As I’m reaching the final stages of writing a piece of music I like to add metronome markings because, although a performer’s tempo choice can change from hour to hour, these numbers still give some broad indication of shape and character and, more importantly, of relationships between different sections. When I first started to write my Third Piano Sonata, the stark, cold opening was conceived at a crotchet = 60, the pulse of a heartbeat. But after the piece was finished and as I was checking through proofs for publication, this just seemed too slow – a heart beating comfortably at home rather than with excitement and energy on a stage. A red line scratched through and changed it, warmed it up to 72. Exact numbers in music can be deceptive too.
The idea that anything in life can be perfect or fixed is a dangerous one. Imperfection is perhaps one of the definitions of being human, and patience with other people’s imperfections is an essential part of being humane. Mind you, sitting nervously backstage before a concert, with the audience gathering, hands getting colder and clammier by the minute, it’s always good to spot a thermostat on the wall and then to hear it hiss into action as the dial is turned to the perfect number.
The essence of underpants and the lap of luxury
I am aware that I appear to spend most of my life in the lap of luxury. I don’t see myself as recklessly decadent (who does?) but compared to those for whom a slice of day-old bread is a feast, or clean, running water a miracle, I am guilty of culpable indulgence.
It is safe to say that at no time in history have humans been more aware of and also, to be fair, more concerned about such global inequality. This knowledge should spur us on to ever-greater generosity but our wheels of altruism constantly risk getting stuck. A terrible crisis hits the news and suddenly donations rise, but then time passes and the crisis disappears from the news and we carry on as before. I honestly don’t know the solution to this except to keep the issue always in sight and keep helping out as we can, even in the smallest ways.
But that’s not what I want to write about here. I want to defend luxury, to unpick the preconceptions of cheap or expensive. I want to make the point that although a bag of the best Darjeeling Second Flush is much more expensive than a box of PG Tips teabags, it’s a lot less expensive than a daily cup of coffee at McDonald’s. A bottle of Andy Tauer’s delightful, smoky Lonestar Memories perfume might well be more expensive than a week’s wages for some, but one squirt (it’s all you need) is a lot cheaper and healthier than a Mars bar – and a bottle could well last you for years. It has often been said that a hand-crafted pair of shoes is better value in the long run than a pair bought in a high-street sale. The former, if looked after, will outlive you, whereas the latter can be cracked and useless after one rainy season. If we decide to continue drinking tea and buying clothes, it might well be that the luxury brands are not quite as extravagant as they seem.
There’s another side to this issue: those expensive designer clothes that are not any better than their generic twins. I remember being appalled, seeing the price tag on a simple white T-shirt (made in a developing country) listed at over $100 and distinguished from others, it seemed, only by a label; not to mention hearing once in Singapore about a T-shirt (this time with a design mass-printed on its white torso) that cost over $400. Why do people buy such things? I don’t think it’s just to show that they can afford it and therefore they must be rich, powerful and worth something.
Paul Bloom, in his fascinating book How Pleasure Works, talks about the ‘essentialism’ in how humans look at objects. We know a cake shaped exactly like a tiger is not a tiger, not only because we bite it rather than it bites us. We know that there is an inner essence to things. There is a ‘tigery’ something and there is a ‘cakey’ something and we know this goes beyond (inside) the furry stripes or the chocolate chips. St Thomas Aquinas, via Aristotle, talked about substance and accidents to try to make clear the distinction. Bloom points out that when we put on designer clothes we are subconsciously wearing and responding to the essence of the product. The logo or colour is only the accident; it’s the hidden (unspeakable?) connotations that are the substance. Even if unseen, designer underpants cling to those who buy them with a comforting hug that is due not merely to their properly fitting waistband or padded pouch.
