on composing

Double Concerto July 2023

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A few days ago, I dreamed I was composing a new piece. I could hear the ending and also sense the kind of music that led up to it. The final notes themselves were in my mind and I saw the notation, so after I awoke, I could write the passage down. Although I quite often compose in my dreams, it rarely has this clarity.

What was also quite unusual was that in my dream I had imagined in some detail a double concerto with oboe and viola as soloists. The next day, as soon as I started to consider what I had thought of, I said to myself “That is a weird combination and probably won’t work as sound”. I also reflected that the double reeds are likely the least glamorous of the winds and the viola and double bass are possibly the least glamorous of the strings. So, my idea was unpromising and probably a “non-starter”. I also reflected that I have no commissions at the moment and that my stupendous reputation as a composer doesn’t exactly conjure up performances out of nowhere, so I would end up with a piece that would just disappear into a drawer.

But I am not so much in thrall to negative thinking as I was when I was young, so after a time I lost patience with it and grasped a pile of manuscript paper and got to work. I call this spontaneous method “improvisation with a pencil” though others might think of a more fancy name like “stream of consciousness”. The point is, you just write without stopping and there is no planning. After a few days I had a small quantity of music which, though crude, was well worth working on.

Talking to a couple of friends, I discovered that at least one concerto for oboe and viola already exists, so I would not be exploring entirely new musical ground with this unusual combination of instruments.

A little hard-won freedom for the imagination

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June 27th 2016  –  A little hard-won freedom for the imagination

Nowadays I wake very early and begin to work straightaway in this little attic room above my apartment in Amsterdam, where there is a pleasant view of sky and treetops.  I practise the piano and compose. It is a dull day today and all I can see is grey sky and the branches of plane trees swaying in the wind. The curtain M. hung in my window yesterday, in order to keep out the dazzling early morning summer sun, is redundant. In winter when there are no leaves to obscure the view, one sees all the way to the tower of the Westerkerk on the horizon. In Den Haag, when I lived on the Prinsengracht, the view was of the tower of the Grote Kerk, but that was close by.

I usually start with some keyboard exercises which I repeat in the middle of the day and in the evening. Keyboard technique is difficult to hold on to, but it has become very easy for me to compose now that the barriers to my imagination have been lifted, either because I removed them myself, or because they rotted away through time.  It is, after all, way back in the late 1960s that I developed a loyalty to a certain modernism as defined by the composers I admired in those days (Boulez, late Stravinsky, Webern). I remember the time I first heard Le Marteau sans Maitre on a record and got the score. That was exciting indeed. To my mind, all along, such music has been a sort of orthodoxy and I strayed from that world with difficulty. The music of Alexander Goehr and that of Peter Maxwell Davies stood as examples of how one could move on from styles characteristic of the postwar period.

Boulez talks of the two necessary lungs of a composer  –  systematic thinking being the one and spontaneity being the other. For myself now, spontaneity/improvisation is of the essence and there is no need for systematic thinking as I do not wish to be involved with that. I speak of my composing as “endless melody”. Not that I write melodies necessarily, but the idea of melody  –  a line which is rendered more than just a line by virtue of possessing some sort of soul  –  is appropriate. I have many ideas and the flow, like water from a tap, is, as I say, endless. Perhaps if over the coming years I make a thousand pieces, I will start to repeat myself or to run dry, but I doubt it. A good sign that one of these ideas possesses a strong soul and is therefore worth cultivating is that when I leave off working, the idea goes on revolving in my head, often through the night, so that it is still there in the morning.

During this summer and my rest from concerns about students, I have reviewed many old ideas I had noted down. They are largely forgotten, but when I look at them, they spring to life again. They are useful and blessed thoughts and I recognize them as I would recognize a person. There are many thoughts however that in comparison appear malignant. Memories of bad things loom in one’s head and I ask myself what is the use of such thoughts and, where I can, I dismiss them. I am interested in ancient Greek mythology and I wonder if the source of these painful thoughts can be identified with the Erinyes we read about?

