The Memory of Music

by Andrew Ford

  ‘I think you should make a vocal work for Jane Sheldon and the Seraphim Trio out of some famous last words,’ she replied, as though she’d been expecting the question. ‘You could use Captain Scott’s diary.’

  So I did, although it took me a while to work out that it would require final poems to give Last Words substance.

  The Musical Child was all Anni’s idea. Researching the radio series Music and Fashion, she had unearthed the story of William Crotch, the much put-upon child prodigy, exploited by his overbearing mother (she had him giving organ recitals at the age of three), who went on to be the first director of the Royal Academy of Music. My stint as resident composer at ANAM in 2009 allowed me to write a piece about him. There was something fitting about having the piece played by young musicians, many of whom had themselves been prodigies, if better treated than little William. The Musical Child would also be my last piece for Gerry English, who was no longer singing but, aged eighty-three, had recently taken the part of the reciter in Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon at ANAM, and William would be a speaking role. Anni’s idea to ask Cathy for a libretto was inspired. In her screenwriting, Cathy has always been good at characters whose outward confidence conceals a damaged soul, and that was William as an old man. Her libretto was funny and touching.

  I finished composing The Musical Child only a year after Gerry’s Ode to Napoleon, but when I sent him the finished score, Gerry wrote back saying his health hadn’t been good and he no longer felt he could perform it. The concert, which would also contain the first performance of Rauha, was scheduled for May 2010 and would be conducted by Brett Dean in his final orchestral concert as ANAM’s artistic director. Brett had the idea of asking Geoffrey Rush to perform The Musical Child. Hardly daring to hope, we sent his agent the score, and heard back that Rush was interested. He couldn’t yet commit, pending receipt of the filming schedule for Pirates of the Caribbean 4, but we thought it was worth waiting.

  So we waited eight months, before hearing that Pirates of the Caribbean had claimed him after all. By now it was March and I was in Finland. The premiere of The Musical Child was just over two months away, but we had no William, and there was no obvious replacement for Geoffrey Rush. The piece required not just an actor, but a musical actor. Someone who could read music and learn a score. We asked Lyndon Terracini, who was keen, but in his new role at Artistic Director of Opera Australia lacked the time to learn the piece. We were reaching the point where only one person did have the time, because he knew it already, and that was me.

  The performance was not a success. ANAM’s musicians were committed, Brett was impeccable and, in the first half, Rauha came off wonderfully well. But The Musical Child needed a real actor with real stage presence; I had cleared room for him in the score – a huge personality, someone you can’t take your eyes off, a Gerald English, a Geoffrey Rush … I was not that man, and without a central performance of the proper magnitude, the piece seemed thin. People were kind; everyone told me I’d done a good job – and I’d certainly given it my best shot – but from childhood I’d known there was something special about actors, and here was more evidence that I didn’t have whatever that was. I felt I’d let Cathy down: for eight months she’d had reason to hope that her words would be spoken by one of the great actors of our time, but she’d ended up with someone who wasn’t an actor at all. Sometimes, perhaps, the show mustn’t go on.

  What it came down to was professionalism. I wouldn’t have accepted a player who hadn’t had much experience of their instrument, so why had I thought that a non-actor could perform the role of William Crotch? A professional attitude is really at the heart of being a musician. It means being dependable, and not turning up to a rehearsal poorly prepared because you’ll undermine the whole enterprise. Musicians guard their reputations – it’s what stands between them and unemployment – and there is an unspoken rule that you are all there to make each other sound good. If you don’t know or can’t play your part, you put others’ livelihoods on the line. You may be forgiven, but your unpreparedness will not be forgotten. Next time, someone else will get the gig. In this particular case, it was the reputation of The Musical Child that had been on the line. While Whispers had survived Barrie Kosky, The Musical Child shows every sign of not having survived me.

