The Memory of Music

by Andrew Ford

  Gerry English had a gloriously clear tone and the best diction I have ever heard from a classical singer. Many singers are uncomfortable with new music. It’s partly that some of them don’t read music terribly well, so a score without a recording poses problems, and partly that a singer’s training is pretty conservative in terms of repertoire, so the music of the singer’s own time seems foreign to them. Often, when faced with a piece that isn’t tonal, they disguise their inadequacy by widening their vibrato so you can’t really hear a precise pitch. I suppose they would argue that the right note is in there somewhere. This doesn’t happen as much as it used to, but it still happens. With Gerry, the note was always hit smack in the middle.

  Working with him was a pleasure, partly because he was so straightforward. He was a thorough professional and regarded it as his job to get the piece right; if he made a mistake, he wanted to be told. I’ve worked with prima donnas (some of them men), where any critical remark was instantly deflected. For example:

  ME: In bar 83 on the final quaver, you’re singing an E flat instead of E natural.

  PRIMA DONNA: [Huffily.] Yes, I know. I’m doing it on purpose. I thought E flat sounded better.

  ME: Really?

  PRIMA DONNA: Yes, it’s more ‘in character’.

  ME: But it doesn’t fit the tonality. The flute’s got an E natural.

  PRIMA DONNA: Yes, see, that’s what I mean. It makes me sound more mysterious. Like a sort of outsider.

  This is very time-consuming when you just want him to sing the note you wrote in the score, so you have to find a way to lead into the correction:

  ME: Now, that is amazing! I can’t begin to … How do you do that? I mean, you’ve nearly memorised it. And I loved what you did in bar 72, the way you floated that high A. It was perfect. Oh, just before I forget, I think my notation in 83 might be a little unclear. The last note is an E natural, not a flat.

  PRIMA DONNA: [Triumphantly.] Yes, I did wonder about that. You composers!

  But with Gerry, the conversation would go like this:

  ME: Gerry? Bar 83 – the last note’s a natural.

  GERALD ENGLISH: Ha! So it is! [Takes pencil from behind ear, puts circle round offending note. Never wrong again.]

  Sometimes Gerry was a little too quick to learn a piece. When I’m composing for a specific performer, which is most of the time, I like to send through a photocopy of the pencil score for comments before the piece is typeset. Sometimes, if it’s a long piece, I’ll send the pages in little bundles as sections are completed. This was dangerous with Gerry. He rang on one occasion to see how a piece was going.

  ‘Have you done any more?’ he asked. ‘I’ve learnt that bit you sent the other day.’

  ‘Stop learning it, Gerry!’ I said. ‘I’m still changing notes.’

  I gave up sending him excerpts from pieces after that. But still he would turn up to a first rehearsal with scruffy photocopies of my handwritten manuscript, even though I had sent him a nice, clean, accurate printed score. I put it down to his background in early music, where original manuscripts often provide a clearer picture of what the composer intended than a published edition. When a composer has been dead for 300 years, the manuscript is a way of being in touch with Purcell or Handel.

  Gerry gave me some remarkable performances. One of the best was of the premiere of the second piece I wrote for him, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, a setting for tenor, horn and piano of Craig Raine’s poem. I’m not sure I’d have had the nerve to set this poem to music had I still lived in England, because its notoriety was so great. The poem was published in the New Statesman in 1977 and Raine’s extreme use of metaphor and metonymy was instantly taken up by others, including Christopher Reid, who were quickly styled the Martian school.

  The conceit is that a Martian comes to Earth then writes a typical holiday postcard describing the local customs, either getting the names of things wrong or mistaking their function or purpose: ‘Caxtons [books] are mechanical birds with many wings / … / they cause the eyes to melt [tears] / or the body to shriek without pain [laughter].’

