by Andrew Ford
‘I find myself singing instinctively,’ he told me. ‘I go out here onto the lawn on a lovely May morning, you know, and you start singing: “How pleasant and delightful on a bright summer’s morn …” A set of circumstances can trigger a song off in your head straight away, and it echoes, and you know that back down that long line of ancestors from which we all come [there] was a person who felt the same as you did about a certain thing: the weather or rough luck or good luck. Through these songs you can get a pretty good feeling and imagination of what it was like to live in those days. Some of them are sheer poetry, by the way, and all preserved in those old people’s minds – most of them illiterate, remember, and yet: “Come write me down, ye powers above, / The man who first created love, / For I’ve a diamond in my eye / Wherein all my joys and comforts lie.”
‘What lovely poetry that was! And it was in those ignorant old men: dirty old men, chewbaccers, spit down on the floor as soon as look at you. And yet they’d got in their head these little bits of poetry and these tender feelings about the sadness of people lost at sea and battles and what have you.’
That’s how music works in our memories and in our lives. Sometimes, when the memory is jogged – by a ‘lovely May morning’, say – the music comes pouring out, and when it is jogged by music, all sorts of things pour out.
When Anni and I became parents, somewhat late in the day, I discovered that being a dad unlocked a surprising number of memories from my own childhood, many of them musical. As I sang to my baby daughter, songs from my own early childhood half a century earlier kept popping into my head, often with complete sets of words.
A baby changes everything, as I was the last among my friends to discover, and if your work involves dredging up music from your imagination, a baby will certainly affect that. The day after Elsie was born, I sat down to write a musical setting of Jane Taylor’s poem, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, all five verses of it. I called my version ‘Little Star’ and wrote a gently meandering harp accompaniment to my vocal line. Looking at my daughter, still only hours old, it seemed apt to ask the existential question ‘How I wonder what you are.’
The next piece I wrote, You Must Sleep, but I Must Dance, for viola and percussion, was inspired by pram-pushing. Not only did the exercise in pursuit of a sleeping infant remind me of Cormac McCarthy’s line (misquoted, by the way, from Theodor Storm, who had it the other way round), but the tune that dominates the final movement occurred to me while out pushing, our walk, on this occasion, curtailed so I could get home to write it all down.
The idea of Blitz had already occurred to me before Elsie was even conceived, but when I came to write it the year after her birth, it was impossible not to think of children under dropping bombs without thinking of Syria, and, as every parent knows, it is hard to see children in harm’s way on the nightly news without personalising it. Children get everywhere in your life.
Becoming a father is daunting, especially if you’ve reached the age of fifty-three without it happening before. I spoke to several colleagues with experience in the area and received advice about time management. Brett Dean told me I’d learn to do seven hours work in forty-five minutes; Damien Ricketson said I’d learn new respect for first thoughts, though I can’t say this has always been the case. When Elsie was born, nearly everyone told me to treasure the first weeks, months, years, because ‘they grow up so fast’ – a cliché, obviously, but no less true for that. Only one person, the soprano Jane Edwards, said that it gets better, but this is what I’ve found.
What I was not prepared for was how fascinating it would be, watching and hearing a child grow up, and part of that is the forming of her musical tastes. It started with Bach. As a newborn baby, Elsie responded visibly to The Well-tempered Clavier (played on the piano by Roger Woodward), the preludes and fugues seeming to attract her attention and hold it for a while. No other music did this. I guess it must have been the constant affect of the pieces, the unchanging pulse, and that it would be the same for most babies and most baroque music. But the first taste she formed for herself was a love of the Beatles. I’d been sent CDs of The Beatles at the BBC, radio recordings from Saturday Club and Easybeat, which in some cases I had heard as a child. I thought I might write about them for Inside Story, the online journal to which I contribute a monthly music column. So I put the CDs in the car and listened as I drove around. Often enough Elsie, now three years old, was in the back, and it wasn’t long before she was calling out requests: ‘Play “Yeah Yeah”, Daddy!’ Then came demands for more songs and for information about the singers. Before I knew it she had Beatlemania, and I was obliged to attempt ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ (she called it ‘Busy Miss Lizzy’) as a bedtime lullaby.