Since last Thursday  –  the day the British voted in a referendum to leave the European Union  –  I have been working on something new: a song. I don’t like to write vocal music. The conservatoire vocal colour is not to my taste and the faulty tuning is just as much a problem for me. I understand very well why some composers are reduced to writing for marimbas and the like, where such performance problems don’t exist.

Of course I am interested in and certainly treasure aspects of musical modernism  –  I have for example called Schoenberg’s music the Crown Jewels of Europe  –  but I have a life before that musical world existed, and that is also valid. All those Victorian hymns I sang as a boy, and loved, they are still in my mind. You can seem to forget them, but they have just slipped over the horizon, they have not ceased to exist in the mind. When you review them (occasionally I hum these tunes), they spring to life again and are full of soul.

Scottish folk music is not even over the horizon for me, it is a tradition sitting in the centre of my imagination.

Musical style is something we share just as we share musical traditions. All this stuff goes very deep, as deep  –  say  – as learned male and female behaviour. How should we walk, speak etc. This is a tribal matter. Sometimes I watch TV journalists with the sound switched off. It is interesting to see all those mannerisms as they are replicated from person to person. Of course it was the enlightening observation of such things that led me to grasp quite late in my life the concept of soul/spirit. But here is not the place to drag out that sermon yet again.

I don’t consider style to be a shallow thing, nor do I consider it to be a manner in which something is said or done. It is itself the “something”. “Freedom from conditioning”, my piano teacher Alan Rowlands used to say, and it was what he sought the whole time I knew him. A hard-won freedom for my imagination was what I sought and it has been my achievement. I started out by rejecting my imagination because it didn’t offer perpetual “newness”. In the end I angrily rejected this rejection.

 

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.

Speaking to Hamish

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Old Town Edinburgh from Calton Hill, G.W.Wilson 1870s

Old Town Edinburgh from Calton Hill, G.W.Wilson 1870s

Hamish is my closest friend, albeit a fairly grumpy one. He has seen much of my joy and sorrow and commented on nearly all of what he has seen. There has been plenty of laughter along the way. It is now over 20 years since I left Edinburgh but the connection with him has grown stronger, not weaker. Artistic matters are the most personal of all and I have been able to discuss these with him, but not so candidly with others. Like everyone, I am guarded about what is most personal. Yet I have the necessary release of being able to share my private world with this one friend.

Though Hamish is not a musician, he hears me out on my ideas for writing music, saying what he finds positive and what he finds negative. And this is good as one wishes in any case to reach out to a public that does not comprise simply fellow composers. Our music descends into a purely professional activity if we are not careful. We speak to each other like doctors whose jargon excludes the general public. Yet music is intended for that general public just as much as medicine is. Indeed, is it not a sort of medicine? At college, where one sits in the auditorium amongst fellow students, listening to the work of other students, one acquires a taste for “purely professional activity”.

So, in a long conversation last night I explained what I have been planning for the group in Venice I am writing for. It is a radical departure for me, though in a direction I have tried to travel before. There is a point of departure, a direction, a route, a goal, and all things must align themselves if the voyage is to happen. Yes, I can be honest and admit that I have spent a great deal of time hanging around the harbour “getting ready” whereas I was actually “getting into trouble” of various kinds. After I talked to Hamish and he approved my ideas, I felt a nice puff of wind in my sails and some forward momentum as a result.

Disobeying the die

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diceWalking yesterday in Rembrandtpark, I had my 20-sided die with me in my pocket – the green one, that I use partly for yes/no answers. This had not only brought me to the park – I couldn’t decide where to walk – but it was also guiding me around it. Naturally there are many different directions to take, all more or less equal in their appeal…… I came to a fork and the die said go right but I went left. Right only led to the children’s zoo and from a distance I had already seen that it was crowded with people. Nowhere to sit there. So I was wrong to give a decision to the die as there was actually no choice to be made.

I was looking for a quiet bench as I wanted to compose the variation theme for the piano sonata I had started the day before. I had brought manuscript paper with me and a pencil and a rubber. The music was in my head, but only vaguely so. It lacked that specificity that I sometimes have. I like to compose out of doors or in cafes. As I walked through the park I remembered how in the sixth form at school I also used to like sketching out of doors. I miss that. It was a nice time for me. Here in Amsterdam I never see anybody doing that. In Venice you see it the whole time. Why? Because it’s picturesque there? But people should sketch everywhere. Big factory chimneys belching smoke are visually nice too.

