memories

When that I was and a little tiny boy………….

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ct-jester_14253_lgGRAVY 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.

A tune, a dream, a cat

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Woman With a Cat c.1875 Renoir

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.

Open and closed

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117af-magritte-rene-la-victoire-9952604In 1987/88, when I was (briefly) doing a composer-in-residence job in the north of England, I started going out with a guy I met there. He wasn’t a student but was that sort of age. He’d left school and was already working. I was cheating on my partner, who lived in another city far away, so I was feeling uneasy about that. One day the young guy told me his favourite singer was Tracy Chapman. I smiled at him sweetly thinking to myself: “Why am I with this moron who likes pop music?” I assumed directly that Tracy Chapman was some pop bimbo of the moment. But actually I didn’t know anything about her………….so my reaction was pure prejudice, pure snobbery. And, as I indicate, it was deceitful, because my thoughts were not “sweet”. In fact it was deceit within deceitfulness, given the circumstances. Crystalline deceit, lies reflecting from every wall…..

Today, nearly 23 years on, I watched a video of Tracy Chapman’s song “Fast Car”. I’d been attracted to this song which was coming over the radio at work and elsewhere. I didn’t know what it was and I decided to track it down. Imagine my surprise when I found out…..

I loved it. It’s gorgeous. She’s gorgeous.

It’s a long time to be mistaken about something, but realizing the error is not an unpleasant experience. On the contrary, it’s interesting. Suddenly discovering such a “mistake”, if that’s the correct word, half a lifetime later shines a light on my then ignorance. And it shines a light on my then prejudice and snobbery. Also it shines a light on now. I think I am “open” today but perhaps I am simply “closed” in new ways. Am I open, am I closed? Am I good, am I bad? The questions are not futile, just tricky.

“Know thyself” seems to be a saying featured in nearly every religious text. I am guessing though that to achieve such an understanding requires opening up your heart and seeing everything that is there..

Lady Beltham enquires about John Cage

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belthamThe Lady Beltham [maîtresse de Fantômas] interviews Geoffrey King about the work of John Cage.

Lady B: What is your opinion of John Cage?
G.K: Well, I’m surprised to see you here.

A spirit can roam about, to some extent.
Apparently. Anyway, I’ll have to rephrase your question in order to answer it. I don’t have much of an opinion about Cage, but I do have some feelings and thoughts.

Ok, your feelings and thoughts on this topic then.
I am interested in the man’s writings and also in his music. The mesostics don’t interest me but I have seen some art work that I enjoyed. I met Cage twice. The first time was in Edinburgh and the second time was in The Hague where I was studying in the late 80s. I remember also a concert at the Royal Albert Hall where he appeared with some other performers. I walked out of that.

That was impolite and also “avoiding the topic”. Why did you walk out?
Cage and the other performer were fiddling around making noises with transistor radios. There was a big audience and I noticed a young man dressed in hippy style swaying to and fro as if transported into some state of enjoyment. I walked out after that in a state of indignation.

Why indignation?
Because I thought the event was pretentious.

Have you something against hippies?
Nothing I could formulate. But I can say that any discussion of marijuana and recreational drugs in general is extremely tedious to me. Say, as tedious as hearing about the inner workings of a car.
We did not have hippies in my day, but they are not just about drugs are they? I regard the automobile as a quite remarkable invention by the way.

Cars in your day were worth looking at. I feel sure you’re right about hippies and drugs. What are these people about actually?
I don’t know, nor even if they exist anymore. I move in entirely different circles.
Yes, your boyfriend’s a murderer and a thief. Quite a special circle that.

You do not know how appealing he is.
I can imagine. Anyway hippies are just one of the many issues I feel I ought to know about, but don’t, and probably never will.

Back to Cage. Any other thoughts or feelings about him?
Yes, I remember a concert in Edinburgh that included a work of his. I was very struck by that.

Why?
Well you have to know the context. It was just one item in a concert of contemporary music. The other pieces did not involve the performers in chance procedures. But for me the random juxtapositions in the Cage made for the most interesting harmony of the night That’s when the penny dropped. It was a large penny and it dropped a long way.

Oh I adore large pennies. But what do you mean precisely?
Well, think about it. One composer spends days and weeks and months trying to write “the right vertical note combinations” whilst another sets up some method whereby you get random juxtapositions, but his harmonic results are better. If this were science, I would say that was a pretty conclusive experiment.

