Geoffrey King

My trip to Venice in October 2011 was in order to attend the premiere of my Concertino, which was written earlier in the year for the Ex Novo Ensemble. The concert took place at the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello where I had been a student of Rubin de Cervin and Sinopoli for one year in the 1970s. (Photos: Roderik de Man)

Metrodorus of Lampsacus

An extraordinary day, yesterday, because of a remarkable dream in the afternoon. I drifted off to sleep after lunch, as I often do, but this time it was a long sleep of perhaps two hours. In the dream I heard the end of the piece I am working on and it was very different to what I had already written. So when I awoke I went to my desk and altered what I had. There is now a sort of battle between two minor triads, with loud thumps on drums.  A minor and G# minor, with G# winning the struggle.

In the evening I went to work and there was that small Asian who is a Christian preacher. He has tried everything he knows to get through to me. Today it was a hand on my shoulder and “I bless you, I really do”, together with “Jesus loves you”. We sat down and began to speak, though these people don’t converse, they just tell you the “good news” and hope you will give up your obstinance and immediately declare fealty to the Lord. No chance.

So against my better judgement I finally said “I am gay and your God obviously didn’t create me because he makes clear in the Bible what he feels about that”. I watched him carefully and my point hit him hard and he was aghast. It was only a micro-second but I saw him flinch. (I am good at reading people like this  -  one of my God-given talents, along with the ability to fall in love with my own sex……). But this guy is a smoothy. He recovered quickly and rather uncertainly started on about homosexuality and sin (“God hates the sin but loves the sinner”). I cut him short.

Before arriving home I called in the café at the end of the street and ordered a dark beer and some nuts. Very nice. I sat there feeling good. It was late and the waiters and waitresses were fussing about cleaning and getting ready to close. Two boys from the kitchen staff were also getting ready to leave and as they were going to and fro they kept stopping in front of a huge mirror and preening themselves as if they were in their own bathrooms. Muslim boys. Absolutely weird and embarrassing  -  the open vanity. Well I once said to Hamish that Moroccans could be the Italians of Holland if they could just dump their religion. I see that I was right. Instead of which they……….well, let’s not get on to that subject.

One final thought occurred to me before I headed home. That I should have been born in ancient Greece as I like both men and philosophy………

GRAVY EVERYWHERE

Finish your plate they said, because Chinese children don’t have enough to eat. Where was the logic to that? Anyway, we had to finish whatever bad-smelling rubbish they put on our plates.

And once, one end of a trestle table we were sitting at collapsed and all the plates slid off on to the floor. Wonderful, but scary. Several of us were called to the headmaster’s office to explain what had happened. Somebody had loosened the screws at one end of the table. Not me.

Oh nice. Gravy everywhere. Boys could have slid around in it, made slides, as they did in the playground during winter time. Long slides, until the bloody teachers put salt on them. .

But I didn’t do it, sir. And I didn’t do it.

Those shit meals, they deserved to be tossed on the floor.

PLASTICINE

Take some plasticine to make a model. You can roll it in your hands and make long worms of it. And eat some on the sly because it tastes nice, though somewhat gritty. .

BUDS

The playground was where boys played football against a wall. They didn’t invite me and I wasn’t interested. I looked instead at the branches of trees. Something sticky there and budding. The teacher brought the branches into the classroom and we watched them explode with green leaves.

YOUR FACE

Your face, like a mask or helmet – perfectly symmetrical – but I didn’t know I loved you, as the word had not yet been born in my mind, let alone in my mouth. Only the feeling was there. But you were definitely a hero, of sorts, me trotting after you like a dog. Until you invited me to go swimming one Saturday morning and I said yes. But didn’t go, out of shame, because I couldn’t actually swim. You were angry and after that we never spoke again.

MR KING, TEACHER OF THE TOP CLASS AT JUNIOR SCHOOL

Frightening old bald man with my father’s name. He loved Gilbert and Sullivan. He asked me to sing some and I sang what I knew and loved – a short cadenza from the Yeoman of the Guard. But he wanted a tune, complete with “comic words”. He showed his disappointment. Another time I stole a swig of some home-made dandelion wine from his cupboard. Daring. And it tasted nice. It’s possible I still like cadenzas more than tunes. And I don’t bother about words, comic, or otherwise.

RADIANCE I – SOMETHING IN THE SKY

Once, sitting on a low wall I saw something bright in the sky. What was that? There were no words even to think it, let alone describe it. But I knew it wasn’t meant to be there.

