by Andrew Ford
Vocal ticks can be part of that music. Peter Sculthorpe was famous for his ums. Ask any Australian radio producer who has worked in the arts and they will tell you they have spent hours removing ums from interviews with Sculthorpe. I once heard him slip an um into ‘Wagga Wagga’. But you have to be careful, with someone like this, not to tidy up the speech too much or it will lose its character.
Once on The Music Show I interviewed a man with a savage stammer. He was an academic and the expert in his field. The interview was from a New York studio and until the man gave his first answer we had no idea of his speech impediment, let alone the scale of it. It was Friday, and the interview and its topic had already been announced for the following morning. Had it been just a few remarks, we might have run it unedited, but we were supposed to be devoting an hour to this topic, and he, our one guest, was very difficult to listen to. From a moral standpoint I’m not sure we should have done it, but the interview was cut in three, and three producers each spent hours going through their third of the tape, removing the ticks, hesitations and repetitions from his speech. By the time the editing was done, there wasn’t a trace of the stammer, but while the man’s words now flowed, they were curiously monotonous. All the expression in his speech had been in those stammers. Without them, he sounded flat and robotic, like Stephen Hawking’s voice generator. A number of listeners commented.
Because expressive speech is musical, we often get a sense of a musician’s art through the sound of their speaking voices. This is plainly true of singers, particularly when they sing their own songs. To hear Paul Kelly interviewed about his songwriting is to hear the same laconic vocal delivery that sings those songs; moreover, since he writes his songs using that voice, his answers bring together the songwriting and the speech, the singing and the song. Something similar, though less obvious, happens when classical musicians speak. I’m not so much thinking of how they might sing examples, as the pianist Mitsuko Uchida once did for me with Beethoven sonatas via a bad phone line from London. I’m thinking of how the orotund impetuosity of Steven Isserlis’s speech somehow mirrors his cello playing, how Pekka Kuusisto’s tendency to stop mid-sentence and reach for an unexpected reference or analogy is not dissimilar to the way he plays the violin.
The Music Show began on ABC Radio National in 1991. It was a nationwide consolidation of half a dozen different state-based programs, all called In Tempo, that had focused on classical music in their respective capital cities and regions. Not only did the new program cover the whole country, it covered the waterfront in terms of musical style. It was the invention of Maureen Cooney and Penny Lomax, and for the next twenty-six years they produced it together. Christopher Lawrence was the first presenter (I was occasionally a guest), followed briefly by Julie Steiner. I took over in February 1995. Like most programs on Radio National, The Music Show is producer-led. The producers, who are music specialists, choose the guests I will be speaking with and the music I will play; they research the interviews and precis their research in the form of suggested questions on which I then base my interview. It’s also the producers’ job to hone the presenter’s on-air skills, pointing out bad verbal habits and refining the timing of an interview – one of the most frequent instructions I hear in my headphones is ‘Move on now’. Practically everything I have learnt about radio, I learnt from Maureen and Penny.
When I began at Radio National, I did what all new ABC presenters do and attended seminars run by more experienced broadcasters. These are intensive sessions held over a few days, aimed at making the newcomers into better readers of scripts and askers of questions. On the first morning, our seminar leader said, ‘Of course we all aspire to present The 7.30 Report,’ mentioning ABC TV’s flagship current affairs program. I have never aspired to do this. I am not a career journalist and, in my third decade of presenting this long-running radio show, I still feel like a complete amateur. Naturally, over the years I have picked up some of the skills and tools of the broadcaster’s trade: I have always operated my own panel – microphones, CD players and so on – and I am confident enough on air not to use a script. If, as I hope, The Music Show sounds spontaneous, it’s because it mostly is. So when I say I’m an ‘amateur’, I’m not fishing for compliments – after all this time, I think I’m quite good at presenting the show and asking questions. What I mean is that my approach to the program is that of a musician, more than a journalist.
