by Andrew Ford
While we pondered what to do with our opera, one pressing matter was how to replace it in the university schedule. Four years earlier, I had seen a music-theatre piece called Bow Down by Harrison Birtwistle and Tony Harrison, at the National Theatre in London, and been taken with its simplicity of design, musically and dramatically. Nine performers sat on stage in a semicircle telling and retelling a story common to traditional ballads from Scandinavia, Scotland, England and the Appalachian Mountains in North America. The basic elements are always the same. Two sisters, one dark and one fair, love the same man. The suitor chooses the fair sister, and the dark sister kills her out of jealousy. In several versions, this is done by drowning, the fair sister’s remains found by a blind harper who constructs the frame of a harp from her bones, stringing it with her hair. He plays at the wedding feast of the dark sister to the suitor, the harp mysteriously telling of the murder. There’s a related German version of the story, collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, in which the sisters are brothers and the harp a flute. Mahler used this version in Das klagende Lied, and I turned it into Once Upon a Time There Were Two Brothers …, a piece for a speaking flute player, first performed by Sally Walker at the 2013 Melbourne Festival.
In Birtwistle’s Bow Down many different versions of the story overlap, the nine performers all speaking, singing and playing instruments in the cyclical retelling, while taking it in turns to get up, adopt characters and act out scenes. So that summer we put on the second-ever season of Bow Down, Graham directing the student cast, while I was music director. A late dropout forced me to perform in the piece too. I don’t know whether he’d been booked in advance to review Poe, but to everyone’s surprise Felix Aprahamian, the august music critic of the Sunday Times, turned up to the show.
Soon after the short season ended, two of the students who had taken part in Bow Down asked to meet Graham and me. Nick Chapman and Nikki Axford announced that they would like to continue to perform Bow Down and make the group into a professional company. Since Nick was an environmental science student and Nikki a linguist, Graham and I felt a degree of responsibility. We’d done our jobs a little too well and now were about to ruin the lives of two young people. As ideas went, starting up a contemporary music-theatre company had to be one of the more doomed, but Nick and Nikki were not to be dissuaded. Very much against our better judgement, Graham and I agreed to help.
To begin with, a name had to be found. Nick and Nikki favoured Breath. Graham pointed out that the company’s first negative review would be headlined ‘Bad Breath’, and so he and I decided to come up with something better. We were talking about this one afternoon as we watched cricket on the TV in Graham’s parents’ flat. The enormous West Indian fast bowler Joel ‘Big Bird’ Garner was in action.
‘How about “Big Bird”?’ Graham said.
Neither Graham nor I had spent much time watching Sesame Street, and so we didn’t know that this was where Garner’s nickname had originated. But Big Bird Music Theatre, though essentially meaningless, had a certain ring to it, and it stuck. Graham and I agreed to revive the production of Bow Down, and some dates were lined up. By the start of the tour, two performers had dropped out and so this time both of us ended up on stage.
Nick and Nikki successfully applied for small grants and new pieces were commissioned, but full Arts Council funding proved elusive and Big Bird remained a part-time company. My involvement as a performer ended with my move to Australia in 1983, though as a composer I was involved till 1985, when Big Bird performed in New South Wales and Canberra. The production for which I wrote music was From Hand to Mouth, an evening-long work devised from an oral history project in the Yorkshire Dales. Beyond my schoolboy cello sonata, this was the first time I had worked with folk music, but ever since this piece folk songs and dances have proved an endlessly rich mine of material for me. Even when a folk tune all but disappears into the fabric of one of my pieces, it can leave behind a vibrancy that couldn’t have come from anywhere else. I have a love of drones that comes from folk music, and often techniques drawn from folk fiddling can be found in my scores.
I was proud of From Hand to Mouth, but because it was more devised than composed there never was a score, making the ninety-minute piece hard to repeat. And because the four performers all had to be able to act (above all) as well as sing and play musical instruments – and do Yorkshire accents – those Big Bird performances were the first and last.
