Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A major and most fertile composer, known for his long and productive career.
On the island
Eight records
The first one I've chosen is by Monteverdi, a composer whom I didn't know of, and I think the majority of people didn't know of until the late 1930s, when Orfeo was published, his opera Orfeo was published in piano and vocal form. This I liked very much, and was very excited about it, and when The Madrigals appeared some few years later by a group of singers conducted by Nadia Boulanger, I was captivated by the sound of them, and I've never forgotten the first impression I had of them.
Cambridge University Musical Society Chorus
Now I saw the score of this in a curious way. In in about nineteen thirty or thereabouts, I was reviewing for the Monthly Musical Record ... In my reviews came an enormous parcel one morning. containing the score of the forty part motette of a composer I didn't know anything about, Talis. I was so enthralled by it.
Choir of King's College, Cambridge
I was impressed by its utter simplicity. And It's directness of expression. The words of the Requiem usually suggest something very dramatic and rather fierce in a way in some parts of it but in the Foray Requiem this is not so. It's peaceful, serene, and sometimes critics have said it's over sweet. But I don't mind that, because all French music tends to be sweet.
Symphony of Psalms (Praise Him with cymbals)
Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford
Yes, for two reasons really. It's directness of expression. It's a lack of over-sentimentality and romanticism, direct expression of the words. Also because the part I've chosen is the psalm beginning Praise Him with symbols. Well, usually that's uh given, if it's set at all, with music that's full and loud. But somehow Strovinsky invests it with a hush of awe, and that immediately attracted me.
Benedictine Monks of the Abbey of Saint-Maurice and Saint-Maur, Clervaux
I've always been interested in this. I don't know why or how I uh first of all met it. But the simplicity of it always caught my musical imagination. and particularly when, as in this record, the Gregorian chant is coupled with bell sounds. Now bell sounds have been in my music and with me since my youth.
Choir of King's College, Cambridge
I used to lecture in Oxford University on all the English well, a lot of the English school, and I went through the three Masses of Bird and was most impressed by this five-part Mass.
Until the Chieftains appeared on a record and I thought here they are, the real Irish people playing real Irish music in the real Irish way. and I was immediately attracted and held by it.
Symphony No. 9 in C major, 'The Great'Favourite
London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult
for me It contains not so much of the intellectuality of Beethoven's symphonies. But is far more Lyrical, spontaneous. And contains everything for me.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:29Were you born into a music-loving family?
Yes. My mother was an amateur singer, soprano singer, with very good voice ... And my father was uh an opera lover primarily.
Presenter asks
3:44Was it in those early school days that you decided that you wanted music somewhere or other to be your career?
Yeah. You see, my mother and father. were very helpful, although they're so poor. They wanted to help me to do whatever I wanted to do. But my mother's ambition, oddly enough, was for me to be a clerk. And I did become a clerk at the age of fourteen, of course.
Presenter asks
8:39Was that where you met Holst for the first time?
Host, yes. Host was a teacher who ... travelled to Reading University College, as it was then. to teach one day a week. There was no room for him to teach in, actually, so he taught in the great hall, and we sat down to the pile of printed music and studied the counterpoint, because host wouldn't use text books.
The keepsakes
The book
Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner
A. A. Milne
I've found that Winnie the Pooh and the house at Pooh Corner fills the bill. Always when I read it, I've been entertained vastly by it, and it never paused.
The luxury
composer's kit (manuscript paper and pencils)
I did at one time think of asking for a piano, but then of course the difficulty is that in a hot climate they tend to quickly get out of tune and I've no experience of tuning a piano... So I think a composer's kit and all it entails would be useful.
Presenter asks
24:04Did you resent having to teach as an interruption in your work, or was it always rewarding to be working with young musicians?
I think teaching is a rewarding occupation, because one learns, particularly at a place like Oxford University, one learns so much from one's pupils.
Presenter asks
28:52Do you have a musical idea and develop it through to the end? Or do you sometimes have an idea for a finale or a scherzo and then you work either side of it?
Sometimes the symphonies have started backwards, as it were, doing what I think is going to be the first movement, turning out to be what I feel after it's finished, to be the finale and nothing could follow it. That's happened twice. But usually I begin at the beginning and go on to the end. following the line of thought. Yes. Right through to the end.
“I didn't mind at one time, but nowadays I don't listen to them so much. ... Don't like to be influenced by other people's music now.”
“I only knit my music, I don't write it in the normal way, I knit it.”
“I like to have a piano with me to test the sounds. Because I think if You don't. Music's not alive. Ernest Newman yu always used to say that uh reading a score is as good as hearing the music. Well, I don't believe that.”