Breaking the law: a short speech for the Middle Temple
Thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen. I’m delighted indeed to have been invited to become an honorary bencher of the Middle Temple. But I think you’ve made a terrible mistake. You see, I spend my whole life breaking the law. It’s not that I’m ignorant of it. No, I study it carefully, and then, with relish, I disobey. In front of tens of thousands of people every year. And, worse, I encourage young people to break the law too – in my teaching, in articles, in interviews. In fact, if a student of mine fails to break the law, if he or she meekly obeys it, I’m afraid the marks have to be reduced.
I’m referring, of course, to the laws of music, both the man-made ones and those presented to us by nature. Let’s begin with the latter: specifically, the harmonic series. When I strike a C on the keyboard of the piano you are not just hearing that isolated note but a series of sympathetic vibrations rising up from it and forming the halo of a C major chord. Tonality exists as a law of nature whether we like it or not, but the fun began as musicians started to play with those rules. To shrink the major third in that harmonic series will give us a minor chord, a darker, sadder tonality … and so on, through thousands of years of musical history.
Once humans began to preserve musical vibrations in written form, they created laws and structures. Pleasing sounds were codified so they could more easily be recognised and repeated. An ugly interval sung in choir in a medieval monastery became a musical ‘sin’ to be avoided; and the worst offender, the tritone, which came to be known as ‘diabolus in musica’, was a symbol of the greatest transgression – the forbidden interval. Liszt’s Dante Sonata opens with a whole chain of tritones. The Devil is at the very gates of his imagined Inferno.
After humans began formulating rules of melody and harmony, they started to structure the forms within which they would resound. By the eighteenth century sonata form became the highpoint of Western musical order. No one respected this particular legal framework more than Beethoven – most of his compositions utilise sonata form – but no one was more audacious in bending and breaking its laws.
Lawless rebellion takes on a more subtle, devious shade with performers. The composer’s score is made up of dots on a page representing instructions for performance – a sort of brief, I suppose. These are meant to be, and in general are, conscientiously observed. But certain effects cannot be written down, and decisions about nuance of sound and timing require a performer to make constant judgements about appropriate licence. How far can I go within the boundaries of respect for the composer’s intentions? Can I change dynamics, alter notes or even make cuts?
Without structure, without rules, music’s vibrations in the air would merely buzz around as if through open windows, impossible to grasp … or enjoy. But ultimately law is about freedom. We restrict one thing so that another more important thing can flourish. A firm starting place is the path to fluidity and creativity for a musician.
‘Life is not a rehearsal,’ it has been said. No, but it is an improvisation. And despite the themes given to us by Nature we each have to make our own variations. That search for the perfect balance between law and freedom, rigidity and flexibility – in music and in life – is perhaps, to borrow an analogy from that famous Victorian song, a search for the Lost Chord, that harmony we will get to hear only in heaven.
The Proms
The Royal Albert Hall – that 6,000-seat, redbrick spaceship parked to the south of Hyde Park – is home to the greatest music festival in the world. The First and Last Nights of the BBC Proms have become the artistic bookends of London’s summer life: the First Night in the shadow of Wimbledon’s last serve; the Last Night as deckchairs and sunglasses are reluctantly put away, one final burst of pomp before circumstances return to normal. Most cities take it easy in the vacant vacation-time; London brings out its pièces de résistance, night after night.
The perennial fluidity and invention of the Proms is a constant source of wonder. Its British identity is held as firmly as a bulldog’s jaw, yet it presents more international artists, orchestras and works over its two-month duration than any other festival anywhere. It keeps alive the antiquated idea that live music heard in concert might still be an exciting way to spend an evening, yet the central role of the BBC – radio, television and internet – ensures as rich a feast of broadcasting as it’s possible to imagine. ‘Britannia rules the waves’ … well, the airwaves at least during the season. The Proms are sheer good fun but also surprising, often challenging, never snobbish. The most seasoned concertgoer will almost certainly find something he has never heard before (not counting the many world premieres), but there are enough of the great standard classics to seduce the most innocent classical music virgin.
The Proms has an important social function too. We should not take for granted music’s extraordinary power to unite, that spell of solidarity when over six thousand people are moved as if by one heart. To walk onstage into such a crowd, the noise of their applause reduced to breathless silence as the concert begins, is to experience a thrill hard to describe. The tingle in an auditorium as strangers share the experience of the same vibrations in the air renders all boundaries – at least for a while – irrelevant and somehow small, as if looking down on our blue planet from the distant sky.
Classical music has a special knack for putting certain things into perspective. To listen to or play music written up to five hundred years ago and still find its voice utterly contemporary is to experience a telescoping of human experience, a direct link to the wisdom and passion of the past. And, unlike some forms of entertainment, classical music is not escapism. We don’t leave behind our deepest human longings for the length of a concert; rather we explore, with the composer, the most profound part of our being. Music heals. It is an antibiotic, not a painkiller.
