The Memory of Music

by Andrew Ford

  I had felt this once before, in 1982, in the weeks preceding the Falklands War. Prior to Argentina’s invasion, few people in Britain had heard of the Falkland Islands and fewer still could have found them on a map. Now, it seemed, we were going to war over them, and the only beneficiary would be either President Leopoldo Galtieri of Argentina or the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, both highly unpopular leaders seeking to bolster support in their respective countries. The fact that it would be weeks before war could commence, the British fleet first having to sail to the South Atlantic, somehow made the prospect more ridiculous and appalling. We were going to war in slow motion; there was time to stop it, but not the will. As the popular press did what they always do and egged Thatcher on, wars selling newspapers, I felt angry and began to imagine angry music. Pacing around my small Bradford apartment, I was overtaken by the brutality of the orchestra pounding away in my head. I had the feeling that if only it could be heard by everyone else, this music would stop the war.

  Absurd, I know, but sometimes that is how the music comes, suddenly, urgently and in response to a non-musical event. Once, after the break-up of a relationship, I was feeling pretty devastated and began to imagine beautiful, lyrical music – consoling music, you might say. In my wretched lethargy I lacked both the concentration and the will to get any of it down on paper, so you’ll have to accept my word that the music was beautiful, but my Falklands piece was finally written in 1986, by which time I was in Australia. Four years on, my anger had shifted focus. The war was now a small piece of history, but Thatcher, buoyed by her military triumph, had won re-election in a landslide. At the postwar victory parade though the City of London, she had received the salute with the Lord Mayor on the steps of Mansion House. Initially only able-bodied soldiers and sailors were invited to participate in the parade, but after a public outcry hundreds of maimed and wounded service men were also permitted to march. A newspaper reported that Thatcher had asked a blinded sailor: ‘How are you enjoying the day?’

  My piece, The Big Parade, was written without a commission for the largest orchestra I have ever employed, and it took the form of a twenty-minute funeral march that erupts midway into a distorted parody of ‘Rule, Britannia!’. Not a very subtle gesture, but looking at it now I find the piece as a whole has a certain relentless power. I sent the score to the head of ABC Concert Music, which at the time ran Australia’s orchestras, but it was never performed, possibly due to its seven instrumental soloists and extra string players on raised platforms behind the orchestra. I offered it to the BBC, suggesting it (tongue-in-cheek) for the Last Night of the Proms, and received an amused letter of rejection. Thatcher had recently appointed her stooge Marmaduke Hussey to chair the BBC, and my correspondent was moved to imagine Hussey’s apoplexy occasioned by a performance of The Big Parade.

  In the end, my response to 9/11 was completely different. I imagined some sort of musical protest, involving especially dark brass sonorities, but nothing eventuated. I simply went back to work on my song cycle. I reasoned that creating something new, seeing it through and getting the details right was more or less the opposite of terrorism. It wasn’t just that life goes on, though that was part of it; neither was it written in the spirit of ‘Take that, Osama bin Laden!’ But it seemed to me that if there were enough positive acts in the world, they might counterbalance acts of aggression. If my own contribution was relatively modest, it was sincere. So this time my response was not, I hope, absurd, but it was arguably quixotic.

  Sometimes I wish a composer could do more. When I was married to my first wife and she was still a lawyer, she would come home each evening having won compensation for an injured worker or spent the day prosecuting some child molester.

  ‘What have you done?’ Margaret would ask, and the answer would be that I’d written some really nice chords, or just as likely failed to.

  I don’t avoid political issues in my work. A piece such as my choral setting of Constantine Cavafy’s poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ can certainly be read as a double-barrelled protest at pusillanimous, do-nothing politicians who appease violent oppressors. When, at the end of the poem, and after all that waiting, the barbarians fail to appear, everyone is disappointed. They’d have been ‘a kind of solution’, certainly better than our own lacklustre leaders. Cavafy wrote his poem in 1898, and it only seems to have become more topical with the passing of time, though you might argue that, these days, the waiting is over: to borrow again from Sondheim, ‘Don’t bother, they’re here.’

  My Waiting for the Barbarians is an angry piece – the anger born of the pent-up frustration in Cavafy’s poem – and the ending is desolate but, even if the words have driven and coloured the music, I didn’t choose the poem in order to make a protest. I chose it because I was looking for words that would be suitable for a joint commission from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus and the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, two big groups of singers, and ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ is that rare thing, a poetic crowd scene.

  In his commonplace book, A Certain World, Auden wrote, on the subject of ‘Commitment’, that it was well and good for a poet to produce ‘engagé’ poetry, but that he (sic) will be the only one to gain, his reputation enhanced ‘among those who feel as he does’.

  ‘The evil or injustice,’ Auden goes on, ‘will remain exactly what it would have been if he had kept his mouth shut.’

  It’s harsh, perhaps, but Auden is not sparing himself (he never did). This, after all, is the author of ‘September 1, 1939’, as engagé a poem as you could wish to read, and one that he had recently culled from his Collected Shorter Poems, labelling it dishonest.

  Still, political art is not useless.

