The Memory of Music

by Andrew Ford

  5.

  Work

  ‘Not the 21-year-old,’ the memo read, or words to that effect.

  For obvious reasons I never saw it, but later I heard this was the gist of the Vice-Chancellor’s message to the chair of the appointment committee. Six applicants had been shortlisted for the job of Fellow in Music. I was the 21-year-old.

  The University of Bradford in West Yorkshire was established, like Lancaster University, in the 1960s, but was a very different place to its counterpart on the other side of the Pennines. Bradford University wasn’t on a campus out in the middle of nowhere, but in the city itself. Next door was the Bradford School of Art, which David Hockney had attended, but the university was technological – modern languages being as close as the university came to the humanities – and the arts were the domain of the fellows in theatre and music. There was nothing academic about these roles. It was the fellows’ job, simply, to makes theatre and music part of the daily life of the campus.

  The chair of the appointment committee, the professor of pharmacy, was a cultured Scot named David Mathieson, and he elected not to share the VC’s advice with his colleagues. I forget how I finally found out about it. Following a first round of interviews, six candidates were whittled down to two – me and Charles Rae, now Charles Bodman Rae, the distinguished Sir Thomas Elder Professor of Music at Adelaide University. And after another round I was offered the job. It might easily not have happened.

  As Professor Mathieson was wrapping up the interview, Kenneth Whitton, professor of German, spoke up.

  ‘Just out of curiosity, this new music group of yours … What exactly is a moonflower?’ I scanned the faces of the panel, attempting to size up the members’ combined botanical knowledge, then explained about a pale yellow flower, native to the Morecambe Bay area of Lancashire. It was a bit like a primrose, I said. I couldn’t remember the Latin name, but the locals called it the moonflower because its petals reflected moonlight.

  As Fellow in Music at Bradford, I had several responsibilities and I wasn’t truly qualified for any of them, though at the time this never occurred to me. The first part of the job was to run the University Music Centre. This was easy enough, consisting largely of accepting bookings from students who wanted to use one of the centre’s practice rooms. But there were two choirs to conduct – a large choir for all-comers and a small, invitation-only chamber choir. And there was a concert series to run, with a budget to pay for it. The 1978–79 season was already planned and announced by my predecessor, Philip Jones, and included a recital by the great mezzo-soprano Janet Baker at St George’s Hall in the city.

  To my surprise, when I walked into the Music Centre on my first day, I discovered that I had a secretary. Brenda H. was a kind, jovial, middle-aged woman with a rare talent for malapropisms (‘Anthony Wood can’t come to the rehearsal, because he’s having an autopsy’). Brenda was as surprised by my arrival as I was by her presence, mistaking me at first for a new student. It was partly my age, partly my clothes. I later learnt that Philip Jones had worn a suit to work, but I turned up that first day in dungarees and a tartan bomber jacket. Brenda was an old-fashioned secretary who expected to type my letters and generally be told what to do. Since I barely knew what I was doing myself, this was tricky; it might have been better for the first few weeks had she told me what to do. But we soon worked each other out and in time became good colleagues.

  My counterpart at Bradford, the Fellow in Theatre, was the writer and director Graham Devlin, and to start with he was as wary of his 21-year-old colleague as the Vice-Chancellor had been. But we discovered a shared sense of humour and, because of our parallel jobs, often found ourselves fighting similar battles. Graham was nine years older than me and ran his own touring theatre company, Major Road, which had once come to my school to perform, so I tended to look up to him. Among other things, Graham helped broaden my musical tastes, which had narrowed at university as I concentrated on contemporary art music and my own composing. It’s probably good for a young composer to be single-minded, but I’d gone so far as to sell my rock LPs, eschewing pop music in general, with the exception of some rather mainstream jazz. I hadn’t been oblivious to rock – punk was impossible to ignore, and I developed a lasting admiration of Elvis Costello when his second album came out in my final year at Lancaster; I was also immediately drawn to Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside and the magnificent weirdness of ‘Wuthering Heights’ – but on the whole, I think I had developed a slightly snobby attitude to music. Today I would argue no one sort of music is better than any other sort, only different, but back then I had come to consider pop music to be shallow (of course some of it is) and too easy to be worth an investment of my time.

