Karl Jenkins

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2006

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Britain's most successful contemporary composer, Karl Jenkins. He is most famous for developing a style that fuses his classical background with his interest in jazz and world music and his albums top the charts around the world. He was brought up in a small Welsh village and, after his mother died, lived with his father, grandmother and widowed aunt. His father taught him the piano when he was a child and in his teens he gravitated towards the oboe and went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music.

His first musical career was as a jazz musician - he won first prize at the Montreux Jazz Festival and played venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall and Ronnie Scott's. In the 1980s, he gave up life on the road and started writing advertising music and jingles. More awards followed, but he felt cramped by the nature of the work and wanted to write music that was more expansive. A track which he'd written for a minute long commercial went on to become the corner-stone of his most well-known work, The Adiemus Project.

He's said that it was only then that he realised his niche lay in composing work that was grounded in his classical upbringing but also benefited from his interest in jazz and world music. And, while critics have on occasion sneered at his work, he has collected countless gold and platinum discs and a worldwide audience.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: The Final trio from the third Act of Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss Book: The Michelin Guide to France by Michelin Luxury: A piano

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2006. My castaway this week is Britain's most successful contemporary composer Carl Jenkins.
0:33.6	His affinity with music began conventionally enough in Wales with an organist choirmaster
0:38.0	father who schooled him in early piano lessons.
0:40.6	He later went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
0:44.0	But that's where the solid predictability of his musical journey ends.
0:48.0	In the late 60s and 70s, he took a tour into Jazz Fusion,
0:52.0	winning first prize at the Moncher Jazz Festival and performing
0:55.4	at Carnegie Hall and Ronnie Scots. In the 80s, he gave up life on the road to write music and
1:00.5	jingles for big budget ads, with customers including Delta Airlines, Pepsi, Debeers and Levi's.
1:07.0	More awards followed.
1:08.0	Now his full-length symphonies sell like hot cakes around the world and his crowd-pleasing compositions
1:14.4	have seen inverted into Classic F. M. Hall of Fame, the only living composer to make it.
1:20.6	But his music also excites a good deal of huffing and puffing from the critics,
1:25.0	for among other things being uncomplicated, hummable and safe.
1:30.0	In reply, he says, I write music that connects with a lot of people and gives them they say
1:35.2	some spiritual solace so maybe I'm doing something right you are then Carl Jenkins that
1:40.2	rare thing a contemporary composer who sells a lot of records. Do you think of your audience
1:45.0	when you compose? No, because I think it'd be fatal to second-guess what people want or what people like.
1:51.1	I write for myself and I'm fortunate in to a certain degree that my music is accessible.
1:57.0	Where do you take your inspiration from?
	...

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