by Donald Greig
‘We should write a new piece,’ said Marco.
‘Yeah. Peter. You studied music,’ said Ollie. ‘Can’t you knock out a quick mass in the style of Ockeghem? We’d clean up.’
The idea gathered momentum, with several suggestions of unlikely tunes upon which the mass could be based, The Bee Gees’ Staying Alive being the clear winner. Emma remembered her meeting with Andrew that night. Might the young musicologist have made a real discovery? Repertoire was still coming to light in odd places, dropping out of neglected books in Tallinn, such as the recent ‘new’ motet by Dunstable, and not so long ago someone had found a manuscript of a composition by Tallis which had been used by a Renaissance plasterer to fill a hole in a wall. If Andrew Eiger had inadvertently stumbled across something like that, then she wanted herself and the group to be involved. But she was dreaming. In all likelihood, he probably only had some new pet theory about the structure of a chanson, something arcane that thrilled him but which was no more than a cosmetic detail to a modern audience. Musical archaeology was a laborious process with few Eureka moments.
‘Oh, hang on,’ said Marco. ‘There’s an interview. With Em.’
‘Oh, don’t read that out,’ said Emma.
It was always embarrassing to see her life reduced to a few words, the struggle and hard work compressed into a single sentence, foresight attributed to her where the reality was a series of unplanned accidents and coincidences. Fortunately the bill arrived at that point, prompting the usual debates about who owed what.
Emma managed to retrieve the magazine from Marco and skimmed it as she and Ollie walked together to the gate. There were two pictures of her and one of the current group, a posed photograph with fixed smiles and polished shoes, far from the shambling image they presented that morning. The same gap between the public image and the private reality struck her again with the photos they had taken of her. Backlit in the bay window of her house, she looked unnecessarily earnest, more an intellectual than a performer. The cameraman had caught her leaning forward, a crease of worry etched into her forehead, the reason being that the interviewer had just spilled his tea rather than, as the image suggested, that she was struggling to explain something to someone less erudite than herself.
The history of the group and its development was dealt with in two paragraphs; ironic, she thought, because in many ways Beyond Compère’s transition from stage play to concert group was the story of two romances. She had originally conceived the theatrical production with Paul, whom she thought of as her first ‘serious’ boyfriend. They were both post-graduates at Nottingham University; she had just begun an M.A. researching early Italian opera, whilst he was in the second year of his Ph.D. on Loyset Compère. The soundtrack of their life was fifteenth-century music and inevitably she came to learn a lot about the little-known French composer. That November they had set off in Paul’s battered Citroën Dyane for a two-week journey around Northern France to visit the key towns of Compère’s life: St Quentin, Douai, St Omer, Cambrai. While Paul scoured the archives, transcribing church records and searching for elusive leads, Emma wandered through the narrow, chilly streets. The townscape seemed to be perpetually blanketed in damp mist, and her own image of the composer emerged as if from the cold November fog itself. Each evening over dinner, Paul would share some new biographical detail and a new idea would form in Emma’s imagination. On their final evening in St Quentin, she outlined her vision: a theatrical production which told the story of the composer, Loyset Compère, using a simple set, tableaux and commentary, with music by the singer-composer and his contemporaries. The style would be boldly eclectic, ranging from detailed re-enactments of events in musical history to surreal sequences that explained the past using modern references. Already she could see key scenes perfectly crystallised: Dufay hawking CDs on a market stall outside Cambrai Cathedral; the Pope as a disc jockey introducing Josquin in the Sistine Chapel; Compère, the priest with a girl in every town. It would, she declared, be the first early-music musical. Paul, an historian through and through, had little time for such theatrical conjecture, but, amused and impressed, he agreed to act as consultant. Over the next few months, she developed a script and workshopped it, before staging three performances at the university. Its immediate success encouraged her to take the company to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for a short run, a heady three-week period during which her love-life crashed and burned.
