Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
Composer of opera, symphonies, concertos and more than fifty film scores (including 'Four Weddings and a Funeral'), also a jazz performer.
On the island
Eight records
Theme from Tender is the Night
John Hall, the great saxophone player, playing my theme, I'm sorry to say, from the television series Tender is the Night. And this is where I met John on the recording session.
this is um a a a wave towards somebody who is my one of my idols, the Hollywood composer um and jazz arranger Johnny Mandel. from a score he wrote for a very strange movie called Agatha.
Violin Concerto: I. Andante comodoFavourite
Yehudi Menuhin and the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by William Walton
my favourite English composer from a very early age was William Walton. And I loved him. He was a very funny man, a very dry man, and we were very happy, you know, talking to one another.
somebody I've met recently is an a young American pianist, I guess, thirty, thirty one, called Bill Sharlapp. And he to me is a great jazz pianist. And he loves tunes.
the partnership I'm involved in now, which I think is the best partnership I've ever had, is with the American singer Mary Clear Harran.
there was a girl singing there that night and as soon as she walked onto the stage I said to my friend who I was with, that is a star and her name was Claire Martin
the greatest French horn player in the world, Barry Tuckwell. And he's playing a beautiful tune, early Jerome Cohen tune from 1917 called Till the Clouds Roll By
again, one of my idols. Shirley Horne, the one of the greatest, even if she's still a secret, one of the best regarded, best-loved jazz artists of all.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:18What was the first work of yours that you heard performed by anyone else?
Well, it must have been small songs or pieces I wrote for children's orchestra. I think I wrote always very much for things that were around me and school orchestras of course were always part of my upbringing.
Presenter asks
2:43What happened when you left the academy?
Well, I did something which I think is very important for a young creative artist. I went right away from my own environment. I went to Paris and I studied privately with Pierre Boulez, who has always terrified me as a musician. He still does.
Presenter asks
3:00Why does [Boulez] terrify you?
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 … his musicianship is incredible, phenomenal.
Presenter asks
4:30How many films have you done altogether?
The keepsakes
The book
The Atlantic Book of British and American Poetry
Edith Sitwell
I love anthologies of poetry. Because I can go back to them and every time I find out more and things I didn't understand the first time, suddenly there's they're speaking to you. And my favorite anthologist from whom I've learnt a very great deal of poetry is Edith Sitwell. And my favorite anthology of hers is The Atlantic Book of British and American Poetry
The luxury
6mm, 36-inch circular knitting needle
I want a a six millimetre, th thirty six inch circular needle, that's to say with a point at both ends. And so I can knit myself sweaters from palm trees and stuff.
Well, about thirty.
Presenter asks
4:33Which are the ones you like to talk about?
About two … I like Far From the Madding Crowd very much. And a picture I did for Bette Davis called The Nanny.
Presenter asks
5:01How would you describe the genre of The Mines of Sulphur?
Well, it's not an experimental opera. It's a very romantic opera, it's a very dramatic and kind of nocturnal and sinister kind of piece, which I needed to write at that time.
Presenter asks
6:00Is 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 once they've got beyond a certain stage they write to commission … and large orchestras don't generally commission composers unless the composers are beginning to be well known. And of course one hopes to write what people will want to play.
Presenter asks
1:24Is that quote of yours accurate, that what you need to do is communicate with audiences?
I do. Some composers don't. I think when you're when you're learning your craft, when you're twenty years old, you're too involved in technique and fashion and so on really to want to communicate with people. And then later on as I, so to speak, grew up, I realized that I really wanted A to give music to the players, which they would really want to play … but also to to bring pleasure, sounds a bit soppy, but for people to enjoy what I was doing.
Presenter asks
10:35What about your relationship with your father?
He was a rather shadowy figure. Um he was a a writer um of children's books basically, um, Rodney Bennett, and um he was he was not very strong, he had a heart condition, so I was rather kept away from him. And later on when I went you know, I was in living in America and I I went into therapy because I had to stop smoking and I suddenly realized that I resented terribly the fact that I I didn't know him. … And he used to beat us, and it was not that happy.
Presenter asks
14:57What was attractive about [the twelve-note technique] for you, then?
Um so much music that I was interested in used that kind of technique, and also the idea of taking a tiny thing, i. e. an arrangement of notes, and making o an entire, if you like, a symphony out of it, was so marvellous.
Presenter asks
16:48In what way did Pierre Boulez take you apart?
Because I'd been writing s since I was five or six. I was immensely fluent. I'd started doing movies when I was nineteen. Um I could write in all kinds of styles and this did none of this impressed him in the s the slightest degree. Rather the opposite, I think. He gave me a very tough training and I was very grateful to him and I always have been.
Presenter asks
22:28Were you afraid that the classicists wouldn't take you seriously [for liking jazz]?
Seriously. Slightly. But then when I went into film films when I was twenty or whatever, there was a certain amount of sniffy behaviour. I mean, people sort of forgot, I suppose, that William Walton and Benjamin Britton and and Ralph Vaughan Williams and John Arland and Arnold Bax and all kinds of English composers had done serious film scores. And also when I, as it were, came out as a jazz pianist, although I'd always done it, now it was ah, it's their problem, it's not my problem.
Presenter asks
25:08Are you worried [when you write music]?
Yes. If I'm doing a commercial score, I mean, you there's no time to sit around and thinking um and think, Oh my god, I can't do it this time. And you just have to plunge in. But if I'm writing if I had to sit down tomorrow and start writing a symphony, I would be in stated like I'd never written music before in my life.
“I first took up playing the piano 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.”
“I went to Paris and I studied privately with Pierre Boulez, who has always terrified me as a musician. He still does.”
“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.”
“From an audience point of view it was The Mines of Sulphur … I really got in touch with a lot of people.”
“It's a very romantic opera, it's a very dramatic and kind of nocturnal and sinister kind of piece.”
“I hate the idea of the modern music the modern composer as somebody who tortures his audience and the player.”
“I wouldn't have been able to to write with uh the um fluency that I write now if I hadn't been through a very strict technical discipline in my early years.”
“I've been professional composer for some forty years and heaven help me if I'd sat around and waited for divine light to come down from the sky. You it's technique. It's a lot of imagination, a lot of technique and a great deal of hard work.”
“I'm good at living on my own. I like it.”