thoughts

Walking 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.

No 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.

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.