I was listening to the Beatles more than at any time since my own childhood, the house suddenly and repeatedly ringing to Rubber Soul and Revolver. And the sound of our house changed in another significant way. We became a bilingual home, Anni speaking to Elsie only in Finnish, as Elsie’s command of the language quickly surpassed my own feeble attempts to learn it.
The main musical project Elsie inspired was an album of children’s songs, There Was a Man Lived in the Moon. Some of them were composed by me – for instance, ‘Little Star’ – but most were arrangements of traditional nursery rhymes. I had come to feel as though I was a conduit for these rhymes, put in my head by my mother in the late 1950s and early 1960s and now being passed on to my daughter, and this CD was a tangible result. ‘Have You Seen the Muffin Man?’, ‘Incy Wincy Spider’ and ‘Lavender’s Blue’ are songs that everyone knows in one version or another, and it was both a pleasure and also quite hard work finding new chords and instrumental colours for the songs, freshening them up without spoiling their simplicity.
I made each arrangement for a different combination of instruments (I wanted the album to function as a ‘Young Person’s Guide’ to instruments of the orchestra), but the singing was shared between Teddy Tahu Rhodes and Jane Sheldon, two artists for whom I have enormous respect. In addition to the well-known songs, I also included some that were childhood favourites of mine and my mum’s. ‘The Tailor and the Mouse’, for example, is a song I associate only with Mum. I can’t remember anyone else singing it or ever hearing it on the radio: we’re in the realms, here, of oral tradition. The song had quickly become a favourite of Elsie’s, but in the recording studio it turned out no one else knew it – not Teddy, not the players, not Virginia Read the producer. Since the album came out, I’ve received a number of letters from members of the public saying it’s become their favourite track. So the oral tradition is apparently alive; the conduit is functioning.
Because composers tend to work at home, it is inevitable that their home lives will impinge on their work, and not always in a helpful way. It is also inevitable that the events of their lives will affect their music. When my father died unexpectedly at the end of 2012, I was in a busy period of composing, with two pieces nearly finished – a fourth string quartet and On Reflection for the two-piano team of Liam Viney and Anna Grinberg; there was also a fifth quartet waiting in the wings. I managed to complete the fourth quartet before flying to England for the funeral, and On Reflection on my return. Both turned out to be angrier pieces than I was expecting. But the fifth quartet, which I dedicated to my father’s memory, was the piece I was always intending to write, except in one particular.
When I was commissioned by the Australian String Quartet to write a piece for their 2013 season, I immediately had the structure in my head. My fifth quartet would be in a single continuous movement of approximately fifteen minutes, and at its heart would be an expansive tune to which everything else would relate. The only hymn sung at Dad’s funeral was ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’, better known as ‘To Be a Pilgrim’, which had been Dad’s school song. It’s a great hymn: John Bunyan’s words, tidied up to suit modern Christian sensibilities (sadly, the ‘hobgoblin’ had to go) and put to a folk tune adapted by Vaughan Williams for The English Hymnal. Vaugha
n Williams, in fact, had collected the tune himself from Mrs Harriet Verrall of Monk’s Gate in Sussex, about twenty-five miles north of the Coppers’ home down on the coast. In the hymn book, the tune is called ‘Monk’s Gate’. It wasn’t the expansive tune I’d first imagined (it’s actually rather jaunty), but after the funeral I couldn’t get it out of my head – I found myself whistling it at Dubai airport on the journey home – so I decided to use it in the quartet. Fragments of the tune are heard from the very start as they build towards a complete statement of ‘Monk’s Gate’ around the ten-minute mark, and there’s hardly a bar of the piece that doesn’t make some reference to it.
