Palates and Palettes

SINCE a great deal of this book is about music, this seems a good point to pause and describe my feelings about music in general, and writing music, and orchestrating music.

If I had to pinpoint one piece which really turned me on to music as a child, it would have to be Debussy’s ‘L’Apres-midi d’une faune’. I was fifteen when I heard it played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with Adrian Boult conducting in my school hall. Listening to it, I couldn’t believe that human beings were making such an incredibly beautiful sound. I could see these men in their monkey-jackets, scraping away at pieces of gut with horsehair and blowing into funny instruments with bits of cane on their ends. But the mechanical things I saw simply didn’t relate to the dream-like sound I heard. It was sheer magic, and I was completely enthralled.

My curiosity aroused, I got hold of the miniature score of the work, looked at it and saw how it was done. I saw which bits’ were on flutes and which on clarinets, I saw where the French horn came in, the special sforzando effects on the strings, and so on. I looked at it, I analysed it, and today I know exactly how that piece of music works, and precisely why it is so clever. And in spite of knowing those things technically, I still think it’s the most magical, wonderful piece of music.

But although today I can write music like that myself, I didn’t do it first. Debussy did. The real wonder of music and orchestration is that you can actually paint sound, yet no modern artist worth his salt tries to imitate Bot-ticelli. Classical music was my first love, and I am often asked what I am doing working in the pop field. ‘Isn’t it something of a comedown?’ is the typical question, but the typical answer is ‘No!’, for various reasons.

To start with, the ‘classical music’ that people refer to when they use the term is old music, music that was written at least fifty and more often at least a hundred years ago. Of course, there is contemporary ‘classical music’. But to most people it sounds extremely dissonant, and I personally don’t know anyone outside the profession who really enjoys listening to it.

To be fair, most composers writing contemporary ‘classical music’ are in a cleft stick. They can’t use the styles which have already been evolved, because then they’re accused of being romantic, or sensuous, or derivative. So the only way to go is to write new sounds - and remember, even the twelve-tone scale is old-fashioned now, and almost regarded as romantic itself. The result is that the modern ‘classical’ composer either writes stuff that most audiences can’t stand, or reverts to writing symphonies that could have been written by Brahms. And what’s the point of that? So ‘classical music’ becomes a one-way street; and that’s where pop music has come into its own, because it can be truly creative.

What’s more, many ‘classical’ composers have obviously been popular. Schubert, for instance, wrote ‘pop’ music in that his songs were sung for the pleasure of ordinary people. Even Beethoven wrote for hands and so on. At the same time, one has a certain reverence for them simply because they laid the groundwork of our basic musical culture. But if Bach were alive now, I’m absolutely sure that he’d be working at music in the same way that we do in the business today. Above all, he was a worker and a craftsman, and he didn’t enjoy much reverence in his time. He was really hard-working; he trudged hundreds of miles to try to meet Handel, because he’d heard so much about this famous man who was the toast of London and a friend of the king. (Poor old Bach never did meet him; he missed him by a day.) He lived comfortably, but never in luxury, which was hardly surprising since he fathered twenty children by his two wives. There was no choice but to work hard, running a choir, playing the organ, and constantly writing music for his patron, the duke of wherever it happened to be at the time.

The duke would say: ‘I need a cantata for Sunday week because it’s the wife’s aunt’s birthday.’

Bach would say: ‘It’s going to take me a while to write it, your dukedom.’

But that never helped, because the reply would inevitably be: ‘Sorry about that, Johann, but I do need it for that day, and you do want to eat next week, don’t you?’

So Bach would go home and think: Oh, hell! What am 1 going to write now? Ah, I know. There was a good little tune in that string quartet I wrote three months back. I can take that out and give it to the sopranos. He would literally do this, pinching his own material, rearranging it, and then saying to himself: That’ll do. He’ll never know I wrote it before.

And when he presented the duke with his cantata, sure enough, that worthy wouldn’t recognise it, and would be delighted. ‘Great. You’ve done it again, Johann. Terrific.’

Bach would just keep churning it out, writing away like a film writer of today who has a deadline to meet - and God knows, Bach had plenty of those. So whether or not he’d have a regular number-one spot in the hit parade today, I’m quite certain that he’d be in there pitching. The one thing he wouldn’t have been doing is punk rock, because he was musical and punk rock wasn’t - it was a separate phenomenon altogether.

Of course, there are composers working in the ‘classical’ style today, and very successfully; but usually for special reasons. Take Khatchaturian, who died recently after a life of writing extremely popular ‘classical’ music. I suppose I call his music ‘classical’ rather than anything else because he wrote symphonies, and because he wrote for orchestra rather than rock group. But one of the main reasons for that is that in Russia they regard the development of electronics in music, pioneered by the West, as being bourgeois and decadent. They have few rock groups, and what there are are carbon copies of ours; that’s why there’s such a demand for our rock records behind the Iron Curtain. So, if any musician is going to be encouraged in Russia, it won’t be in that direction, but into the footsteps of Tchaikovsky, Borodin, and so one. Naturally a Khatchaturian, if he has any talent at all, will tend to write for symphony and ballet orchestras.

Now that’s fine, because they have an outlet for that music. But in the West, sheer economics operate against large orchestras. In the ordinary way, no one can afford to have an orchestra playing his or her music. Composers do get commissions, of course, but the outlet for the big orchestral style is almost invariably in film music. The hard fact is that if, as a composer, I say, ‘I only write for symphony orchestra,’ the response is bound to be: ‘Hard luck, mate. You’ll never hear it played, will you?’ Havergal Brian proved that with the enormous list of symphonies he wrote, only a few of which have ever been performed.