And your conclusion?
Don’t waste time and effort organizing something that works better when done randomly. Birtwistle describes somewhere exactly this phenomenon. He talks about a group of actors walking on stage and how if you just let that happen randomly it looks much more convincing than if you direct them where to stand. Random numbers are important in Birtwistle’s music and I think that may have had a big impact on me from about 1990. I think the large ensemble work of mine: Magritte Weather is the first piece that resorts to these methods of creation. As the title perhaps indicates, the randomness cultivated by the surrealists had also had an impact on me.

I still want to nail you down regarding Cage. Is he a great influence on you? Is he of great importance in the history of our times?
What I know is that if you hand me some of his writings I’m going to find them interesting. My impression of the man is that he knows his own mind and can speak it. How many of us can say that? Most of us are too scared to poke our noses out of our mouse holes. But also I simply like some of his music. It refreshes me. He does the things other people don’t think of doing, or dare to do. He dares to be simple and dares not to attempt all that flashy whooshing around we go in for.

Any other memories?
Yes a very odd one. At the Royal College of Music in the early 70s there was a concert of music conducted by Ferneyhough. Somewhere in that there was a Cage piece. It was “realized” for a little chamber ensemble, maybe 5 or 6 musicians – I forget. Anyway, at the College there was a Cage-ian composer called Malcolm Fox. With his background as a connoisseur, he had arrived at the opinion that this particular performance was somehow against the spirit of Cage and decided to make a protest. Shortly after the performance began, in he came, carrying a wooden step ladder which he set up behind the conductor. He mounted to the top and waved his arms about in a clownish imitation of beating time. He was carrying a double bass bow. He climbed down and lay on the floor, placing the bow between his legs just by his balls, pointing upwards. He started to “masturbate”. This was a moment of considerable embarrassment as you can imagine. John Lambert walked out looking very indignant. I myself was unsure whether this was how the piece was meant to be – you never know, do you..

The sight of a man simulating masturbation on a concert platform is certainly an image to be reckoned with. How did you feel?
Embarrassed.

Is that all?
Well it was “scandalicious” AFTER the event, but DURING, it was excruciating. By the way, I really don’t care for people miming sexual acts on stage (though I’d make at least one exception for the brilliant Danse Sacrale of Béjart, but that’s a whole different story). And stage nudity is generally irksome. I don’t even like dance companies (you know who you are) whose posters regularly feature semi naked dancers.
By the way, Malcolm Fox was then (or shortly before, or shortly after, I forget) my roommate. On the one hand he wrote very good academic exercises and his theory teacher was pleased with him. On the other hand he wrote these Cage-ian works. That struck me as weirdly polarized. Later on I found a similar polarity in quite a few composers – for example an interest in big fat juicy music from the late 19th century combined with an inclination to write thin bloodless music when it came to creating their own stuff. I’ve always wondered why these “Mahler fans” don’t put the “Mahler” into their own pieces. Probably naïve of me.

I find your musings about psychology of interest. But let’s stick to something concrete. Give me your opinion of Cage. Is he a great man? A great creative artist?
Well he’s a famous man, that’s clear, and he’s someone I admire. I’m looking forward to learning more about him and his work. I am very interested in his use of chance processes in creating music. Possibly this came about, as I say, because of my interest in surrealism and in Birtwistle. But certainly I’ve been struck by the odd parallel with Cage in my own recent work – he is after all a person for whom I had absolutely no respect when I was a student.

You haven’t given me what I was looking for. Is it so hard for you to come up with a clear statement about the worth of this composer?
Shut your mouth.

Alan Rowlands and John Ireland

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rowlandsI have been listening to Alan Rowlands’ new triple CD of John Ireland’s music (Lyrita Ream 3112).

http://www.lyrita.co.uk/

Alan was my piano teacher at the Royal College of Music in London in the late 1960s. He also became a close friend, though in subsequent decades we saw little of each other. But our friendship remains and in a few weeks he will visit me in Amsterdam for the first time.

He is a tremendous pianist, but within that musical excellence there is something more special still. (I don’t refer to the unusual musical gifts he has – being able to go to the piano and give a pretty good rendition of bits he has liked from a new work just heard on the radio, or during conversation leaping up to play a few bars from a Beethoven symphony to illustrate some point – these Glazunov-like gifts are impressive of course). What’s so special is Alan’s engagement with the music of his time. He had a real bond with John Ireland. And this is what is good, that a performer has had at some stage (probably when he/she was very young) a proper bond with a living composer – something deep, that matters and has consequences. Let’s not mix that up with the sort of association that happens later on – where collaborations can be little more than shallow money earning ventures and sometimes quite dispiriting.