So much for some of the subconscious reasons we shop like this – blindly, blithely; but there is an urgent ethical need for these hidden connotations to be unveiled and then changed. We need to be constantly reminded of the injustice involved in producing and purchasing this flimsy underwear. We need to ‘taste’ the sweat in the sweatshops, to look into the eyes of the oppressed faces of those slaving in the factories. And we need to keep doing this with the monotony of the machines themselves until the unseen pleasure such garments might give us unravels … until it trickles away, leaving solidarity with those who make our clothes the most sought-after logo of all.
Do musicians tend to be socialists?
When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013 some voices were raised on social media asking why there was so little respect for her or regret about her passing from musicians. I have no way of measuring this but it reminded me of two points about musicians: we tend to be fairly apolitical (or at least politically naive), and we’re only a few generations away from being the equivalent of servants, thus naturally left-leaning.
I was out of the UK as a fun-loving student during much of Mrs Thatcher’s time in Downing Street and, as I didn’t own a television in New York or read the newspapers, she was a shadowy figure in my memory. Indeed, I recall one morning in 1982 walking along a practice corridor at the Juilliard School and meeting my friend Ezequiel Viñao.
‘Did you know we’re now officially at war?’ asked the Argentinian composer with a grin.
‘Oh, are we? Gosh. Anyway, let’s go and have a coffee. What are you working on at the moment?’
Many musicians in the darker years of the twentieth century took a heroic stance against dictators and their atrocities, but some who continued to live in totalitarian countries during these times seemed unwilling to engage in politics. Perhaps we can criticise what we perceive to be their collaboration or pusillanimity but we must remember that musicians do not usually work with (their own) words; their intellectual inspiration tends to have a different focus. Where prominent writers are expected to have a socially, politically responsible voice, musicians sometimes find meaning only in the voice that produces melodies with vocal cords.
I think it is safe to say that most musicians have predominantly liberal, left-wing views, and it’s worth remembering that the superstar, highly paid musician is a recent phenomenon. Before the twentieth century, to be a successful musician was to be one who was employed. A few, such as Liszt, Paderewski and some singers, had phenomenally lucrative careers, but they were rare – and Liszt gave all of his money away, travelling by choice in a third-class railway carriage.
In most situations a musician was like a cook, someone brought in to provide a specialised service. Even when the more celebrated ones were offered a place at an aristocratic dining table, they were often seen as something of a performing monkey. Fast forward to the twenty-first century. Someone was telling me only the other day that when playing a concert in an English country house a few years ago, he had had to arrive via the servants’ entrance. I rest my case, ‘but not on the Queen Anne desk, please’.
Robert Mann, a founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet and its first violinist for fifty years, told me that he never passed a busker or street musician without stopping and contributing some small change. He saw them as colleagues – less successful ones perhaps, but still ‘comrades’. And Gordon Green believed that musicians should be paid less than refuse collectors because they were doing something they enjoyed and which carried its own reward.
Whether such socialism is foolish naivety or heroic idealism is a matter of opinion, but what is certain is that, however many recordings are sold or tours sold out, the sound waves themselves are fr
ee. Musicians, at their best, have kept this insight alive, reluctant to grasp or exploit something so fragile, so universal – like the natural beauty of lilies in a field. ‘Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these,’ as someone often accused of socialist leanings put it.
The Final Retreat: my novel of desire and despair
When I was a teenager, in Warrington, a local Anglican priest committed suicide. As someone who was about to convert to Roman Catholicism, and was even considering a priestly vocation, this shocked and moved me deeply. How could someone whose life was meant to bring comfort to others be so desperate as to be unable to find comfort himself? But it was not just the issue of ending a suffering life (or the question of sin and salvation involved) but the disgrace. Shame was in the air and as little as possible was said about the affair in the community – although there were whispers that he might have been ‘one of those … queer’.