In retrospect she realised that she had failed to heed the warning signs, enervated and distracted as she was by the demands of the show and the critical acclaim. She also realised that she’d lost interest in her own research and in academia generally, the more exciting path of ‘directing real plays with real people in the real world’ having opened up before her. That was the unfortunate line with which she had expressed her misgivings to Paul, whose sole aim was to be a scholar. From then on their dissimilarities seemed to inform every aspect of their lives, even the smallest details such as the different ways they peeled the potatoes or made the bed; every instance of disagreement amplified their incompatibility and presaged their separation.
As consultant, Paul’s input was confined mainly to the development period, though that hadn’t prevented him from expressing his opinions in rehearsals. He seemed to enjoy the interaction with the cast and his role as advisor, sitting in the stalls with his notebook, offering the occasional comment in a tone of long-suffering tolerance that suggested his personal vision was a more authentic version of the past. At times his observations were valuable, but increasingly his comments seemed to Emma to be self-serving, presented to display his knowledge, smacking of the same kind of pedantry that so dominated early-music performance at the time. And, given that the show consistently used contemporary reference and made obvious play on anachronism, such criticisms struck Emma as not just unhelpful but also unsupportive. At first he had dismissed the idea of accompanying the production to Edinburgh, so she was surprised when he announced that he wanted to come along. When, in the second week of its run, a West End impresario contacted her and requested a meeting, naturally she asked Paul to attend. He refused brusquely, saying that ambition was rather vulgar. Emma was confused. He’d often said that he wanted Compère to be recognised as a great composer and, given that few people had even heard of him, surely the opportunity to reach a larger audience was something he would want?
That evening, Emma was made an offer she couldn’t refuse: the chance to stage Beyond Compère in London with a professional cast. Rather than accept immediately, she had explained that she needed to talk it over with the man with whom she had devised the show; she would give the impresario her answer tomorrow. But she’d already decided. Paul could call her ambitious if he wanted, but it was too good an opportunity to miss. She would, though, try to get his blessing.
Returning to the rented six-bedroom house that the cast had taken for the run, she was surprised to hear voices upstairs. The others had planned to see a comedy show that evening and it was still too early for them to be back. When she reached the top of the stairs, a bedroom door opened, that of one of the actresses, and out stepped Paul in his underwear, his clothes held in one hand, the other waving goodbye to the bedroom’s occupant. He didn’t even see Emma, who stood frozen on the penultimate step. When she walked into their bedroom he was feigning sleep.
There was nothing to be said. The quiet carping from the stalls, Paul’s late-in-the-day decision to come to Edinburgh, finally made sense. Emma packed a few things in a bag and booked herself into a hotel. The next morning she rang the impresario and, three weeks later, was running auditions in London. Reluctantly, she had informed the amateurs that their involvement in the project was over and glimpsed for the first time the degree of single-mindedness that professional life entailed. Splitting up with Paul was more straightforward. Limply devoid of any moral authority, he soon abandoned a half-hearted demand of payment for his consultancy, though she continued to credit him in the programme, a recognition which she knew
did no harm to his standing in academic circles. For the professional replacements she drew on London-based singers, both from opera and from the world of early music. A successful run at the Almeida in London led to performances in Hamburg, Paris and off-Broadway.
As director, Emma’s control over the project was total, although she called upon the singers for advice on matters musical. Thus began a gradual shift towards a more collective mode of working which would characterise her work with the concert group, but when it came to matters of staging she dispensed with the democracy of musical co-operation and her say was final. The three opera singers and two actors had some experience in movement and were used to taking such instruction, but the remaining four – Ollie, Marco, Peter and Susan, the core of the future concert group – had no such experience and were worryingly stiff on stage, particularly the men. It was Emma who had to berate them for their stagecraft, direction that maintained a professional separation between them.
