Collective nouns for orchestral musicians

I've got a soft spot for collective nouns. Apparently they were all made up by some vicar in the nineteenth century or something, but so what. I like the random yet strangely appropriate feel of things like a pride of lions or a murder of crows. But what of the world of musicians, I hear you ask?* Well, I@m glad you asked.** because I've been wondering about that too. Here's a few possibilities:

An oversubscription of flutes

a mallard of oboes

an intonation of trumpets

a flatulence of trombones

an accelleration of percussionists

a payment of harps

a hubris of first violins

a neurosis of second violins

an oppression of violas

an indulgence of cellos

Any more? I've been concentrating on orchestral sections, but there must be some good ideas out there for drummers too, at least.


* I know you didn't. So what?
** see above.

Till the money runs out

The days pass, and I find myself on the brink of the new season, preparing to take up my cello and start rehearsing once more. After a good long summer break, it's good to feel some enthusiasm building for the coming year.

That's tempered with some trepidation, though. The credit crunch is biting everyone, and the orchestra's no exception. Rising costs, venue hire, the difficulty in persuading people to part with some cash in return for an evening's entertainment are all things that impinge on the activities of an amateur orchestra, and one that receives no subsidies at that. We rely on the subs that players pay, ticket sales and any sponsorship we can attract to keep going, and while it'd be exaggerating to say that we're on the brink of collapse, that fact is that an orchestra's an expensive thing to run; we made a big loss last year and we expect to this year. A lot of imaginative thinking will be needed to find new ways to raise money to keep the band going. (Any other amateur bands having the same worries round here?) >eanwhile hard decisions must be made, programmes changed and belts tightened.

Performing arts organisations must all be looking over their shoulders at the moment, as they're usually prime targets to have their grants cut when the economy starts to nosedive, no matter how well they seem to be doing. There have already been scare stories in the recent past when the Arts Council cut off all support to a number of prominent bodies. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the time's coming when the best place to be is in an amateur band, working on a small scale and, for all the financial worries, perhaps better placed to ride out the storm than a large pro organisation that depends on public subsidy. One of the points trumpeted about the new Kings Place development is that it's funded entirely by private money, which I suspect is another sign that no-one sensible would want to be relying on public money at a time when there seems to be something in the air against the very idea of it.

On a tangent, there's some interesting (and quite long, don't try printing this out if you want to save trees) reading in this government report on amateur music-making. There's a bit of techno-waffle and stating the bleeding obvious, of course - this is a government document, after all - but I shouldn't be churlish, as it's good to see something vaguely official that propagates the notion that the Arts are something that people do, rather than a product to be passively absorbed. Whether this leads to the conclusion that amateur organisations should be cherished and supported in a way that officialdom doesn't really do at the moment, or that by some twisted logic their presence and popularity should serve as a reason to slash public arts funding remains to be seen.

Tales From the Back Desk

Just post-holiday's always a good time to summon up some vague enthusiasm for doing something new, so with that in mind I've started a new project: Tales from the Back Desk. It's a regular (weekly, if I can summon the time and energy) comic about music and musicians, that grows out of the three strips I drew for Classical Music earlier this year. I was hoping they might be enthused enough about those to have such a series in the magazine, but hey, their loss is the internet's gain.

Eight Songs for a Mad King

A heated debate on the Grauniad blogs in response to an article by Joe Queenan on why all modern SCCM* is rubbish (of course I put my tuppenceworth in) takes me back to when I was 11 or 12 and encountered my first bit of real, proper, honest-to-god modern music: Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King.

It was an LP in school, performed by the excitingly named Fires of London, conducted by the composer and with a chap called Julius Eastman singing (well, vocalising, anyway) and it was one of the most extraordinary things I had ever heard. I started off laughing, then being delighted at the extraordinary sounds that were coming out of the speakers, then finally captivated and shocked by the realisation that what I'd first taken for comedy was in fact searing horror.

I grew up in a house where music abounded, but I'd heard nothing like this: my parents' favourite composers were Mozart and Haydn, and the other sounds I heard were my brothers' and sister's rock and pop records. This was something entirely new: it was wild, crazy, untameable stuff, and it felt as though I'd lived a life in black and white** and suddenly been catapulted into the most garish technicolour imaginable.