  Graham had a devotion to American rock, and through him I found myself listening properly to Dylan and discovering Springsteen. Darkness on the Edge of Town had just appeared; it is still my favourite Springsteen album, its emotional energy almost overwhelming. This wasn’t shallow at all and it wasn’t that easy. Some of the best rock music took effort and persistence. It was, for instance, years before I understood the appeal of Van Morrison, and that was despite having a girlfriend at Bradford, Diana W., who was a Morrison fan (it wasn’t till we eventually moved in together that I appreciated the richness in Morrison’s voice). Ry Cooder was another discovery I made through both Graham and Diana, and listening to those early albums – Boomer’s Story, Paradise and Lunch and Chicken Skin Music – whole swathes of America’s musical past opened up. I had never taken country music seriously, but Graham had just returned from the United States, having directed the lighting on a tour by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. He had Red Headed Stranger – one of the great albums of the 1970s. Among his other mementos was Willie’s recipe for mixing a margarita: one part lime and lemon juice (you need both); one part triple sec; four parts tequila. You mustn’t drink too many of these, but by the same token, once you’ve tasted Willie’s recipe, all other margaritas seem like soft drinks.

  My first challenge at Bradford was the two choirs. In the concert schedule left for me by Philip Jones there was a December date on which the large University Choir was to perform in Bradford Cathedral. I had never conducted a choir in my life and my chamber ensemble repertoire consisted almost exclusively of twentieth-century music, the single exception an ill-advised Moonflower performance of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll. For my first concert with the choir, I programmed two pieces I had sung at school and knew thoroughly: Bach’s cantata Sleepers, Wake! and Vivaldi’s Gloria. To my relief, rehearsals went well. I discovered that I enjoyed conducting this music and had a rapport with the choir. But you also need an orchestra to perform these works and there wasn’t one.

  Philip Jones had scrapped the University Orchestra – I soon discovered why – preferring to engage a professional chamber orchestra for these concerts. But I felt that a university ought to have an orchestra, and so should a city of nearly 400,000 people, so I put out a call for players in the Bradford Telegraph & Argus. The initial response was not encouraging. Of the four or five violinists who turned up on the first night, only one, an elderly man named Stanley, showed flair, and with Stanley there wasn’t much except flair. Still, in the absence of anyone else, I asked him to sit in the concert master’s chair and we began our weekly rehearsals. In addition to the Bach and Vivaldi, I also programmed Tippett’s Little Music for String Orchestra. It’s not such a difficult piece to play, but it was too much for these players. While the choir improved all the time, singing the Bach and Vivaldi with real feeling, the orchestra made little headway. I couldn’t even count on the same players coming each week. Some weeks, even Stanley didn’t come.

  The difficulty was that Bradford had no music department. In most universities, the music students form the core of the orchestra, talented players from other departments making up the numbers. We had no numbers to make up. Our players were chemical engineers and mathematicians, physicists and pharmacologists. There were some good ones, too, but th
ey never seemed to be violinists. As the concert drew nearer, I realised I would have to bring in other players, so I asked old Lancaster friends to come and give the orchestra some body – and indeed some accuracy. I didn’t handle it well. At the final rehearsal, Stanley arrived to find someone else in his seat. Much of my job at Bradford required interpersonal skills. By the time I left there, four years later, I think I had acquired some, but along the way I offended people.

  The concert wasn’t exactly a disaster. The singing was good. But my resurrection of the University Orchestra looked like a poor decision. Spotting the Vice-Chancellor in the audience – the man who had advised against my appointment – a member of the choir said with Yorkshire bluntness that he expected one of two things to happen as a result of the concert: there would either be more money for music or there would be less.