In 1986, after several unsuccessful attempts, Nick and Nikki finally learnt that Big Bird Music Theatre had secured continuing funding from the Arts Council of Great Britain. Flushed with success, they wound up the company.
These days, Nick is an environmental scientist in Sydney and Nikki an arts administrator in Glasgow, so apparently Graham and I didn’t ruin their lives. Graham, who remains one of my best friends, went on to be Deputy Secretary General of the British Arts Council. A section of Poe was performed in 1985 at the Sydney Opera House by the Australian Opera. And sometimes I watch Sesame Street with my daughter.
6.
Starting Again
As the Qantas flight made its descent into Sydney, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ played in the economy cabin. It was the Cloncurry tune, which I prefer to the standard tune, and I assumed Qantas always did this to welcome visitors and returning travellers, though I’ve never heard it since. It was August 1983, and I was coming to Australia for what I imagined – and had told my parents – would be five years.
I knew almost immediately I’d be staying longer. Before leaving England, I had taken the precaution of obtaining permanent residence, so my options would be open, and Australia quickly felt like home. I liked the apparent optimism of the place, as well as its informality. On my second day I walked into a branch of Westpac Bank to open an account. When the manager emerged to take me into his office, he was wearing shorts.
‘Barry,’ he said, extending his hand and telling me his first name but not his last.
During my final year in Bradford, I had begun to think it might be good to undertake some further study with a composition teacher. It had also occurred to me that I could combine this with living in another country. I wrote to Bernard Rands in San Diego, Sven-David Sandström in Stockholm and György Ligeti in Hamburg. Ligeti replied to say he couldn’t take more students, Sandström didn’t reply at all and I had a pleasant late-night phone conversation with Rands, at the end of which the whole thing felt a bit impractical. Then, on 1 October 1982, my final day of employment at Bradford University, the mail contained a postcard from Edward Cowie. On the front was a painting by Arthur Boyd of the surf crashing on a beach as a dog runs alongside (it hangs in Wollongong Art Gallery); on the back, a short message from Edward advised me to accept no job offers – ‘I have a job for you.’ Since I had no obvious prospects, I took Edward’s advice and stopped searching. Meanwhile, I composed music and drew the dole like thousands of young artists before me and since.
Edward was almost as good as his word. It transpired that the job, in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong, was not his to offer. It would have to be advertised and I would have to apply. At some point there was a phone interview and the whole process took nearly a year. While I waited, I continued to send scores to potential performers and promoters, and had some success. Portraits, three pieces for piano, was shortlisted for the Yorkshire Arts Composer’s Award at the 1982 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, where Peter Donohoe gave the first performance. The judges were the composers David Bedford and Nicholas Maw, and they awarded me joint first prize along with Mark-Anthony Turnage, who would quickly go on to greater things. The concert was broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Another piece, Bright Ringing Morning, was taken up by the BBC for a studio recording. There were a couple of new commissions, including one from Adrian Jack at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. This became Chamber Concerto No 2: Cries in Summer, the title adapted from a line in Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘Asides on the Oboe’ (twenty year
s later, I would borrow Stevens’s title, too, for a solo piece for the oboist David Nuttall).
The first performance of the ICA piece was scheduled to take place the weekend after I left for Australia, but I heard from friends who attended the concert that it hadn’t been performed. When I asked Adrian Jack what had occurred, he reported that the program of six new pieces had turned out to be too long, and since I wasn’t there my piece had been dropped. It seemed a clear indication that, for a young composer, out of sight was more or less out of mind. And so it proved, well beyond the point at which I ceased being young. Since I came to Australia, my music has only occasionally been played or broadcast in the UK. Chamber Concerto No 2 was one of my first pieces to have its premiere in Australia, when the Australia Ensemble devoted a Sunday afternoon workshop/concert to my music in late 1984. I took the cancelled London performance and subsequent Sydney premiere to be evidence I was starting my career all over again.
