Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
A composer who began as a controversial firebrand and became Master of the Queen's Music, known for Orkney-inspired works such as 'An Orkney Wedding' and 'Farew
On the island
Eight records
Große Fuge in B-flat major, Op. 133
Well, this piece intrigues me, because Beethoven finished this quartet with this fugue, and then withdrew it and put a very conventional little finale on instead of this fugue, and I wonder why there was this crisis of self-confidence, because this fugue is, I think, one of the most outrageously original movements that Beethoven ever wrote.
French National Radio Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Ernest Bour
This is something which I was very fond of when I was at Leigh Grammar School. ... And the bit that I'd like to hear is where suddenly you're transported into the garden at night, and I think it's one of those most marvellous economic but atmospheric pieces of painting in music that I know.
Farben (Summer Morning by a Lake) from Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16
BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Pierre Boulez
I still find quite, quite atmospheric and it leads me to think about all sorts of marvellous orchestral colours in my own work.
New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein
I find Carter's music very stimulating and for me it in some way sums up the whole experience of coming to terms with particularly New York, which I find a very difficult place indeed, and the whole American experience that I've had over the years.
An old favourite, Bartock's fifth string quartet, one of those pieces where as a boy I realized that music isn't only in three, four, and four, that it can be at seven, eight and nine, eight and change all the time.
Helen Donath and Elisabeth Söderström
This intrigues me, this work, because throughout the opera Nero behaves disgracefully, murdering this and that one, and at the end there's a complete triumph of evil, and Poppeare and Nero sing this love duet very innocently right at the end, and it is so beautiful and so touching, and one knows that they are wholly evil. It makes me think.
Symphony No. 7 in C major, Op. 105
Hallé Orchestra, conducted by Sir John Barbirolli
I remember hearing this trombone tune in the Seventh Symphony, and I think my hair must have stood on end. It struck me as one of the most, well, ominous sounds I'd ever heard, but so invigorating and so enormously atmospheric, like black clouds and thunder.
Mass for Four Voices: Agnus DeiFavourite
Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, conducted by Simon Preston
The Bird Four Part Mass, the Anus Day, particularly the last bit, I find very moving the Donanubi's Parchum Givers Piece.
Victimae paschali laudesFavourite
The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos
The Victimi Pascali Laudis is an Easter hymn, and I do remember when I was a student in Rome, hearing a very large congregation, led by the monks of the monastery at S. Anselmo, singing this, I associate it with such joy and such ... I think a sense of wonder.
Symphony No. 38 in D major, K. 504 'Prague' (1st Movement)
Dresden State Orchestra, conducted by Sir Colin Davis
It's this ambiguity in the structure, which is very tight, this looseness and tightness together, which makes it so perennially fascinating. You can come back and still you don't know how he did it.
The Parley of Instruments Renaissance Violin Consort, directed by Peter Holman
This is the first of John Darwin's lachromy, or Seven Tears. It has for me something of the extraordinary atmosphere of, say, John Donne's poetry of much the same period. That intensity, that extraordinary indulgent melancholia.
This tune works perfectly in canon with itself, and also if you do play with it a little bit, you can make inverse canon. I've got that kind of mind that sees mathematical and arithmetical possibilities in material, and there's so much more implied than is actually written down.
London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Colin Davis
I choose this because Alexander Gerr was such a good friend and such a wonderful guru when I was a student at Manchester, and the opening chords, they always struck me as being so beautifully balanced and so well heard.
George Mackay Brown, the Arcadian poet, he was a very big influence on me. I've set his poems, I've made operas and music theatre pieces out of his work, and I would hate to be on a desert island without him reading some of his own poetry, and here he is reading The Old Woman.
This extraordinary experience I had as master of the Queen's Music, making it my duty to get to know all sorts of ... byways of musical life that I'd never explored before, and I realized that there was a whole different world of music there, with its own laws, its own regulations
Symphony No. 9 in E-flat major, Op. 70 (1st Movement: Allegro)
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy
It's just the unpredictability of the man, and the sheer naughtiness of the man, in a situation where he could have disappeared into the gulag for his cheek. That makes me love him and makes me love this piece so much.
In conversation
Presenter asks
5:07Do you remember your very first exposure to music?
Yes. Uh first time it really hit me was when I was taken to see the gondoliers. I determined there and then that that was what my life was about. It was just one of those extraordinary experiences. I was four.
Presenter asks
6:40How much music was there at your school [Leigh Grammar School]?
There was very little indeed. It was a rather sorry experience at Lee Grammar School in those days.
Presenter asks
10:14How did you visualize yourself [as a musician]? What was your impact on music to be?
I knew that I was going to be a composer. That was all that I really was interested in. Not so much playing or conducting, but just composing. And I was very interested in opera and the theatre. And I saw myself doing something on those lines, writing music, possibly incidental music for film. I had no highfalutin ideas about being a big name composer, but I thought I might be able to make an honest living perhaps writing incidental music or something of that kind.
