Interview with Johan Famaey: ‘With the music, you start with colours but don’t have a complete idea where you’re going’

Hamme, Belgium-based classical composer, Johan Famaey will release his futuristic EP ‘3022’ on 16 September, giving us a journey from the beginning of the world to a thousand years from now where few people exist.

The piano-based EP will comprise 3 tracks: ‘Now We’ve Left’, ‘There Was A Time’ and ‘When People Walked The Earth’. The first piece, ‘There Was A Time’, is set in the past, ‘When People Walked The Earth’ represents the present and ‘Now We’ve Left’ depicts future life on another planet.

‘I liked the idea of playing with time, the concept was the first track and the cello,’ Famaey said. ‘There Was A Time’ is very earthy, very grounded – it resembles human voices. It was the first time I’ve written tracks in order.’ The piece starts with a delicate yet melancholic piano line before the cello – also played by Famaey – lends its own mournful voice. Like many of his earlier compositions, it’s incredibly cinematic and evocative, fading to the piano at the end and it seems like a fitting way to imagine the beginning of earth 4.5 billion years ago leading up to mankind’s own brief history: ‘I can’t pinpoint the inspiration for it but maybe Erik Satie (a French composer and pianist, 1866-1925). He lived in the vivid city of Paris – he was a bit strange (laughs)! His music is calm and so he was in his head but, in fact, he felt Paris was chaotic.’

‘When People Walked The Earth’ has a similar feel but is faster paced and moves between a lightness of touch on the keys and more emphatic, almost urgent, playing: ‘It’s about when people walked the earth, it gets louder and faster, that represents the multiplication of people,’ Famaey said. ‘Then, at the end, it fades to just a few chords as the people disappear. It’s deliberate that it starts with a few ‘people’, leading into too many ‘people’, it’s very intense and overcrowded.’

‘Will the world be sad like it is now or will it be better?’

Famaey is drawn to the sparseness of composers such as Ennio Morricone because of the elegant precision of his compositions and adopts Morricone’s approach that everything in a piece of music has to be there for a reason: ‘His influences are omnipresent,’ he said. His own dream is to write a film score, which would be a natural fit given just how visceral and cinematic his pieces are. However, his compositions can also stray from that: ‘I have a lot of influences, I write some music that’s dark, a friend told me of one piece: “It’s too dark for your audience” (laughs)!’

‘Now We’ve Left’ shares many of the same characteristics as ‘There Was A Time’; it is every bit as cinematic but it’s more uplifting; the melancholic undertones are still there but they’re less amplified without the cello: It has echoes of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’, that same slightly sorrowful air but with a lightness of touch, almost as if the song itself is also floating through space. When you listen to it knowing the backstory, you realise how optimistic is actually is. It’s hopeful: ‘It paints the picture that we’ve left the earth, we’re in space,’ Famaey said. ‘You don’t know how to look at it. Will the world be sad like it is now or will it be better? I think I’m an optimistic person, so I think science will give us more answers. Maybe in a billion years, we will be leaving earth. If you look at extinction waves over time, science gives you a way out but I think some human beings will thrive even if many of us perish. There’ll be another catastrophe at some point.’

Incredibly, he wrote the initial structure for all three pieces in one day and likens writing music to painting: ‘With the music, you start with colours but don’t have a complete idea where you’re going,’ he said. ‘It’s like I have a sketch and start colouring in (laughs). How it gets filled in is left to the moment.’

‘It’s always been part of my life to look beyond’

Famaey often composes at night, so the time has a special significance to him. He is particularly drawn to minor chords, saying to me last year that ‘they’re more emotional, there’s more tension in minor chords’. His fascination with the moon, the universe, planets and the stars has seeped into many of his compositions, including his ‘Recuerdos’ (“Memories”) EP which came out in 2020: ‘I’m always interested in the universe and the moon, it’s always been part of my life to look beyond,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been into history and love reading about what happened before. And we start thinking about climate sustainability and the sea level in 100 years and all the other dramatic events that may happen.’

He got into music when he was just two years old when he expressed an interest in playing the organ like his father. At the age of four, his father taught him to play the accordion with piano keys, which is a bit smaller than a regular accordion and spans two octaves. Famaey went on to study music at the Music Academy in Lokeren and received his Master’s degree in 2002 at the Lemmens Institute in Leuven.

​He decided to stay in Leuven when he graduated and study Mandarin, where he met his wife, who is Chinese, and they moved to Qingdao in China in the summer of 2005, an experience that he describes as ‘an adventure’. Whilst there, he taught chamber music at the Qingdao University Music Conservatory and the faculty of music at the Qingdao University for Science and Technology. He was also the cathedral organist in Qingdao, before returning to Belgium in 2009, where he now teaches at the local music academy in Hamme.

