Writings

Inaugural lecture given by Professor Piers Hellawell on Art as Trojan Horse: Composition is at the Gates

given on Thursday 6th May 2004 at 5 pm - The Harty Room, School of Music, Queen's University of Belfast.

I cannot remember a time before the arranging of sounds, to make something that wasn’t there before, seemed the best and only thing to do. Composition finds its victims, and it found me before I was five. However, being possessed of the mission is no qualification for writing durable music; and since education is our shared context here, this talk will be devoted not to composition practice but to the road leading to that practice. I shall be examining my own and others’ priorities in the education of the young composer; specifically, since our advanced musical training is now inseparable from issues at school level, I shall not apologise for giving much scrutiny to the classroom and its legacy. Queen’s is not a vacuum, of course, but part of a larger cultural mechanism, and that makes wider education our direct concern. I would like also to offer a brief overview of how the environment for acoustic composition has changed in my time here. I do recognize that there is a sore temptation, in inaugural addresses, for the speaker to fire off salvos at any and every target perceived to be obstructing the discipline. So – let’s get started!

My view of artistic education is simple: understanding empowers us to experience art. The powers of our time proclaim every kind of access save for the only one that counts, the proper theoretical, practical and historical grounding in how an artistic medium works. No amount of free entry to museums and concert-halls will bring art into people’s lives, if they have not been equipped to receive and process the art they find there: yet the New Labour 2000 Green Paper Culture and Creativity: The Next Ten Years devotes (1) its section 6, Widening Participation and Access, to the electorally recognizable policies of free museums and galleries, access to libraries, digital technology and lottery funding. Concern is not expressed for empowering the very children we seek to educate to appreciate these arts first, by ensuring proper education in them. I say it again; you cannot separate the physical access to the arts from the educational, unless the access you plan is limited to visits lasting an hour or two. There is only one access that lasts a lifetime. If education does not ‘widen participation’, we are all wasting our time – though I think the better phrase is ‘deepen participation’, something less interesting to politicians, for whom scale is everything. If one argues publicly for prioritizing training, as I did at a conference on that Green Paper held in the Tate Modern, voices cry out that one is ‘against participation’ in museums and so on; the charge of ‘discouraging access’ is the modern equivalent of crying ‘witchcraft’ – shoddily argued, but still a button-pusher. In fact, far from defending an establishment fortress, I shall argue here that it is as invaluable source of subversion that composition rests upon training: only carpenters can build a Trojan horse.

I must say that I have never had any doubts about the position, subversive or otherwise, of composition in universities. The current debate I hear on practice and research risks overlooking the time-honoured role of composition and performance in the academy. Some may even whisper that it is the research culture in music that is the newcomer. If I am defensive of the place of the creation of music in our curriculum, it is partly because the practice of composition, as once construed, was for so long a corner-stone of academic music-teaching.

A characteristically Delphic comment on composition in education comes from Sir Harrison Birtwistle. In an interview (2) he said

“Historically in the UK there has been too little composition teaching available. Arguably there is now too much.”

I’ve wondered what his argument may be that there is too much now, not because I am outraged but because I rather agree. If he has interviewed youngsters or their teachers about this, he may feel that the drive to get teenagers composing, largely in pre-existing style formulae, has led to a widespread confusion of intentions for the students and their embattled teachers. His comment certainly indicates that composition activity per se is by no means desirable. This can only now be unscrambled by swallowing a political heresy: getting everyone doing something without prior proper training, so they can be said to be doing so, is a poor and muddled use of resources. So that will not be confronted soon. I shall return later to the curricular pile-up that is schools composition, for here, above all, mere activity is espoused to the detriment of training for that activity.

Birtwistle’s claim that there has been too little composition teaching in the UK historically is undoubtedly true of the widest educational spectrum. If, though, we look at the hallowed portals of our university music schools, we find composition, of a sort, was once inseparable from time-honoured skills of the rounded academic. Such skills, of figured bass, tonal improvisation, counterpoint and advanced score-reading are now dwindling markedly.

Those of us who pick up the pieces in the wake of the decline of serious musical education at school level may well feel a pang when we contemplate the very different firmament of student composition a hundred (or fifty) years ago. Of course the loss of those skills in much of today’s curriculum is plain, and I will not pass up the chance to lament it today; but let us note too what may be behind this, lying some distance away from the main part of that wreckage. This is the trend towards self-expression, which today replaces the former emphasis on technical training in the young composer. Individual development has now far overtaken the latter as the entrenched priority. Since truly subversive creativity is only possible on a basis of sound technique - and I shall use Schoenberg’s example to assert this - then composition is in danger of losing its disruptive power, and stumbling around blindly – if we are not careful, more Pantomime Horse than Trojan Horse.