  For a composer, professionalism is just as important. You will be allowed only so many mistakes in your scores before performers give up on you. For that reason, I am more pleased by a compliment from a player than by anything else. No composer plays every instrument; we all write music we cannot play ourselves then put it in front of people who are experts. So when a violinist tells you that your writing fits her instrument well, or a cellist says that his part is a pleasure to play, it’s a feather in your cap.

  I once told John Williams I found the guitar the scariest instrument to write for, to which he replied that I should just write what I wanted to hear and ‘we’ll fix it up’. That seemed to me the sort of advice that is bound to get a composer into trouble, because it’s the opposite of professionalism. I avoided the guitar for years.

  Sometimes, professionalism is a matter of being practical and flexible, of a willingness to solve problems, which come in all manner of sizes. In 2011 I composed Blitz for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. I had interviewed my parents and two of their friends about their recollections of the bombing of Liverpool in World War II. They’d all been children at the time. I’d also recorded the memories of elderly Germans concerning the fire-bombing of Hamburg and Berlin. There was a mismatch between the accounts, the English voices often cheery in telling stories of children’s escapades, the Germans sombre, befitting the scale of destruction in their cities. As with Elegy in a Country Graveyard and A Singing Quilt, the edited interviews would form part of Blitz, but this time the context would be orchestral in a piece lasting nearly half an hour. The English voices would be heard first, then the Germans.

  When Simon Rogers, artistic manager of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, had first talked to me about the commission, he’d asked if I would like to use the TSO Chorus as well, but I couldn’t imagine what words a choir might sing; the speaking voices were already so powerful and touching on their own. So I was surprised to receive, late in 2011, the orchestra’s concert brochure for 2012, announcing Blitz as a work for chorus and orchestra. I rang Simon to point out the error.

  ‘Shit,’ he said; then, barely pausing for breath: ‘Are you sure you don’t want a choir?’

  Blitz was more than half written, but I was approaching a point where a change of mood was needed. The final speaker in the piece, Ursula Ezimora, is describing her present-day walks though the Hamburg neighbourhood of Barmbek. This is where she had lived as a child, when the whole area had been flattened by RAF bombing in July 1943. Approximately 45,000 people had died in three nights. She says it feels pleasant enough to walk around the neighbourhood today, but she can’t go near the place where her childhood home stood. I wanted to introduce some element of hope at this point, a new harmony, maybe, that would lift Frau Ezimora’s words and help her story and the music to turn a corner. So I brought in Simon’s choir, softly and wordlessly, the orchestra dropping away save for a few tiny flickers of percussion. The magical effect, which was due to an administrative error, was many people’s favourite moment in the piece.

  Perhaps the most important aspect of a composer’s professionalism is their willingness and ability to recognise when something is wrong with a piece. Of course you hope to solve all musical problems at your work desk but it doesn’t always happen.

  ‘A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned,’ W.H. Auden wrote in 1966, paraphrasing an observation by the French poet Paul Valéry. The Frenchman had been more precise. ‘A work is never completed,’ Valéry had said, ‘except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death’. Satisfaction, of course, can wear off.

  Sometimes, the moment of abandonment comes too soon. Hearing your music played or sun
g when previously you had only imagined it in your head will always be a shock. It’s not that you are surprised by what you hear – though sometimes you are – but the physical sound of an orchestra or a string quartet or a soprano voice is bound to take you aback in some way, often a good way. If you know someone only from a photograph, then meet them in the flesh, you may recognise them, but they will be shorter or thinner or darker than you’d imagined.

  The rehearsal room is full of these little shocks. A chord you had marked fortissimo isn’t as loud as you expected. Perhaps it’s to do with the spacing of the notes in the chord; repositioned, they might be more vibrant. You discover that an important line of counterpoint is getting lost in the texture. Perhaps it is an octave too low; perhaps the other instruments are too loud. From time to time, you write a piece that needs no further work, but most require some last-minute tweaking, and some need more than that. The hardest thing, as always, is to get the timing right.

