The Memory of Music

by Andrew Ford

  The Sunday-night events were an example of my growing interest in the way music is presented. Ever since I’d dragged schoolmates along to concerts there’d been an element of missionary zeal in my attitude to music. At Bradford, I invited guests not only to perform but also to talk about music. A favourite was Wilfrid Mellers, Professor of Music at York University. He came a few times, on one occasion speaking about Hebridean mouth music, on another the music of the Spanish composer Federico Mompou and on a third about tradition in the songs of Dolly Parton and Joni Mitchell. Largely through his books, Wilfrid was an important role model for me, but in his lectures the occasionally purple prose of his writing style translated into an irrepressible fountain of enthusiasm for whatever was the music at hand, and he always emphasised that you could talk about any music at all. I was soon emulating him, giving a series of my own talks that ranged from Kate Bush to Edgard Varèse, speaking before concerts in Leeds Town Hall and writing occasional articles about music for the Yorkshire Post.

  Another aspect of musical presentation is program building, which at Bradford became a favourite game. It’s to do with mixing and matching pieces of music so that they illuminate each other. The trick is not to be obvious. You can put chamber music in an orchestral concert; if you play an overture, it doesn’t have to go first – it can end the evening. We’re used to mixing old and new, and to the familiar pieces providing context for the unfamiliar, but occasionally the more recent music might be better known than the older works, even when the older works are by famous composers. The Bradford concert of which I was most proud began with Bach’s Cantata No 50 (for the Feast of St Michael), followed by The Fields of Sorrow by Birtwistle, then Bartók’s Piano Concerto No 3 (with Geoffrey Brown). After the interval, we performed Birtwistle’s Nenia on the Death of Orpheus for soprano (Poppy Holden), three bass clarinets, percussion and piano, and finished with full choir and orchestra in Beethoven’s late cantata, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, a piece that feels like the ninth symphony condensed into ten minutes. You can easily imagine a concert in which the Bartók concerto would be the novelty item, but on this evening it was the most familiar work, and there were more audience members who knew one of the Birtwistle pieces than had heard either the Bach or the Beethoven.

  In addition to those concerts I was conducting, I was able to indulge in building programs for visiting artists, and we had some great names in those four years. Besides Janet Baker, Ravi Shankar came, the great recorder player Frans Brüggen gave a solo recital and Christopher Hogwood visited twice; we welcomed the Carla Bley Band, the medievalists Syntagma Musicum of Amsterdam, the Dutch contemporary music group Hoketus with composers Louis Andriessen and Frederic Rzewski (narrating his impassioned piece about the Attica Prison Riots, Coming Together); the Arditti Quartet played Debussy, Bartók and Ligeti, the Lindsay Quartet played Tippett and Schubert, the University of London Orchestra visited with Nicola LeFanu’s Farne, and Julian Lloyd Webber played cello sonatas by Ireland, Bridge and Delius. There were regulars, such as the Fitzwilliam Quartet who came from York three times a year, and old heroes of mine: the harpist Osian Ellis, who had once inspired me to strum the back of a dining chair, the counter-tenor James Bowman, the clarinettist Alan Hacker and the pianist Peter Donohoe.

  Because everywhere in the United Kingdom is close to somewhere else, there are touring musicians constantly crisscrossing the country, You can perform in Bradford and then, if you’ve planned your tour well, drive the forty miles to Manchester or fifteen miles to Huddersfield or eight miles to Leeds for the following night’s concert. It’s very different to touring in Australia. So, as a concert booker, I spent much of my time discussing not only dates but also geography with these artists or their agents. I also discussed repertoire, and was surprised to learn that this was unusual. When I was booking Peter Donohoe, for instance, I asked if he would include Boulez’s first sonata on his program, since I knew he played it and thought it might fit well with the Berg sonata he’d said he wanted to play. To my delight, he agreed. Later he told me that since none of the other promoters on the tour had expressed any preferences about music – they just wanted Peter Donohoe to come and play their pianos – he played the Boulez for them too. I hope they were grateful.