The School of Creative Arts was new and had grown from the recent merging of the University of Wollongong with the neighbouring teachers’ college. As part of the amalgamation, the staff of the latter were guaranteed their jobs in the new set-up, notwithstanding the fact that they were no longer training teachers, but, ostensibly, artists. Not all these men and women were suited to their new task. The school included strands in theatre, the visual arts, creative writing and music, and the degree was interdisciplinary. Students took a major course in painting, say, and a minor in acting, or perhaps a major in music performance and a minor in ceramics. Applicants who wanted to do only music were encouraged to look elsewhere. New staff were appointed, all practising artists, and one of the first was the celebrated sculptor Bert Flugelman.
Looking back at the school (later it became a faculty) through a twenty-first-century lens of rationalisation, efficiency and vocational training, it all looks a bit pie-in-the-sky, but I believed in the school’s aims and still do. The most interesting people I know are curious about all the arts (and other things besides), but in music they are quite rare. Traditional music education tends to focus closely on technique – as it must – but often in a way that encourages tunnel vision. I think the flute player who can throw a pot or write a sonnet or design the lighting for a play will tend to be more interesting than the player who has only mastered Boehm’s studies.
In my first week at the school, the Illawarra Mercury – Wollongong locals often refer to it as ‘the mockery’ – sent a reporter to interview me, the newly imported member of staff. I could tell she wasn’t really paying attention as I enthused about the courses, about the school’s willingness to experiment, about how risk was vital to artistic success and how an element of danger inherent in the course was what made it so exciting.
‘SCHOOL OF CREATIVE ARTS “DANGEROUS” SAYS LECTURER’ was the following day’s headline, above a picture of me smiling cheerfully in front of a sculpture. The department received a number of phone calls that morning, the first from the Deputy Vice-Chancellor’s office.
I was surprised to discover that tertiary education in Australia is quite local. In the United Kingdom, going to university usually involves leaving home and moving to the other side of the country. It’s part of the rite of passage. But nearly all the students at Wollongong University were from Wollongong, the majority still living with their parents. Our first students came based largely on word of mouth, and they were good – independent-minded, open to ideas, driven and creative. Each week there was a lecture in a course called History of the Arts, which the whole school attended, including most of the staff. It wasn’t really a history in any strict sense, but individual lecturers speaking about great art or artists – occasionally it might be a single work – that fascinated them. I gave the first lecture, about The Rite of Spring, and others in the series on Beethoven’s late string quartets (with quite a lot about Eliot’s Four Quartets) and Samuel Beckett. These days it is so easy to find clips of things to show in lectures, but then if you wanted your students to see the opening of Krapp’s Last Tape, you had to find an actor. I ended up doing it myself, my ambition in this area never fully vanquished, and presented the departmental secretary with a petty cash receipt for the bananas Krapp must consume at the start of the play. In the years that followed I gave lectures on the origins of rock’n’roll, the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and themes in English folk song: we didn’t just cover ‘high art’. The lectures given by others were just as wide-ranging in their topics, and the History of the Arts course was important in terms of bringing and binding together a hundred or so staff and students.
Those early years were full of excitement and energy. Many of the courses had no plans. We taught from week to week. If I had discovered something interesting in Stravinsky’s music, suddenly finding myself preoccupied with the rhythmic structure of Symphonies of Wind Instruments, we would listen to the piece, look at the score and discuss it. I would be doing my best teaching, because I’d be talking about something that was right at the front of my mind. But I wouldn’t always be right, and it was important for the students to realise that just because I pointed something out, it wasn’t necessarily true. There are always different ways of thinking about music.