Of the other half of Alan’s life – his work as an Alexander teacher, or his fascination with Douglas Harding, Krishnamurti and more recently Ramana Maharshi – I can’t say much, as I have little interest in these things. But I have today been rereading Harding’s “On Having No Head”.

http://www.headless.org

Now back to John Ireland. As I say, I have been listening to his piano music. It is so familiar, so English………….so pleasing in many ways, yet I am struck by a “what if?” What if one were to rewrite certain ideas, turning them upside down, back to front, so to speak?

Alan worked closely with the composer on his interpretations and I have no reason to believe that he goes against his wishes. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that Ireland was well satisfied with the results of the collaboration. So when I target the performance of Chelsea Reach* (the first of the three “London Pieces”) it is not in a spirit of quibbling about performance, but instead to raise an artistic issue.

The rhythm of Chelsea Reach is very basic – almost entirely quarter notes, yet they are not played as such – these are “quarter notes” and not quarter notes. The beats are almost always delayed and by so doing you set up a polarity. You drift between strict and free. The word rubato is used for this. Some music teachers use the word “musical”, as in “he plays so musically”. It is in fact a routine addition to notated music in this period and when one is young and learning, it seems matter of fact and nothing worth commenting on. It’s as obvious as letting a woman go first through a door. Normal, one can say, except when viewed from a different cultural perspective.

When you view this issue of “rubato” from a distance, it appears anything but normal. It appears to me as extremely effete in fact. I haven’t just had this reaction, I’ve seen it in myself for a long time. And I’ve written something about a related issue – the custom of slowing right at the end of a piece and pausing very long on the last chord. This is uncomfortable for me – something like soap under the nails.

If I speak of a polarity, then I can develop that metaphor and begin to speak about “distance”. In the second of the London Pieces: Ragamuffin we are confronted by proletarian material. The composer let’s us know by the way he handles this that he has taken a distance from his material – he is no proletarian. In the strongly class orientated structure of English society this makes perfect sense. Why wouldn’t he take a distance from “street” material? The interesting question is “if you have to take a distance, why are you using street material anyway?”

If there were no distance, then what? If there were no rubato, then what? As I said, I am not criticizing anything here, I am raising “what ifs”. What if the last 30 seconds of Aubade were the beginning of a piece rather than an ending? That final descending fifth might be allowed to drift on, to multiply, in other words, you might like to imagine the music “after the ending.” Ditto the last 20 seconds of Equinox. Ditto the last 10 seconds of Sarnia – An Island Sequence. Ditto the last staccato chord of the Sonatina which is mainly there to thrill us into applause. Where could we put that in order to make another use of it?

I’m afraid I’m not much of a critic. First I can’t think of words to assign to feelings, second I get the urge to rewrite other people’s music and third, I am too soft hearted to do much damage. My beloved composition teacher Rubin de Cervin said to me this summer that “kitsch exists in order to protect us from the horror that is life”. Perhaps we can bear that in mind when listening to Ireland’s piano music. About where on the “scale of horror” does it appear?

Finally, talking once again about “street” musical material, Michael Bonaventure (my great mate, the Scottish organist) was here a few weeks back and we listened together in hysterics to two tracks from Russ Conway – his Roulette and his Lesson One. This is street stuff, real prole stuff, and no mediation whatsoever. The modulations are like gear shifts in a rusty old car. One of those black ones I remember from my childhood – on the floor by the back seat there will be a couple of screwed up tissues stained yellow with dried spunk. The music smells of beer, tobacco and urinals. …….We were talking about Russ Conway (a popular pianist in England from long ago) because I was telling a story about my dad sort of falling in love with him at one stage – we even had a picture on the mantelpiece…………(round about the time when dad went to see him at the London Palladium).

I myself like popular music very much and certainly don’t want to take any distance from it. Not at all. I think I speak for Michael when I say that the laughter we shared was one of joy – joy in the earthy aspect of English culture that goes along with the effete aspect. But then Michael next moment will be off to do a recital in Westminster Abbey, and I will be off upstairs to write a Sinfonietta. So I think it should begin to be obvious why he is such a great mate of mine…………

* [Rowlands has a nice story about Rachmaninov once telling Ireland that he liked his “Chelsea Leech”].