When the London run began, she regarded her cast as colleagues, though not necessarily as friends, and the trip to New York was to bring them only slightly closer together. The constant flow of celebrities and famous theatrical people who beat a path to Emma’s door kept her further apart from her cast, so much so that she didn’t know that Ollie had begun a trial separation from his wife. For herself, she was quite content to be single. She was free in the day to shop, sightsee and plan her next move without any encumbrance of personal commitment, and occasionally free in the evening to take in plays and musicals, the latter a medium which increasingly interested her.
Such independence also afforded her plenty of time to consider her past and plan her future, one in which she was certain theatre would play no part. There were many factors in her decision, yet crucial to it was the realisation that of all the aspects of production – staging, lighting, acting, writing, the music and its performance – it was music that surpassed everything else. It excited her emotionally and, as she’d abandoned her Ph.D., it provided an alternative intellectual outlet. Now she could indulge her interest in history and performance and travel the world. She was not blind to the rigours of touring and took advice from several people, but new possibilities had opened up before her and she was determined to embrace them. By then she had also developed an exaggerated contempt for actors – hardly a good basis for a life in theatre. It was no accident, she thought, that dressing rooms were ranged with mirrors, the actors’ reflections multiplied in an endless celebration of self. Actors were constantly, unhealthily aware of how they appeared to other people, possessed of a narcissism which never seemed to switch off. Their voices at dinner were affected, their honeyed tones reflexive, rather than those of the singers’ which were released from their physical constraints after the show – drinking, laughing and shouting – as a woman might loosen her corsets. They had experience of touring and knew how to do it; the singers were, quite simply, more fun to be with.
When the New York run ended, Emma invited Ollie, Marco, Peter and Susan to dinner at her flat and announced her intention to re-launch Beyond Compère as a concert group. She explained that, although she could not promise anything definite, she was confident that she could organise an American concert tour and that, in time, European bookings would come. The three opera singers were unsuitable, their voices too heavy for ensemble singing, and Emma needed four singers of similar ability and voice-type to each of them: respectively Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass.
Two weeks later, four singers were duly appointed, all of them known to one or more of the group and to Emma from their various recordings. The group was reborn; the new eight-voice Beyond Compère rehearsed two programmes and the first concert took place in a small church in Berkeley, California. All music was sung from memory, which allowed more theatrical elements to be incorporated into the conventional concert format. Movement, lighting, and singing from different parts of the building and in various combinations were distinctive novel features that would become the group’s trademark. The approach demanded of the singers commitment and considerable private study, something which those who were used to the defined limits of session singing – where one turned up, read the music, and went away – found challenging. The US tour was a great success, the reception from West Coast to East Coast ecstatic, which only added to the almost narcotic rush they got from being in America. Ollie and Marco were the only ones who had toured the States before (with The Tallis Scholars and The Sixteen) but now they were part of a new group – founder-members, even – thus more involved and better rewarded, feted and honoured in this, the New World. Rave reviews were passed like trading cards amongst the group at breakfast and at airports, and Emma’s confidence as a presenter grew. She kept her delivery fresh by pretending she was addressing the group that sat behind her, not the concertgoers in front. It both relaxed her and gave her material a lightness of touch that had audiences eating out of her hands.
Touring itself proved to be a very different kind of bonding exercise to the stage show. The shared experience of constant travel and daily uprooting to a new city brought them closer together, their individual exhaustion displaced into expressions of care and concern. Each of them saw tiredness only in others, their senses dulled by a constant flow of caffeine, alcohol and adrenalin. Exhausted as they often were, tempers were nonetheless kept and an addictive, wild-eyed enthusiasm for experience prevailed as if this was their first and last tour. Virtually every night there was a post-concert party of some kind, organised by local choirs eager to rub shoulders with the famous English singers: in Jackson, Mississippi, they ate cornbread and barbecued ribs washed down with beer and mint juleps; in Boston it was a keg of Sam Adams and lobster; in San Francisco, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and sushi at a private house with glorious views of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate; and on the final night in New York the group itself hosted an impromptu party for an amateur choir in a suite that Allie had been assigned through the hotel’s clerical error. Between the concerts, the parties and the travel, they managed to fit in seal-watching in Monterey, wine-tasting in Sonoma, a visit to Graceland, a trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and a late-night helicopter ride over Manhattan.