As I was completing my quartet, Margaret Thatcher died, and ‘To Be a Pilgrim’ was sung at her funeral by 2000 people in St Paul’s Cathedral. My father had loathed ‘that woman’, and not only because her policies had cost him his job. Shortly after she arrived at Downing Street in 1979, with a prayer from St Francis of Assisi and a package of neo-liberal austerity, Dad had been one of her earliest casualties, BAT suddenly able to manage without his clerking. But if he felt sorry for himself – and he did – he felt sorrier for those who didn’t have a solid pension to fall back on, or a wife who was by now a school principal. The point is that had Thatcher died before Dad, we would surely not have sung ‘To Be a Pilgrim’ at his funeral, knowing it had been sung at hers, and so my fifth string quartet would sound very different.
‘Monk’s Gate’ is a generous tune. By that, I mean its melody is wide-ranging, its rhythm unpredictable and its metrical gait delightfully lopsided. There is also something generous about the way Vaughan Williams used it. A lifelong believer in musical communities, he conducted amateur choirs and encouraged ordinary people to sing. I’m sure this is why, although an atheist, he accepted the editorship of the The English Hymnal. He believed, as Peter Sculthorpe did, that music brings people together. In putting ‘Monk’s Gate’ in the hymn book, he was liberating the tune from Mrs Verrall’s memory and making it available to millions of others.
One reason I wanted to use it in my quartet was that Dad was a generous man. Generous to his family, but also to numerous charities and to strangers who came calling at the house. I learnt, after his death, that he’d been on first-name terms with a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses who had become semi-regulars on his doorstep, and with whom he was always happy to chat. In the unlikely event that Margaret Thatcher had dropped by, I dare say even she’d have been offered a cup of tea.
I’m talking, I suppose, about generosity of spirit, about openness. This is the only useful attitude to adopt in the face of art. If you are suspicious of a new piece of music, demanding that it prove itself to you, you are unlikely to get much from it. If you’re open-minded, open-eared, open-hearted, if you have a little faith, the music may speak to you. That isn’t to say you will necessarily like it or that it will be any good. You might be grievously disappointed. That’s the price frequently paid by the open-hearted. You believe the best of someone and they let you down. But the alternative is to put up the shutters, to harden your heart, to close your ears and your mind. Then you’re like the man at Lord’s.
Music is participatory. Not necessarily in the way Vaughan Williams hoped for – you don’t have to sing along. If you bring your ears to it, your imagination and your memory, you will be participating.
Some music can appear forbidding, but it’s not usually the music’s fault. If you worry you’re not cool enough for hip-hop or serious enough for jazz, or not sufficiently like the late Lord Boyle to appreciate the piano quartets of Fauré, you are worrying about the wrong thing. Music isn’t like advanced physics, which would be hard to grasp without a knowledge of elementary physics. With music you can jump in anywhere: Snoop Dogg, Sonny Rollins, Joni Mitchell, Wagner, Sami yoiking, klezmer, Pauline Oliveros. If the music doesn’t appeal to you, get out and jump in somewhere else. You will find something that does appeal and, before you know it, like Elsie with the Beatles, you’ll want to know more.
But you may also discover that some music which didn’t, at first, speak to you has lodged in your memory and is calling you back to listen again, for often enough the memory of music has little to do with reason or good sense. On the contrary, it is mostly non-sense, and it lies too deep for words.
Acknowledgements
A few of these words have appeared in print before in slightly different forms. The paragraphs about my school choir, Headlong and a couple of paragraphs from the introduction appeared first in Inside Story; the first part of Chapter 3 was written for Meanjin (Summer 2016) under the title ‘God and I’. My thanks to the editors, respectively, Peter Browne and Jonathan Green. At Black Inc. I must thank Chris Feik, Patrizia di Biase-Dyson, Julian Welch, Kirstie Innes-Will and Georgina Garner.
Thanks to my mother and sister for helping with my memory; likewise Mark Lawrence, Roger Ashton-Griffiths, Graham Devlin, John Davis, Maureen Cooney, Penny Lomax and Belinda Webster. Thanks to Cathy Strickland and Tim Pye for lending me their beach house to finish the book, and to Cathy for enthusiastically reading chapters. My main thanks, as always, go to Anni Heino, who read everything first and made unfailingly useful and constructive criticisms, and also to our daughter, Elsie, who, in a way, inspired this book.
