The Memory of Music

by Andrew Ford

  In 2009, when I was resident composer at the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM), there was an event for the Academy’s supporters. The orchestra had given the first performance of my Symphony the previous year and was about to play it again the following week, but this evening was an open rehearsal for an invited audience of forty or fifty people who had been generous to the Academy in one way or another – a sort of thank you.

  Nick Bailey, ANAM’s manager, had the idea of placing the audience members in different sections of the orchestra, alongside the players. Brett Dean, the Academy’s artistic director, conducted the orchestra, and after some general rehearsal, which the audience experienced from the players’ point of view, he asked me if there was anything I wanted to say. We changed the balance in a few places, slowing the tempo in one section and exaggerating the woodwind’s accented attacks in another. At the end of the piece, where the strings play a rather plangent coda, there are some tiny, decorative figures from the piano and glockenspiel, soft but sharply dissonant, like little flecks of light. One of these wasn’t terribly effective, so I suggested to Brett (or perhaps he suggested to me) that the piano play its figure an octave higher. We tried it that way and it was an improvement. You could hear more clearly the gentle clashes I’d intended between the piano and the glockenspiel. It was a tiny detail – maybe two seconds of music, maybe less – but we’d brought it better into focus.

  Following a complete performance of the Symphony, there were drinks. The event had been a success – for most of the audience, it was the first time they had sat in an orchestra and they had found the rehearsal a revelation. The room was buzzing. Nick Bailey sidled up to me, clearly pleased his idea had worked so well.

  ‘Do you know what they’re all talking about?’ he said. ‘They keep saying wasn’t it amazing when the piano went up the octave!’

  8.

  Inventing Music

  I dislike the expression ‘music industry’. I don’t think such a thing exists. There is – or was – a recording industry, but for what I do the term ‘industry’ is inaccurate. Being a composer is more like cottage gardening.

  I’m often asked what composing entails from day to day. Do I keep office hours or wait for inspiration to strike? What do I physically do and what goes through my mind?

  I do work office hours. If you wait for inspiration, you might wait a very long time. Also inspiration can be distracting when you’re trying to get something right, because it usually means having a brand new idea. I work with my pencil and paper, sketching ideas to begin with, then writing a full score, still in pencil so I can rub out the mistakes. Gustav Holst said a composer’s most valuable piece of equipment was an eraser. As for what I think about, it depends.

  I listen. I listen to the sounds in my head – they are always there (often to the detriment of conversation) – and I listen to the sounds I make at the piano, repeating chords over and over, leaning in the better to hear them. When a piece is going well, I’m not thinking much at all about the music, just listening: the sounds are telling me how they relate to one another and how they want to be ordered. Sometimes the piece seems to be writing itself while I hang on for dear life, and that’s one of the best feelings there is. You look at your day’s work, come dinnertime, and wonder how all that music got to be on the page.

  But I do think about the performers, especially if I know them (which is generally the case), and also about the commissioner.

  Often commissions come from the performers themselves, but increasingly they are from private individuals. And they take three forms: a performer might approach a patron asking him or her to fund a new piece (Halcyon asked Barbara Blackman if she’d fund my song cycle Willow Songs); a commissioner might propose an open commission (Kim Williams asked me what I’d like to write, and the result was Raga, my electric guitar concerto); sometimes a commissioner will approach you with an idea for a piece. When private individuals put their hands in their pockets to pay you to compose, you naturally wonder what they will think of the piece and hope they’ll feel their investment was worthwhile. But when they have the idea or some aspect of the idea, they are a collaborator. For example, the commission for Oma kodu came with the request that the piece feature a solo clarinet (Catherine McCorkill) and make reference to an Estonian folk song; Hear the Bird of Day, a setting for the Song Company of the poet David Campbell, was commissioned to commemorate ‘lost loved ones’; Contradance, for the Omega Ensemble, was a birthday present, the commissioner telling me his partner had recently enjoyed the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, so I should include some dance rhythms. These sorts of commissions are increasingly common, and I like them. Of course if you don’t fancy Estonian folk music you can always say no, but I enjoy the challenge of coming up with something that gives the commissioner more than they asked for, taking their idea in an unexpected direction.

