The Memory of Music

by Andrew Ford

  Two of my books came from other people’s ideas. Earth Dances, which also became a radio series, was the suggestion of my publisher, Chris Feik. Illegal Harmonies, which began as a radio series, was proposed by Maureen Cooney. She rang me one day in the early 1990s, even before I began working with her on The Music Show, to point out that the twentieth century was going to end, that someone ought to make a radio series about the century’s music, and that perhaps it should be me and her. It would be a big job and we should start as soon as possible. In 1994 we took the idea to the new head of ABC Classic FM, Peter James. We wanted to make ten ninety-minute episodes, one for each decade, and asked for $35,000 for me as a freelancer to write and co-produce the series. As it turned out, the project took far longer than anticipated, and the money wasn’t nearly enough, but it seemed like a hell of a lot at the time and Peter blanched, asking that we leave the proposal with him. The following morning he rang, telling me to go ahead. Such was the freedom accorded to heads of the ABC’s networks in those days, and such was their control of budgets.

  Illegal Harmonies was always primarily about the music of the concert hall and opera house – it was, after all, commissioned by a classical music station. Yet because the twentieth century was also the century of the sound recording, of mass production and commercialisation, and of popular music going global, Maureen and I felt it was important to talk about this too, at least in so far as pop music had affected classical music. On a small scale and at a local level composers had been drawn to vernacular music since the Middle Ages, but the twentieth century was different. From its earliest days, American jazz reached out across the Atlantic, its syncopations and, to a lesser extent, its harmonies enchanting European composers from Debussy to Stravinsky to Ravel. By the 1960s, pop music had more or less eclipsed all other music so far as the mass media were concerned. Some modern classical composers, including Berio and Stockhausen, were changed by it; those who were not, those who had chosen to ignore the Beatles and the Beach Boys and Jimi Hendrix, were arguably composing in opposition to popular taste. So besides Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Bartók and Berg, Illegal Harmonies also considered Irving Berlin and Ethel Merman, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, Buddy Holly, the Beatles and Run DMC. The radio series was first broadcast in monthly episodes in 1997 and the book published in the middle of that year. In 2011 it went into its third edition.

  Making a series such as Illegal Harmonies is hugely enjoyable, the highly produced programs more collaborative than the weekly The Music Show can possibly be. I write scripts, the producer edits them, we choose music and maybe other sounds, and then the collaboration really starts; for once the script is recorded, we start to lay it out. It is rather like composing, but with a producer and engineer to bounce ideas off and, occasionally, overrule me. Sometimes the music or other sounds are woven through the words; more often the words are woven through the music. Either way, it’s counterpoint. And how you use the music helps tell the story.

  In the eighth episode of Illegal Harmonies, about the music of the 1970s, we wanted to look at minimalism, but minimalist music tends to last a long time and using little excerpts would have been misleading. So we had the idea of running music continuously under my voice, cross-fading different works as my script took us from one piece to another. Because of the repetition inherent in minimalism, it works quite well as a sonic bed: you can talk over it in a way you can’t with, say, Stockhausen’s Gruppen, which is a series of big events. By leaving the music under my voice we were able to show the continuity that most minimalism offers, bringing the music to the fore between my paragraphs to show different colours or textures. The music didn’t stop for the first forty minutes of the program, as Bryars’s Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet gave way to the first-movement development of Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony (to show that minimalist devices weren’t new), then Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians, La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #7 (lasting as long as its single chord continued to resonate), Riley’s In C, Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain, Reich’s Drumming, Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts, Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, Pärt’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, Anne Boyd’s Angklung and Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. By the end of our work on Illegal Harmonies, I felt Maureen and I had created a kind of house style for our radio features, and our next project allowed us to develop it.

  Dots on the Landscape was a six-part series about Australian composition that Maureen and I made for ABC Classic FM in 2001. In contrast to Illegal Harmonies, which was ten extended radio ‘essays’, Dots was an oral history, the story of music since colonial times told by more than thirty composers and a few critics. My voice introduced each episode and popped up occasionally to move the program along or to identify a speaker, but essentially each episode was a collage of voices, music and ambient sounds, most of the interviews having been conducted on location. The series looked at what is unique in Australian music – or if not unique, then heightened: colonialism and Aboriginality; the role of opera in the national psyche; attitudes to Europe, Asia and the landscape; and finally expatriation, Australia having more immigrant and emigrant composers than any other country I can think of. I avoided certain topics – such as modernism and postmodernism – because there wasn’t a specifically Australian angle: that debate had happened everywhere. Inevitably, there were some well-known composers whose voices we didn’t hear, because they didn’t fit my themes.

