A word in your ear: Searle's sound has vision
MICHAEL TUMELTY
July 19 2006
Let me tell you a curious and intriguing tale about a young Scottish musician. His name is Oliver Searle, he's from North Berwick, a composer, and 28 years old. For the past five years or so he has been studying at the RSAMD, in Glasgow, where he has collected a basket of degrees. He recently completed a PhD; a portfolio of compositions amounting to some two hours of music. It's been clear for some years that the gifted young Scot has a special talent. He's already had his music played by the RSNO, something some composers wait a lifetime for and never achieve. He has also received commissions and performances from the Paragon Ensemble, the Hebrides Ensemble and the Britten-Pears Orchestra.
He was commissioned by the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland to write a short piece, and the organisation was so impressed, it then asked him to produce a bigger composition for full orchestra. That piece, called Earworm, will be premiered by NYOS in a fortnight.
So far, so straightforward. But young Mr Searle is a versatile musician. He is also a jazz cabaret pianist, and might be seen jamming in the newly-refurbished Kelvingrove gallery with a group of luminaries from the Scottish jazz scene.
He is also enterprising. As well as being a leading figure in the RSAMD's thriving composition department, where he conducts, composes and plays music by himself and by his peers, about two years ago he co-founded a specialist contemporary music group called Symposia.
This impressive outfit has been playing concerts in the academy and other institutions, has attracted significant funding and has been invited to take up a residency at this year's Sound Festival of contemporary music, which is held in the north-east of Scotland.
All very impressive, but here's where the tale takes an intriguing turn. Recently, Searle has been difficult to get hold of. When I was trying to track him down to arrange a meeting, he seemed never to be around. "He's in Vienna," said the academy, without further explanation.
In fact, over the past two years, when trying to contact the composer, one might have been told that he was in the States, or in Hungary, or Austria, Germany, or Spain, England, Wales, and other places too numerous to mention.
I was bristling with curiosity, which intensified recently when I caught a glimpse of him. I was in a throng of people heading into the Alexander Gibson Studio at the RSAMD for a concert. I noticed Searle slipping quietly into the building. He looked most un-composer-like, and resembled no student I had ever seen.
He was extremely well-dressed, wearing a sharp suit, carrying an attache case and looking for all the world like some young entrepreneur from the financial sector. That did it. I had to get hold of this guy and find out what he was up to.
When he explained to me his goings-on, I was so shocked and uncomprehending I had to confess to him several times that I didn't know what he was talking about.
For the past two years, on top of all his other musical activities, Searle has been working at the forefront of medical and scientific research. He has been employed by an Austrian company, MedEl (Medical Electronics) to attend conferences, give lectures and design and develop a computer program to be used in the assessment and rehabilitation of people who have either lost or are losing their hearing and who use cochlear implants. He's doing it through his first love - composition - and has written more than 50 little pieces which are used in laboratory assessment tests by audiologists and others.
First things first. A cochlear implant, as described by Searle, is "a basic device that lets deaf people hear". He says: "It's an implant that fits under the skin with an electrode that actually winds into the cochlear." There are, says Searle, highly developed and sophisticated speech-processing programmes for testing the hearing of implantees. "But the incorporation of music into the testing system is the next big thing, so, from the corporate point of view, it makes sense for the companies to invest in a music programme. Ultimately, it's to improve the nature of the implants and how they work."
Searle's involvement, which has taken him all over the world in the past few years, and which has culminated in his development of a music software CD, came about by happenstance. The idea for developing tests using the panoply of musical elements - melody, harmony and rhythm - came from two Welsh scientists, one of whom is an amateur musician and himself has a cochlear implant. They sought the advice and assistance of a neighbour, who happens to be the composer John Harris, a former artistic director of the Paragon Ensemble. Harris was too busy to get involved, and, with sharp insight, recommended Searle as a musician who was bright, highly organised, supremely conscientious, very articulate and, technologically, super-literate. And that was it.
The subsequent details of Searle's involvement would fill a thesis (and one day probably will), but he has been ultimately working at a high level of sophistication for his Austrian bosses, developing graded "emotion files" to test the degree and quality of responses from implantees. It is highly subjective, he agrees, though he claims a surprising consistency and predictability in the tests' results.
The musical stuff of his scientific work has fed back into his own music, and characterises, to a degree, his new composition, Earworm, a straight translation from the German word Ohrwurm, to describe the universal phenomenon of one of those tunes that gets stuck in your head, goes round and round, haunts you for days, interrupts your concentration, and which you can't get rid of.
One of the melodies he wrote for his scientific tests buried itself in Searle's brain. He couldn't get shot of it, so he's used it as the basic inspiration for his new orchestral composition. With the completion of his software CD, which is now on the market, Searle has hurled himself back into composition.
He has contracts to sign and a commission to complete for a new amateur choir, a piece that represents the first commission handed out by Glasgow's restored City Hall. It's due next year. Does this incredibly industrious young man have time for anything else? What music does he listen to himself?
It's the only point in our long conversation where he halts, looks embarrassed, grins, then comes clean: "Heavy metal. Lots of Iron Maiden. I grew up listening to it and I love it all: another misunderstood art form."