I (and several of my friends) became obsessed with the piece; I ordered in the score from my local music shop and marvelled at it - it seemed to function as much as a work of art in itself as a set of instructions for which notes to play when. We harboured the idea that we might try and get hold of the parts, construct the giant cages in which the players sit, and perform it. We never did of course. I wish we had, though. It would almost certainly have been a terrible performance, but it would have been a hell of an exciting thing to do.

It's that feeling of intense excitement, that I'd discovered a new world and could never think of things in quite the same way ever again, that set me off on the road to this disreputable role we call "composer", and it's the feeling I still look for even now, which is why I still listen to new music and refuse to sink into comfortable middle-aged predictability. It's also why, when I want to explain what contemporary SCCM is and how magical it can be, I think of that record first.




*So-Called Classical Music

*Well, orange and brown; I grew up in the 70s, after all.

Prometeo (RFH)

Time's a funny thing; or the perception of it. Prometeo runs for over two hours, two hours in which not very much happens. And yet, in another sense, an awful lot happens, because by the end of it you're in a different space to the one you started out in.

It's a bit different for me perhaps; I've sat through the five hours of Morton Feldman's For Philip Guston*, so a couple of hours is peanuts in comparison. And Bruckner wrote 90-minute pieces in which, in a very profound sense, nothing really happens (and yet everything!). So there's plenty of precedent.

Not everyone can take this sort of thing: there were several people who walked out, some after less than half an hour. But it takes a half-hour or so to acclimatise yourself to this sort of music, and you need the patience to do that if you're going to get something out of it.

The spacial element of Prometeo is of course one of its main selling points. Stockhausen of course experimented with breaking down the traditional relationship between performers and audience in the 60s with Gruppen, and playing Strauss's Alpine Symphony recently, with its army of off-stage brass, reminds me that playing about with these things is nothing new in itself. But Prometeo takes these ideas and runs with them. There are clusters of musicians everywhere, even before you consider the sound field created by numerous speakers distributed all around. This creates a slight tension, as the Royal Festival Hall is clearly designed for the traditional layout of audience all pointing towards a stage, so our sitting position works against what Nono is trying to achieve. But in a strange way this only seems to point up how entrenched we are in our concert-going habits, the very thing Nono wants us to question.

The (excellent) programme contained the texts used in the piece, but this is really better studied later on, as Nono deliberately abstracts the words in his setting so that it's really incomprehensible in any conventional sense. Rather, he exploits the libretto as a source of sounds and timbres for the voices. There didn't seem to be any need to think about the text or the legend of Prometheus except in the most general, abstract way, and this is part of what it's about: it's not about comprehending, it's about the pure experience of listening.

Normally when you hear something involving a combination of instruments and electronics you expect the electric part to be superimposed on the acoustic, but what Nono does is much more subtle than that, and it's a credit to him that you hardly think about the presence of the sound system, so carefully are the two elements integrated; this is use of technology as a subtle enhancement rather than a bludgeoning club. The effect as you hear sounds from their original source drift across the room and transform into complex textures is serenely discorporating.

The actual music itself seems much more eclectic than I'd have expected, ranging from terrifying clusters to the sweetest of perfect fifths, and pretty much everything in between. Occasionally a roar emerges from the orchestras, but largely the music is a great drift.

Nono is classed as one of those nasty modernists we're all supposed to reject these days in favour of Golijov. But what's striking is that this music (as well as being far more immediate than the anti-modernists would have you believe) doesn't sound "modern" at all. It sounds extraordinarily, immensely ancient. We leave the hall at the end, and to return to the bustle of London after this feels like returning from a journey to an unimaginably distant world, perhaps even time. The world seems too fast. Nono gives our thoughts space to breathe. And time.

There's so much more to be said, and yet also nothing. I go about my day as before. But behind it somewhere there's the memory of this other place, and it'll be a while before it's absorbed. it's all a matter of time.





Tim Rutherford-Johnson has a good roundup of reviews of the performances.


*I've sat through the even bigger String Quartet No.2 (over six hours on the Flux Quartet's recording, helpfully available on DVD to avoid those annoying disc changes). But somehow it seems cheating, doing it in the comfort of your own living room.