  In 2007 the Sydney Symphony Orchestra gave the first performances of my short piece Headlong, a work commissioned for its seventy-fifth birthday season. Jeffrey Tate was the excellent conductor and he drew a particularly fine, clear, even passionate performance from the orchestra. The work was meant to be a celebration, but something seemed wrong.

  Headlong was a piece with a plan. Its structure involved a seventy-five note melodic line – a tone row – that shot around the orchestra, its rhythm always fluctuating, leaving its harmony in its wake. The row repeats a semitone higher, then a semitone higher, then a semitone higher, until finally it runs smack into a suitably jubilant chord of A major. It was a display piece for the orchestra – everyone gets a little solo – and, bar for bar, the music sounded fine. But the ending appeared to come from nowhere.

  Apart from devising my long tone row, the only thing I’d decided in advance was that it would be unstoppable; this line would rush through the piece – headlong – from start to finish, now in one octave, now in another, now in the violins, now on the tuba, slowing in the middle of the piece to enter a dense, dark thicket, but never stopping. Yet that final chord never felt earned; the arrival at A major lacked inevitability, even if my long and winding row insisted that it was inevitable.

  At the end of the first performance, I thanked the conductor and asked if the following night he might bring himself to play the central section a little more slowly; after the second performance, I asked him to play it more slowly still; finally, following the third performance, I asked him to slow the whole piece down. Sir Jeffrey is a lovely man and did as I asked. I have a CD of all four performances, each longer than the last. Headlong wasn’t a disaster – the ABC sent the final performance to the European Broadcasting Union and, for the next few years, radio royalties trickled in from all over Europe – but I still wasn’t satisfied. When the Sydney Symphony Orchestra informed me they would be playing the piece again in their 2017 season, this time with Ben Northey, I decided it was time to pull it apart and fix it.

  There is nothing wrong with using a system. It functions like a clamp on some aspect of the music, usually rhythm or, as in this case, pitch. Composers have been doing it since the Middle Ages, and there can be something powerful in a work of art that contains fixed elements (my tone row) alongside free elements (everything else in the piece). But sometimes a system can lead you into trouble, because having established the rules of the game, you tend to follow them. The tone row in Headlong ran through the piece without stopping. That was the point of it. But it ought to have stopped. The listeners – I include myself – needed more time to take in all that information, and slowing the music down wasn’t enough. So I cut a hole in the music just after it reaches the central section. There’s a silence, a moment to breathe and reflect on the story so far. After the music picks up and carries on, there are numerous places in which a note is held longer, a couple of bars are inserted to draw out a harmony, a rhythmic figure extended. I felt the piece was a tight-fitting garment that I was letting out. In the process, of course, I was breaking my own rules. There were now places where the line of notes didn’t move forward, but lingered or doubled back on itself. Well, they were only my rules.

  So is Headlong now finished or merely abandoned again? One of the changes I made to the score when I revised it was to add a new last bar. It didn’t replace the old last bar, but was in addition to it. A second thought, an esprit d’escalier. The final peroration happens as before, though at slightly greater length and leading more purposefully to the A major chord. But where once a big fat pause sat on that chord, now it is played in strict tempo, followed by a sharp attack on the same chord, then a (sort of) F sharp minor eleventh chord (in case you’re interested) that splinters apart as individual woodwind and percussion instruments execute little figures that slow down, independently, to nothing.

  So the music disintegrates. Far from the triumphant blast that ended the original version, this time the piece actually sounds as though it’s been abandoned.

  9.

  The Point of It

  When I was a child, my father and I would go to watch cricket. We were at Lord’s late one afternoon, when the newspaper seller came round with the Evening Standard. The headline announced that someone was ‘helping police with their enquiries’ over a string of murders.

  ‘They’ve got him,’ said the man in front of us, clearly very pleased.

  ‘Let’s hope he’s the right one,’ Dad said.

  ‘He’ll do!’ the man replied, slightly belligerently.

