How composer and DJ Gabriel Prokofiev is bringing classical music to a young audience
- The Russian-British composer, producer, DJ and artistic director of London nightclub Nonclassical talks about growing up with his father, artist Oleg Prokofiev
- He says that, though his grandfather was composer Sergei Prokofiev, there was no pressure to go into music
Famous fathers: My father, Oleg Prokofiev, was a Russian abstract painter. In the 1950s and 60s, abstract art was forbidden in the Soviet Union, so he couldn’t exhibit his work or live as an artist. His second wife was Camilla Gray (a British art historian), who he met in Moscow but had to wait seven years for permission (from the Soviet government) to marry. She moved to Russia and they had a daughter, Anastasia, but a year later Gray fell ill with hepatitis and died.
My father came to England for her funeral and never went back to Russia. He got a fellowship as a resident artist at Leeds University and met my mother (Frances), who was a student there and an artist. They started a family and I was born in London, in 1975. There were five of us kids growing up in Blackheath. It was a lively, creative household. My father was always working on his art and playing loud minimalist music, like Philip Glass, or jazz or Bach.
Striking a chord: When I was 10 years old, I began writing pop songs with a friend, Nathan Cooper. We would get together at the weekend, sit down at the keyboard with a blank page and an hour later we’d have a melody and some chords. We performed a song in school assembly and everyone liked it. We were hooked. By the time we were 12, we’d formed a band with some friends, and by 13 we were doing concerts around Blackheath.
Then there came the chance to write classical pieces at school. I wrote a piano piece and the teachers were impressed. For the first time, I thought maybe I could do classical music. It was so far removed from what my grandfather had done that I didn’t compare it to him, didn’t feel any pressure. As I got older, I felt self-conscious about the Prokofiev name and wanting to do music and shied away from composing for several years.
The penny drops: I had a gap year in Tanzania and taught English and maths in a secondary school on the plains below Mount Kilimanjaro. It was a life-changing experience. I studied music and philosophy at Birmingham University, and focused on electronic music. It was there the penny dropped that something was wrong with the way new classical music was presenting itself. No other students would turn up to hear classical concerts performed by students.
During my time in Tanzania, I’d seen a choir in the local village. It was ritualistic music, rhythmic singing with occasional clapping. It was only the old people who knew the music, so it was clear that when the old people died it would be lost. I got in touch with the British Library’s Sound Archive and they said, “You must record it.”
In the summer holidays after my first year at university, I went back to Africa and encountered music I never knew existed. I went to an all-night Maasai ceremony where the men did circular breathing, almost hyperventilating rhythmic chanting, which went on for hours until they went into a trance. The music had a strong effect on me, it definitely got in my blood. A lot of my music has a strong sense of pulse and groove and that comes from that time.
Making dad proud: From Birmingham, I went to York University to do a master’s. In the summer of 1998, when I was completing that degree, my father died suddenly. I was very close to him. He’d seen me have some success – three months before he died, I won an international competition for electro-music composition and he was very proud of that. I regret that he hasn’t seen how my music has developed because I learned a lot about music from him. His death was a big shock. I moved back to London and have lived in East London ever since.
On the Spektrum: I stopped doing classical music and formed a band called Spektrum with Lola Olafisoye, an old-school soul singer. We were making electronic music and played in a lot of nightclubs – I wanted to reach an audience and feel that the music was being communicated. I also produced rap music with a woman called Lady Sovereign. But I got frustrated with the club and pop music scene: if you wanted to get on the radio, you had to be formulaic to fit into the fashion of the time.
In 2003, I bumped into a cellist from York University who asked if I’d write a string quartet. Re-engaging with classical music was as if a new world had opened up. I wrote my first string quartet with influences from electronic and dance music. It had these syncopated rhythms you could almost dance to.
Classical with a twist: In 2004, I set up Nonclassical, an organisation that promotes classical music in a non-traditional way. It grew out of the belief that a lot of young people have the potential to love classical music, but it doesn’t enter their sphere. Young people go to clubs and live gigs, they don’t go to classical concerts, so if classical musicians want them to listen to their music, they need to bring their music to the venues.
We put on classical events in nightclubs and bars. I promoted the first event as though it was a normal club and we had a good turnout of people in their 20s. The press got quite excited. I thought, “This is the future, within a year there will be classical clubs all around London every weekend.” Of course, that didn’t happen. The next one wasn’t until six months later.
After two years, I teamed up with someone and it went monthly. It was a struggle to book acts every month and promote it. In London, there is so much going on, the competition is fierce.
The big break: In 2006, I did a turntable concerto that was performed at the BBC Proms in 2011. That was my breakthrough career moment. It was broadcast on BBC television and someone put it on YouTube and the word got out. It led to a lot of work. Over the past eight years, I’ve written seven concertos for orchestras and soloists. I was asked to be composer in residence for Orchestre de Pau Pays de Béarn, in France, and wrote four pieces for them.
Dancing all night: I met my wife, Makila, at a party in 2001. We just danced the whole night. She’s half French and half Congolese. We did things in the wrong order – we had three children and only got married a year ago. Our first child, Lutia, was born in 2005, Dmitri is 11 and Cilka is eight. It was nice for the children to be old enough to see their parents get married.
Protest music: This is my first time in Hong Kong. I will perform live electronics with a string quartet. We will play a piece called Howl! I wrote it in 2012 at the time of the Arab spring. It has industrial, ominous sounds against a lyrical, haunting melody. It’s about the loneliness of the protesters, because it can be a lonely and frightening experience.
Gabriel Prokofiev was in Hong Kong to perform at the Fragrant Village Festival.
