by Andrew Ford
Hand in glove with my brief commitment to religion went an ever-deepening engagement with music and art in a broader sense, a curiosity that eventually took over from God. I began to explore books and music willy-nilly, in the process often lighting on works of art that remain important to me today. I bought a copy of T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems. I must have heard about Eliot on the radio. In bed that night I read The Waste Land, and while I don’t suppose I understood more than about twenty per cent of it – there’s much about the poem I still don’t understand – it made a big impact, largely because of the way it sounded in my head. It wasn’t quite Beethoven’s ninth, but the music of The Waste Land captivated and affected me and I began to burrow into its meaning as best I could. George Orwell became another favourite writer, particularly his essays, and here there was no problem at all with meaning. Other books were bought or borrowed: The Mersey Sound – a bestselling anthology of poetry by three Liverpool poets, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten; Leonard Cohen’s Poems 1956–68; Huxley’s Brave New World, Zamyatin’s We, Sartre’s Nausea. Some of these were recommendations from school, where like-minded friends were also reading avidly, meeting in each other’s homes to read plays by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Max Frisch and N.F. Simpson. With a blend of irony, surrealism and high pretentiousness, we called ourselves the Metalwork Club. Sometimes music was involved. Somebody brought the LP of Stockhoven–Beethausen to one session, a version of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kurzwellen – his work for short-wave radio receivers – in which fragments of Beethoven’s music were heard through the white noise. We thought it was weird, and therefore good. There were also girls at the Metalwork Club.
It would be easy to dismiss us as a bunch of teenage pseudo-intellectuals. On my first genuine date with a girl, I got the time of the film wrong and ended up boring poor, hapless Eileen Buckley for more than an hour with my thoughts on the Communist Manifesto. I had read only the first four pages and the last – and never did get around to the rest – but somehow believed she’d be interested in hearing all about it. She must have been mightily relieved when we finally went in to see The Poseidon Adventure, a disaster movie, the theme of which nicely summed up the evening.
But a word in defence of pretentiousness. Just as small children learn by pretending, so do older children. We try on ideas as once we tried on cowboy hats; we want to be like our peers and so pretend to like the same things, the same books and films and music. Sometimes, we discover that we actually do like them. Our pretensions have guided us; we have learnt from them and they are pretensions no longer.
It’s not impossible that my interest in religion had been pretentiousness of a sort, though one that failed to develop. When I stopped going to church I began attending concerts – new music and early music, symphony concerts, chamber concerts and operas – and music became something to proselytise about. I might have been half-hearted when it came to religious evangelism, removing my Jesus badge the first time I was called upon to justify it, but my advocacy for music was tireless. I seldom attended concerts alone, and often dragged along half a dozen friends.
I find it interesting that Richard Dawkins has almost as little time for art as he does for God. I think he detects a similar irrationality of response by adherents of both, and it bothers him. It doesn’t bother me – quite the contrary – and it didn’t bother the musicologist Wilfrid Mellers. The last time I spoke to him, he was in his late eighties and had just written a book about religious music in the European classical tradition. It was called Celestial Music? (note the question mark). I asked him what he thought about religion, to which he replied that he thought it was ‘nonsense really’. Then he added: ‘But perhaps we need more non-sense in our lives.’
I suppose my response to Beethoven’s ninth was irrational. I still find that moment exhilarating, but it has never again bowled me over in quite the way it did this particular day. What, at the time, I thought was God, now I think was Beethoven. Either would condemn me in Dawkins’s eyes. My feelings at that sudden choral entry, blazing away in D major, were, it occurs to me, something like Stendhal’s syndrome. The Frenchman had his dizzy spell while viewing Giotto’s frescoes in Santa Croce, but if a wall painting can provoke such a reaction, how much more likely is music to do it, an art form that takes over the body? And isn’t this all fairly close to the way that some Pentecostals respond to the divine presence? Isn’t this what they call being ‘slain in the spirit’?