I turned left disobeying the die. I thought about that and the irony of my decision. The point of the die of course is to facilitate decisions where there is no obvious choice. It gets you quickly over any hesitation. And yet, disobeying the die like that causes uneasiness. Therefore I must conclude that the randomness is something more than randomness. The die starts to take on an authority, as if it not only chooses, but also sets rules.

It was hard to find a place where people weren’t coming by, as the day was beautiful and the park was full. As I looked for a place I took time to watch people playing. I enjoyed very much watching a rather fat young woman playing football in a little family group. It was a Moslem family I presumed as the women had head scarves on. So the fat woman looked very happy to have that freedom to play football within her family. And I thought directly of Picasso as people are always carping on about the way he depicts the women in his life, but the truth is that there are many paintings of his where he celebrates peace – peaceful scenes like the one I was watching. People free to play in the park without fear of attack. I think that the theme of peace in Picasso is a big one, though perhaps not as important as the theme of eroticism.

I thought a lot about the woman – the meaning of the head scarf and the context in which she was playing, within the family group like that. She had long robes and was really too fat to run properly and was laughing. It made me happy to see her so happy. I found a bench and I started to write. I continued to use the die, twirling it in my left hand and finding the answers I needed whilst writing with my right hand. The die was deciding for me questions to which there were no obvious answers. Apart from the outflow of sound (I compared it once to the Nile in flood) you can say that composition consists of replying to questions. Meanwhile, the biggest questions aren’t even asked and they are decided for you by the spirit that stands at your shoulder – the real director of things. You don’t see his face as it is the face of a god.

I was writing in four-part counterpoint yesterday rather than in homophonic or chordal texture. So the lines went their separate ways. Later at home I made a neat copy using four coloured pens, so that things didn’t get too confused on the page. I made repeated mistakes and in the end got so tired that I had to abandon the task. Making the mistakes upset me and I realized again that random decisions become as fixed as any others. I wasn’t willing to accept mistakes in what I had decided. Therefore disobeying the die is no simple matter. There’s a bigger issue there.

The colours in the score are very pleasing and are in fact part of the fun of doing it. This morning I was up early and completed the thing quickly. The sun was streaming through the windows in the back room where I worked on the dining table. I thought of the cactuses in the bedroom – they share the room with me and sit in the window behind the curtain. They would be enjoying the same intense light at that moment and I knew they would be content as yesterday I had soaked them in water. I also thought of Venice as the intense light reminded me of springtime there, walking around as a student, completely lost in all those little alleys where everything repeats itself in endless variation. The smells of flowers and of baking, and the bright sunshine and many shadows, the sounds of voices and that delicious Venetian accent which itself is music. Though in those days I had not yet understood the concept of a very wide definition of what music is.

I began to write this note as I waited for my neighbours to wake up so that I could play what I had copied neatly. My piano is dampened with felt. Even so, I fear that the sound travels down through the floor.

The primacy of pitch

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pitchNo one talks about Webern any more. He’s never mentioned. Yet his music is a hundred times more attractive to me than nearly everything new that I hear, so it’s disconcerting. His use of pitch restores me to myself. Restores my balance, is that it? Because I recall why I became involved in this modern style as a teenager? That there can be pitch structures so attractive to me, though existing without the “gravitational” aspect of old scales, is a wonder. It is a wonder of the European story I think. Stravinsky spoke of “dazzling diamonds” in reference to this music. And indeed I find it noble. Who imagined in 1900 that such a thing might be possible? Anyone?

There is nothing I regret in Webern’s music. Not at all, I can’t. Yet there are things that I wish were otherwise. There is an inescapable bond with Expressionism it seems to me and I don’t like that. This constant human cry petering out in a morendo for example. It does not move me and I want it to stop. I am attracted to something else – the harmonies, the lines and the splintering of beats. I do not regret the nerve-racking task for performers. Do they not have this same exposure in Mozart – nowhere to hide? And who regrets Mozart because it is so difficult to perform? For that music I fall to my knees.

