from the outside and simply has no preconceptions, but they can also shine a different light on what you’re doing. Bringing two types of audience together always makes for an interesting atmosphere in the room, and for audiences this can stimulate healthy debates and questions.

Q: Is there a moment or something that happens when you feel the synergy of these different disciplines?

That’s a good question and the question that we have to ask ourselves. Honestly, I don’t know, and that’s one of the scary things about these collaborations because you set them up and you chat about it, and you are simply hoping something will work out! And actually, you never know because it’s not been done before. There’s this element of risk which you get better at managing with time because you take comfort and confidence from the fact that it has worked before.

I also know from experience that the fact that it’s worked before with one collaborator is no guarantee that it’s going to work with another collaborator. You develop a language which enables a collaboration to work better and better with time, and that depends on the support you’re getting from the production team and whoever you’re collaborating with. The more that the people behind the scenes get what it’s about and come on board, the better it becomes.

But in the end, to answer your question, I suppose you only really ‘know’ on the first night; you find out from how it lands with an audience in the room. It’s a gut instinct; you can rehearse it and it all feels great, but until you’re in front of few hundred people you don’t actually know how it’s going to translate. I find that really exciting, actually. With Impulse, for example, I was really happy with it during the rehearsals, but I still had that little niggle in my mind saying: ‘Who knows?’

We previewed it in Scotland and the way it landed was perfect, there was just an insane amount of energy in the room. It was so thrilling, and that’s when you know and when you can go, ‘OK, this works, this is good’. The proof’s in the pudding!

Q: You have a history with the RNCM – do you enjoy being back in the conservatoire to work with young musicians?

I studied at ‘the Northern’, so I have very fond memories of being at the place. I also taught there from around 2005 to 2008, 2009, that sort of time, after the Head of Strings asked me to come and do a few projects with the string orchestra.

I have worked continuously with students ever since, it’s something that I really enjoy doing. Young people tend to be very curious, and you can try lots of interesting things with them which may be more difficult in a professional environment. I think students these days get a huge number of opportunities, and it feels like a very different world from when I was a student.

Q: In what way? Has there been a change in teaching approaches at this level of elite study?

I don’t know about the teaching side of it because I don’t teach and I’m not in those rooms when the teaching happens, but it does seem that in terms of what’s on offer to students, there’s a lot more variety now and a lot more porousness between different departments. You now have students who’ll study new music but also play on Baroque instruments, and nobody bats an eyelid. In my days, it wasn’t really like that – it’s all good.

Q: What are your strongest musical memories of being in Manchester?

I studied a joint music degree course at the University of Manchester and the Royal Northern College of Music. My studies were generally quite traditional, but I started going to a lot of jazz gigs. I ended up hanging out with jazzers and became quite obsessed with the music, and I went to hear it maybe twice a week most weeks. It really opened my world, as it were, to a whole different universe. The main venue was Band on the Wall; I’ve heard some incredible musicians there.

When I started working as a professional, I was playing with groups such as the London Sinfonietta, which specialises in a huge range of new music, and so that was another formative experience. I tried to absorb as much of it as I could. And then, I was lucky enough to be with Scottish Ensemble at a time when I was able to rethink what the group was doing with the brilliant chief executive at the time, and together we came up with this idea of investigating and collaborating with other art forms – way back in 2012. It was very much a team effort that launched us on this wonderful trajectory, and Impulse is the current incarnation of that spirit.

Q: Is jazz music where you go to still when you’re not working with the Ensemble or Sinfonietta?

I don’t really go to hear much jazz anymore and, to be honest, I don’t go to that many concerts these days – which I’d like to have time to change because all musicians should keep going to concerts. You have to put yourself in the place of an audience so that you remember what it’s like.

Q: Tell me about the repertoire that we will hear Scottish Ensemble exploring in Impulse.

It’s fairly standard repertoire, but the idea with taking these key works is to re-imagine them and present them in a new way. The act of musicians committing all the music to memory has a significant impact on how it is performed. I mean, we as a group play standing up anyway and it’s only really the cellists who sit, so we’re already quite used to being more physical than groups that sit down. But the way that Örjan choreographs does bring out different things; it’s a huge challenge to be asked to play eight meters apart, and across these huge distances there’s an intensity of listening and an intensity of performance that is quite electrifying – or can be! The kind of concentration and focus that is required from the musicians is extremely high. I think that’s what the audiences respond to; there’s definitely more danger and more risk involved.

Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C major Op 48 is a piece that most string players will know and play many, many times, but to really get to know it, to interiorise it to the extent that you can know it by heart and bring out these physical elements from it, it makes for a very, very different performance. It’s to do with focus and energy and commitment. Everything is raised quite significantly. But, as I said, ideally this experience would mean that if we are asked to play this repertoire in a normal concert format, we can bring the same amount of energy and focus and commitment to it there. In this way, it’s coming back to what I said earlier – it’s not either/or, it’s both, and that’s what I find interesting.