  But how does a piece start in one’s head? When I’m asked this question, which is surprisingly often, I tend to say every piece is different. Music can be inspired by a poem, a painting, a film, a short story, even a word. A couple of times I’ve had the title of the piece in my head before anything else. I knew, for instance, I wanted to write a piece called Harbour before I knew it would be a song cycle for Gerald English and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, let alone where the words would come from. Sometimes another piece of music can set me off on an idea of my own. The spark is always different, but the truth is that the moment the piece begins is always the same. It is a feeling of recognition. The piece suddenly exists – even though not a note of it has been written down or yet imagined – and at that moment I usually know how long it is. It’s always the first piece of precise information I have, or I would be like a painter with no sense of where the edge of my canvas is. Certain ideas come in certain sizes – or lengths, in the case of a piece of music. The other thing I know from the start is the instrumental palette, the quality of the sound. Often this is given and immutable. If a string quartet has asked me for a piece, I can’t write a part for tuba or xylophone. I did once try to convince a piano duet that a mooted piece for two pianos should also feature a French horn, but if you look down my list of works you’ll notice there is no such piece (I still think it was a cracker of an idea). I also continue to regret that the orchestra in my viola concerto, The Unquiet Grave, lacks the banjo I so badly wanted to include.

  Commissions take many forms. It is particularly gratifying when they come from strangers, because it suggests that the music has gone out there on its own and communicated with someone. I once composed a piece, Ringing the Changes, for the Dutch ensemble Het Trio. They took it to the United States and played it at a festival in Pittsburgh. I found out about this when I received a letter from the composer and conductor David Stock, telling me how much he had liked the trio and asking if I would write a larger piece for the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. This ended up being Dance Maze for seventeen players, which, some years later, came to the attention of Joel Sachs at the Juilliard School in New York. Joel conducted it in a concert by the New Juilliard Ensemble, leading to a continuing relationship with both Joel and the school and performances of several other works. One of these was The Unquiet Grave, with violist Jocelin Pan the impassioned soloist. One thing, if you’re lucky, leads to another.

  The composing of The Unquiet Grave is worth unpacking, because it sheds light on several aspects of a composer’s life, and especially on how pieces develop beyond the first spark and that moment of recognition. In the case of this piece, the initial idea was to write a concerto for my friend Patricia Pollett, who had given numerous performances of my solo viola piece Swansong. It was always going to be a rather lyrical piece, and since Patricia hailed from Adelaide and the concerto seemed to require only a small orchestra, we took the idea to the Adelaide Chamber Orchestra and its conductor Richard Mills, who agreed to commission it. (‘How many performances of the piece do you actually want, Andy?’ asked Richard, when I mentioned the banjo.)r />
  In January 1997 I was in Pittsburgh to conduct the first performance of Dance Maze. The following morning I flew to New York and checked into a hotel. In midwinter, New York hotels always have the heating turned up too high, so before I lay down for a restorative nap, after the previous night’s post-concert celebration and an early start for the airport, I opened the window to let in some cold air.

  I was awakened from a deep sleep by a noise from the street. Two noises, in fact: a truck horn and a metallic clang. The horn was loud and long-held, as though the truck driver was leaning on it; the clang, which was a whole tone higher, I took to be a piece of falling scaffolding. I don’t know whether the sounds were related, but the noise of the scaffolding (or whatever it was) cut across the blaring horn, so they were related in my head. It was such an arresting sound that I got off the bed, took out some manuscript paper and wrote it down, putting ‘horn’ beside a long, fortissimo E flat, and ‘tubular bells + harp’ beside the F above. I also added a very short G for tubular bells alone immediately before the F, like a grace note. For good measure, I doodled a viola line emerging from the horn’s E flat, accelerating into a dramatic flourish. Over these few bars of music I wrote ‘Viola Concerto’. Then I went back to sleep.

