An Interview with Robert Nairn
Robert Nairn is an Australian Historical bass player who has lived and worked in Germany, England, Australia and the US. He is a Distinguished Professor of Music at Penn State’s School of Music and on the Faculty of The Juilliard School in New York. Commissioning over 40 new works for solo bass and chamber groups, he has made a real impact on the bass world.
I have had the pleasure of interviewing Robert over zoom, the first time I have done so, and have loved hearing about all the aspects of his career - even the bad moments!
When did music become important to you?
It always has been, when I was about 10 or 11 all I wanted to do was play in a band, I had never imagined doing anything other than music. I have started various other careers along the line, but nothing that has ever taken me away from music, It's all I have ever wanted to do.
When did you start bass?
I didn't start bass until much later, I had been playing guitar and in bands for the whole of high school. I went to law school, and was in a band that suddenly had a hit single, so I dropped out and was on the road for about 3 years. When that came to a close, I realised I wanted to study music, though I had always known I had wanted to be a musician. Somewhere along the line I had picked up a double bass, I remember seeing a picture of Sting with a double bass and had thought that was very cool - so I bought one. I took it with me on tour and messed around with it a bit, and realised I wanted to start it seriously. It wasn't until I was 20 when I had my first ever bass lesson, much later than a lot of people. Because I had been used to playing bass guitar and practising it for many hours a day, I found it quite an easy transition, especially with the help of my very understanding teacher.
When I was a student in Australia I studied with a guy called Max McBride, who is one of the great Australian teachers, and from him I went to Klaus Stoll. What I didn't know when I was studying with either of them is that both of them are historical players. Klaus Stoll sent me year late, a double CD that he did of all these Zelenka pieces and told me I should know all about Zelenka, but he was playing Violone and I replied saying “I never knew you played Violone” , and he said to me “well you never asked”. And the same with Max, it wasn't until years after studying with him that I realised he played Violone and that it was all straightforward and easy for him.
I found there were a few similarities between the two - rock and Historical playing. The main thing for me is having passion to play whatever. Having passion to drive the bass line, and keeping a good pulse is very important in both of them. A lot of the music we played in the band was very rhythm driven from the drums and the bass.
How did you start Historical music?
I came to play Historical music in a rather roundabout way. When I was part of the Australian chamber orchestra, we used to tour with a lot of the leading baroque specialists at the time like Tom Koopman and Peter Wispelway. We did these extended tours at the time and through them I fell in love with this kind of sound world and the idea of discovering and imitating the composer's intentions. The last thing the Australian Chamber Orchestra did every year was a festival called the Huntington Festival which ran for almost a week and featured us in residence plus a host of soloists from Australia and overseas. Florilegium from London were featured one year and needed a bassist, so I put gut strings on my bass for the first time and never wanted to take them off again! As it turned out, Ashley Solomon - the leader of the group, said it was a shame I wasn't living in London because their bass player had just left. My wife and I had been hoping to move back to Europe so this was the catalyst to coming back. So we moved to London and spent quite a few years playing with Florilegium and lots of other historical music groups in the UK. As well as doing the occasional modern thing like LPO, London Sinfonietta and my last job, Principal of the Hallé orchestra, so I was trying to balance steel strings and gut strings, very often with a single instrument. After that we moved to the US and I spent 17 years as principal bass of the Handel Haydn Society, working with a whole range of conductors: Sir Roger Norrington, Christopher Hogwood and most recently Harry Christophers.
What aspects of Historical music do you usually play?
It is quite hard, being a bass player, to get the opportunity to perform solo repertoire in a professional setting unless I create my own opportunity. Mostly I play in small ensembles, though I played more chamber music in the US. My day job is the principal bass in the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, based in Sydney, and we do concerts in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. It's a very small baroque orchestra, most often one or two basses. A lot of the time it feels like I am playing chamber music. One of the great things about being a bass player and playing a lot of Historical music is that you get access to 250 years of chamber music that most modern players don't get a chance to play, as well as having a very active role in the music. Even so, quite often you are doubling what the cello is playing. Though what you do and how you react to the cello playing is really significant. There is such an enormous range of music in that time frame that is incredible to play. One of the things we like to do is to rediscover the language and figure out how it was originally played and why it was so famous of its time.