I can’t recall a single religious inclination from the past four decades, but I do think that perhaps what I and others get from music is what a lot of people get from their faith. And of course it’s not all bursting into tears or feeling faint – in fact hardly ever. Proper listening involves engagement with a musical work. We have to concentrate, to contemplate, but mostly we must listen. I often think that an important aspect of music is that it forces us to stop talking, an attitude similar to prayer. If listening takes place in the concert hall, then sometimes the experience will be amplified by the presence of others. By sharing the experience, even wordlessly, we seem to make it more intense: the audience as congregation, music as communion. This is not, however, to suggest that everyone in the concert hall is having the same experience. If there are a hundred listeners, there are arguably a hundred slightly different pieces of music, because we hear and process music, and certainly understand it, in our own unique ways. We make it – or at least remake it – in our heads. Perhaps it’s the same with God.
I am not, of course, suggesting that with music and religion it’s either/or. Most of the world’s religions use music as an aid to worship, and you can see why. But there are some religions or branches of religion that don’t permit music at all, or don’t permit certain types of music. Or perhaps they redefine the term to suit their needs.
I was once in a Melbourne taxi with a driver who was listening to the most magnificent singing. I was captivated and asked him what the music was.
‘It’s not music,’ he replied. ‘It’s the Koran.’
‘Oh, right … But it’s being sung,’ I said.
‘No, it’s not,’ he said.
‘He’s singing,’ I insisted. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘He’s not singing.’
I finally got the driver to agree that the man was ‘chanting’, and that this ‘chanting’ was a way of helping to focus the listener on the text. Not that I mentioned it, for fear of starting another argument, but the chanting of the Koran was reminiscent of an ornamented plainsong.
In the music of Christianity, medieval plainsong (sometimes generically, and wrongly, referred to as Gregorian chant) led to Renaissance polyphony – to many voices in communion (the symbolism was intended), and to more complex, multilayered forms of composition. At which point – the mid sixteenth century – the Council of Trent questioned the place of music in the liturgy. Was music now too beautiful? Was there too much detail in the masses and motets of Palestrina, too much to take in? In a nutshell, was music getting in the way of doctrine? I understand this concern. Music can seduce us. Music seduced me into thinking I was having a religious experience, when I was having a musical one.
My best attempt to make sense of religion is to regard it as a branch of poetry. Art, it seems to me, is humanity’s attempt to explain itself to itself, and so, I believe, is religion. Some people would find that notion blasphemous. Hey ho.
As a composer, I want people to pay attention to my music. I want their ears, their concentration and their critical faculties. And I have to confess, I am delighted when I’m told by an audience member that my music has moved them. It means that something inexplicable has occurred, some wordless exchange between me and the listener, some non-sense.
My Missa brevis was commissioned by St John’s Anglican Cathedral in Brisbane (their director of music, Graeme Morton, was the ringleader), St Stephen’s Catholic Cathedral in Brisbane, St Patrick’s in Melbourne and St George’s in Perth, in consortium with Ars Musica Australis. I had
been impressed by the stance taken by many cathedrals and other churches in support of the rights of refugees. Australians have never much cared for ‘reffos’, and since the start of the twenty-first century the nation’s politicians have tended to exploit this streak of xenophobia, some while ostentatiously proclaiming their deeply held Christian beliefs. It was, in a way, brave of the churches to stand up against popular sentiment and hypocrisy, but then there’s nothing in the teachings of Christ that says we should reject desperate people who ask for help. In recognition of this, then, my Missa brevis is dedicated to ‘all who seek asylum’, and each of its sections makes use – sometimes quite subtle use – of the tune of the spiritual ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’.
Late in 2015, I found myself at St John’s early one Sunday for a final rehearsal before the choir sang the mass at that morning’s Eucharist. After the rehearsal, Graeme Morton asked me when was the last time I’d been to church, not counting weddings and funerals (they can tell, you see). I did a quick sum and replied that it must have been forty-two years. At the end of the service, as the choir walked up the aisle and Graeme, bringing up the rear, passed my pew, he muttered under his breath, ‘And when was the last time you were in a procession?’, grabbing my arm and pulling me into line behind his choristers as they left the church.