Secrets

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acornsEach trip I make to see my teacher in the north of Italy is different. Perhaps because the house is so remote, one tends to meet oneself there, not a pleasant experience. For the first three nights there were bad nightmares.

But dreams never fail to surprise me. Last night, for example, I was inspecting my own grave with a friend, discussing how far my body had rotted away……………

Right before I left for Italy, I had to write very fast an eight minute movement for small orchestra, consisting of four chamber music groups brought together for the occasion. Altogether, the ensemble was 2 oboes, 5 violins, 3 violas, 3 cellos and a bass. I added to that a percussionist, because the idea was to perform the piece without conductor. In the end however I had to conduct (the premiere was yesterday), as the musicians did not have sufficient time to rehearse.

I have a very bad characteristic – having finished a work, I am not really interested to hear it. I just want to move on to the next one. So, already in Italy I filled up loads of paper with ideas (I put it no higher than that). And I do like most of all composing at a desk with just paper and pen, but this time I did something that I perhaps never did before. I went to the kitchen to work whilst chatting with the cook – well tease him actually – and therefore only half concentrated on what I was doing. That produces very interesting results……Well you have to understand that I am very much of the Max Ernst school – down on my knees inspecting the floorboards, so to speak…………(*)

Lots of gossip where I was, but one has to be discreet………But I can say that at last I met someone who can help me with a text for the string quartet (the piece I have been mentioning ever since I began this blog). I think I have probably written already enough music for ten string quartets. However I have all along been after something very elusive. I’ve been like a hunter tracking down some shy animal.

A few walks in the forest near my teacher’s house. I visited my favourite tree, with some friends. One of them appalled me by picking off a large lump of bark, then throwing it on the ground. I picked it up and bought it back with me to Amsterdam. Another time, one in our little party actually climbed the tree. I tried to stop him, but he was showing off, so no use. Anyway, discussing the age of the old oak, the general consensus was that it could well be 600-700 years old. So with some quick reckoning we worked out that Guillaume de Machaut could have been alive in its early days. I pointed out that it will still be there when we are all gone. But that didn’t spoil the general good humour……… We moved on chattering away, only the tree and myself knowing that we had some secrets together, though I suppose also that those in the party may have noticed at some subliminal level something a little odd. If so, their dreams will report it to them. What are dreams for, if not to discuss all the things we noticed, without noticing them?

* “In art, frottage is an “automatic” method of creation developed by Max Ernst. The artist makes a “rubbing” of a textured surface a bit like a brass rubbing in a church. Frottage however is not concerned with conventional images but is instead aleatoric/improvisational/random in nature. The result can be left as it is, or used as the basis for further elaboration. The method was developed by Ernst in drawings made from 1925 onwards. Ernst was inspired by an ancient wooden floor where the grain of the planks had been accentuated by many years of scrubbing. The patterns of the graining suggested images to him. He captured these by laying sheets of paper on the floor and then rubbing over them with a soft pencil“.

……back to Croydon

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croydenI was born in Thornton Heath, Croydon, England, in 1949 and spent the first seven years of my life there, moving to a large estate on the edge of Croydon (New Addington) just before my eighth birthday. The estate (what the British call a “council estate”) is near Addington Village and also Addington Palace. In those days, the former archbishops’ summer palace was the headquarters of the Royal School of Church Music, and I became a chorister there. Living in public housing as I did was more than a mark of poverty for me. As a child I felt a stigma attached to it – the poverty was, somehow, shameful.

It is May 21st and I have returned to Croydon – the first time in many years (I have not lived in Croydon since 1970). Today was the centenary of my father’s birth and I came to visit his grave and pay my respects. He is buried in Bandon Hill cemetery, a short bus ride from West Croydon Station. The grave is on a hillside and all the headstones are arranged in neat lines, except that my father’s grave has no headstone. I was visiting Croydon, partly, in order to make arrangements for that. I learned that there is room for another family member to be buried in the same plot. It was daunting going back, I had been dreading it. In the event, things proved easier then I feared. I had not been to the area since 1977 (for the funeral) and I had no idea where it was.

I sat for a little while and tried to speak to my father. But in the end all I could bring myself to say was “I didn’t treat you very well”. He left hundreds of diaries in which he detailed the mental suffering he had to endure. There was no lasting way out for him. None of this is happy, not then and not now.