Many years later, I came across James Alison’s brilliant book Faith Beyond Resentment. In a moving introduction James writes about his friend, Father Benjamin O’Sullivan, a monk of Ampleforth Abbey (a musician too), who had killed himself the evening before a story was to run in a Sunday tabloid exposing his sexual relationship with a man. A tape recorder had been hidden in the bedroom of the London flat where they were to have an intimate encounter. My parish in Warrington, St Mary’s, was staffed by priests from this monastery and I found the whole story heartbreaking. What internal turmoil was involved in these two cases, what desperation in their tragic final moments. ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ Could these words have had a more apt, a more poignant voice than from the mouths of these two lonely priests?
My novel The Final Retreat came out of subconscious reflections over the years on such issues and also on how far the idea of a ‘wounded healer’ can be stretched. Having not become a priest myself (and, thank God, not being subject to such desolate thoughts as these two men) I still wanted to write something about it. This novel is not autobiographical in any way – not just because I’m blessed with an optimistic nature but because the background and circumstances of Father Joseph’s life are totally different from mine – but it does explore some issues, both sexual and theological, that have been on my mind since childhood.
My fictional character, Father Joseph Flynn, is a middle-aged priest whose faith and life are in tatters. He goes to see his bishop in a last-ditch attempt to find a solution to his hopeless situation and the bishop, a kindly, sympathetic man, suggests he go on an eight-day, silent retreat for prayer and reflection before any decisions are made about the future. Apart from short, daily meetings with a sanctimonious spiritual director, Father Joseph speaks to no one. But he writes. Page after page of a diary-cum-memoir in which he explores his state of soul, the loss of his vocation, his sexual addiction, and the blackmail that is destroying his life. The novel’s form as a set of notebooks discovered after the priest’s death attempts to convey the restrictions of time and space on a retreat – eight days in a cramped, ugly bedroom – but also for this priest the very act of writing becomes a form of artistic release as he allows memories to unfold while enjoying the process of finding words to express them.
The book works on three levels: musings on faith and religion; Father Joseph’s life and family background; and the untold story of the bishop and the Nigerian priest. The interest and significance of these levels is in reverse proportion to their coverage in the book – we watch the story unfold through the wrong end of a telescope. Only glimpsed at is the ‘untold story’ of Father Chiwetel and Bishop Bernard who each make just three brief appearances in the novel. It’s a big, bold tale but it’s deliberately kept hidden, merely hinted at, a melody unsung. It is the ‘twitch of the curtains’ at the beginning and end of the book.
Father Joseph’s life is told as flashbacks: memories of his childhood with a religiously obsessed mother, and also of his sexual encounters, deliberately non-erotic in description but explicit, aiming to shock with stabs of four-letter words as if he is lashing out in frustration and bitterness. Then finally there are spiritual reflections, both meditations on the Scriptures (the Nativity, the woman caught in adultery, the woman with the alabaster jar, Judas) and on theological issues (the Mass, Confession, Hell, Salvation, the Jews, homosexuality, etc.).
The atmosphere of claustrophobia is important: the narrowness of the retreat and its mindset contrasted with a more colourful world outside, the intimate world of the flesh. I want the reader to experience the utter weariness of Father Joseph, someone too tired to consider changing course, his life wasted, on the (last lap of the) wrong track. Religion represents all that is dull for him: the boredom of a dreary parish’s daily grind and the winding down of late middle age. Sex makes him feel alive; it is exciting, symbolic of freedom and ecstasy and a lost youth.
The feast days on which the action of the book takes place are all relevant. It opens on the feast of St Jude, the traditional Patron of lost causes, and closes on the feast of Charles de Foucauld, who died at the hands of violent men – a hint perhaps that Father Joseph’s own death might not have been suicide. But if a killing, by whom?
Although there are only a few passing references to music in the novel, its construction was influenced by musical composition, not just in the poetic use of words that form rhythmic patterns or that sing in and out of tune, but in the structure too as themes and motives return and form counterpoint with each other. The opening scene was conceived as a theme that, after its initial statement, disappears until the end, its return creating an arch. Indeed this circular form is related to my first three piano sonatas, each of which begin and end with the same material. Then there’s the altered chord: at the beginning of the book the bishop signs his name ✝ Bernard and at the end Bernard x – the cross of episcopal authority becoming a kiss and recalling Father Joseph’s musing in short-story form about the death of Judas Iscariot where the traitor ends up being the one truly faithful disciple. Is Bishop Bernard a traitor to the Church, or is his weakness and vulnerability its ultimate hope?