It was then, reminded as he was of the starlit flight over New York in Superman, that Ollie had recited to Emma the whole of Lois Lane’s monologue, ‘Can you read my mind?’, a gesture that hinted at the dawning of a new intimacy. Even in retrospect Ollie maintained that it was only the indiscriminate romance of touring that had inspired him, not any nascent desire, but the following night Emma had stayed up late talking with him about his marital problems, an event which for others at least was freighted with significance. Time might yet confirm the interpretation that Peter was eager to offer – that Emma and Ollie were meant for each other – but the protagonists themselves believed that it was only the persuasion of coincidence that lent these episodes a poetic lustre.
It was with unprecedented sorrow that the group parted company at Heathrow. The next dates in the diary were not until the summer, a run of concerts at various festivals in mainland Europe and Britain. Until then the singers would be working with other groups, either as session singers or as early-music specialists, and some – like Ollie, Allie and Peter – would be returning to their day-jobs as singers – at Westminster Cathedral, St Paul’s, and Westminster Abbey respectively. The group knew, as they hugged and kissed each other in the artificial light of the baggage claim area of Terminal Four, that there would never be a tour quite like that again. Never would such a gruelling schedule be endured with such equanimity, nor would they be so willing to draw upon their own resources in the spirit of camaraderie to buoy up others when spirits threatened to sink them.
Over the next two years the group flourished, and a regular pattern of concerts and recording was established. Touring in Europe and Britain was, by virtue of its brevity, more circumscribed by the realities of individual professional and domestic life, and Beyond Compère’s status as a second family was les
s keenly felt. The blueprint for most engagements was a hectic twenty-four hours of travel, drinking and eating, somewhere in the chaotic midst of which they would give a performance to an anonymous audience. If the American tour was responsible for fusing the different identities of nine people into a functioning social group, it was the following two years that revealed the fault lines of social organisation and more personal agendas, which had only been dimly sensed on that mythological tour. The Wet Set was soon established: Susan, Claire and Peter were the first to leave the post-concert celebrations, whatever form they took, and Emma was grateful for their sober example. Marco and Charlie assembled an inventory of cultural and historical landmarks, a partnership of shared interest for the daytime hours, and in the evenings they formed a triumvirate with Craig who otherwise kept himself to himself. Emma, depending on her mood and directorial duties, spent time with all of them, but the Allie/Ollie alliance, one forged in beer and emotional reserve, proved to be the most durable and the most problematic.
The two were almost an item, their behaviour on tour as well-matched as ‘Aglio e Olio’, Marco’s nickname for the pair, appropriate enough given that Spaghetti aglio e olio was a late-night dish favoured by drunken men, and not to everyone’s taste. After a concert they would emerge into the fresh air, lift their noses into the breeze and follow a scent that led them directly to the nearest watering hole. There they would order beer, the stronger the better, a beverage chosen in part for its prolier-than-thou image, then pass what remained of the evening in silent companionship. They could be garrulous at times, chatting with members of the audience or with other members of the group and, both family men, were talkative at home and adored by their children. Yet together they shared some unspoken understanding that rendered conversation inessential. Communication in rehearsals was likewise minimal. Agreed nuances of musical expression were implemented without discussion, a process that, to the lay person and even to their fellow singers, appeared telepathic. They shaped the musical lines in exactly the same fashion and anticipated each other’s breathing, producing effortless, consentient phrasing. Allie was a Catholic (‘Lapsed – there’s no other kind,’ he mournfully remarked once) and could not only translate the Latin texts, but also, to use the biblical phrase, understand them in his heart. Ollie channelled his colleague’s religious response like a good method actor and learned from his example. Together they created a unique sound and provided a template for others to follow. When required – or if they felt it appropriate – they would ratchet up the dynamic of the whole group, creating a sense of an expectation fulfilled, rather than inappropriate individualism.