by Andrew Ford
My favourite concerts were by the Early Music Consort of London and the Fires of London, both directed by young, intense, charismatic men, the music historian, broadcaster and multi-instrumentalist David Munrow and the composer Peter Maxwell Davies. Munrow’s concerts were informal yet carefully devised explorations of music from the Middle Ages and early Renaissance; I don’t suppose I had previously heard even a single piece that he presented. It was scarcely any different at concerts by the Fires of London, except that here the music was mostly brand new. Both groups contained some remarkable musicians – the keyboard player Christopher Hogwood was in the Early Music Consort, along with the counter-tenor James Bowman, while the Fires had that fearless clarinettist Alan Hacker.
Maxwell Davies would bound on stage, wired and wiry, his hair a profusion of black curls, his eyes a mix of penetrating focus and pixie-like glint, his conducting all elbows, his sharp, military bows always from the waist. At a Prom concert in 1974, the two ensembles shared a program, the Early Music Consort marking 500 years since the death of Guillaume Dufay with a performance of his mass, Se la face ay pale, the Fires playing Maxwell Davies’s no less monumental Hymn to St Magnus, the two groups joining forces for music from Ken Russell’s film The Devils.
In those days Munrow was ubiquitous. Besides the Early Music Consort, with which he made countless recordings, personally playing forty-three instruments, there were his film and TV scores (including The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elizabeth R), and his Pied Piper radio program for children on weekday afternoons. I would not have been the only child who rushed home from school to hear these carefully scripted, twenty-minute explorations of this or that instrument or of the music of Mexico or Egypt or Berlioz or Villa-Lobos (there was an ear-opening week’s worth of episodes given over to the Brazilian composer), or of dance music down the centuries or ceremonial music or some aspect of jazz. By 1976, when he hanged himself in a state of severe depression at the age of thirty-three, Munrow had written and presented 665 of these finely crafted programs in just five years. That alone should have been a full-time job.
Radio was a vital resource for any young person seeking to explore music, and it remains so, even if there are those, especially on the commercial networks, who would narrow its stylistic range. A knowledgeable presenter makes all the difference, and my own rapacious teenage listening was hugely enhanced by broadcasters such as Munrow and John Peel choosing and ordering the music (these days, I suppose, people would call it ‘curating’, though I wish they wouldn’t) and pointing out the connections. I like to think some of their skill rubbed off on me in my radio work. Their enthusiasm certainly did.
Munrow’s programs went out on BBC Radio 3, the rebranded Third Programme, and this was where most of my own listening was now directed. My cassette recorder was employed to record music by Tippett and Birtwistle more often than Soft Machine or Faust, though I still paid attention to Peel. My school friends also ensured that rock music wasn’t neglected, the sixth-form common room ringing to the sounds of Emerson, Lake and Palmer and King Crimson, Uriah Heep, Bowie and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Bowie, I hardly need say, was extraordinary, but closer to my taste was the Mahavishnu Orchestra. At the time we thought of it as heavy rock – we didn’t know much about jazz besides Dave Brubeck – but now it seems less like rock and more like jazz all the time. It also stands up remarkably well forty years on. An international, jazz rock fusion ‘super group’ – which is what Mahavishnu amounted to – should really sound its age, but the first two albums, Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire, remain fresh and exciting, John McLaughlin’s guitar demonstrating, like Charlie Parker’s alto sax, that you can play thrillingly fast, the music pouring from your instrument with seeming spontaneity, and yet every note is justified and necessary.
The other band of which I was a huge fan, and which seems as fresh today as it did then, was Pentangle, with the guitarists Bert Jansch and John Renbourn and the redoubtable Danny Thompson on double bass. Because the bulk of their material was traditional folk music, Pentangle are lumped together with Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention as folk-rockers, but in fact rock music was one of the musical idioms they never embraced. Blues, yes, jazz, yes, even a sort of ‘world music’ avant la lettre, with banjo, sitar and piano jangling together on certain tracks. Pentangle’s official singer was the slightly pallid Jacqui McShee, but it is Jansch’s soulful, doleful, never-quite-in-tune voice that I hear when I think of the band. Actually, ‘band’ really won’t do. Pentangle neither sounded nor looked like a ‘band’. They sang and played a form of chamber music; they even sat down on the job – ‘bands’ don’t use chairs. To my ears, the folk-rock of Steeleye Span and the Fairports now sounds very much of its time, while Pentangle sound as though their time is yet to come.