The most important skill for an interviewer happens to be identical to the composer’s most important skill – the ability to listen hard and critically. For a composer, it’s about hearing all the possibilities in your musical material, spotting those with the greatest potential and understanding how they might develop or fit together. When composing is going well, the music itself is telling you what to write next, and that also comes down to listening. It’s the same with an interview. The producers’ research is essential background on which to build an interview, and their questions – usually expanded and reordered by me, then reduced to a series of keywords – are the framework. You might say they are the equivalent of a composer’s basic musical material. But just as that material does not make a piece of music on its own, so the list of questions doesn’t make an interview. You have to listen to the answers.
In my early days on The Music Show, I was interviewing an Irish folk musician. He was in a phone box somewhere in rural Victoria. Computer screens had recently been installed in our broadcast studio, so that producers, rather than speak into their presenter’s headphones all the time, could also type instructions or suggestions. As the Irishman spoke, Penny Lomax was typing and I was reading. Suddenly the Irishman stopped speaking.
‘Are you listening to me?’ he asked. I wasn’t.
‘Of course I am,’ I lied. Then I posed a question, more or less off the top of my head, that happened to be relevant to what he’d just been saying. I was lucky and I never forgot the lesson.
The idea of The Music Show is to talk about music: how it’s made, what it’s made of, how it’s heard, how it’s used. I speak to musicians – to singers, instrumentalists and composers in all areas of music – and my job is to help them talk. We want to hear their insights, experiences and points of view. Listening is the key, as it is to any good conversation. You listen so you can prod for more information, the single interjection ‘Why?’ one of an interviewer’s most valuable tools; you listen in order to pick up on information that wasn’t in the research, information that might colour the other questions you were intending to ask; you listen to help the speaker move the story along, because sometimes they can become bogged mid-explanation; and you listen in order to identify when the speaker is struggling with a subject. Often that subject is music itself, and it’s wise not to push if the guest seems reluctant. But you won’t notice this if you’re not listening.
Whenever I’m asked to talk to journalism students about interviewing, I play them my interview with the jazz singer Annie Ross. This was a good interview that turned into a train wreck, and it was my fault for not listening. The first part of the interview was so compelling that it begins The Music Show’s book, Talking to Kinky and Karlheinz.
Annie Ross is speaking about growing up in a family of vaudevillians, becoming a singer and finally going to the Apollo Theatre in Harlem one night to replace Billie Holiday, who’s indisposed. She’s evidently told the story many times, but she tells it well, controlling the dramatic pacing, delaying information and delivering punchlines with a singer’s timing. For good measure, she throws in impersonations of her agent, the mob-connected Joe Glaser; Duke Ellington, who ‘had the band’ at the Apollo; and Billie Holiday herself. It’s a bravura performance.
Then I ask her about music and, specifically, about what makes an enduring jazz standard. She hesitates, then says that it must have ‘a beginning, a middle and an end’. She doesn’t elucidate. I hear her answer, but I’m not listening. What I hear is that she hasn’t understood my excellent question. Were I listening properly
, I’d notice that she has deflected the question away from music, and I might guess that this is because she’s not much good at speaking about music. Some musicians aren’t; some of the more instinctive musicians, brilliant though they may be, can’t talk technically.
I hear none of this. Instead, I rephrase my question and ask if perhaps a certain level of harmonic sophistication is necessary for a standard to be open to a variety of different interpretations.
‘No,’ she replies, with as much dignity as she can muster, given that she’s being tortured on live radio. Deaf to her discomfort, I plough on – because, after all, I know I’m right – pointing out that while some of Bob Dylan’s songs are classics, they lack the richness of harmony necessary to a jazz standard. I’m no longer interviewing her, just trying to get her to agree with me. The interview is off the rails, and all I had needed to do, following her engaging story and brilliant impersonations, was to ask if perhaps she’d care to tell us about some other famous musicians she’d worked with. The presenter’s job is to help the guest sound good, but in trying to sound good myself, I embarrassed Annie Ross.
