The end is where we start from

When is something finished?

I crawl through my manuscript, typing it slowly and painstakingly onto my PC, changing notations here, making cuts there, elsewhere inserting or rewriting passages. When I've got to the final bar I'll go back again and may well see other points ripe for change. And then I may do it again.

But at what point will I decide that enough's enough? It's a question that every composer has to face. One of the composers who taught me told me that his rule of thumb is that a piece will have to be draughted about six times before it's ready. If you're lucky you might get it done by the third or fourth.

Art is never finished, only abandoned, as one artist said; some take this to extremes - Pierre Boulez designates pretty much his entire oeuvre as "work in progress", which seems a bit extreme to me. When I worked for a music publisher, often were the times that a piece seemed doomed forever to stay in revision hell - one (very fine) composer in particular had enormous trouble with the concept of letting go, and continued to tweak and tweak at scores for years after their premieres. It's one thing to rewrite music that doesn't work as well as it might, but endless tiny alterations seem top me to be a symptom of neurosis, which I guess stems from the awful pressure on composers to produce "Masterpieces" - that strange quirk of the so-called classical music world where it seems unacceptable to admit that a piece may be a great work while still containing weaknesses.

I think of Bruckner as well, re-writing his symphonies (sometimes on his own initiative, sometimes at the behest of well-meaning but misguided supporters) to such an extent that different versions stand as entirely different works that just happen to use the same material. There's a parallel to be drawn here with Boulez and his re-writes - the piece as an ever-evolving entity, that cannot be definitively fixed. This goes against the dogma of the score as Bible that underpins all SCCM since the late 19th century, the same dogma that sparks the kind of neurosis mentioned above, and perhaps, as infuriating to librarians and cataloguers as it is, it represents a way out of the straitjacket of the score, and the Masterpiece.

Prom 25: Boulez/Birtwistle (Radio 3/ online)

Pierre Boulez is a composer notorious for reworking his music, sometimes over many decades, and never quite reaching a conclusion (he has commented that works of art are never finished, only abandoned), with the result that his catalogue is full of torsos and "works in progress". Ironic then, that due to the late running of the earlier prom and the vagaries of London's public transport network this late-night offering from the London Sinfonietta and the BBC Singers was already up and running by the time I got home and turned on the radio, so I only heard his recent completion of Dérive 2 as a fragment. I shall certainly be taking advantage of the excellent BBC Radio player to listen to the full work, though, as it was an extraordinary and beautiful work. Boulez is the man fingered by many of those who oppose all avant-garde music since 1900 who ruined it all, and I'll admit I have issues with parts of his aesthetic*, but you'd have to be fairly cloth-eared not to be able to revel in the luxurious sounds he conjures up here. I wonder how the fact that I shall hear the opening of his piece after the close relates to his ideas challenging the idea of a "complete" work?

Coupled with this sensuous, glowing music was another of the bogeymen of contemporary music, Harrison Birtwistle. Again, Birtwistle is a man much misunderstood, as the frequent extreme complexity of his textures belies a thoroughly direct, even blunt, approach. Neruda Madrigals is one of his gentler works, and its more austere sound world, conjuring up thoughts of the Northern landscapes that he inhabits, made an excellent pairing with the Boulez, and made me regret that it was impracticable for me to stay and hear it live. What a shame this sort of thing gets increasingly and timidly relegated to late night slots. One hopes that this is a trend that will not continue when Roger Wright takes over the Proms from Nicholas Kenyon (aka the Doctor out of Star Trek Voyager) next year.

Players and singers were as good as you'd expect, and isn't it good to see in Susanna Mälkki a woman at the forefront of was is still largely a male domain?

* Maybe I'll get round to writing a post about this eventually.