Young Musician of the Year 2008 (BBC4)

I missed last night's string programme (general consensus: the guitarist was streets ahead of the others, and the violinist shouldn't have even been there) but I did see the wind finalists paraded before me and the 3 other people who watch BBC4 on Monday. I'm sure the Scottish flautist who won ("He's so camp!" squealed one of the other contestants, and I'm sure he'll thank her for that when he's lying in some street late at night having his head kicked in) fully deserved his place in the grand final, but it's difficult to be sure, because one of the defining features of this programme was that you didn't get to hear very much music at all. Instead you got treated to lots of shots of the players walking about, going on Facebook (they do little else, at least that's the impression the programme gives; well, as every coked-up London TV executive knows, that's what da kidz do, innit bro?), hugging each other endlessly in the wake of auditions and recitals, thinking about what shoes to wear, lots of voice overs about how nervous they are but also how excited to have got this far... I looked at my watch at one point and realised it was halfway through the programme and not one of the four contenders had performed anything. Not long after that I realised none of them would, beyond a few seconds.

Is this starting to sound familiar? It should, because it's pretty much the same format as every other X-stars-in-Britain-have-talented-operatunity show out there; that stumbling mass of rotten-headed zombie programmes that shuffles unstoppably across the TV schedules, with the sole aim of removing the brains from our skulls.

And that's the point: you can see exactly how we arrived at this sorry abortion of a programme - lots of brainstorming by telly people, lots of guff about how classical music's seen as elitist and we've got to show how these lids are just normal teenagers, not stuck up posh kids (except that they are, because music's been sliding down the priorities of educational policy in the country for years, and only posh kids have parents who can afford to pay for them to have the lessons) - oh, and isn't it lucky one of them's Scottish, because another thing that every coked-up TV executive knows is that Scottish kids are automatically NOT POSH, so let's have lots of focus on him. Make it normal, make it accessible, don't let any hint through that there might be anything special or exceptional about these kids, certainly don't scare anyone off by showing them play an entire piece uninterrupted, get lots of reaction footage of the bods on the jury, much better to have someone tell you how good it is, can't trust the fucking plebs who watch TV to listen and form their own opinion, can you?

So you end up with a programme that fails on every count, because it's too scared to show us the only thing that makes these kids worth our time: their talent as musicians. This is how television likes to deal with classical music; anything, anything but the music itself.

You can see and hear complete performances on the website, I'm sure they would say. And it's true, you can. But why can't you see and hear them on TV? It's not as if the schedules are so stuffed full of content that they can't ever find time to devote hours of transmission time to talking heads spouting inanities about what they loved about the 1970s. I think there's a simpler explanation. I think the people who run TV don't like the music, they resent having to make space for it, they resent its very existence. They know little of it, and care less. All they care about is squeezing the last drop of life from exhausted formats while they wait for the next bandwagon to roll up. I'll bet when they put this programme together they talked a lot about journeys, about personalities, about relevance, about elitism and outreach. I wonder how much they talked about music?

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture"

Erin raises the subject of programme notes. It's something that I've thought about a bit over the years, not least because I've written a few myself, both for my own and other composers' music.

And the conclusion I've reached is this: most of them are a complete and utter waste of time.

I can't remember the first one I wrote, but I suspect a big factor in my starting to do them is that you're expected to do them for your own pieces if you're a composer. And most composers are terrible at it. I went to an spnm workshop on this very subject once, and some of the examples given were astonishing in their obtuse unreadability.

There's a basic problem, in that the way you think about a piece when you're writing it is almost exactly the opposite of how you perceive the same piece as a listener. One often gets the impression that many young composers are treating their note as an exercise for their musical analysis class.

It's not just composers who are bad at this. When I think of the times I heard Stockhausen discuss his music, and compare his clear, simple, lucid introductions to the reams of obfuscatory rubbish I've seen written by others about it, it's no wonder he ha a reputation as incomprehensible to anyone without a PhD in music and mathematics.

There's no point in putting musical analysis into a programme note. it's almost entirely irrelevant. Those who can understand such things don't need to be told about it, and those who can't, well, can't, so why confuse them further? it's distracting, confronted with Schoenberg, say, to be told to play spot the tone-row when what you should be concentrating on is the emotional import of the piece.

Tovey wrote wonderful pieces of musical analysis that are held up as exemplary programme notes, but what's rarely pointed out is that these wonderful essays were sent out to subscribers weeks before the concert they related to. There's an argument for bringing that back, of course,. but in the context I'm thinking of - the interested layman sitting in his or her seat waiting for the concert to start - it's way too much to take in.

I'm also confused by this habit of writing long descriptions of what happens in the piece. I don't want to know the plot of a book or film before my first encounter with it, why should I be denied the excitement of finding my own way through a piece of music?