  With some people, the desire for vengeance is greater than the desire for truth. The man at Lord’s was unconcerned that a murderer might still be on the streets, happy merely that someone was in custody. I was twelve or thirteen years old and thought he must be mad, but I’ve since come to realise this man was not so unusual. There are people who feel somehow vindicated by the punishment of others, whether or not it’s deserved. You see them on the nightly news. They’re the ones in the street outside the criminal court, banging on the side of the police van.

  For them there is no nuance in life, there are no shades of grey. They are keener to restrict than to encourage; they like the death penalty and feel the occasional execution of a wholly innocent person is a small price to pay (of course, they’re not the ones paying it), and when military action is mooted, for whatever reason, they’re always in favour. In the weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq, world leaders and their supporters were so keen on the war that, like the man at Lord’s, they weren’t interested in veracity. If Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of nuclear and biological weapons couldn’t be verified, evidence would be invented. It was to be war and there was no going back.

  I’m not a pacifist. At the time of the Falklands War I considered joining the Peace Pledge Union, having read somewhere that Benjamin Britten had been a member. I sent for the forms, but having read them and understood that a pledge was indeed a pledge – never to fight in a war in any circumstance – I couldn’t bring myself to sign; I could imagine situations in which I might feel obliged to fight. Still, pacifism is at least a logical and defensible position; always being in favour of war is insane.

  What I’m trying to describe is a certain mindset. On the surface, it is aggressive, drawn to conflict, punishment and revenge, though generally at arm’s length. But at heart it’s defensive, because beneath the bluster is a kind of general fear, perhaps of change, perhaps of the modern world, perhaps of the unknown. It’s understandable, I suppose, though no way to live.

  Composing music – creating art of any sort – is more or less the opposite of this. I don’t mean to suggest that all artists have sunny dispositions because, quite obviously, all don’t. But the act of writing a piece of music or painting a picture, of making ‘a hat / Where there never was a hat’ (to quote Stephen Sondheim) is essentially optimistic, even if the optimism is short-lived. Philip Larkin projected a gloomy persona, especially in his poetry, and was apparently haunted by the notion of death. In his magnificent, late
‘Aubade’, he writes about waking early to contemplate ‘Unresting death, a whole day nearer now’. And yet the business of crafting this poem, of slowly getting it right, of perfecting the seeming nonchalance of its opening iambic pentameter – ‘I work all day and get half drunk at night’ – can only be construed as a positive act.

  In my book In Defence of Classical Music, I wrote about my response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, and how, in their immediate aftermath, I felt not only that I couldn’t compose, but that music itself was something I didn’t want to hear. It wasn’t so much a reaction to the horror of what had happened – or not only that – but of what might happen next, and the prospect of the United States and its allies using the attack as a reason for further violence. Knowing that innocent people have died is bad enough, but knowing that innocent people are about to die is somehow paralysing.

  After a short time, I took solace in Brahms’s string quartets, not because I knew and loved them, but because I didn’t. Brahms was a favourite composer – a composer I could depend on – but I had never found time before for his string quartets and this seemed like the moment. I wanted to engage with a generous mind, and a great one at that. Brahms’s three quartets restored me to some extent. They didn’t just offer solace, but context. Yes, there might be crazed, violent terrorists in the world and governments who would grasp the opportunity to consolidate their own ambitions, but once there had been Brahms. What’s more, we’d had terrorism and despotism before, yet Brahms’s music was still here; it had been strong enough to survive.

  The piece I was meant to be composing at the time of 9/11 was Learning to Howl, a song cycle for Jane Edwards, its structure proceeding from Lorrie Moore’s words, ‘When I was a child, I tried hard for a time to split my voice.’ The piece describes the arc of a woman’s life from childhood to old age, in texts by Sappho and Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Emily Brontë and Elizabeth Smart (‘This old woman / Waddles towards love’). My creative paralysis came down to one question: what’s the point? It seemed to me, and doubtless to many others at the time, that artists should be making some sort of response to the human destruction that had happened and would continue to happen.