by Andrew Ford
I knew I couldn’t assess 250 people on my own, so I enlisted the aid of fifteen of my best students from Wollongong University. The students and I had worked through all these various games and improvisations, and everyone was familiar with how they went. I put one student in each group, while I went around observing, joining in, attempting to work out who were the talented applicants. To complicate the matter, we were looking for a range of skills, including the ability to work constructively in a group. At the end of the day, I met with my students, who’d been keeping notes, and we pooled our impressions of this great sea of people. I’m sure we missed some fabulous talent, but from the 250 applicants we chose 150. My feeling was that there would be a significant drop-out rate over six months, and that by choosing fifty more participants than we required, we’d end up with the right number. I was correct about that at least.
So Tall Stories went into development, but very, very slowly. Each Sunday we’d begin with more games and improvisations, the rest of the day devoted to workshops designed to produce the hour-long piece we were tasked with presenting in November. I was insistent the participants come up with the piece themselves. It seemed to me they’d have a far more valuable experience than if I simply told them what to do. And I’d worked like this before, back in England, both with Graham Devlin’s Major Road Theatre Company and Big Bird. We’d gone into schools and colleges, worked with youth groups and, as with Tall Stories, devised public pieces with volunteers. But there were significant differences. In the English projects there were always at least four of us leading the process and never more than fifty participants, usually fewer. The workshops would go for a fortnight, sometimes just a week, and we’d meet daily – they were intensive affairs. With Tall Stories, I was leading over a hundred people on my own, once a week for six months. With just a month to go, the Wollongong students had mostly dropped out, as was always intended, and the couple that remained had long ago taken a back seat to allow the other participants to run the show.
The trouble was we had no show. We had lots of ideas, but nothing remotely cohesive. It wasn’t hard to see the problem: too much democracy was delaying progress. I continued to resist taking over. Instead, I talked to the whole group and suggested it was time to appoint some leaders. It was also time for these leaders to meet on weeknights. Nothing was going to happen if we restricted ourselves to the four remaining Sundays. And so a committee of six pulled all the ideas together, deciding what to leave out and what to develop, and delegating further responsibilities relating to design, lighting and sound. People had jobs; at last they all knew what they were doing.
In the end, the performances were all right. They weren’t groundbreaking but they weren’t meant to be. Built on a framework of individual urban myths, Tall Stories was an episodic blend of music, theatre and movement. It had quite an intense atmosphere, and people were pleased – the participants, the audiences, the Bennelong Programme. But with a project of this nature, it is always the process leading to the performance that is significant. I learnt a good deal from it, though I’d done this sort of thing before. For most of the participants, the experience was new, and for some of them it was literally life-changing, leading to careers in the arts as writers, actors, filmmakers. Friendships were formed and also deeper relationships. More than twenty years later, I bumped into a Tall Stories alumna at the ABC. She told me that she had married one of the other participants, that he had recently died, and that he had been buried in his Tall Stories T-shirt.
The same year as Tall Stories, music commissions began to come my way, performances too. By the year’s end the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the Australian Opera (later Opera Australia) had both performed my music. The Australian Opera included the final third of Poe in their first National Opera Workshop. The baritone Garrick Jones sang the title role in a cast that included a number of up-and-coming singers as well as some operatic veterans. Brian Fitzgerald and John Wregg co-directed with considerable imagination and care. At the start of the process, I had an emergency appendectomy and Brian and John travelled down to Wollongong from Sydney for a meeting, since I was recuperating. I pointed out various things that were in the score, but they’d already spotted them and had ideas about how to realise the moments on stage. I was in good hands. It felt collaborative.
It was the Australia Ensemble concert, though, that seemed to launch my music in Australia. Quite a few of Sydney’s musical luminaries came along, including the conductor Stuart Challender, and I spoke about the pieces before the performances. The Sydney Morning Herald ran a complimentary review written by Fred Blanks, who said that ‘Ford’s music not only touches the heart but stimulates the mind’. I was so pleased with the line, I put it in my published catalogue of works, and it was quoted for years until 24 Hours magazine misprinted it as ‘Ford’s music not only touches the heart but stimulates the wind’.