  Normally, when setting a poem to music, the last thing you should do is illustrate the words. If the poem mentions a dull thud, you do not need to hear it in the music. It would be banal, nothing more than a sound effect. But this poem was different. The Martian never calls a spade a spade, and the innocent listener will likely find it hard to understand his postcard. At one level, then, my music aims to explain the poem. When the Martian is telling of a ‘haunted apparatus’ that sleeps in every home, ‘snores when you pick it up’ and is soothed to sleep when it cries, the horn and piano are going through a gamut of telephone dial tones, ringtones and engaged signals; when he speaks of ‘Model T’, ‘a room with the lock inside’ and a key ‘turned to free the world / for movement’, the horn becomes a police siren, complete with Doppler effect.

  I hadn’t been able to attend any rehearsals for this piece – they were in Hobart – and had never even met the horn player and pianist, so when I arrived for the premiere I had still only heard the music in my head. At the concert that night, Gerry and the others brought it vividly to life, performing it as though it were a repertoire piece. It didn’t sound like new music, but as though it had always existed.

  Above all, I suppose, I saw Gerry’s enthusiasm for my work and his regular requests for new pieces as a vote of confidence. This singer who had worked with Britten and Boulez, Stravinsky and Tippett had faith in me; this man who I’d watched in awe climb the stairs to the Round House in London now came to stay whenever he was in Sydney, and we talked about everything. Although he was two years older than my father, sometimes Gerry forgot we weren’t contemporaries. One conversation began: ‘Andy, you remember before refrigeration …’

  A form of musical collaboration I was keen to pursue was conducting. In my four years at Bradford, I’d conducted approximately a hundred concerts with the widest repertoire and learnt a lot about music and about performing, But only a handful of these concerts had been with professional musicians. Working with amateur choirs and orchestras, you have to do a bit of clowning around; you have to make the rehearsals enjoyable, because you want the singers and players to come back next week. None of that is necessary with professional musicians. What professionals want is a conductor who is as competent as they are but, ideally, knows more than them. In Australia I’d conducted the Australia Ensemble, the Seymour Group and the Magpie Musicians. Then came the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

  In 1992 the artistic director Richard Tognetti invited me to be the ACO’s composer-in-residence, but my association with the orchestra had begun three years earlier, at the Huntington Estate Music Festival in Mudgee, New South Wales, where Richard was also artistic director. Some of the pieces I conducted were my own suggestions – The Unanswered Question of Charles Ives, Berio’s O King (with Emma Matthews), Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (Lyndon Terracini) and Stockhausen’s Ylem – but quite often I was roped in at the last minute to conduct pieces that Richard would normally have directed from the first violin desk. There was never enough rehearsal time at these festivals, and the theory was that if I beat time and Richard concentrated on playing, the allotted thirty minutes might be used more efficiently.

  On one occasion, Richard handed me a score of Britten’s Lachrymae for viola and string orchestra just before lunch, telling me the rehearsal would be at four p.m. with a performance that night. Lachrymae, based on John Dowland’s Elizabethan pavan of the same name, is a wonderful piece in the broad tradition of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Tippett’s Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, but I didn’t know it. I took the score back to my room and spent the next few hours marking it up. The viola soloist was Hartmut Lindemann, a magnificent player and an old friend of the ACO, and the rehearsal went well enough. The performance, however, was close to disastrous. Hartmut, it transpired, was a very spontaneous player and nothing we had decided at t
he rehearsal happened in the performance, though lots of things we’d never discussed did. In particular, his approach to tempo was suddenly exceptionally elastic, pushing ahead in semiquaver passages then slamming on the brakes just before a cadence. It was all very musical, but I couldn’t follow him and so the orchestra couldn’t follow me. In fact, I was in the way. The best chance for the performance to hold together would have been for everyone to watch Hartmut.

  ‘Such a great player,’ said the violinist Monica Curro as I walked off shell-shocked. ‘It’s always different on the night.’