One of the first composers I explored in depth was Vaughan Williams. His music seemed to speak to me directly and I grew slightly obsessed by it. Vaughan Williams’s centenary, in 1972, was marked by many concert broadcasts, but the most important concert to me was the one I sang in with the combined choirs of Bromley schools – an event attended by the composer’s widow, Ursula, who made a speech. She was rather posh and struck me as young, given that her dead husband was 100 years old. The music in this concert was mostly minor stuff, including A Song of Thanksgiving and The Sons of Light (for which Ursula had provided the astrological text), but Vaughan Williams is one of those composers with a strong idiolect, his music recognisable from a few bars, so even his lesser achievements are distinctive. Thanks to Radio 3 and the Orpington library, I quickly became something of a Vaughan Williams expert.
Michael Tippett’s third symphony and third piano sonata date from these same years, and I heard the premieres of both works in radio broadcasts. The torrent of notes from Paul Crossley’s hands at the beginning of the sonata produced in me something like the excitement of John McLaughlin’s guitar playing. Again, I supplemented my radio listening with library trips, and one LP in particular stands out, an abstract blue and white wave framed in black on its cover. It featured the Academy of St Martin in the Fields playing Tippett’s music for string orchestra under Neville Marriner, and it was the sort of recording that changes the way a composer is regarded. When Tippett’s Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli was new, the conductor Malcolm Sargent had found it so intimidatingly complex he’d refused to conduct its premiere at the 1953 Edinburgh Festival, but just nineteen years later Marriner revealed the lyrical strength of its counterpoint. Far from the arid ‘intellectualism’ of which Sargent complained to Tippett’s publisher, the Fantasia Concertante emerges here as a bit of a tearjerker. The final minutes of the piece were used again and again by Peter Hall in his 1974 film Akenfield to evoke a sort of pastoral bliss.
The piece that leaps at the listener off Marriner’s Tippett LP, however, is the Concerto for Double String Orchestra. I can think of very few pieces that come so quickly, vividly and happily to life as this – Beethoven’s eighth symphony, perhaps? Mendelssohn’s Italian symphony? Schumann’s Rhenish? The first movement of Tippett’s concerto is an exuberant display of modal melody and sprung rhythms, crisscrossing each other and the bar lines, and it starts in bar one, bounding into our consciousness like a delighted dog. In his television film Poets in a Barren Age, first shown in 1972, the same year Marriner’s LP was released, Tippett spoke of the necessity of inventing music whether ‘society’ wants it or not, and of how the composer’s role includes the provision ‘in an age of mediocrity and shattered dreams’ of ‘images of abounding, generous, exuberant beauty’. He might have been describing the start of this piece composed in 1938 and 1939, a time of violently ‘shattered dreams’.
The ability of a piece to reveal itself in its first seconds is also exemplified by Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître, another oft-borrowed library LP of my teenage years. The music bursts straight into life, but unlike the purposeful start of Tippett’s double concerto, Le marteau shoots off in several directions at once, a daz
zle of sound that is simultaneously disorientating and beguiling in its use of alto flute, guitar, viola and tuned percussion. The sonority is a big part of the appeal of this music – the instrumental colours glittering at least as much as the darting shards of melody – but it’s also the energy that Boulez generates that captivates us: this music is very fast and yet harmonically stable. For all the teeming activity at the start of Le marteau, we’re not really going anywhere. This piece is the aural equivalent of a kaleidoscope.
