Sir Arthur Bliss

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Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy two.

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Desert Island discs

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As usual, the castaway is introduced by Roy Plumley.

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Yeah.

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Our castaway this week is a very distinguished British composer. He's Master of the Queen's Music, Sir Arthur Bliss.

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Sir Arthur, how well could you endure loneliness?

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I could endure it for a certain length of time, but for not very long, I don't think.

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Of course it's wonderful to be, as it were, alone in a crowd an artist always feels that. But I think to be absolutely alone without any communication

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After a certain period I uh shouldn't like it at all. Where would you like this island to be?

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I think somewhere in the South Seas a nice climate, you know. I like a large, fertile sort of island, plenty of interesting fauna and flora.

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Now you have eight records to choose. Would you have preferred scores to records? Oh, no, I much prefer sound. Reading scores is rather a dry musicologist's occupation. No, I'd like to have the real stuff.

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What's the first record you've chosen?

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Well, this may surprise you, because I should think, if one is on a desert island,

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One would miss one thing in life, that is laughter.

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It's a very healthy thing.

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So I've taken a record actually to make me laugh, and um I'd rather let you hear it first before telling you what it is.

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And uh if any one can listen to this without

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Laughing himself

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I think he must really be without either a sense of humour, or he must be an extraordinarily successful poker player.

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I see what you mean. Now, tell us what they were. Well, that is the call of the Australian bird, the kookaburra.

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And it starts from a slow chuckle, it rises to a crescendo. Others join in chortling at different rates and different pitches. That was a very happy little bunch of kookabutters. It was indeed. Now what's your second record? The second is another

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Humorous record.

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It's by an American professor of mathematics who I believe has become completely famous. I just heard of his name.

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Tom Lairder the other day.

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And um

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I've chosen it because

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This record

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makes fun in a way of um

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A geological subject.

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And my wife is a very keen geologist, spends a lot of her time at the Imperial College of Science.

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And here is Professor telling us

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or seeing it was a series of elements.

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And I think it's what found, I must say.

Sir Arthur Bliss4:02

And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

Sir Arthur Bliss4:06

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium, avoran, gadolinium, niobium, iridium, and strontium and silicon and silver and samarium, invisible chromium, lithium, beryllium, and barium.

Sir Arthur Bliss4:18

Isn't that interesting?

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I knew you would.

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I hope you're all taking notes because there's going to be a short quiz next period.

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There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium and phosphorus and francium and flu.

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Tom Blair and the Elements. So, Arthur, are you a Londoner?

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Yes, I was born

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By Barnes Common. Mhm. Yes, indeed. Did you hear a lot of music as a child? Was there a lot of music in your home? Well, my mother, who uh died when I was only about four, was a very fine amateur pianist. I have heard music.

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and I can see from her fingering and expressions and phrasing that she must have been a very accomplished amateur pianist indeed. And then I uh had three brothers, one older than myself, who

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played the violin, and two younger who learned the cello and

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the clattinet and I

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was a pianist, so we were quite a little chamber orchestra ourselves. At what age did you decide that music was to be your career? Oh, very early indeed. I I can't think of anything that deflected me uh from the earliest years.

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You took a degree in music at Cambridge. Was it composition that interested you most at that time?

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Oh, yes. I started, of course, like so many people thinking, Oh, what wonderful thing to be a world famous pianist, to come on to a great hall. There was the

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grand piano and expectant audience and all that sort of thing. But I came to the conclusion that uh to be a pianist to day you must be a very exceptional person indeed. And also I was drawn

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quite early to begin writing

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Writing music for my family to begin with. Yes. When you came down, you went to the Royal College of Music, but not for very long.

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No, I was only one term there before war broke out. Yes. You had a rather rough war. You saw a lot of trench warfare in France.

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Were you able to do any composing at all during that four years?

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Like most young composers, you were a rebel, you were writing experimental, rather.

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Avant garde music. Did you find recognition slow in coming?

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I don't think so. It's exactly the same as what happens after a big world catastrophe. One hopes to change the world radically in the arts and in living generally. And I think we forced

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a certain amount of recognition, just as the young people are today.

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Let's have your third record. What's that to be?

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Well, the third record, I mentioned my wife, and this is work that I wrote for her.

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In the thirties, it's a serenade to her, one of the Spencer love sonnets, Fair is My Love, and the singer describes the fairness of his love and her physical charms, and at the end sings that the fairest thing about her is perhaps when she speaks and what she says.

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Precious merchandise chief.

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Black Cloud of Climb

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Which of the butterfully

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Pair is my love from your serenade for baritone and orchestra. The singer was John Shirley Quick.

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Now, apart from concert music, you've been very active in the more visual fields of music, in ballet and in films. You were probably the first serious English composer to work in films, weren't you? One of the first, I think. It was a sort of breakthrough with the film based on Wells's novel The Shape of Things to Come, which Corder did at enormous expense at Denham. And one of the breakthroughs was that the music became an integral part of the film. In fact, Wells insisted that one sequence of it should be written first in the music and the film shot actually to it. That is quite novel and new. Yes. How many films have you done altogether? About six, I should think.

Sir Arthur Bliss9:14

That

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Some of them are very interesting and some not. Yes. A very interesting technical exercise for a composer, surely, apart from everything else. Yes, of course it is. I mean, uh i it's fascinating to have to compose a scene. I mean uh let's say the cat jumps out of the window, rushes after a mouse that's barked at by a dog, which takes exactly fifty-three and a half seconds, you know. Yes. And of course you've written a number of ballets. Yes, I've actually written four ballets, three for the what is now the Royal Ballet, and one for an American ballet company in San Francisco.

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And one opera, The Olympians, um and your librettist was a very distinguished one, JV Priestley. That's right, he was a very old friend of mine, and we decided to collaborate. It was great fun. We didn't quarrel much.

