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Bryce Dessner – composer and The National guitarist, whose recent score is for the Sydney Dance Company – says choreography is often at the centre of his work. By Romy Ash.

The National guitarist Bryce Dessner on composing for dance

Musician and composer Bryce Dessner.

Credit: Jens Koch Photography

“I am a twin. So, basically as a twin, you almost have no identity, growing up,” says Grammy Award-winning composer and musician Bryce Dessner. “I mean, it’s beautiful because you share an identity. The problem that most adults go through – with twins, it’s the inverse. A lot of people struggle with their ego, especially in modern society, it can be a source of great anxiety. A twin, though, is a different animal. We grow up … as a collective. A collective identity. Even the ego is shared – there’s always a sort of bridge between us.”

Dessner says collaboration is at the heart of all his work. Whether he’s writing for dance, film, orchestral or operatic work, or as part of his many bands – The National, Clogs, Complete Mountain Almanac – all of his work engages with listening, a call and response. He’s collaborated with the likes of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Paul Simon and Taylor Swift. He’s written music for the highly regarded films The Two Popes (2019) and The Revenant (2015). He’s been mulling over his collective twin identity and how it has shaped both how he first began studying music and his joy in working with others.

Recently, he has been collaborating with Rafael Bonachela and Sydney Dance Company, as well as the Australian String Quartet. In 2015, Bonachela choreographed Frame of Mind to three of Dessner’s existing string quartets. I remember watching this deeply moving, deeply immersive production. “With the Sydney Dance Company, the level of talent is kind of absurd,” says Dessner. “They can kind of do anything. They’re very physical dancers, very beautiful dancers, and they’ve developed their own language of dance. It’s really specific. The level of virtuosity. They’re free of the classical aesthetic, they’re doing more contemporary work and more experimental movement. They’re like a great band or orchestra, they move together in an exceptional way. I would say, it’s very architectural, the way they use space. Due a lot to Rafael’s work with them. Big, ambitious, modern work.”

After Frame of Mind was produced, Dessner came to Sydney to talk to Bonachela about a new project and to meet the dancers. The project became Impermanence, first staged in 2021, a piece that contemplates the fleeting, ephemeral nature of life. Impermanence is being restaged, this month, as part of a double bill, alongside the world premiere of Melanie Lane’s new work, Love Lock.

All that collaboration began with his twin, Aaron Dessner. “My brother and I, we were into different things. He was really into sports, I was into music,” says Dessner. “Later we both did music. You know, specifically for me, what I remember about all of that, was that my Saturday morning flute lesson was basically the only time that I had alone with my mum. I would get 30 minutes with the flute teacher, Mum would sit in the corner and smile the entire 30 minutes, and I would play. I think that’s why I was doing it. I loved it, but it was also just partly, that this moment, I could just have a second. Even to all of our relatives, we were just referred to as ‘the boys’. Literally, still, when we see them: ‘The boys are here.’ ”

The brothers are founding members of the indie rock band The National. They’ve been playing with The National for 25 years, but they were in bands together since their early teens. I watch the official music clip of “Eucalyptus”, a sad song about a couple splitting up that somehow manages to also be upbeat, uplifting. Dessner talks about sad songs later in our interview – about how in a sad song the notes can still “look up”.

“It’s not necessarily the sentiment being sad or happy, but which way is it looking, what’s the horizon of the piece?” I can hear this horizon in Eucalyptus, which is full of lyrics like: “What about the undeveloped cameras? Maybe we should bury these … what about the ceiling fans?” “Eucalyptus” is from the band’s recent album First Two Pages of Frankenstein (2023).

In this clip – and actually in all the other clips I watch – I can’t tell who is Bryce and who is Aaron. Maybe Bryce has the blue beanie on, and not the black? They look exactly the same with their stubble, shoulder-length hair and wry smiles. When speaking, Bryce often slips into this “we”, his collective twin identity.

“The band … it’s almost like my immediate family, like literally my brother, and the others are like my brothers, and there’s a sort of unconditional love there,” he says. “It’s also kind of infantile at times, to be honest. It’s beautiful but sometimes it’s ancient. Sometimes we are relating to one another like it’s 25 years ago, and we’ve all since then had families, been through tragedies. There’s a lot of history there, and it’s mostly great.”

I ask him about what it felt like, the moments when The National went from a band that not many people listened to, to a band that could fill a stadium. “Our first tour to Europe, the French media really started to promote it and take notice, and this was at a time when nobody cared anywhere else,” says Dessner. “We weren’t playing to audiences in New York, you know, our friends would come.

“We showed up in Paris and we played on this little boat on the Seine. A legendary venue called the Guinguette Pirate, a little wooden pirate ship basically, where you couldn’t have fit more than 100 people, I think, maybe 200, and it sold out. It was our first ever sold-out show and that was the moment that, yeah, you got that electricity in the room and the people knew the songs, and it was a messy show.

