Julian Anderson: 'I want to help people celebrate the positive'

When the Danish composer Per Norgard was asked, at a pre-Prom talk earlier this summer, who among his younger British colleagues he was most impressed by, he mentioned only two names: Thomas Adès and Julian Anderson. Adès has been catapulted to public prominence by a musical establishment astonished by his profound musicality and desperate to find a new Benjamin Britten to sit atop the pile. Anderson (no relation to me, by the way) has been making slower, surer progress – no excited headlines; instead, a series of works has shown an evolving command of long-term musical thought. Born in London in 1967, Anderson has been writing music since he was 11; private lessons with John Lambert were crowned with a scholarship that took him to the Royal College of Music – where he is now head of composition himself. His first-class BMus was followed by further private tuition, this time in Paris with Tristan Murail, and a doctoral thesis at Cambridge, with Alexander Goehr. The icing on his educational cake came in a series of courses: in Dartington, where he made Norgard's acquaintance, and at the Britten-Pears School at Snape in 1992 and the Tanglewood Summer School a year later. In both latter places the imposing figure of Oliver Knussen proved an invaluable source of advice.

Since then Anderson has established himself as one of the freshest voices in British music. He made an early impact with an orchestral Diptych in 1992 – when it won a prize from the Royal Philharmonic Society – and his Khorovod, written for the London Sinfonietta in 1994, has been performed the world around. In 1999 the Sinfonietta came back for another piece, Alhambra Fantasy, which also notched up a series of foreign performances before making the Proms last Monday.

Anderson's next appearance at the Proms puts him in an unenviably exposed position. His newest orchestral work, Imagin'd Corners, opens the concert on September 11, when the atmosphere will be heavy with sentiment and, I fear, sentimentality: the year since the attacks has hardly brought the emotional distance one might have expected. Though its position in the programme is a coincidence, Anderson's piece meets the occasion head-on: Imagin'd Corners – premiered in March by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, where he is Composer-in-Association – is, he says, "particularly exuberant". Wouldn't he rather have been asked to write an Elegy for strings or some funerary ode? "No, I wouldn't. It was certainly the most appalling event that has happened in my lifetime, but my feeling is that I would rather contribute to a celebratory sense of what's positive about things in life. Generally, that's what my music has always been about. Though there is an infinite amount to mourn as an anniversary, if a piece like this is being played on that occasion, its function might be to help people celebrate the positive that can come out of dreadful things like that. The coming together of people at that point was something extraordinary."

Those of us born since the Second World War had no experience of the epic until the tanks crushed the students gathered in Tiananmen Square and most of the other Communist dictatorships toppled over like so many deckchairs. The effect, Anderson says, was felt in his music. "It was a complete accident that this happened to coincide with a period in my life when I was trying to sort out my musical priorities as a composer, and there was a sense of enormous liberation and exhilaration and political motion, which had been totally absent in my experience before." What was he working on at the time? "I was sketching what became Khorovod, and I remember this huge sense of release. I can't say I ever wrote a piece about it – I wouldn't try to do that – but it certainly began to make me feel that a sort of musical cold war was also possibly over."

He means, doesn't he, the end of the modernist hegemony, with its Mecca in the summer schools held at Darmstadt? "I don't want to blame Darmstadt. I went to Darmstadt when I was a student and found it a profoundly disturbing and negative experience, with one or two wonderful and positive things. What was very depressing was the uniformity of the music of supposedly diverse styles which "greyed itself out" into a harmonic nonsense. Whilst I might have admired individual pieces of the composers concerned, I became very impatient then with the harmonic problem of contemporary music. There was an emotionlessness about it that I found quite repulsive, and one thing that still concerns me in music is this question of momentum. For me the key figure in this was Sibelius. Tony Payne played me a tape of the first version of his Fifth Symphony before it was available commercially and it was a bit like being given a composition lessons by Sibelius on how he wrote the piece. It is obvious he knew it wasn't right, and you can hear how he is trying to put the piece together and not making it.

"The final form of the first movement is something that seems to grow organically in an almost classic Sibelius way, rather like cells dividing, but then when you hear the original version, you hear just how hard he had to work to get that process right. That's something that I began to try to emulate in my own stuff – this business of trying to make it feel as though the music could have that sense of flow and growth."

Imagin'd Corners seems tailor-made for the Albert Hall – the score requires four solo horns to be spread around the performing space. In this instance, Anderson expects, "they're going to be on the ground floor behind the stalls entrance on either side of the orchestra, probably with the doors closed so that the fanfares will ring round the corridor and filter into the hall somewhat, which I think will create the right sense of resonance and distance."

Was the scoring a deliberate attempt to produce a modern equivalent of Schumann's Konzertstück? "I had been warned by players that the Schumann was proverbially difficult, if I may put it politely, and therefore I knew that I was not going to write a piece of that size. The business of writing a pretty virtuosic horn piece became a challenge. I wanted to write something that felt large-scale but did not blow the players' lips. The duration I ended up with was about 10 minutes. I wanted it to really transform gradually from a very slow beginning to an extremely fast and exhilarating and ebullient coda, and I wanted that to happen almost imperceptibly, in a completely continuous curve. I basically found the shortest possible time and space that that could be done in, and I wrote the piece that length."

Julian Anderson's 'Imagin'd Corners' is performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on Wednesday at the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 (020-7589 8212)