  Next came my first concert with the small chamber choir. No one had mentioned the university’s annual carol service until someone asked which carols we’d be singing this year. I discovered that usually the chamber choir sang a handful of items a cappella, the audience joined in for the big numbers, and the singing was interspersed with readings. So it was a version of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge. Apparently it was the Fellow in Music’s job to devise it and it was four weeks away.

  As a child, like most children, I had loved Christmas, and ever since I married a Finn – and particularly since we had a child – I’ve come to love it again: the traditions, the food and especially the music. But in between I was at best ambivalent, and as a young man, I’m sorry to say, I regarded the whole thing with disdain. With the Bradford carol service looming, it was too late to wriggle out of my responsibilities, but I was determined that if this was to be my show, we’d do something a little less predictable than a pale imitation of Christmas at King’s. I told Graham Devlin my difficulty and asked if he had any ideas.

  ‘What about the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play?’ he said.

  Mystery (or miracle) plays were common in medieval England, retelling Bible stories from the back of a cart, often in a rambunctious manner. Benjamin Britten’s children’s opera Noye’s Fludde is based on a mystery play from Chester, Mrs Noah portrayed as an incorrigible drunk, her refusal to cooperate nearly scuppering her husband’s plan to save the world.

  The Chester plays form one of four complete or nearly complete cycles of mystery plays, another being the so-called Towneley cycle from Wakefield in Yorkshire. And since Wakefield was just down the road from Bradford, it made sense to perform one of their Christmas plays. But the Second Shepherds’ Play is pretty unconventional. The shepherds visit the Christ Child in time-honoured fashion and the infant is identified as the redeemer of humankind, but only after a knockabout first act in which the same shepherds find a stolen sheep lying in a manger. It’s not the same manger, but we don’t know that yet, and a modern audience, such as the one attending my carol service, might easily be confused. Theatre had never been part of the service before, and seeing the play announced in the printed program, there were those who expected a traditional Nativity play. An hour after the service finished my phone rang. It was Professor Mathieson.

  ‘I’m hearing from various sources that this year’s carol service was blasphemous,’ he said. He was deadpan, yet thankfully I could tell he was amused. But from all this I learnt a lesson. The Christmas concert had not been my concert, it had been the university’s. And while I never set out to offend anyone, only liven things up, not everything needs livening up. For the next three Christmases, we did the thing properly.

  There was still the problem of the orchestra. Having brought it back from the dead, I felt I now had to keep it going. Playing it safe was hardly an option, so I decided to aim bigger. For our next concert I programmed Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, having once been impressed by an amateur performance of the piece. I reasoned that it might give the orchestra some confidence since it’s not hard to play and you are obliged to make a lot of noise. My instinct was correct. After ten weeks rehearsing Carmina Burana I had come to loathe the piece for its simple-minded plundering of Stravinsky – so much of Orff is a cheap pastiche of Les Noces – but the performance was a success. And we made a very big noise indeed. The trick was to find the right repertoire. I came to realise there is some music orchestras shouldn’t touch unless they can really play. Mozart is top of the list. An average amateur orchestra can destroy Mozart and we did just that to his clarinet concerto. On the other hand, Schubert, which you might think would be a similar case, seems to stand up much better to a rough-and-ready approach. We played his first, third and eighth symphonies, with the third, which involves a degree of bluster, coming off best. Bluster, indeed, is what you’re looking for if you conduct an amateur orchestra. For instance, while there’s not much Wagner you can play successfully, you can pull off the prelude to The Mastersingers.

  We also tackled more recent music – Elizabeth Maconchy’s early Suite for string orchestra and David Bedford’s The Tentacles of the Dark Nebula (with my old friend from Lancaster, Andrew Murgatroyd), then, more ambitiously, Lutosławski’s Venetian Games and (with the choir) Birtwistle’s cantata, The Fields of Sorrow. And I staged Stockhausen’s Ylem again, the players at first sceptical, because there was no music to read, but gradually coming round until, after many rehearsals, they gave one of the best performances of the piece I’ve ever heard. This was an orchestra that mostly had difficulty playing in tune, but Ylem, which depended on intuition and listening and playing single notes, turned out to be something they could perform with insight. We even took our performance on a little tour, playing it at universities in London and Southampton. Two years earlier there had been no orchestra at all at Bradford University, then there’d been a ramshackle orchestra that had made a hash of Bach and Vivaldi. We were still ramshackle, but for a moment we’d found our mojo and toured it, playing Stockhausen at universities that had actual music departments.

