Vienna and Beethoven

Leave a Comment

I spent quite a while today lost in streets around the Stephansdom (the cathedral of Vienna). This area includes a house in which Mozart lived at one stage of his life. I wasn’t concerned about getting lost because I had plenty of time before I had to catch my plane, but I was tired and suffering a little in the heat. It was lovely to be in the area, in spite of that. I had been staying in Vienna for a week with a colleague/friend exploring various things and it was my last day.

Amongst the sites we visited were the graves of Beethoven and Schubert and other wonderful composers. We owe so much to this Viennese culture, we modern musicians. In the Zentralfriedhof, at the grave of Beethoven, I felt his authority blasting through me, as from a god, and it was hard to hold on to my tears. Somehow I had harboured this level of veneration without even knowing it, strange to say. The “father” from whom mainstream modernism in music flows is, it seems to me, Beethoven. The deity of the Old Testament is the “Our Father” with which the Lord’s Prayer begins. “Give us this day our daily bread.” puts us in mind of the traditional father who orders everything and creates the structure in which we can prosper.

Probably a priest could rightly say that I shouldn’t compare a musician, however great, to the God of the Old Testament and probably that priest might thereby earn a sharp kick from me for saying so. A black cassock affords little protection.

My colleague was curious about my being baptised Catholic a few years back. He knows l am no pious individual. I swear a lot for example and that is the least of it. Others too have asked about this. At the time, in order to avoid giving a proper answer, I said “If it was good enough for Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, it is good enough for me”.

That response left some people baffled and to be honest I wouldn’t then have been able to explain any better. Since, however, I have listened to the marvelous scholar Paula Fredrikson as she comments on what we now call religion in the ancient Mediterranean. She explains well its tribal nature, pointing out that religion is our concept and not that of the ancient Mediterraneans themselves. So perhaps my semi- joke about the “three Viennese” composers was not pure evasion after all.

At any rate, looking at the facade of the Stephansdom and spotting a beautiful rose window to the right, earned a big tribal “yes”from me. People are more lost on these topics than even I was today in Mozart’s streets. Long ago, after someone called me an “aesthetic Christian”, I lacked the claws with which to defend myself. What a joy to step inside the cathedral and see so much that is intact. Perhaps Haydn could now say, “It looks just the same as when I used to sing here”, or Mozart could now exclaim, “It’s just the same as when I married Constanze here”. Contrast that with the British and the wrecking ball of their disastrous iconoclasm. ISIS went to work similarly in Palmyra, and created a loss not just for Syria, but for humanity in general.

My stay in Vienna was marred only briefly by the news that Agnes, my cat, had disappeared. The catsitter phoned me in a panic. After a worrying few hours, my very valuable (in every sense of the word) Siamese returned. Later I resolved NOT to clip her claws as I had planned to. The day she finds herself lost, alone, hungry and frightened on the street, she will need those sharp claws. We humans also need a good set of claws, do we not?

Double Concerto July 2023

Leave a Comment

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.

DIALECTIC 1

1 Comment

Alcibiades being taught by Socrates

Alcibiades being taught by Socrates

(The sound of wind in trees) (a spotlight illuminates two characters sitting next to each other on stage, Tybert to the left and Rose to the right)

Tybert (T): Can you tell me please, Rose, should a new and original kind of music be arrived at by thinking hard and planning hard, or in some other way?

Rose (R): If you put a question like that to anyone around here, they will probably dismiss it and tell you just to write down or to perform the music that comes to you from your imagination. For myself, I don’t have an immediate answer to your question. I am clueless in so many things.

By the way Tybert, are you male or female? You are so covered with fur it is not easy to tell. You see how ignorant I am……..

T: If I am so covered with fur that you don’t know my gender, then leave it at that. What does it matter? I go by the name of Tibby in any case and that should do for any gender. Now can you answer my question?

R: Well, let us leave the issue of gender to one side. You yourself, my handsome Tibby, what do you say that the words “new, original, thinking and planning” mean? Are these words easily defined? And I hardly dare ask you what “music” is, because I see that you have little patience. Speak and reply to an ignorant old woman’s question and prove yourself knowledgeable.

T: So you avoid my question by replying with a question. A very cheap trick, if I may say so.

“New and original” are things that haven’t been done before. “Thinking and planning” are words equally easy to define – anybody who remembers that it might rain and takes an umbrella to work has done that; and music is sound that has been organized by a human mind.

R: O my fine Tibby, not only is your glossy fur a joy to behold, but you claw your way through the difficulties I present you with ease. I see I have great good fortune in encountering someone so wise. I thought you might labour over these issues, as I myself have done. But tell me Tibby, if someone writes a piece for violin solo, is that something new or something original?