I keep quiet when I hear composers complain about Schoenberg and I wonder if these individuals are simply unable to understand chromatic music and unaffected by it therefore. Schoenberg and his pupils – Berg and Webern – remain for me a standard impossible to reach, yet one that drives me on down the road to the future.

The primacy of pitch II

Is American music “the gift that keeps on giving”? Well, to me, it truly is. I have caught the song “Use Somebody” in several versions as I go about my business. Kings of Leon, the rockers who wrote it, have their recording a tone lower than the cover version by the Dutch singer Laura Jansen. I adore her voice, but it is the pitches that I adore most – the bass with its low F (low G in the Jansen version) and the appoggiatura on E (or F#). Yet, as I watch the video of the Kings of Leon original, I am also reminded of why I found men so dazzling in the first place, and call to mind all the grievances and anger that flowed from that.

Inspiration from Kandinsky and help from a friend

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kandinsky

A few weeks ago I was disturbed by something which happened whilst I was sketching the music for a new series of pieces I am calling Composition I, II, III, IV………etc. The first one (Composition I) is scored for flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin and cello. It was late at night and I was making some calculations about where in the piece to place five tutti chords. The following day I looked at the sketches and saw that I had inadvertently made the calculations twice. Therefore I had ten positions for the idea instead of the five I intended. It was disconcerting. I do not like this kind of error and then the decisions that must follow about what to do in the unforeseen circumstances. I decided to leave the error as it was.

I then got the idea that the five chords would each be followed by echo versions, thereby using up all the ten positions I had worked out and as a consequence of that, a greater problem arose, because I was instantly put in mind of the ancient Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus. It is a nice myth and not wholly sentimental. I could “bend” the piece in that direction. To follow that path however would take me away from my intended goal – that is, to write some pieces inspired by paintings of Kandinsky. It is a project I have had in mind for some time and now I was at long last getting round to tackling it. But I decided that I could follow the Narcissus idea and even name the work after him.

The musical imitation of aspects of the myth occurred to me thick and fast – it would be easy to make such an Impressionist piece on the subject. I was disconcerted, as that would mean the abandoning of the Kandinsky project, as the new piece could not be both that and a bit of musical Impressionism at one and the same time. The two things cancel each other out.

Why? A Mozart symphony is not narrative music. It is not a symphonic poem. Equally it is not Nuages or La Mer. In other words a Mozart symphony is not a work wholly dedicated to conveying mood and imagery. But I refuse to describe this aristocratic style of his as abstract. There is no such thing in music as “abstract”. Music is, by its very nature, unable to be inexpressive. In Stravinsky’s 1936 autobiography Chroniques de ma vie, he said “Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.” This statement is not just incorrect, it is bogus. A few years previously the composer had produced Le Sacre du Printemps. A magnificent example of music’s essential powerlessness to express anything, I don’t think. I liken Kandinsky’s “geometric” style to the music that people call abstract. For sure anyway, it is more Bach fugue than it is Jardins sous la pluie.

At this early juncture in the creative process, by chance a composer friend came to dinner and I asked his permission to lay out the issues before him and get his reaction. I explained that I believe it to be a disadvantage that composers rarely discuss their creative processes with others whilst writing and that it would be better for us if we were not so isolated at these times. He countered that he found something positive in this “isolation”. Nevertheless, he consented to hear me out and so I showed him the sketchbook, even explaining the hidden aspects of the process – the chance methods, the cards I use, the coloured beads, and so forth. He shocked me by instantly taking sides with my first idea (the Kandinsky one) and urged me to remain faithful to that and not be diverted from my intended path. He said that the idea that had occurred to me (the Echo and Narcissus one) destroyed the basis of the project. He then went on to a discussion of chance itself, saying that if it were his piece, he would leave a lot of decisions to the performers. For example, he would allow them to choose the position of those five chords that got me into trouble. Now I was doubly shocked.

We finished dinner and went into the other room to watch some absorbing films he had brought with him, including some about Alexander Calder. I had never really considered the career of Calder properly. I enjoy looking at his mobiles and assume many people do, but I only own a print of his work because it was on sale in a print shop, so the artist hasn’t received much respect from me. But here, in the films, I saw all manner of things that I admired deeply – his fluency for example in making paintings. You have to understand how much I have come to detest slow, laboured methods of work in my own creations!