Some guests require a lot of help – the Tibetan singer Yungchen Lhamo, who at the time didn’t have much English, once nodded her answers to my questions – and some require very little. Occasionally, the hardest thing is to stop someone talking. When Malcolm McLaren, the former manager of the Sex Pistols, came on the show, I only managed to ask three questions in half an hour. He spoke well and interestingly, but in a sort of stream of consciousness. In those days we recorded to tape, and eventually my producer informed me the tape was about to run out; we had a minute left and McLaren was in full flight. Because he was wearing sunglasses I couldn’t see his eyes, but he seemed to be staring past me at the view of Sydney through the studio window. At any rate, I couldn’t get his attention and his speech contained no pauses for me to interrupt. I had two choices, one of which was to speak over him, which would have sounded rude. Instead, I wrote him a note – ‘The tape is running out’ – and pushed it across the desk. Still talking, he glanced down at the slip of paper, then brought his disquisition to an elegant and reasonably logical conclusion with just seconds remaining on the tape.
Occasionally the guest goes too far in answering the first question and touches on questions that haven’t yet been asked. Pete Seeger did this when I visited him at Beacon on the Hudson River in upstate New York. Meeting me off the train from Grand Central, he took me down to an old boathouse that doubled as a community hall. I’d been looking forward to this interview, and had prepared my questions carefully. He was coming up to his eightieth birthday, and it seemed to me the best approach to our conversation was to guide him through some of the main events of his life and career. I’d been told that Pete was sometimes a little confused these days, so before we began I explained what I wanted to do. I switched on the recorder and asked my first question, but his answer rambled off into so many other areas that after five minutes he had completely destroyed my interview plan. I had approximately ten questions on my list and he had part-answered eight of them. His was one of the most popular interviews we ever broadcast, but it depended for its success on two days of surgical editing by Penny, who cut down a sprawling hour of reminiscences, anecdotes and oft-repeated stories, to a tight and surprisingly cogent twenty minutes.
The best interviews are always those in which the guest also listens. There are some regulars on The Music Show who we’re always happy to have back because they engage with the questions. I always look forward, for instance, to talking to Robyn Archer and Paul Grabowsky, or the conductors Simone Young and Roland Peelman, all of whom are real conversationalists. They listen to the questions and think about their answers. Pierre Boulez was like that, as were k.d. lang and John McLaughlin. I like to hear people think. In my early days on the show, the guitarist John Williams proved himself to be one of the best interviewees, always listening and never dodging a question. We often talked politics and I once asked him if he believed that, like politicians, music was capable of lying. He thought for a moment and then, without actually naming Andrew Lloyd Webber, left no one in any doubt that he believed the composer of Jesus Christ Superstar fitted the bill.
While you hope that your guests listen as hard as you do yourself, sometimes they don’t, and especially if they are in the middle of a promotional tour, they can be on automatic pilot. When I interviewed Elvis Costello about his doorstop of a memoir, he didn’t wait for me to finish questions, but jumped in as soon as a phrase or word set him off on a train of thought. It was entertaining and informative, but not a conversation. (I might say that his wife, Diana Krall, is one of the best listeners I’ve ever interviewed.) Some guests have given so many interviews in their lifetime it is hard to know what to ask them, but it’s worth trying to come up with something new, because you might prick their interest and provoke a genuine conversation. I asked Eric Idle and John Cleese about the uses of music in comedy and about comedy in music. It turned out they had never really talked about this subject – Cleese gave the impression he’d never even thought about it – and the resulting interview was fascinating, especially when the two men forgot about me and had a conversation with each other that they’d never had before.