The composer-teacher 120 years ago, meanwhile, was a rounded professional rather than a distracted quasi-genius, and not obviously subversive; he (always he, I think) might conduct the choir, write choral works, play the organ and practice solidly classical orchestration, along with written skills rooted in Renaissance technique. Untroubled by Research Exercise considerations, he might nonetheless, sometimes, compose. The shift of priority from this to a more individualised model is neither a tragedy nor a relief, but is an interesting example of educational values being reflected in our different ages, and is a pendulum swing that must be recorded.

We find the ‘old’ values, as we must now call them, set out, as far back as 1830, in a popular English treatise of the early Romantic period by William Crotch (a man no more fortunate with his initials than with his surname). In his Elements of Musical Composition, we read in the Preface (3)

“A knowledge of the elements of musical composition is happily indispensable… to a musical education”.

We can see how remote that sentiment is from today’s thinking just by examining our local GCSE syllabus: though brimming full of composition tasks, it has (as I hinted) un-happily dispensed with those ‘happily indispensible’ basic elements of musicianship. The phrase about ‘happily indispensable to a musical education’ is, for any university teacher of music, bathed in an Arcadian sunlight: it reminds us how composition itself has changed, once a universally-owned science but latterly a recherché pursuit whose mysterious ‘elements’ even differ from one composer to another. What lies behind this evolution? The decline of skills is, as I said, part of a shift toward self-expression, in which something clearly happened to the primacy of pen-paper-and-keyboard skills; the idea of musical training as a practice-based discipline, at least in the U.K., began to fade, a loss that is inseparable from the wider decline of ownership suffered by composition itself. The united stream of art-music has fragmented into a delta of languages, and its core skills may be swept away. That process, at least, is reversible, where there is the will to reinstate training in literacy.

It is surprising how recently all this occurred. William Crotch would not, I think, have found much to alarm him in the Cambridge of the post-war years, where one of our Hamilton Harty Professors, Raymond Warren, was educated. He has told me that practical disciplines occupied a huge proportion of the syllabus, yet with a correspondingly small role given to the historical perspective offered by the exploration of earlier music. In a reflection of its then unchallenged position, musical technique was abstracted from historical generalities. 

A training such as fugue, a compositional work based upon the legendary skill of combining versions of a theme in multiple voices, was central, but it was not cast as a means of studying those who developed it – Bach and his predecessors - nor as a route to discovering their individuality. It was an abstract pursuit, an ossified discipline that had been reduced to core principles, for it was held that skill in these abstractions was, still, at the heart of an educated musician. The mental exercises of these abstractions are as timeless as physical ones: we are still sensory creatures perceiving the relationship of tones, and some would say that this training is, thus, equally beneficial today. Its demands are ever-applicable, like those of language-learning – but of course, there we have it: the demands of language study itself are similarly falling into crisis.

So study at that time was of abstracted principles, then, rather than of great works. Even in my time at Oxford – when ‘history lectures’ were by now offered, if not much favoured by the students – it used to be said that one luminary could give a lecture on Strauss’s symphonic poems without mentioning a single one, and the story was told with a degree of acceptance (if not approval)! Professor Warren remembers a clear move from this culture of abstract training to work-based study, when the late Dr Thurston Dart, pioneer of early music study, began to locate teaching of canon in the Canzonets of Elizabethan composer Thomas Morley. Here was a new sense of priority given to historical practice over extrapolated technique. I can only think this was an improvement overall, and perhaps also for composition, but it did herald the twilight of the training regime that had held the floor for so long.

I am proud of the way our own curriculum seeks to maintain the core emphasis on some of these foundation skills, but the difference is that we are battling with this in the face of a dwindling of skills further down the ladder: unlike those of yesteryear, our new students are not in any numbers assured of fluency in tonal harmony, for example. In my memory of Queen’s such cases were a minority, to be given additional help, whereas we can make no assumptions today about any technical facility among the body of students, for the picture is alarmingly varied according to school and background. To start the academic year, I held a discussion with my first-year class on their own experience in this regard. Both conclusions pointed to a lack of framework: first was the lack of any uniform practice, for their experiences were astonishingly uneven; and second was the widespread sense of desertion among these eager youngsters. The discussion was united by the answer to my questioning whether the students felt they had a training in classical harmony: “No way!” they chorused. This position is replicated across the British HE sector and, in fact, emanates from wider idiocies that, alas, unite our kingdom.