What does help is context. It's good to know where the composer was coming from when he/ she wrote; so in the note I've just finished* for Strauss's Alpine Symphony I've talked a lot about the influences of Nietzsche's Anti-Christ and Strauss's friendship with the recently deceased Mahler. I also like to put in any odd facts I may discover relating to the composer of the piece, simply because I like that sort of thing. What I want to do is write something that is actually enjoyable to read and puts you in the world of the music and puts you in the mood for it. I like to put a bit of humour in as well, if possible. A lot of people feel like there's a barrier between them and this fancy-dan classical music stuff, and a joke or two helps reduce that, I hope.

So, my rules for a successful programme note, partly influenced by Orwell's six rules of journalism:

• Talk about historical context
• Put in something unusual or entertaining about composer or piece, the more trivial the better.
• Don't use any technical musical terms.
• Don't write descriptions of the music, except in the most general terms
• It's acceptable to mention something specific near the end of the piece, so the listener will know they're near the end.
• Entertain the reader.
• If at all possible don't mention the actual music at all.

*Sorry, no free lunch here - you'll have to go to the gig and buy the programme if you want to read it.

Notes & Queries

A trombonist and me in the pub after the concert on Saturday:

"Great programmes notes!"
"Thanks!"
"Not much about music in them, is there?"
"Well, writing about music's a waste of time, really."

And it is.

Well, I should qualify that. There's plenty to be had out of the study of music, for performers and composers. But when you're writing for an audience the rules are different, I think. Maybe once upon a time you could have assumed a certain level of knowledge about how a piece of so-called-classical music works, but the fact is that you can't anymore. I write programme notes for intelligent people who have no musical education. I could witter on about sonata forms or whatever happens to be the bottle tonight's wine is poured into, but for those who know about such things it's unnecessary, and for those who don't it's a confusion. All those descriptions of what happens in the piece you read in most programmes - what's the point? I don't want to be told the plot before I read a book. But it does help to have the scene set, and as a lot of the time we're talking about something that was written in a different age or society, it's good to know the context in which it was created. I usually mention something that happens near the end, so that the audience knows it's nearly done. But really my ideal programme note wouldn't talk about the music at all. Long-winded technical descriptions put the layman off, make it seem an esoteric exercise that you can't begin to understand without a degree. Music should be experienced viscerally.

In the case of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony, the political context of its creation is vital to understanding the work, but that's true of anything. No composer exists in a vacuum. To put a work in context doesn't diminish its universality (as some try to claim, particularly in the case of Shostakovich). When making a case, one argues from the specific to the general, and knowing how, when and why DDS composed his Fourth can only help in understanding its wider relevance today.

These thoughts are with me regularly as I write, of course, but they also come to mind this morning reading the comments on Pliable's post about the review of Alex Ross's book on Radio 3. It's true that there's not much in the way of discussion of music in the book, but is that its purpose? My impression is that the point of it is to put 20th century composers into a social context, something which has been largely lacking. I find the earlier part of the book more successful in this than the latter - although perhaps that simply reflects the extent to which the post-war composers abdicated social responsibility? It's also true that Ross's story peters out sometime in the early 70s, but perhaps with music since then it is too soon to tell. Certainly, the book isn't as wonderful as it's been made out to be - what could live up to such hype? - but Ross has attempted to put 20th century composers before a general audience, and that's something to be admired and encouraged.

Politician may not actually know what she's talking about shock

The debate about the speech that Margaret Hodge gave yesterday rumbles on. And proves that for most people, the Last Night of the proms, the entire proms season and the entire range of what we call" Classical Music" are all interchangeable. Now that's what you call an image problem.

Hodge's own online diary, meanwhile, praised the Proms mightily last September. There's bound to be a suspicion that this proves that she' s simply a vacuous media tart who'll say whatever needs to be said to get some attention (I see more than one person has raised the spectre of Zhdanov), but is it just me or do those diary entries talking about operas and the Vienna Phil read like they've been cribbed from some bluffer's guide to classical music-type book? I'm now confused: is she ignorant or hypocritical?

How Pop Music Works

Oh, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. Don't you look fashionable in your unbuttoned shirt and Converses? Look at you, grooving to "Tomorrow Never Knows", nodding sagely to Joni Mitchell, telling us how great Imagine and Bohemian Rhapsody and Wyclef Jean are, making it OK to like pop. Well, you know what? I don't need your patronising waffle to justify listening to anything. I don't need you pinning songs down like butterflies.