  In the third episode, the only one devoted to a single composer – because it struck me that Percy Grainger was a theme unto himself – I recorded nearly everything at the Grainger Museum in Melbourne. The museum, established by the composer in the 1930s, is a fascinating place for many reasons, and some of the displays are laid out like Victorian or Edwardian drawing rooms, stuffed with furniture and other objects. I tried to make the Grainger episode in Dots reflect this, with a multiplicity of voices edited into small sound bites, jostling to be heard among the fragments of music. In contrast, the fifth episode, about the influence of landscape, uses very few voices and allows them time to be expansive. To begin, we hear David Lumsdaine and Barry Conyngham speaking in turn about the bush and the city, and there is no music at all, just birdsong and insects behind Lumsdaine’s voice and the sounds of Sydney Harbour behind Conyngham’s. Barry and I had recorded our conversation one warm Saturday evening, sitting on a bench outside the Opera House, the ferries and passing concertgoers giving us all the ambiance we needed.

  Dots on the Landscape, though it was designed as a history and functions as one, was close to being a musical composition. The production techniques were similar to those I had used on Night and Dreams and would go on to use in Elegy in a Country Graveyard. It’s an indication of the size of the role that the ABC’s producers and sound engineers have played in my professional life, not only by training me up as an on-air presenter, but also in broadening my outlook as a composer.

  Writing books, inevitably a more solitary business than making radio, is a different kind of pleasure and always demanding. I have also sometimes found it to be a form of exorcism, and wonder how many other writers have had this experience. Before Martin Buzacott and I wrote Speaking in Tongues in 2005, we were two of the biggest Van Morrison fans in Australia. We would devour his new albums and discuss individual songs whenever we met, until one day one of us said to the other that we should write a book about them. So we did.

  We divided the task between us. Martin wrote the introduction to the book and most of Part Two, about Morrison’s albums up to 1990; I wrote Part One, about the themes in his songs, the final section of Part Two (the albums since 1990) and the Epilogue. Then we swapped chapters and edited each other. But by the time we came to do publicity for the book, sitting in a small studio chatting remotely with ABC Kalgoorlie or wherever, we realised our hearts weren’t quite in it anymore. It was as though, having spent so long listening to the songs, thinking about them, and dissecting and discussing them, we had lost the sense of fandom that had dr
iven us to write the book in the first place. It wasn’t that we’d gone off Van the Man – when the presenter in Kalgoorlie introduced our conversation with the opening of ‘Madam George’, Martin and I exchanged happy smiles – but there was no longer the urge to seek out his music. Of course the more recent material hasn’t been up to much, but even the classics – Astral Weeks, Common One, Into the Music, whatever – have tended to gather dust on my CD shelves since the book came out.

  Is it that I know the music too well and in consequence it lacks the interest it used to have? I don’t think so. When remastered editions of Astral Weeks and His Band and the Street Choir were released in 2015, my wife gave me them for Christmas. I listened again in wonder. I still love that voice and marvel at its flexibility and emotional depth; my admiration for his singing is undimmed. Perhaps it’s simply that the mystery is gone, that I’ve worked out what I think about Van Morrison and would now rather listen to something I haven’t worked out.

  There are those, of course, who feel that you shouldn’t write seriously – let alone analytically – about popular culture. These people come in two varieties: the academics and the anti-intellectuals. The first group think pop is worthless, and that musical analysis should be about Buxtehude; the others think that pop music becomes less cool if you study it, and it’s enough to give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. I think they’re all wrong. With anything you like – people, food, books, cars – it’s worth wondering why. You don’t have to be Socrates to feel you will get more from life if you subject it to a little scrutiny.

  I’m fond of quoting a remark I once heard Wilfrid Mellers make in a lecture. He said that if you’re not talking technically about music, you’re not talking about music at all. He was right, and most pop journalism dodges the music to discuss the lyrics of a song or the attitude of the singer. But from time to time you meet people who are suspicious of scrutinising any music too closely, let alone trying to put that scrutiny into words. Not many people now feel comfortable speaking about the structure of a bass line, the insistence of a rhythmic figure, the unfolding of a melody. It wasn’t always so.

  In my book In Defence of Classical Music, I wrote about Donald Tovey and his seven volumes of Essays in Musical Analysis. If we pick up one of these books today, we will see specialist writing about classical music, filled with extracts from scores, apparently aimed at music students. But Tovey, who published his books in the 1930s, was writing for ordinary music lovers, in a plain, direct style reminiscent of George Orwell’s. Tovey’s readership, perhaps more than averagely well-educated, lived at a time when an interest in classical music was not regarded as anything out of the ordinary. His Essays in Musical Analysis had begun as program notes for public concerts, and the books were aimed at readers who weren’t only interested in classical music, but were also able to prop open his books on the piano in their front parlour and make some sense of the examples. In the mid twentieth century, amateur musicians and music lovers were the bedrock of musical life, their love of music a matter of engagement. I’m talking about the middle class, the bourgeoisie that had invented the notion of classical music for a paying public in the nineteenth century. They still exist, and though their numbers are dwindling, they are not to be scorned. In Australia, Musica Viva was founded by people like this.

