The theme served three purposes. First, it was memorable — hearing the music all these years later, I still think of the masked avenger before the Swiss freedom fighter. Second, television programs went to air at a certain time of the week (The Lone Ranger, for me, was Saturday tea time) and the music served as an alarm call. It even began with a fanfare of trumpets and French horns that could summon you from another part of the house. Today, when many people watch “linear” television only for news bulletins, news themes still often begin with some sort of fanfare.

The third purpose of the Rossini was that it was cheap, and this was a hangover from radio days. It was some time after the advent of radio before anyone thought to employ composers to write themes or incidental music, and it was the same with television. In the short term, much of the music came from stock recordings, and they weren’t always of the highest quality — the trumpets and horns were never quite together at the start of The Lone Ranger. Burlingame’s book tells us that sixty-seven of the eight-nine cuts of incidental music in the series were classical pieces by the likes of Liszt and Tchaikovsky together with a library of generic “Western” music by uncredited studio composers. Most of it had been recorded in Mexico in the 1940s.

By the mid 1950s, television drama was taking music more seriously and this involved drafting film composers to ply their trade in the new medium. Accordingly, Bernard Herrmann, who had composed the theremin-heavy score for The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951, was invited to supply the theme for the first season of The Twilight Zone eight years later and came up with a score consisting of drifting minor-key harmonies and dreamy harp arpeggios, not unlike his contemporaneous score for Vertigo.

But this is not the theme most people associate with The Twilight Zone, the one with the famous four-note ostinato on an electric guitar. That came the following season (the theme was changed to underline the fact that these were new episodes) and was the result of someone editing together two scraps of library stock. Their composer, the Frenchman Marius Constant, was unaware his music had been used, let alone edited, let alone turned into a theme, and his name never appeared on the credits. As Burlingame explains, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the composer realised how significant his music had been. Having dinner with some American friends, he dropped into the conversation that he had written the theme for The Twilight Zone.

“There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by an enthusiastic outburst,” Constant recalled; “it was as if I had confessed to having written Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.” The anecdote alone demonstrates how important TV had become in people’s lives.

Burlingame’s excellent book, which is full of such stories, is a nostalgia trip, no doubt about it; but it is also what its author intended: “a history of a vastly underappreciated realm of American music.” Divided into television genres — Westerns, detective series, sci-fi, drama, comedy, news, cartoons and so on — it charts the rise in importance of the sound of television and the role of the composer. As soon as composers were attached to projects, music began to establish, from the outset, the pace of the show — the powerful swagger of Fred Steiner’s Perry Mason theme, say, or the five-in-a-bar hell-for-leather of Lalo Schifrin’s Mission: Impossible. With words added, the theme could prime new viewers with details of a show’s dramatis personae; it could even provide the backstory. This was particularly true in the case of comedies.

“Flintstones! Meet the Flintstones!” was the viewer’s invitation, in 1960, to “have a gay old time” with “the modern stone-age family.” Many thousands of years later (in 1963), the family of the future was afforded more specific introductions: “Meet George Jetson, his boy Elroy, daughter Judy… Jane, his wife.” In the 1970s, prime-time cartoon comedies went out of fashion, but when they returned with a vengeance in the form of The Simpsons (1989–) the opening sequence was a nod to both those earlier shows. Danny Elfman’s theme, though it had dispensed with lyrics, borrowed the rising melodic line of “Meet George Jetson,” while, in a pointedly ironic reference to the Flinstones’ trip to a prehistoric drive-in, which is how that show began each week, we saw the Simpson family rushing home to sit on the couch and watch themselves on telly.

“Come ’n listen to my story ’bout a man named Jed,” was the first line of a song with words and music by Paul Henning, the creator–producer of The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–71). The banjo-accompanied song told viewers, at the start of each episode, why and how “a poor mountaineer” and his family had ended up in a Beverly Hills mansion, without which knowledge the show wouldn’t have made much sense. As another producer, the screenwriter Sherwood Schwartz, remarked, “a puzzled audience cannot laugh.”

Schwartz himself was obliged to come up with the theme song for Gilligan’s Island (1964–67) ahead of CBS’s commissioning the show because the president of the company believed it was impossible to give enough backstory for a new viewer. Schwartz was no songwriter, but he stayed up late and wrote a calypso-style number (the island, after all, was in the Caribbean) that at least satisfied the studio. Later, working with composer and music director George Wyle, Schwartz developed the familiar shanty-esque song — “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale” — that provided an introduction to all the characters and a recap of the “fateful trip” that had led to their predicament.

“Here’s the story of a lovely lady,” was the start of a hyper-efficient lyric that explained how the “lady” in question and her “very lovely daughters” had grown acquainted with “a man named Brady” and his sons, and in no time at all (in fact, fifty-eight seconds) become The Brady Bunch (1969–74). You could start watching any of these shows mid-season and know all you needed to know by the time the opening credits are over.

In The Addams Family (1964–66) we scarcely needed the “kooky/spooky/ooky” words to let us know what was going on because lined up on our screens, as if for a family photograph, was the family itself. They weren’t smiling, they snapped their fingers ominously, and really that, together with the sound of the harpsichord, did the job. Perhaps most radical, though, was All in the Family (1971–79), in which Archie and Edith Bunker (Caroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton) sat at a piano each week and sang their theme song (“Those Were the Days”) to the studio audience and to camera. The longer she did it, Burlingame relates, and the more laughs she got, the more raucously off-key Stapleton would sing.

When the first edition of Burlingame’s book appeared in 1996, it ended with a lament that the great days of television were gone, while hoping they might one day return. Almost on cue, cable TV hit its stride, with streaming not far behind. In some ways it seemed as though television music was starting again from the same place.

The Sopranos (1999–2007), eschewing the score its creators believed would manipulate the viewer, opted for existing music (not classical this time, but pop). Stock music was also back, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (2001–) using a twenty-five-year-old library track he had first encountered on a California bank commercial. But composed music was changing, too, the new widescreen televisions taking us closer to the characters and drawing subtlety from composers, even in signature themes. With no need of fanfare-style tunes or (in the age of bingeing) songs that filled in the backstory, David Carbonara’s mesmerising Mad Men (2007–15) theme, the creeping menace of Hildur Guðnadottir’s score for Chernobyl (2019) and Siddhartha Khosla’s wittily compelling music for Only Murders in the Building (2021–) would all have seemed a little underdone in TV’s first golden age.

Is the second golden age already fading? It could be. Certainly the theme is now at the viewer’s discretion, for as the opening credits roll on your favourite show, the streaming service on which you’re watching it will invite you to “skip.” If it’s your third or fourth episode of the evening, you might well be tempted. •

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Come Christmas Eve, there, under the tree, was the twelve-inch square LP, all wrapped up. Unable to wait, Gavin took a kitchen knife and slit open the wrapping paper, sliding out the album so he could hold it at last. Not play it, you understand — the rest of the family was asleep — just hold it. That was the thing about LPs: music aside, they were objects of wonder.

Some eight years before that night before Christmas, I’d had a similar, though more extended, experience. I was twelve and had saved up my pocket money to buy Abbey Road. Much had been made of the fact that this was the first Beatles album to be released only in stereo; printed on the inner sleeve was a warning to the effect that playing the record on the wrong equipment would damage the vinyl.

My family didn’t own a “stereogram,” only an old mono record player. So for months my appreciation of Abbey Road consisted of admiring its famous cover photo, reading the extensive list of song titles on side two and wondering what they sounded like, occasionally rereading the warning to be certain I had it right.

Eventually, I could bear it no more. I took the record from its sleeve, put it on the old gramophone and discovered it sounded fine. I still thrill to Lennon’s opening “Shhht!” and it is partly because of those months of delay in hearing it.

I no longer own a turntable. Back in 1986 I sold my vinyl and began to collect CDs and while I have always lamented the shrinkage in size (and experience) of the artwork that came with the smaller digital format — the gorgeous cover of Abbey Road was undeniably diminished by being scaled down — I lament, even more, that the surprisingly abrupt demise of the CD ushered in the age of streaming.

I lament it not only when I read my royalty statements but also at Christmas, because you can no longer give someone a thoughtfully chosen album without doing a background check on whether they have a turntable or CD player. Many people have neither. A vast array of music is available on most people’s phones — there’s no more waiting — and the musical object under the Christmas tree is increasingly a thing of the past. It all adds up to the possibility that music is mattering less.

The notion of music as an object predates recording. In the late Middle Ages, as notation became more than an aide-mémoire, manuscripts were treasured, even by those who couldn’t read music. Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Europe’s first great opera, was performed precisely twice in 1607 at the Mantuan court of the Gonzagas, and we might know nothing of it but for the existence of a score. In the early seventeenth century full scores were not used in performance, but the Duke had one produced as a souvenir to have and to hold.

The other form of musical object I confess I miss is the carefully constructed compilation tape. A ninety-minute cassette could take the best part of a day to get right, the handwritten list of contents inevitably involving Tipp-Ex, and made a particularly thoughtful gift. In his novel High Fidelity Nick Hornby writes touchingly about the art of the mixtape and its potential role as a form of long-distance foreplay.

In my home are ten such cassettes that I made in 1999 and 2000 for my wife (she wasn’t then my wife) but we no longer have anything to play them on, so they are purely objects, which, for sentimental reasons, we can’t throw out. Mixtapes, too, are now part of history and I doubt if “I’ve made you a playlist on Spotify” is going to help anyone find a life partner.

For those who still value musical objects (you can also download them if you must) and who have yet to complete their Christmas shopping, allow me a few recommendations.

• ZÖJ is a collaboration (they call it a conversation) between Iranian-born singer and kamancheh player Gelareh Pour and drummer Brian O’Dwyer. Their album Fil o fenjoon (CD from Bandcamp) is by turns exhilarating and heart-stoppingly beautiful.

• Jazz trumpeter Phil Slater’s Immersion Lure (CD from Bandcamp) brings together some of Australia’s finest players (Matt Keegan, Matt McMahon, Brett Hirst and Simon Barker) for a musical meditation of a particularly intense sort. You are gently drawn in and then they won’t let go.

• A similar (if more laid-back) intensity marks recently discovered Chet Baker radio sessions recorded at Hilversum in 1979. The Blue Room is late Chet at its very best and may be my favourite listening of the year. A double album on vinyl or CD from Birdland.

• German violinist Isabelle Faust, Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov and others play Schumann’s piano quintet and quartet on instruments of Schumann’s time, the natural balance putting paid to all those tired criticisms of Schumann’s music being opaque. It’s also beautifully paced and phrased. CD from Harmonia Mundi.

• And, staying with period instruments, the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra’s pairing of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony and his A major piano concerto K. 488 is similarly revelatory, not least for Neal Peres da Costa’s endlessly thoughtful traversing of the solo part. I know this music very well but found myself hanging on every note. CD from the orchestra.

* The Music Show’s conversation with James Gavin on the subject of ravaged voices may be heard again on Sunday 7 January, and if you’d like to hear it now the podcast is available here.

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Giuseppe Verdi was nearly eighty when he presented his final and, for many, greatest opera, Falstaff, in 1893. But Falstaff, his only comic opera, had a quality of lateness about it and lacked the dramatic urgency of Nabucco and Rigoletto. In contrast, Hackney Diamonds, from the venerable trio that is the remains of the Rolling Stones, is as full of youthful swagger as almost anything the band has done. For the record, Mick Jagger is eighty, Keith Richards will be eighty next month, and Ron Wood is seventy-six.

This album is many things: a reaffirmation, a summing up and a celebration — Mick, Keith and Ron sound as though they’re having a whale of a time. If it sounds formulaic, well the Stones always were. If the production tries a little too hard, wouldn’t you?

The lyrics are mostly workaday, but no one ever bought a Stones record for the words. Half the time it was impossible to make them out. When, two years ago, the band announced they were no longer going to perform “Brown Sugar,” one of their biggest hits and the song always guaranteed to bring a flagging party to its feet, I had to look up the words to discover why. Among my childhood mondegreens, now clarified fifty years on, had been the line, “Hear him with the women just around midnight.” As probably everyone except me knew, it was “whip the women” and the “him” referred to a slave trader.

“Brown Sugar” was the opening track on Sticky Fingers, and Stones albums have generally begun with similarly danceable numbers, often heralded by a few syncopated chords from Richards’s guitar. Hackney Diamonds is no exception, though what’s most striking about “Angry” is Jagger’s self-mocking vocals — on this song he seems to have become a Jagger impersonator, all leers and pouts.

Among the standouts from the twelve new tracks are two slow songs. “Depending on You” has a strong melody — good tunes are a feature of the album — and a stronger lyric. It’s a heartbreak song, with a chorus that includes the line “I’m too young for dying and too old to lose.” There are lots of “depend/depending on you” songs out there, but they’re all present tense; this one is past: “I was depending on you.” An old man’s lyric, you might say, which, from these Peter Pans, is refreshing.

The other slow song is, believe it or not, a slow-burning prayer. “Sweet Sounds of Heaven” features two of the album’s guest artists, Stevie Wonder on piano and Lady Gaga getting her Merry Clayton on. Clayton, you may recall, provided the searing soul embellishments to “Gimme Shelter,” but truly Lady Gaga outdoes her.

Other guest artists include the ubiquitous Paul McCartney, who provides a strong, fuzzy bass solo on “Bite My Head Off”; Elton John, whose piano playing features on two of the tracks; and, remarkably, Charlie Watts, who had recorded the drum parts to two songs before his death and is joined on one of them by the eighty-seven-year-old Bill Wyman, emerging from retirement to play bass on his first Stones album since Steel Wheels thirty-four years ago. For three minutes and 52 seconds, the gang’s all here.

It is something of a Stones tradition for Keith Richards to take lead vocals on one song, and here it’s “Tell Me Straight,” another slow, heartbreak song that’s perhaps Richards’s best since the magnificent “Thru and Thru” (on Voodoo Lounge). It also showcases the album’s best guitar playing.

So what is this? A Rolling Stones renaissance? You wouldn’t bet on it or even necessarily wish it, though Jagger has denied that Hackney Diamonds will be their final album. But if this is it, it seems like a suitable valediction, not only because the album is generally so strong, but also because of how it ends.

Hackney Diamonds’s final track is the song that gave the band its name, Muddy Waters’s “Rolling Stone,” touchingly performed by just Mick and Keith, the last two originals. There’s a distinctly lo-fi, homemade quality to the sound — they might be in one of their bedrooms — and it would seem a good place to stop. It is, after all, where they started. •

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ANDREW FORD: You once told me the piano was the centre of your musical universe. This suggests that being alone at the piano is where everything starts. Does it?

PAUL GRABOWSKY: Every musician would regard their instrument as the centre of their musical universe, but there’s an additional philosophical proposition behind that to do with what the actual relationship is between playing music and life more generally. What I’ve said many times over the years is “the piano never lies,” by which I mean that the piano, as beautiful as it is, is ultimately a large, complicated piece of essentially nineteenth-century technology, utterly mute, even useless, until it becomes the means of expression for a player. It will quickly reveal to the player where they are at, no quarter given. So that’s been my relationship with the piano: my lover, my scold. Does everything start there? Yes, because my musical language was developed at the piano, and informs everything I make, whether orchestral music, which has lately taken up a lot of my time, or anything else, down to solo piano music per se.

AF: During the pandemic, there were two things I genuinely looked forward to. One was Tim Stevens’s daily “quarantune,” the other your Friday night offering from the piano — and it was an offering, a sharing, a weekly gift. What did you get out of that?

PG: The lockdowns were famously severe in Melbourne. Our communal patience was tested to its limits. There were no gigs for quite a while, but luckily we had the ability to communicate via other means. I’ve long harboured the belief that music is forged out of the mysterious moment of exchange between player and listener; that until that exchange occurs there is no “music,” just latency, intent. To be able to play on those Fridays gave me something to look forward to, a virtual happy hour, which we would prepare for in the home with nice food and drinks, to create a sense of occasion. I did it for the sake of my own morale initially. Just before the first wave of Covid really hit, I had heart surgery, so I was convalescing, and the playing helped greatly. It was only later that I started to realise that a lot more people were listening in than I’d realised, and from all over the place. Now I know that it helped other people find their Fridays, locate themselves within the temporal wasteland, join in the occasion, and I am deeply grateful to have been able to make even a small difference.

AF: You’ve been a collaborator from the start — in trios, leading bands, working with singers — but some of your most surprising and memorable collaborators have been from outside jazz. Do you suddenly think, “This might work”? And how do you know?

PG: I think the word “jazz” has been something of a shibboleth for me. I deeply love the music, and still regard it as describing some of the greatest art produced in the twentieth century, but I’ve felt more drawn to the processes that arrive at certain outcomes than the notes that define what we might call “style.” This was the philosophy behind the Australian Art Orchestra from its beginnings in the early 1990s, that collaborations involving the creative application of improvisatory paradigms, including (but not exclusively) jazz, could lead to fascinating and meaningful outcomes.

A lot of the thinking here has been influenced by my love for the art of Ornette Coleman, where what he called “harmolodics” — and I call “relationality” — is the driving principle of both the music and everything that informs it. This thinking inspired early AAO projects (Ringing the Bell Backwards, Passion, Into the Fire, Sita) and then found its most satisfying outcomes in collaborations with Uncle Archie Roach and Aunty Ruby Hunter (Ruby), and with the Young Wägiluk Group (Crossing Roper Bar). So it has been relatively straightforward to apply this idea of relationality to one-on-one projects with singers (Vince Jones, Kate Ceberano, Paul Kelly, Emma Donovan, Ngaiire, Joe Camilleri, etc.), as I come to them with an open mind, not trying to impose “jazz” onto their songs, but simply to make music together.

AF: The collaboration that has persisted longest is the deep engagement you and other improvising colleagues have had with the songmen of Ngukurr in Southeast Arnhem Land, which I think started with Crossing Roper Bar. How did that come about?

PG: For years I wanted to connect with the oldest musical tradition on the planet. It confused me that Australians were quick to see the unique qualities of the visual art of our First Peoples, even adorning our passenger jets with their designs, but seemed oblivious to their music, other than perhaps knowing what a didgeridoo looks like. Of course it’s not easy to have access to language and culture-based First Australians; the locations are often difficult to get to, and just being there isn’t necessarily going to get you very far. I have a friend, Steve Teakle, who was working with various remote communities in the Territory at the time, and he took me to Ngukkur on the Roper River in Southeast Arnhem Land, as he felt sure that the ceremonial songmen there would be happy to talk. Within minutes of arriving there I met Benjamin and Roy Wilfred, and they were singing the Djawulparra manikay (song cycles) to me. It was utterly overwhelming. Nothing had prepared me for the sheer visceral power of this music. That was in 2004 and I haven’t stopped loving the music and its makers and regarding them as one of the world’s great artistic treasures.

AF: You’ve worked with Daniel and David Wilfred on a number of projects. How do you work together?

PG: The willingness of the Wilfreds to collaborate was there right from the beginning, but it took me years to understand the reasons why these collaborations were second nature to them. It had to do with a belief system that expresses the interconnectedness of all things, including time and space, and that these manikay are expressions of that interconnectedness, that everything that happens within the ceremonial framework of the manikay is the manikay, not some form of provocation. The generous spirit of sharing, of commonality of being, that lies at the heart of this form is the gift we have been offered by our First Peoples since colonisation began, but the colonisers have largely chosen to ignore it.

The latest iteration of the relationship is a project called Raki. This word means several things, including the “bush string” used to make dilly-bags for food; it also signifies “law” in the sense of being the string that binds people together, and conveys knowledge and protection across country and between different peoples. Daniel Wilfred leads the project, together with Peter Knight on trumpet and electronics and me on piano. Daniel explains the significance of the word, and conveys the rhythmic modes played on the bilma (clapsticks). I have to perform some of the yidaki (didgeridoo) functions, and he is very insistent that this is done with the necessary degree of intensity and accuracy. In manikay the yidaki functions as a drum, not as a drone, which is the way it is played in some contemporary practice. The yidaki rhythmic patterns in manikay are very complex, and tightly related to the melodies.

The music follows the start/stop form of manikay: tight bursts of great intensity, followed by what Daniel would call “head song,” which takes the form of a spacious improvisation that often invokes locations and ancestors, roaming through space and time and allowing for freewheeling interaction across the trio until the commencement of the next section.

AF: You mentioned visual art before. There have been some objections in non-Indigenous visual art circles about “traditional” art by First Nations artists turning up in “contemporary” shows. I imagine that to you, as a collaborating musician, such a distinction is moot, but I wonder if you think about it at all — I mean from a philosophical point of view? Wynton Marsalis once insisted that all jazz is contemporary because it’s made in the present and never the same twice. Is it the same with all traditional music?

PG: It seems to me the critique around “traditional” versus “contemporary” when it comes to art is a furphy when we’re talking about the world’s oldest living culture. Was Emily Kngwarreye a “traditional” artist? Rover Thomas? Surely not in a precolonial sense. These ancient practices adjust to changing times and conditions without the teleological overlay of “modernism” playing any role. The same is true of manikay. Songs can be about ancestor creator-figures, but can equally be about smoking, drinking and going fishing (in a powered vessel).

Blues music makes a reasonable point of comparison. When was it ever “traditional”? We use the same term applied to New Orleans–style jazz, too, and this is I guess what Wynton means about all jazz being “contemporary.” My projects with the Wilfreds don’t comply with any need to justify their contemporaneity, as they express a timeless belief system within a contemporary collaborative paradigm.

AF: What do you gain from this collaboration as a musician and — if you can make such a distinction — personally?

PG: As suggested above, my work with First Peoples has been quite literally life-changing. I mentioned the influence of Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics to my understanding of musical processes, and this idea of relationality has been clearly revealed to me in the practice of manikay and more generally in my interactions with the Wilfreds. I must add that my work with Uncle Archie Roach was equally profound, and that the generosity of spirit of which manikay is such an eloquent expression was also evident in every word, sung or spoken, by the great Uncle Archie Roach and by Aunty Ruby Hunter.

This is my lived experience of working with our First Peoples, and I wish that every Australian could share in that love. This is why the Voice means so much to me. We as a nation have not listened to our First Peoples, and their right to an advisory body collecting information and making it readily available to governments as they come and go should be enshrined in, and protected by, our Constitution.

AF: This might be hard to answer, but what do you think you offer someone like Daniel Wilfred? Do you think you’ve changed him musically?

PG: It’s not that hard to answer. Like every great artist, Daniel sees possibilities arising out of collaborations that may not have otherwise occurred to him. He sometimes says that his grandfather, the great songman and painter Djambu Barra Barra, comes to him in dreams and gives him new songs. He introduces these into projects like Raki or the work he has done with Peter Knight’s Hand to Earth project.

Manikay is a living, dynamic art form, and while its roots lead deep into the well of time, it remains vibrant, new and exciting in many projects emerging in contemporary Australia. I don’t expect Daniel to gradually reinvent himself as another type of singer, but I do know that he is contributing to the ongoing relevance of the world’s oldest form of song. •

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When Coward himself was eleven his theatrical career had already begun. Billed, prophetically, as “Master Noël Coward” and managed by his mother (a “Mrs Worthington” avant la lettre), he appeared in a succession of plays in Edwardian London, eventually taking the role of Slightly, one of the Lost Boys in J.M. Barrie’s West End hit Peter Pan. Many years later, the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan wrote of Coward: “In 1913 he was Slightly in Peter Pan, and you might say he has been wholly in Peter Pan ever since.”

Tynan’s implication here is that Coward never grew up, but it would perhaps be truer to say that he hid his adult self behind a series of masks. His entire public persona was a performance — the dressing gown and cigarette holder masking a middle-class upbringing in a house that took in lodgers to make ends meet — and while we might think of him today primarily as a playwright and a singer of songs that displayed his “talent to amuse,” he continued acting almost to the end of his life.

In 1965, in Otto Preminger’s psychological thriller Bunny Lake Is Missing, he played the creepy landlord, Wilson (“an elderly drunk, queer masochist! Hurray! That’s me all over,” he wrote to his friend Gladys Calthrop), and four years later, in his last film, The Italian Job, he was the criminal mastermind, Mr Bridger. The list of acting work that Coward turned down is astonishing and includes the King in The King and I, Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady and the Alec Guinness role in The Bridge on the River Kwai; at the height of Coward mania in the 1930s, he declined an invitation to play Hamlet on Broadway.

In any consideration of Coward’s character, it is important to bear in mind just how famous he was, and how suddenly the fame came upon him. A literary scatter-gun, he wrote something like fifty plays in all, sometimes three in a year, and had already had a degree of success when The Vortex, with its frank (for 1924) discussion of sex and drugs, brought him theatrical notoriety. By the end of the following year, he had four plays running in the West End, including the comedy Hay Fever. He had just turned twenty-five.

Meanwhile, he acted and directed and was already writing revues and songs (at first just words, then the music too). By 1930, he had composed “A Room with a View,” “I’ll See You Again,” “The Stately Homes of England” and “Dance, Little Lady,” and written perhaps his greatest play, Private Lives. He directed its first production that year, starring in it alongside Gertrude Lawrence, whom he had met when they were child actors: “She gave me an orange and told me a few mildly dirty stories, and I loved her from then onwards.”

Private Lives contains English drama’s second-most-famous balcony scene, during which Coward’s new song, “Some Day I’ll Find You,” is first overheard, then sung by Lawrence’s character, Amanda, before becoming the butt of her oft-quoted remark about the potency of “cheap music.” Here’s one of those masks, because behind the self-deprecating humour about his music being “cheap” lies the fact that Coward was a sophisticated songwriter.

The sophistication of the lyrics is obvious — the intricate rhyme schemes are a match for those of his friend Cole Porter — but the music is sophisticated, too. The heavy Charleston syncopations in the verses of “Dance, Little Lady” pull the song dangerously off-balance (underlining his warning to the dance-addicted “little lady” not to be “so obsessed with second best”), while the drooping chromatic gloom of “Twentieth-Century Blues” manages, like the century itself, to be both wearisome and seductive. The melodic line of “Mad About the Boy,” dogged, yet haunting, captures the mood of the four besotted women who tell us they are “glad about” and “sad about the boy,” and speak of the dreams they’ve “had about the boy” (even though there are “traces of the cad about the boy”), while speculating that “Housman really wrote The Shropshire Lad about the boy.”

In “London Pride,” composed during the Blitz, the sophistication is patriotic. As Oliver Soden explains, “[the] song has the harmonic basis of the Westminster chimes and is woven from a street-sellers’ cry — ‘Won’t You Buy My Sweet Blooming Lavender’ — and from the opening phrase of ‘Deutschland über Alles.’” It seems remarkable that Coward, while an adequate piano player, couldn’t read or write music and had to employ an amanuensis to take dictation from his singing and playing. Soden says he “seems almost purposefully [sic] to have made his songs the work of an amateur musician.”

Soden’s Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward adopts the overall structure of Tonight at 8.30, Coward’s series of nine one-act plays. But each chapter/act has a unique structure of its own that reflects the variety of Coward’s creative output: plays, musicals, reviews, short stories. Occasionally, Soden allows the people in Coward’s life to speak to each other in pages of pure dialogue (the author stresses that the words are quoted verbatim, even if their context is new), and in the book’s final section, “A Late Play,” there is an extended discussion of their subject by Coward’s biographers, Soden included. The whole approach is arch, no doubt about it, but it works surprisingly well.

Soden proposes Coward, with his quick wit and the clipped precision of his language, as the link between Oscar Wilde and Harold Pinter, notwithstanding the fact that Coward himself had harsh things to say about both the other playwrights. “What a tiresome, affected sod!” was his verdict on Wilde, while Pinter’s early plays, including The Birthday Party, were “completely incomprehensible and insultingly boring.” He came round to Pinter with The Caretaker and the two men became friends, Coward generous with both money (he supported the film of The Caretaker) and advice. Soden relates that Coward even had advice for pop musicians, telling the Kinks’ starstruck Ray Davies, “Always keep a smile on your face when singing about anything that makes you angry.”

One of Coward’s biggest talents was for reinventing himself. He threw himself into war work as an emissary, particularly with the United States, writing, directing and starring in the film In Which We Serve, and finally heading off to entertain the troops. The troops were not always welcoming — they wanted Vera Lynn — and neither were the performing conditions. In Burma, close to the Japanese lines, “the wind, when it changed direction, brought with it the smell of Japanese corpses, stacked nearby in a clearing. Noël vomited into a bucket between shows.”

In the 1950s he became a Las Vegas cabaret artist at the mob-run Desert Inn (“The gangsters are all urbane and charming”). Frank Sinatra chartered a plane to send Lauren Bacall and Judy Garland to the show; Cole Porter came to hear Coward’s rewrite of “Let’s Do It”; Zsa Zsa Gabor sent a giant pink teddy bear to his hotel room. Coward’s success hinged on his playing up the image of the urbane “Master.” The celebrity photographer Loomis Dean took him out into the Nevada desert for a photo shoot, and there he stands on the parched earth, clad in a tuxedo, holding now a cocktail glass, now a tea cup and saucer, now a cigarette: the Englishman “out in the midday sun.”

The paradox with Coward’s mask wearing is that it distracts us from the quality of his best work. His songs really do deserve to be mentioned along with those of Porter, the Gershwins and Richard Rodgers. His plays remain important and, even at their wittiest, more serious than the playwright himself would ever allow.

After Coward’s death, Harold Pinter, always a fan, repaid the older man’s generosity with new productions of his plays. Directing Blithe Spirit at London’s National Theatre in 1976, Pinter told his cast: “Noël Coward calls this play an improbable farce. I just wish to make one thing clear — I do not regard it as improbable and I do not regard it as a farce.”

Perhaps, in the end, even the famous generosity of spirit was a mask. If so, it was often tested. Look After Lulu!, Coward’s translation of a Feydeau farce, opened on Broadway in 1959 to a dire review in the New Yorker from Kenneth Tynan. The day it appeared, Tynan was dining alone at Sardi’s, the famous theatre-district restaurant, when Coward walked in, also alone. Tynan had nowhere to hide as Coward padded over to his table.

“Mr T, you are a c—t. Come and have dinner with me.” Tynan recorded that, throughout the meal, Coward was affable and amusing and the review was never mentioned.

Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward
By Oliver Soden | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | $34.99 | 656 pages

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But I’ve come to see that Kelly’s advice was both sage and pertinent — more pertinent with every passing year. As we get older, we have a tendency to know what we like and like what we know; some people develop this quite young. For a commentator on music, it’s vital to resist such ossification, but how does one manage it as a composer? When artists are making their late work — and who knows, maybe I am — aren’t they meant to retreat into themselves, to plumb the deepest parts of their creativity, to come up with refined, profound, possibly even mystical works?

That we think this way is Beethoven’s fault. It is hardly surprising that, as deafness overtook him, he should have withdrawn into the world of his imagination; but those late pieces — the final sonatas and quartets, the Diabelli variations and the Missa solemnis — were music without precedent, and for the past 200 years they have offered an object lesson in “late style” not only to other composers but to artists in general. T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets are at one level a homage to Beethoven’s final quartets.

Well we can’t all be Beethoven, and anyway perhaps his example leads us astray. The Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923–2006), whose centenary falls this year, offered an alternative to the interiority of Beethoven’s last years with his own endless inquisitiveness (it probably helped that he wasn’t deaf). He also demonstrated that a composer’s openness to influence is not the same as musical kleptomania.

Although of the same generation as Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ligeti never fitted the mould of the postwar avant-gardist. In their early careers, at least, the other composers tended to be single-minded in their dedication to a kind of modernist purity, but Ligeti was interested in everything. The music he invented in the 1950s and 60s was influenced in part by East European folk music, both directly and via his compatriot Béla Bartók, though it became increasingly hard to hear this as the composer piled line upon musical line. In a piece such as Atmosphères (1961), Ligeti gave each instrument of his very large orchestra its own part. The fifty-six string players, instead of forming up into sections — all the first violins playing one line, all the second violins another — had fifty-six individual lines, resulting in a buzzing blur of sound that became the composer’s trademark and earned his music a prominent place on the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In 1973, Ligeti composed Clocks and Clouds, a piece for women’s choir and orchestra, its title borrowed from an essay by the philosopher Karl Popper. In “Of Clouds and Clocks,” Popper divided phenomena into two sorts, the precisely mechanical (clocks) and the indivisible (clouds), the latter, in post-Newtonian terms, made up of the former. “All clouds are clocks, even the most cloudy of clouds,” Popper summarised, before instantly debunking the notion. In Popper’s view, something like the opposite was true and all clocks were clouds, “to some considerable degree – even the most precise of clocks.” Either way, the philosopher might have been describing Ligeti’s music.

Atmosphères predated Popper’s essay by five years; no wonder Ligeti was receptive to the title. It’s often the way: Picasso’s confrontation with African masks at the Trocadéro in 1907 didn’t send him in a new direction, it clarified something he was already doing; when Steve Reich heard tribal drummers in Ghana, the experience confirmed to him he was on the right path with his repetitious music of gradually shifting patterns. Whether we are artists or not, we are none of us likely to be influenced or affected by things unless they spark a connection with our own imaginations.

In Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, Hector, the boys’ teacher, has a speech about the joy of literature. “The best moments in reading,” he says, “are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

Naturally there is more to reading than that, but those moments of recognition are important, and it’s the same with music. Ligeti, whose openness to influence never ceased, seemed to make more of these connections as he got older. In the 1980s and 90s, as the textures of his music thinned out and his rhythmic complexity grew — or grew more audible — he became interested in fractal geometry and chaos theory, the complex jazzy syncopation in the player-piano music of Conlon Nancarrow, and the music of sub-Saharan Africa, particularly the hocketing techniques of pygmies, whose fractured melodic lines bounce back and forth between voices.

In interviews, the composer spoke of his new enthusiasms, and at the time it seemed as unlikely as the reappearance in his music of clear tonal centres, where once had been dense clusters of pitches. His music was perhaps the most recognisable modernist music there was — even, thanks to Kubrick, to the general public. Why would he go changing now?

But Ligeti wasn’t changing — like Beethoven, he was refining his music, allowing it to speak more vividly, discovering greater emotional depth — and those later influences no longer seem surprising. The more we hear Ligeti’s earlier music and look at how he wrote it down, the more we notice that the composer was already concerned with what these new stimuli had to offer him. The syncopation and hocketing were already there in the mid 1960s, even if they were hidden beneath multiple layers of the same thing, and the fractals and chaos theory are both aspects of Popper’s cloudy clocks.

And Paul Kelly? I don’t know whether, back in 1997, he was already obsessed by the poetry of Shakespeare and Donne, Emily Dickinson and Kenneth Slessor, or whether this came later. Either way, these great poets, and others whose words he has found himself setting to music in recent times, spoke to him because he had left himself open to their influence. •

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He doesn’t seem as delighted to be among us as James Reyne had been an hour earlier, and his between-songs patter sounds rehearsed, but the band is tight, his distinctive high tenor is only slightly raspy and he can still hit those top notes, if not always in the middle. The bottom notes are completely gone, but they were never his strength: odd for a bass player, as my wife remarks. In “Fields of Gold,” for example, we can’t hear the word “gold.” My first thought is that the gap at the end of the line is emotional choking; but no, the big screens at the side of the stage show him singing the word, it’s just that no sound is coming out. (It’s the lowest note of the song, though only a D.)

Without a doubt it’s the voice that we’re here for. No one has ever really sounded like Sting, especially when he’s navigating the loping melodies that characterise “Message in a Bottle” (his opener), “Roxanne” (his first encore), “Walking on the Moon” — the “giant steps” of the lyric matched by those of the melodic line — “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” and “Every Step You Take.” (“Don’t Stand So Close to Me” seems to have been retired.)

Sting is seventy-one, and his audience looks around the same age. I have never seen so many portaloos in one place. Eschewing, for the most part, songs from the height of his solo fame in the late 1980s (there’s nothing on the set list from The Dream of Blue Turtles and only a couple of songs from Nothing Like the Sun) he sticks to the Police’s back catalogue and more recent songs. Everyone in the audience knows the former, but there are plenty of diehard fans who’ve followed every step he’s taken since. “Oh I love this one!” says a woman near me as the band strikes up a song I’ve never heard in my life.

The songs are good, especially the perfect pop of the Police, that pared-back blend of post-punk and reggae. And while we could have stayed home and listened to the records — the songs would have been better sung and the sound cleaner — we’d have missed something that was only going on in that Southern Highlands paddock.

Was it nostalgia? Perhaps. It was certainly the pleasure of familiarity. The crowd listened patiently to a couple of songs from his newest album, but roared its approval at “So Lonely.”

I often wonder — and have written here before — about the place of music in our lives, and how a pop song summons a memory in the way that a classical piece or jazz album generally doesn’t, at least not for me. I can tell you, for instance, the first time I heard Brahms’s piano quintet; I recall buying my first recording of The Rite of Spring; I know who recommended I listen to Oliver Nelson’s Blues and the Abstract Truth. But the sound of the music doesn’t evoke those memories. Familiar pop music, like Proust’s madeleine, brings the past rushing back, and a single bite will do it.

Play me a few seconds of “Message in a Bottle” and I can see the interior of the flat I lived in at the time; I can smell its dampness. And in that Bowral field, I was surrounded by thousands of other people simultaneously experiencing their own musical madeleines. I felt I was sharing something with them, but I didn’t feel I was sharing much with Sting.

The last time I attended an outdoor rock concert (as opposed to a festival) was in fact back in the heyday of the Police. It was in Roundhay Park in Leeds, England, and the headliners were the Rolling Stones. As with Sting in Bowral, it was the end of a tour, they put on a fine, well-rehearsed show — Mick, I recall, was on a cherry picker out above the crowd — and they sang all their hits. One imagines the set list wouldn’t be too different today.

But it’s Joe Jackson and his band I remember best from that afternoon. They were one of the support acts and they sang the whole of the album Night and Day, which was so new it was unknown to us. There was something fresh about the music and about the performance, and the band was palpably excited to be in front of 120,000 people — they came out on stage with Polaroid cameras to take our photos. There was no barrier between the performers and the listeners. You might say, there was no act.

Something similar happened with James Reyne in Bowral. He was in spectacularly good voice as he worked his way through Australian Crawl’s hits, and when he reached “Reckless” the crowd at first fell silent, then, bit by bit, joined in, the song reaching a rousing and extended climax. No one wanted it to stop. Round and round it went: “Throw down your guns / Don’t be so reckless.”

Reyne must have sung this song a lot over the last four decades, though never in that field, never to that audience — never with that audience. It felt almost mystical, as though the distance between the ticket holders and the stage had vanished.

Perhaps if you’re as famous as Sting — or the Stones — it must always be an act; you never just sing. And perhaps you can only ever be appreciated from afar. •

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Two clichés in a single, admittedly quite funny, joke: the silent Finn and the hard-drinking Finn. And there’s also the shy Finn. How do you know when you’ve met a Finnish extrovert? He’s looking at your shoes, not his own.

When Andrew Mellor mentions that second joke early in his new book, The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture, he admits that the humour relies on nothing more than a stereotype. But does he avoid stereotypes himself?

Mellor’s book considers music from Scandinavia, Finland and Iceland, the author’s aim being to find connections between the works of Carl Nielsen, Edvard Grieg, Kurt Atterberg, Jean Sibelius and Jón Leifs, as well as their musical heirs; and he is determined to find them. If further connections can be drawn to the landscape, architecture and design, and Nordic noir miniseries, so much the better.

But how can he hear the music minus its cultural appurtenances? Nielsen’s Sinfonia espansiva, “the most overtly Danish” of his six symphonies, gives “musical expression to the blustery energies experienced in flat, coastal Denmark.” Really?

Mellor gets off to a promising start with Sibelius’s last completed orchestral work, Tapiola. Composed in 1926, this brooding quarter of an hour is a starkly beautiful thing, a piece that the late English composer Oliver Knussen once said “would be very hard to listen to and not think of snow.”

The title is a reference to Tapio, the forest spirit of Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala, and when he wrote the piece Sibelius already had a well-earned reputation as one of the great nationalist composers. But what does any of this mean? As Knussen pointed out, Sibelius “was in fact a great structural innovator. If you listen to the fifth symphony, I suppose certain landscapes might be evoked, but you also think, what an incredible way to combine a sonata and a scherzo!” And in Tapiola, snow aside, “one also thinks, what an incredible way of fiddling with four notes!”

After Tapiola, Sibelius lived for another three decades but completed no further music of any substance. He worked on an eighth symphony but it ended up in the big, green fireplace at his home in Järvenpää. Those thirty years are usually referred to as “the silence of Järvenpää,” and Mellor looks for and hears silence everywhere in Nordic music. It’s not as though he’s imagining it. There is, for example, plenty of silence in the music of the Dane Hans Abrahamsen — a composer who, like Sibelius, had an extended period in which he couldn’t compose at all (fortunately the music returned). There is also plenty of Nordic music that has nothing to do with silence.

The trouble with looking for regional traits in composers’ work is that the music itself is often overlooked in favour of what the writer feels, and it doesn’t take much effort on the writer’s part to work these feelings up into a theory.

Having correctly underlined the static nature of Tapiola’s harmony, for example, Mellor casts around and finds static harmony everywhere in Nordic music. It’s there in Grieg, and in the work of two more recent Swedish composers, Jan Sandström and Allan Pettersson, and the Finn Magnus Lindberg.

But static harmony is also meant to be a hallmark of Australian music. That’s what we’ve been told about the music of Peter Sculthorpe and any number of his former students. Those long flat melodies over pedal points, mirroring the landscape of the outback. Maybe it’s not so Nordic after all.

Many so-called nationalist composers of Sibelius’s generation — at work during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — drew on the traditional and popular music of their homelands. Sibelius himself did this in a limited way, as did the Norwegian Grieg and the Danish Nielsen. Mahler did it in Austria, Ives and later Copland did it in the United States. Bartók and Kodály did it; so did Stravinsky — though he liked to deny it. The Moravian Janáček did it, going further by working the choppy speech rhythms of his native language into his music. Vaughan Williams’s music, though seldom quoting folk song, seems imbued with its modality.

Whether motivated by nationalism or simply by a desire to refresh their melodic or harmonic palettes with bright new colours, these composers are readily identified with their countries. And the use of traditional music as the raw material for composition still goes on. The Chinese-American composer Tan Dun has, for instance, written pieces in which Western instruments are played with techniques generally used for Chinese instruments. The music of Swedish composer Karin Rehnqvist is striking in its use of kulning, full-throated mountain calls used to summon cattle. She has drawn on these “outside” voices, in one way or another, for forty years, though her music fails to rate a mention in Mellor’s book. Not enough silence, perhaps.

What of composers who spurned folkloric material and yet are thought of as belonging firmly in their national camp? Elgar considered a composer who used a folk tune to be merely lazy. So why does Elgar sound English?

Setting aside the begging of the question, it is hard to point to anything in particular in his scores that isn’t in some way reminiscent of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms or Strauss. Is he thought of as quintessentially English merely by association? He was a great composer at a time when England didn’t really have any others, therefore Elgar equals English music?