I did not consult a map and I do not know in which direction the hillside faces, but I had the idea that all the corpses were lined up facing Croydon, as if to contemplate a life that had been lived. (My father only ever once moved from Croydon – to Mullingar in County Westmeath situated in the Irish Midlands. His mother was from an Irish family and for one year during WWI he was evacuated there). So virtually his whole life was lived in Croydon. It is where his dreams gradually turned into a nightmare.

As I left the cemetery I paused and thought I should turn back. I had said and done almost nothing it seemed. But I didn’t return. Instead I found a very humble café just down the road and sat there thinking about things. I ordered a mug of tea and ate some cake with a strange yellow icing, tasting of marzipan. It was served by a middle aged man with dyed blond hair and several rings on his fingers – gay, so I thought. I looked at him, or rather, probed him, feeling both sorry for him and repulsed. I sat in a sort of cozy daze. After a time I realized the irony of eating cake on my dad’s birthday and dedicated the meal to him. Then I realized I was sitting too long and the owner was waiting to close the place, and I left.
I traveled back to London feeling as if I’d just had that stock fictional experience – an astronaut returns home to earth to find a hundred years have gone by. Everyone he knew is dead and everything has changed…………………………… Croydon was recognizably the same, yet also completely changed.

All greased up

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Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon

Hamish and I almost ran out of stories to tell each other (we are friends since 1984) and he finds it ridiculous how I start to tell him something that he’s heard three or four times already. For my part, I find some of his interests – military uniforms, orders of chivalry, royal palaces, etc. – fairly tedious. He does go on about these things. Conversely, as I fill in the fine detail of my artistic, religious and psychological preoccupations (they can be quite dark) I occasionally catch him drifting off to sleep. If I speak sharply to him, he quickly clicks back into consciousness.

To add to the boredom of our friendship (we’re starting to sit in silence like an old married couple), Hamish just cooks pasta. I don’t wish to misrepresent his culinary skills – we did have stir-fry once or twice – but you can only eat so much pasta before starting to long for something more traditional. Amongst all the ludicrous snobberies that we have to endure, the one about English food is high up on my list of irritations. Why are meat and two veg. so risible? And would my cultivated friends die if they were obliged to eat a plate of sausage, chips and baked beans with a bit of HP sauce on the side? And a slice of white bread? And a cup of milky tea? This is the stuff you eat in “greasy spoons”. Good fun. If I’m with my friend Michael Bonaventure, he’ll light up a cigarette when he’s finished. We can sit there for hours on end like that. But Michael is a total diamond. He agrees with me that you need a well done sausage in your mouth now and again.

Anyway, back to Hamish’s visit. We got in some nice walks, albeit coughing all the way (we both had ‘flu). We went first to Erasmuspark and then, finally, when we felt a bit stronger, to Rembrandtpark as well. I enjoy Rembrandtpark, even though it’s ugly. It has stupid modern bridges, and only a single nice wooden one. (H. photographed me standing there). We enjoyed some of the tall modern apartment blocks adjacent to the park. Nice feeling. Probably Rembrandtpark is quite cruisy at night…..I imagine. Why wouldn’t it be? Well, I’ll not be going there to find out, so, whatever. But this is a topic – the behaviour of gay men – that crops up frequently in our discussions. That whole Hampstead Heath thing, and my view that in some ancient societies (ancient Greece for example) orgiastic behaviour was integrated into religious practice. But we like our purity and innocence, don’t we. Oh we do, we do. Now I remind myself of my most hated hymn at school……

All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful: The Lord God made them all. Each little flower that opens, Each little bird that sings, He made their glowing colors, He made their tiny wings. The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, He made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate. The purple headed mountains, The river running by, The sunset and the morning That brightens up the sky. The cold wind in the winter, The pleasant summer sun, The ripe fruits in the garden, He made them every one. The tall trees in the greenwood, The meadows where we play, The rushes by the water, To gather every day. He gave us eyes to see them, And lips that we might tell How great is God Almighty, Who has made all things well.

Even as a child, being stuck in an assembly hall full of kids singing. All things bright and beautiful was murder. And as I always say, children have all of the feelings and none of the words. So I didn’t know how to say who are you fucking kidding?

And there, in the greenwood, someone wearing nothing but a leather jacket and a pair of army boots is bent over by a tree getting fucked by a row of men. Each little flower that opens………… tra la la.