  Most of the rest of 1997 was taken up with finishing my radio series Illegal Harmonies and its accompanying book, so nothing further happened on the concerto until November. No, that’s not right – one thing happened: I reread Cyril Connolly’s curious little book The Unquiet Grave, his musings on life at forty, written under the pseudonym Palinurus. I was turning forty myself, which I suppose is why I picked it up again. There was something about the title that appealed to me and I wondered if I could steal it for the concerto. Connolly himself had taken it from an English folk song about a grieving lover at a graveside. The young man rends his garments and gnashes his teeth until, at length, his dead lover tells him to pipe down or she will never rest in peace. I looked up the tune. There are dozens of tunes for ‘The Unquiet Grave’ and dozens of versions of the words, but the one I had on my bookshelf was in the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs edited by Ralph Vaughan Williams and A.L. Lloyd. It was a good tune. If I was going to take the title, I reasoned, I should take the tune too.

  In November, I went to stay with Belinda Webster in Kangaroo Valley, two hours south of Sydney, where she was house-sitting for the composer Martin Wesley-Smith. If I am kept from composing for long, the music pours out when I finally have some manuscript paper in front of me. With Illegal Harmonies done, the radio series on air and the book published, I returned eagerly to the viola concerto. To my surprise, the fragment of music I’d jotted down in the New York hotel room still made complete sense to me. I tweaked it a bit, adding an oboe, saxophone, bassoon and trumpet to the front of the French horn’s E flat to kick-start it, prolonging the resonance of the bell and harp with some delicate string harmonics. Other than that, what you hear at the beginning of The Unquiet Grave is what I wrote down in that hotel. As for the rest of the piece, it is an exploration of the English folk song that had given Connolly his title. For four days, I sat at Martin’s dining table and wrote music until Belinda decided it was time for gin and tonics. On the fifth morning I took the train back to Sydney with the first ten minutes of The Unquiet Grave, fully scored, in my bag. Peter Sculthorpe threw a party that weekend, where I told anyone who would listen about my astonishing progress on the piece. I had never had such a productive week of composing and, figuring it must be partly the country air, decided I must move out of Sydney. Two years later, I bought a house in the Southern Highands, but first I was fortunate to have a couple of years in the Peggy Glanville-Hicks composers’ house.

  The Unquiet Grave was the first piece I completed in the house in 1998, the beginning of a very productive period. I was happy with the piece and eager to hear it performed. Unfortunately, I now learnt that the Adelaide Chamber Orchestra had ceased to exist. These things happen from time to time. Circumstances change while you are completing a commission – the person who requested and paid for it has moved on or, as in this case, the whole organisation has closed down – and your new piece has no scheduled performance. Martin Buzacott, who was devising musical events for the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music, came to the rescue, and in 1999 Patricia Pollett gave the premiere with an ensemble conducted by the composer James MacMillan.

  Writing earlier about From Hand to Mouth, I mentioned the vibrancy that folk music can generate in one’s own work, but there’s something else that comes with the introduction of found musical objects of any stripe, folkloric or not. A preordained melody frees you: you write things that otherwise you might not. In The Unquiet Grave, the folk song is unrecognisable until the end of the piece, when the solo viola at last has the tune. For the first fifteen or sixteen minutes of this seventeen-minute concerto, fragments of the song provide the building blocks for my own melodic material. The tune contains a lot of minor seconds, and there is a moment in my piece where the viola ruminates on this interval. My music at that point sounds oddly Sculthorpean, and I would never have come up with it had I been inventing my own material, because I’d have spotted the similarity to lines in pieces such as Irkanda IV (there are minor seconds everywhere in Sculthorpe), and I’d have edited myself. As it was, I didn’t notice the resemblance to Sculthorpe’s music until my piece was in rehearsal, because while I was composing, my imagination had been in the folk song. The source material had prevented me being too selfconscious and allowed me to expand my harmonic palette in a new direction. It was a step towards finding my voice.