Composition lessons were still more spontaneous. Students brought their latest scores and we looked at them together and talked about how they might be improved. All young artists are pursuing individual paths; they tend to flourish abruptly, often in unexpected ways, and then they might hit a rough patch; a good teacher tries to keep up and help them discover what they need, but they all need different things at different times. Suddenly a composition student will find that her work is taking her in a very contrapuntal direction, at which point it’s time to talk about counterpoint, look at Bach maybe, look at Schoenberg. But another student will be doing something completely different and doing it well; he doesn’t want his teacher forcing him to look at Schoenberg, when what he needs is a good dose of Xenakis, or possibly just to be left alone for a while.
You wouldn’t get away with this now, and we didn’t get away with it for long. When the school became a faculty, the individual subject strands had more autonomy, and some began to argue we’d attract a better standard of flute player if she were not obliged also to be a ceramicist or a poet. It was a fair argument, but my response was that there were plenty of other institutions catering for musicians who only wanted to play their instruments. Just try telling the director of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music you’d like to add sculpture to your course. But gradually the offerings of the Faculty of Creative Arts were standardised and the academic staff spent more time being accountable: filling out forms, writing reports and attending meetings. It happened everywhere, I know. We were expected to inform our students at the start of a semester what they would be taught each week and, significantly, what the outcome of this teaching would be. As if we knew! The notion of student artists as individuals, and of that individuality leading their education was bit by bit eroded as spontaneity went out of the window. If it said on the course outline that in Week 9 the students would learn about metrical modulation, that’s what we did, whether anyone needed it or not (some of them might have needed it sooner). I believe the education we offered in the first years of the course was better than this regimentation, and the number of former students from those years now in gainful employment right across the arts would suggest I’m not entirely wrong. So I grew unhappy with academe. After four years at Wollongong, I became a part-time employee in order to devote more hours to composing, and after twelve years I abandoned my tenured university job to join the ABC as presenter of The Music Show.
But good things happened at Wollongong. We started a new music group, somewhat clumsily called the SCAW Ensemble (an acronym for School of Creative Arts, Wollongong), and as with Moonflower at Lancaster we performed as many student works as possible. We also played new or newish Australian pieces by Ross Edwards, Anne Boyd and Vincent Plush alongside twentieth-century classics by Webern, Stravinsk
y and Grainger, Janáček (Capriccio) and Kurt Weill (Little Threepenny Music and the songs from Happy End), Berio’s Folk Songs, Gavin Bryar’s Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, Birtwistle’s La Plage and Boulez’s Dérive I. Perhaps inevitably, we also did Ylem. Most memorably, we gave the first Australian performance of Stockhausen’s Stimmung and staged one of John Cage’s music circuses.
Stockhausen’s music was notable for its inconsistency of style (Cage’s too, for that matter). Great store is set by composers who are instantly recognisable; we feel their music must be good because it has such a strong idiolect. But this can be true of bad music just as much as good. In terms of its sound world, Stimmung could hardly be more different from Ylem, or any other piece by Stockhausen. Scored for six, closely miked voices, it explores, for more than an hour, the harmonics of a single B flat ninth chord. The singers, three female and three male, must learn to produce overtones with their voices, rhythmically animating them by chanting the names of divinities from many of the world’s cultures. There are moments of precise syncronisation between the voices, as different singers take turns to lead each of the fifty-one sections, but all the singers must be constantly aware of what the others are doing. I sang bass.
We rehearsed Stimmung with great enjoyment for three months from December 1985, then performed it at Adelaide’s Pilgrim Church during the 1986 Adelaide Festival. During the festival, but not as part of it: we had an audience of around sixteen. We sang it in Sydney, in Canberra, in Wollongong, and the experience was indelible. Apart from anything else, it is a piece that stops time. The composer stipulated that it should last between sixty and ninety minutes. Our performance generally took seventy but always felt as though it had gone by in about fifteen. To some extent, all performing is like this, but Stimmung is an extreme case in this as in nearly everything else. It is a piece, like Cage’s 4’33” – his so-called ‘silent’ piece – that is unique. It occupies a special niche of its own. You can’t have another piece like it because it would be a straight-out copy.