In addition to the first performance of the chamber concerto dropped by the ICA, the Australia Ensemble concert included a solo violin piece written for the occasion and played by Dene Olding. Like Icarus Ascending – its title filched from Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Amelia’ – would become an important piece for me, one that has been played in several countries. In 1988 I took the piece as the basis for a third chamber concerto, building layers of music (for flute, clarinet, percussion, piano and cello) around the solo line. This piece was commissioned by Terra Australis Incognita, a group of Australian expats living in New York, formed with a view to playing Australian music around the United States during the bicentennial year. The group’s pianist, Lisa Moore, had already played two of my pieces, one of which she’d commissioned. I travelled to the US to conduct the chamber concerto at the June in Buffalo festival in upstate New York and as Visiting Composer at the Aspen Festival, and there I met another musician who would become important for my music, the violinist Rohan Smith, who was my soloist in these performances. Later still, Rohan made a spectacularly good recording of Like Icarus Ascending and commissioned a new piece, which I called Icarus Drowning, for his Kowmung Music Festival in central New South Wales.
That chain of events is typical of how, in professional music making, one thing leads to another, and of how composers and performers work together. Collaboration is important for both sides. Most performers of classical music spend their time communing with the dead. Bach and Beethoven are two of the greatest composers who ever lived, but you can’t ask them questions; by comparison, most living composers, while a long way from the accomplishments of their German forebears, are happy to discuss possible wrong notes and matters of interpretation.
This is to the composer’s advantage as well as the player’s. You might think you have made your intentions clear in the score, but it is surprising how often misunderstandings occur. If you are invited to rehearsals, you must attend, though it’s a good idea to avoid the first one or you’ll end up depressed; if you’re not invited to rehearsals, you should try to attend anyway. Once a piece has been played a few times by different performers, it’s another matter, but when a piece is new, the composer should hover. Often, of course, performances happen without your knowledge; sometimes recordings do, too. Like Icarus Ascending first appeared on CD in 1999. I was not involved at all and only discovered later that the recording had taken place. I didn’t know the violinist and although I asked to hear the recording prior to its release, the tape never arrived. When I saw the CD, I assumed that the timing of my twelve-minute piece at seven minutes was a typo. It wasn’t; the performance was nearly twice as fast as intended. It was also full of mistakes. Pizzicato notes were bowed, bowed notes plucked, and at the end of the piece, where Icarus floats off to his doom like Major Tom (he doesn’t crash into the Aegean Sea in this piece), and the violin plays long, quiet and stratospherically high notes, my artificial harmonics were read as regular double stops and the music remained stubbornly earth-bound in a chain of parallel fourths. I complained, but it was too late and the CD is still for sale. Fortunately, Rohan
Smith’s excellent recording of the piece came out the following year on Tall Poppies.
Performers often inspire composers, and sometimes they imprint themselves on a composer’s sound. Peter Pears influenced the vocal lines of Benjamin Britten so strongly that it is hard for another tenor to sing Britten’s music without sounding a bit like Pears. It was something to do with the colour of Pears’s voice, the effect certain pitches created when applied to certain vowel sounds, and also the fact that Pears had his great vocal strength around the note E, where a lot of tenors have a weakness since it’s where the full chest voice changes to a head voice. Britten was an intensely practical composer, and in writing well for Pears, he naturally exploited the singer’s qualities. He may even have done it without thinking, having that familiar voice in his head.
Something similar happened to me. I had worked with Lisa Moore more than any other pianist when, in 1997, Ian Munro rang to ask me if I’d write him a big piece, ‘like a sonata’. Over the next four and a half years I composed Ian a very big piece that was nothing like a sonata. The Waltz Book consists of sixty individual movements each lasting a minute (on paper at least) that may be played separately or in groups, but taken together add up to a continuous hour of music. It’s a musical mosaic, each piece drawing on at least an aspect of the classical waltz, while many are full-blown waltzes.
