'Lots of fingers in lots of pies'

IF YOU'RE going to make a living as a composer, Richard Taylor believes you have to be something of a musical carpenter - make a chest of drawers one week and a table the next.

Last year the Yorkshire-born music man's work included writing an opera for English National Opera, the music for the Martin Kemp TV drama Brides In The Bath and the score for a Jamaican-set stage version of Medea. "It's lots of fingers in lots of pies. I haven't pigeonholed myself because one discipline feeds off the other. If you do one type of music all the time, you become a bit stale," he says.

Medea was staged at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, where he's halfway through an 18-month residency as Music Creator in Residence. This unique position has been sponsored by the Performing Right Society Foundation as part of a plan to bring original music to new audiences in a range of different places. The work involves him getting involved in all areas of the theatre's artistic programme, from main stage productions to developing musical projects with people of all ages.

Malton-born Taylor has worked as a freelance composer since leaving the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, in 1989. "I left with a first class honours degree in composition and realised the day I picked up my degree that I was qualified to do nothing," he says.

"I couldn't teach or anything, although the four-year course had taught me a great deal of technical skill. When I left, my friends generally weren't musicians but students from other colleges - artists, photographers, textile designers. These were people I felt very at home with."

With the aid of a Government Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which paid him £40 a week, Taylor went into business as a composer. He played piano in hotel lounges to supplement his income. Fifteen years later he's a successful composer with a residency that gives him the kind of security rare for the job.

Taylor has been making music most of his life, first playing piano when he was only three. His parents bought a piano because his elder sister wanted to learn. Her interest lasted just three lessons by which time Taylor had his fingers on the keyboard.

Finding him a piano teacher was difficult. "No one would give me lessons until I could say the alphabet and reach the pedals," he says. "When I was five, I got a piano teacher although I could play by ear - the theme tune to Coronation Street and all the things I'd heard. I was always writing music. My piano teacher, when I was very little, told me to stop doodling but that was me actually writing music."

During his seven years at Scarborough College, he entered the annual music competition run by Max Jaffa, whose summer Spa concerts were so much part of the town's musical life. "I won every year and that meant I got a solo spot at one of his concerts in front of thousands of people," he recalls.

In his last year at school, Taylor had to decide whether to be a pianist or a composer. He opted for the latter. He's still grateful to have piano skills but couldn't be content playing other people's music all the time. He hasn't touched a piano as a performer for six or seven years, although he did accompany the Playhouse's Heydays over-50s choral in a piece he'd written this summer. But he claims: "I'm a shrinking violet as a performer".

The Playhouse residency has the advantage of being on his doorstep, as Taylor lives in Tadcaster. Working close to home was one of the attractions of applying for the Music Creator in Residence post, as well as the rarity of a job on that scale. "I work in a lot of theatres but genuinely believe it's the best thing to work at because of the number of different levels of work going on. It has a plethora of things happening on a weekly basis. The beauty was that the job allowed me to get involved in all those different areas," he says.

"I've made the job my own because I'm not stepping into anyone's shoes. It's newly created and an open book. I can make of the job as much or as little as I am able to do."

Taylor has to write music for six productions but, otherwise, the scope of his role is limitless in finding new ways to bring music into the building. Time and again, he's found that people are hungry for collaboration, whether working with a Chinese opera company or recruiting Leeds cathedral choir to sing Handel in a forthcoming Playhouse production.

Taylor works across the arts on stage, TV, radio and the concert hall although he leans towards the theatre or something with a visual element. "Even when I listen to a CD the music paints pictures and, if I see a picture in an art gallery, it suggests music. It's what pushes your buttons in the arts. I need a visual stimulus."

One of his Playhouse scores was for a play, Electricity, originally heard on Radio 3. This was daunting as the writer Murray Gold is also a composer and had written the music for the radio production. "We very vaguely talked about it, but I didn't want to know. You make a decision what sort of music or world the people in the play live in. Once you've made it, that seems the only decision that could have been made for that play."

His current project is the music for Ying Tong, a new play centred around Spike Milligan. "It's not just a recreation of The Goons. If it was, it would be pretty two-dimensional for me as a composer," he says.

"The play is more about Spike Milligan and his state of mind, what fed him as a writer. That makes it very three-dimensional. He was a trumpeter so the sound of the trumpet will be very much featured in the production and some recreated Goons-type music."

Taylor is also working on the Christmas production of Pinocchio, as well as doing education work in schools and with the Playhouse's over-50s group. "I'm working with a whole mass of different people. The different use of a composer is a very important part of my work here," he says.

* Ying Tong is at West Yorkshire Playhouse from October 22 to November 20. Tickets 0113 213 7700.

Published: 18/10/2004