“We were inside a little ship. We could barely fit the instruments onstage. Whether you’re playing to 100 people or 1000 people or 10,000 people or 100,000 people, it’s just, the feeling is the same, to be honest. It’s almost more intense, the smaller rooms.” I laugh at this, a little incredulous. Not at the description of the gig in the Guinguette Pirate, but the nonchalance with which he makes the 100 people to 100,000 people comparison. It’s strangely endearing.

I watch Mistaken for Strangers (2013), the documentary about The National’s 2010 tour made by frontman and lyricist Matt Berninger’s brother, Tom Berninger, at a point in the band’s trajectory when they were beginning to make it big. It feels like Matt was sad everyone else had their brother along and decided to include his. The group’s other members are brothers Bryan Devendorf, who plays drums, and Scott Devendorf, who plays bass.

Tom Berninger is portrayed as an adorable slacker, a struggling filmmaker, still living at home with his parents in Cincinnati. When I ask Bryce Dessner about Mistaken for Strangers, he makes a face. “That documentary – it’s not entirely…” He leaves off. The face says I shouldn’t believe everything I see. It is much more fun to believe everything I see. The film really is a look at fraternal bonds and is definitely a stand-out in a genre of filmmaking that, unless you’re a fan, is often boring.

When I talk to Dessner, it’s morning in the Basque region of France. He’s late, because he’s just dropped off his kid at the first day of the school year. It’s the end of summer. The school is three minutes down the hill. He lives in a 17th century farmhouse. He’s 10 minutes from the sea. There’s a mountain at the back of the house and a forest full of old oak trees. He’s in his studio, surrounded by instruments. The studio is all white walls and exposed timber beams. He’s got a lovely voice.

He’s always had two sides to his music making: the indie rock side and the classical side. He’s speaking about the “physicality” of his music, how he’s always thinking about dance, movement, bodies, when he’s composing. “I think it connects to the fact that I am a performer also,” he says. “I was talking about playing as a kid: I played fife, then I played recorder, then I played piccolo, then I played flute, then eventually I played alto flute.”

He talks about how those instruments expanded in size as he got bigger. “They make sound,” he says, “but they also – you hold them in your hand. The electric guitar, which is the primary instrument I play onstage now, say in the band, it has physical properties of sound. A lot of what we do – we are not playing fast virtuosic lines [in The National] – sometimes it’s just a chord, but letting the chord resonate and you really feel it against your body, the way that the sound feels in the chest.

“The volume, even a lot of contemporary composers are playing with frequency, I would say, the timbres, the natural harmonics that resonate off an instrument, creating… People who are really good at electronic instruments are playing the room itself, tuning the room. All these things are physical. Physicality, it might be, partly, growing up in New York City, where I would go to rock clubs as an 18-year-old or 20-year-old and sit in front of Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth and watch him just setting his instrument against the amplifier and playing the pedals and creating explosions of sound. Or Kim Gordon – she’s a good example of the world that I grew up in, the possibilities.”

Dessner spent a lot of time in New York City as a young person, but he grew up in Cincinnati. His first performances in public were playing the flute in churches, small recitals playing Mozart. He was so good at the flute he was excluded from all his middle school music classes. He had to practise his virtuosic lines in an empty room alone. He jokes about being too good a musician for indie rock, too. He says if The National was a metal band, it would be a different story. His dad was a jazz drummer in the ’60s. He and Aaron had their dad’s original drum set in their suburban Ohio house, in the basement where they jammed for years, their sister’s boyfriend teaching them post-punk songs. The basement is where they played with The National’s drummer, Bryan Devendorf, as 13-year-olds. Dessner says it was “very American”. Where he lives now, in France, there’s no basement.

He also grew up watching his older sister, Jessica Dessner, dance ballet. She’s “the artist of the family”, says Dessner. He remembers sitting in the cheap seats at the Cincinnati Music Hall and watching her dance The Nutcracker. He says, “When I write music, it’s very choreographic. Kind of all my pieces, almost all of them were written for dance, but not for dance. Even recently – last year I wrote a concerto for piano, dedicated to my sister. It’s a dance piece without any dance.”

It’s as if his sister is always with him, a spectre dancing, and his brother, both of them so intrinsically linked to Dessner’s artistic practice. Of course, he is often, also, actually writing for dance.

“Most of my favourite classical scores are written for dance, The Rite of Spring, Firebird, the Tchaikovsky ballets, even West Side Story, there are a lot of examples of great scores written for dance,” he says. “I have written a lot of orchestral music. I have written a lot for film. I have written staged, theatrical and operatic works – but there’s something about dance. It is often the best sort of collaboration.”

Dessner and the Sydney Dance Company have an ongoing collaboration. “The beauty of working with dance [is] music comes first actually,” he says. “It wasn’t scoring their movement. I created the piece [Impermanence] for them, and then they choreographed the movement to it. I literally had the dancers in mind, as I wrote.

“Ultimately, my pieces are not programmatic, they’re not telling one story, and it really comes back to movement and the body. The beautiful thing in music is leaving room. The magic is not all in the score. It’s what happens after. It’s true in the band, it’s true in the dance company, it’s true in the orchestra. It’s the unplanned thing, the accidental things.”

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