  It’s true that Picasso’s Guernica didn’t alter the course of the Spanish Civil War, let alone stop people massacring each other or being fascists, but it stands as a memorial to a horrific act, and as long as we have horrific acts we will need memorials. Though Picasso painted it in anger, and though it is evidently a work of great emotional power, it offers us an artistic context for the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937, and a way to think about the event. You might counter that it also sanitises it, but I don’t agree. It brings distance, certainly, but a photograph of the destruction would do that. I think when we look at Guernica – a mural on a grand scale – we see the time and care that went into the painting, the work and the energy Picasso spent on it. Looking at Guernica sets in motion a process of contemplation and understanding that bypasses words. We can’t come to terms with something as grotesque as that massacre, the Luftwaffe and Italian air force invited to bomb the Basques by Spanish nationalists, but the mural offers a degree of perspective.

  Some of Brett Dean’s music has started with his concern for the plight of displaced people and refugees; it’s the same with the paintings and installations of my Robertson neighbour Ben Quilty. And if it’s not refugees, it’s the death penalty or soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. By putting subjects such as these in his work, Ben opens himself to the charge of being a ‘bleeding heart’, though that doesn’t strike me as much of a condemnation. What’s the alternative? To be hard-hearted? Heartless? Who wants to look at heartless art?

  I don’t think that these causes drive Ben to paint – he is an artist and so already driven – but they guide and shape the nature of his work. Still, when you look at his large canvases in a show such as After Afghanistan, you are aware of the mental pain these soldiers have experienced and in some cases are still experiencing. Painting has it over music in that it can show us things. In the case of Brett Dean’s first string quartet, entitled Eclipse, you wouldn’t know, unless you were told, that the music was a response to the Tampa crisis of 2001 and the hardening of Australia’s policy concerning asylum seekers who arrived by sea. Music without words is abstract sound, and in this case even the title isn’t much help. Eclipse is a fine piece, gripping in its emotional intensity, but even if its composer had intended th
e music as a blow-by-blow account of the unfolding drama, a listener could have no idea. As it happens, the Tampa was simply the starting point for the music – Brett’s inspiration, if that’s not too positive a word for a boatload of desperate people.

  My own musical ideas seldom begin this way, and when they do – say, with 9/11 – they generally amount to nothing. Increasingly, I find, a piece of music begins with musical concerns. If it ends up ‘political’, like Waiting for the Barbarians, this will be a result of the compositional process. Indeed it may even be an accident, as with A Singing Quilt, a statement about reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians that others heard and had to point out to me.

  Music is primarily about structure, about itself. It may claim to be about other things, and the composer may sincerely believe it to be about other things, but without words (or perhaps a musical quotation, such as my distorted ‘Rule, Britannia!’), no one will ever guess. So why do we give our pieces titles at all? Why call a purely musical work Like Icarus Ascending or Swansong?

  T.S. Eliot once argued that meaning in poetry was a deliberate distraction on the part of the poet. The poet, he said, is like a burglar who throws a piece of meat to the guard dog. The meat is a poem’s meaning and the dog is our conscious mind. While our conscious mind gnaws on the juicy meaning, the poet goes though the drawers of our subconscious. Perhaps this is the function of an evocative title given to a piece of music; if not exactly a distraction, perhaps the title is the focal point in a musical meditation, holding our attention as those patterns of sound do their work on our subconscious minds. Or perhaps titles serve to prime us for the music, and make us receptive.

  I once said to Peter Sculthorpe that, next to a doctor or a firefighter, a composer’s work could seem pretty insignificant, but he demurred.

  ‘I think what we do is very important,’ he said. ‘Music brings people together.’

  He was right, no doubt. Shared experiences may be in decline in the modern world, but, as I have suggested, concerts still provide them. And shared experiences operate on many levels. There is, for instance, the sense of community that comes from attending a concert, and it’s not simply among the musicians on stage or the audience in the hall, it’s between them. A great performance is an act of communication, of reaching out – the listener reaching out as much as the performer. Part of what is being communicated by music is the onstage collegiality necessary for such a performance. A musical performance offers us an idealised model of society. This is not to say that all the musicians on stage love or even like each other, but in order to produce great music they must cooperate. There are myriad stories of rock bands and jazz musicians who play well together though they can’t abide one another. Once, as a student, I spied on the Amadeus Quartet in rehearsal from the gallery in the Great Hall of Lancaster University. It was not like any other string quartet rehearsal I’ve witnessed. The players seemed profoundly irritated by each other, all talking all the time, occasionally shouting; individual players would suddenly stand up and walk off or wander upstage to practise a completely different piece; they were never all seated at the same moment. At the concert in the evening, they played like angels.

  But of course there are also deep friendships between musicians, even between composers. There are, perhaps, a handful of my composer colleagues I would be loath to trust with my secrets, but by and large we wish each other well, and a success for one composer is regarded as a success for us all. I have been quite close to certain colleagues at different points in my life. Perhaps the most important was Roger Smalley, a wonderful composer, who was an inveterate supporter of my music, conducting it, playing it on the piano and programming it with his WASO New Music Ensemble and sometimes farther afield, yet never calling in the favour. I have had friendships with composers where we have shown each other new scores and given each other feedback; sometimes we’ve given each other moral support; sometimes just shared gossip.