This was an interlude as we then went back to discussing the chance processes we had debated at the dinner table. I made the point that for me to be asked to present scores with large areas of decision making left to performers (so-called “aleatoric music”) is like asking me to do something that revolts me. I shrink from it. Now it was his turn to look a bit shocked. Did it seem to him a rather brutal dismissal of the whole idea of aleatoricism, something very dear to him? Well, we parted on good terms, as usual, so he did not take offence.

The next day, I was very pleased with everything that had happened the previous night. It had been right to open up to a trusted someone about my creative problems and the reaction I had received was very helpful. I found I agreed with my friend that a chance error cannot be allowed to lead one away from the goal one has set for a work. If there had been no goal in view, I could have followed the unexpected path that presented itself. But no, on this occasion, I shouldn’t. As to the issue of aleatoricism, in the John Cage sense, I would defer dealing with that until another day, as peace negotiators do when confronted by some core disagreement.

Thoughts in the forge – art, craft, language and the invention of musical ideas

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e0f2b-0211vela

I believe that many artistic problems that crop up, either on the work table, or in the conversations of composers, are really only as problematic as we choose to make them. Many diverse things can be artistic, even a child playing with coloured bricks. But a mother would be foolish to come into a room and complain that her child should put two blues together, rather than combine a blue with a red. If she did, the child would be right to carry on playing, regarding his mother’s remark as bit more adult craziness to be ignored. So here at least there’s one “artistic problem” that can be discounted……….

Fashion and also money manifest as artistic issues. Rich people are perhaps uninterested in last year’s designs, so if you are out of date, and trying to sell to that clientele, you’d better watch out. However, there are those who are so poor that they are lucky if they own any clothes at all, so they are hardly likely to be concerned with fashion. Everyone needs clothes, but only a few need fashion.

Similarly, in music, if you compose like those long dead out-of-fashion composers (like John Ireland for example) then you are going to be shifted to the least prestigious venues (dusty church halls? – whatever). Whilst composers who write “cutting edge” stuff have their pieces done by the major ensembles and in the ritziest of surroundings. I like that hideous cliché “cutting edge” along with another overused term – “challenging”. “He is a cutting edge composer doing challenging work”.

There are those who say they write for themselves and those who say they write for others. I think it’s a false distinction. It’s not like making dinner in which you can say you cooked just for yourself and didn’t invite anyone along. A better metaphor is language. You don’t talk to a child the same way as you would talk to a pope or a princess. And you don’t talk to a pope or a princess the way you would talk to an intimate friend. The language differs. So it is right what Stravinsky says – he said he composed for the hypothetical other. We are always “addressing” someone – hypothetical, or real – it’s unavoidable.

The invention of musical ideas is the simplest of tasks. In my case the ideas are there the whole time and if I think about one, it just starts developing automatically. In the four minute movement I wrote over Christmas, I made for the first time a special point of using this automatic invention I have. Over the course of a few days I wrote down all the variations that occurred to me of a particular idea, in a long list, simply that. When this involuntary invention came to an end I incorporated everything I had invented into the piece. In fact I think nothing else was invented for the piece aside from the decisions about proportions and texture, instrumentation and so forth – the structural stuff. Well, put like that, it seems quite an unoriginal way of working, but as I say, it was a first for me.

I am troubled by some craft issues. It vexes me for example that I do not play a wind instrument and have to work so hard to imagine the physical actions required to play my wind music. In addition there are sound issues with regard to the combinations of elements that are hard work to imagine. Here though, I believe I made recent progress. In the new piece I included a few moments where the instrumental texture combines in such a way that distinct identities break down and the sound blends. I adore these moments. They have for me the status that “special effects” do in sci-fi films. This is an old art to be sure. Look for example at the first few moments of Stravinsky’s 1917 symphonic poem Le Chant du Rossignol. That is a model of this kind of writing and not the only example from the master’s work in that period of his career.

In the good Turkish café……….