One could easily make the same claim of Grieg, Nielsen and Sibelius in their respective countries. Is that why people feel Sculthorpe’s music contains the essence of Australia? His was a distinctive and easily recognised musical voice in a country that didn’t really have anything similar.

Clichés abound in these discussions, and they’re hard to avoid. Take French composers and their reputed obsession with colour. When did this start? With Lully, Rameau and Couperin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Was Berlioz a nineteenth-century colourist? Really, when this cliché comes up, it is Debussy and Ravel we mean. But why single them out when one could point to scores by German composers, Mendelssohn, Wagner and Strauss, that are just as dazzlingly orchestrated?

Mellor steps right into this trap in writing about the contemporary Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. An early composition, Lichtbogen, was apparently inspired by “the Northern Lights in the Arctic sky,” but then, having established herself in Paris, “colour and translucency” became her overriding musical concerns. France, apparently, will do that to a composer.

But it was Saariaho herself who told us about the Northern Lights, and we must always remember that composers can be their own greatest mythmakers. It was Sibelius who called his piece Tapiola and put at the head of the score a verse about “the Northland’s dusky forests” (“dusky,” mark you, not “snowy”). In his fifth symphony, the big slow horn ostinato theme that emerges in the finale is supposed to have been inspired by the composer seeing — and hearing — sixteen migrating Whooper swans flying over his home: “One of my greatest experiences.” Well, maybe. Mellor certainly buys it.

And then there’s the final “silence of Järvenpää.” This was real enough. The music dried up and it seems uncharitable to wonder if Sibelius was colluding in this piece of mythology. Perhaps, after the concision of Tapiola, there was nothing more to say.  There again, just because something is true doesn’t mean it can’t become a cliché.

I don’t mean to disparage Mellor’s book or even damn it with faint praise. It is a book by a journalist, no doubt, a book-length colour supplement piece, and none the worse for that. What’s more, it is likely to introduce its readers to a wide range of composers and performers whose music will be unfamiliar, and that is no bad thing.

The problem with Mellor’s attempt at an overarching theory of Nordic music — and the author is  aware of it — goes back to that opening joke. Nordic people aren’t all the same and their art isn’t monolithic. The music of Grieg, Nielsen and Sibelius had many more points of difference than similarities. What the three had in common is that (like Elgar, like Sculthorpe) each was for a time — or seemed to be — his country’s only composer, so his music came to stand for the country itself. In each case, this created a somewhat dampening effect on the generations of composers who followed, and the result has been a further proliferation of style and approach.

To speak of Danish music or Finnish music as though they were narrow musical types is every bit as misleading as to speak of the Northern Silence. •

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The first Dalek voices were the work of David Graham, better known today — insofar as voiceover artists are known at all — as Peppa Pig’s grandfather, a role from which he retired only recently (he is ninety-seven). With a little effort one can hear the Daleks in the pompous tones of Grandpa Pig and also the Wise Old Elf from Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom — another Graham voice. Not that he only played posh. His range of roles for the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson “Supermarionation” series of the 1960s included Thunderbirds’ stammering American scientist Brains and the adenoidal Cockney chauffeur Parker.

I’m familiar with the sound of these voices because, after years of watching Peppa Pig and Ben and Holly with my pre– and early–primary school daughter, we are now bingeing Doctor Who. What’s more, my twelve-year-old seems to have inherited from me a fascination with actors and their voices — or more likely I primed her for it. My dad certainly primed me.

Doctor Who first aired in Britain at teatime on Saturday 23 November 1963, one day after the assassination of President Kennedy. I was there in front of the telly — well, to start with — six years old and scared. I’d like to be able to tell you that the sofa on which my daughter and I now sit to watch the later episodes is the same one I hid behind, but that sofa is half a world and half a lifetime away. Incidentally, she has a blanket that goes over her head in the scary bits.

While certainly aimed at a children’s audience, Doctor Who was always just a bit too frightening for them. I suppose that was part of its attraction. While the newer episodes seem even scarier than those of the 1960s and 70s, this may be partly a function of having scenery that doesn’t fall over and boom mics that stay out of shot.

The Daleks weren’t in the first episode in November 1963, but they’d arrived by Christmas, complete with their posh-voice threats to “Exterminate!” The incidental music to the first Dalek series was by Tristram Cary, a postwar pioneer of electronic music who would later found the electronic music studios at the Royal College of Music in London and the University of Adelaide. His ability extended beyond his electronic music compositions into film (he had written the score for that great Ealing comedy, The Ladykillers), but it was the sound of his electronic compositions that recommended him to the producers of Doctor Who.

That Doctor Who had a distinctive, futuristic sound was apparent from the first minute of Ron Grainer’s famous theme. Not that Grainer was responsible for the distinction. Grainer had turned his composition over to an in-house group of composers and technicians who worked anonymously to produce music for various series in the name of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The arranger of Grainer’s theme was Delia Derbyshire, who turned it into a work of musique concrète, the individual sounds recorded from various sources, sped up or slowed down and then cut together — the tape was literally cut — to assemble the theme note by note. A few years later the same thing could have been achieved with a synthesiser, but it took Derbyshire weeks.

Grainer was astonished when he heard it and attempted to give Derbyshire a co-composer credit. It was, after all, Derbyshire who had made the theme sound so arresting. But the BBC held firm to its all-for-one-and-one-for-all policy regarding the Radiophonic Workshop and so it was fifty years before Derbyshire’s name appeared in the credits of an episode of Doctor Who, by which time she was dead.

It is now decades since the Daleks were voiced by David Graham, but his orotund template has always been followed. Doctors may come and Doctors may go — stern, whimsical, self-important, self-aware — but thanks to Graham the Daleks always sound the same. Alas, this is not true of the theme, with Derbyshire’s version long since junked in favour of increasingly overblown orchestrations, which she heard and despised.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that when one encounters her musique concrète arrangement from fifty-nine years ago, it sounds more modern than any of the versions that followed — more futuristic, indeed. But then the creators of Doctor Who and the Daleks knew better than anyone that the sound of their program was as important as the way it looked, particularly if some of your viewers were hiding behind the couch. •

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The Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi wrote his Messa da Requiem (Mass for the Dead) in 1874 in memory of the poet, novelist and patriot Alessandro Manzoni (for a time it was known as the “Manzoni Requiem”). But even ahead of its performance it divided opinion. On the eve of the premiere, the conductor Hans von Bülow, Wagner’s great champion, wrote in a German newspaper that Verdi was “the almighty corrupter of Italian artistic taste” and mocked his Requiem as an “opera in ecclesiastical dress-up.” (He later said sorry.)

Von Bülow wasn’t actually wrong about the operatic nature of the enterprise — opera, after all, was Verdi’s stock-in-trade. Although the Requiem was first performed in St Mark’s church in Milan (on the anniversary of Manzoni’s death), it was repeated three days later at Teatro alla Scala, the great opera house. At the premiere, all the female singers were hidden from view because a papal edict banned women from singing in church (it’s hard to believe anyone was fooled by their being placed out of sight), but at La Scala the double chorus and the four soloists shared the stage. These were the same soloists who had sung in the premiere of Verdi’s opera Aida two years earlier.

The operatic nature of the Requiem is most evident in the famous “Dies Irae,” the damned depicted as a howling chorus, accompanied by a merciless bass drum and virtuoso woodwind writing that has the whole orchestra rushing chromatically to hell. It’s the musical equivalent of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement with a touch of Hieronymus Bosch. Yes, this Requiem is certainly overblown — some of it — and in Sydney, in the Great Hall at Dangrove, Judith Neilson’s enormous storage facility for visual art, the performance came with coloured stage lighting and dry ice. Had we been listening to Brahms’s German Requiem it would have been poor taste. Not for Verdi.

Billed as a modern cathedral, Dangrove’s acoustic lived up to its description. I didn’t count, but the choir, instrumentalists and soloists surely numbered more than a hundred, and in the faster, louder parts of the Requiem the acoustic quickly became saturated. There was no chance of catching the details of the dense, eight-part choral writing in the “Sanctus.” On the other hand, when the music was slower, quieter and transparently scored, its elements had an alluring clarity.

I’d gone along not with a view to being allured by Verdi’s ninety-minute work (though that was the happy result) but to check out the venue, hear the soloists — one of whom I’ve spent most of this year composing a piece for — and catch Ensemble Apex in the flesh for the first time. This isn’t intended to be a review, but I should mention that the performance, conducted with complete authority by Sam Weller, was remarkably good. There were no weak links among the soloists — Mariana Hong, Anna Dowsley, Nicholas Jones and David Greco — and given that the average age of the performers was twenty-something (VOX is the “young adult” choir of Sydney Philharmonia; Ensemble Apex has players of similar age) it was very likely everyone’s first performance of the piece.

Perhaps that accounted for the emotional intensity: as Jones sang the opening phrases of the “Hostias,” both Hong and Dowsley were visibly moved. But the intensity also came from the music itself which was, I began to realise, in large part cultural.

It hit me especially in the “Lacrimosa.” The words are part of the “Dies Irae,” the text of which is an entirely non-scriptural Latin poem (it wouldn’t be completely unfair to call it doggerel) that forms one of the central planks of the Requiem. After the fire and brimstone of its opening with the howling chorus and alarming bass drum, “Lacrimosa” is grief in repose, just as it had been for Mozart in his Requiem: a sort of lyrical memorial for the dead. But Verdi’s is something more, the composer placing this lament not in the opera house so much as the town square.

It begins with the mezzo-soprano singing a simple tune to a gentle Verdian oom-pah from the strings alone. Gradually other voices and instruments join, solo voices at first, then the chorus, as the orchestral winds and brass create the impression of an Italian banda slowly approaching, the returning bass drum now softly enunciating the dragging anacrusis of a funeral march. And right there is that musical vulgarity I mentioned, but in the word’s original sense of belonging to the common people.

I think I’ve always understood this about Verdi, that his music was rooted in the lives and daily music of his fellow Italians. It’s as true of his operas — truer, indeed — as of this Requiem. But it’s one thing to appreciate something, another to come to love it. It took those performers in that space to bring about the transformation in me and show me what I’d been missing. It has left me not only with an appetite for more Verdi but also wondering what other music I might finally come to love. •

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The seventeenth-century composer, Henry Purcell, wrote three choral settings of these words taken from the Funeral Sentences in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer of 1549. The first two versions are somewhat elaborate, involving polyphony (the voices contrapuntally out of step with each other) and the repetition of words. But the last, dignified and direct, the voices in rhythmic unison, was composed for the funeral of Queen Mary at Westminster Abbey in 1695. Later the same year it was sung at Purcell’s own funeral, also in the Abbey, where he was buried near the organ.

At Purcell’s funeral, it is possible that another of the sentences was put to music by the young William Croft, who would go on to become the Abbey’s organist. At any rate, Croft published a complete set of the sentences in 1724, retaining at its heart Purcell’s setting of “Thou knowest, Lord.” Croft had felt it could not be bettered, as he wrote in the preface to his edition: “The reason why I did not compose that verse anew (so as to render the whole service entirely of my own composition) is obvious to every Artist.”

Since their publication, Croft and Purcell’s Funeral Sentences have been sung at every British royal and state funeral, and they were sung again on Monday as the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II was carried into Westminster Abbey.

I never met the late Queen or even saw her passing by, and I must admit I hadn’t felt myself especially invested in the story of her death, though I realise many were. (Even Cuba has held a day of official mourning.) But watching the funeral I was drawn in by the music. There was a traditional element to everything heard that day, traditions not only expressed by the music but also embodied in it. It’s one of the things music — all music — does so well. Storing up memories, private as well as public, the sound of music can unleash waves of sentiment and history in a far more immediate manner than words or images. And there it all was, from imperial pomp to simple grief.

For many people — especially those in the Abbey invited to participate — the hymn singing would have been the emotional heart of the music. In the Anglican world, the chosen hymns were especially well known, and a good proportion of the congregation would have sung them all their lives. But even in England, the everyday familiarity of such music has faded in the last half century, and for the majority of those watching from afar, the hymns, though undeniably stirring with their trumpets and high treble descants on the final verses, would have rung few bells.

The Abbey’s real bells were another matter. Muffled (like all the drums), as is customary following the death of a monarch, their muted peal rang on through much of the afternoon, the continually shifting patterns of change-ringing familiar enough in sound if arcane in detail (“Stedman Caters,” the sequence in question, involves moving through 5096 different permutations of the bells).

Change-ringing predates Purcell, beginning in the early 1600s with full-circle ringing, which allowed bell-ringers greater control over timing and the requisite precision to ring complex changes. The Great Highland bagpipe is at least 200 years older, and its presence en masse, as the Scottish and Irish regiments marched to the Abbey, was frankly thrilling (“Why is the music so cheerful?” my twelve-year-old daughter wondered). At the end of the service in the Abbey — and later at the interment — a lone piper played a lament. Who said bagpipes weren’t versatile!

For the origins of marching we must look to ancient times. Fast marches, quick marches and slow marches all have their military functions. From the Abbey to Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner, thousands of troops marched with the Queen’s coffin as members of the royal family walked with them. Here, it wasn’t so much the band’s playing of funeral marches of Beethoven and Mendelssohn that was so affecting as the relentless, almost hypnotic, tread of the thousands of feet. The tempo of seventy-six beats per minute never wavered and the procession took forty-five minutes to reach its end. (I’ll leave you to do the maths, but there were not quite so many steps as there are changes in “Stedman Caters.”)

The oldest form of music heard that day was, of course, the singing — and children’s singing at that. It is, one may safely assume, the earliest form of music there is, though here it was linked to the newest pieces, two anthems composed for the occasion by Judith Weir and James MacMillan.

The music might have been new, but the habit of commissioning it, dating back to well before Purcell’s day, is not. As though to provide context, the combined choirs of Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal also sang a tiny anthem composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams for the Queen’s coronation. (The fact that at her coronation there had been music specially written by someone born in 1872 rather underlined the late monarch’s longevity.)

If Weir’s and MacMillan’s pieces were being heard for the first time on Monday, the hymns were being sung for the many thousandth. But here’s the thing; it was all new. Music can only be heard in time and the time is always now. By the same token, musical tradition is renewed every time a baby produces a gurgle for its own amusement. The boys in Monday’s choir were themselves babies quite recently, their gurgling now replaced by a remarkable degree of expertise in an art that affects us more than others because, to some degree, we are all part of it and because music also seems to know the secrets of our hearts. •

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Before he began making records under his own name, Stevens was part of Browne–Haywood–Stevens, a trio with the late, great and hugely influential drummer Allan Browne (nearly three decades Stevens’s senior) and bassist Nick Haywood, and they played standards among the original music.

“I was staunchly anti-standards since Browne–Haywood–Stevens wound up,” Stevens tells me, “mostly because of the precedents set by Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. Because I’m a white guy who loves a trio, everyone compares me with those two; I have a classical background also, which is something else I share with them. It really used to irk me.”

But it wasn’t an antipathy to standards that drove Stevens so much as a desire to contribute new material.

“As a student I’d go and hear Al Browne’s band Onaje, and it played an entirely original repertoire. Richard Miller wrote most of the music that band played and I loved hearing those tunes. A gig at Mietta’s in 1990 with Al, Gary Costello and Paul Grabowsky featured original compositions that totally blew me away. They had titles like ‘Happy Go Lucky Country’ and ‘Colonial Sketch No. 1’ and their obvious relationship to this place was stunning and hugely influential.

“So I wanted to be the guy who wrote the book, and in my trio with Ben Robertson and Dave Beck that’s pretty much what I’ve done, unless we’ve been improvising freely. The notes to the new album state that I can’t recall playing a single standard with them. Because I can’t.”

On three recent solo albums, however, Stevens has worked with a different kind of standard: hymn tunes. He began with a sort of musical memoir, based on a range of hymns and other music he had known since childhood, then followed up with albums of Christmas and Easter hymns.

“The whole church thing began,” he explains, “because the Melbourne Recital Centre offered me a solo gig and when I suggested things I could do, for some reason I said ‘standards’ even though I wasn’t all that keen. That was the one they went for, so I thought about it a bit and got back to them saying, what if I took the standards from the English Hymnal? Would that do? And they said, yes.”

Stevens’s approach to the hymns, as often as not, was to provide long preambles that explored the mood of the hymn, ruminating on certain melodic phrases or harmonic progressions before revealing the tune itself at the end, and that’s also how he tackles some of the “real” standards on this new album.

A couple of the tunes are given sprightly salsa/rumba treatments. One is Vernon Duke’s “Taking a Chance on Love” (the song that provides the album with its title), the other — somewhat less likely — is Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are,” which launches into an increasingly manic stream of syncopation from which the melody occasionally pokes its head. But it is the subtle harmonic twists that Stevens introduces that offer the main surprises.

“Instead of doing it as it was written,” Stevens says, “where the bridge finishes on E and then you get a C7 chord to go back to F minor, I play instead a C#7 and play the last eight bars commencing in F-sharp minor. So the chorus finishes in A. The next chorus begins with F-sharp minor, and its bridge finishes on F. So it’s easy there to go straight back to F minor and finish the chorus as written. I don’t know anyone else who’s done this, and I showed it to Ben Robertson who was shocked and delighted. That has maintained my interest in a tune that is played far too much and is one of the first ones I ever had to learn as a student.”

I mentioned Duke and Kern above, but Stevens would be the first to point out that “Taking a Chance on Love” was also written by lyricists John La Touche and Ted Fetter, while “All the Things You Are” has words by Oscar Hammerstein II. Actually, Stevens wouldn’t be the first to point this out. There’s a story of a Manhattan showbiz party where someone referred to “Jerome Kern’s ‘Ol’ Man River’” only to receive a tug on his sleeve. “Excuse me, young man,” said Oscar Hammerstein’s widow, “but I thought I heard you mention Jerome Kern’s ‘Ol’ Man River.’ Mr Kern did not write ‘Ol’ Man River.’ Mr Kern wrote ‘Dum dum dum dum.’ My husband wrote ‘Ol’ Man River.’”

While we might not hear the words to the tunes on Stevens’s album, they are anything but “Dum dum dum dum.” All the lyricists are credited, the lyrics are available to read on the album’s Bandcamp page, and you frequently sense them in Stevens’s playing. Indeed, he tells me that “I’m Gonna Laugh You Right Out of My Life” was included because of the lyrics. It’s an early Cy Coleman tune (well before “Witchcraft” and “Big Spender”) with words by one Joseph Allen McCarthy (you see why he insisted on the “Allen”). The tune is lovely, too, and Stevens brings out its pathos, doubtless while singing to himself lines such as “If I find you and I really meant that last goodbye / Then I’m gonna laugh so hard, I’ll cry.”

Like many an artistic project in 2022, The Ace of Hearts Is High had its immediate origins in the Covid pandemic. Right at the start of the first lockdown, on St Patrick’s Day 2020, Stevens posted a video of himself playing “Danny Boy” on his Facebook page and was surprised by the positive response. So he kept going, until eventually he had more than 200 “quarantunes.” Because it quickly became a daily routine, he found himself falling back on tunes he already knew, many of which were standards, including quite a few by George and Ira Gershwin and a handful of Irving Berlin tunes from the 1936 Hollywood musical Top Hat, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

The first nine tracks on the new album were among those quarantunes (including the Gershwins’ “Lady Be Good” and two from Top Hat), but the album’s final track was not. Indeed it was an afterthought, added in the studio when, as Stevens explains, it struck him the album “didn’t have a waltz.”

The joke here is that the track in question, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” isn’t a triple-metre song. At least it wasn’t before this album. But under Stevens’s fingers, it becomes the lightest of waltzes, concluding with a magical coda, a sort of rapt chiming that reminds us these songs from the Great American Songbook are played by the same man who previously found his standards in the English Hymnal. •

The Ace of Hearts Is High is available digitally, and will be out on CD soon.

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On the face of it this is odd, for I was a kid from Liverpool and a mad-keen fan, but the truth is nobody really remembers where they were when the Beatles disbanded, because there was no single moment at which it happened. After about eighteen months of rumours and newspaper articles, Paul McCartney confirmed in April 1970 what we already knew — that the group was no more. A month later, when the album Let It Be and an accompanying film of the same name were released, it was anticlimactic.

That film, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, had been shot during the album sessions back in January 1969, the idea being that the group would write a new set of songs then perform them at their first concert in nearly three years. Initially, this was to have taken place in North Africa — a Roman amphitheatre in Libya was one possibility. More modestly, North Africa became North London — an open-air concert on Primrose Hill where the Beatles would set up and play with no announcement. Finally, as everyone knows, they just went upstairs and played on the roof until a bewildered constabulary asked them to pack it in.

This was their last live performance (“and we hope we passed the audition”), and its context in the film was the dying days of a dysfunctional group barely able to stand each other’s company. But that was an editorial interpretation. Rumours of animosity between the members of the Beatles were seldom completely accurate. In Peter Jackson’s new film, The Beatles: Get Back, cut together from sixty hours of footage (fifty-eight of them unused by Lindsay-Hogg), the four musicians, working cooperatively in the studio, read a column in the tabloid Daily Sketch about their impending break-up, complete with allegations of physical violence between John Lennon and George Harrison, and mock the old hack responsible.

This isn’t to say the four weeks of sessions lacked moments of tension. At one point, in an episode inexplicably omitted from Lindsay-Hogg’s film, Harrison walks out and doesn’t return for several days (“If he doesn’t come back by Tuesday, we’ll get Clapton”). The following morning, only Ringo shows up. But the atmosphere, overall, is one of good-natured collaboration, resulting in an extraordinarily productive month. The Beatles not only worked up the songs for Let It Be, but also half the songs for Abbey Road and quite a few that wouldn’t see the light of day until their solo albums began to appear. Paul is already trying out “Another Day,” George has “All Things Must Pass,” and John is in the early stages of “Gimme Some Truth” and “Jealous Guy.” Indeed he has the whole tune of “Jealous Guy” but a completely different set of lyrics — at this stage the song is called “On the Road to Marrakesh.” So well was the group working together that three weeks after the rooftop concert, they were back in the studio piecing together Abbey Road.

The most common criticisms of Jackson’s three-part film, which runs to nearly eight hours, are that it’s too long (given that this is the director who turned The Hobbit, a comparatively slim novel, into an eight-hour trilogy, I think we got off lightly) and that it’s boring. The second criticism is interesting. I think the film is honest, rather than boring. Anyone who’s hung around a recording studio (or film set or theatre) can attest to the fact that there’s a lot of waiting for something to happen. Here, the Beatles aren’t just recording songs, they’re writing them, and songs don’t spring spontaneously to life, even if you’re Lennon or McCartney. They take shape slowly, and they require work. Often the work occurs, to borrow from Lennon, “while you’re busy making other plans,” or as happens here while drinking tea or white wine, smoking cigarettes and consuming alarming amounts of toast (it was the white bread consumption that concerned me).

In contrast to so many documentaries about the making of a great album, which show us brilliant people having one brilliant idea after another, The Beatles: Get Back is full of creativity’s longueurs. A recurrent problem is that after years of overdubbing and other studio trickery, the Beatles, once again writing for live performance, find themselves a member short. The “fab four” are no longer enough. The songs seem to require a keyboard player, yet when Paul or John sits at the Blüthner grand or Fender Rhodes, the songs are suddenly lacking a bass or a rhythm guitar.

Enter Billy Preston like a deus ex machina. He’s an old friend from the group’s Hamburg days, when he was backing Little Richard. Visiting London, he stops by to say hello, sits down at the keyboard and never leaves. He also cheers everyone up. Further tension is dispelled — and those longueurs filled — with an endless variety of ad hoc performances: old blues songs, early rock & roll hits, numbers from musical theatre, spoofy renditions of the Beatles’ own songbook, and novelty items such as “Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellen Bogen by the Sea,” to which, it transpires, they all know all the words.

Jackson’s film shows us what’s going on around the making of the album: Yoko Ono is ever-present, though, contrary to rumour, the other Beatles seem to like her; Linda Eastman and her young daughter are there; producer George Martin flits about looking for something to do (there are no tapes to cut up and throw in the air on this album); and those two supreme shysters Allen Klein and Alex Mardas hover at the perimeter. The whole project nearly fails before it’s begun because “Magic Alex” has built a new recording studio that doesn’t work. At this point George Martin appears to be biting his tongue. But Jackson’s focus, rightly, is the music — it is, after all, the only reason we’re still interested in these people — and the film’s most fascinating moments involve the sight and sound of Beatles songs taking shape.

At first, “Two of Us” consists of a couple of catchy ideas, but gradually the song’s metrical complexity emerges. In its final version, as the perfect little pop song that opens Let It Be, it will have alternating bars of six, four and three beats, but at this point Paul just knows that a particular part should be “like a waltz.” Even when they have the rhythm under their belt, the song isn’t right. They keep slowing it down, and eventually John suggests it could be “quieter.” Out come the acoustic guitars and the thing falls into place.

The sharing of ideas that had always been a hallmark of the Beatles’ songwriting is continuously on show. George is working on “Something.” So far, he has “Something in the way she moves / Attracts me like,” but he doesn’t know what comes next and asks for suggestions. Lennon says that at this point anything will do if it allows him to keep working on the music, and proposes “Attracts me like a cauliflower.” Later, it’s “Attracts me like a pomegranate”, which is rhythmically more precise.

The film’s best sequence is the rather swift emergence, one morning, of “Get Back.” Paul plays the rhythm on his bass, adding a few nonsense words. In a matter of seconds, “Get Back” starts to be recognisable. George and Ringo, pottering about the studio, suddenly get interested and join in. John hasn’t even arrived for work, and the song exists. Later we hear prototype verses about racial prejudice (“Get back to where you once belonged”), but the song’s social conscience is short-lived. “Jo Jo Jackson left his home in Arizona,” Paul sings. Later, minus his surname, Jo Jo leaves “his home in Tucson, Arizona.” “Is Tucson in Arizona?” John asks. We hear the song over and over, increasingly coming to resemble the version we know, as John insists the introduction start from nothing and grow louder.

It’s extraordinary to eavesdrop on it all, and when it’s over you find that you can’t get this most underrated of the Beatles’ albums out of your head. But then, as Giles Martin, son of George, has remarked, an album that contains “Get Back,” “Let It Be,” “Across the Universe,” and “The Long and Winding Road” should never have been underrated in the first place. •

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It might have been the novelist himself speaking, for “muddle” was a word to which E.M. Forster returned, time and again. In Howards End, Margaret Schlegel gets into a “muddle” with Ruth Wilcox; according to Cyril Fielding in A Passage to India, “India’s a muddle”; elsewhere Forster claimed that London was a “muddle” and so was listening to music.

Yet one suspects that the meaning of the term had a certain lability for him, because, pace Mr Emerson, Forster’s “muddles” don’t always seem like the worst thing in the world. He rather liked London, and he loved music, about which he was sensitive and knowledgeable. But in his 1939 essay, “Not Listening to Music,” he wrote of the difficulties of giving it his full attention.

“Listening to music is such a muddle that one scarcely knows how to start describing it. The first point to get clear in my own case is that during the greater part of every performance I do not attend. The nice sounds make me think of something else. I wool-gather most of the time, and am surprised that others don’t.”

Me too. Well, maybe not most of the time, but it does happen.

Let it be said that Forster is speaking about classical music in the concert hall, pieces that might last an hour or more in the case of symphonies by Mahler and Bruckner, and for the most part lack words to tell us what’s going on. This is music that invites us in while freeing our imaginations. It’s that freeing that’s the problem.

Forster divided music into two sorts: that which reminds us of other things and that which is itself. The former includes the operas of Wagner which, even apart from their texts, are full of those leitmotifs indicating precise objects and emotional states. “With Wagner I always knew where I was,” Forster writes; “he never let the fancy roam… he was as precise in his indications as an oriental dancer.” And naturally the stories also help us focus.

The trouble is all that other music — the sonatas and concertos and symphonies that have no stories. How should we listen? And what should we understand? Forster writes of trying to foist Wagnerian significance onto other composers’ music. Often, he tells us, he sees music in colours or images, but he is aware that these are his own responses and, in a sense, take him away from “music itself.”

“Music is so very queer that an amateur is bound to get muddled when writing about it,” Forster suggests. He proposes that music “untrammelled and untainted by reference” is “obviously the best,” but recognises that the problem of staying focused never goes away, not least because even Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Brahms’s fourth symphony “certainly have a message. Though what on earth is it? I shall get tied up trying to say.”

Interestingly, Forster’s attempt to explain music’s message came down to rhythm, which he thought was trying to push at the listener “something which is neither an aesthetic pattern nor a sermon.” That’s quite good, if undeniably vague.

As “an amateur,” Forster was at least able to approach music through his own performances on the piano, which “grow worse yearly.” But no matter how unsatisfactory his playing, seated at the keyboard there was none of that wool-gathering: he was compelled to attend. Here, he could enter the music and finally experience it as “music itself.” “I see what becomes of a phrase, how it is transformed or returned, sometimes bottom upward, and get some notion of the relation of keys.”

My own difficulty concentrating on music may be partly a problem with concentration, full stop. For if you put me in a restaurant with music it will distract me from conversation. And I don’t mean loud music that leaves one shouting at one’s dinner companion: quiet music — however dreadful — is somehow more distracting still because there’s always a part of me striving to hear it.

In concerts, my concentration problems take three forms. The first, rather like Forster’s, results in my thinking about something else. When we arrive in the concert hall, we aim to put our lives away and make room for the Schubert sonata or whatever it is. But sometimes we can’t switch off and the demands of our daily life overwhelm us, a few bars of Schubert leading us back into our own world.

For the second problem, I blame Wagner — not Wagner the composer, but Wagner the impresario of Bayreuth whose idea it was to dim the houselights in performance. A comfortable chair in a darkened hall quickly puts me to sleep. I once travelled a considerable distance to hear a colleague’s new piece and slept through the whole thing.

But my most common form of distraction is to start composing. I imagine it’s the same for every composer. Michael Tippett’s second symphony began to take shape while listening to Vivaldi — Tippett’s symphony opens with pounding low Cs in the cellos — and his third started in a performance of Pierre Boulez’s Pli selon pli at the 1965 Edinburgh Festival. If ever there was a piece that encouraged you to wool-gather, it’s Pli selon pli, Boulez’s musical portrait of the poet Mallarmé. More than an hour long, and notwithstanding its frequent splashes of colour, this is remarkably static music. Not only are there none of Forster’s pushing rhythms, there’s also very little harmonic development. I’ve never heard this piece — in concert or on a recording — without my mind wandering, and Tippett’s wandered off in the direction of what he might himself do with such fixed sounds.

One senses, reading Forster’s essay, that he feels a degree of failure, not to say shame, at his musical distractions. But I like to think there’s something honourable about ceasing to attend because you’re having musical thoughts of your own. A feather in the cap of the original composer, too, to have sparked off new ideas in another composer. Not that it’s always the music itself that leads me astray. When I was sitting in the new concert hall in Lahti, Finland, some years ago, the bright yellow ochre of the wooden interior conjured up Bruegel’s painting, Children’s Games. I no longer have a clue what music I was there to hear — it was new and Nordic — but by the end of the concert I’d mapped out the three movements of my piece Scenes from Bruegel in a fair amount of detail. Sometimes not listening to music can be rather productive. •

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To do this, we need to adopt a version of what literary scholars call close reading. It’s a bit like stripping down a car engine. Close reading examines the actual writing — the choice of words, the syntax, the grammar — in order to reveal or construct meaning. Ideally (I would say), close reading should come first, unencumbered by theory. But even if you are an armed-to-the-teeth foot soldier in the culture wars, the close reading of a text will help you marshal evidence, the better to grind your axe. To be taken seriously, you must be across the details.

The British musicologist Wilfrid Mellers (1914–2008) knew about this. He once said that if you’re not talking technically about music, then you’re not talking about music at all — you’re talking about something else. He had initially studied English at Cambridge, where he had come under the wing of F.R. Leavis, whose own ability as a close reader was rivalled only by his insistence that literature must be read in the context of the society from which it came. In book after book, all filled with his special brand of purple enthusiasm, Mellers illuminated music from Couperin and Bach to Grainger and Poulenc, not forgetting Duke Ellington, the Beatles, Ma Rainey and Dolly Parton, but always with reference to the text, whether it was a score or a recording.

I’ve been thinking about Mellers while reading a new collection of essays by Christopher Ricks, professor of the humanities at Boston University and one of the closest readers alive. He’s been at it for a while. He published his first monograph, Milton’s Grand Style, in 1963, fought his corner against the Cambridge structuralists during the 1970s, and although not himself a poet was Oxford professor of poetry from 2004 to 2009, during which time some of these essays began as lectures. The collection is called Along Heroic Lines, its title having (at least) a double meaning.

One of these lines is the iambic pentameter (five weak/strong beats) of Milton and Shakespeare, Dryden and Keats, lines that in the hands of fine poets are endlessly flexible: “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day” (Thomas Gray); “The past is all about us and within” (Oodgeroo Noonuccal); “And now if you will find my spectacles” (John Betjeman); “I work all day, and get half-drunk at night” (Philip Larkin).

It was Samuel Johnson who called these lines “heroic,” and Ricks can spot them a mile off — and not only in poetry. That’s the point; he even finds them in one of Dr Johnson’s letters. Heightened emotion in written or spoken English leads naturally to the heroic line: this is more or less what Ricks believes.

A master of the literary party trick, Ricks begins his essay on Norman Mailer with two sonnets constructed entirely of lines (all of them pentameters) taken from Mailer’s prose, and there’s a third example at the end of the essay. He even contrives to make these sonnets rhyme. That’s pretty close reading. Geoffrey Hill’s poetry is examined, for pages, on the basis of his overuse of words ending in either “-able” or “-ible.” Ricks goes hunting for anagrams in Shakespeare’s sonnets and finds them everywhere.

Not to deny the brilliance of Ricks’s approach — it’s dazzling and always leads us back to the writing under consideration — but there are drawbacks. It’s the Leavisite notion of literature in society — the context — that is so often missing. By failing, for example, to take into account the vagaries of Jacobean publishing, Ricks presses his claims for Shakespeare’s anagrams based on what, in many cases, will be almost randomised spelling. And this is to say nothing of the Bard’s own flexible attitude to such matters, right down to the spelling of his own name.

Close reading might be our starting point, it may even be our end point, but factoring in other matters will affect meaning. Yes, that performance of a Carnatic raga creates patterns in sound; there’s a drone; there are melodic notes that push and tug dissonantly away from the tonic; there’s an accelerating pulse, with elaborate rhythmic play; there’s an ecstatic proliferation of the melodic line. One can say all this, and it will be true and based on evidence. But where is the significance?

Issues of context come up in Western classical music, too. Perhaps because the repertoire of the Western concert hall consists largely of music from the past, a knowledge of historical styles and techniques is thought to be vital to our understanding of its music. It makes sense. We want to hear — or at least believe we are hearing — what the composer heard. It’s a sort of fidelity. And yet in a literary musical tradition, such as this, a composer’s score — the more Urtext the better — might be considered a higher fidelity yet.

When Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten began performing Schubert Lieder, they knew almost nothing of the performing traditions of Schubert’s time or those that had grown up since. They had the scores, worked it out for themselves, and the results, whether you like them or not, are undeniably compelling. This was also essentially pianist Glenn Gould’s approach to Bach; and, as a conductor, it was Pierre Boulez’s attitude to more or less everything. Play the notes accurately, balance all the parts, and the music will take care of itself. Style is affectation; tradition is bad habits. (I’m exaggerating, somewhat.)

But a complete absence of historical or cultural context can also lead us astray. The point at which Wilfrid Mellers and Christopher Ricks most closely intersect is over the work of Bob Dylan. Both wrote book-length studies: Mellers’s is A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (1984); Ricks’s is Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2003).

Mellers, as the word “backdrop” in his subtitle suggests, is all about context. He picks apart the songs to show their workings, but his analyses are in the context of the oral traditions from which Dylan sprang. Ricks’s enormous volume discusses the words alone, the words on the page, and of course he does it brilliantly, but you’d be forgiven for concluding that Milton and T.S. Eliot meant more to Dylan than Woody Guthrie or Blind Willie McTell. To separate Dylan’s lyrics from their musical context — especially from the music in Dylan’s voice — is to miss much of the point of him.

I do agree with Mellers’s maxim. Talking about music must be technical, the equivalent of literary close reading. But if you don’t have the context too, you may miss the forest for the trees. •

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I received one of these recently from the driver of an oncoming car in response to what must have looked to him like a greeting from me. In fact the twitching of my little finger was involuntary conducting as I drove along listening to Mozart. It was my pleasure in the first movement of the Linz symphony that had communicated itself to the other driver, whether he realised it or not. (I’m guessing not.)

In performance, musicians continually communicate with each other through gesture, the conductor only the most conspicuous example among them. There are conductors with long sticks, conductors with short sticks and conductors with no sticks at all; some are histrionic in manner, some clinically precise, one or two barely move. If you’ve never seen film of the composer Richard Strauss on the podium, take a look on YouTube: seldom has a conductor appeared so uninvolved. There’s a Mr Bean sketch in which our hero, holding a baton in front of a Salvation Army brass quartet, discovers that each gesture he makes will elicit a note, a chord or a whole phrase of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” the players divining all this from the merest flick of his stick. In reality, conducting is a less exact science.

But even when a performance is unconducted, which is most of the time, musicians rely on their eyes as well as their ears. The sightlines in an ensemble have to be good. It might be a look, a nod or a raised eyebrow — something so small the audience won’t see it — but without it a performance can fall apart.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’m contemplating a large-scale work for voices and instruments that will have no conductor. Not only that, but it will involve projections, which means the performers are likely to be sitting in the semi-dark. It’s important, then, to consider from the start that the players won’t have the usual access to each other’s eyes, and that any hand signals may have to be more pronounced than a raised pinky. For the most part, the cues will have to be in the music itself — in the printed part on the players’ stands and in the sound of the music.

There are precedents for this, some of them pretty extreme. A few years ago, New York’s JACK Quartet brought Georg Friedrich Haas’s third string quartet to Sydney’s Carriageworks. The piece is directed to be played in complete blackout. In contravention, one imagines, of most council regulations, even the exit signs are extinguished.

“When the blackout began,” music critic Alex Ross wrote of a performance he attended in 2010, “I initially felt a fear such as I’ve never experienced in a concert hall: it was like being sealed in a tomb.” So Haas asks a lot of his audience, but even more of his players, who must not only memorise the music but also rely entirely on their ears for coordination. As if the fact that the players can’t see each other were not enough, the four musicians are required to sit far apart in the corners of the room, sending out musical signals to their distant colleagues, their sonic lines crisscrossing the audience.

I would say Haas’s third quartet was unique, had not the composer, impressed with the JACK’s dedication to the piece, written them another quartet (No. 9) that also requires a blackout. But while Haas’s quartets might offer some of contemporary music’s more intense experiences, that intensity is limiting. It is also born of limitation. The performance might wrap its listeners in sound, but it excludes them from the performance.

We know from reports and illustrations of concert audiences in the late eighteenth century that once upon a time people tended to talk and eat during performances. There’s Mozart at the piano, and yet half the audience seems not to be paying attention. During the nineteenth century, a different attitude crept into the concert hall. In the Romantic age, audiences were more likely to commune with a performance in a rapt, reverent, one might almost say prayerful manner. And one sees it still, people in concerts — classical concerts, anyway — listening with their eyes shut.

Stravinsky disapproved of this habit. He thought those people were missing something and urged audiences to watch performances as well as listen. He wanted them to see the moments of effort and ease that go into playing instruments and to notice the players’ interactions. I’m with Stravinsky. Live music requires interaction, and that’s only enhanced by the look of it. Musical gesturing embodies sound, and when we watch it closely it brings us closer to the sound of the music.

Just this morning, walking with my dog, I was passed by a car in which the driver was animatedly drumming on his steering wheel. I couldn’t hear the music. It didn’t look like Mozart. Meeting my eyes, and realising he’d been spotted — perhaps only then realising what he was doing — the driver gave me a sheepish grin. Not that he stopped drumming.

My favourite such experience, vivid in my memory, happened thirty-eight years and four or five cars ago. I was driving down a suburban street near Wollongong University, listening to pop radio. Elton John was singing “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues,” and I was belting it out with him. I remember the moment because behind the wheel of an approaching car was a woman singing the same song. We were lip-syncing. She saw me too, as our cars passed, but there wasn’t time to wave. •

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The Englishman Gerald Finzi (1901–1956) was another minor figure in twentieth-century music, and Diana McVeagh, who has edited a massive, 1080-page, two-kilo volume of the composer’s letters, is as clear-headed and unsentimental in her estimation of his importance as Gillies was about Grainger. But the book, if unwieldy, is fascinating for its glimpses into not only the creative mind of a lesser composer and his circle, but also a time and place.

McVeagh, who will turn ninety-five next month, is a significant figure in English musicology. A decade ago she published a life and works of Finzi, and all the way back in 1955 a similar study of Elgar. Indeed, near the end of her edition of Finzi’s letters, she makes a cameo appearance when her Elgar monograph receives an encomium (“first rate”) from Finzi himself in a letter to his friend, Cedric Thorpe Davie. Later there’s a letter from McVeagh to Finzi — in reply to what one assumes was more direct praise of that book — and finally a note to McVeagh from Joy Finzi, the composer’s wife, following her husband’s death. (Joy’s portraits of her husband and his friends illustrate the book.)

Though English to his bootstraps, and suspicious, as McVeagh puts it, of “abroad,” Finzi came from a line of Italian Jews. He was non-conformist in many ways — agnostic and, for the most part, pacifist — yet his musical style was conservative. His tastes were conservative, too, and these were shared by his friends. Part of the attraction of this volume is reading letters to and from Finzi that wrestle with the progressive music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Berg and Boulez. In Finzi’s case, it’s clear he really is trying to appreciate it all (“there’s no reason why we shdn’t appreciate Schoenberg & Walton”), though even when he gets it, his judgements can take you by surprise.

“See Stravinsky’s Noces if you get the chance,” he writes to fellow composer Howard Ferguson. “I liked it — not as European art, but rather in the same way as we shd like some curious oriental or asiatic music.” The language might be of its time, but it’s not an impossible judgement on this particular Stravinsky score.

More often he fails in his attempts to be ecumenical, writing to William Busch in 1942: “I wd rather listen to a deft, delightful, light, movement by Ed. German, or Fauré, or J. Strauss or Elgar than all the ponderous integrity of Bruckner or the constipated integrity of Schoenberg! (I tried Pierrot Lunaire the other night. It was deadly.)” Just in passing, one wonders how Finzi heard Pierrot in 1942, because the first recording of the piece only appeared in 1949. Perhaps he had a score. This was the single moment of puzzlement I had from a volume in which the editor seemed to have anticipated and provided answers for all my questions as they arose.