  Being a concert promoter involves financial risk, of course, and even though it wasn’t my money on the line, it was my reputation as far as the university’s finance officer was concerned. In my first year we lost a packet on Janet Baker. I don’t know why the tickets didn’t sell – I even put advertisements on buses – but the hall was half-empty and Janet Baker didn’t come cheap. In those days, she charged £2000 a concert, which was nearly half our annual budget.

  A good way of making money, I found, was organising children’s concerts. This wasn’t simply a fundraising exercise. An important aspect of the fellows’ job was what universities in the 1970s were pleased to call ‘outreach’. By putting on concerts and plays, we were bringing audiences from the town to the university, and filling the place with children seemed an especially worthwhile form of outreach. I put on at least one children’s concert a year, and they generally sold out; if I booked the University’s Great Hall, I could finance a number of other projects with the money taken. The flute player Atarah Ben-Tovim came one year, and on another occasion the percussionist James Blades, who in addition to being able to hold an audience of small children in utter thrall at the age of eighty was the source of wonderful stories over supper. He told me about playing The Soldier’s Tale for Stravinsky, and working with Britten, who had written many of his percussion parts with Blades in mind and often on the strength of his advice. Blades had provided J. Arthur Rank with the sound of his gong, and the BBC with its wartime call sign ‘V for Victory’, tapped out in Morse code on a drum.

  One year, I booked a double bass player for the children’s concert, but when I tried to secure the Great Hall I was told this would be a problem, because two days later it would be required for graduation and preparations would already have begun. I went to see the building manager, Mr Jack, who was not happy about having hundreds of small children in his hall just forty-eight hours before the Chancellor, Harold Wilson, was due to lead an academic procession into the same place. I gave him my word that the morning after the concert he wouldn’t find so much as a sweet wrapper on the floor.

  On the evening of the children’s concert, I was due to be in London for a concert in which a piece of mine was being performed. But I had enlisted a small army of student volunteers, to whom I gave the same talk Mr Jack had given me, and I had no doubts they would cope. As it turned out, they never had to cope, because the children’s concert never took place.

  Late in the afternoon, the bass player and her pianist arrived to set up as planned. Apparently the Great Hall looked splendid. Special blue velvet curtains bearing the university’s insignia in gold had already been hung either side of the stage in readiness for graduation. With only the house lights up, it was a little gloomy on stage and the pianist couldn’t see her music, so she went off in search of a light switch. Backstage, she discovered a lever and pulled it. But it wasn’t a light switch.

  At first the water came as a trickle, but before long the emergency sprinkler system was in full flow, and by the time it was switched off several thousand gallons of water had fallen on the stage. Forty-five thousand is the figure I remember. It wasn’t just water, either, but quite dirty water that had been sitting for years in a large tank on the roof of the Great Hall. Obviously, in the event of a fire, the first thing to go up is the curtains, so that’s where most of the water was directed. Alarms went off. Fire engines arrived. There was a photo of three of them on the front page of the next day’s Telegraph & Argus under a headline about ‘Water Music’. The cleaners were called back; a security guard slipped on the wet stage, fell into the auditorium and broke his leg; the stage lights were put on full to dry the floor, but the heat warped the boards and the following morning a team of carpenters had to l
ay a whole new stage. I know these things because Mr Jack told me.

  Sometimes it’s hard to remember what life was like before mobile phones and instant messaging. Whenever I want to remind myself, I recall the sound of Brenda’s voice when I rang from London to ask how the children’s concert had gone. But the face-to-face meeting with Mr Jack was more memorable still. You must imagine the following delivered in a Yorkshire accent by a fundamentally kind man pushed well beyond his limits. I was told he had once been a sergeant major, but to begin with he spoke surprisingly quietly:

  ‘You may remember,’ he said, ‘that when you came to see me six months ago and told me you wanted to have a concert in the Great Hall two days before Graduation, I was reluctant. But I agreed on condition that there wouldn’t be a single sweet wrapper dropped. Do you remember that?’