  As a young composer, this was something I’d worried about. What kind of music should I be writing? In what style? I loved Vaughan Williams, but I also loved Stockhausen; I loved Britten, but also Boulez. In which directions should I take my own music? Michael Tippett often used to talk about the importance of finding your own voice, possibly because it had been a struggle for him, but this only made matters worse. For it’s all very well saying you have to find your voice, but where do you look for it? And how do you know when you’ve found it? These were daunting questions for a young composer, and there were no answers.

  In the end, finding your voice as a composer is like finding your voice in life. It finds you, and you don’t notice it happening. When you speak, other people hear and recognise your voice, but you don’t hear it yourself, because you’re focused on what you’re saying. Composing is the same. The more you concentrate on getting the content of your piece right, the less you worry about style. Writing The Unquiet Grave consolidated this for me. The melodic material was given and it was calling the shots; I was writing very fast, barely stopping to think. When I did stop, I was surprised at what I had written. In the Glanville-Hicks house, I took the score to the piano. I was forty-one years old and this was the first time I had lived with a piano since I’d left home to go to university at the age of eighteen. Gingerly, falteringly, I played through the final pages of the concerto, where the viola states the folk tune, against a series of slowly descending scales. The music made me cry. I don’t know why.

  The folk song – this musical found object – had in a sense distracted me from myself. It had focused me on the music, and I wrote a piece I would otherwise have been too selfconscious to write. But it’s not just musical source material that can bring you out of yourself and send you further into the work. I have composed a number of pieces that had visual art as their starting point. There are, for instance, three pieces for flute and percussion entitled Mondriaan (the original Dutch spelling of the painter’s name), and there’s a work for string orchestra in five movements called Manhattan Epiphanies, consisting of musical responses to the work of four twentieth-century New York artists: Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko (twice), Joseph Cornell and Jackson Pollock.

  In the Mondriaan pieces, each based on a specific painting, I took the proportions of the artist’s work and employed the same proportions in my music, allowing them to govern how long harmon
ies, textures and even individual notes should last. The most extreme of these pieces is ‘Composition with Yellow Square’, for piccolo and metal percussion, in which the piccolo plays long, mostly loud notes representing the yellow and white paint, interrupted by metallic clanging for the black lines.

  In Manhattan Epiphanies I attempted to find musical equivalents for the works of art. I’d seen a Motherwell retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in late 1984, and I remembered how the painter’s dark abstractions seemed to jump off the wall as I walked down the spiral ramp with that watery light pouring in through the ceiling. I called the piece ‘Motherwell at the Guggenheim’, and contrasted airy chords in violin harmonics with thick stabs of dissonance in the lower strings. With Cornell, whose art consisted of little boxes displaying tiny installations filled with fragments of theatre posters, dolls, small stuffed birds and so forth, I made thirteen of my own miniatures from little shards of Bach and Beethoven, Brahms and Webern. I also added toy instruments to the mix, since so many toys turn up in Cornell’s childlike art. I had never worked like this before, but the source material was obliging me to. And it was the same with Rothko and Pollock. The two Rothko movements were great smudges of tone, seventeen solo strings wending their individual ways from their highest notes to their lowest in ‘Rothko I’, and back again in ‘Rothko II’, with lots of small details for the listener to attend to. If you walk up close to one of Rothko’s canvases, what had seemed a monolithic slab of colour turns out to be quite varied, the surface patina of brush marks surprisingly subtle. The Pollock movement was the only one based on a particular painting, the so-called Blue Poles, which hangs in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra (where this movement had its first performance). This time I tried to imagine my string orchestra playing the painting, the drips of colour running across the canvas like notes across a page, the slanting poles that gave the work its nickname functioning like bar lines. Apart from the first two bars of this piece, nothing is fully synchronised in the music, the players free to play their rather intricate material each in their own time. The ‘poles’ themselves are vaguely synchronised, but the effect is of a jagged line – like the poles in Pollock’s painting.