by Andrew Ford
Now it’s hard to credit that BBC television had a live Saturday-night program devoted to contemporary arts, involving not only interviews and discussions, but also performances of drama, poetry and music. It was called Full House, and this particular night the guests included the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and the London Sinfonietta, a chamber orchestra specialising in twentieth-century music. They rehearsed and performed a new work, Ylem, that had had its first performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall only the night before. The actor and comedian John Bird – a devotee of new music – interviewed the composer and they took phone calls from viewers. Someone – a schoolboy – rang in to ask if he might dedicate his latest composition to Stockhausen, and Stockhausen told him to dedicate it to God.
Even if I didn’t understand it, I was already fascinated by the music of Stockhausen that I’d encountered on recordings since my first, puzzled exposure to Kurzwellen. In particular Hymnen, operating on a broad canvas, its lonely national anthems battling their way through radio static, seemed almost romantic in scale and intent, yet at the same time daring and of the future. But hearing and seeing Ylem rehearsed, performed and discussed was perhaps the most formative musical moment in my life.
This was a new piece of music by a so-called difficult, modern composer, and I was able to grasp it completely at one hearing. The shape and structure of the music were clear, the premise was beguiling, the fabric of tones and timbres was vivid and provocative, and the commitment of the players was completely convincing. I couldn’t turn away. More importantly, I realised that this was not only something I wanted to be part of – the creation of such bold new sounds – it was something I could be part of. Though I was able to read music and follow a score – those piano lessons had to have been good for something – I wouldn’t have known how to begin notating a conventional work for an orchestra like the London Sinfonietta. But I could very quickly see how I might devise a piece along the lines of Ylem.
Stockhausen was always interested in the stars (he once dreamt he was born on Sirius, and occasionally stated this as fact). Ylem was inspired by the theory that every 80 billion years the universe explodes and reforms. Reflecting this, his music had a strong spatial element, most of the performers playing portable instruments so that they could move from one place to another.
At the outset of Ylem the players gather, heads bowed, around a piano with its lid off. A sharp tam-tam stroke is the signal for them to jerk suddenly to life, repeating, fast and loud, either an E flat or an A in the middle of their ranges. These will be the only stipulated pitches in the whole piece. The mobile players now begin to drift away from the piano, leaving the stage and spreading out to encircle the audience. Bit by bit their range of pitches and style of playing broadens until by the central moment of the piece we are hearing the very shortest sounds and the very longest, the loudest and the quietest, the highest and the lowest, and also silences. Then the music goes into reverse as the players gradually converge once more on the piano, their tonal ranges shrinking in the process until the piece has returned to the loud, fast repetitions of the initial E flat–A tritone. When this interval reaches maximum intensity, there is a second tam-tam stroke, the music abruptly jerks up a whole tone and off the players go again, this time leaving the concert hall or, in this case, television studio. Even those players who didn’t move before – the pianist and percussionist and others whose instruments couldn’t be carried – now pick up toy instruments and follow the others out, the music eventually fading from earshot.
Ylem was a revelation in all sort of ways, but the aspect of it that most grabbed my imagination was that this was one of its composer’s ‘intuitive’ pieces. That previous paragraph was more than my attempt to describe the music; it was a precis of the score. For there is no notation in Ylem, no crotchets and quavers for the players to read, only a few pages of verbal instructions, which I’ve summarised. The instructions are quite specific – the piece is anything but a free-for-all – but a good performance depends upon the players listening to each other (when not walking, they play with eyes closed) and establishing sonic connections with each other across the room.