The thing is, there are some interesting people on this programme, with pertinent things to say about what makes a great pop song. But why do we have to put up with you bringing your relentlessly average thoughts to bear? It's bad enough that you're becoming ubiquitous in the field of classical music on telly, a middle aged, dressed twenty years too young television producer's wet dream of half-arsed ideas of "accessibility" and "relevance". Why do you have to ruin pop as well?

Arrival

Give up everything, we were on the wrong track.
Begin with yourself:
you are a musician.
You can transform all the vibrations of the world into sounds.
if you firmly believe this and from now on never doubt it,
begin with the simplest exercises.

Become quite still, until you no longer think, want, feel anything
Sense your soul, a little below your chest.
let its radiance slowly permeate your whole body
both upwards and downwards at the same time.
open your head on top in the center, a little towards the back,
and let the current that hovers above you there, like a dense sphere
enter into you.
Let the current slowly fill you from head to foot
and continue flowing.

Quietly take your instrument and play, at first single sounds.
Let the current flow through the whole instrument.
Whatever you want to play, even written
music of any sort, begin only
when you have done what I have recommended.

you will then experience everything on your own.

before you play, you may let your thoughts
run free, you may train the muscles
of your fingers, of your larynx, etc.
But now you know what you think and train for,
and even the thinking and training
will be completely new, completely different from before.
Nothing is as it used to be.

as long as you retain this consciousness,
everything you do will be right and good.

excerpt from Aus den Sieben Tagen, by Karlheinz Stockhausen. © 1970 by Universal Edition.

Sound vs. Noise 6: I do not whistle a happy tune

We all have our pet hates - some of us, bad-tempered fellows such as me, have several. But one thing particularly sets my teeth on edge, and that's whistling.

Whistling is to me very nearly as annoying as the tinny scratching of someone else's personal stereo gouging at my eardrum. That comes simply from a person being a thoughtless twat - I suspect most of the i-Podded different drummers crowded onto the morning tube have somehow managed to convince themselves that they're not playing their music that loud and no-one else can hear it - but to whistle requires a conscious decision to foist your sound on others.

Many years ago, in another job, in another city, there was someone at work (isn't there always?) who was in the habit of whistling. he whistled in that especially irritating old man's style, which was inevitable, I suppose, given that he was an old man. Now I am in a different job in a different city, but still there is someone at work. Although he is younger than my previous irritant.

Apart from the inherent high-pitched annoyance of the tone of it, the whistler is nearly always notable for the paucity of his repertoire, sometimes not even getting to the end of a single tune, but repeating the same four or five-note phrase over and over, like a concussed budgie. The addition of monotony only furthers the pain.

Of course, being English, I'm far too repressed to jump up, make a grab for the offender's throat and throttle him wildly, while shouting "SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP!" I'm so inhibited I probably wouldn't even do it if he weren't my boss.

So I do what I must - I retreat into my headphones and hope whatever I put in the CD drive of the PC can be turned up loud enough to drown the tweeting awfulness of it all. Of course, I can d this, because it's not that loud, and no-one can hear any leakage from my headphones, can they? And so the cycle goes; man hands on misery to man.

Record company in good idea shock

Interesting times in the world of online music, the recent unveiling of the new Deutsche Grammophon web shop being followed by the Philharmonia's. Both offer higher quality files than you'd find at the likes of iTunes (320kbps, since you ask, which is near as dammit CD-quality), and DG's are DRM free (it's not made clear whether this is the case with the Philharmonia, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt). Certainly initial reactions to the DG shop sound very promising, and it seems they've succeeded where many record companies have failed so far in managing to put together a carefully thought out and imaginative response to the challenges posed by the digital revolution. If some of the bigger companies follow their lead, it'll be all to the good. Although EMI seem too busy worrying about the productivity of their artists (who lest we forget, tend to produce a record less than every two years largely due to the way big record companies run their business) to think about any proper long term ideas.

Ladies and Gentlemen, your Christmas No.1

...if there's any justice. Genius!

Another gratuitous plug

Bryan,who describes himself as a long time reader of this blog (something I find flattering and terrifying in equal measure), draws my attention to a band called Your 33 Black Angels, who have released an album all by themselves without a big record company, and are therefore Splendid (even though I haven't had time to listen to them properly yet). Rolling Stone like them too, but don't let that put you off ;)

As I haven't had time (etc), feel free to pop over to their MySpaz and come back here and say what you think. This is of course an example of internet democracy in action, and not just a lazy way of whoring for comments. Honest.