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Splendid. Of all your compositions, which one are you happiest with? Which one would you like to think you're going to be remembered by?

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The next

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That's a good answer.

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To what extent has the musical scene changed for the young composer? Is it much easier nowadays for a young man to get his work performed than it was when you started? Of course it is. I remember when I was young and

Sir Arthur Bliss10:29

Oh f

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met Elgar and how bitter he was about the fact that he couldn't start composing until comparatively late because he had no private means. You couldn't

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Uh you couldn't live by composing now, of course

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It's comparatively easy, if you have talent, to do so.

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the BBC with commissions, with recording, with performing rights and so on. If you've got any talent at all, you will be able to get a decent income.

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It means hard work, but we can do it.

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Let's have your fourth record. Watch that. My next record is an Indian raga.

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You can play a raga at morning which is entirely different from the one you play at night when it's calm and mysterious. The one I've chosen is one that you can play best perhaps between three and six late afternoon as I sit under my palm tree.

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I don't know if it's fun.

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Bring

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And then

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Ravi Shankar playing an excerpt from A Late Afternoon Raga.

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So, rather, you began as an avant-garde composer, but you're not regarded as that. Now, what do you think of avant-garde music today? What do you make of all the plinks and plonks and bangs and crashes? Because at eighty-one you can't really make contact very easily with those in the early twenties. I mean, they're experimenting as they should do, and something will come out of it, but I'm certainly not going to give my opinion to the world as to the value of it at this moment.

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You've held a number of administrative posts. For example, you've been director of music at the BBC. Looking back, was that...

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A rewarding pastime administration? Unbearable.

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I don't say that because uh I'm sitting in the August BBC, but simply because to any creative artist administrative duties are quite intolerable. It was only made possible by the help and uh affection of my colleagues. They did all the work.

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Now, you are master of the Queen's Music, and you have been for nearly twenty years. What are the duties that go with that post, and how long has that post been in existence? Oh, it's a very old post. It goes back, I think, to Charles I's days, where the duties were very much more onerous than they are now. Today, it simply means that your main duty is to be ready to write the

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suitable music for big royal occasions. I mean, I've written for the coronation, for wedding of Princess Margaret, for the birth of the two princes.

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investor to the Prince of Wales and so on, you know. Indeed.

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Another record, please. Now this next record is uh

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I'm going to take for my self-protection.

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I don't want to be disturbed on this island by any Man Fridays, or even by wild animals of all kinds, and so I've taken this record to put on very loud if I feel that I'm in any way in danger. And again I'm not going to say what it is until you've heard it.

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Well, that's a a frightening sound. That would certainly keep intruders at bay. I think you'd better say what it is. Well, of course it's the howling of wolves, which is one of the most dramatic sounds in all nature. It's a blood curdling noise. Let's have uh record number six. The word wolves

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Uh makes me

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at once think of the opposite lands. And this is a record of my own music that I particularly like.

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It's a miniature scherzo that comes out of a set of variations, or meditations as I call them, on a theme by John Blow.

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The Scherzo from Meditations on a Theme by John Blow, The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hugo Rignold.

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How resourceful a castaway would you be, Sir Arthur?

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Well, I that's got to be uh proven. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty bad with my hands. If a question of uh of putting a fuse in or hammering a nail in the wall, I generally call my wife to do it. And of course, if one doesn't do these things oneself, one loses the instinct to do it. Very possibly, if I was by myself, I'd be more resourceful, but I don't know. Would you try to escape?

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Yes, I think I should.

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Actually, I don't know how it'll be accomplished, but I don't think I want to stay there all by myself for ever. Hmm. Would you? No. No, well. I'm not sure about how brave I'd be about setting off into the blue in in a a home made canoe or something of the sort. Oh, well you had to wait for the mermaid or something like that.

Sir Arthur Bliss18:02

Uh

Sir Arthur Bliss18:09

Oh, right, we have

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Something will turn up. You're an optimist.

Sir Arthur Bliss18:13

Turn up

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Let's have record number seven.

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Well, in case um my island is a small one and I suffer from claustrophobia.

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I've chosen as a record um

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Some music that gives the uh the the feeling of immense space. It's by Bodadine in the steppes of Central Asia.

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Bodin's In the Steps of Central Asia, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Constantine Silvestri.

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And now we come to your last record. What's that to be?

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Well, I want to go as a contrast from the vast and mournful plains of Central Asia to sunny Sicily, where my wife and I and two friends spent wonderful holiday a good many years ago, and which made me want to write a pastoral set of classical words, the myths of the gods and goddesses, pan nymphs and shepherds and so on.

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And I've chosen from this choral setting a song by Theocritus. The Reaper's Song is in praise of Demeter, the classical goddess of fertility.

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And since we speak nothing more than

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The Reaper song from Your Pastoral.

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The Brook Normale Choir of London and the London Chamber Orchestra conducted by Wynne Morris. If you could take just one of the eight discs you've played us, which would it be? Oh, I should take the love sonnet I've wrote from my wife.

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And one luxury to take to the island with you?

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But I think I'd like to have a fine pair of field glasses to observe what there is on this island. Right. And one book, assuming that the Bible and Shakespeare are already there. Oh, there's no question about it. The Swiss Family Robinson. Remember, that's the father and mother and four sons shipwrecked, and the father knows absolutely everything about all the growing things, animals, and so on. And by the time they've been there six months, they're living just as luxuriously as though they were in the London Hilton. I shall learn a lot from them.

Sir Arthur Bliss22:02

Yeah.

Presenter22:04

Good. And thank you, Sir Arthur Bliss, for letting us hear your desert island discs.

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Goodbye everyone.

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You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4.

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Uh