Another sort of guest is the legend. I count myself fortunate to have spoken to some ridiculously famous musicians, from Odetta to Ornette Coleman, Tom Jones to Patti Smith, Joan Baez to Boy George. For the most part they wear their fame lightly, but sometimes you feel the legend has claimed them. Marianne Faithfull was one, though she was undoubtedly entertaining.
‘If I thought I was no better than little Alanis [Morissette],’ she announced, when that singer’s name came up, ‘I’d cut my fucking throat.’ We edited the comment out and I wish we hadn’t. Another guest who had become his own legend was Yehudi Menuhin.
‘I’m just a child, you see,’ he told me in 1998, and I’m afraid I didn’t believe him. All I could think of was Harold Skimpole in Dickens’s Bleak House. Surely anyone who was really ‘just a child’ would not even know. During our half-hour together, Menuhin made some profound comments about the nature of music and especially about Bach, but I didn’t warm to him.
My earliest interviews were all with composers and mostly for newspapers and magazines, particularly, in the early 1990s, the ABC’s magazine 24 Hours, under the inspired editorship of Suzy Baldwin, and it was some of these interviews that ended up in Composer to Composer. At the time I felt I was on reasonably safe ground, even though a few of the interviews were daunting. Because I didn’t want to risk being late, I arrived an hour early at the Greenwich Village building in which John Cage had his loft. I waited in a cafe round the corner, where I became increasingly nervous as it dawned on me I would never be able to think of a question he hadn’t answered a hundred times before. But Cage was very kind, and if I failed to ask him anything new, he treated all my questions as though they were interesting propositions he was keen to explore for the first time.
Brian Ferneyhough was daunting in a different way. Unable to meet in person, we opted to do the interview by fax. Ferneyhough, an Englishman in San Diego, said that he preferred written interviews anyway, and he agreed to answer my questions as spontaneously as he could bear to in an attempt to bring a conversational feel to the exchange. When I read through his answers, I found there were parts that made no sense. Ferneyhough had a well-deserved reputation for composing extremely complex music, and another reputation, only slightly less deserved, for giving extremely complex answers in interviews. So I tried harder to comprehend his sentence structures and use of obscure words, but the more closely I read his fax, the more it seemed to me that those bits I couldn’t grasp were a result of his having used the wrong words. There were half a dozen such places. In each case, the words were all long and fancy, and I felt I could see the words that he had meant to use, words that would make his answers, though still arcane, at least intelligible. But how do you suggest to a fellow of Ferneyhou
gh’s stature that he’s misusing the English language?
I faxed back a politely tentative letter, apologising if, through my own stupidity, I had misunderstood his answers, but wondering if it was possible that in the following instances he had used the wrong word. I sent him my suggested replacements. The next morning, his reply lay in the fax machine tray, cheerfully accepting all my corrections. I couldn’t help wondering whether some of the more obscure utterances I’d read elsewhere, attributed to Ferneyhough, were a result of his interviewer or editor failing to challenge his word choices.
One or two people to whom I’ve told this story took it to be evidence that Ferneyhough was a charlatan. I don’t think that at all. Assuming it wasn’t an isolated case, I think a tendency to succumb to grand malapropisms is charming. It humanises him. It’s like Boulez’s comb-over.
There are really only two reasons to write or broadcast about music. The first is to encourage people to listen harder; the second is to encourage them to think musically – with a view to listening harder. Interviews are a good vehicle for the latter because they bring different points of view. In some of my books, I’ve included interviews alongside my own writing to present opinions other than mine. In Earth Dances, for instance, straight after my chapter on the significance of The Rite of Spring, there’s an interview with the composer Martin Bresnick that begins with his judgement that The Rite is far from Stravinsky’s most interesting piece, and he explains why. My broader point in doing this is that while it might be possible to be precise about musical mechanics, it is almost impossible to be precise about meaning, and therefore about significance. Perhaps, for this reason, I’m open to other people’s suggestions for writing articles or books. It’s a way of engaging with an idea I hadn’t previously considered and discovering what I think about it.