Only a few weeks earlier, the same TV program had broadcast the first UK performance of David Bedford’s audience-participation piece With 100 Kazoos, also involving members of the London Sinfonietta and with the composer himself conducting. Bedford’s piece had been commissioned by the BBC for Boulez to conduct, but he had thought it trivial, and didn’t believe the audience involvement would work. The eleven instrumentalists played and, from time to time, the audience would blow the kazoos of the title in imitation of what they’d heard. Much of the instrumental music was conventionally notated, but as the piece went on the camera moved in on the players’ music stands to reveal that they were also playing from drawings and diagrams. There was a star chart and illustrations from children’s stories, including a picture of a rabbit. Boulez was right, the piece was trivial, but the sight of that star chart on the violinist’s desk got me thinking, especially after I’d seen and heard Ylem. I started to compose my own music.
Anything I might have attempted to notate with standard notation would have sounded dull and simplistic because I lacked the technique. I wanted to create the sorts of sonorities I’d heard in Ylem – spiky points of sound, and long, sustained smudges of tone – and by using diagrams and a few verbal instructions, I was able to construct a score that represented this. One diagram consisted of shard-like shapes, reminiscent of vorticist art; another had layers of horizontal lines of different lengths. The players would interpret the diagrams vertically (pitch) and horizontally (time), and I would be a composer. Except that I didn’t have any players.
In an act of extreme chutzpah, I decided to approach my friends at school, who, between them, played a range of instruments. I put together a mixed ensemble of six or seven players from which quite a variety of colours could be extracted and I wrote my piece for them. Though they must have been surprised to learn I was suddenly a composer, they entered fully into the spirit of the occasion. The piece, in three movements, was called Short Suite – I don’t know why the neutral title – and was full of all the unusual sounds I could come up with. Thinking the idea was mine alone, at one point I had the pianist pluck the strings inside the piano. I was disappointed, later, to learn that composers had been asking for this effect for fifty years. Some of the music used simple standard notation, some diagrams. Most of the conventional scoring was in the middle movement, where the music – a sort of warmed-up English pastoralism – was as conventional as the notation. But the diagrams produced fresher sounds. There were also parts of the piece in which both sorts of notation coexisted. To the extent that the music required a conductor at all, the job was really just that of a coordinator, indicating the beginnings and endings of sections. But I was not about to pass up the opportunity to make my debut as a maestro. I couldn’t lay my hands on a baton, but had a paintbrush with a long handle. Armed with this, I stood in front of my little orchestra and waved my arms enthusiastically. If my friends thought me absurd, they were kind enough not to mention it.
So that was opus one, and having been taken seriously I was in no mood to stop. Opus two was a cello sonata, built around a folksong – Stockhausen never ousted Vaughan Williams from my affections. But it was a listless thing, largely because, again, I was attempting to notate the piece conventionally and lacked the skill. A more ambitious notion was an oratorio called Moses with a libretto by one of my school friends, Richard Brown. I’m not sure he ever finished writing it; certainly the score never advanced beyond about page four.
But I was composing, and the experience was teaching me some valuable lessons, most importantly that this was hard work. While it might have seemed like a good idea to write an oratorio, evidently it was going to take an enormous amount of my time to do it properly. The other issue, not unrelated, was that I had better find myself some notational skills. This reliance on graphic notation was a
stopgap. A spiky diagram was unlikely to produce more than a spiky musical texture, and increasingly I was imagining specific musical ideas – melodic lines, harmonic fields, precise combinations of instruments. I had to acquire the ability to write it all down accurately, because diagrams weren’t going to be much use. I had no composition teacher. My piano teacher, Mr Dresser, had retired, but wouldn’t have been any help. When I showed him my first scores he was kind enough, but he had nothing to say.
I believe that all composers and probably all creative artists are largely self-taught. Teachers can set examples (good and bad) and can certainly save you time, but you have to find your own way, own metier, own voice. For a composer, as Malraux’s comment implies, that starts with listening to a lot of music and looking at it too. So I set about the task.