The Royal Albert Hall seems as if it might have been constructed especially for this festival: it can give Mahler’s ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ space to spare and yet the faintest whisper of a chamber choir’s last breath meets the ear through the silence. However, the first fifty years of the Proms actually took place in the Queen’s Hall, which was situated at the end of Regent Street, until it was gutted during an air raid on 10 May 1941. The last work to be performed there, earlier on that same fateful day, was Sir Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. How cruelly pertinent must the Demons’ screaming chorus have seemed on the following, rubble-filled morning: ‘Dispossessed, Aside thrust, Chucked down, By the sheer might of a despot’s will, Of a tyrant’s frown.’
The Proms moved to the Royal Albert Hall in the same year, and the same composer’s rousing Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 is still the theme song of the Last Night. Elgar wrote it only four months after the death of Queen Victoria, in May 1901, and it was a huge success from the beginning. A. C. Benson added verse to the central section’s tune, and it became virtually a second national anthem in Britain: ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. The irony of these overblown words is that their swagger and jingoism came at the very point when the empire they extolled was starting to crumble. The queen was recently dead, the Boer War was at its high point, and the government’s ‘wider still, and wider’ policy was beginning to have a whiff of hysteria about it. ‘God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet’ was an unanswerable prayer.
It all had to come to an end, and it did – shuddering, splintering, splattering in two world wars. But what remains can be celebrated without shame or embarrassment. The Victorians created so many of the things we love and take for granted today, including some of the social and political mechanisms with which their worst mistakes could later be rectified. Flags can safely wave; voices can safely roar in praise of a long-gone empire, which is now only a memory: as real as the Prince Consort’s golden statue on the edge of Hyde Park; as real as the extinct German duchies of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, which were attached to his name.
Britain’s true ‘hope and glory’ for me is its rich artistic life. Th
e written and spoken word has always been the jewel in the crown, but Britain also excels internationally in film, dance, architecture, fashion, the visual arts and, of course, music. And not just as exports. Arts tourism and our educational establishments are magnets attracting visitors to Britain from across the world – culture as a unifying force conquering hearts without taking possession of lands.
It is important to realise how indivisibly pan-European the world of classical music is. Not only are our British orchestras, like our football clubs, full of ‘foreigners’ but it would be a significant challenge to exclude European music from the repertoire of the Proms. In the world of music education it is the same. My alma mater, the Royal Northern College in Manchester, was founded by Sir Charles Hallé, born in Hagen, Germany. He also founded the orchestra that bears his name and that was made internationally famous by a conductor with an Italian father and a French mother: Sir John Barbirolli. English musical life is stitched with European threads on every seam. Take Germany or France or Italy out of British culture and we would be left with rags.
‘How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?’ asks the Elgar chorus. Awkward, because even our dear Queen Elizabeth has recent ancestors who were not born here. ‘Go back home,’ shout the bigots. Not outside the Royal Albert Hall, please. The mustachioed consort of Victoria would have to take the next boat back to Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Their son, Edward VII, at whose request Elgar wrote ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, was three-quarters German. Queen Victoria, through her own background and her children’s marriages, is the original European Union.
We see flags wave across the Royal Albert Hall on the Last Night in joyous celebration but they are by no means just Union Jacks. Dozens of nations are represented, a rainbow fluttering across the auditorium, a visible reminder of the universal appeal of this most British of festivals and a mirror of the eclecticism of the city and country in which it takes place, not to mention the enchantment of music’s wordless communication across language barriers. The confidence of a healthy patriotism doesn’t need to exclude. ‘Festival’, via its Latin roots, is a synonym for feast, an occasion when sharing is impossible to avoid. The Proms is the ultimate classical music feast and with ticket prices cheaper than a luncheon voucher, there’s no excuse not to join in the fun. It is the feeding of the six thousand on the edge of Hyde Park.
STAGE
Once more onto the stage, dear friends, once more
The great British actor Simon Callow once drew a parallel between one of the famous speeches by King Henry in Henry V – urging, firing up, spurring his soldiers on to victory – and aspects of being a ham actor: ‘Then lend the eye a terrible aspect … Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide.’ As I thought about Simon’s irreverent take on this passage (and actually a commander in the army does need some of the same magnetism as an actor), I saw that it contained insights for a musical performer too.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more …
Once more – standing in the wings, summoning up energy, focus, inspiration. The consciousness of both a pleasing familiarity with the process but also a strange sadness if those wings are far from home.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility …
In the practice room there is calm focus, self-criticism – we pare the score down, quietly delving into the composer’s mind. There is peace off-stage, far from the crowds, free from nerves, away from the broadcaster’s microphones.
