Richard Rodney Bennett

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This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of Desert Island Discs. The presenter was Roy Plumley.

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You said that your parents gave you the Walton Viola concerto when you were a child, so you had musical parents.

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Uh

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Uh

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Uh

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Yeah.

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My mother was a pianist and composer.

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And my father wrote uh children's books and also song lyrics. Any song lyrics that we know?

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Well, um I don't know if the young would know them, but one was called Bird Songs at Eventide and one was called Brown Bird Singing. Oh, yeah. And I believe he I believe he wrote them as a bet. Somebody bet him he couldn't write successful song lyrics, and he did.

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And I believe we

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And I think I was educated on the proceeds.

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I believe you ab you absorb Pop music voracious Play all kinds of music. As a youngster. Well, it was always around me, and so there was it it was just there, and that was what I liked best. Mhm. Modern music attracted you primarily. Modern music primarily, yes. It seemed the most kind of exciting, and jazz as well. And then it was really later on when I was a student that I got around to

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Modern music

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to um the the essential classical repertoire.

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When did you start to compare?

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Well, I always did. I I n I certainly never made a decision, and I can't remember when I first started, because before I actually wrote down music I drew music on pieces of paper.

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And it was never a decision. I always just did.

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Yes.

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What was the first work of yours that you heard performed by any one else?

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Well, it must have been um

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S small songs or pieces I wrote for children's orchestra. I think I wrote always very much for things that were around me and and and school orchestras of course were always part of my upbringing.

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Yeah.

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Uh

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You went to the Royal Academy of Music. Mhm.

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And those three years at the Academy, I believe, produced a quite impressive list of compositions.

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Well it certainly

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got me going. I I found

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I was beginning to find my way in the professional field and I was very much in contact with young composers and musicians which was enormously stimulating for me and I did write a lot then, yes.

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And your academy has also established you as a jazz pianist.

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Well, I I helped myself along by being a jazz pianist. I first took up playing the piano

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playing jazz to kind of defend myself against other boys at school,'cause if you could play jazz you were okay, whereas if you could write music you weren't okay at all. And it did come in handy later on.

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While still a student you had your first commission to write film music. Yes, I started um when I was nineteen with John Hollingsworth.

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And I've that's really been my bread and butter ever since.

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What was that first film?

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It was a picture about insurance, the history of insurance dating back to the Great Fire of London.

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And your first feature?

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I believe it was a picture called Interpol, which was a thriller with Victor Mathur.

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What happened when you left the academy?

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Well, I did something which I think is very important for a young creative artist. I went right away for my own environment. I went to Paris and I studied um

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privately with Pierre Boulez, who has always terrified me as a musician. He still does. Why?

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Well, apart from anything else, he has the most incredible ear, a musical ear, that I believe anybody has ever had. I've never known anything like it. His knowledge and his um

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How shall I say, he's j he's just m his musicianship is incredible, phenomenal.

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Yeah.

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Uh

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You came back from Paris, having completed your postgraduate studies, and began to operate a as a composer on several different levels until Uh

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Yes, um from when I was nineteen.

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Till now I've made my living almost till now I've made my living by writing film music.

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At the same time I was writing, so to speak, my own music, serious music, and jazz has always been my hobby, so I always wrote and played a little of that.

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Yes, I was pretty clear about why I was doing the various things. Not that I was doing film music just for money, because I do love the cinema and it's my main

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Recreation and pleasure. But um one has to regard film music as a means to an end. Writing film music requires

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is a discipline that it's very useful for a composer to acquire.

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requires a facility that it it might be dangerous for a composer to have.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Uh

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Well, the facility itself isn't dangerous, but film music can be dangerous because it's extremely exhausting mentally.

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Um I remember one year when I did four films, which is the equivalent of writing four symphonies in a year, and I think I wrote ten minutes of my own music, and that was when I began to pull out, and in fact now nowadays I do less and less, because I am aware of the dangers of of expending one's energies in that way.

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I'm on that

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Yes, how many films have you done altogether? Well, about thirty.

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Which are the ones you like to talk about? About two. Which?

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I like Far From the Madden Crowd very much.

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And a picture I did for Betty Davis called The Nanny. Oh yeah.

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Now on the serious side, which was your first important composition? Which was the one that first

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From an audience point of view it was the Minds of Solfer, because which is an opera, there's an audience for opera which is not necessarily interested in other forms of music.

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And so I really got in touch with a lot of people. You were commissioned to write. That was a commission, yes. How would you describe the the genre of of of The Minds of Sulphur? Well, it's not an experimental opera.

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Yeah.

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That was a commission.

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It's a very romantic opera, it's a very dramatic and kind of nocturnal and sinister kind of piece.

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which I needed to write at that time.

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Um, one goes through periods.

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And this was the sort of music I was writing then. And now I wouldn't touch it ever again. Well, since The Saddler's Wells production it's been performed in quite a number of

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countries. It's been p p done abroad a lot, including America and

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Uh

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And including La Scarlet Milan. Including the Scarlet Milan, yes, which.

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Wasn't one of my favorite. In fact, it was the lowest I shall probably ever get as far as audience reaction.

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Uh

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Yeah.

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Oh dear.

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and at more or less the same time as the mines of Salvaux. Your first symphony was performed.

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Yes, and that has started me on another trend towards symphonic writing. After mainly vocal music? Yes, I I started writing vocal music when I was a child. My sister was a singer.

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an amateur singer and I always until that point had written vocal music. Is there a reluctance among modern composers to write for the symphony orchestra? Is this an economic thing? Well it is partly because most young composers um once they've got beyond a certain stage they write to commission that's to say they write what they're asked for and paid for and um large orchestras don't generally commission composers unless the composers are are beginning to be well known.

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And of course it's one tr hopes to write what people will want to play.