  I nodded. I was tempted to point out that in fact no sweet wrapper had been dropped, but I was biting down so hard on the side of my mouth I couldn’t speak. Perhaps Mr Jack could see what was going through my mind, because now he became more emotional.

  ‘Well, then. On Thursday night I went home as usual. While Mrs Jack and I were having our tea, the phone rang and a security man told me that some … clown … had turned my hall into a … swimming pool …’

  When I arrived at Bradford, I wasn’t, technically, a professional composer, because I had never been paid to write music. My first commission came courtesy of a lovely man, the composer Philip Wilby, director of the Aulos Ensemble. This was a contemporary music group based in Leeds and it regularly gave concerts at Bradford University. The clarinettist was Ian Mitchell, already an important figure in new music; the pianist was Martin Roscoe, his fame still ahead of him; and Phil himself played violin and viola. Phil was a real mentor: he was wise, experienced, encouraging of me and my music and, where necessary, also questioning and gently critical. The encouragement was the important thing.

  Artists thrive on encouragement. Naturally, there’s an element of ego about this. Everyone likes praise, but from time to time artists actually require it. It goes without saying that you wouldn’t want to listen to music composed by someone with a low opinion of themselves and their work, so for this reason alone it’s a good idea, now and then, to bolster an artist’s ego. But the opposite of confidence is doubt, and with that comes vulnerability, which is every bit as important. We may work best when we’re feeling confident, but the motivation to work comes when we’re vulnerable, because that’s when we know we can do better; that’s when we say to ourselves, ‘The next piece will be my best.’ Vulnerability is also important to art itself. Art that is only a series of bold statements, brooking no opposition, might dazzle us for a moment, but will eventually push its audience away. The best art asks questions and opens its audience to doubt.

  Encouragement is also important, because it demonstrates to the artist that contact has been made. As a composer, I spend my time putting dots and squiggles on paper – I still use pencils and paper. Some pieces take months to write, occasionally one might take years. You know what it sounds like, of course, or you wouldn’t be writing it down in the first place, but no one else can hear it, and it might easily be that the first performance occurs a year after the piece is finished. So to learn that the music has meant something to a listener is reassuring. In fact, it’s more than reassuring, it’s a justification for doing what you do. Your work isn’t pointless and you’re not deluded, because someone else found it worthwhile.

  It doesn’t take much. A well-timed email or card, even an approach from someone in the street saying they have enjoyed a piece of my music can set me up for days (I do see how that might sound a little pathetic), but the best form of encouragement is a commission for a new piece. That is the sort of compliment about which there can be no doubt, and it also helps you pay some bills. An artist’s first commission is a milestone in their career, and perhaps the biggest encouragement they’ll ever receive. I responded to Philip Wilby’s commission for the Aulos Ensemble with my best piece so far, a chamber concerto (these days called Chamber Concerto No 1) that they performed in the Theatre in the Mill in June 1980. I conducted. It earnt me my first review, Ernest Bradbury writing in the Yorkshire Post that the piece ‘had air in it and light’.

  Other commissions followed, but I was able to use some of my time at Bradford to compose works that hadn’t been commissioned. At this point in my career, no one was likely to pay me to write a Concerto for Orchestra, so I did it off my own bat. It was quite a dramatic piece and not for a conventional orchestra so much as an imagined one: double woodwinds; four horns; just one each of trumpet, trombone and tuba; three percussionists; a piano; eight double basses. I dedicated it to Edward Cowie and sent the score to the SPNM. Surprisingly quickly a letter came back informing me that the composer Oliver Knussen would conduct it with the London Sinfonietta in a concert at St John’s Smith Square. It was April 1982, and this time there were lots of reviews. In those days they appeared the next morning in the national press and you could wait up for them, which I did, reading about the premiere in the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph. The following Sunday, more reviews appeared in the Observer and Sunday Times, and finally the monthlies came out with an especially nice review in the Musical Times. The reviews were mostly positive, while the Sunday Times ran one of the most honest pieces of criticism I’ve ever read, Desmond Shawe-Taylor writing that as he hadn’t been able to make head or tail of the piece, he would resist writing anything about it at all.

