Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Composer of film scores including The Piano and The Draftsman's Contract, and of string quartets, concertos, and opera.
On the island
Eight records
Dwayne Eddy song because it must have been playing on jukeboxes when I think I I had my first infatuation with with somebody called Linda, I think, and uh Station Road, North Chingford.
What Power Art Thou (from King Arthur)
Les Arts Florissants, directed by William Christie
I discovered the sheet music of this Purcell. piece when I was writing in nineteen eighty five. At large, a sort of one and a half hour piece which became a memorial for. The victims of the Hazel Stadium disaster... I played it and I just sat there thinking, what an amazing piece of music.
what is interesting about this and why it's a very interesting token of sixties culture. is that, you know, one day you can be hearing hearing this at a Bob Dylan concert, and the next day I would go to a lecture by Wilfred Mellers... then, you know, thirty years ago we were living on the edge.
The Great Learning: Paragraph 7
The Scratch Orchestra, conducted by Cornelius Cardew
I am on this next recording... my voice is there. Somewhere and this is a A brilliant piece of kind of socialized music making... It represents a kind of sort of paradise, a kind of innocence, that we were We were modest and we worked together
Madamina, il catalogo è questo (from Don Giovanni)
Michele Pertusi, London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Georg Solti
I remembered when I was about thirteen or fourteen that Leslie Winters had taken me to see Don Giovanni at The Old Shadow as Wells, and I remembered this amazing chord sequence.
New Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Eduardo Mata
I owe the B B C a debt of gratitude for this piece when I was writing for the listener... If you can imagine Stravinsky living in Mexico and being kind of politically committed to Mexican history and Mexican peasants, you can sort of imagine this music
Der Abschied (from Das Lied von der Erde)Favourite
Kathleen Ferrier, Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Bruno Walter
quite simply Kathleen Ferrier singing Part of the last movement of Mahler's Daslied von der Ede, which I haven't heard since I was about twelve or thirteen. Again, part of the Leslie Winters phenomenal music education, which makes it worth taking, I think.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:34Why do you think you're cast into [the Twilight Zone]? Who's cast you?
The people that make those choices, whether it's programming or commissions, don't like my music. Simple as that. So it's pe it's people at the Royal Opera House, it's people at the ENO, it's people at the BBCs.
Presenter asks
2:44Do you feel that music is under too tight a control in this country?
No, I don't think so. No, I th I think when when when there are personal fiefdoms, when when a single person who works for may work for a corporation has particular likes and particular dislikes. And you happen to be one of those dislikes, it's kind of unfortunate, but can't have everything.
Presenter asks
14:54How was it bliss [working with Peter Greenaway on The Draughtsman's Contract]?
It was blessed because I was allowed to and encouraged to do more or less what I wanted. Obviously, since it was a film that was set during Purcell's time, we decided that Purcell's music would be the best model, the best resource to recompose. And he basically said, you know, I'm a composer, he was an artist, I was a composer, write 12 pieces of music.
The keepsakes
The book
Laurence Sterne
I've been trying to turn it into an opera for twenty years and it is so vast and it's so confusing. I think I could for the first time in my life sort of take a big bit of beautiful sandy beach and actually plot the structure of the narrative or non-narrative and try and work out how I was going to do it. And then it might also be a sign planes flying over that there was this was not an uninhabited island
The luxury
fully plumbed in flushing lavatory system
for kind of ritualistic purposes amongst other things. A fully plumbed in flushing lavatory system would take a lot of beating
Presenter asks
16:03Why did you [and Peter Greenaway] fall out big time [on Prospero's Books]?
when I saw the film, I've only ever seen it once, I just found that he had not used the music with the respect that he'd used my other music. He fiddled about. He fiddled about... All I expected, I suppose, was Peter to ring me and say, Look, things have changed, the different film, the soundtrack is is magnificent, but I'm going to use it differently.
Presenter asks
18:40Why did you suddenly decide to stop composing [in the 1960s]?
They introduced this the new radical post-Waban serial music, whatever, you know, modern music as we would call it... it was made pretty clear that this was the only music that you were permitted to write. It was a sort of fascism in a way... And so I was very excited by this and I learnt all about serialism and twelve tone and manipulating tone rows and started writing my first twelve tone piece. And then after about thirty minutes I thought This isn't for me.
“The people that make those choices, whether it's programming or commissions, don't like my music. Simple as that.”
“composers have been doing that, you know, since day one, you know, whether it's Gregorian chant or whether it's a you know, a parody mass from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, or whether it's Bach rewriting Vivaldi or Vivaldi rewriting Corelli”
“one of the problems with recycling other composers' music is that um It it has to be an enrichment and not a diminishing.”
“An orchestral piece enables you to go for broke, and I like going for broke.”