My next discovery came when I brought home Leonard Bernstein’s recording of recent pieces by two American composers, Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter. I did this entirely on the strength of the Copland, who was an early favourite (and another recommendation of my mum’s), but this wasn’t the cowboy Copland I knew. Connotations and Inscape were thorny, twelve-tone creations that had their moments but didn’t quite come off. I couldn’t have said why, but it seemed to me the composer himself wasn’t convinced by the music. The pieces seemed like dutiful fakes, and they still do, but they are interesting nonetheless, because Copland was a great composer and sometimes a great composer’s forgeries are more interesting than a third-rate composer’s greatest hit.
I hadn’t heard of Elliott Carter, but as soon as I began listening to his Concerto for Orchestra, I knew there was something authentic going on. I’d never encountered such multilayered complexity, but just as impressive was the energy that erupted from the orchestra early in the piece. Unlike those works by Tippett and Boulez, it wasn’t at the very beginning – there’s a minute of undulating calm preceding this explosion, and when it comes, it takes us by surprise. It evidently took the sound engineer by surprise, too, because you can hear the fader being hastily pulled back as Carter detonates his orchestra. This moment of this recording remains for me a sort of touchstone for musical excitement, and I would go on to follow Carter’s music for the rest of his very long life. He was sixty when he wrote the Concerto for Orchestra, and he was still composing at 103. I interviewed him at his home in New York on a number of occasions, and he was always generous with his time. He called me Mr Ford, and naturally I called him Mr Carter, so I treasure the copy of his Collected Essays and Lectures he gave me when I visited him in 1999, inscribed from ‘Elliott’ to ‘Andrew’.
The energy that Carter’s Concerto generates takes different forms, depending partly on how you listen. This is music of interlocking layers or strands – each with its own instrumentation and set of harmonic and rhythmic parameters – and one method of listening is to follow a particular strand; Carter said the piece consisted of four movements playing simultaneously. But there’s also a cumulative energy to the music. You feel, as the listener, that you are borne aloft by this music, moving at great speed. When, after twenty-something minutes, the forward momentum abruptly ends over wispy string harmonics and gently chiming bells, you keep going like one of those cartoon characters who has run over the edge of a cliff and is now running in midair before plummeting to the bottom of some chasm. Carter’s ending provides a parachute. I often return to this work, but associate it especially with the student house I lived in at university, where more than once we put all the lights out and listened to the Bernstein recording very loud, lying on our backs. It was never less than a shattering experience.
There’s another piece by an American composer that is almost the negative of Carter’s Concerto for Orchestra. Lucia Dlugoszewski’s Fire Fragile Flight, for just seventeen instruments, doesn’t have Carter’s complex multilayers. but shares its energy and sense of momentum. The difference is that listening to Dlugoszewski’s piece you don’t seem to be moving at all. On the contrary, the music hurtles past your ears while you stay rooted to the spot. The effect is like being inside a vortex, and occasionally you want to duck as some musical debris flies by.
In January 1974, I sat holding the cassette recorder’s microphone to my transistor to capture a broadcast of Harrison Birtwistle’s orchestral piece, The Triumph of Time. Like most of my other listening, it was a whim. I’d never heard of the Lancastrian composer before this broadcast and I tuned in largely, I think, because there was something vaguely provocative about his name. I’ve been enthusing here about fast music by Boulez, Carter and Dlugoszewski, but The Triumph of Time is very slow, a funereal procession through a blighted landscape. The composer, I believe, came to think less of the piece the more it was performed, but it has never grown stale to me and I have listened to it a lot, especially that first cassette tape. The meandering cor anglais tune, always outwardly the same, always different in detail, one of the most plangent sounds in the music of the past fifty years; the amplified soprano saxophone, its three note motto magically ringing out from the centre of the orchestra; the culminating peroration for unison winds as the percussion department goes wild: even though I now know to expect these things, they never pall.