But when the blast of war blows in our ears …
When the final backstage bell rings: ‘Mr Hough, this is your on-stage call.’
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood …
Actually you should probably try to loosen the sinews, but the blood is usually rushing and the heart is usually beating fast.
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect …
That one’s for the conductor.
Overall I think this speech gives a very good sense of the sort of energy and passion involved in performing music on stage.
A taxi driver once asked me what I did for a living.
‘I’m a musician – a classical pianist.’
‘Oh, I love classical music; it’s so relaxing,’ he replied.
This is one of the worst insults to serious music. It should be stimulating, exciting, moving, touching, exhilarating, life-changing … but never merely relaxing. I smiled at the driver and disguised my hard-favour’d rage with fair nature, holding hard my breath.
Bored on stage
Someone wrote to me once, ‘How do you guys do it? Same programme night after night without variation. How could anything remain fresh after so many repetitions? Don’t those of you who perform for our pleasure feel abused by this sort of monotony? Would you have it any other way?’ He was referring to recitals and the sheer number of times a concert pianist plays a particular sequence of pieces.
I think I’ve learned more about this aspect of performing on stage from observing and thinking about actors than I have from musicians. No solo musician has a schedule of repetition like an actor in a successful play – sometimes eight shows a week, often in the same theatre for months on end. I at least get to perform in different halls, on different pianos. But one of the skills that makes a great actor is precisely the ability to walk out from the wings, every single time, with fire in the belly – every word and movement charged with electricity. With the greatest thespian there isn’t the slightest hint of routine or boredom; every step, every line is alive.
For me this issue has a certain connection with two hard- working composers: Tchaikovsky and Britten. Both used to sit down every day and write. It was not a question of waiting for inspiration; the very act of picking up the pen was the shortcut to new ideas flowing from that pen. As performers we can’t even allow for the possibility that the pieces to be played that evening might not be fresh. We walk to the piano as if to a liturgy. The music is there – all that remains is for us to be ‘there’ too. Of course, we can be physically or mentally tired, or even ill, and this can affect the quality of the performance, but it shouldn’t really affect the intention of the performance. I’ve heard seventeen-year-olds sound jaded with a piece they’ve just learned, and seventy-year-olds bursting with fresh ideas about music they’ve played their whole lives.
Neurotic on stage
So much for maintaining inspiration when repeating the same repertoire many times; what about maintaining sanity in the same circumstances? What are some other factors to consider about playing music that is extremely familiar to us? Before looking at the mental health issue, here is a question and an assumption.
The question
In an interview once a journalist asked me if I felt differently about playing a familiar piece on stage than one that was unknown, and whether it affected the way I approached the performance. It was in reference to Mozart’s Concerto in C K. 467. It struck me, as I was about to answer, that every piece I play is equally familiar because I’ve spent the same amount of time working on each one of them. I know the obscure Saint-Saëns Third as well as the familiar Rachmaninov Third. I’ve certainly spent enough hours working on both! So I don’t really feel I would approach one differently from the other.
The assumption
Then there is the assumption that an often performed piece is forever in the brain and fingers. Something that’s difficult to do does not automatically become easy the more we do it. Witness the pocketing of that black snooker ball for the 10,000th time. Sometimes it can get more difficult, and here we encounter the neurosis of my heading.
With familiar pieces one has always to guard against both distraction and obsession. Distraction, because some passages become so much part of our motor memory that the notes tumble past via the reflexes without properly engaging the mind. Then if the focus changes for some reason,
we can come totally unstuck. Obsession, because certain passages become feared over time, especially if they’ve caused a problem in the past. We can get a mental block about them, and then minutes before they arrive a certain panic arises. (Don’t ask me to tell you which mine are.) Some people get a hang-up about a specific technique. They believe they can’t play octaves, for instance, so every time a passage in octaves appears they expect to fall on their faces – and therefore they often do. Then there are the silly mind games performers can play with themselves on occasions. ‘I’ll bet the audience thinks I’m really involved in this passage, but actually I’m deciding whether to eat risotto or pasta afterwards.’ ‘What was the fee for this concert? Is that before VAT?’ And so on. Overcoming psychological hurdles in concert life requires the same kind of willpower and discipline as not allowing oneself the possibility of being bored … and it is a lifelong challenge.
Nervous on stage
Maybe being bored or neurotic on stage has not crossed the minds of those who attend rather than give concerts. But being nervous – the paralysis in the wings, the butterflies in the stomach, the trembling leg, the thumping heart – is something anyone who has done anything in public can appreciate, whether it was that fumbled speech as best man at your sister’s wedding or the Nativity play at school long ago when you feared dropping the frankincense. It all boils down to ‘What will people think?’ – that insatiable need for approval and admiration that reaches back to our childhoods and threatens to dominate our entire conscious lives.
Rough Ideas Page 8
