by Andrew Ford
I always tell student composers to write songs or at least set words to music. I did a lot of this as an undergraduate, and learnt a great deal from the experience. Working with a text takes some of the decisions out of your hands and helps you become more fluent. You’re not having to devise structures – or not necessarily – because the poetry has its own structures, some of which you can borrow. Phrases also have structures, and so do individual words, and to some extent tell you what notes to write. This helps a young composer be less self-conscious, and that’s always a good thing. I made settings of Japanese haiku in translations by Kenneth Rexroth, as well as words by cummings, Yevtushenko, Eliot and Pound. I even set some of my own poetry to music, though it turned out that late-adolescent pretentiousness will seem only more pretentious when sung. After the first performance, I rewrote the vocal line for clarinet and changed the title from whatever it had been in the first place to Songs without Words. Both scores are lost. In fact, none of my student scores survives, just a few recordings.
There’s an orchestral piece called Rounds and Hollows, the best thing about which is its title, taken from the opening of The Return of the Native. It’s a short, brooding landscape of a piece that owes a debt to The Triumph of Time, though it includes canonic structures (inspired by the ‘rounds’ of the title) that Birtwistle would never have used. Another recording is of those first-year haiku settings. I called the piece A Salt Girl and scored it for tenor voice – Andrew Murgatroyd, who it was obvious, even at the time, would become a professional singer – flute, harpsichord, piano, tuned percussion and string trio. Listening now to the recording, the word setting is poor, the harmony is worse and the piece depends almost entirely on pretty gestures. But there’s something there – atmosphere, I suppose, partly the result of that glittery instrumentation, partly the timing of the gestures. Timing is one of the hardest things to get right in a piece of music, and listening back to the songs, forty years after the fact, I think perhaps I hear the flicker of talent that Cowie heard, though it’s very much a flicker. I remained fond enough of this piece to recycle both the title and the words in 1994 in a new setting for tenor and piano. Before I did so, though, I sought permission from the publisher of Rexroth’s translations, something I failed to do with any of my student settings. Not until it was too late.
In my second year at Lancaster, I set to music two rather sensual (not to say sexual) poems from Ezra Pound’s Lustra. I understand why the poems ‘Coitus’ and ‘Doria’ might have appealed to a nineteen-year-old, but I can’t say I like them much anymore, and I certainly can’t imagine setting to music the line, ‘The gilded phalloi of the crocuses are thrusting at the spring air’. The resulting piece, Flowers of Orcus for soprano and small ensemble, didn’t seem to me as effective as A Salt Girl, and unusually we didn’t give it a performance at Lancaster. At Edward’s suggestion, however, I submitted it to the Society for the Promotion of New Music (SPNM) in London, and forgot about it until I received a letter informing me that the piece had been selected for inclusion in their 1978–79 season. The concert would be at London’s Southbank, the conductor would be the highly respected John Carewe (Simon Rattle’s teacher), and this would be my first ever professional performance. Unfortunately, I didn’t have permission to use Pound’s words.
I wrote immediately to Pound’s publisher. I could hardly tell them I’d already used the poems, let alone that the piece had been scheduled for a London performance, so I played the helpless student card. This was an error. It was a while before I heard back, but when I did it was in the form of a letter asking me to provide references addressing my ability to make ‘a satisfactory musical work’ from Pound’s poetry. I was running out of time. The performance was only a few months away. One of the women I shared a house with, Jayne Gill, wrote poems and so together we set about the task of ripping Pound’s words out of my score and putting in Jayne’s. This was a less straightforward task than my giving the vocal part to an instrument, because in order to fit the notes the new words had to have the same stresses as the old and, where possible, the same or similar vowels and consonants. They had to sound like Pound’s words, without actually being Pound. They also had to make sense, and ideally share the same mood as the original poems so that the music seemed apt.
The day came for the performance of Ford and Gill’s Flowers of Orcus. It was a rehearse-and-record session in which the public could hear a new piece rehearsed from scratch, then performed (and recorded) a couple of times. Lynda Richardson sang it admirably, John Carewe was affable and assiduous, and a boy came up to me at the end to say how much he had disliked the piece. A year later, I received a letter from Fabers granting me permission to use the two poems by Pound.
The biggest event of my second year at Lancaster was the week Michael Tippett spent in the music department. We were told in advance that he would not be looking at our scores or listening to recordings of our music because he was in the middle of writing his fourth symphony. I understand this much better now than I did at the time, when we all felt a little short-changed.
There are two sorts of influence on a composer. The first consists of the aggregation of early musical experiences that go to shape a composer’s voice, the sort of thing I’ve been writing about here. But the second is a less welcome sort of influence that can come from bumping into a piece of music almost by accident. It doesn’t have to be a good piece: encounter it at the wrong moment and it will throw you.