The bête noire for Finzi and his friends, however, was their fellow Englishman, Benjamin Britten, younger than any of them, undeniably brilliant and enjoying early success. “Britten is rapidly going to the dogs,” Edmund Rubbra writes to Finzi of the twenty-two-year-old; and of Britten’s Piano Concerto, “Seldom have I heard a work so empty & futile.” Britten’s opera, Albert Herring, is best “seen & not heard” (Ferguson to Finzi); St Nicolas is “twaddle” (Ferguson, again); Winter Words is “just awful” (the poet Edmund Blunden); and Les Illuminations is “just like soap bubbles. Iridescent & easily exploded.” That last judgement is by Finzi himself and he was evidently pleased with it, repeating it in letter after letter.

What Finzi and his friends had experienced that Britten hadn’t was the first world war, and perhaps that’s why they resented his blithe facility. Britten was only five at the war’s end; twelve years his senior, Finzi had lost two elder brothers in the fighting (a third had died just before it began), and it is hard not to feel that this coloured his musical outlook and drew him to the writings of Thomas Hardy, whose poetry would provide the texts of six of his nine song cycles. That Hardy would, much later, also be the poet of Britten’s Winter Words rankled with Finzi’s circle.

The other vital figure Finzi lost in the war was his first composition teacher, Ernest Farrar, killed in action with the Grenadiers at the battle of Épehy on only his tenth day in France. The letters bring it home. In April 1918, Farrar is writing to Finzi from barracks, asking for manuscript paper. In May he thanks him for it. In September, Farrar’s wife, Olive, writes to let Finzi know her husband has gone to France, and in October she acknowledges Finzi’s letter of condolence following Farrar’s death (“I feel so proud of him, & yet my grief is unspeakable”). That these letters should take up less than two pages of McVeagh’s fat volume makes the snuffing out of Farrar’s talent the more pitiful.

And then there’s this, in a 1923 letter from Finzi to his friend Vera Sommerfield: “Ivor Gurney has gone mad. It is the most terrible news I have had for five years. Overwork on top of shellshock. He may get better.” But he didn’t, and the editing and publication of Gurney’s poetry and music became a mission for Finzi. It was the same with the music of the eighteenth-century English composers William Boyce and John Stanley, and the Victorian Hubert Parry, lost causes all in the progressive twentieth century. Yet, “Why not appreciate a Bartók… and a Parry?” (Finzi to his younger colleague Anthony Milner).

Much of this book is concerned, as you would expect, with the business end of a composer’s life — concerts, broadcasts, publications, frustrations. At the heart of it is a fascinating to and fro between the composer and the publisher Leslie Boosey (“My dear Finzi,” “My dear Boosey”). It’s 1939, another war is coming and Finzi is desperate to get Boosey & Hawkes to take on Dies Natalis, his setting for high voice and strings of words by the seventeenth-century mystic Thomas Traherne, in time for its first performance at the Three Choirs Festival. Boosey is being hard-headed, insisting it is not a commercial proposition. At length, Finzi more or less agrees to fund the publication himself. Then both premiere and publication are shelved for the duration of the war.

That correspondence is fascinating partly because we know now what neither correspondent knew at the time — that Dies Natalis would become Finzi’s best-known piece — and partly because it has the ring of high-stakes negotiation (though, except for Finzi, the stakes were small), the letters pinging back and forth on a daily basis, almost as emails would today.

There is rather less space devoted to Finzi’s musical philosophy (Finzi’s fault, not McVeagh’s — most of his extant letters are in the book), which is a shame because when it comes it is touchingly revealing. Here he is, writing to his wife, about William Rutland’s biography of his beloved Hardy:

I’d like you to read it… & perhaps it will give you some idea of why I have always loved him so much & from earliest days responded, not so much to an influence as to a kinship with him. (I don’t mean kinship with his genius, alas, but with his mental make up). Here is a passage from the book “The first, manifest, characteristic of the man who wrote the Dynasts is the detestation of all useless suffering and his loathing of cruelty. The suffering that fills the world, and the thought that it is unnecessary, are to him a nightmare. This was the long tribulation of Hardy’s life.”

It’s impossible to read these letters and not conclude that this was also Finzi’s tribulation. And perhaps that explains not only the thick seam of regret that runs through even the composer’s most radiant music, but also why, in the century of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, it looks so wistfully backwards. •

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At The Music Show on Radio National we pride ourselves on ruling nothing out: no sort of music is invalid if it’s powerful and well made. But certain styles seem destined to get up the noses of some of our listeners. Country music is one (it’s generally referred to as “hillbilly music” by its detractors), hip-hop is another, and modern classical music of the atonal variety — the kind composed by my above-mentioned colleague — is a third. But singer-songwriters also bring out the critics.

The odd thing here is that “singer-songwriter” hardly describes a musical style at all. In fact, I suspect it was stylistic neutrality that made it such a useful term. Back in the 1960s, when the likes of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell started out, they were thought of as “folk singers.” And it’s true both Dylan’s and Mitchell’s early days involved their singing traditional songs, but the label was always employed more loosely than that.

Rather quickly, “folk singer” came to denote anyone singing more or less anything, especially his or her own songs, with an acoustic guitar (in recent times, it’s made a comeback whenever acoustic instruments heave into view). But when Dylan went electric in the mid 1960s and Mitchell sang jazz a decade later, “folk singer” simply wouldn’t do. Hence, “singer-songwriter.”

So if “singer-songwriter” isn’t a musical style, what is it some people are objecting to? I suspect we have to go back a bit further than Bob and Joni for the answer to that question.

In twelfth-century France, trouvères (in the north) and troubadours (in the south) were perhaps the earliest singer-songwriters, and their subject, more often than not, was love and how bad it made you feel. These poet-musicians were mostly aristocratic men, the female objects of their desire obscured behind a wall of indifference, not to say contempt.

“My love of her imprisons me,” sang Bernart de Ventadorn (1135–1194), the most famous of the troubadours. “I contemplate death, when I look on her great beauty.” (There were also female troubadours, known as trobairitz, although, as you might guess, we don’t know much about them. We have, at a generous estimate, two dozen samples of their words — some of them, interestingly, also addressed to women — and a single tune.)

Yet while the twelfth-century melody and formal diction (in the Occitan language) render Bernart’s song distant and exotic to modern ears, we recognise the sentiments. The ardour, the jealousy, the anguish and pain, the oversharing… it’s the world of the singer-songwriter. The same themes might turn up in baroque operas, nineteenth-century German lieder, the songs of Broadway, jazz standards and rock & roll, but the manner of delivery is different.

In opera, in lieder and on Broadway, the words are not the singer’s; in rock & roll, the words might be the singer’s, but you could argue the singer is in character. With the singer-songwriter, however, you have a first-person art form: the singer is telling us his or her story (or seems to be), and as the listener sometimes it’s hard not to feel like a therapist. I think it’s that intimacy that discomfits many listeners. We don’t know where to look.

When Joni Mitchell’s Blue was released fifty years ago, Kris Kristofferson, shocked at how much of her personal life Mitchell had revealed, wrote to the singer begging her to “save something” for herself. And yet, just because a singer-songwriter is using the first person, it doesn’t mean she’s sharing confidences. “Confessional” is a word that’s often dragged out to describe the singer-songwriter, but while it might apply to the singer’s tone of voice, listeners shouldn’t assume they are hearing slices of autobiography. Recently on The Music Show, Joan Armatrading, whose songs are nearly all about love and nearly all in the first person, insisted they’re almost never about her. If Randy Newman’s first-person songs were truly “confessional,” he would be in prison.

Still, if you venture into this territory as a performer, you will quickly find yourself asked to explain how your lyrics relate to your life. It’s like being a novelist in that regard. The other thing you must prepare for is the naming of your influences. These are nearly always Dylan (for men) and Mitchell (for women), comparisons as pointless as suggesting a modern composer has been influenced by Stravinsky: you can’t be a serious composer and have learnt nothing from Stravinsky, even if you rejected it. So much for the anxiety of influence.

Joni Mitchell’s name has been mentioned quite a bit in connection with Medicine Man, the remarkably assured and accomplished debut album from Martha Marlow, though beyond Marlow’s use of vibrant open tunings for her guitar, it’s hard to hear much that she has in common with her Canadian predecessor.

“The anxiety of influence only happens after the fact,” Marlow says, “when some listeners want to try and identify specific influences and measure them. It’s an analysis that other people apply to your work to place you in a context.”

She’s not being defensive. Were Marlow the sort of artist much exercised about influence-spotting in her work, she’d hardly begin the final song on the album with “Yesterday,” followed by a McCartneyesque gap, and she certainly wouldn’t begin its fourth verse with “Yesterday… All my dreams seemed so far away.” Or maybe she’s teasing us.

Marlow would be the first to acknowledge that the songs on Medicine Man have been a kind of therapy for her, but not in the sense of sharing gratuitous confidences with an unsuspecting audience. She has had a lifetime of ill health, hospitalisation and operations. She lives with pain, and this music is her attempt to sing it away. “Come out Medicine Man / I feel you cutting in — I do / Do your worst, do,” she sings defiantly on the album’s title track, one of several up-tempo songs that transform her pain into energy, enhanced by the elaborate string arrangements of jazz bassist Jonathan Zwartz (her father) and the presence of a few other jazz luminaries.

On my favourite track, “One Flew East, One Flew West,” a rhythmically lopsided rant of a song, Marlow insists, “You never, never, never, never see what’s in my head.” I’m unsure who she’s addressing here, but it can’t be her listeners. We see all right.

“I don’t think being confessional is an essential tool,” she tells me. “I do think good singer-songwriters invoke real emotions and can bravely address things that are often unsaid. Those things don’t have to be factual or drawn from a real situation, but rather the singer-songwriter does need to draw on a real emotional experience. Like a good actor, who uses everything for their craft — for their character.

“Your life experiences become your palette — they are the colours you use, and which you mix up in different ways. You don’t have to literally speak to a specific experience, but anything you’ve experienced can turn up, and sometimes in unexpected places. You might have a powerful understanding of grief, for example, but that might reveal itself in a beautiful love song.”

You don’t need to know Martha Marlow’s story to appreciate her album. It is a collection of thirteen songs, filled with unpredictable melodic lines, surprising chords, propulsive rhythms, striking images, hope and, yes, love. The composer friend who recommended telling The Music Show’s next singer-songwriter to get a grip is now dead, but I venture to suggest even he would have admired Medicine Man. •

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Dexys were a band from the English midlands pretending to be Irish (Rowland’s parents really were Irish), and “Come On Eileen,” replete with fiddle, banjo, tin whistle, accordion and lots of “toora loo rye ay,” took them to number one in Britain, the United States, Australia and half a dozen other countries. Although they were somewhat more than one-hit wonders (their version of Van Morrison’s “Jacky Wilson Said” reinforced the impression they might be from Ireland), it is “Come On Eileen” for which they are best remembered, and that’s partly because it’s one of those earworms. In spite of its odd structure, its abrupt and unpredictable changes of tempo and key, the song lodges in the memory.

When Kristen Dunphy, creator of the eight-part ABC television drama Wakefield, was casting around for a tune to put in the head of her central character, Nik Katira (Rudi Dharmalingam), she googled “earworm” and up popped “Come On Eileen.” It was the perfect song, not only because of its references to the act of listening, the power of music and Johnnie Ray’s emotional vulnerability, nor even for Rowland’s oddly prescient line at the end of the second verse, “I’ll hum this tune forever!” No, it was perfect because, being an authentic earworm, it stuck in the audience’s head, too. As viewers of this series, we find ourselves participating in a unique manner; Nik’s problem becomes ours, following us into the shower, on to the bus, into our workplaces.

Nik’s workplace is a psychiatric hospital at the top of a cliff in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, where he is a nurse. The “song stickage” (a real term) that he experiences is more than just an irritation; it also represents a repressed childhood memory. As Wakefield moves from episode to episode, we learn about the lives of its characters — the doctors and nurses, the patients (the new mother, the businessman, the musician) — but the source of Nik’s trauma remains hidden until the last episode, hinted at by the persistence of “Come On Eileen” and the sound of tap shoes. In his childhood, we learn, Nik was a tap dancer, and these taps are almost as recurrent a feature of the soundtrack as the infernal earworm.

Wakefield’s composers are Caitlin Yeo and Maria Alfonsine, the latter attached to the project from the outset. Unusually for TV drama, Alfonsine was in some of the early planning meetings, and a good thing too, because this is not the sort of show for which a composer can be brought in late in the piece and given the job of making the sad bits sadder and the funny bits funnier. Music is central to the story.

The Dexys song is put through endless variations. It is strummed on a guitar by one of Nik’s patients, turns up as a gospel number and, in an already famous scene at the end of the first episode, becomes a tap routine on a station platform performed by a chorus line of waiting passengers. But away from these set pieces, it is the fragmentation of the song — and of the sound of tap shoes — that insinuates itself into the drama most effectively.

Yeo and Alfonsine have provided Wakefield with plenty of conventional music to establish mood and underline character — conventional, that is, in the way it’s used — and I’m told a soundtrack album is under consideration. This would mean that music like the evocative opening theme, which brings together a viola and the voice of Hindustani singer Rucha Lange, will have an existence separate from the TV series. And so it should. In the context of the show, the music suggests both Nik’s fragile state of mind and his Indian family background. But without the pictures, it’s free to mean whatever the listener wants it to mean.

Still, it’s the music in Wakefield that probably won’t make it on to a soundtrack album that is the most remarkable. The composers isolated tiny melodic cells in the Dexys song and wove them into new musical strands, but tellingly, these fragments are also allowed to stand on their own. Some of the musical cues in Wakefield are one or two seconds long; some are at the threshold of audibility. Was that music? Was that “Come On Eileen” that just flashed by? Was that a tap shoe? The effect is sometimes comic, sometimes unsettling, often both, and at moments such as these it is impossible to separate the composers’ work from that of the sound designer, Sam Petty, and sound editor, Abigail Sie. But then that’s frequently true of music in film and television when it’s used well.

Music is the key both to Wakefield’s mystery and to the telling of its story, and it also provides a quietly satisfying ending. Onscreen, songs are frequently called upon to do the work of a lazy scriptwriter, telling us what to think, what to feel. Not here. For one thing, the scripts (by Dunphy, Sam Meikle, Cathy Strickland and Joan Sauers) need no saving. For another, because musical fragmentation has brought us to the climax of the story, only a complete song will round it out.

So in the final scene, the music, no longer in our heads or on the soundtrack, comes out of the mouth of one of the main characters, Kareena (Geraldine Hakewill), who sings Measure’s “Begin Again.” And because she isn’t miming, but really singing, it’s possible to have her start the song unaccompanied, giving it an air of magical spontaneity. The song’s phrases, connected in the original version by keyboard fills, are now separated by silences. Kareena/Hakewill sings as a mother might sing at her child’s bedside. And when, at length, a keyboard arrives to help her join the dots of her vocal line, something yet more magical occurs. The actor looks up, turns to the camera and sings to us. It’s Wakefield’s final moment of audience participation, dispelling, as it were, the earworm and silencing the tap shoes. •

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It’s not a problem with other music of the era. We all know what punk rock was. We know what ska and reggae and soul and disco were. But New Romanticism is harder to define, at least musically, because it was more an attitude than a style. Perhaps that is why, in Dylan Jones’s 680-page book, Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics, he enlists a multitude of voices to help him work it out.

It started in the late 1970s, was all over by about 1985 and its middle name was flamboyance — unless it was pretension, or possibly petulance. It was certainly visually striking, but whenever you try to say something about the music itself, you end up talking about the look of the thing. That look — eighteenth-century ruffles and tricorn hats when it wasn’t warpaint; brightly coloured coats and wide-brimmed fedoras when it wasn’t business suits and quiffs — was part of the bands’ success, especially in the United States, where, as Jones points out, the nascent MTV loved these British acts.

Musically, though, it is easier to say what New Romanticism wasn’t than what it was, and even then there are paradoxes. The New Romantics’ music wasn’t ska or reggae, though with his soulful vocals on “Red Red Wine” and “Many Rivers to Cross,” UB40’s Ali Campbell staked a claim to be counted in their number; it wasn’t soul, though what was Boy George if not a soul singer? And what was Annie Lennox, who would go on to duet with Aretha Franklin? New Romanticism wasn’t disco either, yet consider, for a moment, the muscular synth-pop syncopation behind the chorus of the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.” Above all, it wasn’t punk, with its loud, fast, three-minute, two-chord rants; and yet, in a way, it had more in common with punk than anything else.

The debt to punk is something Dylan Jones nails down quite quickly. As with the punks, their successors were all about dressing up and posing. The clothes might have been brighter, cleaner and less torn, the pose more a sulk than a sneer, but New Romanticism was as much an attitude as punk ever was. And punk’s primary impresario was there, too: fresh from grooming (if that’s the word) the Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren was taken on by Adam Ant to give him and his band a makeover. In a typical burst of wild imagination, McLaren suggested Adam dress as a “dandy highwayman” and sing his songs to an imitation of tribal drumming from Burundi. Then (and this was equally typical of McLaren) he made off with both Adam’s money and his band, added a thirteen-year-old girl, Annabella Lwin, who’d been discovered working in a laundromat, and named the new group Bow Wow Wow. He even gave them the Burundi drumming idea.

Bow Wow Wow’s first single, released on cassette and called, somewhat self-reflexively, “C•30 C•60 C•90 Go,” certainly sounds like punk — short, shouty and monotonous — but the imagery McLaren devised for the band was something else. When the band’s first album came out, it had the outlandish title See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah! City All Over, Go Ape Crazy, but its cover was beyond outlandish. In emulation of Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, the band members picnicked on the grass, young Annabella naked and meeting our gaze, like the woman in the painting. Even at the time, the image raised eyebrows — today it would be unthinkable — yet the significance of the cover was the band’s borrowing from nineteenth-century French art. This was no longer the world of the Sex Pistols.

But if punk was the New Romantics’ immediate precursor, maybe even their catalyst, earlier models were closer to their aesthetic. David Bowie was certainly one. He makes the cover of Jones’s book, flanked by Boy George and Lennox, Adam and Sade, he contributed to the music of the New Romantic years — first with Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), then the critically underrated Let’s Dance — and he carried on for three more decades.

Bryan Ferry was another. Peter York, one of Jones’s talking heads, says of Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” that Ferry’s voice was “the natural antithesis of Joe Cocker.” Here was “a singer whose whole approach said, ‘I’m not singing, I’m being a singer.’” Ferry’s example was taken to heart by the likes of Tony Hadley, Simon Le Bon and Midge Ure, their bands (Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and Ultravox) even donning Ferry’s suits and ties from time to time.

The other singer we might mention in this context was Marc Almond of Soft Cell. Jones describes this duo as a mixture of glamour and squalor, which nicely sums up their biggest hit, “Tainted Love,” but Almond’s singing on that most touching of revenge songs, “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye,” is oddly heroic. The elongation of “me” — such an unlikely word and such a hard sound to draw out — in the line “Take your hands off me” is all the more affecting for Almond’s 90 per cent accuracy.

Almond was also very obviously gay, and never before in pop music had queerness in general been so celebrated. Part of it was men dressing as women — admittedly this sometimes went little further than an elaboration of the pantomime dame trope — and women as men. Annie Lennox and Sade’s buzz cuts were as much their trademarks as their magnificent voices were (and if you’ve forgotten what genuinely great singers some of these figures were, you could do worse than start by listening again to Lennox’s wild vocal arabesques on Eurythmics’ “There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart)”). But Pet Shop Boys, Bronski Beat and Frankie Goes to Hollywood had no need of cross-dressing or androgynous looks. They wore their pride in their music.

The echt New Romantic song? I’m going for “Don’t You Want Me,” which is not only catchy as hell but also involves perhaps the best story of the era. The Human League was a moderately successful electro trio, a sort of worthy version of Kraftwerk, when in 1980 its two best musicians, Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware, departed to form Heaven 17. Left behind was singer Philip Oakey, who was responsible for fulfilling the commitments of a Human League tour, only days away. He spotted two schoolgirls dancing together in a Sheffield nightclub and thought they looked the part. (The parallels with Annabella Lwin’s discovery in a laundromat are uncanny.) Susan Sulley and Joanne Catherall had never sung or danced professionally and hadn’t heard of the Human League, but there and then Oakey invited them to join his tour, which they did with their parents’ permission.

Following the tour, the two of them had to go back to school, but the following year were then signed up as full-time members of the band, together with new musicians to replace Marsh and Ware. The band wrote new material and began putting out singles. After their third single in a row made the Top 20, they cobbled together an album, Dare. Wanting to cash in, the band’s manager suggested releasing a fourth single from it. Oakey was reluctant to put out “Don’t You Want Me,” which he regarded as atypical, but was eventually persuaded. By Christmas, it was number one, where it remained for five weeks, the biggest-selling UK record of the year.

It’s a pure pop story and a pure pop song, and the song might as well be about the story:

You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar
When I met you.
I picked you out, I shook you up
And turned you around,
Turned you into someone new.

Oakey explains in Jones’s book that the song was misunderstood: “For some reason people think ‘Don’t You Want Me’ is a love song, and it’s not. It’s a power song.” But it’s also a song about the times, about image and artifice, about “not singing, but being a singer.”

And here’s a curious thing. Until this moment, many critics had refused to take this music seriously, in spite of — or more likely because of — the popularity of some of it. But both Dare and “Don’t You Want Me” — the New Romantics’ commercial zenith — were surprisingly well reviewed.

As Jones puts it in his book, “Here was a record you could hear in Woolworth’s as well as in a nightclub, something you might hear on both John Peel [the radio DJ famous for playing new, hard-edged, often experimental music] and daytime Radio 1, a walk-you-through-my-story song that moved a banal domestic to-and-fro up onto the big screen. This was the perfect New Romantic macro/micro-riposte to the genre’s previous tropes of isolation and elitism. You could sing along with it too. The object, after all, was ultimately success.” •

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Weeks later Wagner was dead from a heart attack, his body taken up the Grand Canal by a gondola just like the one Liszt had seen. From Venice, the coffin made its way by train across Europe for a lap of honour through Bavaria, where the railway stations were themselves draped in black. Such was Wagner’s fame.

Nearly nine decades later, Stravinsky, too, would end up on a black gondola. But the Russian composer wasn’t leaving Venice, he was coming home to his favourite city. This time the measure of the composer’s fame was the fact that his funeral was beamed around the world on television. It was April 1971.

I remember watching the six o’clock news as a fourteen-year-old boy in England and seeing the flower-decked coffin make its way across the Venetian lagoon to the cemetery isle of San Michele, where it would be interred near the grave of Stravinsky’s great supporter and friend Sergei Diaghilev. I remember how the gondola seemed almost too small for the coffin, let alone the crew of four, who were (oddly, I thought) dressed in white. And I remember the black drape, trailing in the gondola’s wake.

Stravinsky was the twentieth century’s most famous classical composer, and he remains so. Although he didn’t need to, he courted this fame and was jealous when others got their share. It seems inconceivable that he should have fretted over the near ubiquity of Sibelius’s Valse triste, a popular classic in the middle of the last century, but from time to time he would knock out a short piece — three or four minutes, the length of one side of a 78-rpm shellac disc — in the hope it might catch on like the Finn’s sad waltz. His Piano–Rag–Music (1919) was one such attempt; the Circus Polka (1942) was another.

Stravinsky was an inveterate polisher of his own myths, giving interviews over the six decades of his career that were always, in the words of the musicologist Richard Taruskin, “charming, crafty, hyperarticulate, unerringly self-serving.” This from the composer of The Rite of Spring!

The notorious premiere of that work took place in May 1913 at Paris’s brand new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Commissioned by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the music that emanated from the orchestra pit was unprecedented in its apparent barbarism and its use of convulsed syncopation. It has been suggested that the attendant riot was exaggerated or even prearranged, or that it was more about Nijinsky’s choreography than Stravinsky’s score. Whatever the truth, reports of a noisy disturbance did the composer no harm at all. From that moment on he was modern music’s top dog.

But how “modern” was he? Even as I write those words, the question strikes me as absurd. These days, I’d be inclined to answer it with another question: “Who cares?” But in the middle of the twentieth century — that century of modernism and progress — this sort of thing mattered very much.

It certainly mattered to Theodor W. Adorno, social philosopher and cultural theorist of the Frankfurt School, when he evaluated the competing claims of Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg to be the future of music. He came down reasonably firmly on the side of Schoenberg, figurehead of the second Viennese school (with Alban Berg and Anton Webern) and pioneer of twelve-tone composition.

It also mattered to the young John Cage, who in 1933 went shopping for a composition teacher and plumped for Schoenberg, who had abandoned Hitler’s Germany for Los Angeles. Later, when Cage met Stravinsky, the Russian asked (“plaintively,” according to Cage) why he had chosen Schoenberg instead of him. Cage told Stravinsky that he’d been attracted to the chromaticism of Schoenberg’s music and to the twelve-tone technique.

“My music is also chromatic,” Stravinsky insisted, adding that what he had never liked about Schoenberg’s music was “that it wasn’t really modern.”

There is truth in this remark. Both in his teaching (as Cage discovered) and in his music, Schoenberg was a traditionalist, and Viennese tradition ran deep. Take away the atonality, and you find in Schoenberg’s music an approach to rhythm and phrasing little different from that of his Romantic predecessors, and reaching all the way back to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Even the atonality, as Schoenberg himself liked to explain, was the inevitable outcome of a century of burgeoning chromaticism — from late Beethoven and Schubert to Liszt and Wagner.

But much as he felt he’d made a clean break with it, Stravinsky could hardly escape the past. Eight years younger than Schoenberg, he was born when not only Liszt and Wagner were still alive, but also Brahms and Bruckner and Tchaikovsky. As a boy, he saw Tchaikovsky at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, where Stravinsky’s father was principal bass. Two weeks later, Tchaikovsky was dead, and the eleven-year-old Stravinsky deeply affected.

There is an obvious connection between Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores — Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker — and the three scores Stravinsky wrote for the Ballets Russes between 1910 and 1913, culminating in The Rite of Spring. Musically, The Firebird (1910) is in the tradition of those earlier fairytale ballets, but there are strong hints of the syncopation that would soon take over Stravinsky’s music. Petrushka (1911) is bursting with syncopation, and also with colour and melody; and in The Rite there are long passages where there’s little but syncopation. The famous eight-note “stamping” chord of “The Augurs of Spring” repeats for pages, with the unpredictably shifting accents giving the music momentum, shape and meaning.

In his most famous utterance, Stravinsky explained that, in contrast to the music of the second Viennese school, the composition of The Rite was “guided by no system whatever.” Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, he explained, “were supported by a great tradition, whereas very little immediate tradition lies behind [The Rite of Spring]. I had only my ear to help me. I heard and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which [The Rite] passed.”

And we can believe it. Almost. We know that the piece was composed at a piano, and that the composer was feeling his way. The octatonic chord in “The Augurs of Spring” doesn’t seem calculated: we can well imagine Stravinsky discovering it at the keyboard. Of the unprecedented syncopation in the final “Sacrificial Dance,” Stravinsky said that he could play it before he’d worked out how to notate it; and that sounds about right, too. But he chose his words carefully in regard to “immediate tradition,” for while he liked to deny that The Rite, in contrast to his earlier ballets, contained folk music, it was, in truth, full of it. Even its famous opening bassoon solo was closely modelled on a folk song from Lithuania.

For Adorno, The Rite of Spring was a celebration of primitivism, while the so-called neoclassical music that Stravinsky composed from around 1920 (in Pulcinella — another Diaghilev commission) until the early 1950s was “contrived.” He wasn’t necessarily wrong in his observations, it was just that he considered these traits in Stravinsky’s music to be faults. Adorno passed his judgements in a book, Philosophy of New Music, published in 1949, before the elderly Stravinsky embraced the twelve-tone techniques of his three Viennese contemporaries (all now safely dead) in the 1950s.

Like Beethoven’s before it, Stravinsky’s music falls neatly into three periods, and at first glance they are fiercely delineated. Any contemporary audience member familiar with the rebarbative sound world of The Rite of Spring must have been astonished, just seven years later, to encounter Pulcinella, its elegant score based on eighteenth-century Neapolitan tunes. By the same token the premiere of the austere Canticum Sacrum in 1955 in St Mark’s Basilica, Venice, would have seemed pretty shocking four years after Stravinsky’s fizzing burlesque, The Rake’s Progress, had received its premiere just along the canal at La Fenice.

Stravinsky’s first change of style was partly a matter of practicality. His pre–first world war successes established his name at the forefront of new music, but they brought him no income. Neither Tsarist Russia nor the Soviet Union was party to the Berne Convention on copyright, so Stravinsky, now permanently in exile, had no access to royalties. His solution was to write more music — shorter pieces for smaller forces — and write it fast. Perhaps having models, such as eighteenth-century songs and concerto movements, helped speed things up. Financial insecurity probably also accounted for the desire to have a hit record. Even after his move to the United States in 1939, a year before The Rite of Spring found a massive new audience through Disney’s Fantasia, he continued to remain cautious about money.

His second change of style was also a change of heart, and was provoked by another crisis, this time of relevance. After the second world war, young composers in Europe and the United States were searching for a wholly new way of doing things, a clean musical slate. Their idol was Schoenberg’s pupil Webern — not only his serial techniques but also his fractured melodic lines, crystalline textures and endlessly shifting instrumental colours. In 1945 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées another Stravinsky premiere was booed. This was the Paris premiere of the three-year-old, neoclassical Danses concertantes, and leading the booing was a composition student named Pierre Boulez.

Three years later, another young man — the American conductor Robert Craft — befriended Stravinsky, became his assistant and in time was the catalyst for the composer’s adoption of twelve-tone serialism. It was essentially Webern’s approach (fractured melodic lines, crystalline textures, and so on), but Stravinsky immediately found a way to personalise the technique. He composed in this manner for the rest of his life, applying it to pieces as different as his last ballet score, Agon (1957), the chamber opera for CBS Television, The Flood (1962), and his final masterpiece, Requiem Canticles (1966).

Listening to all this music now, fifty years after Stravinsky’s death, I increasingly hear the changing styles — the early Russian period up to and including the first world war; the neoclassical decades; and the final years of serial music — as a form of dress-up. The music underneath seems unified and the composer’s unique voice always rings true. It is there in the way he puts together small building blocks — musical cells — to form larger structures, working, at times, like a mosaicist. It is there in the motor rhythms with attendant syncopation that characterise nearly all his work. It is there in the way he voices his chords. Since this last aspect of his work is not as obvious as the others, it may be worth a little elucidation, because this, above all, is where Stravinsky’s musical fingerprints are to be found.

Stravinsky was an expert at writing chords so that they seemed to gleam with inner light. Aside from the sheer originality of his pitch choices, the chords were widely spaced, often covering a number of octaves, with big gaps between the notes. But just as importantly, the composer was adept at interleaving instruments — mixing winds, brass and strings in unusual ways — so that their distinctive timbres might create a wholly new sound. It was like a painter blending colours. You could argue that this is simply orchestration, which all composers do. But no one did it like Stravinsky. Here are two examples from The Rite of Spring.

In the first half of The Rite, there’s a still, quiet moment, just four bars long, after “Procession of the Sage” and before the concluding “Dance of the Earth.” The Rite is scored for a massive orchestra, and suddenly everyone falls silent except for seven solo instruments: three bassoons, two contrabassoons, a kettle drum and a single, muted double bass. The bassoons produce a chord — two high notes, one low — which frames the other instruments. While the second contrabassoon doubles the tapping of the drum and double bass, the first plays a fragment of melody: D flat, slowly rising to D natural, then falling back to D flat. Contrabassoons (sometimes called double bassoons) are big instruments, built for playing low notes, and the strangeness of this moment is underlined by having the contras play higher than the regular third bassoon.

After the ensuing pandemonium of “Dance of the Earth,” the second half of The Rite of Spring ushers in an eerie calm. The chord we hear is a polytonal blend of D minor with C sharp minor and D sharp/E flat minor, its inherent instability enhanced, once more, by the composer’s distribution of instrumental colour. Above a cushion of four widely spaced solo horns sit three flutes, two oboes and three clarinets, but where you might expect the flutes, as the instruments capable of the highest notes, to be on the top, they are in fact in the middle. Two clarinets and an oboe are above them, and at the bottom is the third clarinet — specifically an E-flat or “piccolo” clarinet, the normal function of which is to play loud and piercingly high (think of its solos in Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel).

This, to be sure, is the composer’s ear at work, hearing and writing what he heard. It never failed him over the next half century, and it was never a matter of contrivance, whatever Adorno may have believed. Adorno also complained that Stravinsky’s neoclassical music was “monotonously effervescent.” This is not how we remember the central years of Stravinsky’s musical life. The charge might apply to a few of the pieces (though, once again, you’d have to believe, along with Adorno, that effervescence was a bad thing), but it will hardly do as a blanket description. The opera-oratorio Oedipus rex; the melodrama Perséphone; the ballets Apollo and Orpheus: effervescent? Symphony of Psalms? The solemnly hypnotic coda to that work is among the least effervescent music of the twentieth century; it’s also among the most mysterious.

So a word, finally, about endings. Right across Stravinsky’s career are moments when, just before the end of a piece, time seems to stop. Symphony of Psalms (1930) wasn’t the first instance of this. A similarly hieratic moment occurs in the closing pages of Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920), dedicated to Debussy’s memory. And it happens again in the coda of the Octet (1923) for wind and brass, a little jauntier on this occasion, but scarcely less affecting.

At the end of Les noces (1914–22), the bustle of a Russian wedding culminates in the celebratory chiming of pianos and crotales (small tuned cymbals made of brass), punctuated by thrilling silences. More than four decades later this moment found its echo in the gentler ending of the Requiem Canticles — celesta, tubular bells and vibraphone ringing out at the composer’s own funeral in Venice.

But the end of Symphony of Psalms remains the most astonishing of all Stravinsky’s codas. I remember the first time I heard it, and the effect it had on me. I must have still been in school. I forget the chorus, orchestra and conductor (which is unlike me — I have a good memory for those things), but I do recall where I was sitting in London’s Royal Festival Hall: up the back of the stalls in the cheap seats.

The fact that it’s a physical memory, rather than a recollection of detail, is doubtless significant. The music of the last movement — a setting of Psalm 150 (“praise him upon the high sounding cymbals”) — ranges from the stately to the dynamic, but finally settles into a slow-motion glimpse of heaven. The chorus softly intones its falling triple-metre phrases as if in a trance, underpinned by the timpani, harp and two pianos — but especially the timpani — playing a steady, four-note ostinato figure. Round and round they go, coming together again after every group of twelve beats. The music was mesmerising and incredibly beautiful. I sat there, I remember, hoping it would never end. •

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We stared at it in awe. There is something eerily grand about a creature that runs and climbs and jumps around in trees, now suddenly motionless — wildlife reduced to still life; an animal that can keep you awake half the night fallen perfectly quiet.

For the last twelve months, of course, it’s been mostly the other way round. When the world juddered to a standstill in March 2020, out came the critters. Now there really were kangaroos hopping down the main street (in our town the drought and fires had already forced the odd one to overcome its wariness of humans) and the skies, emptied of aircraft, seemed fuller of birds. All over the world, people found themselves listening harder to animals, because the background din of modern life was gone and their voices could be heard again.

Down our way, grey butcherbirds and Australian magpies seemed to sing more tunefully than before, and I grew especially aware of blackbirds. Were these European interlopers increasing in number, and should we have been worried? They’ve been in Australia since the mid nineteenth century, but from their nearly endless stream of melody late last year, my sense was that suddenly they were everywhere. Perhaps it was simply that I could hear them better.

A new book from the Welsh writer, Steven Lovatt, Birdsong in a Time of Silence, devotes a chapter to the blackbird, whose voice, at least in the British Isles, “rises unmistakable” over those of other birds in early spring. In March 2020, its song was not only the harbinger of spring; it heralded a time when people would be more aware of the sounds of nature than at any point since before the industrial revolution. Skylarks poured out their song from on high with greater clarity than before; cuckoos were more widely heard; there were even nightingales.

Scientists around the world have seized on this new-found peace. The Australian composer, Leah Barclay, who is leads a double life as a researcher in the area of acoustic ecology, has a particular fascination with waterways. Her recordings (made mostly with underwater microphones) feed her creative endeavours but also enhance our understanding of animal and plant life. The sensitive hydrophones can, for instance, pick up the sound of gases being exchanged by plants on a river bed, particularly if there is no noise from boats. The quietening of the rivers and oceans made such work not only easier, but different.

Michelle Fournet, from Cornell University, found that her study of humpback whales in Glacier Bay, Alaska, no longer depended on the few hours when the cruise ships weren’t around. Suddenly she had a whole summer. Because cruise ships predated her recording technology, she was hearing things no one had ever heard before. And the whales? Without ship noise to contend with, their songs seemed quieter and more nuanced. They could hear each other better, and they could also hear themselves.

Lovatt suggests in his book that the silence of the coronavirus shutdown meant the earth “could hear itself think,” but while that must surely be counted a good thing, it was doubtless confronting for some. There is evidence that being deprived of noise you have come to take for granted can prove discomfiting.

Take the damming, in 1929, of the rapids on the Vuoksi river in southeastern Finland. This was just twelve years after Finland gained its independence from Russia, and the construction of a hydroelectric dam was regarded as symbolic of the country’s progress. There were national celebrations. Sibelius was asked to composed an Imatra symphony (he didn’t). Ambassadors and heads of state came to witness the silencing of the Vuoksi.

But locals who had lived their lives against a sonic backdrop of the roaring river were spooked. It was too quiet, and the oddly noisy chirping of finches and warblers in the surrounding forests was small compensation.

A few years ago, I composed a piece about this moment, called Rauha (the Finnish word for peace). It begins with its climax — a hectic downward rush of notes that quickly peters out to almost nothing. Then there’s an unsettling fifteen minutes of silence punctuated by the occasional instrument, sometimes joltingly loud. Like those Finnish citizens last century, the listeners are left on edge wondering what might happen next and how this piece will end — how the peace will end.

As our lives return to something resembling their old routines, and the continuity of background noise resumes, many people, whether or not they are fully aware of it, will feel a sense of relief from the latter. But equally there are those of us who’ll be sorry to find that birdsong is less prominent, and life less safe for possums. •

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Corea became famous by having a finger in so many musical pies. And he did it all at the highest level. He could play straight-ahead bop like his great idol, Bud Powell, and Latin rhythms with the naturalness of his Cuban contemporary, Chucho Valdés. His electronic keyboard work for Miles Davis in the late 1960s was pioneering and morphed into his own band, Return to Forever, first as a purveyor of Latin jazz-pop, now sultry, now madly dancing; later as something rockier and more driven. Corea’s classical forays, although occasionally unnecessary (like his Mozart concertos with Bobby McFerrin), included the vital and inventive collection of Children’s Songs inspired by Béla Bartók’s books of Mikrokosmos. It was through these that he found his widest audience, many of whom quickly became his interpreters.

Corea liked to speak of “experiments.” He had an insatiable musical curiosity and an often playful spirit of enquiry. But he was always serious about the work. Even in the Mozart concertos, the improvised doodles before each movement and the spontaneous embellishments of the melodic lines were based on eighteenth-century practices of preluding and ornamentation.

Corea’s first album as leader, Tones for Joan’s Bones, was released in 1968 (two years after its completion) and featured a quintet line-up, à la Miles Davis, with a rhythm section complemented by trumpet and sax. But that same year he recorded a second album that properly revealed his credentials. Now He Sings, Now He Sobs was, on the face of it, a classic jazz trio recording with Miroslav Vitouš on bass and Roy Haynes on drums, but the playing was fresh and bold — melodically, harmonically and rhythmically — and age has not wearied it. The sheer confidence with which Corea launches into the mercurial preamble to the first track — a minute of melodic fragments, dense chords and changing metres that seems to involve echoes of jazz gone by — is still breathtaking.

A great deal of Corea’s later career can be traced back to that album, which produces remarkably unified trio playing from three musicians who hadn’t previously worked together, amid a welter of apparent musical contradictions: the sings/sobs dichotomy of the I Ching–derived title is a pointer to Corea’s variety of approach. This is a creative musician laying out his wares.

Between the recording and release of the album, Corea joined Miles Davis’s group where, in short order, he would become a necessary part of the trumpeter’s exploration of jazz–rock fusion. On Filles de Kilimanjaro, he played an RMI electra-piano on “Mademoiselle Mabry,” and in early 1969 he was one of three electric keyboard players (with Herbie Hancock and Joe Zawinul) on Davis’s groundbreaking, proto-ambient In a Silent Way. Later that same year he was back in the studio with Davis and Zawinul for the Bitches Brew sessions.

Although it’s often paired with In a Silent Way — the albums, made just months apart, have many of the same personnel — Bitches Brew is a very different affair. Corea’s contribution to the former had largely been as a sprinkler of fairy dust, but on Bitches Brew he was, in effect, an extra drummer. The rhythmic precision of his playing is sometimes overlooked by those who think of him primarily as a tunesmith, but it is what unifies his progress through a lifetime of different jazz encounters.

While still in Davis’s band, Corea and bassist Dave Holland were already forming Circle with drummer Barry Altschul and reed player Anthony Braxton, their free-jazz experiments making further use of Corea’s percussive playing. Yet no sooner was Circle up and running than Corea formed Return to Forever, the band that in its first manifestation — and particularly with its second album, Light as a Feather — would bring him his greatest mainstream success. Corea played a Fender Rhodes electric piano with Joe Farrell’s flute and soprano sax, Stanley Clarke’s astonishingly agile double bass (on the first album Clarke had played electric bass), Airto Moreira’s ever-inventive percussion and Flora Purim’s heart-stoppingly simple vocals.

What to call it? Brazilian lounge jazz? Some of it was, but most of it wasn’t. Some of it was like a wild cosmic dance. For Corea himself, it was an experiment — everything was an experiment. He couldn’t have cared less about style.

“The whole idea of style is a red herring,” Corea told me on The Music Show in 2006. “Style is always a result of the idea, and of the experiment itself. So what results in a band like the first Return to Forever was not a style that was thought about at all, it was a feeling of music and a certain expression in communication and atmosphere… among the musicians themselves.

“This resulted in choices like: ‘Well, I think I’m going to use the Fender Rhodes for this, and gee Joe, why don’t you play the flute in this part? The flute sounds really nice with the Fender Rhodes: let’s do that. And, Stanley, instead of playing electric bass, why don’t you play acoustic bass on that piece? That’ll give it a different sound. And Airto, would you please play that samba beat that I like so much?’ Things like that finally ended up in the sounds that you hear. You listen to it when it’s all done — specially thirty-five years later — and you want to give it names, like ‘What style is that?’”

Light as a Feather contains tracks that look back and forward. Most obviously, there’s “Spain,” based, like Miles Davis and Gil Evans’s “Sketches of Spain” on Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, and really a homage to Miles. But there’s also “Children’s Song,” with its Orff-like ostinato pattern pointing to those piano pieces that were still more than a decade away.