Chronological selection of pieces by Andrew Ford
1976 A Salt Girl (lost)
Rounds and Hollows (lost)
1977 Flowers of Orcus (lost)
1978 Sonata for Four Instruments
1979 Chamber Concerto No 1
1980 Concerto for Orchestra
1981 Portraits
Wedding Songs
Est il paradis?
1982 Boatsong
Epilogue to an Opera
1983 Chamber Concerto No 2: Cries in Summer
Poe
1984 Like Icarus Ascending
A Terrible Whiteness
1985 Sacred Places
From Hand to Mouth
String Quartet No 1
1986 The Big Parade
Five Cabaret Songs
A Martian Sends a Postcard Home
On Canaan’s Happier Shore
1987 Swansong
A Kumquat for John Keats
1988 The Piper’s Promise
The World Knot
Chamber Concerto No 3: In Constant Flight
1989 Wassails & Lullabies
The Art of Puffing: 17 Elegies for Thomas Chatterton
Parabola
1990 Ringing the Changes
Whispers
1991 Pastoral
The Laughter of Mermaids
Piano Concerto: Imaginings
1992 Harbour
… les débris d’un rêve
In somnia
1993 Jouissance
The Widening Gyre
Mondriaan
Composition in Blue, Grey and Pink
1994 The Great Memory
A Salt Girl (recomposed)
1995 Casanova Confined
Dancing with Smoke
1996 Rough Magic
Dance Maze
1997 The Past
1998 The Unquiet Grave
Tattoo
Icarus Drowning
1999 Hymn to the Sun
Manhattan Epiphanies
Night and Dreams: the Death of Sigmund Freud
The Furry Dance
2000 The Very End of Harvest
2001 Learning to Howl
2002 Tales of the Supernatural
The Waltz Book
Asides on the Oboe
Chamber Concerto No 4
2003 Fear No More …
2004 The Crantock Gulls
The Armed Man
War and Peace
2005 Sad Jigs
An die Musik
2006 Scenes from Bruegel
Barleycorn
Oma kodu
A Reel, a Fling and a Ghostly Galliard (String Quartet No 2)
Headlong
2007 Elegy in a Country Graveyard
Bagpipe Music
Domestic Advice
2008 The Tears of Geertje Dircx
Symphony
A Singing Quilt
2009 Rembrandt’s Wife
Bright Shiners
Willow Songs
The Musical Child
Rauha
2010 Nine Fantasies About Brahms
The Rising
Little Star
The Scattering of Light
You Must Sleep, but I Must Dance
2011 Blitz
Waiting for the Barbarians
2012 Hear the Bird of Day
String Quartet No 3
String Quartet No 4
2013 On Reflection
Uproar
String Quartet No 5
Untuning the Sky
Australian Aphorisms
Last Words
Once Upon a Time There Were Two Brothers …
2014 Slow Air
A Pitch Dark Night
After the Visitors
Common Ground
2015 There Was a Man Lived in the Moon
The Drowners
Missa Brevis
Contradance
2016 Raga
In transit
Comeclose and Sleepnow
Never
2017 No One Could Relax around Jezebel
Peter Pan
For more details about these pieces, visit www.andrewford.net.au.
Discography
Numerous individual pieces by Andrew Ford can be found on releases from ABC Classics, Attacca-Babel, Halcyon, Move, Tall Poppies, Vexations 840 and Vox Australis, and there are plenty of pieces on YouTube and Ford’s own Soundcloud (www.sound-cloud.com/drandrewford).
The following are discs devoted to Ford’s music.
There Was a Man Lived in the Moon (ABC Classics)
Little Star, Nonsense, Golden Slumbers and arrangements of nursery rhymes and folk songs
Jane Sheldon, Teddy Tahu Rhodes
Learning to Howl (ABC Classics)
Learning to Howl, Snatches of Old Lauds, Sounds and Sweet Airs, Elegy in a Country Graveyard, The Birthday of My Life