The keepsakes
The book
The Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana (with a Sanskrit dictionary)
Traditional
I would like to spend time with that, and in the normal circumstances of life you don't really you just don't, and it's terrible.
The luxury
Copper plate engravings of Dürer's Passion
Because they are technically masterpieces, their spiritual content is overwhelming, and it was something which was made for home use, for everybody. Anybody could have them. It wasn't a work of art which was just for one person. It was printed and done off in thousands. And I wouldn't feel guilty about that.
Presenter asks
10:39Which contemporaries of yours [at the Royal Manchester College of Music] would we know by name?
There were Harrison Bachwisle, Alexander Gurr, um Elgar Harth, John Ogden, um Rodney Friend, I remember, who's now leading the B B C Symphony Orchestra, he played some of my music then. It was a very, I think, a very Good group of students in that we were always discussing.
Presenter asks
23:53How much has Hoy influenced your music?
Oh, a lot Not only in that I've been able to concentrate and work many, many hours for a long time together, many, many weeks together, but just the experience of having your ears cleaned out so that you can hear natural sounds, sounds of the wind, sounds of the waves, without machine noises, without electric humming or anything... And um traffic noise causes no road anywhere near. So just this encounter with natural sound I think was a revelation at that stage for me
Presenter asks
1:02Why would seeing a production of The Gondoliers at age four inspire you to become an avant-garde musician?
It was more real than real. I know it was only Mrs So and So from up the street, dressed up, but there at Salford Central Mission ... I didn't really understand what was going on, but there was an orchestra, and it was the most wonderful thing I'd ever heard in my life a live orchestra. ... I thought I want to have to do with that world that erupted briefly on that stage.
Presenter asks
2:23What do you remember about getting lost in the mist in the Lake District?
I forget exactly where it was. I think I was with my parents, walking up Helvellyn. ... And Miss Came down. ... And I heard as it were in the distance the music that I was going to write. That was the sound of the orchestral music that I write now, that I've been writing for the last years. ... It was there, in the air. I just heard it, as if it were some kind of fairy music coming out of the mist, and I can't explain.
Presenter asks
5:57Have you ever walked into your studio, sat down and not been able to write a note?
I can save very honestly, I hope that day never comes. It would be horrible. And it never has. It never has, no, no. I have been criticised a lot for writing in different styles and different kinds of music. ... I've been called a prostitute. Fine In that case so was Mozart. But I don't see why one shouldn't write in these different genres, because life is complex, and I don't think one can honestly say that one is a person who is only one thing.
Presenter asks
11:03Is it fair to say you were an unlikely son for your northern working-class parents to have produced?
I think it is, but then I suspect that in that kind of setting there would have been no chance for anybody to study music that it just wouldn't have occurred. You'd have had to go to work at the age of fourteen, and that was it. Well, you might have done, of course. I nearly did. I got myself a scholarship to go to the college and the university in Manchester.
Presenter asks
26:09How do you feel in the moment when people walk out or shout during your performances?
Oh, it was very upsetting. It really is discouraging. And you have to fight away a despair. But I think I did that, and went on and went on, and I remember that Colin Davies conducted World's Bliss not long after that, and I put it about mischievously that I'd done some revision. I did none at all, and the press said how much better this revised version was.
Presenter asks
31:49What's your answer to those who say you're a conformist now for accepting a knighthood and the post of Master of the Queen's Music?
I think I had to resist the establishment in so many ways, and I hope that I can perhaps make it a bit easier for people coming along who might be in my position. And part of the thing with the royal appointment is, I am sure, enhancing the profile of serious new music. And I also, having spoken with the Queen and learnt to respect her very much, I hope that she is going to enjoy this appointment as well, can I say very quietly?
“I think it's important for a composer not only to be with people, working with musicians and knowing how audiences react and what the professional side of communicating music is all about, but also to be by himself so that he comes to terms with the compositional problems that he has in his own time and to the fullest possible extent.”
“I think that one wants to find something which perhaps one doesn't know quite so well and which is going to be very stimulating.”
“I knew that I was going to be a composer. That was all that I really was interested in. Not so much playing or conducting, but just composing.”
“I will, even if it's midnight, cook a meal, set out the table properly for myself, with the right cutlery, the right glass, for the right kind of half bottle of wine. And um have my meal in candlelit style, all by myself, and this I think is very important.”
“It's a question of walking the beach with the dog. It's as if you're walking inside the harmonies in three dimensions all around you, and you can move this note and shove that one, and then walk that bit again, so that you get from that chord to that chord in another way.”
“I do care. And particularly I feel that I do want to tell people how it is to be PM D, and I hope that my music reflects something of the spiritual values and helps people to understand their own musicality, their own spiritual development, and that it means something in people's lives.”
“Every piece of music that I write, whatever its style, it's a step on the way to finding out. No, I don't know, but when I've written the next quartet, or the next choral piece, or the next whatever it is, I'll be that much closer to finding out.”