Ian is a wonderful pianist, a fine composer, a dear friend and a Schubertian through and through. He brought to my music a kind of old-world sophistication, a wistfulness that often seemed to elevate the music and clarify the connections with waltzes of the past (because there are oblique references in my pieces to Schubert and Chopin, Schoenberg and Ravel). Ian began to perform individual waltzes as I wrote them. He played the first one (‘Waltz for Jasper’) at the 1998 Dartington Summer School in England, before the other fifty-nine were written and even before the commission was finalised. Other pianists played them too. Roger Smalley performed a group of the waltzes in 2000 when I was composer-in-residence at his New Music Week in Perth; my niece Kirsty played some in her first-year university exam.
The premiere of the complete hour, an unusually nerve-racking occasion for me, was in 2003, the final waltzes having been written late the previous year. I was concerned that sixty of these pieces played back to back would be too much for any audience, but Ian was magnificent and the longer he played, the more enthralled the Hobart listeners became. He gave three more complete performances that year, including one at the Sydney Opera House and another at the Melbourne Festival. I heard them all, and with each performance Ian made The Waltz Book more his own, discovering new details all the time while finding ever more ways of turning the pieces into a seamless entity.
Then something curious happened. At the Australian Youth Orchestra’s National Music Camp in January 2004, Lisa Moore was the piano tutor. She had planned a sort of tag-team performance of The Waltz Book in which she and her three students would share the pieces between them. I was a tutor myself that year, and as I walked through the Canberra School of Music, where the camp was based, I heard one of my waltzes being played in a practice room. The sound of the music forced me to stop. I recognised something familiar in the playing. It was Lisa. It wasn’t just her interpretation, her sound was part of the music. It’s hard to put this into words – it’s like describing wine – but there’s a crisp clarity to Lisa’s playing that I like very much. It suits her approach to Beethoven, it suits her Janáček, and it suits contemporary music, of which she has played a vast amount; perhaps her sound was forged by contemporary music. Since I first met her in 1984, I’d heard her play my music quite a lot, and while I hadn’t realised it at the time, I had composed The Waltz Book for Ian with Lisa’s sound in my head. What I recognised coming through the practice room door was my original inspiration.
But if Lisa was giving me exactly what I’d imagined, Ian had given me something I hadn’t imagined, which in a way was more valuable. He had shown me new possibilities. You can learn a lot about your music from interpreters, and The Waltz Book has had a few. Besides those I’ve mentioned, they include Piers Lane, Gerard Willems (at the Adelaide Festival), Jenni Flemming, Sally Whitwell, Simon Docking (in Canada), George Lopez (in the USA), David Vance (in Vienna) and Vyacheslav Novikov (in Finland and Poland). I heard only a few of these performances, but the most memorable by far was Novikov at the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival in Finland. The Ukrainian pianist played seventeen of the waltzes and – disregarding my tempo instructions, which would have brought his performance in at around seventeen minutes – took twenty-five minutes over them. A Schubert specialist, like Ian, Novikov played the pieces with great romantic freedom; indeed, there was as much Rakhmaninov as Schubert in his playing. It was a little shocking to hear, but fascinating, and gratifying that the music could stand up to such a wayward interpretation.
I’ve been fortunate to work with a number of fine and intelligent singers. I won’t make another list, though I should mention the sopranos Jane Edwards and Jane Sheldon, who, between them, have commissioned, sung and recorded nearly all my music for that voice. But the most important collaborator I have ever had was the tenor Gerald English, for whom I composed a dozen pieces across a range of media, from song cycles to music-theatre pieces, from a role in a children’s opera to a part in a radiophonic work.