The whole business was fascinating to me: composing the mass, writing for an organ for the first time in my life, discussing the work with the commissioners, hearing it sung in a liturgical context dotted through a ninety-minute service. Still, the single most interesting part was when it was all over and the tea and biscuits came out. This was when I was approached by a number of parishioners who told me that their worship had been enhanced by my music. Now, I have had compliments over the years, but never of this nature, and while, of course, I said thank you, I admit the words gave me pause for thought. Only for a moment. Then I realised I was never so pleased in my life.
The first concert I attended off my own bat was a Prom at the Royal Albert Hall played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. I chose it for Gustav Holst’s suite The Planets, but it was significant in other ways. For one thing, it contained a piece by a living composer, Elisabeth Lutyens. De amore is a cantata for soprano, tenor, chorus and orchestra to words by Chaucer, lasting more than half an hour. I found it hard to comprehend and fairly tedious. Although this was its first performance, the music had been written in 1957, the year of my birth. The fact that a large-scale piece by a significant composer might wait sixteen years to be heard should perhaps have served as a warning to a boy who was already thinking a lot about composing. But if it registered at all, it was eclipsed by the thrill of the composer herself walking on to the platform to acknowledge the applause. Lutyens, the daughter of Edwin Lutyens, the architect of New Delhi, was one of the first British composers to take Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system seriously – this was before the war, when British music was typically a mixture of arch pastoralism and pastiche jazz with added-note chords and syncopated rhythms. Lutyens’s music, in contrast, was spikily modern, and as likely to turn up on the soundtrack of a Hammer horror film as in the concert hall. In the 1950s and 1960s, she influenced many of the next generation of modernist composers, including Richard Rodney Bennett and Malcolm Williamson. Now here she was on stage, glamorous, bohemian and very serious. In years to come I would often see her in the audience at concerts, but I was too shy to speak to her.
The rest of the concert consisted of The Planets and Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for string orchestra, the latter unfamiliar to me but making an instant impression that evening and still a favourite today. Both these pieces were conducted by the 84-year-old Sir Adrian Boult, Desmond Swinburn’s old teacher. Not that I registered it, but I was in the presence of history. In 1930 Boult had been the founding conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra; he had numbered both Holst and Elgar among his friends and conducted the first performance of The Planets as long ago as 1918. I couldn’t see a lot from my cheap balcony seat, but I was taken with Boult’s evident authority and already interested enough in the art of conducting to pay attention to how he beat the five-in-a-bar of ‘Mars – the bringer of war’ with a pattern involving a second, smaller downbeat.
Boult disapproved of conductors who made themselves the centre of an audience’s attention, and once insisted that you do not go to see a concert, but to hear it. And fair enough: it’s a distinction I’ve subsequently been careful to make, and when I hear others say they’ve ‘seen’ music, it jars. But over the next few years, I attended a lot of Boult’s concerts, and I watched as much as I listened, more often than not from a seat behind the orchestra. I heard and saw Boult conduct three of the four Brahms symphonies, as well as music by Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart, Elgar and Vaughan Williams.
Like his own teacher, Arthur Nikisch, Boult used a long stick by modern standards – it must have measured at least half a metre – but otherwise moved very little. He conducted from the wrist and his beat was clear and patient. His face was as impassive as his stance, yet you could never say that his conducting lacked expression. Where other conductors show through their gestures how they feel about the music, and by extension how you should feel, Boult showed the music itself. It wasn’t the stick alone that did this, though his manipulation of the baton was certainly expressive; it was also the sparing, unfailingly poetic use of his left hand, and the focus of his eyes. He never wore glasses and the pale blue intensity of his gaze was impossible to avoid, even from the choir stalls.