In 2016 I was composing Comeclose and Sleepnow for Gian Slater and the Monash Art Ensemble. The piece is a song cycle, subtitled ‘six Liverpool love songs’, that puts to music poems by Henri, Patten and McGough, the poets of The Mersey Sound, whose work I’d first fallen for more than forty years earlier. Before I had finished these songs, their commissioner Paul Grabowsky sent me the Ensemble’s new CD, which included Aerea by my friend Mary Finsterer. I badly wanted to hear this piece, not least because it was for the very ensemble for which I was composing, but I delayed listening until I had completed my own work and was glad I that I did. Had I listened to Aerea before I’d finished, I’d have been in trouble. Mary’s very powerful music was utterly different to mine, and the moment I heard it I began to have doubts about my songs. Should I have had some of Mary’s sound world in my piece? Should my songs have been more rough-hewn and harmonically repetitious? Should the whole cycle have been more dissonant? The novelist Peter Carey once spoke about the danger of reading other writers’ books while engaged in writing your own. You come across a beautiful description of rain and are suddenly, sickeningly struck by the complete absence of weather in your novel.
In asking not to hear our music at Lancaster, then, Tippett was being careful, because you can be derailed by any music, and even a student piece will do it. But he gave talks and attended concerts of his own music, including A Child of Our Time, which we sang in the University Choral Society (by the end of the performance he was in tears); he conducted a memorably touching performance of the Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli with the visiting Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; and, most importantly, he talked to us informally over lunches. I told him about a string quartet movement I had planned down to the last detail. It had taken me a whole term to compose and I could have explained the significance of every single note and shown you how it was derived from a set of charts. I was proud of my achievement until the Delmé Quartet played the piece and I heard how boring it was. I told Tippett of my disappointment and he listened, a little amused, never having been one for systems himself.
‘Just use your ears, love,’ he said.
It’s not perfect advice – you need more than your ears – but it was what I needed to hear. I went off and composed Flowers of Orcus and have seldom used a musical system since.
Of course, being a composer isn’t just about organising your musical ideas. You must also learn a professional attitude to the job, and much of that comes down to practical experience. As a non-instrumentalist, I was in danger of
ending up an impractical, academic, even theoretical, sort of composer. But in addition to singing in the university choirs, I could conduct a bit. I had started at school with my own first pieces, graduating to a few items of standard repertory. There was a performance of William Walton’s Façade that I organised as well as conducted. I had no training, but I’d watched Boult and Boulez very closely, studied Walton’s score well and sought advice from Desmond Swinburn about how to beat a bar of 5/8.
At Lancaster I carried this on, first conducting my own music and my fellow students’, then adding in other twentieth-century pieces. I began to plan little seasons for which we needed posters and therefore a name. Lancaster University New Music Group seemed cumbersome. The equivalent group at York University, I noted, was called Anemone. One of my housemates was our violinist Michael Rafferty, who after finishing his studies in physics would go on to become the respected conductor of Music Theatre Wales. Mike picked up the copy of The Tao of Love and Sex we had lying around our student home to impress girls (which I’m sure it didn’t) and more or less randomly lit upon the expression ‘moon flower’, a term for female ejaculate. So Moonflower we became, with a nice logo involving a many-petalled flower growing from the letter ‘f’, though when anyone asked what the name meant we tended to temporise.
Not all the players in Moonflower were brilliant – it was a university department, not a conservatoire – and I was far from being a good conductor, but there’s something about youth: you don’t always see the problems. Early on, we performed Ravel’s delicate, sinewy Three Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé, the soprano part sung by the future Emmy-winning documentary maker Cesca Eaton. The day before our concert, I was in the university library reading that these songs were seldom performed because of their difficulty. I was surprised. The writer didn’t say exactly what was difficult about them and, apart from a tricky piano break in the middle song, there was nothing I could think of. But in the years that followed I conducted the songs again with other singers, and each time they seemed harder to pull off, as though the more experience I had, the more difficulties I saw. Years later, I came across a cassette recording of our Moonflower performance, and it wasn’t bad at all: simple, unfussy (the best way, in my view, to approach Ravel) and rather poised.
Our repertoire was broad. We did lots of Stravinsky and Maxwell Davies, works by Schoenberg, Webern, Martinů, Walton (Façade again), the wonderful Italian composer Luciano Berio, the American experimentalist Christian Wolff, Stockhausen and student composers from the department, including Andy Vores and John Woolrich. At the end of my last year, we staged a festival of three concerts. The first was made up entirely of student works, the second was an all-Stockhausen program that included Ylem, and the third featured Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King, another important piece for me and in some ways a cause celèbre of the new music repertoire.
The king of the title is either George III or someone who believes himself to be George III. He’s played by a singing actor who, across five octaves, screams, barks and howls words by Randolph Stow, some of them borrowed from the historical George, while four of the six instrumentalists sit in giant bird cages representing the monarch’s bullfinches. Eight Songs had been composed in 1969 for the South African actor Roy Hart and his impressive range of extended vocal techniques. There must have been some falling out between Hart and the composer, because the actor did it only a few times. Maxwell Davies and the Fires of London continued to perform it with other soloists, usually classical baritones. The multiphonics that Hart could produce eluded most subsequent performers, including me when I did my one and only performance as the king at Wollongong University in the late 1980s.