T: Well, that depends on the style. If it sounds, like Wieniawski, then, clearly, it’s not original, but it is new.

(Wieniawski)

R: Good, so now we have opened up a gap between what is new and what is new, but also original. Perhaps we can also open up gaps within those words. For example, are there degrees of originality? Is Sibelius as original as Schoenberg?

T: They are equally original but Schoenberg sounds newer than Sibelius. In Sibelius you have many memories of older music.

(Sibelius’s music)

R: I think perhaps you have forgotten that beautiful perfect 5th near to the beginning of Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra. That sounds quite ancient to me. But I agree with you that Schoenberg’s music frequently sounds newer than that of Sibelius. I also agree with you that they are equally original.

(Schoenberg’s music)

I think we begin to see that what is new or original is not a simple matter of “things which haven’t been done before” but more complex. And indeed if we find a piece for solo violin which is, let us say, completely new and completely original, isn’t even the idea of writing a solo violin piece already an old one?

(Bach violin music)

T: Well yes of course it’s an old idea. No music is entirely new nor entirely original. Indeed if it were, perhaps we shouldn’t even be able to call it music.

R: Exactly. And that brings me to your definition of music as “sound organized by a human mind”. Neat though that definition is, I find it lacking.

T: As a matter of fact, I think my definition can apply to all music of any style or tradition throughout human history.

R: And if a small child in a pram is wheeled through a tunnel by its mother (I am thinking of one of those underpasses that we use in order to get from one side of the street to the other) and starts to use its voice to enjoy the echo, is that also “sound organized by a human mind” and therefore music? The tunnel is certainly not a concert hall and it probably smells of piss, with a few dried up turds scattered around as well………..but it is at that moment a “music venue”, as they say, albeit a very dusty one.

(a child making vocal sounds echoing around)

T: I hardly think that a screaming child is music. Where is the organization there?

R: And where is the “organization” in any improvisation? It’s organized, yes? Or it’s organized, no? You could argue both ways. I’d rather cut that word right out of the discussion.

T: I was including improvisation in my definition, because that is the human mind organizing sound in a very fast manner, though I admit I hadn’t quite thought of a screaming child as improvising. That is a stretch, but I suppose you are right.

R: Indeed I am right. A child making sounds in the circumstances I describe is making music. Organized, or not, there it is, and you will find that the creation of music and of images and of stories is founded in what we do as children. All three activities fascinate children. Well, we say they are “playing”. We could also take that word apart, just as we are doing with the other words here, but let’s leave that issue on one side, we already have enough to deal with.

T: By all means, let us leave at least some word definitions on one side. It is not I who am making such a fuss about simple definitions, it is you. Your probing into everything gives me a suffocating feeling. I don’t want to be choking on all this unnecessary questioning.

R: My dear Tibby, forgive me, I believe you asked me a question and I am trying to answer it, that is all. Perhaps I should tickle you under the chin and that will calm you down..

T: I’d prefer you to keep your hands to yourself. Just let me run up and down this curtain a few times and I will feel better.

R: Very well, you do that. And I will take a sip of this wine meanwhile.

(silence) (pause)

********************************************************************************

(the sound of a child’s echoing voice)

R: Now did we establish that a child improvising with its voice is also producing music?

T: Yes Rose we did, though I hadn’t thought of it that way before.

R: Good, because many people have not recognized that children are making making music a lot during the course of the day. They invent and perform music with their voices and their banging around.

Our modern aesthete possibly imagines the smelly underpass I describe with a feeling little short of horror. I myself find that these little nooks and crannies in the contemporary world can be strangely exciting……….But let us transport our fragile aesthete to somewhere more in line with their tastes. To a pine forest somewhere in an alpine landscape, shall we say? It is a windy day and the tops of trees are waving to and fro. They make a marvelous sound and our aesthete sits on a log to listen carefully. I hear them mutter “what a beautiful music”.

(the sound of wind in trees)

T: Well they could hear it that way, but the most you could honestly say about it would be that it is musical.

R: So a sound can be musical, without being music?

T: Of course

R: But you spoke of organized sound and so I think you need to explain what happens to the musical aspect of sound once we remove the human organization. There is no human organization in the sound of wind in trees, but you admit that it can be musical. I suggest to you that whether sound is music, or at least musical, does not have to reflect human organization.

T; Now you are going too far and by the way, did I ever tell you that your old neck wobbling around makes you look like a frog?

(the sound of frogs)

R: I suggest to you that sound sometimes becomes music simply because of the way we listen to it.

T: You are a crazy old frog. You might as well say that a pile of bricks becomes a work of art just because of the way we look at it.