Cassette recorder at the ready, I was already an avid radio listener when I encountered Bernard Rands’s Wildtrack I played by Boulez and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a concert broadcast from Stuttgart. What was so captivating about Wildtrack I – and, later, other pieces by Rands, whose music I began to seek out – was his placing of fully notated passages alongside music that was less determined, perhaps with lines the players repeated at will and in their own tempos. In some cases the two sorts of music alternated, but at others they occurred simultaneously, like the horns playing independently of the orchestra in Musgrave’s Horn Concerto. And there was a dramatic quality to Wildtrack I – also reminiscent of Musgrave’s music – in that the orchestra begins the piece before the conductor comes on stage, making visually apparent those musical lines that are synchronised by the arrival of the conductor and those that are free-floating. I tried this out on a small scale and discovered it gave me textural richness (from the players’ rhythmic independence), yet harmonic control (because I was still stipulating the pitches). I felt I’d made a real discovery. Still, what I’m describing requires some context, and the context is this: I was a schoolboy preparing to take A levels in English, history and economics with a Special Paper in history, prior to a degree in English and a life in primary-school teaching like my mum. The idea that I might one day call myself a composer like Rands and Musgrave hadn’t entered my head.
Because Lancaster University was at the bottom of my list of choices, I hadn’t read the prospectus very carefully. During my interview with the English department, I was asked which other two subjects I hoped to study in my first year. At the time, taking three subjects of equal weight was a Lancaster requirement for first-years, but I knew nothing of this and had to improvise. Instead of mentioning history or economics, I heard myself asking about Lancaster’s music department and, before I knew what was happening, I was sent to meet Richard Langham Smith. His office was just off the balcony of the Great Hall and next to it was another door marked ‘Edward Cowie’. At last, I thought, I am going to meet a composer.
In fact I wasn’t, not that day. Langham Smith, a nice man who gave the impression of only just being able to contain his amusement at life, was a specialist in Debussy and music of the French baroque. He began with an apology.
‘Of course Ed should be seeing you,’ he said, ‘but he’s in Liverpool.’ At that very moment, he told me, Alan Hacker was rehearsing Cowie’s clarinet concerto for its premiere by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Charles Groves. I could almost reach out and touch this exciting world. Instead, I was told to take a seat while Langham Smith proceeded to ask me questions about my compositions and my interests, my favourite composers and so on; moving to the piano, he gave me a series of aural tests, which I seemed to answer to his satisfaction. Finally he played a sequence of chords.
‘Who uses suspensions like this?’ he asked. The sequence was dimly familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
‘It’s Britten,’ he said. ‘The Agnus Dei from the War Requiem.’ Far from feeling crushed, I was elated. If these were the sorts of conversations that went on here – Britten’s harmonic writing pulled apart and examined – I wanted to join in. Langham Smith was encouraging and I promised to send my scores to the department when I got home. As I was about to leave, his phone rang.
‘Is Ed all right?’ I heard him ask. It transpired that the orchestral parts from Cowie’s publisher were full of mistakes and the rehearsal had been a disaster. The premiere of the clarinet concerto was cancelled – permanently, as it turned out – and Alan Hacker would play Mozart instead. I suppose you could say this was my first composition lesson from Edward Cowie: make sure your parts are accurate or you will waste the players’ time and sabotage your performance.
So after school, I went to Lancaster and had lessons with Edward, who was charismatic and inspiring in many ways, chiefly for his energy and voracious inquisitiveness. He read a lot of science – D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form was a sort of bible for him – and painted curious little watercolours involving plants and birds, with little bits of musical notation in ink, which he exhibited publicly. I couldn’t get along with D’Arcy Thompson, but I took up drawing and painting with enthusiasm. In three years with Edward I can’t say I learnt much specific musical knowledge – when he was on sabbatical I got more of that from his replacement, John Buller, in a single term – but I picked up a healthy attitude to work. You couldn’t show up to a lesson with some puny excuse about having had no time to write, because you knew that Edward had been working since dawn, completing a watercolour and sixty bars of a string quartet before coming to the campus. As a professional composer, I’ve always delivered my work on time and often early, and I put that down to Edward.