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turkishstreet

Out early this morning to the shops. The youth behind the cash register in the Turkish butcher/grocer was completely tired and bored, just slumped there – he said he had got up at 5. I chatted to him a bit, but he wasn’t interested. No spinach for my Indian recipe, so I searched round the corner. Nothing doing. Cycling back, I saw the “tired” youth now outside in animated conversation. So I thought, it’s just ME that was boring, not he who was bored. Probably he finds middle aged men with sparkly inquisitive eyes boring. Can you blame him?

I ended up in the good Turkish café, where, to my surprise, I ordered lamb and aubergines preceded by lentil soup. And coffee on the side. Weird. I almost never eat breakfast and certainly not something so heavy.

I had music paper with me as I knew I would sit somewhere and write. My favourite way to write music is to sit at a table and not bother with an instrument. There was loud music playing and I thought it was funny to write my own stuff against that background. So as I put pen to paper I just incorporated the sound of singing into the instrumental lines I was writing. That was a first for me, but in other respects it went as usual – very fast, with no rest for my wrist.

It had begun to storm outside and after a while a man came in carrying his small daughter all wrapped up in a coat against the wind and rain. He set her on the floor and she looked thrilled to be in the place. He was very handsome, so I was eyeing him, then I saw how he handled his daughter and how he looked at her with such love, his eyes sparkling. It was lovely to see. He was manly, yet somehow sweet and pretty at the same time. She was very young and he couldn’t understand what she was saying to him. After a while he got bored and just let his eyes wander around the room, leaving her to prattle on about “her things”.

Because of the loud music, my mind drifted to thoughts of Mr Z. and the fuss he used to make if music started up in a restaurant. He would squirm and look pained. It was a look that invited you to DO SOMETHING NOW. You might suggest leaving or even decide to have a kind word with the waiter. Either way, having manipulated you into doing something, he would act as if it had been your idea. That memory flashed by and I thought I should have screamed at him “children are so hungry in Africa they don’t even have the strength to stand up and YOU WANT TO MAKE A FUSS ABOUT MUSIC IN A RESTAURANT???????????!!!!!!!!!!” I would have needed to pop in something like “WHY DON’T YOU STAY IN YOUR OWN FUCKING HOUSE?” to make the full effect. But he was 15 years older than me and the apple of my eye, so I thought he knew better than me. In any case, I couldn’t have brought him to his senses. He was way beyond even spoiled, he was half way to being a god. And there he was, his nose jammed in the smelly armpit of this terrible world with its piped music, the poor darling.

[How sensitive am I, I ask myself? The deep vulgarity of these times we are cursed to live through are too much for me sometimes. I feel the urge to flee to some rocky place where all you hear are the calls of seals, the cries of gulls and the moaning sound of wind and sea. The pitter-patter of rain and the ratatat of hail. Miles of grassy sods and not much else. Pebbles, sand, sun and moon.]

Concentrating so hard on my piece, the loudspeaker music was gradually blotted out and then it was all done. I wrote at the top of the page “good Turkish café 7th July 2009”. Then I thought that would make a nice title.

It was by this stage storming enormously. A woman hurried by – short dyed blond hair, neat tight jeans, and small umbrella in the process of getting destroyed……She had to hurry as she was frightened the wind and water would spoil her set piece………She might arrive looking like a wet dog – O the shame of it! Puddles formed, drops made circles and bubbles floated. I thought that would make a nice image for a title too. Then I remembered that the music I was busy with didn’t convey any of these things, it was just something formal in approach. The Turkish singing had been a starting point, but nobody would guess that, and puddles of water weren’t being reflected on my page either. Mostly when we stick a label on music we find it already has its own “text” thank you very much.

I thought about how this music compared with the first piece I wrote, when I was 14 – no improvisational element there, just chords and gestures worked out at the piano with clear metres, and very nice too. [I must make a neat copy of that and show it some pianists…………though best not to mention the juvenilia aspect.] I began to wonder if that piece was possibly more convincing then what I write nowadays, with my far superior technique. [Such positive thoughts about myself tend to arrive in the early mornings – one good reason for getting up…………..]

Cycled home and got half drenched. Heh-heh.

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.