For Chick Corea, jazz — music — and his career were always in the present tense. All those experiments had continued potential; nothing was ever let go. Musical friendships were nurtured and rekindled. Just as the world had him pegged as an electric keyboard player, he formed a piano duo with his old friend, Herbie Hancock. A still older friend, the vibraphonist Gary Burton, with whom Corea had once worked in Stan Getz’s band, formed another duo with him. In the 1980s, the trio with Vitouš and Haynes was reformed. Return to Forever indeed.

Throughout it all, through all the experiments, Corea’s piano playing remained central, and it was grounded in an unwavering technical ability; even in his eightieth year, there was no evidence of decline. And at the heart of his technique was rhythm. •

A transcript of Chick Corea’s interview with Andrew Ford on The Music Show is available here.

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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During the next two years, Picasso’s massive painting toured Scandinavia, Britain and the United States, doubtless horrifying many spectators and, as intended, raising some consciousnesses. But it didn’t stop Franco or Hitler or Mussolini.

How many wars have been halted by protest songs? “We Shall Overcome” and “Give Peace a Chance” might offer hope and feelings of solidarity to those who sing them — nothing wrong with that — but they haven’t changed the course of history and never will.

And yet the notion that art can change society must be as old as art itself. They might not admit it, but all artists, at some level, feel their work makes the world a better place. Or why would they do it? Still, changing society with a painting or a poem or a novel, a symphony or a song is a tall order, and it’s difficult to name an example of where it has happened. I suppose we could mention Estonia’s “singing revolution,” but it was the act of singing, more than the songs themselves, that helped along that country’s independence movement.

The reason I have been thinking about art at the service of causes is that I have found myself caught up in one. It began with a commission from the Australian Youth Orchestra.

This is an unusual situation for me. While the majority of my pieces might have poetic rather than generic titles, the music is seldom intended to be descriptive or have any programmatic intent. In so far as it is “about” anything, my music is about As and Bs and F sharps and E flats. I suppose you would say it is abstract.

There have been a few exceptions along the way. Back in the 1980s, I composed a large orchestral piece I hoped might stop the Falklands war. Its efficacy was never put to the test, partly because the war had been over for four years by the time I completed it (orchestral pieces aren’t like protest songs — you can’t knock one off overnight), and partly because, thirty-five years later, it’s still awaiting a performance.

The first performances of my Australian Youth Orchestra piece are scheduled for July, and on this occasion, sadly, the reason for its polemical stance will not have gone away. It is a response to the climate change we once only read about but now see and feel all around us — change to which the next generations won’t be able to turn a blind eye as so many of my generation have. There remain those in our parliaments and media who wish people didn’t talk about this topic all the time. They might as well get used to it.

Now, the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras used to call the AYO the best orchestra in Australia and I know what he meant. The players’ skills are so astonishing that they could — and do — step straight into professional orchestras all over the world. And what they lack in experience, they make up for in enthusiasm and willingness.

I’d have liked my first piece for these talented players to have been only for their musical minds and skills. A concerto for orchestra, perhaps, or a symphony — I’ve long harboured the desire to write a second symphony. But when I look at the players — and when I look at my ten-year-old daughter — I have to wonder about the world they are inheriting. And when they look at the likes of me, they in turn must wonder why my generation hasn’t acted to safeguard their futures against the worst effects of this changing climate. At one level, my piece, The Meaning of Trees, is a sort of apology.

Composers have let the natural world into their music from the start. Indeed, you might argue that the very first music was nature itself. A handful of personal highlights from Western “art music” includes Hildegard’s “viriditas” songs from the twelfth century, celebrations of both nature and the divine (the Abbess of Bingen made little distinction); all those Renaissance madrigals that imitate birds; “Ombra mai fu,” Handel’s aria in praise of the shade of trees in his opera, Xerxes; Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony; the forest murmurs in Wagner’s Siegfried; the elaborate tangle of woodwind lines in the introduction to The Rite of Spring.

Nearer to our own time and place, I’d add Liza Lim’s Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus and, perhaps especially, David Lumsdaine’s astonishing soundscapes, such as Pied Butcher Birds of Spirey Creek and Cambewarra Mountain, which return art to nature.

That Handel aria — popularly known, in its orchestral guise, as “Handel’s Largo” — lies behind my music in The Meaning of Trees. The title is borrowed from a proverb my sister-in-law heard some years ago when working in Mozambique: the meaning of the tree is in the shade it provides. Handel’s King Xerxes delighted in this meaning, and today we need it more than ever.

I am not, I admit, optimistic about the future of the climate, and I started work on my piece during late 2019 when the Australian sun was hotter than I can ever recall and for weeks smoke filled the air. But I could hardly inflict music of despair on this particular group of players; I felt it my duty to offer something positive. So, without wishing to give the game away, I can say that The Meaning of Trees proceeds from musical desolation — a dried-up, windy tundra — to something like a cry of defiance, one I hope the young musicians will revel in.

Music can do nothing to slow climate change. How could it? And whatever I may call my piece, and however much it might refer to Handel’s song about shade, it is still, really, about As and Bs and F sharps and E flats. Yet if, through its title and a knowledge of its source material, it also offers moments of encouragement to its players and listeners, then it will have served a more useful purpose. •

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Aaron Copland would be a popular choice. It was Copland, after all, who in the late 1930s and 40s invented what some still dismiss as “cowboy music”: ballet scores such as Billy the Kid, Appalachian Spring and Rodeo, full of wide open spaces, revivalist hymns and hoe-downs.

His modernist contemporary, Elliott Carter, composing from around the time of the Wall Street crash until after the global financial crisis (well into his 104th year), might be another contender. What about Philip Glass? He’s one of the few living composers whose music and face are known to a wide public. And let me mention Roy Harris, forgotten but for his terse, single-movement Symphony No. 3 of 1939: in many people’s view (mine included) there is still no greater symphony by an American.

Shall we broaden the discussion to pop? Can we go past its éminence grise of five decades, Quincy Jones? Since we’re talking about the United States, we can hardly rule out composers for TV and film. Is there a better-known theme in either sphere than the fiercely syncopated Mission Impossible theme of Lalo Schifrin?

This is, of course, a pointless game, but my reason for playing it is to draw attention to the fact that Copland, Carter, Glass, Harris, Jones and Schifrin shared a teacher. And we can add to the pupil list Jean Françaix, Lennox Berkeley and Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Burt Bacharach and Michel Legrand, tango composer and bandoneonist Ástor Piazzolla and jazz trumpeter Donald Byrd. From the 1920s till the 1960s, composers of all stripes — particularly American composers — beat a path to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger.

Boulanger, born in 1887, and her younger sister, Lili, were precocious musical talents. Their elderly father was a singing teacher, their mother a Russian princess who had been his student. Both girls studied composition with Gabriel Fauré at the Paris Conservatoire, but Lili’s gifts were greater in this regard.

After Lili’s death in 1918 at the age of twenty-four, Nadia stopped composing. This seems to have been almost out of respect for her sister: Lili had been the composer; now Nadia would teach and perform. She became a trailblazer in both areas, though she held some socially conservative views, especially concerning the place of women in music. In spite of her late sister’s talents, and despite the presence in her classes not only of Glanville-Hicks but also, later, of Priaulx Rainier and Thea Musgrave, Boulanger believed a woman’s first responsibility was to be a wife and mother. Not that she became either.

In the “Boulangerie,” as her class was nicknamed, she taught harmony and counterpoint with reference to existing musical works rather than simply through exercises; students sight-sang their way through Bach’s cantatas and studied music from before Bach’s time through to their own. Stravinsky’s music, which from the 1920s to the 1950s itself showed the influence of Bach, was a prime exemplar of her influence. As a conductor, Boulanger presided over the first performance of Dumbarton Oaks, sometimes referred to as Stravinsky’s “Brandenburg Concerto,” and the composer became a personal friend, sending his son Soulima to study with her. There recently appeared a slightly disappointing volume of correspondence between Boulanger and the Stravinsky family, less concerned with music than with birthday greetings and travel arrangements. Mind you, the fact that it filled a book underlines their closeness.

Boulanger, whose reputation as a pedagogue preceded her, became the first woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. This was not an achievement that much impressed Boulanger herself.

“I’ve been a woman for a little over fifty years,” she said, “and have recovered from my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, I do not believe this is a job where sex plays much of a role.”

What does still seem astonishing about her conducting was the music she chose to present. It was generally works that would have been unfamiliar to her listeners: new music, much of it being heard for the first time (some of it by her former students), and old music that in many cases had been lying dormant for centuries.

A recent collection, on the Eloquence label, of Boulanger’s American Decca recordings from the 1950s concentrates on music of Renaissance and baroque composers such as Josquin, Janequin and Lassus, Monteverdi, Charpentier and Rameau, together with Brahms’s second book of Liebeslieder waltzes. Some of the recordings now sound their age, the performance of baroque instrumental music having come a fair way over the last seventy years, but choral madrigals by Monteverdi and the French Renaissance composers are rather sprightly.

Boulanger had recorded Monteverdi between the wars, using a piano. Here she uses a harpsichord, which she plays herself, but there is little else in these recordings by way of “historically informed” style. Instinct plays a far greater part. By comparison with the recordings of Raymond Leppard, say, who recorded Monteverdi’s madrigals in the 1960s and whose harpsichord playing is characterised by a lot of unnecessary flourishes, Boulanger’s recordings from the decade before are direct and unfussy, and all the better for it.

Working almost to the end of her life, Boulanger died in 1979, her composition students having since begat composition students of their own, their students begetting yet more students. The Boulanger dynasty is established. But her baroque recordings reveal a different lineage, a scholarly and performative tradition that points the way to modern performances but also looks back, and not only to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Late-nineteenth-century Paris is also here. This was where so much early music was rediscovered.

Many of the musical archaeologists were themselves composers, people such as Vincent d’Indy and Camille Saint-Saëns; Boulanger’s own teacher, Fauré, offered encouragement and introduced this music to the Conservatoire, where from 1905 he was director.

In her recordings, we sense the astonishment and excitement the young Nadia must have felt being around such discoveries. She makes us feel this, too. •

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Last month, a few days before her seventy-seventh birthday, she put out a handsome multi-disc package of recordings predating that release. Joni Mitchell — Archives Volume 1: The Early Years (1963–1967) consists of nearly six hours of material, recorded in coffee houses and bars, on radio stations and at home. In the earliest sessions she was still Joan Anderson of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and she sang others’ songs, principally traditional tunes such as “House of the Rising Sun,” “John Hardy” and “The Dowie Dens of Yarrow,” along with numbers often believed to be traditional, by the likes of Woody Guthrie (“Pastures of Plenty”) and Merle Travis (“Dark as a Dungeon”). She was, in other words, that thing she later resisted being called: a folk singer. But she wasn’t that for long.

The booklet accompanying the boxed set of CDs includes an extended interview Mitchell gave to the filmmaker Cameron Crowe. In it, she insists that one person who never influenced her was Joan Baez (“Happily,” Crowe sniggers), and yet she sounds very much like Baez in the earliest recordings, and even singing her own early material, for instance “Day After Day,” written at the age of seventeen. Mitchell’s performances of the traditional songs are assured but cool and unremarkable (except that they’re Mitchell’s). Her heart isn’t in them. That all changes in 1965. From then on, singing almost exclusively her own songs, there’s nothing but heart.

Doubtless it is simplistic to associate the change with her having given birth, in February that year, to a baby girl, whom she called Kelly and gave up for adoption, but after that you do hear a difference. One of the surprising things about her voice is its depth — not just that she could hit low notes, but that she was vocally so strong down below middle C. Much of the time she sounds like a tenor. And the distinctive guitar playing is there, too, taking shape even faster than the voice. She reveals to Crowe that the earliest recordings were made on a four-string baritone ukulele, but by the time she has a guitar, she is already experimenting with open tunings. (It’s interesting to hear how she developed her between-song patter in order to accommodate the continual retuning of the instrument.)

What is extraordinary about Mitchell’s songs is that all that traditional music failed to leave its mark. Her refusal of the “folk singer” label was a matter of accuracy: her harmonic sensibility and song structures were sui generis. Where Bob Dylan took the templates of traditional music into his own songwriting — even on this year’s Rough and Rowdy Ways we find him mining both the blues and the English, Celtic and Appalachian ballad traditions — Mitchell almost never did. Perhaps the closest she came, if we discount the self-conscious folksiness of “The Fiddle and the Drum” (earnest issue songs were never her strong suit), was “The Circle Game,” an early success for her, thanks in part to a recording by Buffy Sainte-Marie. There are three versions of “The Circle Game” here and, as she explains to Crowe, she likes it to be a “communal song.” “Sing with me,” she tells the audience at Michigan’s Canterbury House in 1967. It’s hard to think of another Joni Mitchell song that might benefit from audience participation.

Listening to Mitchell’s originals in this collection, one is struck, from a repertoire point of view, by two things. First, she knew when she’d written a good song, and refrained from recording her weaker songs in the studio. But she also knew how to improve the better songs. Here, “Night in the City” is a little slower, a little gentler than the hard-driven album version (of course it also lacks the canonic overdubs of the chorus). “Both Sides Now” — here called “From Both Sides Now” — also turns up three times, including “about three days” after it was written. It would later benefit from the deeper thrumming drone of her studio guitar, but it’s interesting to hear the song in 1967 sounding so world-weary as the words leave her mouth.

It would take Mitchell four albums before all the good songs she was singing in 1966 and 1967 had been commercially released. “Little Green,” a high point of this collection, sung in Michigan in 1967, would have to wait until 1971 before it was recorded for the album Blue.

Mitchell kept her baby a secret for thirty-two years, but, as we now know, “Little Green” is addressed to that baby. She would have been two years old in 1967. There are several notable differences between this performance and the later album version. In 1967, Mitchell sang the song in the lower key of A (on Blue it’s in B flat), and she makes the most of her low voice. In the familiar version, at the third line (“Call her green”) the melody rises above a supertonic minor chord; but four years earlier Mitchell modulated to a chromatic mediant (C major in the key of A), the melody dropping down to low Gs and Es. It’s a darker song.

At the end, unlike in the album version, Mitchell repeats the first verse, which ends with the injunction to “little green” to “be a gypsy dancer.” Then she repeats that final line, only this time she sings her daughter’s name. “Kelly green,” she calls out in the melodic pattern used to summon children in playgrounds all around the world — the fifth note of the scale falling to the third, rising to the sixth and then back to the fifth. It’s a devastating performance, and yet, somehow, Mitchell holds it together emotionally. This listener did not. •

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There have always been neglected instruments. Sometimes, they’re neglected because they have become stereotyped, like the harp and the classical guitar once were. The harp required rescuing from Harpo Marx and any number of Hollywood dream sequences; the guitar had to be saved from Spain.

The harpist and composer Carlos Salzedo (1885–1961) set about the first task, writing a body of virtuosic music for his instrument that expanded the repertoire and served as an inspiration to other composers. Julian Bream (1933–2020) did more than anyone to make the guitar into a serious recital and concerto instrument, commissioning works from Benjamin Britten, William Walton and Michael Tippett, Malcolm Arnold, Hans Werner Henze and Tōru Takemitsu. In some cases he had to cajole them into writing their pieces.

If Bream’s legendary predecessor, Andrés Segovia, had had the same presence of mind, the guitar repertoire might contain works by early twentieth-century composers such as Bartók and Ravel, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. But none of them wrote a note of guitar music. Even Manuel de Falla failed to write more than a single miniature for the instrument, and he was Spanish. What was Segovia thinking? Performers, as much as composers, have a duty to expand and renew the repertoire of their instruments.

These musings started back in August, when Bream died and the extent of his contribution loomed large. Then, the other week, I heard an album of modern harpsichord music from Mahan Esfahani. Here’s another instrument that needs saving from its own reputation, and Esfahani has nothing less in mind. Harpsichords have long turned up in horror-movie soundtracks, sometimes to create a sort of sophisticated, old-world creepiness. Hannibal Lecter springs to mind. There’s the old adage “Never trust a pop song with a harpsichord,” the instrument generally used to bring a gloss of sophistication to songs that otherwise have none. Van Morrison’s “Cyprus Avenue” is an exception.

In the concert hall, there is plenty of music for the instrument — both as a soloist and in ensembles — and nearly all of it from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet for some reason the harpsichord is considered an old instrument while the flute and trumpet — which are older — are not.

To make matters worse, the harpsichord has been captured by early-music specialists, whose attitude to both the instrument and its repertoire is often exclusive. The latest research says Bach was played this way or that, and if you play his music differently, you’re at best an iconoclast, at worst a dummy. It’s a curious attitude and very much tied to the instrument. Even such a polarising figure as Glenn Gould, who played Bach on the piano, is seldom berated for playing it “the wrong way” — on the piano, an instrument unknown to Bach, there is no “right way.” But at the harpsichord, players are meant to follow historically informed fashion.

Esfahani doesn’t. The only thing to come between the notes on the page and his own imagination — and this is not unlike Gould — is his prodigious technique. His recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations was among the freshest I’ve heard, especially the flexible tempos and the non-dogmatic approach to ornamentation. But Esfahani is also determined that the harpsichord escape history, and to that end he plays a lot of modern music, much of it written for him. Four years ago, at a concert in Cologne, his performance of a piece by Steve Reich was booed and heckled. At the time, some newspapers reported the incident as a racist attack, but it seems more likely that the sensibilities upset were those of audience members finding it hard to think of the harpsichord as anything other than cosily historical.

In fact Esfahani’s work isn’t as fully cut out for him as Bream’s was. There are quite a lot of twentieth- and twenty-first-century pieces for harpsichord, even if we don’t often hear them in concert. Pioneering harpsichordists in the middle of the last century — figures such as Wanda Landowska and Ralph Kirkpatrick — commissioned works and inspired others. There are concertos by Falla, Poulenc, Martinů and Frank Martin (the first two written for Landowska); there’s a big, complex double concerto for piano, harpsichord and two chamber orchestras by Elliott Carter (for Kirkpatrick); and more recently there are pieces by the likes of Xenakis and Ligeti, Górecki and Glass.

On the new album, Musique?, only one of the six pieces was written for Esfahani. Two of them, indeed, had been composed before he was born — Henry Cowell’s Set of Four (written in 1960 for Kirkpatrick) and Luc Ferrari’s pounding and polemical, if initially seductive, Programme commun “Musique socialiste?” (1972), from which the album borrows its interrogative title. Arguably the most remarkable aspect of these six works is their variety of style and sonority. They range from Takemitsu’s gently lyrical Rain Dreaming (1986) to the frankly apocalyptic Intertwined Distances (2018) by Anahita Abbasi, a young composer born, like Esfahani, in Iran. Listen to its waves of seething anger, electronically picked up, amplified and sent whirling through space, and you will never again associate the harpsichord with powdered wigs. •

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Born one hundred years ago to parents who were Bengali Brahmin, and given the name Robindra, shortened to Robu or Robi, Shankar was raised by his mother in Benares (Varanasi). He didn’t meet his estranged father until he was eight years old. Because of the estrangement, the family was poor. At around this time the boy began to suffer sustained sexual abuse from “a family member.” Shortly before his ninth birthday, his favourite brother, Bhupendra, died of the plague. Like Ray’s Apu, he lost both parents while still in his mid teens.

Another aspect of Shankar’s early life also has a bearing on his work as a film composer. From childhood he was a storyteller, not through music — that came later — but through dance. Joining his eldest brother Uday’s international dance troupe, the boy became a performer on the world stage, touring Europe and the United States. In his diary of April 1933, the nineteen-year-old Benjamin Britten singled out the thirteen-year-old “Robindra” as a highlight of the performance he had witnessed in London.

Late in life, Ravi Shankar would complain that he had missed out on a childhood, but at the time he enjoyed meeting the celebrities of the day, including Greta Garbo and Myrna Loy. At a party in Hollywood, the actor Marie Dressler asked Uday, in all seriousness, if she could adopt the boy.

“Robi” is the Bengali word for sun. In Sanskrit, the word is “Ravi,” the name he took around the age of twenty. Craske’s book, Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar, is the first biography of the musician, with the exception of Shankar’s own memoirs, the last of which, Raga Mala, was a collaboration with Craske. But in spite of its writer’s closeness to his subject this new book is no exercise in hagiography. Shankar himself encouraged the author to wait until after his death and tell the whole story, and Craske seems to have done just that.

Better yet, Indian Sun is that rare thing, a biography of a famous musician in which the music is kept in the foreground and knowledgeably discussed. The book’s preliminary pages include a detailed diagram of a sitar, an explanation of the steps in an Indian octave, and lists of the ragas Shankar created and the talas (rhythmic patterns) he commonly employed.

Shankar didn’t take up the sitar until his late teens — very late indeed for someone who would become the most celebrated sitar player in history — but he worked hard and learnt fast. His guru was Allauddin Khan, not himself a sitar player but a master of the sarod. In short order, Ravi was allowed to play jugalbandi with Khan’s son, Ali Akbar Khan, another sarod player. The pairing of sitar and sarod on equal footing (which is what the term jugalbandi implies) was rare, even experimental. It was a sign not only of the faith Khan had in Shankar (who also married Khan’s daughter, Annapurna) but also of things to come. From early in Shankar’s musical career, his playing received praise and criticism in equal measure, the criticism nearly always for a want of purity.

Shankar had a Zelig-like tendency to be present at great historical moments. As part of Uday’s dance troupe, for example, he witnessed the rise of Hitler. Until 1933, Germany had been the country in which the Indian dancers felt most appreciated. In New York he heard Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club. He sang for Gandhi and received a blessing from Rabindranath Tagore. All this before he turned eighteen. As Craske underlines, though, the greatest example of Shankar being in the right place at the right time — twenty years before he moved to California, just before the Summer of Love — was his emergence as a charismatic cultural figure in India at the moment of that country’s independence. Before he taught the world about Indian classical music, he demonstrated its value to a nation emerging from the shadow of colonialism.

By the mid 1960s, Ravi Shankar had become not only a famous musician but a global celebrity, his influence felt everywhere — certainly in musical circles. After lessons with Shankar, John Coltrane felt he was “just beginning again,” and went on to name his son Ravi. Yehudi Menuhin regarded himself as Shankar’s disciple and recorded albums of music for violin and sitar. And in 1965, Shankar changed the lives of two young musicians: one was among the most famous musicians on the planet, the other a recent music graduate from Juilliard.

George Harrison’s debt to Shankar is well known (Shankar greatly appreciated the Beatle’s seriousness and modesty), Philip Glass’s less so. In Paris, pursuing his studies with Nadia Boulanger, Glass found himself engaged to assist Shankar with scoring Conrad Rooks’s film Chappaqua. Shankar would sing lines to Glass (who was impressed that he had all the music in his head) and Glass would write them down in Western notation. But such notation required bar lines, and when the music was played there were unwanted stresses on the down beats. The barlines were moved and the stresses moved with them. “All the notes are equal,” explained Alla Rakha, Shankar’s tabla player. Finally, the barlines were eradicated and the music worked. Whether or not he realised it at the time, Glass had probably just received the most important composition lesson of his life.

Craske’s book leaves little out. Shankar’s international touring is described in such detail we begin to glaze over, but perhaps that’s the point. How, we wonder, did he fit so much in? And how did he manage his 180 affairs with women? (And who was counting? Did he have his own, personal Leporello?) And there are copious nuggets of trivia. Among my favourites is the fact that Peter Sellers went to Shankar for guidance about how to look like a sitar player in Blake Edwards’s film The Party. In the film, Sellers, in “brownface,” plays a hapless Indian actor mistakenly invited to a Hollywood party at which he proceeds to wreak havoc. Satyajit Ray, for one, found Sellers’s performance repellent. But Shankar and Sellers were quite close for a time, even working up a double act for friends, in which they impersonated each other.

To the end of this mighty book, Craske rightly prioritises the music. The penultimate chapter, “Late Style,” discusses Shankar’s final compositions. By his eighties, although he occasionally performed alongside his daughter, Anoushka, using a modified sitar with a short neck, he was mostly a composer. He wrote an opera, Sukanya, named after a woman in the Mhabharata who marries a much older man. It was a name shared by Shankar’s second wife, and the opera is both an extended love letter to her (there’s a musical motto based on her name) and a hymn to Krishna. But it is also a grand summing up of Shankar’s musical life, reworking ragas that had been important to him — Piloo, for instance, which he had recorded with Menuhin — and other earlier compositions.

The music to Sukanya was written first — is there another opera for which the music was composed ahead of its libretto? — and words fitted only after Shankar’s death in 2012. The premiere was in England in 2017. The same year, at the London Proms, Passages, Shankar’s album-length collaboration with Philip Glass, had its first live performance, with Anoushka Shankar playing sitar. The event was televised live by the BBC. As Craske writes in the title of his final chapter, this sun “won’t set.” •

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A composer may work for weeks, months or sometimes years to polish up a score, but the music remains silent on the page until brought to life by a performer or performers. This bringing to life is itself interesting, because it is essentially the same for a thirteenth-century motet as for a brand-new composition: in performance, all music is made new.

Something similar might be said of the listener’s role. If there’s no one to receive the music, the musical experience is incomplete. It’s not quite the tree falling in the forest, because the performer is also a listener, but a non-performing listener brings something else to the music, and it’s another form of participation, as Britten stressed in that Aspen speech.

Good listening, he said, “demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the program perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts.” It’s all true.

And yet Britten’s triangular formula only holds for notated music, where the composer and the performer are different people. It doesn’t cover improvisation, the spontaneous composition of music in which intense listening by the performers will dictate the next note.

Two Step, by the Australian oboist and composer Cathy Milliken, certainly throws a spanner in the works of Britten’s theory. Long resident in Germany, Milliken collaborated with friends and colleagues from Brisbane, Berlin and Tel Aviv — players and singers, most of them also composers — to create a continuous span of seemingly evolving music. When the recording appeared at the start of the year, the producers of The Music Show on Radio National attempted to find a four- or five-minute section to play on the radio, but there’s really nothing that makes much sense as a standalone item: to do it justice, you must hear the whole, or at least a very long stretch. This is remarkable, given the circumstances under which the music was made.

The work comprises a series of duets between Milliken’s oboe and Sören Birke’s duduk, Milliken’s oboe and Vanessa Tomlinson’s percussion, Milliken’s oboe and Brett Dean’s viola, Milliken’s cor anglais and Carol Robinson’s clarinet; but also between Tomlinson’s percussion and Julian Day’s organs, Tomlinson’s vibraphone and Dietmar Wiesner’s bass flute, Wiesner’s flute and Dean’s viola: it’s like a chain. The duos, a mix of notated sketches and improvisation, were all recorded separately, then edited, juxtaposed and overlapped. The end result is music that flows from moment to moment. Except when it doesn’t.

Listening to this piece can seem like eavesdropping on a series of intimate conversations — not quite what Britten had in mind — though there are also moments when we are called to attention, when the music doesn’t flow so much as stop us in our tracks.

The first of these is the entry of William Barton’s didgeridoo, its glorious sonority overwhelming the nearby viola and cor anglais. Something similar occurs when Wu Wei’s sheng plays. When we hear the flute or the vibraphone for the first time in Two Step, we register that a new instrument has appeared in the piece, that a new sound has been added to the mix. Barton’s didgeridoo and Wu’s sheng come freighted with cultural significance we can hardly ignore and they grab our attention. Perhaps that’s why Milliken used them sparingly in her final assembly of the component parts.

Then there are the voices, singing and speaking. The spoken words are from poems in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914), read by Day, Tomlinson, Dean and Milliken herself. The composer explained to Shirley Apthorp in the sleeve note accompanying the Tall Poppies album that she incorporated the poems in her musical landscape because she “was interested in seeing whether the texts stand out or merge with the music.” She concludes that they do both.

At first, I wasn’t so sure. When you hear words, particularly Stein’s rather inscrutable texts, you try to comprehend them. And the speaking voices are generally in the foreground, adding to this inevitability. But one day I found myself, by chance, listening to the album with the volume very low. I could still hear the voices, but only as murmurs. The words were indiscernible, the voices now fully part of the music.

Where does all this leave Britten’s triangle? In Two Step, the roles of composer and performer are blurred, but the listener — and this includes Milliken and her colleagues, as well as you and me — is more important than ever. Any piece of notated music is made first by its composer, then by its performers, then once more in the listener’s head. Even a piece such as Britten’s War Requiem, which we might know well, is remade each time we hear it, affected by what we’ve listened to and possibly read in the time since our last encounter with it, what we heard just yesterday, and how we’re feeling today. Sometimes one is simply not in the mood.

But Milliken’s Two Step, which its composer assembled from fragments of musical ideas — many of them the performers’ ideas — and which retains a somewhat provisional air, requires more of us. We must bring our imaginations to the project, as well as our experience of Western and non-Western instruments and our ability to parse Stein’s writing. It’s hard, indeed, not to feel that we are, to some extent, composing the music ourselves. And with that, Britten’s triangle collapses. •

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Rough and Rowdy Ways is Dylan’s thirty-ninth studio album, released one month after his seventy-ninth birthday. It is his first collection of new material since Tempest (2012), and also his first since being awarded the Nobel Prize in literature four years ago. That may be significant. In 2016, in response to the umbrage of those who believed song lyrics were not literature, the new laureate’s apologists spoke of Homer, of the anonymous poets of Beowulf and Sir Gawain the Green Knight, of Chaucer and Burns and Thomas Moore: all writers who expected their words to be performed. Dylan, we were assured, was a bard.

And so he was, and so he is. For anyone still in doubt, “Murder Most Foul,” the first track to be released from the new album, puts the matter to rest. It’s more than seventeen minutes long — his longest ever — and took the singer to the top of the Billboard charts for the first time in his career. But is it even a song? Dylan’s voice sits on a cushion of C major, the first of only three chords. Indeed there’s so much tonic C that the accompaniment occasionally reminds one of the drone-embellishing tanpura in Indian classical music. The melodic line, such as it is, consists of Cs with occasional flicks of E, and as the track continues, more and more Ds. But that’s it. It’s musical monotony, Dylan a chanter, an intoner, more than a singer. Yet it’s hardly dull. The longer it goes on, the more compelling “Murder Most Foul” seems.

As probably everyone knows by now, its starting point is the Kennedy assassination. This is how it begins:

’Twas a dark day in Dallas — November ’63
The day that will live on in infamy
President Kennedy was riding high
A good day to be living and a good day to die.

Four lines of pure doggerel to launch this epic. “’Twas,” indeed! But that’s the thing about Dylan’s poetry. To understand it, to apprehend its nuances, to appreciate the brilliance in the bathos, you must hear it sung/spoken by its author. There’s a wryness to the delivery of this song; with Dylan, there’s always wryness. The most serious of his songs are undercut with dark humour, because he refuses to take himself too seriously. On “Murder Most Foul,” Dylan knows exactly what he’s doing with that nod to the ballad tradition (“The day that will live on in infamy”). It was ever thus: “Come gather round people.” Casual listeners think of Dylan’s songs as confessional, but they hardly ever are. He’s a wearer of masks, more Randy Newman than Joni Mitchell.

It’s fifty-nine years since Dylan recorded his first album, and the new one contains plenty of echoes of his earlier work. We can hear them in the band, in the singing and in the songs themselves. Add Al Kooper’s organ to the musicians playing on the bluesier numbers and little seems to have changed since Highway 61 Revisited. The blues has been more central to Dylan’s art than even the Anglo and Celtic song traditions that came down to him through Appalachian singers such as Clarence Ashley and Dock Boggs.

On the new album, “Crossing the Rubicon” is a slow, twelve-bar blues, “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” a hard-driving, electric blues with echoes of earlier songs such as “From a Buick 6” and “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” Moreover, Dylan’s tribute to Reed, the late Chicago bluesman, is in keeping with such songs as “Blind Willie McTell” and “High Water (for Charley Patton).” The album’s title comes from a 1930s record, “My Rough and Rowdy Ways” by yodelling country singer Jimmie Rodgers. And there are familiar lyric tropes and images: the police procedural tone of “Murder Most Foul” is reminiscent of that of “Hurricane” on Desire; the “Black Rider” might be “The Man in the Long Black Coat”; and “Armageddon Street” is surely in the same part of town as “Desolation Row.”

The album begins by presenting us with its key. “I Contain Multitudes” is a gentle song that takes its title from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Like much of Whitman’s poetry, this album will be full of lists, mostly names. The name-checking begins at once with references to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” and William Blake’s “Songs of Experience,” Beethoven’s sonatas and Chopin’s preludes. “I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones / And them British bad boys the Rolling Stones,” Dylan sings: it’s a rollcall of “contradictions” and “moods”; like Tennyson’s Ulysses, Dylan is a part of all that he has met.

“False Prophet” is a bluesy–rocky number in which the singer announces, “I’m first among equals — second to none / I’m last of the best — you can bury the rest.” The voice tells us he’s joking. On “My Own Version of You,” we find him prowling morgues and monasteries searching for body parts (“Limbs and livers and brains and hearts”) in order to build some sort of model human, part lover, part commando: “If I do it upright and put the head on straight / I’ll be saved by the creature that I create.” So, a better outcome than for that other modern Prometheus. The song is a quick waltz, but with suspenseful chords creeping chromatically in the manner of some 1950s film noir or 1960s American TV cop show. In fact, they are the chords that underpin the opening of the James Bond theme.

“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” comes next. Is that “you” the fabricated creature we’ve just been told about? Is this slow waltz the counterpart of the fast one we’ve just heard? You listen harder and realise it’s not a waltz at all, but a barcarolle, with six beats to the bar, not three. And it’s not just any old barcarolle, it contains phrases repeated over and over, from the most famous barcarolle of them all, the one Offenbach composed for The Tales of Hoffmann, in which Hoffmann falls in love with a courtesan, having earlier loved a mechanical doll.

Then comes “Black Rider,” another triple-time song, slower still. Who is the rider? Is he Samiel, the satanic Black Huntsman of Wolf’s Glen in Der Freischütz? Is he death itself? Whoever he is, we feel a new chill as the album takes a darker turn yet.

Between the two blues numbers comes a hymn, “Mother of Muses” — a companion piece to “Mr Tambourine Man,” and with a gentle, felicitous melody, just like its precursor, though the elderly Dylan’s voice can’t do much more than sketch its outline. It’s late now for “skipping reels of rhyme”; the best the singer can hope for is that this “Mother of Muses” will grant him some eloquence as he finds himself “falling in love with Calliope,” the muse of epic poetry.

The final track on the first disc, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” is arguably the most enigmatic in a very tight field. It is also perhaps the most sheerly beautiful song on the album. It’s a reminiscence, a love song, a coming to terms with faith and with mortality, an attempt to make sense of things. Key West, after all, was where the poet Wallace Stevens situated his “Idea of Order,” his song of praise to the revelation that comes from artistic enquiry and invention.

I hadn’t intended to write about this album at all, and now I see my monthly column is going to be roughly twice the length it’s supposed to be. But this dark, dark album has taken over my thinking for the past two weeks. There is so much in it that can’t easily be explained, let alone reduced to an article — even one that has overshot its word limit.

The Bible is everywhere, and multiple myths and histories. The Trojan wars and the first Crusade are mentioned; “Mother of Muses” contains the names of generals from the American civil war and the second world war; another military leader, Julius Caesar, makes two appearances. And then there are the presidents, not just Kennedy but, in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” Harry Truman, who had a second White House on Mallory Square in Key West, and William McKinley, president from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. Of course, the spectre of modern American politics also hangs over this record, and that’s about as dark as you can get.

More than any other Dylan album I can think of, Rough and Rowdy Ways is of a piece. “Murder Most Foul” might seem like a separate item, because it was released early, because it occupies its own disc, and because it’s seventeen minutes long. But it’s as integral as “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” was to Blonde on Blonde. If “Key West” is this album’s summing up, and “I Contain Multitudes” its key, “Murder Most Foul” is its heart.

The gunning down of John F. Kennedy is the starting point of the song and its thematic refrain. But the song is about what came next and what is still coming, about politics and movies and, above all, about songs and their singers. Dylan refers to dozens of them. A whole cultural history is unveiled on this long track. It’s not neat and it’s not meant to be. It is Dylan’s cultural history, as messy and contradictory as yours or mine, with which it surely overlaps. When it’s faded away, we find ourselves ready to start again with track one.

The source of its title, Walt Whitman, should have the last words. They could stand as the motto of the album and of Dylan’s life.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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Berlin wrote the first version of his song in 1918. It was the year he became an American citizen and the year he joined the army. The song was for a comedy revue about army life, and “God Bless America” was intended as its climax. But the song was a little mawkish, certainly not funny, and it was obvious to Berlin that it was unsuited to its purpose. So he dropped it from the show and put it away in his “song trunk.” There it remained for the next two decades.

In 1938, the singer and radio entertainer Kate Smith asked Berlin if he had something she might include in a show for Armistice Day. Out from the trunk came “God Bless America,” the songwriter taking the opportunity to modify its lyrics, making it more like a plea for peace against the background of rising European fascism. Smith’s performance was such a success that soon she was singing it on her radio show every week, and at the 1940 presidential election, both candidates, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, used the song at their rallies. Some people even thought it would make a good national anthem.

“The Star Spangled Banner” had only become the official US anthem in 1931, and was always an odd choice. Yes, it had a stirring, if somewhat convoluted, tune; but how many Americans could tell you, hand on heart, what Francis Scott Key’s words were about? (They’re about the British bombardment and American defence of Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812.) “God Bless America,” now coming out of the radio every week, might have had a less distinguished tune (in the pantheon of Irving Berlin numbers, it’s hardly up there with “Cheek to Cheek” or “Puttin’ on the Ritz”), but at least you could understand the words, which were about the sorts of things national anthems were meant to be about.

But already the song had detractors. One was the singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie, who heard “God Bless America” wherever he went and grew to loathe its cloying, self-congratulatory tone. He considered Berlin’s song exclusive, celebrating a vision of America not everyone could share — certainly not the people he knew. In 1940, he wrote “This Land Is Your Land,” turning Berlin’s lyrics back on themselves. “From the mountains to the prairies / To the oceans white with foam” — lines that are both poetic and idealised — became, in Guthrie’s song, more precise: “From California to the New York Island / From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters.” This was a song properly rooted in the American soil.

Guthrie’s next line made the connection with Berlin’s song more explicit yet — “God blessed America for me.” That was the tagline at the end of each verse in the original version; four years later, when Guthrie recorded the song, it had been replaced by the more familiar refrain, less pointed but lyrically stronger: “This land was made for you and me.”

As usual, Guthrie found an existing tune for his words, borrowing a Carter Family song that in turn had made use of an old hymn tune. But in spite of its musical origins in the church and the fact that the words — which are essentially about sharing — are hardly revolutionary, there were those who were swift to condemn the song for its political sentiments. Increasingly, the song cropped up at protests and left-wing celebrations. In 1981, Bruce Springsteen sang it at a concert in London, dedicating it to “Bob Marley and the people of Brixton” — this was a few weeks after the Brixton riots and Marley’s death.

Thereafter, it became a regular feature of Springsteen’s concerts. In 2009, he sang it with Pete Seeger on the steps of Washington’s Lincoln Memorial for President Obama’s inauguration. I thought of that moment this week, as I looked at the image of masked troops lining those same steps at the behest of Obama’s successor.

And I thought of “God Bless America.” To Woody Guthrie, in 1940, it was all sanctimonious patriotism, but right from the start it had another sort of detractor: American fascists, those white supremacists who believed an immigrant Jew like Israel Baline had no business writing songs about God, let alone America.

But music is flexible, its words may be reinterpreted, and both songs and singers may fall from grace. In 2010, Noel Stookey and Peter Yarrow, the surviving members of Peter, Paul and Mary, insisted their recording of “This Land Is Your Land” be no longer used by the National Organization for Marriage, a lobby group opposed to same-sex marriage, as its views were antithetical to those of the singers.

And just last year, Kate Smith’s widely beloved recording of “God Bless America,” which had become a part of many American sporting fixtures, was dropped by the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Flyers. It turned out that the singer who had helped make famous this alternative national anthem by a Jewish immigrant and had once used her radio show to plead for racial tolerance had, early in her career, recorded such novelty songs as “Pickaninny Heaven” and “That’s Why Darkies Were Born.” •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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On Zoom, it’s different. At Claire Edwardes’s concert last month, the Sydney percussionist played my vibraphone piece, Hook, and there they were: the paying public, with glasses of wine and bowls of nuts, watching and listening from the privacy of their homes. Except there wasn’t much privacy. One could look not only into their eyes, but also into their living rooms. It bordered on voyeurism, yet it felt collegial.

Claire introduced the short pieces in her hour-long program and, following each performance, the audience members in their little on-screen boxes unmuted themselves to submit their applause. They were also invited to comment on what they’d heard. And they were kind to me and my piece, even though I was, to them, an invisible presence, the camera perched on top of my monitor having chosen this moment to go on the fritz.

I’ve been wondering, since, about the place and role of the composer in the concert hall. Composers are mostly not performers; in rehearsal we may work with performers, but at the performance, when they’re up on stage playing our music, we’re in row M. If the piece is well received, we will probably be called upon to take a bow, but that will be the extent of our involvement on the night. Mind you, once the bow is taken and the figure in row M outed as the composer, interesting interactions often occur with other audience members.

There are those who want to tell you they enjoyed your music (the people who haven’t enjoyed it mostly keep away), some of whom will have questions. My favourite responses involve the listeners who tell you how the piece made them feel or what memories it conjured. I was once told, by a farmer in northern Tasmania, that she had been reminded of getting up in the middle of a freezing winter’s night to assist with calving. The piece was called Pastoral.

Audience feedback is important to all musicians — even, I suspect, to those who claim otherwise. Composers are no different. Ours is a solitary activity. Consumed by the need to get the music right, all else goes out of the window, and at that point the audience is the last thing on your mind. If the music doesn’t satisfy you, you’ll be offering the listener either damaged goods or a well-made fake. The process of rehearsing isn’t that different. It might not be solitary, but it will likely be hermetic. But there’s no point to any of it — those weeks or months of composing, those hours or days of rehearsal — without the audience at the end.

It’s a triangular relationship between composer, performer and audience, and it’s only slightly different when the composer and performer are one and the same. Musicians might believe they know what their music means when they write or sing or play it, but individual members of an audience make new meanings as they listen. We hear the same music, but feel it differently. If it sounds, to one listener, like a cow giving birth, then that is what it is.

Online concerts are no different. Indeed the listeners’ responses may be more varied than ever, now we are all more alone. But something is lost when we no longer sit tightly packed in the same hall having our individual experiences alongside one another. It’s an unspoken yet strongly felt emotional connection that comes via the music. Is it body language, is it breathing that conveys it? At its most powerful, it is a kind of magic, and for the time being we are having to do without it.