Part of the power of Birtwistle’s piece is its dramatic timing, and this was also a feature of the instrumental concertos of the Scottish composer Thea Musgrave. Her Viola Concerto was played at the Proms in 1973, the first year I began paying attention to those concerts and the first year I attended. But it was her Horn Concerto for Barry Tuckwell that really seized my imagination. From time to time in Musgrave’s orchestras, players stand to declaim solos, and sometimes they move. There’s one moment in the Horn Concerto where the four orchestral horn players leave the orchestra, walking to the four corners of the auditorium from where they play answering signals to the soloist on stage. At this point in the piece, there’s a sharing of control between the conductor (Musgrave herself on the recording I discovered in Orpington Library) and the horns whose calls are independent of the conductor’s beat. It was that rather fluid aspect of the piece that most appealed to me.
Besides the Dlugoszewski (which I heard later), all the works I’ve mentioned impressed me as a teenager; they all affected my early musical thinking, and I still bear their influence. They are very different pieces – Tippett’s double concerto and Le marteau have little in common – but they were the pieces I latched on to, while others left no mark. These pieces seemed authentic, to repeat the word I used in relation to Carter’s music, and I sought to own them. In the first place, this was a literal matter: I gradually acquired my own copies of the LPs so I could listen whenever I wanted to. But they were subtly different to earlier purchases – the Beatles, Beethoven’s ninth, Pentangle, Mahavishnu Orchestra or whatever – because even as I bought this music by Birtwistle and Musgrave, Carter and Boulez, I could feel they were part of something new in me, something creative.
I was coming to the end of my schooling, and there was the question of what to do next. It would be university, but which one? St Olave’s had a tradition of sending boys to Cambridge and a group of us was taken to look around the place and stay overnight in Selwyn College. I think most of the other boys in the party ended up going to Cambridge, but I was put off by the atmosphere of the place and came home adamant that I didn’t want to go there. It’s hard to explain. I certainly detected an air of privilege to which I took a strong and instant dislike; I was also put off by a weight of tradition that is hard to miss even on an overnight visit.
What did attract me was the concrete and glass modernism of the new universities built in the 1960s, and my choices reflected this. I applied to five of them. York was at the top of my list; Lancaster at the bottom. I forget the others. The first four institutions neglected to make me an offer; Lancaster gave me an interview. And this was just as well. For all my obsession with it, music was still a hobby. At university I intended to study English, and would have ended up with an English degree had I not been lucky enough to be rejected by my first four choices. The University of Lancaster was about to be my salvation.
4.
Permission to Compose
The first of my friends to claim to be a composer (as opposed to a composition student) was in fact not a composer at all for very long. He quickly turned into a baritone and, after that,
an actor. These days he is a well-known face on television; the last time we had a drink together, following his stint on Game of Thrones, we were interrupted by teenage girls wanting selfies. But at some point in 1976, over a cup of coffee in Lancaster University’s Cartmel College refectory, Roger Ashton-Griffiths was bold enough to begin a sentence with the words, ‘Speaking as a composer …’ I have no idea what he said next, because I was so taken aback by those first four words.
My surprise at hearing them was multifaceted. For one thing, the phrase sounded absurdly grand. We were eighteen or nineteen years old and could scarcely have claimed to be anything at all, least of all something so exalted as a composer. Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky were composers, Benjamin Britten was a composer, our teacher Edward Cowie was a composer: by comparison – could one even make a straight-faced comparison? – we were just fumbling around in the dark. (I now know that blind fumbling is part of the job.) But what Roger said also provoked a frisson of possibility. Because while I couldn’t have spoken those words myself at the time – and would still find them hard to utter – there was nothing I wanted more than to be a composer.
But how do you become a composer? The French novelist and philosopher André Malraux said that you don’t turn into a painter by looking at landscapes, but by looking at paintings. By the same token, you become a composer by listening to music and not by contemplating the heavens or the human condition. And yet there must be more to it, because most people listen to music but do not become composers. Unless you count those childish thumpings on my grandparents’ piano and my improvements to the works of Walter Carroll, the first inkling I had that I might want to compose music came late in the evening of Saturday, 10 March 1973, a week before my sixteenth birthday. Actually, it was more than an inkling.