I had been a fan of Gerald English’s since I was a teenager and often heard him on the radio and at concerts in London. I heard him sing Tippett’s Songs for Dov (of which he’d given the first performance) and, at a Prom concert at the Round House, Elisabeth Lutyens’s And Suddenly It’s Evening with the London Sinfonietta and a 21-year-old conductor called Simon Rattle. I was queuing before that concert and remember the frisson of excitement as the tenor bounded up the steps past me. English’s career had always embraced very new music and very old – baroque and earlier. In 1950 he’d been a founder member of the Deller Consort, one of the first vocal groups to specialise in early music, leaving only when he came to believe that Alfred Deller was keeping fifty per cent of the takings for himself and distributing the rest among the other five singers. He was part of Raymond Leppard’s Glyndebourne Opera revivals of Monteverdi in the 1960s. Under Britten, he sang Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw when Peter Pears had double-booked himself. In Lisbon he sang the title role in Oedipus Rex with Stravinsky conducting. He sang Berlioz with Thomas Beecham, Vaughan Williams with Adrian Boult, and Britten with John Barbirolli. He even sang the Evangelist in Bach’s St Matthew Passion for Vaughan Williams. Berio and Henze both composed operatic roles for him, and he returned to La Scala several years in a row to sing in Berg’s Wozzeck under Claudio Abbado. At the BBC, Boulez regularly engaged him to sing Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Ravel.
When I was organising concerts in Bradford, I tried to book Gerry more than once, only to be told by his agent that ‘Mr English is in Australia’. I assumed he must be on tour almost continuously and it was only when I arrived in Australia that I discovered he’d been living in Melbourne since the late 1970s as founder and director of the Opera Studio at the Victorian College of the Arts. I met him for the first time when he visited Wollongong University and sat in on a rehearsal I was leading of Birtwistle’s Bow Down. I was hardly less in awe of him than I’d been as a teenager at the Round House Prom. I wanted to ask if I could write him something but couldn’t summon the courage, so I sent him a letter. Gerry wrote straight back saying he’d be delighted to sing something of mine, and so the Seymour Group, Sydney’s new music ensemble, commissioned Sacred Places, to words by the poet Christopher Reid. I composed most of the piece in hotel rooms in Amsterdam and Los Angeles, while on a honeymoon of sorts with Margaret, and I conducted the first performance in the Sydney Opera House’s Recording Hall in 1986, Gerry singing Berio’s Melodrama on the same program. Later, Margaret would write me two sets of words for Gerry. The first was for the song cycle Harbour with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, a piece we wrote at the start of 1992, just as our marriag
e was ending. The other, in 1999, was Night and Dreams: the Death of Sigmund Freud., which Gerry performed at the Adelaide Festival in 2000, and at the Sydney and Melbourne festivals the following year.
By this time Gerry was seventy-five and no longer had his very top (or bottom) notes, but was in good voice and in no mood to retire. I composed Night and Dreams for his singing voice as it then was and Margaret’s libretto also required him to speak to the audience, quite naturally, in the character of Freud. It was an immense challenge for him at many levels. Naturalistic acting isn’t the strong suit of most classical singers, and Gerry had never done anything like it, though he pulled it off supremely well, thanks in no small part to the direction of the ever-patient George Whaley. After the first performance, Robyn Archer, directing that year’s Adelaide Festival, commented that she knew actors who couldn’t act that well. The piece also required Gerry to be alone on stage for an hour, so it was quite a feat of memory for a man in his mid seventies, especially since there was no instrumental ensemble, so no conductor giving cues.
In place of live instruments, I had made a backing track in the studio, bringing in Ian Munro (Gerry’s son-in-law) to play piano, and two harpists, Marshall McGuire and Alice Giles, the latter playing an electro-acoustic harp, and then supplementing their contribution with sound effects and historical recordings of Hitler and Chamberlain – Night and Dreams is set in the exiled Freud’s London home in 1939, with Britain declaring war on Germany in the final weeks of Freud’s life. A backing track can be a straitjacket for a performer because once it starts, it keeps going. I wanted Gerry to have as much flexibility as possible, so I divided the cues between two CDs, allowing tracks to overlap. This meant that Gerry not only took cues from the recording, but was also able to give cues, certain words or notes or gestures prompting the start of the next CD track. The operation of the CDs was quite a collaborative and rather virtuosic role, requiring a technically minded sound projectionist who was also a musician, her role, essentially, to accompany Gerry like a pianist in a lieder recital, except that instead of a piano she had two CD players. Fortunately this is where Wollongong’s Faculty of Creative Arts came into its own, Ingrid Rahlén having studied both theatre technology and music.