Last week, Opera Australia announced the cancellation of its entire winter season. This included the postponement of Rembrandt’s Wife, my opera written with Sue Smith, which was to have had seasons in both Sydney and Melbourne. Sue and I had already had a meeting with the director, the evidently brilliant Tabatha McFadyen, who’d have been making her debut in this new production; Mark Thompson’s designs were ready to go; I could barely wait to hear one of Australia’s great singers, Taryn Fiebig, in the dual roles of Saskia van Uylenburgh and Hendrickje Stoffels.

Above all, though, I wanted to be in row M, sharing the experience of this brand-new production with an audience of total strangers, and gleaning their responses to a piece of work that had taken over my imagination for nearly eighteen months. That moment of direct communication is now indefinitely on hold, as are countless others. In company with most musicians, my schedule of live performances for 2020 is completely blank.

But as online concerts increasingly pop up, and little groups of listeners peer into each other’s homes, it may be that this new method of musical communication, one that allows us to observe the performer at close quarters and then discuss the music with the performer and composer, will remain. In a way, these sorts of events predate the concert hall. They are authentic chamber music — from the performer’s chamber direct to yours — and they permit a level of engagement and interaction that the concert hall can’t match. They will never match the excitement of a live event with an audience — the opera theatre, the jazz club, the rock band in the pub, the outdoor festival — but for musicians prepared to reveal more of themselves and audiences keen to watch musicians at work from just a metre or two away, there’s surely no going back. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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During the Great Depression, music flourished. Money might have been tight, but the 1930s was the decade in which many of the world’s great orchestras were founded. A lot of them were associated with the new medium of radio: across Europe and North America, Asia and Australia, broadcasting companies established house orchestras — not just symphony orchestras, either, but light music orchestras, dance bands and choirs. Standards were high — the BBC Symphony Orchestra (founded in 1930) was regarded at the time as the best in Europe — and audiences flocked to concerts, both in the flesh and on radio. The NBC Symphony Orchestra in New York, which boasted Arturo Toscanini as its conductor and paid the highest salaries of any orchestra in the United States, made weekly broadcasts — first on radio, then television — until 1954, when Toscanini retired and the orchestra was disbanded.

But it wasn’t only radio orchestras that were established. Independent orchestras were formed (in 1932, Thomas Beecham conducted the first concert of the London Philharmonic) and so were opera companies and festivals. The depression created a demand for culture, and when the second world war began at the end of that decade it was a matter of honour and necessity for concerts to continue. The London Blitz? Undaunted, Myra Hess continued her lunchtime piano recitals in the National Gallery. The firebombing of Berlin? Furtwängler conducted Beethoven and Brahms at the Philharmonie until the RAF bombed it at the start of 1944, whereupon they played on at the Staatsoper.

When the war was over, the building of new concert halls and theatres, art galleries and museums was everywhere regarded as an essential part of restoring cultural pride and creating economic resurgence. The Festival of Britain in 1951 involved not only the commissioning of new music, opera and plays, but also new buildings: the Royal Festival Hall is still a commanding presence on London’s Southbank. Ten years later work began on the Berlin Philharmonic’s new home.

One of the big differences this time round is that the social distancing occasioned by Covid-19 has shut all places of entertainment and, one imagines, they will not reopen quickly. When audiences are finally ready to venture out — and we can imagine the hunger for all forms of live music and theatre — some of the arts companies and institutions that had formerly provided that cultural nourishment will have vanished.

Early in March, Angela Merkel and her culture minister announced an aid package of US$54 billion. It was not only for the arts — all small businesses and freelancers were part of the package — but the arts were mentioned first. The Arts Council England has launched emergency funding in excess of US$300 million, aimed at individual artists as well as organisations. The Australian federal government’s support package consists of $27 million — $10 million for crisis relief via Support Act, $7 million for Indigenous visual arts centres, and $10 million for regional arts. The proposed amendment to extend the JobKeeper assistance plan to freelance workers (which would have included many artists) was voted down by the government, including the arts minister himself.

Germany, Britain and Australia all have conservative governments, so why has Australia’s response to the present crisis been so different when it comes to the arts?

From Robert Menzies to Steven Marshall, successive Coalition governments, federal and state, have nurtured Australia’s cultural life. I was intending to list these Liberal prime ministers, premiers and arts ministers and enumerate their achievements, but I see Julian Meyrick did it for me in his recent essay for the Conversation. Meyrick, indeed, took the story all the way back to Alfred Deakin’s establishment in 1908 of the Commonwealth Literary Fund. Like me, Meyrick has been wondering why culture has been neglected in Australia’s response to Covid-19, especially when the party of government has such a proud record of supporting the arts. I think I know why.

One of Australia’s best arts ministers, not mentioned by Meyrick, was Peter Collins, who held the portfolio in the Coalition government in New South Wales between 1988 and 1995. Collins held other portfolios too (at various points in those seven years he was health minister, attorney-general and finally treasurer), but he was always arts minister.

I met him at a reception in Sydney a couple of years after the Coalition had lost power, and we got talking about his time as arts minister. Of course, there were never any votes in it, he said ruefully. Artists, on the whole, want to change the world, while conservatives don’t. I suggested it must be the same for Labor ministers of primary industries. They’re also representing people who, by and large, vote for their opponents. It was a fact of life, we laughed, the tacit assumption that the arts and primary industries must be looked after, no matter who was running the joint.

That, it seems to me, is what has changed. The increasing tribalism in Australian politics has led to a situation in which governments fund the people who agree with them: artists tend not to agree with politicians right across the ideological spectrum. At the very least, we are sceptical of them, and that is as it should be. Art, after all, is a search for some sort of truth, while politics is increasingly occupied with the promulgation of “alternative facts.”

Time and again, we have seen in opinion polls that voters like and trust their politicians best when they cooperate with each other, when they put ideology aside, cease attempting to score political points and concentrate on making things work. Perhaps there is still time for such bipartisanship in Australian politics when it comes to supporting Australia’s artists and cultural institutions. It would be good to think that when the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s audience is ready to return to Hamer Hall, its players will be there to play for them. •

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It’s been that kind of year from the start — even before this pandemic showed up. As the year began, I was working on a large orchestral piece and it was going well. The piece in question was a response to the climate emergency, and in late 2019, as the temperatures soared and bushfires raged, the project had gained a certain urgency.

Then in January the fires came closer to the NSW Southern Highlands where I live with my family, and on a couple of occasions it seemed prudent to evacuate. We went to friends in Sydney, the second time missing a close call. The fire didn’t come to us in the end, it changed direction at the last minute, but when we returned our little town was eerily quiet, shrouded in smoke, and so still that the only perceivable movement was tiny flecks of ash floating down from on high.

A few days later, I had an email from Britain. My friends in the Brodsky Quartet had seen the Southern Highlands mentioned in a news report and wondered if I was okay. After a few messages back and forth, we settled on an idea for a piece of music in response to the fires. I wanted to do it quickly, like musical reportage, and they suggested an April premiere, since they had a concert in Bristol with the didgeridoo player William Barton and would be able to slip it into the program. It seemed a shame for William to sit my piece out, so I called him up to ask if he’d like to be in it too.

Accordingly, the orchestral piece was set aside, and over the next few weeks I worked furiously on my seventh string quartet, entitled Eden Ablaze, with an optional part for didgeridoo (not all string quartets are able to rustle up a didgeridoo player). At the end, little high-pitched specks of sound drift down like that ash. I completed the piece in late February and booked my flight to England. The concert was cancelled a few weeks later.

So much for musical reportage! Of course, now bushfire stories have themselves dropped out of our newsfeeds. Still, if composers are never likely to be much use as reporters, especially in these days of fast-breaking news and ever-changing world events, there’s always crisis management — particularly if a crisis can be foreseen.

The viola-playing doctor is Tim Senior — no stranger to Inside Story — a GP working with the Tharawal Aboriginal Corporation community-controlled health service in Campbelltown, southwest of Sydney. He’s also principal violist in the Southern Highlands Symphony Orchestra, which I conducted late last year in the first performance of my Big Bang. Now he wanted a solo piece that he might learn and practise, when, as seemed likely, he succumbed to the coronavirus.

On the phone, Tim mentioned a number of pieces he liked, including Benjamin Britten’s Lachrymae, variations for viola and piano on the Elizabethan tune of that name by John Dowland. Midway through Britten’s piece, the composer memorably quotes another Dowland song, “Flow My Tears.” Perhaps this is what put Purcell’s song “O Solitude, My Sweetest Choice” in my head. That, plus its title. I sent the Purcell to Tim to see what he thought about making “O Solitude” my starting point, and he approved, so I got to work.

It took me a week and a bit to write and, as with any piece that’s going well, it threw up some surprises along the way. Tim had requested two to three minutes of music and, I think, imagined the piece to be elegiac in tone. That’s what I expected, too, and certainly that’s the vein in which the music sets out. Before long, however, it was straining at the leash. Every time I pulled the piece back into line, it tugged more vigorously. In the end, the struggle between what I wanted to do and what the music wanted to do became a defining feature of the piece, which turned out to be about three times longer than Tim had asked for.

Just as I was completing it, I was in touch with my friend, the composer Brett Dean — himself, as it happens, a fine viola player — who is presently recuperating from his own bout of Covid-19. Brett mentioned that the music he’d been craving in isolation was fast and rhythmically driven, providing him with “a much needed shot of energy.” His comment made me understand my piece.

As I write these words, Dr Senior is still well, but he tells me he’s already working on In My Solitude, as the piece has come to be called (thank you, Duke Ellington). Naturally, I very much hope he remains well, that solitude isn’t forced upon him, and that his only problem in the coming weeks is when to give the online premiere of our piece. •

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Why the fuss? Why is every orchestra and classical chamber music organisation in the world arranging mini festivals of the composer’s music featuring cycles of his symphonies and concertos, string quartets and piano sonatas?

Many would argue that Beethoven is the greatest of all composers, and perhaps he is. Today, he is the most famous. When we hear the word “composer,” it is probably Beethoven’s brooding countenance that comes to mind. The pianist Glenn Gould once remarked that Beethoven is the only composer whose fame depends entirely on “gossip.” He meant the biographical details we all know: the composer’s deafness, his fierce independence and stubborn demeanour, his moodiness — that brooding countenance.

Gould was right, but Beethoven’s fame is justified all the same. If we think of him as the epitome of the independent composer, it is because he was the first. Before him, successful composers tended to be employed by the church or the aristocracy: Bach was cantor in Leipzig for the last twenty-seven years of his life; Haydn served a succession of Esterházy princes as Kapellmeister in their palace at Eisenstadt, where he wore a servant’s livery. And note: Bach and Haydn were not considered composers but directors of music, expected to compose in addition to running choirs and orchestras.

Though a fine pianist, Beethoven, Haydn’s pupil, was primarily a composer, and a freelancer to boot. When he courted patrons — because then, as now, a composer must eat — he did so on his own terms. He wrote music for princes but also for the public, as an emerging bourgeoisie — educated people with disposable incomes — built concert halls and put on concerts. Beethoven was the first modern composer.

But Beethoven’s lasting modernity is in his music. There, he did things composers hadn’t done before. He inherited the symphony, the string quartet and the piano sonata from Haydn and Mozart, and changed them fundamentally.

In the years after his death, it became the convention to divide Beethoven’s work into three periods. In a sense, this was yet more “gossip,” because one can find characteristics associated with the composer’s early style in the music of his middle period and harbingers of the late style in his early music. But even if the early–middle–late division is somewhat arbitrary and undeniably porous, it remains a useful shorthand way of talking about Beethoven’s output.

The early period stretches from 1795, three years after his move to Vienna, when he published his piano trios Op. 1 and the piano sonatas Op. 2, to 1802, when he wrote the so-called Heiligenstadt Testament — an existential cry of pain on the subject of his failing hearing addressed (though never sent) to his brothers. The music of this period is characterised by a debt to the Classical style of his great Viennese forebears.

Beethoven’s middle period, from the composition of his third symphony (the Eroica) in 1803–04 to around 1815, is typified by music constructed from small motifs: musical blocks that develop and proliferate to form larger structures. There is often a thrillingly pugnacious quality to these works. The first movement of the fifth symphony is the obvious example.

The late period, from 1815 to the end of Beethoven’s life a dozen years later, is marked by an interest in line more than block, long melodies rather than short motifs, and in consequence there is a greater focus on musical forms that employ such lines — fugues and variations. The music of these last years is often expansive — pieces tend to be longer — and listeners find a kind of rapt spirituality in much of the music, especially the late quartets and the final three sonatas. Mind you, this quality tends to be thrown into stark relief by the juxtaposition of short, even jokey movements in the same works. The late quartets Opp. 130 and 132 both contain outpourings of intense lyricism cheek by jowl with brief scherzo-like movements.

Beethoven’s late quartets are considered difficult connoisseur’s music, not for the average listener. It’s partly their evident seriousness (all those chromatic fugues), partly the introspective mood of much of the music; but it is also the chopping and changing of direction. It is puzzling stuff. What could it mean?

This was a question posed in the composer’s lifetime, and not only about the late quartets. It has been asked frequently of the Eroica symphony, for example, and was raised again last week at the Adelaide Festival by the Cambridge historian Sir Christopher Clark, when he introduced a performance of the symphony by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. That we ask it at all is a key to the composer’s historical standing, for “meaning” is not something we demand to know of a Haydn quartet or a Mozart symphony. Beethoven changed the nature of music.

The motif that opens the first movement of the Eroica could hardly be simpler — an arpeggio, rolling up and down — but from it Beethoven creates driving, dramatic — “heroic” — music, unprecedented in a symphony. It is followed by a deeply tragic slow movement — a funeral march. Whose funeral is this? Not the funeral of Napoleon, the erstwhile dedicatee of the symphony. Beethoven had been quick to recognise what Byron called Napoleon’s “feet of clay,” scratching out his dedication. But the Frenchman didn’t die until 1821.

If we have not wondered, during the funeral march, what the Eroica is about, we surely will at the start of the third movement, when the solemnity suddenly gives way to a breezy scherzo full of rhythmic games and hunting horns. This abrupt mood change disturbed early listeners and, as conducted in Adelaide by Richard Mills, it still pulls us up short. Then there’s the recycled ballet music of the last movement, a set of variations — that “late” device in a “middle period” work — on a theme from the finale of The Creatures of Prometheus.

Beethoven’s music is dramatic even when we can’t interpret the drama. In this, he established a new way to listen. Hearing Mills’s performance of the Eroica, I found myself thinking (not for the first time) of Gustav Mahler. Funeral marches and peasant dances, sleigh bells and cowbells, military bands and massive, heartfelt adagios coexist in Mahler’s symphonies in a manner that recalls the disjunct styles in Beethoven. But Mahler’s symphonies wouldn’t come along for another century. In between, Beethoven influenced everyone. Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner: the names of those whose music wouldn’t be the same without Beethoven’s example is a list of the nineteenth century’s great composers.

The figure of Beethoven, the heroic artist at the dawn of the Romantic age, might today seem quaint, but this was the start of something more than a creative unbridling of the ego. Composers became self-aware — the Heiligenstadt Testament is written by a man who questions everything except his right to be a composer — and a self-aware artist will consider matters of style.

To be sure, there had been differences between the early and late works of J.S. Bach and Haydn and Mozart, but they were not glaring differences. Often they were the result of technical advancement — fugues grew more complex, woodwind writing became bolder. Beethoven’s stylistic shifts were protean. It is sometimes hard to believe that the composer who wrote the ninth symphony is the same man who wrote the first and second; that the Hammerklavier sonata Op. 106 and the Grosse Fuge Op. 133 emerged from the same imagination as the Op. 2 piano sonatas and the Op. 18 quartets.

As an independent composer, Beethoven wrote music for a new musical public in those new concert halls and, increasingly, for the virtuosi who performed there. But he was also writing for himself, for this was the moment in history when music became art. Not the background to conversation, not the accompaniment to dancing, not even an aid to divine worship: music was a sonic art to be listened to and contemplated and argued over as one might a poem or a sculpture or a philosophical conundrum.

Reason enough to celebrate. •

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Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), also not a musical, contained several songs. That film was constructed from the interweaving of short stories by Raymond Carver, but with the addition of a single character, unique to the film. Tess Trainer is a nightclub singer, her career all but washed up. She’s played by the jazz singer Annie Ross and the film affords her set pieces in which she sings songs by Doc Pomus and Mac Rebennack (Dr John) and a specially written song, “Conversation on a Barstool,” by Bono and the Edge.

Ross’s function in the film is that of Greek chorus, and she sings because her character is a singer. But more commonly when movie characters break into song it is to reveal or underline something about themselves. In Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987), Albert Brooks’s character Aaron, a news reporter snubbed by his network in favour of the dim but rugged-looking William Hurt, mixes himself a drink and rattles off some of the French lyrics to Francis Cabrel’s “L’Édition spéciale” to confirm to himself his superiority.

In The Savages (Tamara Jenkins, 2007), Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing a Brecht scholar with a failing love life, distant sister and father with dementia, listens in his car to Lotte Lenya singing Brecht and Weill’s “Salomon-Song” from The Threepenny Opera. It’s a song about disappointment and at first Hoffman hums along, before joining in the chorus (“How great and wise was Solomon”), in which Brecht points out that wisdom only gets you so far in life.

In Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003), Bill Murray’s character gets up in a Tokyo karaoke bar to sing Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” the song underscoring his fish-out-of-water status in a group of much younger and mostly Japanese people who, nevertheless, cheer him on.

All these films find reasons in the plot for their characters to sing, but in Magnolia (1999), the director Paul Thomas Anderson creates magic by having his actors sing with no pretext at all. Again, the film is not a musical, but the director was apparently inspired by Aimee Mann’s songs, and several of these feature in the film, along with songs by others (including Harry Nilsson’s “One,” sung by Mann). Mann’s “Wise Up” is the song that creates the aforementioned magic, as the film’s characters take up the song, one by one, each in his or her own situation — snorting cocaine, say, or nursing a dying man. It’s the sonic equivalent of the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the film changes from black and white to bright primary colours. Not only are we “not in Kansas anymore,” we’re in a different sort of movie.

Something similar happens in Marriage Story. Baumbach provides his characters with reasons to sing — Johansson’s Nicole (an actor) is at a party, Driver’s Charlie (a theatre director), recalling Lost in Translation, is singing karaoke — but the nature and provenance of the songs are what is significant here. They are not only both by Sondheim, but both are from his 1970 musical Company. Moreover, they are sung in Company by characters in situations similar to those in which Johansson and Driver’s characters find themselves.

In Company, Robert — Bobby — is a typical young man of the late 1960s, a mixture of self-pity and self-justification when it comes to relationships with women. He thinks he’d like to commit, but until the right woman comes along feels obliged to play the field. Three of his exes confront him with “You Could Drive a Person Crazy.” In Marriage Story, the song, performed at a Hollywood party to celebrate Nicole’s divorce from Charlie, remains a trio — Johansson’s Nicole is joined in her performance by her mother (Julie Hagerty) and sister (Merritt Wever). It’s so much in the style of the original that you imagine Johansson studying Donna McKechnie’s version. In the film, the performance ends — as it does in Company — with the tagline: “Bobby is my hobby and I’m giving it up.”

From Nicole’s high spirits, we jump to a New York bar, where Driver’s Charlie is surrounded by sympathetic friends. When Robert sings “Being Alive” in Sondheim’s musical, his performance is punctuated by a running commentary from his own friends. Baumbach might have had Driver similarly interrupted, but it would have been a step into archness (some will feel the whole Sondheim trope is that, in any case). Instead, Charlie’s karaoke performance includes his own interruptions, as he gives himself Robert’s advice: “Is that all you think there is to it?”; “Don’t stop now! Keep going!” Driver not only sounds like Dean Jones, the original Robert, but seems also to have studied the voices of Robert’s friends from the soundtrack album. The whole scene is theatrically alienating and at the same time emotionally wrenching.

Marriage Story has received plenty of critical plaudits — rightly so, in my view — but the full effect of the musical scenes can surely only be felt by someone who knows Company and the original context of the songs. If you do, you will also feel the characters in Baumbach’s film slide suddenly, if not completely, into the characters from Sondheim’s show, then back again. I can’t think of another film that has a similar moment. •

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“Wichita Lineman” was written by Jimmy Webb. Glen Campbell had a hit with it in 1968, and most people of a certain age can probably conjure up the sound of his smooth vocals in their mind’s ear: “I am a lineman for the County / And I drive the main road / Searching in the sun for another overload.” There are only two verses, the first half of each dealing with the singer’s job, the second half with his relationship. The relationship is obsessive (“I hear you singing through the wires / I can hear you through the whine”) and the job is demanding — he needs “a short vacation.” The way Campbell tells it, being the “Wichita Lineman” isn’t much fun.

But Cash’s comma ushers in pride. “I am a lineman, for the County,” he sings. Just listen to him! This man has a trade, a profession: he’s a lineman. What’s more, he works for the County. It’s a prestigious gig. So to hear him, in verse two, practically begging — “And I need you more than want you / And I want you for all  time” — is all the more affecting.

Cash’s recording first appeared on the vinyl version of The Man Comes Around, the fourth American Recordings album produced by Rick Rubin in 2002. His voice was ravaged and quavery, seldom in tune, but full of the wisdom of experience. It was the quality that told him to make that gap after “lineman.” He was only seventy, but sounded older. He died the following year.

Elderly voices can do things younger voices can’t. They don’t try so hard. In his new book, It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, Ian Penman writes about Joni Mitchell’s recording of two of her own songs from three decades earlier, the title track and “A Case of You,” on her standards album Both Sides Now (2000). He likens them to late Rembrandt self-portraits.

“She returns to these songs of her (and our) youth,” he writes, “and sings them inside out with her fifty-seven-year-old voice and all it contains: all the love, desire and disappointment; all the lessons learned from long hours working with brushes and paint. Cigarette smoke, lipstick and holy wine.”

The lines come near the end of the book’s final chapter, which is actually about Prince, who had recorded his own memorable version of “A Case of You.” Prince is one of seven musicians given a chapter by Penman. The others are James Brown, Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, John Fahey and Donald Fagen. At the outset, you wonder what these men might have in common, and the answer, you gradually realise, is something to do with lateness. Parker, Presley and Prince died relatively young, though arguably they all had late periods, but Brown, Sinatra, Fahey and Fagen continued performing into old age. Even early in Steely Dan’s career, Fagen seemed a generation ahead of those he was singing about (“Showbiz Kids,” “Hey Nineteen”).

The theme of the book is never spelt out, and anyway this isn’t a through-composed piece of writing. It is a collection of essays, written between 2012 and 2018 for the London Review of Books and City Journal, but it slowly becomes clear that Penman’s main concern is something like musical truth. One of the first clues, in his introduction, comes from songwriter and producer Dan Penn, who contrasts Chuck Berry with Bobby “Blue” Bland and Aretha Franklin. “He was cute and he was smart,” Penn said of Berry, “but he never went to church. I never heard that in his voice.”

Penman doesn’t believe Penn meant this in a literal sense. It wasn’t so much that Berry was godless, but that he never went “somewhere altogether elsewhere and unexpected the music takes you, somewhere that’s hard to name.” Without attempting to name the place, the book undertakes a search for it, finding it, time and again, in the work of these musicians and particularly their late work. It is as though in maturity they became more themselves. Perhaps we all do.

So it is that Penman finds Sinatra’s truth (because musical truth is really what we’re talking about) on albums from the 1960s and 70s that we tend not to take very seriously. Vocally, Sinatra’s great period was probably before the war, singing with Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra. Musically, his best work is surely from the 1950s, working alongside Nelson Riddle and others. But he was never more himself than in the late 1960s. The choice of material was hit and miss, so were the arrangements, and nobody needs to hear Sinatra’s versions of “Mrs Robinson” or “Both Sides, Now.” But on A Man Alone (1969) and Watertown (1970), which Penman says he reveres “like holy objects,” Sinatra is “disarmingly convincing.” The songs are not of the quality of the standards found on the singer’s Capitol recordings with Riddle, but they are effortlessly, truthfully performed. You can hear the commas.

Penman, naming no names, writes of today’s stars attempting to pull off Sinatra’s style and admits they sometimes get the surface details right. But ultimately they always fail. “They can’t ‘do’ Sinatra, because Sinatra didn’t ‘do’ easy, imitable exaggerations. His tone was toned right down: his slow-burn intensity came from somewhere deep inside… None of this can be applied like spray tan. It’s probably not something that can even be learned any longer.”

Sinatra, Penman writes, “may be the last big mainstream entertainer to perform without carefully applied quotation marks.” And there it is: musical truth.

The title of It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track comes from a 1958 poem, “Walks,” by W.H. Auden. But Penman imagines the “curving track” of black vinyl, while home is the place that all musically truthful singers take us. •

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“I think it’s wonderful for people to come here to Dartington and play Beethoven Five. They’ll have a nice time and they’ve got their toe in the water of something quite interesting, but I don’t want to hear it.”

One of the things I’ve always liked about Birtwistle is the absence of sugar-coating. He says what he means, both in his words and his music, and if you don’t like it that’s too bad. “I can’t be responsible for the audience” is his oft-repeated disclaimer when listeners find his music heavy going.

His avoidance of amateur performance might seem ungracious (particularly at Dartington!), but if we’re honest, we all know, at some level, what he means. We don’t attend a performance by a primary school recorder group because we enjoy hearing “Little Bird” played out of tune; we go to offer encouragement to the young players in the hope that one day they may play something more interesting and play it in tune. If a high school orchestra is playing “Beethoven Five” — to take Birtwistle’s example — we might well think that we’d be better off (from a musical standpoint) buying a ticket to hear our nearest professional orchestra or staying home with a recording conducted by Furtwängler or Klemperer, Carlos Kleiber or Simon Rattle. But it’s not for Beethoven’s sake we go to hear a high school orchestra.

It’s as easy to criticise amateur music making as it is amateur dramatics, but while the principal benefits of both are surely for the performers, there can be musical gains for audiences too. Technical perfection, after all, is not the main point of musical performance. I have heard some famous musicians give spotless accounts of classics, playing the right notes in the right order and nothing else. I have also heard amateur orchestras give inspiring performances, albeit with wrong notes and dodgy intonation, that have taken me deep into the music.

Birtwistle’s remark can be found in a book called Beyond Britten: The Composer and the Community, which is less about amateurs playing Beethoven (or “Little Bird”) than about their involvement in creating new works. Benjamin Britten, believing it was a composer’s duty to be “useful, and to the living,” was heavily committed to working in his own East Anglian community (and further afield) with amateurs of all stripes. Choirs, of course, especially children’s choirs, but also orchestras.

In his 1958 opera, Noye’s Fludde, based on the late-medieval Chester mystery play, performers of various levels of experience are required. The orchestra, which is a mix of professionals and amateurs, includes a part for “third violins” in addition to the usual firsts and seconds. These third violins play only in first position, mostly on open strings. And as the animals board Noah’s ark, two by two, children in descending order of age, size and experience sing the parts of everything from lions and tigers to mice and birds. The truly remarkable thing about the piece is that while Britten certainly writes down for some of the participants in terms of technique, he does not write down in an aesthetic sense. This is one of Britten’s finest works.

In Atlas of the Sky, seen and heard at the Melbourne Recital Centre last year and coming up again in the Sydney Festival in January, Liza Lim has written music for a soprano and percussionists — Jessica Aszodi and Speak Percussion at the premiere — together with a “crowd” of volunteers. Twenty people, young and old, some of them with no prior performing experience, sing and play percussion instruments, real and invented — there is a passage for bowed chairs — and, moreover, they perform this seventy-minute work from memory. The intensity of the piece is surely down to the energy generated by the interaction between the soprano and percussionists and the “crowd,” the performance of the latter lifted by its proximity to the highly skilled virtuosity of the former. If the “crowd” consisted of professional or even experienced singers and percussionists, it might not be so powerful.

I am presently rehearsing a new work of mine with my local community orchestra, the Southern Highlands Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra commissioned it from me last year, and I’m not sure which of us has been on the steeper learning curve. Very few of the players had played much contemporary music before, and while, long ago, I used to conduct an amateur orchestra, I had never written music for one. The players’ skills vary, of course, and I tried to take this into account. Having attended several of the orchestra’s performances, I had a fair idea where its strengths lay.

So far, so good. The orchestra seems to be enjoying the piece and I’m enjoying the orchestra. I sense the players feel that they own this music, something I seldom experience working with professionals. The piece is called Big Bang, and during its seven or eight minutes the universe expands, explodes, reforms, expands and explodes once more. It is important to me that the structure of the piece is as clear as possible and the music makes “sense.”

It seems to be working. I don’t know that Birtwistle would enjoy it, but if the players are as enthusiastic at the premiere as they are in rehearsal, they will convey this music — my music, their music — to the people of Bowral, New South Wales, with lucidity and great energy.

Big Bang is dedicated to the memory of Richard Gill, whose own energy was the stuff of legends and who believed not only that music could change lives but that lives could change music. He worked with everyone from the finest musicians to non-musicians (I suspect he didn’t believe there were such people as non-musicians) and his loss is still keenly felt.

A similar powerhouse was John Curro, the founder, fifty-three years ago, of the Queensland Youth Orchestra and its conductor until his death last week, aged eighty-six. I have no doubt that if you surveyed the players in Australia’s orchestras to learn where they grew up, you would discover the majority are Queenslanders. You would also discover that they had once played in Curro’s orchestra.

But those others are important too: those thousands of people who played for Curro or Gill, and may no longer play at all, but whose love and understanding of music were cultivated there. Or perhaps they play today in community orchestras. Perhaps they run community orchestras. Or choirs. Or sing in choirs.

Professional musicians might provide the more reliable accounts of “Beethoven Five,” but most music happens elsewhere, and arguably that’s the music that matters more to people’s lives. •

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The Old Testament’s Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) is a book so devoted to poetic descriptions of love and sex that it doesn’t even mention God. Its poems date from around the tenth century BCE. The troubadours and trouvères of medieval France wrote about little else but love, though it was generally out of reach, and the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century, when not writing about nature, also tended to concentrate on love. In fact they often combined the two, nature providing the backdrop to romance, so that in songs by Schubert and Schumann, to words by Müller, Goethe, Eichendorff and Heine, declarations of love are made to the chirping of birds and rustling of leaves, while hearts break as brooks babble and mill wheels turn.

That changed in the twentieth century. New York City became the home of songwriting and the city itself the setting for most of its output. Love went urban. In the first song of Schumann’s great song cycle of 1840, Dichterliebe, or A Poet’s Love, Heinrich Heine’s words told of the magically wonderful month of May, when love sprang up in the poet’s heart as buds opened and birds sang; eighty-five years later, Heine’s great-grandnephew, Lorenz Hart, together with Richard Rodgers, would “turn Manhattan into an isle of joy” while having “the Bronx and Staten Island, too.”

Perhaps it was simply that the songwriters of the “Great American Songbook” felt at home in New York. The concept of home was important to Jews fleeing oppression in late nineteenth-century Europe, and that accounted for the families not only of Rodgers and Hart, but also of Irving Berlin, Vernon Duke, Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields and Oscar Hammerstein II.

A few of these were themselves immigrants. Irving Berlin, the composer of “God Bless America,” was born Israel Beilin in tsarist Russia; Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky) was also born there. But the majority were the children of immigrants. Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, who together would write “Over the Rainbow” — in the end, perhaps, a more enduring American anthem than Berlin’s — were born Hyman Arluck and Isidore Hochberg. The Gershwin brothers were born Gershwine, the family having already changed its name from Gershovitz. Those not born in New York ended up there anyway, along with a host of other composers and lyricists.

In his new book, City Songs and American Life, 1900–1950, the American broadcaster Michael Lasser documents how the United States changed songwriting and songs changed the United States. Dozens of songs have “New York” or “Manhattan” in the title, hundreds have it in the body of the song. Even individual streets are named, Broadway being only the most obvious.

“The idea of Broadway was a magnet for the rest of the country,” writes Lasser. “It was a place to be thrilled by and a little afraid of.” The Broadway theatre district, including 42nd St and Times Square, was synonymous with the city itself and the burgeoning American century. Here are the titles of just a few of the songs that celebrate it: “Broadway,” “Broadway Melody,” “Broadway Serenade,” “Lullaby of Broadway,” “Broadway Blues,” “Broadway Belle,” “Broadway Wedding Bells,” “Broadway Butterfly,” “Blossoms on Broadway,” “Broadway Rose,” “Broadway Reverie,” “Broadway Rhythm,” “The Broadway Whirl,” “I Miss You Dear Old Broadway,” “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “The Broadway Triangle,” “The Bright Lights of Broadway,” “When the Lights Go Out on Broadway,” “There’s a Broken Heart for Every Light on Broadway,” “There’s a Little Street in Heaven that They Call Broadway” and “Broadway’s Not a Bad Place After All.” We have just scratched the surface.

It wasn’t only that the setting of these songs was urban. Urbanity was their trademark. The songs that Rodgers wrote with Hart were a heady mix of romance and wisecracking sophistication. They showed off the lyricist’s literary skills (these songs are full of long words) as surely as his familiarity with modern slang. In the musical A Connecticut Yankee, Hart has Martin woo Alice (at King Arthur’s court) with a mixture of cod Shakespearean English and American slang: “Thou swell, thou witty, thou sweet, thou grand / Wouldst kiss me pretty? Wouldst hold my hand?” But it’s the slang that wins — “Hear me holler, I choose a / sweet lollapalooza / in thee.” In 1927, “lollapalooza” was a neologism.

The modern world is everywhere in songs about clubs and speakeasies, modern fashions and modern social mores. There are songs about recreational drug-taking (“Some get a kick from cocaine”) and aeroplanes (“Flying too high / With some guy in the sky”); household mod cons and motion pictures (“The radio and the telephone and the movies that we know / May just be passing fancies…”). And it wasn’t just modernity these songwriters wrote about, but sometimes, and rather knowingly, modernism. Lasser quotes Gene Buck’s lyric for Dave Stamper’s “My Futurist Girl” in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1914: “We’ll have a Futuristic honeymoon / In a Cubist house just built to spoon / If you’ll only be my Futurist girl.”

So much for lyrics — they are Lasser’s principal subject. What about the music? The jazz age saw to that. These songs were not themselves jazz, but ragtime rhythms and blues chords increasingly underpinned them. Songs began to sound modern, sometimes self-consciously. “Gershwin keeps pounding on tin,” wrote Ira in a line of the verse of his brother George’s “By Strauss.” Woody Allen’s choice of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1925) was perfect for the opening of Manhattan (1979), his panegyric to New York City. This was what New York had sounded like at its most confident.

By then, of course, it was long over, and we can mark the moment at which songwriting moved on. Rodgers took up with a new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II. Musical comedy became musical theatre. Sophistication for sophistication’s sake was old hat. To be sure, the songs were still mostly about love, but Rodgers and Hammerstein’s shows were also about serious matters — about domestic violence and racism, nuns and Nazis — and they were not set in modern Manhattan but in rural Oklahoma and the South Pacific, nineteenth-century Bangkok and 1930s Salzburg. The sound of Rodgers’s music changed too, the influence of jazz — which by now was bebop — nowhere to be found. In any case, between The King and I (1951) and The Sound of Music (1959), there was a new music in the offing, and rock ’n’ roll was not specifically urban — it was universal. •

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Back in 1989, Smalley wrote this little piano piece by way of congratulations when I won a prize from the Australian Music Centre for writing about music. I recall he sent me a letter, telling me he’d done it, but he never sent the piece. Two years later, at a restaurant in Perth, he presented me with a score of his piano trio, hot off the press, saying, “This is what your piece turned into.”

Years later, two years after Smalley’s death in 2015, I received an email from the pianist Daniel Herscovitch asking if I knew where the music of Albumblatt might be. I didn’t, but another pianist, Adam Pinto, a former student of Smalley’s, unearthed a rough manuscript, edited it, and now here it is on the new recording, thirty years after I was first told about it. (And it’s beautiful. Thank you, Roger.)

That mixture of generosity and forgetfulness was completely typical of Roger Smalley. I’ve never known anyone more devoted to music — his and others’, new and old — but the devotion frequently claimed his whole attention, distracting him from the practicalities of daily life. In his last years, by which time he was in the grip of Parkinson’s disease, music could have a galvanising effect on him when little else did.

Such creative assiduity might suggest single-mindedness, but Smalley’s own music, though unfailingly rigorous in design and execution, was always warm and humane. It was also stylistically varied.

Born near Manchester in 1943, Smalley grew up in postwar England at a crucial moment for music history. Continental neoclassicism and post-Romantic pastoralism had been the prevailing styles of concert music in the years leading to the second world war. After the war, young composers came to think of that music as somehow culpable, and sought a new beginning in the form of a rigorous systematising of the compositional process.

Smalley was a gifted pianist and his talents took him to the Royal College of Music in London. As a composer, he was quick to embrace new ideas (not that the college itself was much use in that regard). He was initially drawn to the music of fellow Mancunian Peter Maxwell Davies, later coming into the ambit of Karlheinz Stockhausen. His music of the 1960s and early 70s bears the hallmarks first of one, then of the other. By 1974, he was an established figure in the European avant-garde, and his reputation earned him an invitation to visit the music department of the University of Western Australia.

You might have expected this European modernist to find mid-1970s Perth intolerably provincial, but Smalley felt at home. He looked at the droves of ordinary music lovers going to classical concerts and felt a kinship with them. Perhaps he recognised his younger self queuing to hear John Barbirolli’s Hallé Orchestra in Manchester. It dawned on him that he wanted to address a wide audience rather than a new-music coterie (which Perth didn’t really have), and in 1976 he accepted the offer of a full-time job at the university.

Because he was such a fine pianist, he found himself playing chamber music with other Perth musicians — not new music, but Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. The music of these and other nineteenth-century composers was well known to Smalley from his youth, and his reimmersion in their world now began to affect his own creativity. My little Albumblatt, for instance, is an elaboration of a few bars from near the end of Chopin’s Mazurka in A-flat Major, op. 59, no. 2.

There was nothing nostalgic about Smalley’s borrowings, and still less was it a form of postmodernism — he would have hated that suggestion. If the materials of his work could sometimes now be tonal in harmony and Romantic in provenance, his method of working with them was as rigorous as ever.

Method was important to Smalley, style less so, and this made him the best of teachers. He didn’t mind what sort of music you wrote, so long as it had integrity, and it speaks volumes that his former students include both Cat Hope, whose dark, noisy and conceptual music involves improvisation and graphic scores, and Iain Grandage, who is equally at home composing for the orchestra and the theatre (Cloudstreet, The Secret River) and conducting arrangements for Tim Minchin and Kate Miller-Heidke.

Some of Smalley’s music can be heard on two recent recordings, Roger Smalley: Piano, Vocal and Chamber Music and Transformation: Music for Percussion, Piano and Electronics. The former contains mostly work composed in Australia, the majority from Smalley’s final decade, and includes his beautiful song cycle about cats, Nine Lives, in a radiant performance by Taryn Fiebig. Smalley composed so little vocal music — this is his only work for voice and piano — and yet he was evidently a master of the genre. The latter recording features two pieces for piano and electronics composed in the decade before he arrived in Perth. Both discs include one of his final pieces, the Morceau de concours, written as a test piece for the 2008 Sydney International Piano Competition and played here by Herscovitch on the first album, Pinto on the second.

Smalley’s music spans fifty years, and between them these discs offer an overview of his work. But if you are expecting a sudden jolt in the late 1970s, following the composer’s move to Perth and rediscovery of nineteenth-century chamber music, you will be surprised by how seamless it all is. Smalley’s music hangs together as a body of work. The simple diatonicism of the first song in Nine Lives (2007) is, on one level, a world away from his Monody (1972) for piano and live electronic modulation. But there’s more to this music than the outward trappings of style.

Indeed, there is style and there is style: the first conscious (like musical dress-up), the latter unavoidable (like fingerprints). With some composers, the second kind of style is an idiolect. Stravinsky, for example, is recognisably himself composing the early Russian ballets, the neoclassical works of his middle period and the austere serial pieces of his final decade. Smalley’s fingerprints are not like that. You don’t hear a few bars of one of his works and think, “Ah yes, Smalley!”

You do, however, rapidly sense that this is important music, that it needed to be written (even the cat songs), and that it would be hard to change a note without diminishing the composer’s achievement. There are not many composers about whom you could say that. •

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It had been at least a couple of decades since I’d seen Archer perform. In the interim I’d read her essays, heard her lectures and interviewed her several times on The Music Show, either about arts policy, in her capacity as a festival director in Canberra and Tasmania, Adelaide and Melbourne, or about her abiding passion, the writers and composers of the Weimar Republic. The Archer of A Star Is Torn and The Pack of Women had gradually been replaced in my memory by Archer the public intellectual. So it was a jolt to see her once more treading the boards at last month’s Adelaide Festival, and performing from a repertoire that embraced opera, national anthems, hymn tunes, James Bond songs, Jacques Brel and Mary Schneider.

Robyn Archer is a hoarder. She says she isn’t, but there can be little doubt. The entrance to the banquet room at the Adelaide Festival Theatre was festooned with vast collages of boarding passes, baggage tags and Do Not Disturb signs from a hundred hotel doors. They were not props, but evidence, retained by Archer, of forty-two years of international travel.

You enter the venue itself, and the room is a maze of cardboard buildings, further mementos from Archer’s journeys. There are maquettes of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, the Chrysler building and the Empire State, the Tower of Pisa, the Palace of Westminster and the Sydney Opera House. Not the Parthenon, though, which Archer later confesses to having mislaid, together with the Taj Mahal.

Her show takes place in and around these models, with individual buildings and groups of buildings illuminated as she recalls her life in stories and songs, accompanied by George Butrumlis’s accordion and her own guitar and ukulele. She arrives in London for the first time in 1977 to Flanagan and Allen’s “Underneath the Arches”; in New York, she sings Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney’s “Brother, Can you Spare a Dime” in tribute to those who built the Empire State; in Paris, her favourite city, it’s Piaf’s “La vie en rose.” As you might predict, Bertolt Brecht lays claim not only to Germany (“The Ballad of Mack the Knife”) and Spain (“The Bilboa Song”) but also to Austria (“The Song of the Moldau,” with music by Hanns Eisler).

Most memorably perhaps, an American road trip is represented by a medley of some forty songs — I quickly lost count — that takes us from “San Francisco” to Rodgers and Hart’s “Manhattan” via Phoenix, AZ, Baton Rouge, LA, St Louis, MO, Mobile, AL, and Massachusetts, among many others. I’ll leave you to guess the songs, save to say that Archer’s fleeting impersonations of Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan and (with Butrumlis) the Brothers Gibb were almost as good as her Dean Martin. If Archer brings Picaresque to a theatre near you, you should certainly go and see it. Apart from anything else, she sings so well — something else I’d forgotten.

After her show, I couldn’t get it out of my head. In particular, I found myself wondering if there was a contradiction between Archer’s stature as a thinker and leader in the arts, and her sometimes playful performance in this show. You’d think the two might be at odds, and yet evidently they complement each other. She is equally convincing as intellectual and entertainer.