In interviews, Boult talked about music as architecture, and his hope that he could, above all, convey a sense of a whole piece from start to finish. My experience of his conducting was just that, and in several cases, as with Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro, Boult’s concerts provided my first exposure to the piece. I had never, for instance, encountered a Mozart piano concerto until I heard André Previn play the C minor concerto with Boult; in the same concert I had my first experience of Elgar’s Cockaigne overture. Boult’s conducting of the Siegfried Idyll was the start, for me, of a long journey into Wagner’s music. With all these pieces, I took away, as Boult had hoped, an impression of the whole work, but there were also details from those performances that remain vividly in my memory. Previn’s first entry in the Mozart was breathtaking – this was largely Mozart’s doing, of course, but there was a simple fragility to the moment, set up by Boult’s dramatic phrasing of the long orchestral introduction; in absolute contrast, I was pinned back in my seat by the timpani thwacks at that moment when a marching band arrives in Cockaigne – the player that night must have had particularly hard sticks, because ever since I’ve found this moment anticlimactic; in the Siegfried Idyll there was a sudden pianissimo that I’ve never heard more elegantly achieved than in that first concert with Boult conducting.
The other conductor I watched a good deal was Pierre Boulez, who from 1971 to 1975 had Boult’s old job as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Because the orchestra was publicly funded, it could take programming risks the other London orchestras could not. A radio orchestra’s concerts are broadcast and heard by many thousands, so if the concert hall itself isn’t completely full, it doesn’t necessarily matter. But there was something about Boulez that pulled audiences anyway, even when the music in his programs was well off the beaten track. It’s hard to say what created the magnetism, for, like Boult, Boulez was hardly a showman. Businesslike is perhaps the best description of his technique. Where Boult had a very long stick, Boulez had none at all, but otherwise they were rather similar. There was no extraneous movement from Boulez; each gesture was related to a musical imperative. Watching him, one was taken directly into the score, rather than into a personal fantasy of the conductor’s. And then of course there was the music, much of which, again, I was hearing for the first time. The second Viennese school, Varèse, Berio, Stockhausen, Boulez himself: in the 1970s there were still those who regarded even Stravinsky and Bartók as difficult, but Boulez conducted i
t all with such precision and style that many of the difficulties fell away. Schoenberg had once remarked that his music wasn’t difficult, just badly played, and here was Boulez proving the point. Schoenberg’s orchestral textures can seem clotted, but Boulez rendered them transparent; you could hear everything. Applying the same technique to familiar music – Berlioz, Schumann, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel – Boulez’s results were equally revelatory.
As well as summer visits to the Proms, I was now regularly making the 25-minute train journey up to London to attend concerts in the Royal Festival Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall at what is now called the Southbank Centre. Today this part of London is a thriving riverside hub of bars and cafes, street performers and carousels, but in the 1970s it was an empty, concrete space, like something from Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, the poorly lit off-white facades of the concert halls emphasising their 1950s brutalist style. I thought it was fabulous.
The excitement I felt at attending these concerts was partly a matter of anticipation. Sitting in an audience, waiting for this or that musician to emerge and perform, the frisson of expectation is always the same, even if, when the concert begins, there may be disappointment. Perhaps the performance isn’t very good; perhaps the music doesn’t appeal. Sometimes we discover we’re simply not in the mood, as I wasn’t for Lutyens’s De amore. But when one is receptive and expectations are met, time flies by. And one of the most magical things that can occur in a concert – or with any other experience of art, a novel, a play – is when we are taken by surprise. A piece of music we hadn’t expected to enjoy suddenly sucks us in, or it might be something we have heard a hundred times that now speaks to us with renewed intensity. What I’m describing doesn’t always happen, or even happen often, but when it does the experience is so powerful it keeps us returning with renewed anticipation. Sometimes it also has the effect of making us wonder about the music and want to try to get to the bottom of it. We go off exploring: we search the internet, we buy a book or a recording, we scour the radio.