  Touring was something the chamber choir had always done and sometimes we gave concerts outside England. We sang Monteverdi and Purcell in churches around Yorkshire and Lancashire, Dufay and Dowland in Dundee and St Andrews, Gesualdo and Victoria in Kilkenny and Dublin, and Byrd, Allegri, Bruckner and Stockhausen (Atmen gibt das Leben) in Amsterdam, Gouda and The Hague.

  The Ireland tour took place in the summer of 1981, at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This was the year of the hunger strikes in the Maze Prison, a number of republican prisoners starving themselves to death. The first to die was Bobby Sands, two months before our tour. Since we were going to the Irish Republic, not Ulster, it hadn’t crossed my mind that the choir might be in any danger until I was contacted by the Irish Special Branch. They also didn’t believe we were in danger, but said they would be keeping an eye on us all the same. The night we arrived in Dublin, a member of the Special Branch called at the house where we were staying and told us there would be officers at all our concerts and rehearsals. But not to worry.

  On the day of our first concert the fifth hunger striker died. We arrived at a big barn of a church in the Dublin suburb of Finglas West, to find the letters IRA carved into the front doors. A couple of Special Branch men came to say hello and stayed for the rehearsal. The first half was secular music, Italian and Elizabethan madrigals along with the first performance of my own Wedding Songs, sung by the baritone Austin Allen. The second half included more music of the Renaissance, this time liturgical in nature and enthusiastically received by the audience, culminating in an extraordinary piece for twenty-four solo voices by a friend, Vic Hoyland. It was called Em, its text a deconstruction of the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Ruin’ – a ruin of ‘The Ruin’.

  Em is an exceptionally intense piece, performed – you would hardly say ‘sung’ – by opposing ‘phalanxes’ (the composer’s word) of male and female voices, twelve and twelve. The two lines stand facing each other but as far apart as possible and utter loud, high-pitched shrieks across the divide
in a complex, violent polyphony. Vic himself had attended an early rehearsal, encouraging the singers to push their voices until they hurt. By the end of the ten-minute piece, the singers are reduced to quiet guttural noises, slowly fading to nothing. Then there’s a long silence. We always did it last on a program, because no one could really sing after it, and once it was under our belts we seldom rehearsed the piece. Never on the day of a performance.

  So at the concert that evening our Special Branch protectors, chatting in an anteroom with the parish ladies busy preparing sandwiches, were ignorant of Em until the moment it started. In that cavernous building it sounded very much like a massacre. The police went for their guns, one hitting the floor while another flattened himself against the wall, edging his way into the main part of the church (or so the ladies told us later). Once in the church, it took the officer a few moments to realise that the reason he couldn’t see the choir wasn’t that its members were lying dead on the ground, but that they were hidden from his view behind pillars. Fortunately, he could see me conducting, it slowly dawning on him that this appalling, blood-curdling din was a piece of music.

  The Fellow in Theatre’s office was in the still-new Theatre in the Mill, a converted wool mill that now housed a small performance space. The seating was flexible and the theatre could be set up with the audience at one end or on any two sides. It seemed ideal as a space to present little workshop concerts. We did these on Sunday evenings, performing one or two pieces of twentieth-century chamber music, with an illustrated introduction, followed by a discussion. One of these evenings was devoted to Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, with the Australian soprano Margaret Field. I was surprised when she asked me which language I’d like her to sing the piece in, because I’d only ever heard it in German. But Margaret had also performed it in English, and so we took advantage of this to present all the introductory examples in English, with the subsequent performance in German.