Since then, Chinese influences have permeated his compositions, particularly their pentatonic melodies, harmonies and typical ornamental elements. This is best exemplified by his composition ‘Chinese Memories’, released tomorrow (9 September) and which originated from three earlier melodies that he composed in China which he later extended into a song cycle. The 10 pieces are based on poems from the Tang and Song Dynasty and blend Lieder, opera and film music and will be performed later this month in the Amuz concert hall Antwerp in Belgium. One of the tracks, ‘Chun Xiao’ blends Chinese elements with a melody that is reminiscent of Morricone’s ‘Once Upon A Time In The West’, underpinned by soaring strings and features stunning vocals from soprano Annelies Van Hijfte, who he describes as ‘amazing’. Another piece on the album, ‘Ru Meng Ling’, is sung by soprano Jolien De Gendt.

‘I like the darker and emotional side of music’

However, he is also a man of other, hidden talents: For the last couple of weeks, he has been the pianist and part of the orchestra for Festivaria’s production of ‘Singing In The Rain’: ‘We recorded the orchestra in advance, they don’t play live,’ he said. ‘My favourite song is ‘Good Morning’ because we had to start recording so early and it helped me wake up! I’ve written happy music and pop music if I have to (laughs). For myself, I like the darker and emotional side of music – it’s hard to resist! I love Saint-Saën’s organ symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78 and music that lingers in the mind like Handel’s ‘Hallelujah’. I especially love Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ but my favourite composer is Chopin, there’s more storytelling involved. My favourite piece of his to play is ‘Fantasie-impromptu C-Sharp Minor, Op. 66 No.4?‘. You know what I also like?,’ he said mischievously. ‘Symphonic metal! Yes, really (laughs). I really like Symphony X (an American progressive metal band from New Jersey). I used to play electric guitar, we played metal (laughs). The live album Black Symphony by Within Temptation – a Dutch progressive metal band – is good, too.’

The link between classical music and symphonic metal is more obvious that it seems at first and I tell him that I’ve interviewed English soprano Lucy Kay, who told me that her dream would be to front a symphonic metal band and this delights him: ‘Oh yes! That’s so great,’ he said, getting very animated. ‘Symphonic metal bands often have a classical background. The music is very well-structured, with good time signatures. You see that with Metallica, you feel those incredibly talented musicians. Take Einaudi (Ludovico Maria Enrico Einaudi, an Italian pianist and composer), he composed a lot of things that were very different to what people expect nowadays from him but then he started composing for movies and that became his trademark. It’s the same with Morricone, he’s released classical music that nobody plays. We are all complicated beings but we have to choose what we want to do for ourselves or we will all get lost.’

Musical challenges are par for the course in his home: he started learning the double bass three years ago and his wife has been learning the cello at the same time. I say that I started teaching myself the guitar last year but I bet my progress is far slower than his and he laughs: ‘It’s important to do it for fun, to enjoy the pieces that are easier, it’s not just about technical skill,’ he said kindly. ‘Enjoying it, that’s what matters the most, the feeling it gives you when you play.’

The artwork for ‘3022’, which was created by Victoria Moré, beautifully encapsulates what the EP is all about: ‘She has already created the last art for me. She sent me a photo, I thought it was a godsend, I didn’t know what to use! It’s amazing, it reflects my influences – you see the moon, the sun and people on the beach going into the water. It could be set on earth or anywhere else.’ 

‘The idea is that it will be the follow-up to my ‘Time Passenger’ show’

Next up will be a series of piano pieces based on some short stories by Rebecca Shahould : ‘I gave her the three sentences from the EP ‘3022’ that she used as the starting point,’ he said. ‘The idea is that it will be the follow-up to my ‘Time Passenger’ show, it’ll form the backbone to it. It starts off with a star, a singularity in ‘Time Passenger’. When you watch the show, you get a video on the back wall showing the creation of earth, dinosaurs, and other moments in time. It ends on a sad note because the star is the last thing you see, it’s twinkling. Then it goes dark, like the end of the universe. Even our universe can start over again, it can burst open again.’

His dream line up would be wonderfully eclectic: ‘I’ll say Ennio Morricone for his memorable cinematic music and conductor Sergiu Celibidache for his incredible orchestral approach to transparency,’ he said. ‘And Hilary Hahn because she is an amazing violin player who I heard the first time play on the soundtrack of ‘The Village’ and afterwards I was amazed by her performances of Paganini. I’ll have Vladimir Horowitz for his pianistic artistry and, in particular, his effortless playing style and musicality. His interpretations of Bach-Busoni and Schubert are fabulous. And Symphony X is a band on another planet, together with Dream Theater they are the pinnacle of progressive symphonic metal!’