I cast around for other examples of this seeming paradox and found them. Barry Humphries — vaudevillian, aesthete and bibliophile — is one. Another is Clive James, with a career that has included hosting TV chat shows and translating Dante. In the anglophone world, the ability to think deeply yet entertain broadly seems oddly Australian.

It may be that, prior to Picaresque, the last time I saw Archer on stage was in 1990, in Barrie Kosky’s production of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire for the Seymour Group. Even if that show wasn’t anyone’s finest hour, my memory of it remains vivid. And it brings to mind Pierre Boulez’s description of Schoenberg’s violently humorous monodrama with its twenty-one individual numbers, each a kind of musical parody, as “un cabaret supérieur.”

Cabaret, in fact, is the perfect vehicle for all of Archer’s talents. If she was playful in Picaresque, she was also perfectly serious. One moment she was the sauntering ne’er-do-well, “Burlington Bertie from Bow,” the next she was singing “Abide with Me,” unaccompanied, as she had once done at the Lucknow grave of Walter Burley Griffin. She spoofed “Nessun dorma,” but performed “You Only Live Twice” as straight as a die.

Often these days, cabaret means the adoption of a larger-than-life character, usually some tragic diva of the past, Billie Holiday or Judy Garland or Nina Simone providing the backstory, songs and voice for a performer who lacks a backstory, songs and voice of her own. Sometimes it works, but it’s cabaret at one remove.

The authentic experience is personal. The stories are from the life of the singer, and the songs have been collected along the way, like Archer’s boarding passes. It hardly matters that the songs may not be composed by the singer: in the context of the singer’s life — and loves and politics and disappointments and triumphs — they have specific meanings, and it is these, as much as the songs themselves, that the cabaret singer communicates to us. Real cabaret is transactional, and the best is transformational. I doubt I shall hear “Abide with Me” again without thinking of Lucknow.

On Archer’s new CD, Classic Cabaret Rarities, she presents examples of European cabaret in three of its heydays. From fin-de-siècle Paris there are the songs of Aristide Bruant; from Germany in the first thirty years of the twentieth century — from expressionism to Weimar — there are songs by Wedekind, Brecht and Friedrich Hollaender; from 1950s Paris, there’s Léo Ferré and Brel. They are intense songs, all of them: angry, tragic, bitingly funny; songs about ideas. They matter to Archer and she makes them matter to me. This is the real thing.

And regarding the Dean Martin impersonation, the trick is this. Don’t bring your lips together on the consonants and you’ll achieve that characteristic slurred drawl every time. •

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He was born Andreas Ludwig Priwin in Berlin in 1929, studying at the conservatory there from the age of six until, three years later, he was expelled for being Jewish. In 1939, at a moment’s notice, the family fled Berlin for Paris, leaving everything behind. Their final destination was Los Angeles, where the boy completed his schooling at Beverly Hills High and even before graduating found himself writing arrangements for MGM. By the age of twenty, he had composed his first film score for a Lassie feature, The Sun Comes Up, starring Jeanette MacDonald. He had also changed the spelling of his name from Priwin to Previn because, he would later say, he didn’t want to go through life being called “Mr Prune.” (In fact his father’s cousin Charles, who was head of music at Universal, was already a Previn.)

In postwar Hollywood you learnt to be professional, and you learnt standards. Those sniffy British critics perhaps forgot that many of the best musicians in America worked in Hollywood’s studio orchestras, and many of them, like Previn, were European émigrés. For example, the members of one of the mid twentieth century’s greatest classical ensembles — the Hollywood String Quartet — had day jobs recording film scores for 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros.

Previn’s Hollywood career was stupendously successful. By the age of thirty-five he had received Academy Awards as arranger and music director for Gigi, Porgy and Bess, Irma la Douce and My Fair Lady. That’s when he walked away from it, though rather more gradually than he sometimes claimed. He received his last Oscar nomination as late as 1974. (Previn’s memoir of his Hollywood years, No Minor Chords, is worth reading and very funny.)

All this time, Previn had had a second life as a jazz pianist, and a fine one too. He made a lot of recordings in the 1950s and 60s, both as leader and sideman, and among his best were discs that reimagined the songs of Broadway hits such as Pal Joey, Gigi, West Side Story and (with Shelly Manne) My Fair Lady — this was in 1956, eight years before Previn arranged and conducted that musical for Hollywood. The expressive range of his keyboard touch is evident on these recordings, and it’s allied to a rhythmic precision that makes them thrilling still.

But classical music was coming for Previn. Jazz, like movie music, was slowly put away — at least until the 1990s, when he began making jazz records once more. Even so, in 1996, when he appeared as the “castaway” on BBC radio’s long-running Desert Island Discs, Previn chose no jazz at all. Jazz, he said, excited and moved him as much as ever, but he had taken the program’s basic conceit to heart and concluded that, if he were to be marooned for the rest of his days, he would want to hear compositions, not improvisations.

As a classical pianist and orchestral conductor, Previn exhibited many of the same qualities found in his jazz, and for the next fifty years these endeared him to some of the world’s great orchestras, not least the Vienna Philharmonic. The variety of his touch at the keyboard, for example, was eminently suited to Mozart — both in the concertos and the chamber music — and also Brahms. And on the podium he excelled in repertoire with a rhythmic spring in its step — Mendelssohn’s Italian symphony, Tippett’s Double Concerto, Prokofiev, Shostakovich. He was also especially convincing in the music of Rachmaninov and Vaughan Williams, discovering a profound melancholy in the slow movements of their symphonies (Rachmaninov’s second, in particular, and Vaughan Williams’s fifth). The recordings of these composers’ work he made with the London Symphony Orchestra have hardly been bettered.

Above all, perhaps, he found in William Walton a composer who brought together all these qualities: a heart-on-the-sleeve emotion, achieved through richly chromatic harmonic writing, and a rhythmic drive and delight in syncopation that no one has ever delivered as well as Previn.

In 1968, Previn succeeded his conducting teacher, Pierre Monteux, as conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and the following decade brought him his greatest fame. With his third wife, Mia Farrow, he was a good fit for the fading years of Swinging London, and he quickly became a TV star, going on to host three seasons of a prime-time BBC show, André Previn’s Music Night, with the orchestra in the studio. For a while, he was Britain’s Bernstein, and someone calculated that, in a single program, Previn and the orchestra must have reached an audience equivalent to sixty-five years of LSO concerts.

As a composer, Previn was less successful. It’s interesting that his two late operas, A Streetcar Named Desire and Brief Encounter, both instantly conjure famous films, the latter with a Rachmaninov piano concerto running through it. Much of the music Previn imagined for his operas was too reliant on film cliché. One small example: in the famous “Stella!” scene in Previn’s Streetcar, Stella comes to the window in response to Stanley’s cries, and the composer wheels out a bluesy saxophone solo.

And yet, in smaller structures requiring a lyrical response, he could deliver. There is, for instance, plenty to cringe about in the Guitar Concerto he wrote in 1971 for John Williams — not least noisy outbursts from electric guitar and rock drums in the final movement. But the slow movement is a beautiful thing, simple, tuneful and, especially in the week of Previn’s death, exceedingly poignant. •

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The tenor Philip Langridge — a generation younger, and a great fan — once told me he had heard English at the Proms in Berlioz’s Requiem. He sang magnificently, Langridge said, but blew a succession of top notes. The following day, not a single review mentioned the fluffs, only the artistry.

“And quite right too!” Langridge added.

English had a remarkable career. He sang with famous conductors from Thomas Beecham to Simon Rattle (in 1976, he was the soloist in the twenty-one-year-old Rattle’s first appearance at the Proms). He sang Britten under Barbirolli (their Cologne performance of the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings from 1966 recently appeared on CD); Vaughan Williams under Boult; Bach under Leonhardt; and Stravinsky under Ansermet and Boulez. On André Previn’s famous 1974 recording of Orff’s Carmina Burana, he sang the song of the roasting swan (was there ever a more poignant rendition?) and it became his party piece: two decades later he was still being called upon to fly to the United States to reprise these three minutes of pain for Christoph von Dohnányi and the Cleveland Orchestra.

At English’s operatic debut in 1956 he replaced Peter Pears as the devilish Quint in the English Opera Group’s production of Britten’s Turn of the Screw, the composer conducting. He sang Monteverdi at Glyndebourne, Walton’s Troilus and Cressida with Janet Baker at Covent Garden, and Berg’s Wozzeck — first as Andres, later as an especially deranged Captain — for the Paris Opéra, La Scala (several seasons in a row for Claudio Abbado), and at the 1976 Adelaide Festival in Elijah Moshinsky’s production.

Most people who heard English remarked on two qualities. First there was his purity of tone and control of vibrato. He didn’t wobble constantly as so many operatic singers do, but employed vibrato to colour certain notes. The other thing that distinguished him from nearly all his colleagues was that you could understand his words. He believed that singers with poor diction were merely being lazy. Yet in many quarters incomprehensibility is taken for granted in opera singing, and English’s clarity of diction earned him the label “character tenor.”

The other feature of his singing that set him apart from colleagues who seldom ventured much beyond the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and believed music from the 1920s to be modern, was an insatiable willingness to explore the whole musical repertory, particularly the very old and very new.

In 1950, the great countertenor Alfred Deller invited English to join his new vocal group in excavating music from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, some of which had not been sung for hundreds of years. Because there was no singing tradition — some would say bad habits — to fall back on with this music, the Deller Consort had to work out for themselves what a composer from the twelfth or fifteenth century might have wanted. Paradoxically, this same attitude equipped English for his increasingly regular forays into new music. In both cases, it was a search for musical truth.

English was fearless and could sight read anything, so he was a composer’s dream. Besides his work with Britten, he sang for Stravinsky (the title role in Oedipus Rex), Tippett (the first performance of Songs for Dov and many subsequent performances), Berio (the European premiere of Opera) and Lutosławski (Paroles tissées), each time under the composer’s own baton. He sang in the first performances of Richard Rodney Bennett’s opera The Ledge and, at Covent Garden, Hans Werner Henze’s We Come to the River, the latter in the composer’s own production.

In 1977 English established the Opera Studio at the Victorian College of the Arts and became its first director, lecturing, teaching singing, and directing and conducting operas — sometimes from the harpsichord. His presence in Australia was a boon for local composers, and among those whose works he sang early on were Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Peter Sculthorpe, Richard David Hames and Barry Conyingham.

I was particularly fortunate. I had admired English’s singing since my childhood, and he was one of the first musicians I met when I arrived in Australia from England as a young composer in 1983. We quickly hit it off, though I was very much in awe, and I summoned the courage to ask if I could compose something for him, aware that at the age of fifty-eight he was nearing the end of his career. He agreed enthusiastically, so I wrote him a song cycle to words by Christopher Reid, Sacred Places, which he sang with the Seymour Group in 1986.

But of course he wasn’t at the end of his career. He had two more decades to go, and I had another eleven pieces to write for him: big songs and small songs, three further song cycles, an operatic role and two solo music-theatre pieces — Whispers (with Rodney Hall) and Night and Dreams: The Death of Sigmund Freud (with Margaret Morgan).

This last, which he performed at the Adelaide Festival in 2000 and at the Sydney and Melbourne Festivals the following year, was really his swansong — on stage at least — and in rehearsals, with George Whaley directing, I witnessed for the first and only time Gerry’s cheerful professionalism crack. By now we were old friends, and I was surprised to see the stress he was under.

Night and Dreams is a huge undertaking for any singer. The performer is alone on stage for more than an hour, there is no conductor to follow — because all the other sounds are prerecorded — and, in addition to singing, he is obliged to speak to the audience, in character, for quite long stretches. Gerry was pushing seventy-five and had never done anything like this. Operatic acting, yes — but this was naturalism.

The fact that he pulled it off — and triumphantly — was partly down to Whaley’s patient manner, but mostly a matter of sheer determination on Gerry’s part. A determination to get it right, as he had done for Tippett and Henze and Berio, and for all those medieval and Renaissance composers whose music he’d first sung with Deller half a century earlier.

That he was now singing my music was something I never took for granted or quite got used to. For me, working with Gerald English was always an immense privilege; but for Gerry learning new music was simply what he did. The notes were there on the page, no one had sung them before, and it was his job to search for the truth in them and convey that to an audience. And he did it so vividly, over and over. •

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When Andrea Keller, herself now a composer, pianist and band leader, heard Bailey play with her pianist colleague Roger Frampton in the 1980s, it was Keller’s first live jazz gig. “The music resonated so deeply with me,” she explains, “that it became the beginning of a new passion and intrigue that continues to this day. Also, at a vitally impressionable age I was seeing Judy — one of the most accomplished jazz pianists in the country, a rare female working in a sea of men, a mum — she showed me that all is possible.”

So we must add to Bailey’s other accomplishments her significance as a role model, not only for young women but also these days for senior artists who see no reason to retire — who might, in any case, be in the prime of their creative lives.

“I really believe that Judy is an unstoppable force,” Tim Firth, the drummer of Bailey’s trio, once said. “If a nuclear bomb was dropped on the earth, there wouldn’t be anyone left except Keith Richards, Judy Bailey and maybe a few cockroaches.”

That was in 2015, when saxophonist and composer Jeremy Rose put together a tribute to his former teacher on her eightieth birthday and asked friends and colleagues to share their thoughts. A few weeks ago, when I recorded a conversation with Bailey for The Music Show on Radio National, nothing seemed to have changed. Uppermost in her mind was the following week’s recording sessions of her new scores for Jazz Connection, the student big band of which she is musical director, and with whom she performs at Sydney’s Lazy Bones Lounge on the fourth Sunday of each month.

“We must mention the recording sessions,” she said with the air of a much younger composer given her first break in the studio. Her enthusiasm is boundless and infectious. She is also a detail person. My producer had asked Bailey for some suggestions of music to play during our interview. By way of reply, an email arrived with a list of excerpts from nearly twenty tracks, each with careful timings for start and/or fade points in the music.

Judy Bailey’s development as a jazz musician began with something of an epiphany. It was 1949, and she was a thirteen-year-old growing up in Whangarei, the most northerly city in New Zealand, and taking classical piano lessons. The National Broadcasting Service (now Radio New Zealand) was making test broadcasts ahead of the opening of its Whangarei studios.

Bailey remembers the moment vividly. “I heard — on the Bakelite radio that lived on the Formica bench in the kitchen — the George Shearing Quintet,” she told me. They were playing “East of the Sun (and West of the Moon),” a song she knew and a favourite of her father’s. But after the first chorus came “all this other stuff.” It was improvisation, of course, and Bailey had heard nothing like it before. Knowing the song’s structure, she found she was able to follow what Shearing was doing at the keyboard, and she was instantly beguiled.

The following week, her jazz education was ramped up a notch when the Stan Kenton Orchestra came on the radio. “I thought I was going to faint,” she said. “I still get goose bumps remembering it.”

When 1XN (later Radio Northland) announced open auditions for local talent, Bailey’s father drove his daughter to the studio one afternoon after school. She had no idea where she was going, but when she arrived she was ushered into a room with a grand piano. She’d never played such a fine instrument in her life, but she clearly impressed the producers. They booked her for an appearance on the station’s opening night. She duly performed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” a song turned into a big hit by another Judy.

Perhaps more significantly, the producers gave her access to the record library, and her education began in earnest. In short order, she also landed her own show with a singer. “A Date with Judy and Wendy,” a half-hour program, was broadcast live each week.

By 1960, it was time for Bailey to spread her wings. She set off for London, but never arrived. Stopping in Sydney, she discovered a thriving jazz scene. Outside El Rocco in King’s Cross, the queues would stretch round the corner into William Street; inside they served what Bailey remembers as “the worst coffee” while bands played the best jazz.

“Don Burrows, Errol Buddle, George Golla, John Sangster…” Bailey began to reel off the names of the legendary figures of 1960s Australian jazz who appeared at the club. In no time she had joined their ranks. She also found herself in high demand on radio and television.

More than half a century later, this era of “light entertainment” is hard to recall, but in music the term generally implied some form of jazz, with swing still predominant but new forms of jazz by no means excluded. TV networks had their own bands and orchestras. The ABC, for instance, ran big bands in both Melbourne and Sydney in addition to its six state symphony orchestras. At Channel 7, Tommy Tycho had a band and a string orchestra. There was John Bamford’s orchestra at Channel 9 and Jack Grimsley’s at 10.

Bailey, who was quick, bright and efficient, and had a fantastic — and now legendary — ear, worked for one after the other, as pianist, arranger and composer. At the ABC she had a stint with the Don Burrows Septet.

But fashions change. Swing bands were already on the way out, even before the arrival of rock and roll. Gradually, live music disappeared from the TV schedules, and with it went the bands. Jazz clubs closed (and opened and closed again). A jazz paradox emerged.

In 1973, the jazz course began at Sydney Conservatorium with Judy Bailey a founding member of its teaching staff. Today, she is still showing up for work, and over the past forty-six years she has trained many hundreds of musicians. The talent pool in Australian jazz has turned into a lake — more, a lake district. But the work is no longer there. The jazz musician’s phone doesn’t ring as it once did. Without the bands and the TV and radio work, and with the existence of jazz clubs always in peril (they still open and close), musicians must be entrepreneurial. In order to work, they must first make the opportunities.

Bailey is well aware of the paradox of so much talent and so few venues, but she continues to believe strongly in what she’s doing, and argues passionately for music as part of the school curriculum.

“Sport fuels the body and school feeds the intellect,” she said, “but it’s music that nurtures the soul.” Moreover, improvised music, she believes, nurtures it in a special way. It’s to do with trust. Trusting others and trusting your instincts. But in order for one’s instincts to be free, not only must musicians absorb the technique, they must also learn to forget it.

“We are creatures of habit,” Bailey told Jeremy Rose in 2015, explaining that if a performer has practised hard, and learned to play certain melodic ideas in every key, then these will tend to go into his or her memory bank and surface in improvisation. When that happens, it isn’t really improvisation.

“I know a lot of players work this way, and good luck to them, but what I’ve noticed is that as a musician accumulates a whole series of practised patterns and ideas… they start to sound like, well, ‘licks,’ and no matter how skilfully or how fast those licks are delivered, they are still just licks, and they become very boring. And, unfortunately, those licks tend to make their appearance at moments that are not necessarily part of the actual flow that the player ideally should be trying to create. The licks appear at, if I can put it this way, disjointed moments, so that… the improvisation starts to take on a fragmentation.

“Now, there again, fragmentation in itself is not a crime, and in fact, if a player feels, say, in a quirky mood, then they can create a solo that is fully fragmented, full of little quirky ideas, jumping one on top of another, scattered here and there. But it is still possible to maintain an actual flow through that succession of quirky ideas.”

Bailey’s need for flow — for a through line, a sort of musical logic — has found her composing more and more, though she insists that improvisation and composition are “pretty much the same” for her. It’s all about “making stuff” and still comes down to instinct.

“I’m trying to allow the music to have its way,” she told me, “to have its head, to say what it wants to say without me getting in the way.”

I asked her about the compositional spark, the moment the light goes on, a piece of music comes sharply into focus, and a new piece suddenly begins to exist.

“Yes, I know that spark,” she replied. “That can happen when you feel you’re on a roll and it just happens. You make no attempt to stop it because it just feels right. It’s trusting in instinct. But then again there can be times when the intellect is saying, ‘I want the piece go this way’; and the music is saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no, forget that. It’s got to go this way!’ And the intellect says, ‘Yes but I didn’t have any plans for it to go that way.’ And the instinct is saying, ‘Tough! Just be quiet and go with it.’

“I’m more and more inclined to do that. When I’m aware that there’s a fight going on upstairs, I’m learning to trust that gut feeling. Going with the instinct rather than giving in to the intellect.”

“Giving in?” There was a pause as Bailey pondered my challenge.

“Succumbing,” she decided.

Trusting your instinct and trusting your ears, Bailey says, are the same thing. It comes down to trusting the music itself. But how do you teach such things? Perhaps the answer is to trust your students. One of them was bassist Ben Waples.

“Playing with Judy helped me to realise the absolute importance of using your ears,” Waples told Rose. “I don’t think we ever spoke about what notes/scales to play over what chord.”

Judy Bailey is very much a melodist. On The Spritely Ones, a solo album of original material recorded for the Tall Poppies label in 1998, her playing of the title track is unfussy and unselfconscious, but above all it is continuously melodic. The melody leads her — she allows it to provide that through line; the music is her guide, not the other way round. And note the spelling: “spritely,” not “sprightly.” They are variants, of course, the two words meaning much the same thing, but they are weighted differently — there’s a difference of emphasis.

“Sprightly” suggests what this eighty-three-year-old woman is, physically and mentally: down to earth and businesslike; getting on with things; heading off, a spring in her step, to the next lesson or rehearsal or recording session.

“Spritely” implies something otherworldly. Perhaps this is where the music comes from. Perhaps this is the instinct she trusts to override her will, rather than “succumbing” to her intellect. •

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When we listen to the opening of the Christmas Oratorio we hear joy, certainly, and of course it’s Christian joy, the trumpets and drums and trilling flutes heralding and celebrating the birth of Jesus. But we also hear the physical and intellectual joy of musical invention, and for Bach all these things went hand in glove. No one created more musical joy than Bach, not even his contemporary and compatriot, Handel. By the same token, no one handled its opposite, grief, so sublimely, and no one offered better consolation. In Bach, we find a composer perfectly balancing the mind and the body.

It is not universally true, but great artists tend to be prolific, unstoppable, and Bach’s output is huge. To call Deutsche Grammophon’s Bach 333 edition (just released, 333 years after the composer’s birth) a “boxed set” is accurate but misleading, for it is a boxed set like no other. The size and weight of a case of wine, it contains 222 CDs sourced from twenty-two different record labels, two large-format hardback books and seven thick paperback booklets containing, among other things, the texts of the vocal and choral works that dominate this composer’s work. I haven’t yet worked out where to put it. But that somehow seems appropriate, for great art is not made for our convenience.

Bach was born in 1685 into a family of musicians in Eisenach in the central German province of Thuringia. His father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, ran the town band. Ambrosius’s father and grandfather had also been musicians, and so were his brother and cousin, both of them, as it happens, called Johann Christoph. It was Christoph the cousin who had the most talent, and he taught the young Johann Sebastian the organ. Johann Sebastian himself would be married twice, fathering twenty children, half of whom survived into adulthood. All of them seem to have been musical, though we don’t know much about the daughters, and three of his sons themselves became distinguished composers. Quite the dynasty.

Eisenach had solid Lutheran associations. Martin Luther’s mother had been born in the town and Luther himself spent some of his childhood there, returning in 1521 with a price on his head to take up residence in the Wartburg Castle, where, under the protection of Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony, he translated the New Testament into German. We should count ourselves lucky the Bach family was Lutheran. Had Johann Sebastian been born a Calvinist we might never have heard of him.

In contrast to Calvin’s musical strictures, Luther considered music an essential part of Protestant worship and, in itself, something like a moral good. “Those who have mastered the musical art are made of good stuff,” he wrote, “and are fit for any task. It is necessary for music to be taught in schools. A teacher must be able to sing, or I will not even look at him.”

Writing a two-part study of Bach and Beethoven, the late musicologist Wilfrid Mellers called his first volume Bach and the Dance of God (the second was Beethoven and the Voice of God). He was correct to stress the dance. Most obviously in the instrumental music — the partitas for solo violin, the English and French suites for harpsichord, the solo cello suites — dance metres and rhythms are everywhere. These suites comprise allemandes and courantes, minuets and gavottes, sarabandes, bourées and gigues. They were the fashionable dances of the time, danced at court and emulated beyond, but in most cases their origins lay a century or two earlier with the peasantry. Did Bach know this? In including these dance forms in his work, did he reason that he was not merely addressing an audience of nobles but embracing the experience of all classes? It would certainly have fitted with his Lutheran beliefs: the Bible and liturgy in the vernacular, the congregation singing popular hymns.

For it was not only in his instrumental music that Bach employed dance metres. The two hundred religious cantatas he composed, first in Weimar and then later Leipzig, contain movements founded on dance. And when not specifically related to dance, baroque music in general had a steady pulse running through it. If Bach’s mind is contemplating heaven, his feet, while stepping lightly, make regular contact with the earth.

Was he aware of that medieval conceit of the life of Jesus as a dance? In his cantatas, he was drawn over and over to the notion of Christ in dialogue with his “bride,” the Church: was music, for Bach, an emulation of the “general dance”?

In 1723, Bach was appointed cantor of St Thomas’s in Leipzig, a position he held until his death in 1750. It was a prestigious but arduous role: as “Thomaskantor” he was not only responsible for providing the music each Sunday at four churches, but also for teaching the boys in the adjoining St Thomas’s School. Adjoining his apartment that is — you wonder how he composed at all! Yet in his first six years in the post he composed the majority of his cantatas, often at the rate of one per week. That’s perhaps half an hour of new music composed, copied out and rehearsed, along with his other responsibilities, every seven days. It must have been a gruelling routine, but there is nothing routine about the music.

Each cantata takes as its starting point the Epistle and Gospel reading appropriate to the Sunday for which it was intended — the second Sunday after Epiphany, the third after Easter, the twenty-seventh after Trinity, and so on. The sung text is generally a theological disquisition in poetic form given to one or more solo voices, with or without chorus. So we might think of these cantatas as sung sermons, and it is remarkable the extent to which Bach was responsible for the tone of the pronouncements. For while the solo voice presents its commentary on the day’s lesson, an obbligato instrumental line typically spins a secondary, wordless commentary around it.

A feature shared by about a quarter of these cantatas is the presence of a chorale — one of those popular Lutheran hymns — generally subjected to vocal and instrumental embellishment at the beginning of the cantata, then sung straight at the end.

As a concrete example of all this, we might take the cantata Mache dich, mein Geist, bereit (Prepare Yourself, My Spirit), BWV 115, composed in Leipzig for the twenty-second Sunday after Trinity in 1724. The day’s Gospel reading was the parable of the unforgiving debtor from Matthew 18:21, and the cantata is built on a well-known hymn by Johann Burchart Freystein. The first verse is presented upfront as an elaborate structure in which sopranos sing the tune (doubled by a cornetto), while the other voices offer imitative embellishments on top of a four-part fantasy for solo flute and oboe d’amore with unison violins and violas over an energetic bass line. There follow two long and expressive arias. In the first, which has the form of a lilting siciliano — a dance in 3/8 — an alto voice, with strings and oboe d’amore obbligato, reprimands the soul for sleeping on the job; in the second, a soprano with a double obbligato of flute and piccolo cello directs the soul, softly, achingly, to pray for forgiveness and purity. Each aria is followed by explanatory recitativo passage for bass and tenor voices respectively, and the whole cantata ends with the final verse of Freystein’s hymn, simply harmonised and stripped of its earlier instrumental adornments.

The cantata is a masterpiece, but how it went over at its first performances is anyone’s guess. The arias are such concentrated spans of lyrical introspection that it is impossible to imagine them having much effect in a large church, packed to the rafters with congregants, many of them chatting, some arriving late or leaving early through the open doors, while animals wandered about untethered.

For this listener, it helps immeasurably to be able to read the texts that Bach set and understand their background. This is music driven by Bach’s faith, and directed by it — of course, it was also his job, and he was nothing if not a professional. But even without all the theology, the music can speak on its own behalf to anyone with time to devote to it and ears to hear.

So how do we sum up this man and his art? The big box currently on my coffee table seems to demand this attempt, but it’s hard. Did Bach the jobbing musician even think he was creating art? While his time in Leipzig might have been dominated by religious music, the six years before his arrival there were spent at Prince Leopold’s court in Cöthen writing instrumental music (including the cello suites) because that’s what his boss required. And staunch Lutheran though the composer was, he chased a position at the Catholic court in Dresden by offering them one of his very greatest works — the Mass in B minor.

Bach’s body of work is immense, varied and of a consistency unequalled in Western music. It’s true to say he was not an innovator in the manner of Haydn or Beethoven, or of Wagner, Debussy or Stravinsky. He didn’t alter the nature of music. Even in his lifetime, he was called a conservative, the writing of fugues considered old hat. And yet, was there ever a more influential composer?

After Bach’s death, much of his music fell into disuse. The St Matthew Passion lay unperformed for nearly a century until the twenty-year-old Mendelssohn presented it in Berlin in 1829 to an audience that included the philosopher Hegel, the poet Heine and the King of Prussia. But Bach’s keyboard works were never forgotten and were particularly prized by other composers, among them Mozart and Beethoven, who made his Vienna debut as a pianist with a program that included selections from the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Still, if Bach was no radical, he remains a touchstone. When it comes to the organ, he is the one composer who is indispensable. An organist’s work, whatever else it may involve, begins and ends with the music of Bach. In a way it is the same with the cello. There has been music for solo cello composed in the last 333 years (most of it in the last century), but nothing on the scale of Bach’s six suites. They are simply unique, and even today, a composer sitting down to write for cello alone will find him or herself in dialogue with that music.

The 222 CDs in the Deutsche Grammophon box contain 280 hours of music, not that the composer’s complete works last that long. An important aspect of Bach’s music is its aptness for interpretation and reinterpretation. While we have learnt over the last seventy years to play this music in a manner informed by history, it is not the only approach. In this box are performances of all Bach’s music that fit the “historically informed” approach, but there are also multiple recordings of many of the works, and some of these predate modern research while others simply ignore it. There are also responses to Bach — arrangements and musical commentaries — by later composers as various as Elgar  and Webern, Birtwistle and Kats-Chernin (her Re-Inventions for recorder and string quartet, played by Genevieve Lacey and the Flinders Quartet). And there’s the jazz of Jacques Loussier’s Play Bach Trio and the still-sparkling scatting of the Swingle Singers. Bach is not only indispensable, but indestructible!

In the end, it is this quality of Bach’s music one cannot gainsay. The richness of the harmony, the exuberance of the counterpoint, the integrity of the notes on the page. Play them fast, slow them down, jazz them up: the strength of the composer’s invention endures and speaks to us irrespective of style.

It also seems to bypass the composer’s ego. When we listen to Beethoven’s music — remember Mellers called it “the voice of God” — we do indeed hear a voice; it’s the composer’s voice. We listen to Beethoven’s quartets or sonatas or symphonies and we sense Beethoven. It’s the same with nearly any other composer you can name, particularly after Bach.

But Bach is different. We listen to Bach’s music, however grieving, however consolatory, however joyful, and Bach himself — the man, the jobbing musician — doesn’t seem to be there. This is why there is no sentimentality. When we listen to Bach, we hear own grief, our own consolation, our own joy — our own Christmas. •

The post The dance of God appeared first on Inside Story.

“Hullo Zoe,” I said. “How’s the piece going?”

“It’s… coming along,” she said. “Do you have MIDI files of the third and fifth movements?”

The piece we were talking about was my sixth string quartet, which Zoe and her colleagues were about to premiere. They’d already played the second and fourth movements, separately commissioned, in 2015 and 2016, and had liked them well enough to ask for three more. But these new movements were evidently not giving up their secrets so easily. The third and fifth are rather denser and more “orchestrated” than the dance-like even-numbered sections. A MIDI file, in this instance, is the sound playback from music notation software. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface.

But let’s backtrack a moment. I’ve told you what Zoe said to me; this is what I heard:

“You know your sixth quartet? The one we commissioned from you — and paid you for? Well it doesn’t sound very good. In fact, it doesn’t even make sense. We’ve been working our arses off here, but to no avail. In a last-ditch attempt to understand your notes, we would like to have them played to us by a computer.”

Artists’ egos are fragile things. If you scratch a composer, you will discover, beneath the bravado, a thick layer of self-doubt bordering on paranoia. I had completed work on my sixth quartet in December 2017 — I pride myself on delivering my commissions in plenty of time. But since then I have composed other music, so ten months later, with the quartet finally being rehearsed in Melbourne and me in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, I was sufficiently detached from the piece to believe, all too easily, that I had royally stuffed things up.

I write my music with a pencil and paper. I imagine the sounds in my head, sketch them, move them around on the page, and gradually put things together. I go for walks to let the music play itself to me, then return to the desk to write it down. Occasionally, I wander over to the piano to try out a chord, but the music is designed in my head and on paper. When I’m satisfied that I’ve written down what I mean — that I’ve notated the music as vividly and accurately as possible — I pay a copyist to turn my handwritten manuscript into a typeset score.

Back in late 2017, I was sufficiently satisfied to send the manuscript off, but now I was beginning to panic. I emailed Rob the copyist to ask if he’d be able to send through MIDI files, and I forwarded these to Zoe. But I made the mistake of listening to the files myself. Zoe was right. This music was rubbish.

The trouble with MIDI files is that the notes aren’t played by human beings. The music doesn’t breathe; it’s flat; it lacks energy and dynamism. There are some fairly sophisticated software systems now that allow you, with a lot of extra tinkering, to come up with more lifelike sounds, and Rob offered to do a bit of work to make these sound better, but really what was the point? The Flinders Quartet would be playing the piece on Sunday — that’s if they decided to go ahead with it — and my mortification would be complete.

This was last Tuesday evening. Wednesday was not a good day. I jotted down a few ideas for some songs I’m presently working on. Then I scribbled them out. I went for a walk. I jotted a bit more. I picked my daughter up from school and we sat on the sofa reading Clarice Bean Spells Trouble by Lauren Child, which I recommend if you have an eight-year-old.

Then Zoe rang again.

“Thanks for sending those files through. What a difference they’ve made!”

“Really?”

“Now that we can all hear how our parts fit together, we know what to listen for; and correct intonation is so much easier. Everything’s clearer.”

I opened a bottle of wine.

The following afternoon, Zoe sent sound files of that day’s rehearsal. This was the first time I had heard real people play the music. The quality of the sound was distorted — I’m guessing it had been recorded on someone’s phone — and there was no atmosphere, the quartet seemingly in a large cardboard box. And of course it was a rehearsal, so here and there the playing was a bit rough. But the Flinders’s artistry shone through. There was vigour in the playing and delicacy — things that a digital mock-up can’t deliver. To my great relief, the music sounded as I had imagined it would, and in her email Zoe sounded even more pleased than on the previous afternoon.

I told my wife, who said I should write this down. And on Sunday, when Zoe rang, after the first public performance, to tell me it had gone well, I confessed how worried I’d been following her request for the MIDI files. She thought I should write it down too.

I still have no idea if the piece is any good. After I’ve heard it in the Salon of the Melbourne Recital Centre, I might have an opinion. But at least I now know it’s what I meant. •

The post Welcome to my anxiety appeared first on Inside Story.

Born in New York in 1908 and able to recall a time when it was possible to ride his bicycle the length of Manhattan and not see a car, Carter was something of a late bloomer as a composer. He had an early supporter in that pioneer of American music, Charles Ives; at Harvard, his teachers included Walter Piston and the visiting professor, Gustav Holst; later, he studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. After Boulanger, Carter emerged as something of a neoclassicist, before his friendship with Aaron Copland led him to attempt more populist works, such as the wartime Holiday Overture. It wasn’t until Carter was forty years old that he started to compose the distinctive and uncompromising music we now associate with him. Complex and multilayered, both harmonically and rhythmically, and often the result of thousands of pages of sketches, Carter’s music earned him a substantial reputation. But he worked slowly, so there were not a lot of pieces — about four per decade, beginning in the late 1940s.

In 1983, when Schiff’s book appeared, Carter was still composing, but his major works appeared to be behind him. Among them were three string quartets, the Double Concerto, Piano Concerto and Concerto for Orchestra, A Symphony of Three Orchestras, and three late vocal works to poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and Robert Lowell, a return to word setting after a thirty-year break.

But Carter wasn’t done, and the vocal works weren’t late at all. Following the publication of Schiff’s book came two more string quartets, concertos for oboe, violin and clarinet, and a series of orchestral works, three of which added up to his Symphonia, which at nearly fifty minutes was the longest work of Carter’s career. The composer completed it in his eighty-eighth year, and the work’s subtitle (from the seventeenth-century poet Richard Crashaw) was “Sum fluxae pretium spei” — “I am the prize of flowing hope.”

Symphonia had its premiere in 1998, as part of the celebrations for the composer’s ninetieth birthday. The same year, Schiff published an updated edition of his book, taking account of the flurry of works from the previous decade and a half. Surely, now it was safe to sum Carter up!

But, no. Because 1998 was also the year of Carter’s first opera, What Next?. And it didn’t stop there. Carter died in 2012, just five weeks shy of his 104th birthday, and he had been composing until a few months before that. In fact, if one looks at a chronological list of his works, the midpoint of his career appears to be his ninetieth year. As Carter approached and then passed his centenary, he stepped up his rate of production. A good many of the new pieces were miniatures, but there were also concertos for flute, horn and cello, a series of works for piano and orchestra, the Boston Concerto (in effect, a new concerto for orchestra) and a series of vocal works to words by great American poets.

No longer obliged to produce reams of sketches for each work — many of the new miniatures were themselves effectively sketches for the bigger pieces — Carter said he now knew how his music should go. But he wasn’t resting on his laurels. On the contrary, in the year of his hundredth birthday he experimented with music that abandoned his trademark rhythmic and harmonic complexity. Sound Fields has a string orchestra sailing peacefully through a sea of minims at a never-changing mezzo-piano.

Now, six years after the composer’s death, we have a new book by Schiff that doesn’t replace either edition of his first book, though it incorporates material from both. Appearing in Oxford’s Master Musicians series, Carter (as the new book is called) incorporates elements of biography, as is the house style of this august imprint.

Though he was a student and friend of the composer, Schiff is not uncritical of either the music or the man. He has, for instance, serious doubts about the worth of What Next?, which he finds charmless and full of stereotypes. Some of the later song cycles are better than others, though we must depend on Schiff’s word for this as it is frustratingly difficult to hear them. Much of Carter’s later music has been recorded, but he wrote such a lot of it that we are still awaiting recordings of his two Wallace Stevens cycles and his settings of Marianne Moore and stanzas from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

The composer was averse to letting out biographical detail, therefore much of what little we read here seems new. He was, we learn, possessed of a foul temper, partly ameliorated with age, and his political views, which many had assumed to be liberal, were probably not. His family was wealthy and Carter never needed to work. Among many titbits, we learn that for much of his life he had a debilitating stammer, that he had once been a chain smoker (an attempt to deal with the stammer) and — remarkably — that Daniel Barenboim, who commissioned What Next?, originally proposed Woody Allen as the librettist. One can only imagine how it might have turned out.

In due course we shall need both a proper biography and a fuller critical study of the music of this man who, in the end, turned into a remarkably prolific composer. But for the time being, Schiff’s book is personal, opinionated and eminently readable. •

The post The prolific old age of Elliott Carter appeared first on Inside Story.

Franklin was a showbiz phenomenon. She sold more than seventy-five million records, sang at the inaugurations of three American presidents, was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and was the first black woman to appear on the cover of Time magazine. Her voice seemed to speak to listeners more directly and emotionally — and with more variety — than any other voice in pop music. It wasn’t a big voice in terms of its range, but it was big in every other sense.

It is not often one can listen to a great singer when she was fourteen, but Franklin made her first recording as early as 1956. Singing in the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, where her father, C.L. Franklin, was minister and where sixty-two years later her funeral would be held, the young Aretha had a voice that belied her years. There was nothing girlish about the sound. As with Judy Garland, Franklin’s teenage voice was womanly. But where Garland easily made one believe in a land she had heard of “once in a lullaby,” Franklin convinced us there was “a fountain filled with blood.”

At the time of the recording, Franklin was pregnant with her second child, so she was hardly a typical fourteen-year-old. Jerry Wexler, who ten years later would be Franklin’s great producer and collaborator, described her teenage voice as that of “an impassioned adult,” adding that she sang as though she was leading people to God. The New Bethel congregation might have agreed.

“Listen at her!” someone calls out, as she sings “Precious Lord” by the great Gospel composer Thomas A. Dorsey. Listen indeed!

Since Franklin’s death, many column inches have been devoted to trying to account for her wide appeal, and it always comes down to the power of that voice. Perhaps we can narrow it a little.

Queen of Soul she might have been, but unlike that other pioneer of soul music, Ray Charles, who changed the Gospel song “This Little Light of Mine” to “This Little Girl of Mine” and never looked back, Franklin often blurred the distinction between secular and sacred.

With so many of her songs there’s the sense that she might not be addressing her man — or not only her man — but God. “I’ve Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You),” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman” all fall into this category: “When my soul was in the lost and found,” she sings, “You came along to claim it.”

In “Respect,” where she is taken over by the music, her performance propelled by its own tight, swinging syncopations, her demeanour is as much charismatic as carnal. Even when she is trapped by desire, as in “Chain of Fools,” it is as though there is another (higher) reality that puts her quotidian experience in its place.

“Truth is,” her father remarked at the height of Franklin’s 1960s fame, “Aretha hasn’t ever left the church.”

In his book Voices, Nick Coleman writes about “Oh Me Oh My (I’m a Fool for You Baby),”  the first track on the album Young, Gifted and Black (1972). Beneath the vocal confidence, Coleman senses Franklin’s fragility:

This “Oh Me Oh My” is the love song of a woman who fears that the only one you can really trust with your heart is God, but wants desperately for that not to be the case… Because God is everywhere, isn’t he? Even in the childish hearts of men. This song says that it is — but you can hear the singer making the effort to suppress her concern that it may not be true.

Coleman is right. The concern we hear is not manufactured; it is real and it is true. And that truth shone through Franklin’s singing and affected her entire persona as a performer. Even the showbiz side of her was genuine. The greatest popular performers are always genuine. They are not pandering to their audiences, they are leading them, and the audience is willingly led. It is a partnership. It is where entertainment meets art.

In shrugging off her fur coat when it became an impediment to her performance, Franklin was shedding a skin (literally) in order to get closer to her song. None of the songs mentioned above was written by Franklin — though she wrote her share — but she embodied her material so completely it seemed to come from within her, as Otis Redding cheerfully admitted when his song “Respect” became her signature tune.

Aretha Franklin’s vocal personality existed on a spectrum ranging from vulnerable whispers to shouts of triumph, and ultimately it wasn’t just about her man or her God, it wasn’t even about her. It was about all of us. She got close to her songs, and through them we got close to her. All we had to do was listen at her! ●

The post Trusting Aretha appeared first on Inside Story.

According to James Koehne, who has written the sleeve notes for Bowman’s splendid double album of songs, Real and Right and True, the composing of art songs is itself old-fashioned. Koehne points out that the art song flourished among the German Romantics — Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf and Mahler — and was gradually derailed by twentieth-century modernism. Ever since, art songs have been in the domain of conservatives such as Poulenc, Finzi, Britten and Samuel Barber (Bowman’s hero).