  Perhaps even more valuable than friendships with composers, though, are friendships with other musicians. As a composer who is not a performer, you often feel a little like an outsider. You work on your own and send your music off to players, waiting anxiously for their response.

  The cellist Sue-Ellen Paulsen kept me waiting more than a month after I’d sent her The Great Memory, the cello concerto I’d written for her. I was nearly ready to tear the piece up when she finally rang, her first words – ‘I’m not a flute player, you know’ – doing little to assuage my mounting anxiety. Sue-Ellen could be quite scary when she was younger, rumour having it that she’d once made a conductor cry in rehearsal. Fortunately, I already knew Sue-Ellen and loved her dearly. In the end she gave me a magnificent performance of The Great Memory, her reputation for fierceness working in my favour, because the conductor, whose energies, hitherto, had all gone into his first Petrushka, found himself obliged to believe in my concerto as much as Sue-Ellen did. This is the sort of soloist you want playing your music.

  One performer who never played a note of my music was the pianist Geoffrey Tozer. We weren’t constantly in touch, but I treasure our conversations about everything from the music of Medtner to the films of Powell and Pressburger. He had an astonishing musical memory. At one Huntington Festival, he accompanied Jeannie Marsh in Elgar’s song cycle Sea Pictures. He had no music in front of him, which is very unusual for an accompanist, and after the concert I asked him why he had done it. Why would anyone bother to memorise Elgar’s piano part?

  ‘I didn’t,’ he replied. ‘I don’t like Elgar’s piano part. I was playing the orchestral version.’ What he meant was that he had the sound of the orchestra running in his head, while he made his own piano reduction on the fly.

  At that same festival, Geoffrey, Gerald English, Belinda Webster and I went for a drive one morning. We found ourselves in Gulgong, the neighbouring town to Mudgee, where there’s a tiny theatre that calls itself the Prince of Wales Opera House. I’m not sure how much opera it’s seen, but everyone from a young Nellie Melba to the boxer Les Darcy has appeared there. The door was open, so we walked in. There was a grand piano and it was unlocked. Geoffrey struck up the opening chords of ‘Let the Florid Music Praise’, the first song of On This Island, Britten’s early song cycle to words by Auden. Gerry began singing and, quite remarkably, Geoffrey kept playing. How he came to have this piano part in his head in anyone’s guess. At the end of the first song, they moved on to the second. By the end of the second, a small audience had gathered, mostly elderly women with shopping bags who had heard the singing as they passed by and now occupied the front row. They began calling out requests, which Gerry and Geoffrey did their best to fulfil. It was a wonderful morning.

  I have a good memory for music, but Geoffrey’s was different because he had the memory in his fingers as much as his head. And it is poignant to remember because, ten or fifteen years later, as his drinking took hold, it was the memory that went. In concerts, he would talk more and more and play less and less; it was as though he talked to put off the playing. Belinda told me that the last time she heard Geoffrey play, at a lunchtime concert in Melbourne, he couldn’t remember some of the simple children’s pieces he had recorded for her on the very first Tall Poppies CD. He would get lost in the middle of quite a short piece and be unable to find his way back to the music, sometimes for minutes, sometimes at all, improvising his way out. When they went for lunch after the concert, Belinda gently brought this up, but Geoffrey didn’t know what she was talking about.

  The memory of music is a curious thing. As a child of seven or eight, I had a book of American folk songs – cowboy songs, mostly – one of which was ‘The Streets of Laredo’. It’s a song about a cowboy who’s been shot and knows he is dying. My sister, Kate, three years my junior, found ‘The Streets of Laredo’ unbearably sad, and so I would sing the song around the house, regularly reducing her to tears. I was not a good brother. But if it was the words that upset her, I quickly worked out that the tune
alone would have the desired effect, and that even the first line of the tune, softly whistled so my parents couldn’t hear, might tip her over the edge. It is an example of a musical signature that encapsulates a whole piece, and no different in this regard to the opening chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ or the first phrase of Beethoven’s fifth. It is hard to remember the whole of a Beethoven symphony unless you’ve studied it, so the opening bars function as a mental sound-bite that embodies the whole structure. This is how we carry music around.

  In 2003 I was fortunate to visit Bob Copper at his home in Peacehaven, near Rottingdean in Sussex on the south coast of England. Bob’s family had lived here since before the Spanish Armada sailed by, up the English Channel. They had also sung together for generations. As a small boy, Bob had learnt traditional songs from his parents and grandparents, uncles and cousins. In the early 1950s, the Copper Family – Bob and his cousin Ron, together with their fathers – were recorded by the BBC and went on to make some records. When I interviewed Bob for The Music Show, he was an 88-year-old paterfamilias singing with his children and grandchildren. Since his death the following year, the Copper Family continues to sing, a centuries-old repository of musical tradition. Bob’s grandfather, known as Brasser, had written down the words of their songs in his bold copperplate (what else?), but Bob talked to me about the way the songs had been preserved in people’s memories.