  In 1979, when I was at Bradford, I received an invitation to a conference at the University of East Anglia in its recently opened Sainsbury Centre, all steel and glass and light. The conference was about the arts and education, and brought together educators and practising artists from all areas of the arts. It was organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain together with Penguin Books, and I never discovered why I’d been invited, because most of the other conferees were famous. I was a 22-year-old nobody swanning around with the likes of Sir Peter Hall, director of the National Theatre, and the novelist Malcolm Bradbury (I bought him a drink). One day I shared a lunch table with three others, including the actor Patrick Stewart (‘call me Paddy’), who at the time was still only moderately famous as a star of the Royal Shakespeare Company, his roles including the best Enobarbas I’ve ever seen. But the encounter that left the most lasting impression on me was with Basil Deane and Lord Boyle.

  It’s important to understand that while I was nominally the third person in this conversation, I said practically nothing. Deane, who early in his career had been a lecturer at Melbourne University, was now Professor of Music at Manchester; Lord Boyle, as Edward Boyle, had been a parliamentary secretary in Churchill’s postwar government and, in the early 1960s, Minister of Education. The conversation was about the chamber music of Fauré, in particular the two piano quartets (which I didn’t know), and specifically the composer’s handling of harmony. This was very much Deane’s area – he was an international authority on French music of the early twentieth century – and yet here was his lordship explaining a few things to the professor, referring to chord progressions and details of texture. My impression of Boyle was that had the conversation suddenly veered off in the direction of Bach or Mozart or the piano music of Brahms – or the novels of George Eliot or the paintings of El Greco – he would have been equally well-informed. He was simply a cultured person, an enthusiastic amateur who wore his erudition charmingly.

  Fauré’s chamber music is sometimes mentioned as a sort of touchstone of musical sophistication. It isn’t showy and is unlikely, perhaps, to imprint itself on one’s memory with a single hearing. You might call it a connoisseur’s music. It’s possible that Lord Boyle was an extreme case and just happened to know more about chamber music than anyone else in mid-century British political life. I certainly detected a degree of surprise on Deane’s part. But my feeling is that people of Boyle’s generation, education and professional distinction – and also, let’s say it, class – were once able to speak about culture in a way that is no longer common in public life. I don’t simply mean that there aren’t so many parliamentarians with a detailed knowledge of Fauré’s piano quartets, but that there are few who would have the least interest in exploring them, and fewer still, perhaps, who would ever admit to it, lest identification as a connoisseur dent their public image as a man or woman of the people. In this regard, if in no other, public life reflects pretty closely the lives of the rest of us.

  Part of the problem, I imagine, is that we listen less. This may seem an odd claim, when most people you see in the street or on public transport are wearing earphones of one sort or another, but that’s private listening. Public listening – including to the everyday sounds blocked out by those earphones – has been in decline for decades. Once children in schools sang and learnt poetry and chanted their multiplication tables – learning by ear, learning by heart. I still try to learn poems, because I think it’s a way of understanding them. I wouldn’t make the same claim for times tables – I’m perfectly sure that today’s children comprehend mathematics better than children of my generation – but I do, at least, remember my tables and have no need of a calculator for arithmetic. Back in Tovey’s day – and Lord Boyle’s – radio listening would have been at its zenith; even when I was a child in the 1960s we listened to radio as much as we watched television. And the listening was active and communal. I’m told that, before TV, people would sit around the radio and look at it as they listened, the bakelite set a sort of meditation object. In Western countries, for at least the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, people attended church in far higher numbers than today. It wasn’t necessarily anything to do with religious belief: it was a social practice. You sang hymns with others, some of them strangers, and listened to the repetition of familiar words and phrases – often beautiful words and phrases. Whether you believed in God or not, you remembered the tunes and the words, because the communality of listening intensified the experience.

  Where do we find communal listening today? Really only at concerts. Radio and television are shared experiences less and less, because there’s so much choice, not only of what to listen t
o or watch, but also when. In this context, all words about music can be understood in the same light, as a plea to listen, to think and to discuss – to restore something that’s missing from our daily lives.

  It is curious that the most popular segments on The Music Show are always the most technical, the segments in which we heed Wilfrid Mellers’s advice and so really talk about music: a sitar player or a boogie-woogie pianist discusses his musical tradition, demonstrates techniques on his instrument and applies them in a performance; a musicologist, at a piano, takes us through the chord changes in an operatic scene, showing how the harmony gradually brightens; or a songwriter explains the way she constructed the layers of sound in her song, peeling them back, one at a time. We may feel shy talking about music ourselves, believing we lack the verbal tools, but when someone else goes into these details we are fascinated, and when they illustrate their explanation, we feel we understand. So that’s what a diminished chord sounds like! So that’s a hemiola!