  By the end of my three-year appointment at Bradford I felt like a professional composer, and when Graham Devlin and I were offered a fourth year, we decided to accept it if we could farm out some of our regular duties (including conducting, for me) and write an opera together. The subject was Edgar Allan Poe, his life more than his stories and poems. It was a steepish learning curve, and not only because the piece was approximately six times longer than anything I had previously composed.

  One of the most interesting things about Poe’s life was his death, which remains mysterious. En route from Richmond, Virginia, to New York in September 1849, the writer disappeared. He turned up a week later in Baltimore, drunk and delirious outside a bar, and died in hospital two days later. There are different theories regarding the disappearance, the most common – and the one we opted for – that Poe had been a victim of ‘cooping’. The day of his discovery in Baltimore was also that of an election, and it may be that in the days leading up to it Poe was rounded up by a political press gang, plied with alcohol and held (‘cooped’) with others until the polling booths opened, whereupon he would have been forced to vote a certain way and probably more than once. The practice was common in nineteenth-century America; the press gangs looked for loners and Poe would certainly have qualified. He was also a dipsomaniac who would have found the offer of a drink hard to refuse. More recent theories have called into question the circumstances of his disappearance and death (was he even an alcoholic?), but still no one is sure, and the capture of Poe and forced inebriation gave us a framing device for the opera, which we called at first Poe: The Terror of the Soul, then just The Terror of the Soul, and finally simply Poe.

  As part of my research, I made my first trip to the United States, visiting Poe’s houses in Richmond and Baltimore, and giving a talk about the opera at the Peabody Conservatory. Even before it was written, the piece created interest. Clive Wilson, who ran the prestigious Harrogate Festival, agreed to mount the premiere, and with the festival’s imprimatur Graham and I took the idea to a television company in Manchester run by a producer called Tony Sutcliffe, who was keen in spite of Graham’s tendency to call him ‘Peter’ (Peter Sutcliffe was the recently captured Yorkshire Ripper). Rather than making a film about the opera, however, he wanted to turn the opera into a film. He proposed three directors, Ken Russell, John Schlesinger and Jonathan Miller, all from the realms of fantasy casting, and one afternoon I had a pleasant phone conversation with Schlesinger, talking through the possibi
lities.

  None of it happened. The Harrogate Festival suddenly pulled out with no explanation, though not before they had sent provisional program details to the press. The TV film simply withered as most TV projects will. I was neither surprised nor especially disappointed by the latter, having never for a moment believed we’d see a film of our opera directed by Ken Russell, but Graham and I were both angry about Harrogate, not least because we continued to read in newspapers, including the Sunday Times, that the opera would be happening there. One of my new American friends even sent me a clipping from the New York Times mentioning The Terror of the Soul at the Harrogate Festival in a round-up of British cultural events for 1982, at which point I decided to become a nuisance. Ringing the festival box office with my best American accent, I explained that I was a tour manager from New York. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of America was arranging a party of seventy to attend the premiere of the opera, and I wanted to enquire about a group discount on tickets. An embarrassed voice explained to me that the opera had been cancelled, and when I asked why – a question that genuinely interested me – he was unable to provide an answer.

  But an important lesson had been learnt amounting to not counting chickens before they’re hatched. We had no contract with Harrogate and we’d received no money – in fact money had barely been discussed (Graham and I regarded the commission as part of our university work). We had made the mistake of taking an artistic director’s enthusiasm as a guarantee and now found ourselves with a half-written opera and no home for it. The try-out scheduled for the Theatre in the Mill also had to be cancelled, since, without Harrogate’s involvement, we couldn’t afford the twelve singers and fifteen players. But you only make that sort of mistake once. I no longer believe anything will go ahead until I’ve signed a contract or at least received written confirmation, and I don’t begin work without a down payment.