Because of the work’s extremes, which can be confronting, audiences often laugh. It’s a defence mechanism, but the laughter is encouraged by the composer’s disorientating collage of styles, ranging from Handelian pastiche – and even a quote from Messiah – to a ‘smoochy’ foxtrot to the most ear-splitting avant-gardisms you could wish for. For all that, it is a serious work. At one London performance I witnessed a burst of nervous laughter quelled by Maxwell Davies himself, whipping round to glare at the offending audience member while continuing to conduct one-handed. These days, performances of Eight Songs are common enough all over the world, but in 1978 the piece was less than a decade old and seldom tackled by anyone but the Fires of London conducted by the composer. Our Moonflower performance, then, was another of those instances of youthful confidence trumping all practical consideration.
We rehearsed for weeks – someone constructed rather beautiful cages for the players with vertical bars made of rope – and the performance was a triumph, largely due to the fearlessness of our king, Roger Ashton-Griffiths in a nightshirt, who screeched and howled as though to the manner born. Even after we all left Lancaster, we continued to perform our Eight Songs in other venues, for one tour borrowing the Fires of London’s own cages.
The most memorable Moonflower performance was on a Sunday night in January 1979 at Wildsen Village Hall, on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. Soon after we arrived at the venue it began snowing quite heavily, and ten minutes before the concert a blizzard was raging, the hall still empty. Then people started to arrive – not many of them, ten or twelve perhaps, and with one exception elderly women, but we had a quorum. From backstage we scanned their faces through a crack in the door and decided they were not going to enjoy our first half (Berio, Stockhausen, Ford), so the players rummaged through their bags, our flautist Edward Blakeman coming up with Debussy’s Syrinx and a Mozart flute sonata. I think Geoffrey Brown, our keyboard player, had some Bach. The audience hated it all.
Having exhausted our alternative repertoire, and with the cages for Eight Songs already nailed to the stage, there was nothing for it but to go ahead with the second half as planned. Backstage we had the sort of meeting I imagine sporting teams have in their locker rooms before facing a tough opponent. We decided to go out and give the performance of our lives.
I have always had doubts about the musical merits of Eight Songs. The piece seems to have been composed in a great rush and the score amounts, in the composer’s own words, to ‘a collection of musical objects … functioning as “stage props”, around which the [actor’s] part weaves’. Compared to Maxwell Davies’s other collaboration with Stow – the complex, detailed Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot – Eight Songs is musically thin, as the composer once acknowledged. But dramatically it is a tour de force, and in my experience never more so than in the performance Roger unleashed that night on those unsuspecting Yorkshire women. In fact, it wasn’t only the performance he unleashed.
The conductor gets in the way in Eight Songs. The audience wants to concentrate on the king and his interaction with the players; it doesn’t want to watch the conductor’s back. Where possible, then, I always did what I saw Maxwell Davies himself do, and stood in the audience with my score on the edge of the stage. The players could see me very clearly – they didn’t even have to look up – and I wasn’t in the audience’s line of vision. My own line of vision was more or less at stage level, and this was how I came to see Roger Ashon-Griffiths’s penis lolloping towards me that night in Wilsden. For in his enthusiasm for the performance, he had got down on all fours and started crawling to the front of the stage, the neckline of his nightshirt hanging low to reveal his pink body beneath.
Conducting with my right hand, I beckoned furiously to Roger with my left, imploring him to stand up. He thought I wanted him to sing louder.
At the end, the ladies cheered. We took our bows and went backstage. When we returned to the hall to dismantle the cages some time later, the audience was still there. A couple of the women were poring over my score. They wanted a discussion and they got one. Roger, the ensemble and I talked to them for a long time. They had never encountered anything like this piece before, but had understood it completely. Some said how moved they’d been. I was never sure if they’d seen Roger’s willy. I like to think they ha
dn’t.
But the whole night was a lesson in not underestimating your audience. If you give them your best shot – and we certainly did – there’s no reason they shouldn’t respond. Whenever I see orchestras heading off on country tours with a repertoire of popular old warhorses, I remember those Yorkshire women and their response to Eight Songs. I also remember their response to underprepared Debussy, Mozart and Bach.
I learnt another lesson from my involvement with Moonflower, though it wasn’t one I immediately understood. The art – or maybe it’s a skill – of making something happen at a practical, organisational level, of getting everyone together and going out and doing something ambitious, isn’t as common as you would think. There were other people who could conduct a bit, some of whom could do it better than me, but when I graduated from Lancaster and tried to pass on the organisation of Moonflower, nobody wanted to run it.
My talent for making things happen – having ideas and getting others to help me see them through – was doubtless what lay behind a last-minute change in my postgraduate plans. Just as I was settled on studying for a teaching diploma, three of my four music lecturers independently handed me the same newspaper clipping. It was a job advertisement, for the post of Fellow in Music at the University of Bradford. I applied for the job and got it, my career as a primary school teacher over before it had begun.