Koehne’s thesis is broadly true, but we shouldn’t forget the American composer Elliott Carter who died in 2012, aged 103, and devoted his final decades to a succession of song cycles with words by Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, John Hollander, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens (twice), Marianne Moore, E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. They were not only Carter’s contemporaries (and compatriots) but also his fellow modernists, though with the exception of the Hollander cycle, Of Challenge and of Love, which is for soprano and piano, the pieces were for chamber ensembles and even orchestras.

Bowman’s songs here, some of which are grouped together, even if only his Michael Leunig songs might be considered a cycle, all have piano accompaniment, and so are immediately more intimate and even domestic in tone than Carter’s. They also eschew modernist poetry, preferring words by the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Christina Rossetti, Walter de la Mare and Hilaire Belloc — the sort of poets who turned up in school poetry anthologies a couple of generations ago (and are none the worse for that). Neither the medium of voice and piano nor the choice of poet denotes old-fashionedness — Benjamin Britten wrote songs to words by both Eliot and de la Mare. But there is the matter of style.

It’s a vexed issue, and from time to time on social media, Bowman has been berated for his conservatism by more modernist colleagues with nothing better to do. But, to return to my original question, what does this word “conservative” even mean?

If a contemporary composer wrote in the style of Handel, eyebrows would be raised. It would be art in inverted commas, the musical equivalent of a playwright using Shakespearean English. Even faux Schubert or Mahler would fall into that category. But in the early twentieth century something happened to style. Musical approaches proliferated — Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky, the second Viennese school — and the ramifications are still being felt. Since then, we have had Messiaen, Tippett, Cage, Ligeti, Gubaidulina, Reich and hundreds more, but they were all part of the ramifications. This year, it is a century since Debussy died, yet so much of his work still seems current: it’s been a hundred years in which musical styles have stockpiled rather than stagnated. You don’t need inverted commas for Debussy’s chords.

The other thing that happened at the start of the twentieth century was the invention of the gramophone and, with it, the pop song. While composers for the concert hall may have been less interested in songwriting, for the rest of the world the song became the common currency of music. A glance at iTunes or Spotify will reveal that “song” has become the preferred term for any chunk of music.

This is where Calvin Bowman comes in. He is a purveyor of songs — they are central to his art — and his music, though fresh as a daisy, would not have seemed out of place a hundred years ago.

James Koehne contends that a song must have a tune. He’s probably right. At the very least, a song must be singable. Bowman’s songs certainly have tunes and they are beautifully sung here by Sara Macliver, Paul McMahon and Christopher Richardson. All three have luminous tones and near-perfect diction, though some of that is down to the composer’s word setting. My only slight reservation — and I hope he will take this as a compliment — is that Richardson’s bass baritone strikes me as a little too youthful to bring the necessary weight to a song such as Bowman’s setting of Belloc’s “My Own Country.” I wanted John Shirley-Quirk.

The shades of many earlier song composers hover over this collection. The rapt piano epilogue with which Bowman concludes the tiny setting of Belloc’s “The Early Morning” is a trick learnt from Schumann. The roistering “West Sussex Drinking Song” owes a debt to Peter Warlock. But influence-spotting is ultimately a dull game and in this case pointless, since the composer Bowman most resembles is himself.

Real and Right and True has introduced me to several poets. For example, there’s Thomas Hornsby Ferril of Colorado, whose “Song for Silverheels” Bowman has turned into a particularly simple and beautiful number for Macliver; the primitivist American William Jay Smith; and Walter Savage Landor, who was hitherto only a name to me. But perhaps the greatest test of a songwriter is the ability to take a well-known poem and fit a tune to it in such a way that it seems always to have needed it. That’s how I have felt each time I’ve heard McMahon singing Bowman’s setting of Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar.” ●

The post A question of style appeared first on Inside Story.

Under the circumstances, then, it must have been hard, in The 7 Great Inventions of the Modern Industrial Age, for Greenaway to boil all these discoveries and inventions down to the magic number seven (days of the week, deadly sins, ages of man, dials, seals, dwarfs and brides for brothers), but that’s what she’s done, and she’s done it rather winningly.

The complete work must be experienced in the theatre, where it’s a multimedia performance with an actor, pitched somewhere between a cabaret and a medicine show, but as a purely musical experience the piece is surprisingly compelling. The packaging of the disc, designed by the composer, supplements the listening experience, not only with information but also with imagery inspired by circus tents, theatre posters and old-fashioned advertisements of the cures-for-baldness variety.

Ten years ago, Sally Greenaway seemed like the new voice in Australian jazz. She was twenty-four and her first foray into writing for big band was Falling of Seasons, which she conducted with the JazzGroove Mothership Orchestra in the finals of the 2008 National Big Band Composition Competition. She won the prize (I was a judge) and seemed set for a career in jazz venues, both as composer and pianist. In fact, the next I heard of her was in a classical context, and in the decade since her big-band victory she has gone on to compose songs and choral pieces, chamber music, works for solo instruments and for orchestra, film soundtracks and music for the theatre. Her versatility shows in The 7 Great Inventions.

The originality of the project lies not so much in the sound of the music, let alone its style. Like a lot of composers of our day — Martin Wesley-Smith and Elena Kats-Chernin come to mind — Greenaway uses familiar musical types to create surprising juxtapositions and ironic commentaries. Clichés are refreshed, the hackneyed made strange.

For example, the whole thing begins with a solo piano (Leigh Harrold) playing the opening notes of Bach’s Two-part Invention in F, except that it immediately goes wrong and turns into ragtime. The piece is called “Invention Reinvention,” and it works as a sort of overture. The scene is set historically — we are clearly at the start of the twentieth century — but also musically. We can expect more of this sort of thing.

“Telecommunications,” the first of the seven main inventions (or sequences of inventions), is unveiled with a shimmering MGM-like gesture from the whole band — Melbourne’s Syzygy Ensemble — suggesting curtain up on a Hollywood musical or Broadway show. Greenaway has chosen her inventions not only for the way they improve our lives but also for their inherent and frequent disappointments and dangers. So the musical pizzazz is quickly replaced by white noise and radio static, out of which emerges a slow clarinet blues (Robin Henry) suggesting the 1920s. Later, a newsreel boast about the coming of television — of “pictures from the sky” — is answered with a call from the whole ensemble to “fix the aerial!” (Greenaway prepared for writing this piece by talking to people aged ninety and over, and she draws on their memories.)

“Aviation & the Space Frontier” leads from a Cape Kennedy countdown to rising, swirling arpeggios, astronauts Cernan and Schmitt singing on the surface of the moon, a flute tune (Laila Engle) that might have escaped from a Delerue film score and then, ominously, Jack Swigert’s voice informing Houston that Apollo 13 has encountered “a problem.”

At the heart of the work is that most twentieth-century of all inventions, “Massed World Warfare,” and here Greenaway doesn’t know what to do. A cello (Campbell Banks) attempts heroic gestures that fizzle into distorted harmonics. The piano provides banal chords. Nothing leads anywhere, and it’s as honest a response to the topic as you could imagine. Where many composers would opt for thrills and spills, Greenaway, rightly, gives us ugly torpor.

Like Beethoven after his Pastoral symphony storm, the composer now writes a hymn — not of thanksgiving, but to freedom. It’s the most surprising and touching moment in the piece, as these players begin to sing simple phrases, first one voice, then two until the whole ensemble (save the pianist, who eventually provides an accompaniment) has traded its instruments for song.

There’s nothing quite like this piece. It will be interesting to hear what Sally Greenaway does next. •

The post Magic numbers appeared first on Inside Story.

On 16 January 1943, the world was at war. Coventry, the Midlands town where Ferneyhough was born, had suffered one of the Luftwaffe’s most infamous bombing raids, losing two-thirds of its buildings, including its medieval cathedral, in a devastating conflagration. The sleepy Yorkshire town of Goole, in which Bryars was born, experienced its major incident of the war six months later, when two Wellington bombers from nearby RAF Leconfield collided over the river Ouse.

Bryars likes to speculate that this is what made Ferneyhough into a figurehead of the postwar European avant-garde, his name synonymous with fiery modernism, while Bryars himself became a sort of pastoral ironist. It’s a good line, though in its way Bryars’s music is every bit as extreme as Ferneyhough’s.

There are new recordings of both composers’ work and the polarity couldn’t be much starker. The Ferneyhough disc is notable for the inclusion of two works for orchestra. Since Ferneyhough has only ever composed three orchestral pieces and none has previously been recorded, this is quite an event, particularly when you consider that one of these works is a cause célèbre.

La terre est un homme (The Earth Is a Man) was first played in 1979. There were two performances that year, one by the Scottish National Orchestra, the other by the London Symphony Orchestra under Claudio Abbado (in his first concert as the LSO’s chief conductor). Listening to the radio broadcast of the latter, it was very hard to tell what was going on. In this massive score, the orchestra consists of eighty-eight soloists, each player allocated an independent part of unprecedented intricacy, requiring a lot of preparation and individual practice. You can’t show up to a rehearsal and sight-read this piece. Reasoning, perhaps, that no one would ever know whether they were playing the right notes, the musicians acted up. La terre est un homme was not performed again for thirty-two years, when the BBC Symphony Orchestra took it on under conductor Martyn Brabbins.

That’s the performance on this recording, and it’s astonishing. The detail that emerges is consistently compelling and, contrary to my memory of the piece as a never-ending racket, there are sections in which the density of the musical information thins out until just a handful of strings remain — quivering, glistening — before the whole thing blows up again and the piece ends in a noisy cataclysm.

The other orchestral work, Plötzlichkeit (2006) is music of surprises (the German title means “suddenly”). For anyone who only knows Ferneyhough’s earlier music, one of the main surprises is that there are rather a lot of conventional gestures — pulses, repeated rhythms, unisons. You won’t find anything like that in La terre est un homme. The other surprises come from the music’s structure, for this twenty-two-minute work consists of dozens of musical fragments that have nothing to do with each other, except for their adjacency. The child psychologist Jean Piaget pointed out that in life we make connections between things either because they are similar or because they are next to each other. This piece is full of the latter, though the longer we listen, the more our ears seem to find musical similarities. That, after all, is what ears do.

Throw in a superbly confident performance of a Ferneyhough classic — the Missa Brevis of 1966 — sung by the choir Exaudi, and this is quite some CD. But it is music that demands all of your attention. You wouldn’t play it at a dinner party, say, or attempt to listen to it on a train.

The music on Gavin Bryars’s latest album was designed to be heard on a train, specifically the train between Goole and Hull in East Yorkshire. This is a slice of musical autobiography, as charming and nostalgic as Ferneyhough’s works are bracing and visceral.

Like Ferneyhough, Bryars first came to prominence in the 1970s with a piece that divided its listeners. Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971), still the composer’s most famous work, looped the recording of an old tramp singing a fragment of a revivalist hymn, and wrapped it in layer upon layer of orchestral accompaniment. That’s the piece, all twenty-five-to-seventy minutes of it. It’s insistent, but gently so. If you surrender to the music (and you may find you have no choice) you’ll be hypnotised and very likely moved; if you resist, the piece will almost certainly make you cross.

The Stopping Train (2016) takes us from Bryars’s birthplace to the port city of Hull. The train journey along the banks of the river Humber lasts just over half an hour and so does the music, which is designed to be listened to on the way (there’s a second half to the piece for the return journey). A spoken text by the poet Blake Morrison draws our attention to what we might see out of the window, but this self-reflexive piece is very much about the sentimental education of the young Bryars.

“And so we begin,” Morrison says, “in Goole, where Gavin Bryars began, whose music you’re listening to now…”

Bryars’s instrument is the double bass, and his early musical experiences were mostly jazz-orientated. The music of The Stopping Train is full of allusions to hymns, train rhythms and jazz (specifically Jimmy Giuffre’s “The Train and the River” — well, how could you resist?), played by a quartet of electric guitar, viola, cello and double bass (the composer himself). Not only does the pace of the music match a leisurely train journey, the events in the work are timed to coincide with the train reaching different stations and what you might see out of the window: Gilberdyke, Brough, Ferriby, the Humber Bridge, Hessle, Hull.

I don’t imagine many of Bryars’s listeners will experience the piece in all its site-specific glory, but there’s nothing to stop anyone from listening on the train of their choice. The one I take each week from the NSW Southern Highlands to Sydney allows me to hear the whole recording twice. It, too, is a stopping train. The stations come and go; there are rivers, and bridges over them. It’s surprising how the journey seems to match the music — well, I suppose Piaget wouldn’t have been surprised.

With all music, if we listen hard, we begin to find its world fits ours — and that’s no matter how strange the sounds may at first seem. Bryars’s musical world is perhaps even stranger than Ferneyhough’s, but he invites us in with the wry smile of that “pastoral ironist.” And if Ferneyhough is less welcoming, at least we no longer have the bad attitudes of orchestral musicians blocking our path to an exploration of his uncompromising ideas. •

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In fact, the song had been written in 1957 by the British folk singer Ewan MacColl, and the face in question belonged to Peggy Seeger, his American lover and, later, third wife. First Time Ever is the title of her recently released and highly readable memoir.

Now in her early eighties, Seeger has spent much of her life in the shadow of others. In the first place, she was the daughter of brilliant parents, America’s musical folklorist Charles Seeger and modernist composer Ruth Crawford, who gave up composing to raise her children and then died of cancer just after she took it up again. (Crawford’s string quartet of 1931 is a major work, displaying some of the rhythmic and textural innovations we associate with Elliott Carter and György Ligeti, though they didn’t arrive at them until decades later.)

Ruth might have stopped composing, but she didn’t stop work, turning her attention instead to her husband’s area of folk music, and publishing transcriptions and arrangements of American folk songs, work that is still regarded as important. The song collectors John and Alan Lomax were family friends — one day, Alan arrived on the Seegers’ doorstep with the singer Lead Belly, newly released from prison. Another time, Woody Guthrie visited. But Peggy and her mother were not close.

Peggy’s half-brother, of course, was Pete Seeger, a legendary figure in the folk-song revival of the 1950s and beyond, and Peggy’s own work as a singer and banjo player was always likely to be overshadowed by his. For a long time, she tells us, she didn’t mind — she must have seen it was inevitable — but by the 1990s she had grown weary of turning up to play at a small English folk club only to be greeted by a poster advertising “Pete Seeger’s sister.”

And then came Ewan MacColl, a figure in the British folk revival almost as important as Pete Seeger was in America, but without the same level of recognition. Just as most people don’t know MacColl wrote “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” they don’t know he wrote “Dirty Old Town,” which is not a song about Ireland — pace the Dubliners and the Pogues — but about Salford, near Manchester, where MacColl was born and raised by his Scottish parents.

MacColl was a political hardliner — an old-fashioned Marxist — and he was a musical hardliner, too. He sang real folk songs, songs from his own tradition (he wouldn’t sing American songs because they weren’t his to sing); and when he wrote new songs, such as those mentioned above, or his magnificent sea song “The Shoals of Herring,” they were evidently cut from a traditional cloth.

Seeger joined him onstage and in life, along the way becoming one of England’s finest concertina players. After visits to the Soviet Union and China in the late 1950s led to her US passport being cancelled, she had little choice but to remain in England. In order to obtain a British passport, she went to Paris to marry Scottish folk singer Alex Campbell; MacColl was still with his second wife, so not yet available.

Back in London, Campbell handed Seeger over to MacColl: “Here’s your woman.” Seeger adds, not for the first time and not for the last: “I wasn’t a feminist back then.” But she is now, and her own songs reflect this, one of her best known being “I’m Gonna Be an Engineer.” After visiting the women of Greenham Common she wrote the song “Carry Greenham Home” for them.

Following MacColl’s death in 1989, she couldn’t stay in their London flat (she still heard his footsteps). In any case, she had a new lover, Irene Pyper-Scott. Somewhat poetically (and to Seeger’s initial mystification) she had fallen in love with Irene while MacColl was still alive. Now she had another new start. The cold war over, she could return to America; she lived there again until 2010, when she moved back to Britain to be close to her children and grandchildren. She still performs.

In First Time Ever, Peggy Seeger is proudly honest. She seldom blanches before a revelation, though aspects of her relationship with her daughter, Kitty, are off-limits in this memoir. More commonly she’s an over-sharer.

Paradoxically, Seeger’s own voice is so vivid and bright — she is so present in her own story — that we, her readers, feel like onlookers. We can appreciate her deep love for the idealistic, romantic, womanising MacColl, for example, without necessarily liking him very much. But when he hurts her, we feel her hurt.

Pregnant with their first child (“I knew at the time that I put a baby in you, Peg”), Seeger learns that MacColl’s wife, Jean, is also pregnant. Seeger and MacColl discuss names: Kirsty, if it’s a girl; they don’t settle on a boy’s name. It is a boy: Neill. Later, Jean has a girl, and she and MacColl call her Kirsty.

The book leaves us in no doubt that MacColl remains at the centre of Seeger’s life (no one else has been allowed to call her “Peg”), and that, twenty-nine years after his death, his fierce love for her is fiercely returned. It doesn’t mean she isn’t critical. She mightn’t have been “a feminist back then,” but today she has no problem enumerating his faults.

Still, listen to her sing his song for her. Her version is more clear-sighted and far faster than Roberta Flack’s. Seeger takes what most people consider a piece of lounge music, and renders it simultaneously vulnerable and tough. ●

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This is the starting point for Nick Coleman in his new book Voices: How a Great Singer Can Change Your Life. For Coleman, Morrison is a latter-day Caedmon, the seventh-century cowherd of Whitby Abbey whose divinely inspired singing was reported by the Venerable Bede. Caedmon didn’t know how he came up with his hymn and neither did anyone else, and it’s much the same with Van the Man.

“Morrison’s singing is less an act of will than an act of release,” Coleman insists. “And what a voice it is, and what confidence its owner must possess to allow it out in the way he does: often in an abrupt, gruff, hard-edged blurt, which attacks the moment as the edge of a spade chops into a sticky clod, all short-armed functionality and no flourish. But also sometimes a high fluting croon or a distracted stutter or a low burr or a carnal roar…” Precisely.

Coleman is very good at describing voices. Slade’s Noddy Holder is a “chainsaw with ginger mutton chops”; T Rex’s Marc Bolan emitted a “fey gurgle.” There’s the “heart-monitor spikiness” of early Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones rolling “syllables around in her mouth with… a combination of hunger and suspicion,” and Gladys Knight, who “made the sound of loneliness” with “a measured, thoughtful, huskily mournful warmth.”

Little Richard is here, and Bowie and Rod Stewart, Roy Orbison and Ray Davies, Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse. But the book’s cover features a photo of the young Aretha Franklin, of whom Coleman writes: “No voice in any musical style has ever cleaved so closely to the spirit of ecstasy and its close associate, rapture (plus all the bits that break off ecstasy and rapture and fall away to collect in little regretful heaps).”

Coleman focuses not on “Respect” or “Chain of Fools” or “A Natural Woman” but on a B-side — the reverse of “Rock Steady” and the first track of her album Young, Gifted and Black, a song first recorded by Lulu: “Oh Me Oh My (I’m a Fool for You Baby).”

For Coleman it is evidence of Franklin’s musical ardour, though in this song — at least in her performance of it (though less so in Lulu’s) — it is a cooler, calmer ardour than we are used to from her greatest hits. It’s an intimate record in which a table-top ballet is acted out with fingers while curling cigarette smoke conjures a genie and a magic carpet ride.

“There is no sex in this story,” Coleman points out. On the contrary, “‘Oh Me Oh My’ in Aretha’s hands amounts to nothing if not the equation of romantic hope with the exercise of make believe and self-distraction — an entire song devoted to rapture as a form of innocent play.”

In many ways, Voices is a musical autobiography, a book about coming of age musically and in every other way. The author doesn’t spell it out, but pop songs themselves — in their listeners’ minds, and especially if they’re young and impressionable — can be exercises in make-believe and self-distraction, more often than not equated with romantic hope. But in Aretha Franklin’s performance, the author also senses doubt.

“This ‘Oh Me Oh My,’” Coleman tells us, “is the love song of a woman who fears that the only one you can really trust with your heart is God, but wants desperately for that not to be the case.”

It isn’t until the end of the book that we learn that Coleman, who was once arts editor for the UK’s Independent and Independent on Sunday newspapers, and who has written about music for the Times and the Guardian, is now substantially deaf, completely in one ear and intermittently in the other. Even when not completely deaf, the goodish ear only has partial hearing. (If we’ve read Coleman’s earlier book, The Train in the Night, we’ll have known about his affliction from the start.)

Voices, then, is the author’s attempt to translate into words the sound of songs he has loved and the singers who have sung them, words that will salt down these memories for the future, in the hope of enduring “any new season of deafness, whether that silent winter was to be a lifelong one or only temporary.”

It is not easy to convey a sound in words, but Coleman’s attempts are hugely successful. Voices is a personal book, not a technical one, but the author continually finds the right analogies, the right metaphors for the voices in his head, and he brings them so startlingly to life we can almost hear them. ●

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Because Debussy was one of Western art music’s greatest composers, his passing inevitably overshadowed the death, ten days earlier, of another French composer. Here we really can speak of a life cut short, for Lili Boulanger was just twenty-four. Fortunately, she had been a prodigy, composing music from childhood, and her list of works, though short enough, contains far more music than one might expect from a young woman suffering the debilitating effects of the Crohn’s disease that finally killed her.

Boulanger was born Marie-Juliette Olga in Paris in 1893, the second child of a Russian princess, Raissa Mychetsky, and her seventy-seven-year-old husband and former singing teacher, the composer Ernest Boulanger. Always known as Lili, she showed precocious talent, like her older sister Nadia, and began attending music lessons at the Paris Conservatoire at the age of four.

As they grew up, both Nadia and Lili studied composition with Gabriel Fauré, a family friend, and in 1913, aged twenty, Lili won the prestigious Prix de Rome for her cantata, Faust et Hélène. It was a prize coveted by French composers and previously awarded to Berlioz, Fauré and Debussy, though it eluded Nadia; Lili was the first woman to win it. (Ravel tried five times to win it but never did.)

Faust et Hélène remains an impressive work, astonishingly assured for a twenty-year-old. The brooding prelude is redolent of Wagner’s Faust overture, not quite filtered through Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, but already there is enough in the music that transcends the influence of other composers. A dark, dramatic sound world also characterises the orchestral work D’un soir triste (Of a Sad Evening) — there’s a sense of pent-up violence beneath the surface — but its counterpart D’un matin de printemps (Of a Spring Morning) shows the composer creating a diaphanous sheen with her orchestration.

In spite of her failing health, Boulanger threw herself into charitable work during the war, her efforts further exhausting her and probably hastening her death. Arguably part of her war work was the composition in 1915 of a large-scale setting of one of the “penitential psalms,” Psalm 130, De profundis or, in its French translation, Du fond de l’abîme (From the Bottom of the Abyss). Again, and as the title suggests, the orchestration is dark, the harmony chromatic; the deep, rolling timpani sound like distant cannon fire. And yet, just before the end, there is something like a musical transfiguration, as the solo soprano leads the chorus and orchestra out of the depths towards the light of diatonicism at the words “Mon âme espère en Iahvé” (“My soul puts its hope in Yahweh”). This is not the work of a promising child; this is a real composer in full flight.

One of the last works Boulanger completed was a tiny setting of the Pie Jesu from the Requiem. It might lack the ambition of a work such as Du fond de l’abîme — though there is speculation she intended to compose a complete Requiem mass — but it perfectly encapsulates her musical personality. The influence of her teacher Fauré is clear enough — like Fauré in his Requiem, she gives the words to a solo soprano, and the accompaniment is just strings, organ and harp — but the music sounds nothing like his. The harmony is tonally based, but more chromatic than practically any other music I can think of coming from France in that period. Here is Lili, then, still young enough to be influenced by her teacher, but with a voice utterly her own. What would she have become? How would she have developed? And how, one wonders, would music’s patriarchy have found a way to sideline her?

In fact the Boulanger name lived on in the twentieth century through Nadia, who didn’t die until 1979. As a teacher, it was Nadia who oversaw the development of a long list of composers from the 1920s until shortly before her death. Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter and Philip Glass all studied with her, as did Michel Legrand, Quincy Jones and Astor Piazzolla. As a performer, Nadia made some of the earliest recordings of Monteverdi’s music — simple, unfussy performances that stand up pretty well today.

As for Nadia’s own music, a few years after Lili’s death, she put away the manuscript paper. Lili, Nadia insisted, had had that talent; Lili was the composer. •

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It started with Duke Ellington’s 1957 album, Such Sweet Thunder — a twelve-part Shakespearean suite — and continued in 1964 with Cleo Laine and John Dankworth’s Shakespeare and All that Jazz. Among numerous originals, Laine and Dankworth included two of Ellington’s instrumentals from Such Sweet Thunder, the solos of which had been composed so strictly in sonnet metre that Laine was able to sing the words of actual Shakespeare sonnets to them (compare Ellington’s “Sonnet to Hank Cinq” with Laine’s “Take All My Loves”).

The Melbourne-based composer and pianist Andrea Keller has drawn on classic poetry for her song cycle Still Night, an hour-long meditation on death and grief. There’s no Shakespeare, but Keats is here with one of his Elizabethan-style sonnets. There’s also Yeats, Proust and Dylan Thomas; Walt Whitman, Sara Teasdale and E.E. Cummings (twice, his poetry framing Keller’s work); the eleventh-century Japanese poet Izumi Shikibu and the contemporary Australian Richard James Allen. Some of the words are familiar — Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is the best known — some of it not. I confess I hadn’t even known Proust wrote poetry.

Keller’s approach to the words is essentially lyrical, and while their mood might best be described as elegiac, there is something uplifting, even ecstatic about the music. It is partly a matter of the voices she employs. Vince Jones and Gian Slater have different vocal timbres, yet both are rather breathy, so their voices blend beautifully, Slater’s ethereal brightness gilding Jones’s grainier tone. A third voice, belonging to Julien Wilson’s tenor saxophone and bass clarinet, is in some ways the most expressive of all, because Wilson has more room to improvise, offering wordless commentaries on the poems.

Keller’s word setting is quite classical. Her approach to Keats’s faux-Shakespearean sonnet “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be” is to stress the stresses, so, as with “Hank Cinq,” you could substitute the words of a different sonnet and they would fit the notes. “Do Not Go Gentle” is a villanelle (the first and third lines of the opening tercet alternating as the final lines of the subsequent tercets), and Keller plays with this by retaining the same melodic contours for each appearance of those lines, much as Stravinsky did in his more lapidary setting of the same poem. In fact, she goes further, making a conventional refrain of “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” always having the line sung twice. It’s an example of that understated ecstasy.

In addition to those mentioned and Keller herself on piano, the fifth member of the ensemble is that inventive guitarist Stephen Magnusson. Sometimes with Keller’s piano, sometimes apart, Magnusson provides an underlay of shifting colour, but he also has solos, and his work on “If Death Is Kind” (to words by the American poet Teasdale) is especially luminous. In this song, Keller also lets her singers off the leash, death’s kindness inspiring them to playful arabesques against Magnusson’s guitar.

The question is as tired, and probably pointless, as it is old, but in the case of Still Night it’s more interesting than usual to ask whether any or all of this is jazz. As an improvising pianist Keller appears, very largely, at jazz venues, and so do the musicians she’s teamed up with here. These songs are substantially notated, especially the vocal parts, but all require improvisation, and even the notated vocal lines are sometimes treated quite freely. (Of course, no two singers would sing Schubert the same way, either.) It is worth noting that the combo lacks both bass and drums, so the music sounds as though it belongs more in the Melbourne Recital Centre (where it had its first performance) than in Bird’s Basement.

There is no answer to this question — there never is — but it opens up a broader issue. In the work of Paul Grabowsky and Mark Isaacs, Tim Stevens and Emma Stevenson, Peter Knight and Phil Slater (and many, many more), the notion of jazz has not disappeared, but broadened to include all manner of music. The embrace of what we used to call high art — whether it’s Isaacs writing symphonies or Grabowsky and Stevens exploring Bach or Keller herself drawing on Bartók — is part of this, and so is putting poetry to music, which is no longer the exclusive domain of the classical composer (let’s not forget, by the way, Paul Kelly’s recent collaborations with Yeats, Dickinson, Tennyson and Slessor, and a whole album of Shakespeare).

But most of all, it’s increasingly hard to say what a “classical” composer is. Almost as hard as it is to say what jazz is. ●

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If her name is known today, it is most likely because we occasionally see it in the opening credits of old movies. For example, at the start of Brief Encounter (1946), we read:

Note that Joyce’s name is bigger than the composer’s. Such was the scale of her popularity in the 1940s. But while her celluloid fame ensured that her name lived on, at the time it contributed to the dwindling of her concert engagements.

She knew the risk. The year before Brief Encounter she insisted her name be left off the credits of her first feature, The Seventh Veil. But for whatever reason — perhaps she couldn’t resist the publicity — she allowed her work to be credited on Brief Encounter. The BBC and other classical promoters took a dim view and her concerto appearances dried up.

Eileen Joyce was born into an Irish-Australian mining family in 1908. Soon after her birth, the family moved from Tasmania to Boulder in the goldfields of Western Australia. Joyce’s talent revealed itself early, and she was sent to Loreto Convent in Perth where she was taught piano by Mother John Moore. Mother John’s reputation as a teacher was such that Percy Grainger paid a visit to the convent. Having listened to Joyce play, he pronounced her “the most transcendentally gifted young pianist” he had heard in twenty-five years.

The next stop for Joyce was three years of study in Leipzig, followed by an auspicious London debut. It was 1930 and the twenty-two-year-old pianist had arrived in a city where Horowitz, Rubinstein and Schnabel regularly gave concerts. At Joyce’s Proms debut that same year, she played Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3, a virtuosic showpiece that was less than a decade old. Her fame increased exponentially. At its zenith, in 1951, she played four concertos in one concert, including the first Tchaikovsky concerto and the Grieg. For each, she appeared in a different dress.

Much of Joyce’s early career involved playing new music. Following her success with the Prokofiev, she gave the British premiere of Shostakovich’s first concerto, and later his second, and played concertos by English composers Arthur Bliss, Herbert Howells, Alan Rawsthorne and John Ireland.

Western Australian academic Victoria Rogers, co-author with David Tunley and Cyrus Meher-Homji of Destiny: The Extraordinary Career of Pianist Eileen Joyce, wonders whether Joyce played new music because it guaranteed her engagements. She doesn’t seem to have been terribly interested in the music and it is striking that, having made such a splash with Prokofiev’s third concerto, she never played any of his other four. Her repertoire contained nothing of the second Viennese school and not a note of Bartók. And yet her recordings of contemporary music — contemporary to Joyce, at least — are genuinely impressive, and now we can hear them on a ten-CD set, Eileen Joyce: The Complete Studio Recordings, just out from Decca Eloquence. Joyce’s account of the first Shostakovich concerto is bright-toned, stylish and fairly crackling with life.

But it’s in more mainstream repertoire that we can hear why she was so celebrated. It is astonishingly assured playing, technically flawless and full of freedom. Listening to her fleet-fingered work in Chopin, Schumann, Brahms and Liszt, we hear her harness the technique to an emotionally spontaneous projection of the composers’ ideas. Her recording of Brahms’s A major Intermezzo from 1935 is wonderfully impetuous, yet the through-line is never in doubt.

Joyce had most of the great concertos in her repertoire, including both those by Brahms and all five of Beethoven’s, but from the 1950s she was seldom asked to play them. It was around this time she became fascinated — “seduced” to use Rogers’s word — by the harpsichord, and besides her piano recordings the Decca box set includes examples of what, to modern ears, seem very odd performances of Bach. It’s partly the instruments themselves, made by Thomas Goff and sounding like pianos with thumb-tacks in the hammers, and partly the stolid approach to the music, the very opposite of the freedom that characterises her Liszt and Brahms.

Joyce didn’t die until 1991, her final studio session nearly thirty years behind her. Even before her death, she was largely forgotten by classical music lovers. Now, with the restoration and release of nearly thirteen hours of historical recordings, we can all hear what the fuss was about. •

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Lancaster, professor at the WA Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University, is one of the foremost exponents of the fortepiano. This is the instrument for which Mozart composed his sonatas, the forerunner of the modern piano and markedly different from a Steinway grand. The shiny, black leviathan of the modern concert stage is designed to sound as even-toned as possible from the bottom of the keyboard to the top. But the fortepiano is anything but even. The highest notes are bright, thin and flute-like, the bottom octave has a dark, bassoony burr. These contrasting colours bring drama but also clarity. You can hear the different layers of the music, because they don’t blend into a sonorous wodge (however lovely that wodge might sound in its own right). And the tones die away sooner, even with the sustaining pedal down.

But the sound of the fortepiano — beguiling as it is, and beautifully recorded — is the least of the revelations on this new CD. Lancaster’s disc contains the three sonatas Mozart composed in 1783 — familiar, not to say famous, works — so the first surprise comes when you put on the CD, expecting the sonata in C, K. 330, and you fail, utterly, to recognise the music. This is because it’s not Mozart: it’s Lancaster.

In the eighteenth century and beyond — even into the twentieth century — pianists would routinely preface their performances with an improvised prelude. We know that Mozart himself did it. It’s a preparatory flourish in the style and key of the music to follow, a clearing of the throat, a call to attention that leads, after the merest pause, into the sonata itself. In the context of this recording, Lancaster’s preluding has a slightly different function: it makes you listen harder to music you probably already know.

When it comes to Mozart’s own notes, Lancaster makes sure these, too, are as arrestingly unfamiliar as possible. His attitude is one of conjecture but not surmise. History informs his approach — his essay in the booklet is footnoted to within an inch of its life — but the results are anything but theoretical. What Lancaster’s research tells him is that players of Mozart’s day (including the composer) would typically present such music with the utmost freedom. If you know the conventions — and these include liberal use of ornamentation and an exceptionally elastic approach to tempo — you can apply them at will, and Lancaster certainly does that.

Occasionally, I feel he goes too far. For example, in the A major sonata, K. 331, the first movement is a set of variations, lasting, in Lancaster’s account, more than a quarter of an hour. Since the variations themselves form a display case for Mozart’s compositional brilliance and Lancaster’s pianistic bravura, you might hope he would at least present the simple theme… well, simply. But by bar 8, he’s already applied the brakes to the half cadence. It seems fussy. Doubtless Lancaster would think I was just being boring.

I also had my doubts about the famous Rondo alla Turka with which this sonata concludes. It’s magnificently clattery on this instrument, the Janissary music that so captivated the composer here vividly fiercesome. For good measure, just before the end, a crazy, improvised cadenza irrupts thrillingly into the music. But once again I wondered whether this Turkish march music might be more effective if it marched more and lurched less.

In magazines such as the Gramophone, which has reviewed classical recordings since 1923, the question is often posed: is this a recording to live with? Does the recording contain the sort of performance the listener might want to return to? It implies a safe pair of hands, a bland performance without eccentricity.

Geoffrey Lancaster’s CD, quite rightly, is a take-no-prisoners assault on such pusillanimity. For Lancaster, music isn’t meant to be house-trained, any more than it was for Mozart. Lancaster’s performances are certainly not the sort that you would want to listen to every day — though, right now, that is exactly what I’m doing! — and in time, I imagine, the pianist’s wilder exaggerations will come to seem like affectations (some of them already do).

None of that is the point. The point is that this CD demands to be heard and will force you to think about Mozart and his music. Lancaster, I imagine, would say that this is the only reason he performs. ●

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I try hard to avoid clichés in my music and there are a fair few associated with the harp. At the top of the list is the ubiquitous glissando, created by sweeping a hand across the strings. Of course it’s the most obvious thing to do to a harp, but it’s also the stuff of a thousand movie dream sequences, and I was determined not to have a single one in my piece. Composing it took me rather longer than I was expecting.

It was some months later that I heard what Elena had done. Her piece actually began with a glissando. This was followed by another glissando, then another, then another… In fact, there are twelve of them in a row, after which come three chords played bisbigliando, both hands playing glissandi in both directions. The piece is called Chamber of Horrors, and it quickly — and rightly — became a little classic of the modern harp repertory.

This piece (which, as McGuire says, is about as scary as a three-year-old under a bedsheet) tells you a lot about Kats-Chernin and the way she works. Where my instinct was to avoid the tired cliché, hers was to refresh it. To make a feature of the glissando, repeating it until the cliché was transcended. Moreover, where I had spent weeks on my piece, she’d written hers overnight.

I believe Peter Sculthorpe once called Kats-Chernin “our Mozart,” and I imagine it was her facility to which he was referring, though just because a composer makes her music sound effortless doesn’t mean it is. Mozart’s sketches show that while he might have worked quickly — you can’t hang about if you’re going to compose more than 600 works and die at thirty-five — he wasn’t exactly taking dictation from God. There’s self-criticism and struggle on those pages, ideas rejected and urgently crossed out.

So it is with Kats-Chernin. She also works quickly, but having written a piece she is just as likely to tear it up and start again. Sometimes this happens multiple times. It’s the way she works. And she never stops. Performers find themselves being handed new bars of music on the day of the first performance, sometimes at the sixth performance.

Part of the composer’s facility is her exceptional ear. The late Richard Toop, who in the 1970s taught her at Sydney Conservatorium, told me that Kats-Chernin was the sort of student who could hear wrong notes in a performance of Boulez’s second piano sonata. But how much of this was gift and how much training is hard to say. Before coming to Australia from Russia, she underwent intensive study at the Gnessin State College in Moscow, and in 2000 she told me about it for my oral history of Australian composition, Dots on the Landscape (heard on ABC Classic FM and Radio National).

“When I was fifteen,” she said, “already I was writing two-part dictations; when I was sixteen, I was writing four-part dictations — and they were very complicated harmonies, we were doing things like Shostakovich’s music. And we had to sing the chords the way they’re spaced. And they give you a task: let’s say you start in F sharp major, and in a matter of six bars you move on to B flat minor, and you have to go through E major, D major and maybe B diminished seventh. And you’ve got to sing this after five minutes, and you’ve got to have it in your head and not make any parallel fifths or octaves. You have to think incredibly logically and all internally — it was absolutely forbidden to sing until the test. So you all sit in class, twenty of you, and each one has to think it all through and then sing it to the examiner.

“When I came to Sydney, I had to recognise a major and minor third.”

Even if aural training at Sydney Con was child’s play, Kats-Chernin learnt a rigorous attitude to composition from Toop — and a modernist attitude at that. Her final period of study, in Germany with the composer Helmut Lachenmann, ought to have cemented this stylistic direction. But the hallmark of Kats-Chernin’s art has always been professionalism, and that meant earning her living by accepting commissions not only from classical musicians and orchestras, but also from German theatre companies.

In the theatre, that ability to produce a lot of music very quickly is vital. It is equally important not to be too precious about it because, by the time it’s written, the director might have had a change of heart. The other skill you need is versatility. The theatre composer has no style: the play’s the thing.

“Our Mozart” or not, Elena Kats-Chernin is surely Australia’s best-loved composer. At a concert in Sydney for her sixtieth birthday on 4 November, ABC Classics launched an attractive boxed set of ten CDs, including a couple of discs’ worth of recordings not previously available. There’s a lot of music in that box — though it’s only a fraction of her output — and it displays both the breadth of her talent and her range of musical styles. And yet, shining through it all is the composer’s own voice: strong, often funny, always passionate.

While her ear was trained in Moscow and she acquired her compositional skills in Sydney and Hanover, Kats-Chernin’s professional education was in the theatre. For her, musical style is a matter of changing costumes. Underneath, she remains the same person. ●

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But I wonder if students in New South Wales undertaking their Higher School Certificate in English would know what he was talking about. For on their curriculum, the words “writer” and “author” have been replaced by “composer.” Composers write — or, I guess, compose — plays and poems and novels. Or rather they would, if those literary forms themselves had not been rebranded “texts.” In NSW classrooms, Pride and Prejudice is a text composed by Jane Austen.

The Australian Music Centre represents this country’s creators of “art music” (a term deserving an article to itself), and it has been inviting its members to discuss their own feelings about the word “composer” in its online magazine, Resonate.

This is not as solipsistic as it sounds. Most people would accept, for instance, that there’s a difference between composing and improvising, even if they only believe that the latter is a real-time version of the former (there’s generally more to it than that). And what about those art galleries that are increasingly full of art that makes a noise — sound sculptures and installations that emit what sounds a lot like music? Are they the work of composers?

Anri Sala, whose work is presently installed in the Rotunda on Sydney’s Observatory Hill, is not a composer, yet his Kaldor Public Art Project, The Last Resort, while visually arresting (a ceiling full of suspended side drums with drum sticks attached), has more to do with sound than image. Not only do the drums patter out their little tattoos in the breeze, they do so against the slow movement of Mozart’s clarinet concerto. The solo part and different sections of the orchestras have been individually recorded, with tempos that fluctuate according to the details of weather conditions written down in a log kept by James Bell, a Scottish migrant sailing to Australia in the 1830s. These strands of the music are heard via numerous small speakers placed inside the drums, and since they all obey their own tempos, Mozart’s Adagio continually loses and regains its focus.

The result is oddly poignant — and purely musical. Yet Anri Sala — visual artist and film-maker — wouldn’t call himself a composer.

More surprisingly, some of the Australian Music Centre’s members wouldn’t either, and I understand their general reluctance. Mozart was a composer. Bach and Beethoven were composers. “Composer” can feel like a high-status label in the way that “writer” or “painter” or even the generic “artist” seldom do, and you don’t have to be a social-media humble-bragger to resist it. It was years before I was able to use the description of myself, and I’m still hesitant.

There are also people who create musical works, for whom the term doesn’t quite fit. These are not only the improvisers and the makers of installations such as The Last Resort, but also sound artists who deal with actual sound — recorded or synthesised — by shaping it with software, say. And then there are songwriters — especially singer-songwriters — who generally don’t embrace the “composer” label. Many jazz musicians, on the other hand, perhaps tired of the world thinking that they make up all their music in the moment, seem happy to identify as composers.

Over at the Resonate website, which perhaps I should say is edited by my wife, articles have been commissioned (the first two have been published) and the AMC’s members have begun to respond. So far the improviser Jim Denley is wary of applying the word to himself because it puts him “too much at the centre,” the composer Gordon Kerry argues that the term is a useful way to describe the professional creator of music (“There are composers, and there are people who compose”), and the young Tasmanian composer Rhys Gray, taking issue with Kerry, reckons you’re a composer if you say you are, which might turn out to be the most sensible approach of all.

There is, of course, an argument for referring to all music creators as “composers,” just as the NSW Department of Education uses the word to describe all creators of “texts”: this is more or less Denley’s position. But the word also has a specialist application — one that has nothing to do with status.

When I’m asked what I do, I generally reply that I “write music,” which is literally true. Most days, I sit at my desk or sometimes at the piano, and write on large pieces of manuscript paper. I plan and sketch. I write down notes, then rub them out and write new notes. I move the notes around, I put the second note up an octave, the third note down an octave; I take a phrase and turn it upside down. I calculate rhythms and cross-rhythms. Sometimes I cut the paper up and rearrange the pieces. This is, beyond doubt, composing, and I imagine is what most people think of when they hear the word. So I must be a composer.