  This incident should probably have served as a warning as far as professional conducting went, but as the orchestra’s composer-in-residence in 1993 and 1994 part of my duties involved programming and conducting concerts of contemporary repertoire. The first, for strings alone, was a particularly ambitious program containing Webern’s Five Movements, Op 5, Gerard Brophy’s sparkling Orfeo, Michael Whiticker’s little flute concerto Ad marginem (played by Geoffrey Collins) and Birtwistle’s Still Movement, a wonderful piece, since withdrawn by the composer. At the centre of it all was the world premiere of a large-scale song cycle by Larry Sitsky for the great soprano Marilyn Richardson, In pace requiescat to words by Edgar Allan Poe.

  I prepared like mad for this concert and knew the scores inside out. The Birtwistle was full of changing time signatures and metrical modulation and I sat at my kitchen table, beating the air until I could conduct all the transitions smoothly. At the end of the first rehearsal, the players actually applauded. But there was something missing, something that wasn’t happening, and if I knew that, the orchestra certainly knew it. My beat was clear and individual players were getting their cues, but that special rapport, that telepathic bond that puts performers inside each other’s heads, that wasn’t there. And to be fair, I also had technical problems. I’ve always felt that Pierrot lunaire was the hardest piece I’ve ever conducted because there never seem to be more than four bars in a row in the same tempo, the music always speeding up or slowing down. Webern’s Five Movements are similar, and Sitsky’s song cycle isn’t far behind. But what do you do with your hands to indicate this fluctuation? That was my problem. That was where telepathy would have been useful.

  ‘This is very hard,’ I said at one point, rehearsing the Webern.

  ‘For you, maybe,’ said Tognetti, and he wasn’t being mean. If you’re playing an instrument – if you’re actually making a sound – it is far easier to control tiny shifts in tempo than if you’re simply moving your hands through the air. Now, any professional conductor reading those words will immediately recognise my problem, because of course there are ways in which you can indicate these fluctuations. It was just that I didn’t know them, and I still don’t.

  The concert, in Sydney’s Eugene Goossens Hall, was by no means a disaster – the reviews were mostly positive – and a few weeks later the second concert, featuring, the first performance of my piece The Widening Gyre, together with music by Boulez, Berio and Sculthorpe, was rather successful. But I had to recognise that I wasn’t a conductor.

  ‘You know, Andy, you’re not the worst we’ve had,’ said another violinist, Leigh Middenway. It was sweet of her, but if I was going to conduct, then it wasn’t enough to be ‘not the worst’; I wanted to do it well. I’m sure I could have improved over time, but I didn’t really have time and the ACO certainly didn’t. So conducting went the way of painting, my creative life becoming ever more focused on writing music. I have since occasionally conducted my own works – when I stand on the podium to do one of my pieces I am, after all, the world authority, whatever my technical shortcomings as a conductor – but for the most part I’ve left other composers’ music alone.

  In December 1994, my two years with the ACO ended and I returned to Wollongong University, walking straight into a day-long faculty meeting. A condition of my leave from the university had been my return, but by the end of this day, I knew I had to escape.

  On New Year’s Eve, my friend Cathy Strickland asked for my New Year’s resolution. I told her I intended to spend 1995 extricating myself from academe and wheedling my way into the ABC. In the middle of January, Penny Lomax rang from Radio National. She explained that the presenter of The Music Show was leaving and that they were looking for a replacement: would I be interested? It would be two days a week, the same as my university job.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Well, obviously you’ll want to think about it,’ Penny said.

  ‘I already have,’ I said.

  7.

  Words About Music

  Writing well about music – or anything else – isn’t the same as talking well about it. Some people can do one thing but not the other. Andrew Porter was a case in point.