But if there is a musical dialect as such it is more Sibelius than Tchaikovsky. Melodies are hinted at rather than fully sung. Ideas are deliberately left incomplete, left to be finished by the reader/listener. Another analogy might be seen in the world of painting – Howard Hodgkin, whose brushstrokes spill outside the frame, or some of the pieces of Clyfford Still, where the body of the painting remains calm but on the outer edge something seemingly unrelated is pulsating with turbulent life.
This book is infused with memories of priests I’ve met and known over the years; many were heroic souls serving joyfully and selflessly, but there were others whose eyes brimmed over with distress and suffering. Some stayed in the priesthood, some left, still others never took the plunge, hovering on the outside. One New York priest in particular comes to mind, someone I saw regularly celebrating Mass in the 1990s. Externally cheerful (too cheerful, perhaps) but, if he was caught off guard, I sensed tears in his smiles. He died young. Father Neville, Father Joseph’s spiritual director for my fictional retreat, is based on some priests I’ve come across – over-confident, cold, prudish, bullying, never seeming to have any doubts or problems.
Why has the Catholic priesthood wanted to present itself over the centuries as perfect, as impregnable? Well, since the child-abuse scandals of the past two decades this facade has crumbled and our priests are now humbler as a result … and fewer in number. Nevertheless this novel doesn’t touch on the paedophilia issue at all (all of the sex in it is legal, even if not loving) but in the demise of Father Joseph and of Judas we can see perhaps a glimmer of hope in the most anguished situations: if there is anything ’good’ about the Good News it’s that no one and nothing is irredeemable. As Father Joseph writes in one of his notebooks as he meditates about the separation of sheep and goats at the Last Judgement: ‘Goats are extinct.’ Somehow I trust that the final embrace of the Good Shepherd who risks losing ninety-nine sheep
to save just one would have been joyfully experienced by Father Benjamin, by the Anglican priest from Warrington, and by my fictional priest, Father Joseph Flynn.
If I ruled the world
A musician ruling the world? Well, first there would be a lot less music, and the music that remained would be lower in volume. Banished would be music as wallpaper, music to block silence, music to fill empty space – enough! Jingles in lifts, jingles on airplanes, jingles on the phone as you wait to speak to the bank – enough!
Speaking of phones, I would ban marketing calls from loan and credit-card companies and I would make illegal their slick, Brilliantined envelopes, which thicken our doormats. Waste of paper, waste of mental energy, and lethal for a pianist whose finger can suffer a paper cut ripping open their often disguised contents.
On a more serious note, I would launch some green offensives: solar power in every building and lights off in all public buildings at night. The daily glitter of city skyscrapers competing with the stars is an unnecessary, unforgivable decadence. Food waste is another atrocity that is reducible if not completely avoidable. Every restaurant should be forced to recycle its leftovers for animal consumption – and they should create fewer leftovers in the first place. Drastic reduction in plastic and a total ban on straws. And, please, liquid soap in hotel rooms, not those fat tablets, which end up squished into rubbish bins, imprinted with one stray hair from one stray night.
Aside from bigger issues of worldwide hunger, disease, conflict and equality (I’d need to consult my team of experts on those), I would address some aspects of domestic education. I would make sure that every school day began with fifteen minutes’ communal silence, meditation, deep breathing, prayer, what you will … but please, no music. Out of silence is born concentration and from that comes learning. I would extend this to universities and to workplaces: bosses, secretaries, janitors breathing the same air of tranquillity in a fifteen-minute truce.
Rough Ideas Page 30