The same constraints apply in the recording of music. When I started at EMI, my job was to make recordings of classical music. But it was the move into creative pop work that made the job truly worthwhile, and infinitely more interesting. It’s possible I won’t be remembered for it in a hundred years’ time, but it’s certain I won’t be remembered for making yet another recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. So many recordings have been made of that kind of work that there’s no way of contributing anything new.

There isn’t a single classical performer who is creating music in the way that a lot of the pop performers are.

Much of pop music depends on arranging and orchestration - things which are very difficult to teach. The old man who taught me at the Guildhall used to give me exercises. He would say: ‘Now, next week I want you to take the second movement of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata and score it for a symphony orchestra.’ I would spend ages scoring what would be one movement of a symphony, but the trouble was that I never heard it played, so I never knew what rny orchestration would sound like. But he had the experience to know, and he would look through it and say: ‘Oh, yes, very good. I like that. I like the way you used the strings there. But I wouldn’t put the bassoon on the third there. That makes it too thick on the bottom.’ He would tell me what I should and shouldn’t do - but, since I never heard it, I could never truly assimilate his teaching. Today, I can hear something in my mind, but I couldn’t then.

Of course, I had written and played my own pieces on the piano, but that was different altogether. It was a sort of musical doodling with the fingers, which turned into something. But that’s the fingers doing the writing for you, and of course you hear it as it happens. I can sit and ramble on the piano for hours and not play anything. It’s like automatic writing - the fingers just go their own way. That isn’t cerebral composition.

Nor is it orchestration, which is different from composition in any case. Orchestration is a matter of giving colour to lines that are already there, and that is simply a question of experience. There are certain things which, if you do them one way, will produce a particular sound, but which with only slight modification will sound completely different. No amount of lecturing will ever tell you the right method so that you will be able to apply it automatically. Of course, there are certain basic rules you can follow in order to avoid falling straight into a musical manhole, but the actual craft, the technique of being a first-class orchestrator, can only be won by experience. It has nothing to do with music in its pure form. Composition is a cerebral exercise of musical line and harmony, and whether it’s performed on a synthesiser or by a hundred-piece orchestra, it’s still the same music. The basic design doesn’t change. What orchestration does is to give it life. And however you choose to do that colouring changes totally the way in which the audience receives the basic line.

This struck me forcibly when the Beatles came along. There were many people who couldn’t assimilate their tunes, because they couldn’t hear the music for the noise. They thought that the Beatles were a noisy and objectionable group, much as people (with greater reason) thought of punk rock. The average middle-aged person heard them and said, ‘Gosh, what an awful noise!’, and didn’t listen to the music, or the harmonies, or the words.

It wasn’t until they became more popular, when artists like Mantovani started recording orchestrated versions of their songs with pleasant, syrupy sounds, that that same middle-aged person started to say: ‘Oh, that’s a nice tune. That’s the Beatles, is it? They do write good music, don’t they?’ What that person was hearing was exactly the same tunes, the same harmonies, the same basic lines - done in a way that the middle-aged ear could assimilate.

But as time went on, it became more than a mere matter of tunes and harmonies. We actually developed into a composition team, a creative team building musical images which no one else had done before or was doing then. I’m not saying that the results were the equivalent of Bach’s Mass in B Minor, but at least they were creative, they weren’t sterile, they weren’t reproductions of anything that had been done before.

Orchestration is clothing. You could take a Beethoven string quartet, which to some people would be as dry as dust, and you could dress it up in a different way. It would be the same music, but now those people would enjoy listening to it. And of course that’s exactly what happens; every couple of years or so, someone dresses up a classical piece in some new finery, and, lo and behold, it gets to the top of the hit parade.

In orchestral classes at the Guildhall I also had to do the reverse - that is, take an orchestral piece and translate it for piano. Of course, a lot of well-known composers have done that. Rachmaninov turned Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition* into a piano piece, and it’s now a famous part of the repertoire.

The astonishing man was Ravel, of whom we always think in terms of lush orchestrations. He was a very fine pianist, and - with the exception, I think, of his Piano Concerto - he always wrote his compositions as piano pieces first of all. Then he orchestrated them. I find this very curious. If I’m writing an orchestral piece, I write straight for orchestra. But Ravel, who was one of the greatest orchestrators of all time, and the musician I admire most of all, performed what I think was an extra-ordinary operation on almost everything he wrote.

But every man has his own best way of working, as no doubt did the other masters of orchestration like Debussy, Tchaikovsky (who first started using the orchestra in a descriptive fashion), and in this century Stravinsky, who really knew how to handle an orchestra.

Today, orchestration has become a highly developed art, particularly in the film world, where you find many fine orchestrators. When I started, I might be doodling a little piece on the piano and think: That might be rather nice on clarinet. But if I’m writing a film score now, I would come to a particular section and think: Ah, I’d like to use a nasty trombone sound there, or, This is a part where it doesn’t need any strings at all, just a percussive element. I tend to think of orchestration in terms of painting a picture. An artist can do a brilliant outline sketch in sharp charcoal - Picasso, for example, did the most beautiful line drawings. But when it comes to orchestration, what you do is to fill in all the subtle colourings, making the picture into a three-dimensional form.

It wasn’t until long after I left the Guildhall that I started to get a clear mental picture of how that sound picture would turn out. I had to write a lot and actually hear orchestras playing what I had written. And even then, the fact is that every time you write a score, no one can be absolutely certain how it will sound. You may have an idea in your mind’s ear, but you never know for sure. So you learn to take risks, risks that spring from the imagin-ation - the cornerstone of good orchestration.But of all that I knew nothing, as I donned iny old naval greatcoat and cycled off to Abbey Road for my interview with Oscar Preuss.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 766