  Porter was perhaps my favourite classical music critic, his writing a mixture of deep knowledge, elegant literary style and shrewd judgement, always expressed as kindly as possible. He was on the Financial Times from 1953 to 1972, then the New Yorker until 1992, and finally, back in London, the Observer and the Times Literary Supplement. He generally wrote at greater length than his fellow critics – unimaginably greater length than most music critics are permitted today – and was an expert provider of context, which I have always believed to be the critic’s main job. In 2003, Lyndon Terracini, then artistic director of the Queensland Music Festival, invited Porter to Brisbane and asked me if I’d hold a conversation with him. I jumped at the chance and the producers of The Music Show were equally keen, arranging to record the session for later broadcast.

  Before our lunchtime session, I met the famous critic for a coffee. He was charming and interested in everything. He’d even read my latest book, Undue Noise. But as we walked on stage at the Spiegeltent, he said, ‘You know, I’m not very good at this sort of thing. I’m really a writer.’

  And it was true, except that it was an understatement. It was as though the moment he sat down in front of an audience, his mind froze. Over coffee, he had been open and free with his opinions, but now, when he felt his pronouncements ought to carry some weight, this most knowledgeable and eloquent of critics became diffident and tongue-tied. It wasn’t long before people started to leave, and at the end of the session there were no questions.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said to me, as we walked off. The conversation was never broadcast.

  When Andrew Porter died in 2015, I read, in his friend Nicholas Kenyon’s obituary, how Porter had needed the discipline of the written word – and, who knows, perhaps a deadline – in order to formulate his thoughts. Kenyon told a story from Porter’s days on the Financial Times, when he had arrived at the newspaper’s office one night following the first performance of a song cycle by Britten. He didn’t know what he thought; he doubted Britten’s talent for setting words to music and wondered aloud whether Peter Pears was really much of a singer. Then he shut himself in his office, sat down at his typewriter and began banging away. An hour later, his review written, Porter opened the door to announce that the song cycle was Britten’s finest to date, a masterpiece.

  When I begin writing an article about music, I often don’t know what I think; sometimes I’m not even sure what the topic is. I find out by writing. In that sense, at least, writing about music is similar to writing music or making any other kind of art. You discover what you’re doing by doing it. As far as I’m aware of having a writing style at all, I know that it is similar to the way I speak – or would speak if I were better at marshalling my thoughts on the spot. I read aloud everything I write, because I want it to sound natural, I want it to flow; I want my reader to feel as though I’m addressing her. But it’s a confection; it’s not real speech. When I read my actual speech transcribed – in an interview, say – I frequently cringe at the lumpy dullness of it.

  In my first book, a collection of conversations called Composer to Composer, I ran up against this distinction. I interviewed thirty composers, some of them very famous: Cage, Reich, Tippett, Boulez, Stockhausen, Gubaidulina, Carter.
Transcribing these interviews, I noticed that while some of the conversations worked well on the page in a question-and-answer format, many did not. My aim wasn’t solely to present a composer’s ideas but to paint a sort of portrait of each composer as a person. I wanted their personalities to emerge and, much of the time, found I had to write the interview up as a profile in order to achieve this. It wasn’t because the composers were inarticulate. On the contrary, some of the most articulate needed this extra help because the meaning wasn’t just in their words, but in their delivery and tone of voice, and these didn’t translate to the page.

  Talking about music – notwithstanding the difficulty of the subject itself – is fundamentally different to writing about it because, like music, it depends on sound, and musical sound at that. This is true of talking about anything. We are seldom aware of it, but, when we speak, our rhetorical devices are precisely the same tools a composer employs. First there’s pitch. Our voices rise and fall to varying degrees (more so in South Wales than in New South Wales); if they didn’t, we would sound mechanical and no one would listen to a word we said. We use rhythm and tempo to give variety and structure to our speech. We employ dynamics (loud and soft) and different forms of articulation for emphasis, and we use repetition to drive a point home. Without these musical devices, our speech would lack meaning or interest. This is how we bring subtlety to our communications with each other, and also how we divine truth. A person’s words might point in one direction, but the sound of the words gives us a different sense. Some politicians use the music of rhetoric to disguise the fact that they’re not really saying anything at all.