Access no areas

Missed Mark Ronson's critically acclaimed Electric Proms gig? Never mind, you can still catch it online at... oh, er, you can't, apparently.

"Music rights restrictions" suggests either a record company or a publisher's hand at work. Either way, it's another piece of heavy-handed idiocy. Who benefits from this gig being made unavailable? One more example of the way the music industry dinosaurs would rather go out of their way to stop their music being heard than attempt to engage in any way with the possibilities music has online. In a way, this is a good thing, because every clodding act like this brings the day when these vile organisations are consigned to history.

Know Nono? No?

In the absence of any coherent thing of my own to say (hey, I'm busy), may I point you in the direction of an excellent post about Luigi Nono.

The end is where we start

When I was a lad, I was determined that I was going to be an artist. I had this dream from very early on (since 3 or 4, I think), and later on it crystallised into something more specific: I wanted to draw comics. I spent hours copying the characters in comics like the Beano, Buster and Whizzer & Chips, and later on the Doctor Who comic strips, 2000ad and the Eagle were obsessions for me. I marvelled at the wonderful worlds that appeared in them, remembered the artists' name and watched out for my favourites, studying their styles and resolved that one day my name would be listed in the credit cards of 2000ad (at that time pretty much the only comic that credited its creators).

It didn't work out like that of course; I failed my art 'O' level (there's a bit of me that wishes I had had the paper remarked, I'm sure I failed at least partly because my main project was done in a very unashamedly comic-book style), but it didn't really matter, because by then I'd started writing music, and it made me focus on that, and despite my intention to keep drawing for my own pleasure, I stopped making pictures (although I continued to, and still do, doodle voraciously).

Then a few years ago, through comics fans I met through the web, who decided to stop being passive consumers and produce their own small press comics, I started again. I was very unsure of myself at first, in fact to begin with I wrote scripts for others to draw, but gradually I dared to put pen to paper and draw once more. It was wonderful, and all the better because the motivation wasn't any idea of career or success, but a love of the medium and a delight in producing something of my own that was there (as opposed to a piece of music, which once finished must lie in limbo until someone can be persuaded to perform it). And now I find myself drawing for payment, something I've never achieved as a composer, and wondering if this might lead somewhere. Strange how things turn out.

Musicophilia

There's a very interesting interview with Oliver Sacks here relating to his forthcoming (and interesting looking) book about the relationship between music and the brain.

Silence

John Cage, whose birthday I noted recently, is of course the first name you'd associate with silence, as enshrined in his notorious piece 4'33". But there's another composer whose career is partly defined by silence.

It's 50 years since Sibelius died, and approximately 80 years since he produced any significant work. I can't think of any parallel to this. It seems he worked on an eighth symphony for some years, before burning everything he had written in 1943. Tom Service in today's Guardian suggests that this 30 year silence was simply the only appropriate response Sibelius could make after what he achieved in his final symphonies and Tapiola; he simply could say nothing which would not diminish those achievements.

There's probably some truth in this, although it may be romanticising crippling self-doubt on the part of Sibelius. After he burnt the eighth symphony, he became much happier. Maybe this was because he had reached a point where he felt able to let go of his idea of himself as a composer.

I often think about what makes one a composer*, especially when I'm not actually writing anything. If I at what point do I cease to be a composer? Elisabeth Lutyens used to say "If you're a composer, you bloody well compose", which implies that you're only a composer if you're actually writing. This appeals to me, as I've always felt uncomfortable with the presumption and pretension that seems to go with a declaration of "I am a COMPOSER!". And yet, I'm always conscious, even during those dry, unproductive periods, that I feel that I am, in some way. And this is a disturbing feeling, because if I'm a composer, why am I not composing? Generally, before the suspicion that I'm not a composer anymore takes complete hold, I have an idea, start writing,and become myself again.

But that awesome, oppressive 30 year silence of Sibelius continues to haunt me, and sometimes seems as powerful as anything he wrote. I wonder if that happiness that was noted in him after his immolation was due to a sense of freedom, that he had finally abandoned ambition, had unshackled himself from reputation, had admitted to himself that he was a man who had once been a composer, but no longer was.



*Harrison Birtwistle once gave a talk to an audience of schoolchildren, one of whom asked him, "But how do you become a composer?" Birtwistle replied, "Well, you've got to write music. There's no way round it."