For some reason, though, I have yet to muster the swagger of Wonder Boys’s Q and use the term about myself unflinchingly. ●

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To the public, a conservatoire-trained classical musician would, perhaps, seem the very model of proper musicianship. All that study, all that theory. But classical musicians aren’t really called on to put their theoretical training into practice. If they have good instrumental techniques and can read music, they can simply play what’s in front of them without thinking too much about chord structures and harmonic development (of course, the best ones do).

On the other hand, to play all but the freest of free jazz, you must take your knowledge of chords and modes into your performance. It’s how you know which notes will fit and which won’t. And this is not even to mention the memorising of changes for hundreds of standards, so that you can, at the drop of a hat, play “Taking a Chance on Love” in B flat.

Because of my admiration for jazz musicians, I’m always keen to ask them questions on The Music Show but feel diffident when it comes to writing about jazz. As for composing for jazz musicians, the idea is terrifying. Yet that’s what I’ve now done.

As I was saying only last month, composers must take risks. We must write for new instruments and new voices (new to us, at least), invent new forms or perhaps take an existing form we have never before contemplated; we must collaborate with performers, writers, film-makers, painters, even other composers. It’s how we stay sharp, how we distract ourselves from ourselves, how we focus on the music.

In the last few years, I have written, for the first time, for brass band, for church organ, for guitar (the instrument I find the most demanding of all), for electric guitar (a concerto, no less), and for the national carillon in Canberra. Each came with its own set of conventions — in the case of the brass band, its own culture — and each obliged me to find fresh technical (and therefore musical) solutions to issues of orchestration or harmony or even the writing of a melody line. But confronting the Monash Art Ensemble was the scariest challenge of all.

Paul Grabowsky, the ensemble’s founder, and I had discussed the possibility of a piece for his players for some time, and I had temporised. It wasn’t until I decided the piece might be a group of songs, and indeed found the words for them, that it seemed safe to proceed. As a teenager, I had been charmed by the work of three Liverpool poets, Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough, collected in volume 10 of the Penguin Modern Poets series under the title The Mersey Sound. I was hardly alone in my enthusiasm. The volume sold in unprecedented numbers for a poetry anthology, doubtless helped by its title and the fact that it appeared in 1967, the same year as Sgt Pepper. At the last count, the tally was half a million copies.

Coming back to these poets and their work, I found a sequence of love poems — three happy, three sad — that made the structure for my Monash piece, Comeclose and Sleepnow: Six Liverpool Love Songs. Something about the precision of the diction, coupled with the colloquial informality of the expression, seemed to suit these words for my purpose.

It was Paul’s idea to invite the excellent improvising singer Gian Slater to perform the vocal line, not that there’s much scope for her improvising beyond a general indication to feel free to change notes and pull the rhythm around. For the band, however, there’s plenty of room. Some sections of the piece are precisely, even intricately, scored, but in other places, the fourteen improvisers are let off the leash.

It wasn’t easy to set them loose. Leaving bars blank but for the word “improvise” or “embellish” or simply “solo” goes against the grain for a composer who is used to controlling everything. On a few occasions, I had written music that I then rubbed out and replaced with one of those words. After all, improvising is what these players do best, and to compose well for them, you must leave them room to be themselves.

Is it jazz? Who knows? I suppose that’ll be up to the players. ●

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Among the thirty-three composers, three critics and two festival directors Varga interviewed are Sofia Gubaidulina, Giya Kancheli and György Kurtág, who, in Soviet Russia, Georgia and Hungary respectively, had to find more than simply artistic courage. It’s one thing to be sneered at by a modernist colleague, another to offend the Union of Soviet Composers.

Of course, the sort of courage Varga means is the courage to be yourself. You must have that if you are to be any good at all and it comes from confidence and drive. Any real artist is driven to make art — it’s as though the art is trying to get out — and so you could argue that courage barely comes into it; making art is a matter of necessity.

Liza Lim, another of Varga’s composers, suggests that a better word than “courage” might be “authenticity,” and to illustrate her point talks about her experience of Aboriginal art, in particular the paintings of the late Balgo artist Eubena Nampitjin. Nampitjin’s paintings, Lim tells Varga, “take me to another world governed by spiritual laws that are unknown to me and yet the work speaks with an unbelievably direct power that shakes me at my foundations.”

The fact that Lim doesn’t understand the background to Nampitjin’s art is significant. It reaches her nonetheless, and powerfully so — like music, you might think; moreover, she doesn’t know why, not exactly. She senses its authenticity, but can’t explain it. It is so often the way.

Authenticity is intimately linked to originality. You could argue that in art they are the same thing. If you are authentically yourself, you are not quite like others. But how do you stay authentic? Not by repeating yourself, that’s for sure. Authenticity is a condition that must be honed by taking risks, by trying new things, and occasionally by leaving the safety of your artistic home.

“Originality,” the poet Philip Larkin wrote to Monica Jones, “is about being different to oneself, not others.”

Liza Lim has always understood that. In collaboration with artists in other fields — especially theatre and the visual arts — or using sounds from other musical cultures (the sitar, the koto, steel pans, the double-bell euphonium), she has retained her originality, in part, by testing her musical reflexes in circumstances that throw her back on her resources as a composer. Perhaps it is simply that the more an artist is dealing with the unfamiliar, the more unselfconscious she is; the more unselfconscious she is, the more she is herself.

In her Art Music Award–winning composition How Forests Think, first heard at last year’s Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, Lim has the Chinese sheng player Wu Wei act at times as a soloist, at times as a binding agent in the intricate thickets of the Elision Ensemble. The starting point of How Forests Think was the book of the same name by anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, who posits the notion that forests are as much communities as ecosystems. In Lim’s piece, instruments form families, musical tendrils reach out and curl around one another, and the listener is invited in.

Perhaps the most authentic composer in Varga’s book — perhaps the most authentic composer alive — is this Hungarian author’s compatriot, the ninety-one-year-old Kurtág, whose relatively small output is the product of fierce self-criticism and what Varga would call — no argument, this time — courage.

Kurtág, ultimately, shows in his work that originality is not about having new ideas, or sometimes ideas at all. In his case, the sounds themselves are often commonplace — found musical objects — and yet he obsesses and frets over them, placing them in time, reordering them, until they transform into something magical.

Only Kurtág, you feel, could have a guitarist gently strum the open strings of his instrument again and again (as he does at the beginning of Grabstein für Stephan) and make this most familiar of musical sounds seem utterly strange. And only Kurtág would write a song on one note, to the accompaniment of a drone (playing the same note), which is what he does in “Alkohol,” the first of his Four Songs to Poems by János Pilinszky.

The song begins with the words “I conjure the impossible.” Indeed. And from the simplest things — almost from nothing. And that is brave. •

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Once upon a time, rock music was about youth. In the 1950s, rock’n’roll helped invent the teenager. This was the first time in history an age group had had its own music. Even if some of the performers were not, themselves, particularly young — Bill Haley was twenty-eight when he recorded “Rock Around the Clock,” thirty by the time it became an international hit; Chuck Berry was twenty-nine when he had his first hit with “Maybellene” — their target audience was teenagers.

As rock music continued to be made and some of its greatest exponents, against all the odds, remained alive, it gained not only a past but a sense of history. At the same time, we were learning what rock music by forty-, fifty- and sixty-year-olds might sound like. Sometimes it was more of the same — the Rolling Stones’ music is as it was in the beginning, even if songs such as “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” gain potentially new meaning when performed by elderly men — and sometimes it developed.

Rock also became self-referential, reaching postmodernist heights at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 80s, when Bruce Springsteen could write “The Promised Land” in dialogue with Chuck Berry’s song of the same name (Berry: “I left my home in Norfolk, Virginia, / California on my mind”; Springsteen: “On a rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert / I pick up my money and head back into town”), and Elvis Costello began songs with knowing winks to Cliff Richard and the Beatles (“We’re all going on a summer holiday” in “The Beat”; “If there’s anything that you want” in “Possession”). What had once been considered ephemeral music now constituted a body of work. Suddenly rock music didn’t just have classics in the sense of “golden oldies”; it had become a classical music. There’s a strong parallel with the development of what we normally think of as classical music.

In the late eighteenth century, there hadn’t been much sense of music’s past. If you heard a Mozart or Beethoven sonata, you’d probably be playing it for yourself: just as we might buy and read a novel, so the middle and upper classes of Vienna would have bought new sheet music, taken it home and played to themselves. And as we tend to read new novels, the Viennese public would have wanted the latest sheet music. Mozart and Beethoven themselves might have revered Bach, but his music wasn’t widely known or played because the composer had been dead for half a century.

It was only in the 1820s, towards the end of Beethoven’s life, that the concert hall as we know it came into existence and, with it, the notion of classical music. Mozart and Beethoven were destined to live on in the musical imaginations of a paying public, while older music began to be rediscovered. Today this is happening with what we might broadly call pop.

One of the most frequent observations made at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was that the music didn’t seem to have aged, even if a lot of other music from the 1960s had. The other comment I kept hearing was that Sgt Pepper was cross-generational in its appeal. But then Beatles always were and today’s teenagers are still listening to their records, at least some of the time.

We do well not to compare our own time with the 1960s. Today’s instant and continual lines of communication are another world entirely, and because of them we have available a range of music unimaginable to teenagers in the 1950 and 60s. Early rock’n’roll might have begun as a generation’s act of assertion, but the record industry quickly made it mainstream. Today there is no mainstream, in part because there remains scarcely any record industry.

In 2005, when I wrote the Radio National series Music and Fashion, I consulted my colleague Tim Ritchie about the current range of electronic and dance music (the first episode was about dance crazes since the sixteenth century). He provided me with a list of more than fifty styles, some of which were familiar to me — for instance house, trance, garage, and drum and bass — but more than half of which I had never heard of. Seven years later, revising the scripts for publication in my book Try Whistling This, I asked Tim for an update. The list was now four times as long, the categories including such sub-genres as big beat, breakbeat, breakcore, broken beat, crunk, dark wave, deep house, downtempo, glitch, IDM, laptronica, nu jazz and psytrance.

So, while early rock/pop may now form a historical canon — which, like all history, is regularly remade — it is only part of the vast array of music on which today’s teenager can draw, all of it instantly available. No more waiting for your favourite song to come on the radio.

Of course, some things haven’t changed. People still use music to help define themselves, those genre labels intended to exclude as much as describe. And music continues to reflect the world in which it is created, today’s world being more varied — or splintered, depending upon your point of view — than ever before. •

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It’s in our memories that we make sense of music, so something like nostalgia is probably inevitable. Because most music involves some element of repetition, memory plays a role even when we’re hearing it for the first time. In a short song, this is most commonly a chorus, but while it might retain precisely the same features on each appearance, we won’t hear the final chorus of a song in quite the same way as the first. Verses intervene, the song moves on and our perceptions move too. When we hear the song for the second or tenth or hundredth time, other memories come into play: memories of the first time we heard it, the associations it conjures, the music we’ve listened to in the meantime. Of course, every song will have a different set of memories for each listener.

“Penny Lane” has musical features among which we might single out Paul McCartney’s gorgeous bass line, easy to miss with all those piccolo trumpet adornments. Harmonically, the most striking aspect is that while the song is in B major, the chorus is in A. Going into the chorus, the melody rises but the tonality drops, giving the words “Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes” an aura of nostalgia. The lyrics are all present tense, but the song as a whole resembles a sepia-tinged home movie. And as it moves through its three-minute span, the chorus (the words of which change in the middle of the song) becomes yet more nostalgic in feeling. Then at the end, the chorus is sung twice, the second time jumping up triumphantly to the bright B major of the verse, complete with fanfare decorations from the trumpet. It’s quite a homecoming.

It would be perfectly possible and might seem more appropriate to present a similar analytical overview of a classical work. We can talk about keys and modulations, bass lines, melodies and instrumentation. We are less likely, I think, to relate a Beethoven symphony or a Brahms concerto or even a Schubert song to a moment in our lives. I think this is to do with the nature of the music itself.

There is something architectural about a symphony or a concerto. With a long span of music, form is as important as content; indeed, in most of the greatest works the two are inseparable. Even when the music is in three or four movements, they will be related to each other, creating a whole that, if not monolithic, is at least unified. It’s the same with the dozen or more individual numbers that typically make up a song cycle.

As listeners, we enter these works as we might enter a building; we look around, we explore. When we return to a familiar edifice by Beethoven or Brahms, our memories will affect what we discover. We will notice things we hadn’t spotted before; some details we thought we remembered will seem different. It’s inevitable with music on such a scale. I have been listening to Beethoven’s sixth symphony – the Pastoral symphony – for even longer than “Penny Lane,” and I am still discovering things.

But while I can certainly recall the yellow and green cover of my parents’ LP (Erich Kleiber conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra) and the front room of our home in suburban Liverpool where I listened to it, the music does not summon these memories. When I hear the opening bars of the symphony, I am taken into Beethoven’s world, but when I hear the start of “Penny Lane,” I am taken into my own.

We go to classical music, but pop music comes to us – like it or not. We set aside time to listen to Beethoven, but the Beatles invade our lives. It is small wonder, then, that we associate pop songs with the time and place in which we most vividly encountered them, the girlfriend we had at the time, the summer holiday we were on, the college we were at.

The ubiquitous fade at the end of so much pop and rock music (though not, in fact, “Penny Lane”) represents more than an inability to think of a proper ending. Symbolically, it prolongs a short musical work of two, three or four minutes even to infinity. Pop music wants us to remember it, to recognise its sound, to prick up our ears at its familiar opening bars; the fade-out encourages us to believe the song will never end, that we still have that girlfriend, that we’re still on that holiday. •

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The French violinist Ginette Neveu was classical music’s Buddy Holly, an international superstar who died at thirty when her passenger plane crashed into a mountain, and my dad’s account of the event has remained with me. Neveu may not have recorded the Mendelssohn, but her recordings of the concertos by Brahms and Sibelius still take a lot of beating; indeed, she was a particular exponent of Sibelius’s violin concerto. Listening now to her recording from 1946, what I find so interesting is how the mournful opening of the piece seems to have moulded itself to her fate. It is impossible to listen to the first movement without thinking of her untimely death. Come to think of it, the same goes for her Brahms.

With rock music, we half expect our favourite artists to die young. In “My Generation,” The Who’s Roger Daltrey expressed a desire for early extinction, although providence failed to deliver it, and Daltrey and the song’s writer, Pete Townshend, are now both in their early seventies. What’s more, from Janis Joplin to Jimi Hendrix, Tupac to Amy Winehouse, early death has enhanced many a reputation. We may tell ourselves that in the commercial world of rock music, where celebrity is more important than talent, the evanescence of the former is arrested by early death; we may believe that in the classical concert hall the music’s the thing. But we’ll be having ourselves on.

For one thing, showbiz has been part of so-called “serious” music from the start (at the first performance of Beethoven’s violin concerto, the soloist paused, mid-work, to play a novelty of his own devising while holding his instrument upside down). For another, early deaths are just as common in classical music and at least as mythologised – and I’m not even thinking of composers such as Mozart, dead at thirty-five, or Schubert, thirty-one, or Mendelssohn, thirty-eight.

The Romanian pianist Dinu Lipatti, whose centenary fell a few weeks ago, died of causes related to Hodgkin’s disease at thirty-three. He left us rather more recordings than Neveu but, like the violinist, has become associated with certain items in the repertory. In Lipatti’s case, we think of his Chopin first, and perhaps in particular the waltzes, which have seldom seemed more wistful than under his fingers. But is that impression a result of knowing the pianist’s story? Might his Chopin seem less wistful if Lipatti had lived to old age?

In his mid thirties, the Englishman Dennis Brain was generally agreed to be the world’s greatest player of the French horn. Then, one night in 1957, driving to London from a performance at the Edinburgh Festival, he crashed his car into a tree. Brain’s recordings of the Mozart concertos with Herbert von Karajan had brought those pieces to a wide audience, but it is possibly Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings that more people associate with him. Brain made two recordings of the piece with the tenor Peter Pears, one conducted by the composer, and if you know Brain’s story, it is hard to hear any horn player perform the solo Prologue and off-stage Epilogue, with their wondrously “out-of-tune” natural harmonics, without thinking of the young man for whom they were written.

A little nearer our own time, the cellist Jacqueline du Pré was obliged to retire from the concert stage at twenty-seven, suffering from the early effects of multiple sclerosis. It was 1973 and her career was barely a decade old, yet she had already established herself as a great player, her Elgar concerto with John Barbirolli remaining one of history’s most celebrated recordings. She was just twenty at the time, but the LP made both her and the concerto famous. Later, she recorded the piece live with her husband, Daniel Barenboim. No one before had played this piece with such full-toned passion, and few since have come close. Still, the tragedy of her retirement (she died in 1987) undoubtedly gives the recordings a special power.

The list goes on – pianists William Kapell (plane crash), Noel Mewton-Wood (suicide) and Richard Farrell (car crash) were all thirty-one – but, among the household names, Kathleen Ferrier has a special place.

With singers, we already feel that much closer to performers, because they are their instrument, and Ferrier’s voice was completely distinctive. She was a proper contralto – today they’re almost an extinct species – and her voice seemed to come out of the earth. Ferrier died of breast cancer at forty-one, so she wasn’t exactly young, but her career had begun late and, like du Pré, she didn’t have much more than a decade in the limelight. In that short time she sang old music and new (Britten composed for her voice), opera, oratorio and folk songs, but her most famous recording is of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde – “The Song of the Earth.” She recorded it in 1952 with Bruno Walter, a colleague and friend of Mahler’s, who had conducted its first performance forty-one years earlier, just a few months after the composer’s death.

After Ferrier’s death, Walter wrote, “The greatest thing in music in my life has been to know Kathleen Ferrier and Gustav Mahler – in that order.” It seems an extraordinary thing to say and we might surmise that Walter was a little in love with the singer, but perhaps, like nearly everyone else, he now simply found it impossible to listen to the final part of Das Lied von der Erde – the “Abschied” or “Leave Taking” – without remembering Ferrier’s rich, deep voice and her life cut short. •

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This is an opinion already heard about the reading of music. Just last week, at the Canberra International Music Festival, a grandmother was telling me, sadly, that her daughter had announced that her young son would not learn to read music. He was, her daughter had told her, shunning elitism.

People really should look this word up before deploying it. Elitism involves exclusivity. You can only make musical literacy elitist by not passing it on.

Most classical and jazz musicians can and do read music and resent being criticised for it. I think this explains the almost nuclear response to a recent article in the Guardian, in which a journalist, Charlotte C. Gill, argued that the teaching of musical literacy was, in the case of some children, detrimental to musical learning. Gill highlighted the growing discrepancy in Britain between music teaching in private and public schools. This is undeniable (the same discrepancy exists in Australia), and if music education is only available to rich, white kids (Gill’s point), then it might well turn music into an elitist pursuit.

Warming to her subject, however, Gill went on to argue that because some children find it hard to read musical notation, we shouldn’t bother them with it – an elitist attitude if ever there was one! You can imagine the outcry if the same argument were applied to the reading of words.

Still, when the pianist Ian Pace wrote a letter of protest to the Guardian’s editor with more than 600 signatories, including the composers James MacMillan and Michael Nyman, the pianist Imogen Cooper and the conductor Simon Rattle, one felt more was at stake than the views expressed in Gill’s short op-ed piece.

Music notation began in China and in Babylon over 2000 years ago. The systems were both a kind of shorthand, means by which musical ideas might be recorded and so repeated. Notation made possible new sorts of music – literary musical traditions, akin to the literature of poetry, plays and novels allowed by the written word. Different notational systems emphasise different techniques, which tell you a lot about the music they are notating.

For example, the notation for the shakuhachi, the end-blown, bamboo flute of Japan, will often give more information about the gestural quality of the note than its actual pitch. Because Western music is mostly harmonic in nature (unlike the majority of Eastern music), its notation stresses pitch and duration but tells you next to nothing about tone quality. But Western notation also allows the composition of elaborate musical structures.

When Frederick the Great of Prussia was showing off his new fortepiano to Johann Sebastian Bach at the Potsdam Palace in 1747, he presented the composer with a long and rather convoluted theme, possibly of his own devising, challenging Bach to improvise a three-part fugue on it – that’s to say a rigorous, developing structure in three simultaneous “voices.”

There can’t have been many musicians capable of making up a three-part fugue on the spot, but Bach was not only one of history’s great contrapuntalists, he was also one of its best improvisers, and he duly obliged.

Frederick must have been a little disappointed, because he immediately upped the ante, proposing a six-part fugue. At this point Bach demurred, explaining that he would have to take it away and work it out on paper. A couple of months later, he delivered The Musical Offering, an entire collection of pieces based on the king’s theme, comprising some of the most complex contrapuntal music ever created – including that six-part fugue, or Ricercar.

Of course, it’s unlikely that the three-part fugue in the final version of The Musical Offering exactly matched the fugue Bach improvised for the king, because it would have been virtually impossible to remember all the details. It would be equally hard to recall the details of a solo by John Coltrane or Frank Zappa if we didn’t have sound recordings. But in addition to listening to A Love Supreme or Hot Rats, there have always been those fans of jazz and rock who wanted to see the music written down, presumably to see how Coltrane and Zappa did it.

In fact, these transcriptions revealed nothing of the sort. For Coltrane and Zappa, though highly musically educated, did not represent literary traditions. Their art, for the most part, was improvisatory, their ecstatic lines spontaneous and never the same twice: to see them transcribed, the intricacies rendered in hundreds of dots and complex rhythms, is to learn very little. This is not how these musicians thought, and one doubts either could have played his own music from this notation.

Bach’s music – and this goes for most of what we loosely call “classical” music – is avowedly part of a literary tradition: approximately 800 years of Western art music that in most cases could only have been worked out on paper. You can’t improvise something as complex as The Musical Offering or Beethoven’s Missa solemnis or Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. There’s plenty of ecstasy here, too, but it was devised on the page, the score a blueprint for a grand musical design that will be built and rebuilt with each successive performance. When Frank Zappa wanted to compose for the orchestra, which he did more and more towards the end of his life, he, too, had to produce these blueprints.

Academics have tended to hold the written word in higher esteem than the spoken, presumably because they hang out in libraries. Perhaps it is for this reason that some people believe written-down music to be superior to other music. It isn’t; it is simply different, and its structure is often more complex.

It is not hard to learn musical notation – though, as with anything in education, there will be those who find it harder than others – and people who can read music aren’t especially clever: learning a foreign language is far more difficult. Nor do you have to be able to read music in order to appreciate Bach or Beethoven or Wagner – or the orchestral works of Frank Zappa.

But the ability to read music opens up a new dimension and a deeper understanding of the work of those great minds. The more we encourage it and provide access to it, the less anyone can accuse classical musicians of being elitist. •

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Folk music was once regarded as the almost comic poor relation of “serious” composed music on the one hand, and commercial pop on the other. But musicians like Giddens, who came to prominence as the lead singer (and fiddle and banjo player) of “old-timey” band the Carolina Chocolate Drops, have made it the bedrock of their art. On her first solo album, Tomorrow Will Be My Turn (2014), Giddens sings songs by Nina Simone, Dolly Parton and gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, but the first track on the disc is “Last Kind Words Blues,” a powerfully peculiar song by Geeshie Wiley, an African-American singer about whom little is known – and almost nothing for sure.

It’s one of the songs discussed by Greil Marcus in his book Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations, and there’s plenty in the song to talk about. It’s an example of what Marcus has called the music of “old, weird America,” a term Giddens has her doubts about.

“I like that term and I hate that term,” she tells me. “I know why he says it and I know what he means. It’s all the stuff that doesn’t make it into the sanitised view of what American music is. But I don’t think it’s weird. It’s wildly interesting and so much is uncharacterisable. Maybe he means weird in the old sense – supernatural. That I can get behind.” On her latest album, Freedom Highway, there’s a supernatural element in a song Giddens wrote with her producer, Dirk Powell, “We Could Fly.” It refers to the belief that back in Africa, the ancestors of American slaves were so free they could fly in the air.

Freedom Highway represents a different sort of tradition, that of African-American resistance, running from what Giddens calls “the time of bondage” to the Black Lives Matter movement. Its emotional focus is a song called “At the Purchaser’s Option,” inspired by a nineteenth-century newspaper advertisement, reprinted in the booklet accompanying the album. It reads as follows:

For sale, A remarkable smart healthy Negro Wench, About 22 years of age; used to both house work and farming, and sold for no fault but for want of emply [sic]. She has a child of about 9 months old, which will be at the purchaser’s option.

“I was reading a lot about the civil war,” Giddens explains, “the slavery era, and I saw this advertisement and it just killed me. You know, I’ve got two kids and I assume that when I wake up each day they’re still going to be mine; it’s an inalienable right. But the fact that this woman had no control over that or her body or her work or anything: how do you live through that? How do you make a life not even knowing if your basic family unit is going to stay together? So that’s where the chorus came from: ‘You can take my body, you can take my bones / You can take my blood, but not my soul.’

“Women, men, children are still being trafficked today, they have their passports taken from them, they have no agency. Part of the job of the folk arts is to comment not only about what went on, but what still goes on. That’s why I didn’t put any markers in that song that would tie it to the antebellum South or the plantations: this is a woman who is in a position like so many people even now. It’s not just an American story.”

For Giddens, the “folk arts” include rap, and her nephew, Justin Harrington, contributes his own voice and words to “Better Get It Right the First Time,” a song about a mother’s fears for her son in a time of racial profiling.

The civil rights movement of the 1960s is another strand on the album – you might say it is the connecting strand. Richard Fariña’s “Birmingham Sunday,” made famous by Joan Baez, is a quiet, respectful (and therefore devastating) song about the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, and the death of four girls. But the Staple Singers’ “Freedom Highway,” which lends the album its title, seems oddly connected to the present.

“The whole wide world is wonderin’ / What’s wrong with the United States,” sang Pops Staples in 1965, and it’s a question many are asking again. But while Giddens’s album might seem like a response to the current incumbent of the White House, the album was already in the can at the time of the presidential election.

“I started some of these songs four or five years ago,” Giddens explains. “And it’s a little distressing that the album seems so timely. We finished it right before the election and it had a different title. It was originally called ‘At the Purchaser’s Option,’ but we realised that with what was coming we were going to need some hope. ‘Freedom Highway’ was already on the album, and we changed the title to that the day after the election. Now I can’t imagine it being called anything else.” •

Rhiannon Giddens spoke to Andrew Ford and sang two of the songs mentioned in this article on Saturday’s episode of The Music Show on Radio National.

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Auden was paraphrasing an observation by the poet and purveyor of aphorisms Paul Valéry. The Frenchman had been more precise, explaining that “a work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death.” Of these four states, “satisfaction” is the only one that wears off, as Valéry’s compatriot and contemporary, the post-impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard, knew well. Even when one of his paintings was hanging in a public collection, Bonnard was known to whip out his oils and touch up a detail that no longer satisfied him.

In 2007, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra gave the first performances of my short piece Headlong, a work it had commissioned as part of its seventy-fifth birthday celebrations. Jeffrey Tate was the excellent conductor and he drew a particularly fine, clear, even passionate performance from the orchestra. The piece was meant to be a celebration, but something seemed wrong.

Headlong was a piece with a plan. Its structure involved a seventy-five note melodic line – a tone row – that shot around the orchestra, its rhythm always fluctuating, leaving its harmony in its wake. The row repeats a semitone higher, then a semitone higher, then a semitone higher, until finally it runs smack into a suitably jubilant chord of A major. It was a display piece for the orchestra – everyone gets a little solo – and bar for bar, the music sounded fine. But the ending appeared to come from nowhere.

Apart from devising my long tone row, the only thing I’d decided in advance was that it would be unstoppable; this line would rush through the piece – headlong – from start to finish, now in one octave now in another, now in the violins, now on the tuba, slowing in the middle of the piece, but never stopping. Yet that final chord never felt earned; the arrival at A major lacked inevitability, even if my long and winding row insisted that it was inevitable.

At the end of the first performance, I thanked the conductor and asked if the following night he might bring himself to play the central section a little more slowly; after the second performance, I asked him to play it more slowly still; finally, following the third performance, I asked him to slow the whole piece down. Sir Jeffrey is a lovely man and did as I asked. I have a CD of all four performances, each longer than the last. Headlong wasn’t a disaster – the ABC sent the final performance to the European Broadcasting Union and, for the next few years, radio royalties trickled in from all over Europe – but I still wasn’t satisfied. When the SSO informed me it would be playing the piece again in the 2017 season, I decided it was time to pull it apart and fix it.

There is nothing wrong with using a system. It functions like a clamp on some aspect of the music, usually rhythm or, as in this case, pitch. Composers have been doing it since the Middle Ages, and there can be something powerful in a work of art that contains fixed elements (my tone row) alongside free elements (everything else in the piece). But sometimes, a system can lead you into trouble, because having established the rules of the game you tend to follow them. The tone row in Headlong ran through the piece without stopping. That was the point of it. But it ought to have stopped. The listeners – I include myself – needed more time to take in all that information, and slowing the music down wasn’t enough.

So I cut a hole in the music just after it reaches the central section. There’s a silence, a moment to breathe and reflect on the story so far. After the music picks up and carries on, there are numerous places where a note is held longer, a couple of bars are inserted to draw out a harmony, a rhythmic figure extended. I felt the piece was a tight-fitting garment that I was letting out. In the process, of course, I was breaking my own rules. There were now places where the line of notes didn’t move forward, but lingered or doubled back on itself. Well, they were only my rules.

So is Headlong now finished or merely abandoned again? One of the changes I made to the score when I revised it was to add a new last bar. It didn’t replace the old last bar, but was in addition to it. A second thought, an esprit d’escalier. The final peroration happens as before, though at slightly greater length and leading more purposefully to the A major chord. But where once a big fat pause sat on that chord, now it is played in strict tempo, followed by a sharp attack on the same chord, then a (sort of) F sharp minor eleventh chord (in case you’re interested) that splinters apart as individual woodwind and percussion instruments execute little figures that slow down, independently, to nothing.

So the music disintegrates. Far from the triumphant blast that ended the original version, this time the piece actually sounds as though it’s been abandoned. •

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When Shriver gave what some would describe as her infamous speech to the Brisbane Writers Festival last year, claiming the inalienable right to invent and, in the literary sense, embody any character of any race, gender, age, sexuality or creed, she drew a resounding response, most of it negative, a lot of it very angry. I was briefly tempted to wade into the discussion, but the waters looked a bit choppy. This was Shriver’s doing, of course. She set out to annoy people and succeeded. Anyone who describes herself as a “renowned iconoclast” (or “renowned” anything) is already annoying. But I don’t think she was wrong in her assertion of imaginative freedom. She might have lacked nuance in a discussion where nuance ought to play a big part – and she lacked sensitivity, God knows! – but she had a point.

Composers run up against these issues all the time. In writing a mass a couple of years ago, I made the American spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” the starting point for my melodic writing. The mass was dedicated to “all who seek asylum,” and the reference seemed apt. If you know what to listen for, you can hear the spiritual, particularly in the Kyrie and Benedictus, but if you don’t know it’s there, you’ll probably miss it. I didn’t want people to miss it, and since I wasn’t sure how familiar my listeners would be with “Motherless Child,” I made an a cappella arrangement of it that could be sung before the mass. At the first performance, in St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane, the choir sang the arrangement at the start of the service.

Last year the Song Company included it in a concert, and sang it beautifully. But Antony Pitts, the Song Company’s artistic director, told me later there had been some discussion among his singers about the propriety of performing a white man’s version of a song that grew from the struggles of African-American slaves and was, presumably, composed by an African American. (Like most other spirituals, “Motherless Child” is anonymous.) I was taken aback by this, not because the singers didn’t have a point, but because it hadn’t crossed my mind that I’d done anything wrong. Didn’t spirituals belong to us all?

I don’t know when I first heard “Motherless Child.” I feel I’ve known it all my life. I certainly remember as a schoolboy hearing Odetta’s recording in Pasolini’s film The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. So the song seemed part of my musical makeup, rather than some exotic appropriation, which is why it hadn’t occurred to me I was being culturally insensitive.

It’s a delicate area – more delicate, in some ways, than its literary equivalent, because it’s one thing to invent a fictitious character, another to appropriate a musical artefact. Stravinsky is supposed to have said that mediocre composers borrow but great composers steal. The source of the quote is elusive, but if he did say it, he was on to something. When you steal, you make somebody else’s property your own. Stealing music isn’t like stealing a car – whoever you stole the music from still has it – but when you put your stamp on it, you create something different, something new.

But what can be stolen? I have two rules of thumb, the first based on copyright: I don’t want to be sued, though of course I can ask permission of the copyright holder. The second, less prosaic and more vague, is to do with familiarity. Assuming the music in question is in the public domain, does it feel like it’s part of me? I’ve used a lot of folk music in my pieces – British, Celtic, European and Appalachian – songs and dance tunes that in some cases I’ve dressed up in new arrangements, and in others used as the starting point for my own musical invention. My viola concerto, The Unquiet Grave, was like this, an English folk song generating nearly every aspect of the music, though itself unrecognisable until the end of the piece when the solo viola at last has the tune.

What sort of music wouldn’t I use? Aboriginal music would be an example. Not just because it isn’t mine, but because it doesn’t feel like mine. I didn’t grow up with it. It wouldn’t fit my music in the way an old English song sometimes does. Perhaps if I’d been born in Australia and surrounded by Indigenous songs my whole life, I’d feel differently. Then, of course, I would ask permission of the owners of the music. Which raises a significant question: what exactly is the public domain, and where are its borders? And where, for that matter, would you seek permission to use an African-American spiritual?

I am also wary of style theft – of composing music in the style of a spiritual or impersonating a didgeridoo. To me that would feel fake. But I can only speak for myself; I can imagine it being done well by someone else.

Doubtless much of this article will read like a string of rationalisations, and perhaps it is. I don’t know if my pleading would stand up in a court of morality. I would like to think I am sensitive to the issues, more sensitive than Lionel Shriver (though that wouldn’t be hard), but I’m also aware of the danger of misplaced liberal outrage, which is something I’m often guilty of myself.

One of the most famous cases of alleged cultural appropriation in recent years was Paul Simon’s Graceland and the South African music he used on the album. But three years before Graceland, there was Malcolm McLaren’s Duck Rock, full of the sounds of South African township jive, along with hip-hop and South American music. In the case of one song, McLaren was sued by South African musicians for plagiarism, but the wider issue was whether he had any right to be using African music at all, even with permission. As with Shriver’s speech and the responses of her detractors, there was a want of nuance.

I liked Duck Rock at the time, and still do, but I felt conflicted. Then I bumped into a friend of mine, an architect who had been working in Uganda. He told me that in the market places of Kampala they were listening to nothing else. •

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Deutsche Grammophon’s handsome boxed set of 55 CDs and three DVDs containing all Pollini’s recordings from more than forty years is a fitting celebration of the pianist that underlines his focused approach to the repertoire. You could argue, I suppose, that it’s a rather narrow focus. All of the Beethoven sonatas and concertos are here (the concertos in two separate recordings), together with the Diabelli variations. There is virtually all of Chopin (some of that twice, as well), rather a lot of Schumann, those late Schubert sonatas and the Brahms concertos – three times, with the conductors Karl Böhm, Claudio Abbado and Christian Thielemann. There’s also Debussy’s Etudes and Book 1 (but not Book 2) of the Préludes, a few Mozart concertos, Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, a single disc of Liszt, Webern’s Variations, Berg’s Sonata and all of Schoenberg’s piano music, including the concerto. Well, that’s not bad actually, particularly when you add in the famous recording of Boulez’s second piano sonata, discs of music by Luigi Nono and a DVD featuring Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X. You couldn’t really call that narrow.

And yet most of Bach isn’t here; there are no Mozart sonatas and no Haydn at all; surprisingly, there is no Bartók beyond the first two concertos, not a note of Ravel and practically no Russian music. In 1972, Pollini’s first disc for DG was of Prokofiev’s seventh sonata and the three Petrushka dances of Stravinsky – in both cases, I’d argue, recordings that have never been surpassed. But there he stopped. (For this release, DG has unearthed an old radio broadcast of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 from 1974.)

Why is Pollini special? In a word, I suppose: clarity. I was tempted to say fidelity, but that’s such a loaded term, and anyway Pollini’s art doesn’t involve fidelity to every aspect of the music. For one thing, his interpretations can seem a little old-fashioned. Karl Böhm’s Mozart, for instance, though stylish in its way, paid scant regard to matters of historical performance practice, much in the air when he worked with Pollini in the 1970s. The tempos in the piano concertos they recorded together are generally slow, the orchestral textures rather well-upholstered. And when Pollini recorded more Mozart concertos, this time directing the Vienna Philharmonic from the keyboard in the early 2000s, the approach was only a little different.

In general, Pollini’s interpretations haven’t changed much over the years. His first recordings of the Brahms concertos (with Abbado for No. 2 and Böhm for No. 1) date from the 1970s, while his latest versions (with Thielemann, live in Dresden) are among his most recent releases. The broad approach is the same, the tempos hardly varying, but the details become more sharply etched and find their place yet more convincingly in the overall structure of the music. You sense connections between motifs and a kind of inevitability about the performances, as though the pianist is thinking less and playing more. To give a concrete example, the second Brahms concerto opens with a solo horn melody that is completed by the first entrance of the piano: in 1976, with Abbado, Pollini lingers a little over his first bottom B flat; in 1995 – again with Abbado – he lingers hardly at all; in 2013, with Thielemann, he moves right along.

There are aficionados of Chopin’s music who will complain that Pollini’s approach has a want of rubato, the rhythmic freedom with which, we know, the composer himself played his music. But we don’t know how much rubato Chopin applied. There’s plenty of flexibility in Pollini’s accounts, just no exaggeration. And while critics have labelled his technique “steel fingered,” the implication being that his playing is somehow unfeeling, I confess I don’t hear that at all. On the contrary, more often than not he reveals the composer’s score in such a way that it glows with life. In the finale of Mozart’s G major concerto K. 453, to take a small example, I’ve never heard the running left-hand quavers in the second variation so powerfully articulated. So often, Pollini’s clarity is simply thrilling.

The score is the thing, and Pollini makes you believe in it as much as he does. Take Boulez’s second sonata, as daunting a work of mid-twentieth-century modernism as you could wish to hear, and fiendishly difficult – the cruelty of Artaud combined with the virtuosity of Liszt. In concert, Pollini plays it from memory, and I once heard him play it in London’s Royal Festival Hall, beside me a dapper gentleman in his sixties or seventies with a very plummy accent. A retired military man, perhaps, or the chairman of something in the City. Maybe both.

This sonata lasts thirty-five minutes and takes no prisoners. Pollini played it last, after Beethoven and Webern, and I couldn’t help hearing it through my neighbour’s ears and what I imagined to be his sensibilities. I was convinced he must be hating it. But Pollini got him. At the end of the performance the man turned to me, red in the face, his eyes bright with excitement.

“Do you know if there is a recording of that?” he asked. I said there was and I’d seen it for sale in the foyer.

“I’m going to buy it,” he said, rising quickly from his seat. He missed two encores. •

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The present outcry over the announcement that Radio National will cancel most of its music programs shows just how personally people engage with music. When we love an album or a song or a piano concerto or whatever, we will make it our own and find uses for it in our lives. Most of us can name music that cheers us up, calms us down or makes us want to go out and do great deeds. When we grieve, there is music to grieve by. Often enough, the end result is a kind of catharsis. You could argue that the blues is a whole musical genre based on that principle.

Music bypasses reason; we experience it, in the first instance, viscerally. But the more we listen, the more we deepen our knowledge. Some of the anger expressed about the RN cuts has centred on a line in the original statement from the ABC that read, “RN will focus on big ideas and big thinking – and therefore will move away from music programming.” But music is about big ideas, was the retort, or what are Beethoven and Wagner? What is Robert Johnson? What is Charlie Parker? What is Hildegard of Bingen?

Well, yes and no. Music may sometimes be about “about” ideas, but I would say that without exception music is ideas. Beethoven’s ideas were his music, which is why they’re hard to talk about. If music were about something else, an idea translated into music, one could discuss it as one discusses a film or a novel. This is music’s uniqueness. And it’s why when music does come with words, it’s so often the words we talk about. With words we are on solid ground; we can identify those “big ideas” because we can name them. But even as we talk about the lyrics of a song, its music is operating at a more profound level somewhere inside us.

Fiona Maddocks is the music critic of the Observer newspaper in Britain. In Music for Life she doesn’t so much convey the music as write around it, introducing a piece and inviting us to investigate for ourselves. So we learn about the composers of the music she has selected, we discover some of the background to the pieces, some of the historical context, and we learn a little about Maddocks herself. The book recommends works from across some 800 years of what we might broadly call Western art music, from the chant “Columba aspexit” by the aforementioned Abbess Hildegard (1098–1179) to a late work by the longest-lived major composer in history, Elliott Carter (1908–2012). They are loosely grouped under headings that, as Maddocks says, describe “an arc of life” from “Childhood, Youth” via “Love, Passion” and “Grief, Melancholy, Consolation” to “Time Passing,” that last section including Carter’s Dialogues II, composed at the age of 103.

Along the way, there are sections about journeying and exile, war and resistance, and one entitled “Alive, Overflowing,” which includes Bach’s astonishing outpouring of happiness – “One joyous explosion after another,” to quote Maddocks – the motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied (“Sing unto the Lord a new song”).

The psalmist’s injunction here is unambiguous. Old songs won’t do; the Lord needs new songs, and so do we all. If I’m feeling enervated or disappointed in the world, I will deliberately seek out music that I’m not familiar with but know I can depend on because it’s by Bach, say, or Brahms or John Coltrane. I can explore with confidence and discover something that will certainly be worth my while. If I’m feeling good about life, I’ll take a punt on something utterly unfamiliar. There is no thrill quite like hearing music for the first time and finding a connection with it.

As we come to know a piece of music, we take it into our life. Unlike a film or a novel, we find ourselves humming it walking down the street; we didn’t consciously think about it, it just popped into our head. We form personal relationships with music and – as with real relationships – they change over time. With the greatest music, no matter how often we listen, there’ll always be something we’d never noticed before.

Maddocks has selected her hundred works with care and knowledge, but the experience of reading Music for Life is serendipitous. There are pieces famous and familiar, major, minor and obscure. The Rite of Spring and Mozart’s Requiem are here, but so is a lullaby by Manuel de Falla and a little Christmas carol for child refugees by Debussy. There is even one composer of whom I had never previously heard, Florence Price (1887–1953), an African-American woman whose Symphony in E minor had its first performance in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra before an audience of 4000 people that included George Gershwin.

Maddocks’s book, like well-crafted radio, introduces you to pieces of music, sets individual works fascinatingly alongside each other, and presents you with numerous leads for further exploration. •

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