R: You are exactly right. A pile of bricks can indeed become a work of art in certain circumstances.

T: Oh just hop off somewhere will you?

R: It can, just in the way that a slip of paper can become a treasure once a love letter is written on it – a treasure so precious that you hardly dare touch it. But what would you know about love letters? I saw you perched on that fence the other day………you were being visited by several admirers. They were…….

T: Oh shut up you old frog. You have no admirers, that’s clear.

(Tybert exits)

R: You asked a good question in the beginning, but are we anywhere near to an answer? No, we’re not, because you don’t have the patience to find an answer.

Tibby?………………….. Oh, she’s gone. Or he is. I’ll just sit here and finish my wine.

(frog sounds) (light fades to darkness)

A little hard-won freedom for the imagination

1 Comment

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.

 

Concertino for Piano and Small Ensemble

Leave a Comment

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

Men and philosophy

Leave a Comment

Metrodorus-of-Lampsacus

Metrodorus of Lampsacus

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a Comment

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

Leave a Comment

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.

With Michael Bonaventure in Cologne (II)

Leave a Comment

Köln, St Aposteln, Tryptichon

Köln, St Aposteln, Tryptichon

How often have I written here “Listen to your feelings”. The statement is an echo of one I learned from a very wise man. So I felt very good and also very bad in the Cologne churches and these feelings are telling me that the Church is very important to me. In one church, delighted with the atmosphere, I drifted off to sleep like some old tramp. But when I woke, there was a service going on and a young woman was talking endlessly to a congregation consisting mostly of old ladies. Then another woman with a lower voice started up and I thought “Why do you have to talk so much? Why can’t you just perform ceremonies and go through necessary rituals and sing?” Fed up with the noise of these people speaking, I headed in the direction of a small chapel at the back of the nave where there was a statue of the Virgin, part of an elaborate altarpiece (a triptych). A man was kneeling there. From behind I could see his jaw moving and it looked mad. I couldn’t see if he was going through some litany or simply had some facial tic.

I looked at the golden altarpiece and asked myself whether it was really medieval or just a stylistic imitation from the 19thcentury. I disturbed myself with this question and said “Why can’t you simply enjoy it, or not?” “Why is there always this issue: do I have permission to enjoy something: is it in good taste?” At that very moment the organist started up with a rendition of the Veni Creator. It was harmonized, yes, with that stupid soup of chords they use. “Okay” I said, “grin and bear it”. But to my indignation the musician then proceeded to alter the latter part of the melody, making it into something pentatonic and intolerable. I said later to Michael Bonaventure “Why alter the melody of something which is already perfect, in fact, one of the greatest melodies we have?” I was altogether disturbed by these thoughts in the chapel and I said to myself pointedly that if the result of all my education is that I cannot enjoy an altarpiece unless I know its status and cannot enjoy some humble organ playing because it is “incorrect” then there’s something wrong with me. “Excuse me, professor, thank you for all you taught me, but where is my enjoyment in this world gone to at such moments of ‘knowledge’?” At such moments I am like some regimental type getting all worked up over whether the flag is upside down and whether the medals are hanging in the right order. Some joyless dried up grumpy old bugger, in other words.

So I left the church disturbed and with relief enjoyed the stupid tinsel of the shops which don’t claim to be anything other than stupid. And we all like stupid at the right moment. As I walked towards my appointment at the cathedral steps, I put the sour feelings behind me. Indeed the soupy chords are there so that those old ladies can sing along with the Gregorian melody. It makes it palatable to them. The shiny altarpiece exists for that man to mutter in front of it. I on the other hand live with a god who is difficult to reach and endure much that is unpalatable, so in these respects I have the problem, not those I have described functioning well in the church.

I have been wondering since Cologne if I am really a Catholic. Hamish sharply asked for an “explication” of this. I can’t say much about why the Church is important to me as it is an emotional thing and, of course, reasonably, one would assume that no gay man or woman would set foot near all that. I state my attraction, yet the point is drowned out by a”litany of moans”. Explicating that would be tantamount to defining oneself, yet how complex a thing is our life and feelings. We are defined with clarity BY our feelings and should not cast doubt on them. They are the guide. Probably a squirrel has the same problem defining himself as I do, but I do note that he is sensible enough to begin harvesting a walnut tree on the day that the walnuts become ripe. So the creature feels, senses and functions exactly as intended by the Creator. The same goes for me.

Suffice it to say that during my Cologne trip my interest and attraction to the Church was alive at the same time as my annoyances in particular church buildings. After all the pretensions and posturing and lies and manipulation are stripped away, one is left with feelings that tell the truth. How I wish I had listened with more respect to this truth during my time.

Speaking to Hamish

Leave a Comment

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.