The main principles of baroque bass playing?
When I play in a chamber orchestra, quite often I don't play all the notes, and that's not because I'm simplifying it so that it's easier to play, I'm simplifying it to clarify the harmony. Just like how a jazz bass player's intentions with their bass lines is to keep the harmony very clear, the same goes for baroque bass lines. So when I play the line, I listen to the acoustics of the hall, the direction the music is going and play based on that, not just the notes but also the octave choices, making sure I don’t play the same thing twice. Another thing that is equally important is to be a timekeeper, which is very important in baroque music as there is rarely percussion to help with this. The time can be pushed back and forward, allowed to breathe, so it is not strictly metronomic. There is a lot of flexibility in reacting to what other people are doing, which is completely different to a modern orchestra where you are trying to blend into one as a section.
What are some highlights of your career?
Playing in some fantastic concerts, which I have had a lot of recently. I recently did a tour with Shunske Sato - who runs the Netherlands Bach society and who we worked with in 2016 with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra. We did 9 concerts with him in Australia and then I went on to do some chamber music concerts with him, which left me on a big high afterwards. Especially since I went straight after that to do concerts in England with the Australian World Orchestra and Zubin Mehta, which is a completely different music world of Dvorak and Brahms. I've been lucky that throughout my career I have had some really musically defining moments. For example, when I work with a particular conductor that defines a certain work or composer for you, that you then judge other performances on. This year I have had lots of career highlights, which has been wonderful as everything got shut down due to covid these past years.
Have there been some baroque bass players that have really influenced you?
There have been a number of historical players that really influenced me both on numerous instruments. Touring with Anner Bylsma and the Australian Chamber Orchestra and his kindness in giving me some lessons on that tour back in the 90's was a huge inspiration. Then similarly touring with Pieter Wispelway and Florilegium when I moved to London. Cellist Danny Yeadon from Florilegium as well as Guy Fishman from the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston were both enormously inspiring. As Contrabass players Maggie Urquhart, Andy Ackermann, Chi-chi Nwanoku and David Sinclair have all been very inspiring and also very kind and supportive.
What is some important advice you have for younger players?
I've had a very fortunate career, I have lived and worked in four different countries, and I think that the influences you have as a student sometimes take many years to come out. I think that once you do though, it helps guide the way you look at music. A lot of students think that orchestral bass playing is the only option, but that is not the case anymore. I have seen a lot of kids, especially in America, form their own groups and get involved in marketing, social media and being very conscious about a lot of skills we never learnt at conservatories when we were younger. It means that the range of your musical activity can be much broader than it was, as for me it was either playing or teaching. Even when I was in London, there were big rifts between the Classical players and the Historical players, you could only do one or the other. There were times where I would have a morning rehearsal with The OAE (The orchestra of the age of enlightenment) and an afternoon rehearsal with the LPO (London Philharmonic Orchestra), and somewhere in between, usually at a subway station, I would have to change my strings from gut to steel. People must have thought I was the strangest animal, but it was the only way to get to my next rehearsal on time.
The ability to play all music on the appropriate instrument is something Pieter Wispelway first introduced me to, the idea that you can play any music from any period, as close to the correct instrumentation you can. Of course it means that you have to have more instruments, but it means you are much more open to the language the music was written in. When I was a student, if you had asked me the difference between Baroque, Classical and Romantic music, I would have referred to something like the harmony or the ornamentation. I wouldn't have had such a developed idea about all the different languages that those musics were written in, but now that's so easy. Students today become so much more versed in playing all kinds of things, whether it's working with a composer or going back and playing some historical music which has had lots of research behind it. When I was teaching at Julliard, I had to work really hard to keep ahead of my students. I would give them tasks I thought were quite challenging, yet the next week they would have it mastered.
What is your opinion about the future bass players?
There is something that is quite exciting about the future of young bass players, and other instrumentalists. They understand it's not a single career path, but a much broader spectrum. It is so much easier to have a clearer understanding of these different musical languages and styles from a very broad sway of musical history than it was when I was a student. Certainly I think it is a very exciting time to be a music student and I am so jealous of the fact there is so much easy information and so easily accessible as it was 40 years ago.