CRAYONS

The teacher promised us a gift of crayons and I was delighted. But in the end we received only wax ones – which babies used. I took them home. My sister saw me walking up the stairs in a rage and asked what was wrong. I explained and she said she wanted the crayons. I threw them down to her and they broke in pieces at her feet. She cried. We were very poor. Couldn’t even afford coloured pencils. That’s where the rage came from I guess. There was a lot of crying in that freezing cold, dark, empty, broken-down home.

RADIANCE II – A MAN IN BLUE

Once, crossing the road diagonally to our house on Boswell Road, I passed a young man who was so radiant I turned round to stare at him and just stood there. I was too young to know I shouldn’t do that. He was dressed in blue. I would like to know now what that exact image was, because, sometimes, when I see the colour blue, the feeling of that radiance returns – radiance, with no words, like music.

BEST DAY AT SCHOOL

Right before Christmas, we got to make paper chains. The coloured strips had glue on the back which you licked. They came in packets, each packet one colour. You made a circle of one strip, then looped the next one through it, making another circle of that one. And so on, in an interlocking chain. Nowadays I would be busy calculating which order to put the colours in, but in those days, I hadn’t developed an interest in numbers. On the other hand, I still appreciate Christmas for its colours, its lights and the stillness of winter.

Woman With a Cat c.1875 Renoir

Over the summer I worked on a piece for Chinese instruments. It was a frustrating time, just reading about them and listening to recordings, yet not knowing the nuts and bolts in terms of tuning, range and fingering etc. I couldn’t compose with certainty. The sounds of Chinese instruments are absolutely beautiful, however the issue is how to write for them appropriately.

I remember way back in my Royal College of Music days one of my teachers (it was Mr. X, if you must know) saying that he didn’t care how players made the sounds he wrote for them. It was an attitude I found at the time impressive, but nowadays find completely baffling. Why on earth would one NOT care? Mr. X was speaking at a peculiar moment in music history and he was not alone in his attitude. Therefore one cannot condemn him, just condemn the zeitgeist. And condemnation is easier than understanding where someone is coming from and I prefer trying to work that out.

Anyway, finally I threw up my hands in despair and said to my composer friend Luiz Yudo (from whom the idea had come to write such a piece) that I would simply transcribe what I had done for Western instruments. I was angry and didn’t quite manage to spare him from seeing that, even snapping at him when he put pressure on me not to give up.

After I had this conversation with Luiz, I went to bed and dreamed about the issue of the Chinese ensemble in an oblique, yet none the less clear manner. In the dream I had moved to a new house. It was very tall and there were many rooms and a few people already living there. My space was at the top of this house. One of my former partners was in the dream too and I asked him to wait for me in my new rooms. I was apprehensive however that he would run off, as he was nervous and indeed when I returned he was gone  -  but only gone in human form, as he had undergone a surreal transformation from former partner to feline quadruped and was now a nervous black cat hiding under a piece of furniture in the dark.  When I called to him, he came out from his hiding place, cautious but trusting. I woke up with a familiar melody in my mind and understood that this had to be in my new piece. The cat in the dream WAS the melody actually. I woke at five in the morning, but I was really wide awake. I went straight to the desk and back to studying the fingering charts for the Chinese instruments, knowing what I had to do.

Still in the end, a few days later I gave up, defeated by the practical difficulties involved in the novel instrumentation.

When Oliver Knussen and the London Sinfonietta performed my Magritte Weather at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in 2000, I was interviewed on stage by the Stravinsky biographer Stephen Walsh. He asked me a question about the influence of dreams on my work (Magritte Weather had been conceived in a dream and he had spotted the fact in my programme note). It was an awkward moment because I didn’t know how to put into words the considerable influence dreams have on me. Ten years later I give here a good answer to his question.

It was reading Jung back in the late 1960s that first alerted me to the significance of dreams and their influence on human activities.  And I think I was introduced to this literature by my piano teacher, the formidable Alan Rowlands.

Now, a note about that tune and the black cat of my dream. Like a cat, I am often anxious and cautious, for no good reason. Hence, perhaps, my empathy with these furry friends. My family tells me that when I was at the nursery I once carried a cat that lived there all the way home and as I was only 4 when I went to school, I can’t have been more than that when the event took place. I only very faintly remember it, but looking back, I mainly wonder at the way children were handled in those days  -  I think the nurses had given me the cat  -  such a small boy on his own, no doubt struggling with a nervous cat on a busy street, it wouldn’t occur nowadays I imagine.

With regard to the tune that the cat embodied  -  the British organist and composer Michael Bonaventure had been staying with me shortly before all this took place. I took the opportunity to play him this tune which had been in my mind for several years. It’s a chorale, and more English than German. Michael is playing in church every Sunday, so I asked him if it was really my tune or just something remembered. He found some phrases a bit familiar, but that was all, so I got the go-ahead to use it.