Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Composer and conductor whose works are performed worldwide and reflect a belief in the connection between music and the sacred.
On the island
Eight records
Salve Festa DiesFavourite
Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos
Gregorian chant. I love Gregorian chant. I think it's the most perfect kind of music.
Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581: II. Larghetto
Benny Goodman, Boston Symphony String Quartet
one of the very first records that my mum and dad bought me
Tristan und Isolde: Act 1 (excerpt)
Fritz Uhl, Birgit Nilsson, Vienna Philharmonic, Sir Georg Solti
my obsession about music is that it is a kind of search for the sacred
it was my granddaughter's favourite song … My little granddaughter died last year, and every time I hear Jackie's voice, I'm reminded of her.
The Importance of Being Earnest: 'Freude, schöner Götterfunken'
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Thomas Adès
I think this is music of real genius.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:10What sort of emotions do you go through as a composer just before a performance like that [the European premiere of your Requiem]?
It's always a great thrill seeing and hearing a work come to fruition like that in a public performance, perhaps something that has just lain, I suppose, silent in one's mind as a composer.
Presenter asks
8:51Tell me a bit more about your grandfather as a person, then.
He lived for music. He was always listening to music, talking about music. If there were films about music on the television, he would always tell me to watch it. He was proof to me that in communities like those in South Ayrshire, East Ayrshire, and working class communities where men were miners, the love of music is there nevertheless. Some people don't imagine that a love of serious music of various kinds can exist amongst ordinary people, but my grandfather and his friends and colleagues are proof that that is certainly the case and their inspiration worked on me.
Presenter asks
13:44How important was your Catholicism [as a teenager]?
I suppose at this time I was expected to say no, it wasn't, and I gave it up, but I didn't. I got more and more interested in it. … I used to debate with these Stalinists that I was now mixing with about the rights and wrongs of religion. I remember going to a young Communist League conference in Edinburgh when I was about 16 and leaving the Sunday morning session to go to Mass. That didn't go down very well. So I was always interested in the parallels between the secular and the sacred, the political and the religious, and that's not gone.
The keepsakes
The book
Michael Symmons Roberts
My choice is the selected poems of Michael Simmonds Roberts. I suppose composers have this love affair with poetry because we set it a lot.
Presenter asks
21:14What was your breakthrough moment?
I think it was when The Confession of Isobel Gowdie was commissioned by the proms, not just broadcast on Radio 3, but it got a television broadcast. I think it was on BBC One, in fact, way back in 1990. … the day after the piece was broadcast … I went to a Celtic Aberdeen game at Parkhead and was tapped on the shoulder by people who had seen it and they said to me, 'Was that your premiere that was on the TV last night?' and I realised something had changed then.
Presenter asks
27:02How did your faith reply [when your granddaughter died]?
I think it kicked in in the right way for us, but … one's faith is challenged by something like this. On the other hand, it's the whole structure of faith, the whole structure of the church in our case that allowed us to have comfort. We were able to bury her according to the beautiful rites of the Requiem Mass. Again music had its role in that. Gregorian chant, polyphony. Some of John Tavener's music was sung as well as my own at that. And so music, faith, family, it becomes a kind of concoction that one lives on a daily basis. … Sometimes you cope and you have days where life seems pretty straightforward and normal, and other times it kind of hits you rather unexpectedly.
Presenter asks
31:10Could you catch a fish? Could you kill an animal?
I've never done either, but there's always a first time.
“I do believe that music is the most spiritual of the arts. It forges this connection with the hidden crevices between the relationship of the divine and the human.”
“It's like being in a dream for weeks, months, and it really is like waking up and and the dream dissipates, the dream disappears from your mind, literally, and it's on to the next dream, if you like.”
“The analogy I like to use is of an old black and white negative print. That's the kind of image that you have of the music in your mind and then when you hear it at first rehearsal it takes on its full technicolour scope.”
“Music, and especially a discursive music like Western classical music, allows us to open a window onto this and we can choose to look in or not.”
“I have no idea what I'm going to be like about this [my granddaughter's death]. It's something you never get over. But sometimes you cope.”
“My luxury would be the old upright piano that I have in my study. My students … used to call it the magic piano. … There's something about the touch that seems to allow the music to speak more clearly in a very strange, mystical way.”