Attraction

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Edward Frederick Brewtnall - Sleeping Beauty

Edward Frederick Brewtnall – Sleeping Beauty

I continue to be troubled by something in the past. I have explained it before, but no explanation removes the anger about what must have been a big trauma for me. What I have grown to despise is that whole world of “how can you like/do that?” I remember a composition teacher at the Royal College of Music looking at a piece of mine which had a dreamy ending disappearing al niente. He said “you don’t need to do that”. He meant I shouldn’t write something sentimental like that. He didn’t say it, but he meant “we don’t do that”. And “we” meant “the club”. It was that whole golf club thing actually, but, bizarrely, transposed to a London conservatory and to a class dealing with contemporary music. “We aren’t sentimental, we aren’t nostalgic”. “One doesn’t do that”. “No we don’t find that acceptable”.

Incidentally, I have meant in recent years to base a piece entirely on that al niente figure. Maybe I should dedicate such a piece to that distinguished old R.C.M gentleman. But there are so many more interesting things to do…

When you are young you hear a lot about what is and is not good behaviour. If you take it all in, and keep to it, you can belong to the club. You are true to the club but not necessarily true to yourself. Every married homosexual living in the bible belt of America knows precisely what I am talking about here.
This evening by chance, I heard a Bette Midler song and was quite attracted to some chord progressions during the course of it. Do I have to go back to my old professor and ask his permission to like that? Well that’s not necessary, because if the professor was a powerful character, he still sits there, inside my head, and a disembodied voice just has to say “you can’t like/do that”. So you won’t like/dare to do it. That is “training” like dog training. It’s a voice amongst a collection in your head that I call “the taste police”.

I can’t claim that I am completely free of taste “training”, even at my age (59). Indeed a voice does pop up now and again to say to me “you can’t like/do that”. But I grew hostile to that voice long ago and I grew conversely more attentive to what attracts ME. And I say that there is one freedom that no one can take away from you:- the (secret, if necessary) knowledge of what attracts you. You can cloak it, yes, but that’s another discussion.

Now there is a problem inherent in this call for freedom. First, not everything that attracts a man is tolerable. Those ghastly men in this world who would enjoy to torture an animal, are not to be tolerated, of course. Maybe God loves them, but I certainly hate them. There is something peculiarly and uniquely terrible about cruelty to animals. But we are speaking of music and the difference between someone liking Johann Strauss and liking Karlhenz Stockhausen is a matter that can only be treated with tolerance. And the freedom that I refer to here counts also for our audience too. If it finds the idea of a composer writing like Strauss or like Stockhausen unattractve, then fine. The audience should be free. We should be free.

From that freedom can come exciting art.

Meditation I

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melancholyWhen I was a child I used to visit a place not far from my home I called “the black woods”. “Let’s go to the black woods”, I would say. It was a sloping copse of fir trees on the edge of mainly deciduous woodland. I loved it. It was silent (no birds) and the ground was a uniform light brown, and soft – a bit crunchy to walk on because of the millions of dead pine needles.

The other day, during meditation, I placed myself there. I touched and smelled the little dribbles of resin on the bark of trees. I looked at the trunks soaring upwards many feet to the canopy of branches high above. It was mysterious and, somehow, I wanted to remain there, but also to leave. In reality, it was always like that – wishing both to remain, and to leave.

In my meditation I stood there for a few minutes and then stepped out of the wood again on to a grassy slope bordering it, where I used to sit as a child. (The grass was so short it was more like moss – the rabbits kept it like that I suppose). Still in the meditation, I remembered that once it happened that a child was walking by and said something about “that man” to her family (I was then a student). It was the first time I had heard myself called a man and I didn’t like it at all. I had never thought of myself as anything other than a boy and evidently I did not want to be a man.

My thoughts moved on to what happened more recently. I got a lot of replies to a dating advertisement I placed from “men who like older men”. And what I did not like about that was the character I had been given…….that I was no longer a person, but just an eroticized character. I don’t want to be a character, but I am one. I reflected that I do the same myself to others. We all do it……We are all busy with these depersonalizations. “I like black men, I like tall men, I like blonds, I like Asians…I like…..etc etc….”

And I thought “when it comes to the music I write, it is also depersonalized….it is judged for what it is, not what it sees itself as…..it may call itself one thing and yet be judged another”.

These were the thoughts and feelings that occurred during this meditation. I know that I shall go in spirit to that woodland area again. It is certainly a happier place to be than this one, though the point is, can I escape from here to there? Because here is somewhere I do not like. I do not like it at all. It is horrible.