Tutorials consisted of his looking at my work, asking me questions that forced me to justify my choice of pitches and making suggestions for improvements, always trying to get to the bottom of what I was doing. Later, when I taught composition, this was also the way I taught. You ask questions in order to have students clarify their intentions, but you allow them the space to make discoveries for themselves (because that’s how we learn best); occasionally, like a doctor, you prescribe something that will help – you say, ‘I think you’d better take a look at the bassoon writing in Stravinsky’s Octet.’ This approach works with good students, though not so well with those who need constant motivation.
By the end of my first year, it was clear that I was well enough motivated. I was devoted to composing music in a way that I was not devoted to writing essays about The Dream of the Rood or Paradise Lost, though I enjoyed that too. But could I switch my major from English to music? Edward called me in.
‘I think you’re a composer,’ he told me. ‘I don’t say that to everyone.’
I felt as though I had been given permission to compose. This is what every artist needs at some point: a more experienced artist giving their imprimatur. Otherwise, how do you know that your obsession – and it must, first of all, be an obsession – isn’t just a fantasy? For me, music and composing were obsessions, but I’d come to university to get an English degree. I wanted to be a primary school teacher and in my mind had already settled on St Martin’s College in Lancaster for my postgraduate year of teacher training. This was not just what I thought I was going to do, it’s what my parents thought I was going to do. But Edward thought I was a composer. Not that the two were mutually exclusive – most composers, I was aware, supported themselves by doing other things – but since music, to this point, had been a sort of hobby, it was still going to be hard telling my parents I intended to pursue it professionally.
As it happened, I never had to tell them. I had had the same girlfriend since my last year of school and while now we were at different universities, we visited each other every couple of weeks. She had come up to Lancaster just before the end the year and we’d discussed my dilemma. I fancy she may even have talked to Edward. Then she went home, her term having ended a week before mine. By the time I got home, she’d visited my parents to explain the situation and they were reconciled to the notion of my pursuing composition. I don’t know what became of Becky S. – a few months
later, the relationship fizzled, as these things will – but I remain grateful for her diplomacy.
My parents were always supportive of my decisions, even when they would have preferred me to make different ones. Indeed, they were so supportive that I mostly didn’t realise what their preferences were. For example, it was years after I moved to Australia that it dawned on me that they would much rather I hadn’t. At the time, they’d offered only encouragement. On one occasion, when I was working at Bradford University – my first job – and called to inform my parents that I’d decided to accept the offer of a one-year extension to my initial three-year contract, Mum asked if I didn’t think that might be playing things a bit safe.
‘You’re supposed to advocate safe choices,’ I said. ‘You’re not meant to be encouraging me to take risks.’
The University of Lancaster was good for me. The city itself, on the River Lune, inland from Morecambe Bay, is full of history – a medieval castle, a fifteenth-century priory – and the Lake District is only a short drive. The university campus is a mile or two out of the city, a small town in itself. The music department was pretty intimate, with just four full-time staff, but while I’ve sometimes felt a more rigorous musical training might have been helpful, nearly all my pieces were performed, and I was able to hear for myself what worked and what didn’t. Because there weren’t many contact hours in the week, there was also time for me and the other students to put on our own concerts. Rather than being taught an off-the-peg technique, then, I was given the chance to work one out for myself. It meant making lots of mistakes in public – both as composer and conductor – but if your performers are your friends and fellow students, and the public consists largely of other people on campus, it’s not a bad way to learn. Soon enough – and this is if you’re lucky – your music will be played by professionals who don’t know you, may not like your work and may tell you so; they will certainly point out any errors, probably loudly enough for the other players to hear. The public, meanwhile, will be mostly total strangers who have paid to hear your work, or more likely paid to hear the other pieces in the concert and resent the presence of yours. A day or two after the concert, more people you don’t know will publish their judgement of your music. Young composers should make as many mistakes as possible while they’re still students.