The subtleties of this training were, till quite recently, surviving in teaching of Bach’s chorale harmonizations; and their banishment is a scandal of the current A level music syllabus. When Bach described music as ‘the recreation of the spirit’, he took for granted the technical literacy allowing that recreation. Yet, faced with the struggles of teachers to maintain harmonic teaching in a culture hostile to rigorous training, the powers-that-be have relegated that cornerstone to the margins. The tyre-marks of modular culture are on the lawn here, of course: harmony has been relegated to a ‘harmony option’, a now-secret garden walled off from all but the most determined and well-resourced teachers. But worse follows.

Perhaps panicking about having set off this further collapse in harmonic literacy, the custodians of the A Level syllabus have instated a requirement for tonal harmony – in the area specifically dedicated to personal expression, the so-called ‘free’ composition! Just where the students are meant to have acquired this traditional harmony training, without a harmony syllabus, is not clear; but ‘free’ composition now carries the instruction (4) that

“candidates are required to demonstrate, through their composition and commentary…an understanding of, and ability to use, functional harmony for expressive purposes.” It adds that “appropriateness and consistency of harmonic language” carry 20 marks – so let us discuss the nitty-gritty of what is ‘appropriate’.

It is as if an English syllabus were to drop its training in poetic metre and language, for example, only to require students then to cast their ‘free poetry composition’ in Alexandrines, hexameters or Shakespearian English. Since the language of stable tonal harmony was progressively diluted throughout the 19th Century, to insist upon classical harmony for free composition in 2004 effectively excludes all musical development since 1840. This is a muddled piece of Creationism, a Taliban syllabus without contextual sense, yet I believe it to be confusion, rather than intent, that lies behind it. Whatever the impetus, nonetheless, a brilliant teacher among our alumni was warned off exploring even Debussy with a school class, since that master finally dismantled the classical rhetoric of harmony during the 1890’s. This teacher has written to me, on a related prohibition, that 

“I have been advised to encourage the students to pick ternary or rondo form templates and write in them; pieces without a marketable form get just above zero. I know that I'm being given sound advice because the teachers have the experience of what marks well and what doesn't. The pupils must write to formula. It is the opposite of what education should be doing for them. So the last thing the pupils should have access to is a composer - they need a civil servant.” (5)

Clearly teachers are unsure whether to encourage individual-expression in composition or to teach students to work the system. Writing pastiche of Haydn’s language is a useful historical study, mind, one which we still use, but it must never be conflated with ‘free composition’, for which it is one form of preparation. What is breathtaking is that the authorities appear not to understand the difference, that between creative imagination and historical pastiche. 

A different confusion surrounds the presence in the syllabus of the serial or ’12-tone’ method developed by Schoenberg 90 years ago: perhaps his principles of composition with a series of tones are seen as ‘easy to mark’ because the use of a series allows ‘right and wrong’ notes, appearing to ask less in the way of subjective artistic judgement. Most students are not being taught about conceiving a unified work – though this was Schoenberg’s entire goal in evolving serial method – or being taught why this method ever came about in the world of music. Instead they must wield a mechanical tool for which they are given absolutely no aesthetic basis. Schoenberg was explicit about this danger (6) seventy years ago; perhaps he foresaw how vulnerable his creation would be to the sort of outcome now rife in GCSE, where children I speak to are being taught the how without the why.

“Beginners often think they should try it before having acquired the necessary technical equipment. This is quite wrong. The restrictions imposed… are so severe that they can only be overcome by an imagination that has survived a tremendous number of adventures.”

These conditions are hardly met by a GCSE student with no understanding of late Romantic music – a wretched misreading of the principles of serial composition. In any case, Schoenberg repeatedly proclaimed, in his writings now collected as Style & Idea, the primacy of creativity over crude mechanics – for in reality, any individuated composition requires to be controlled on every level, from micro-detail to macro-span, for only thus will the result make sense. 

If there is a recipe for acquiring a ‘composer’s overview’, I think it may lie in the practice-based training whose passing I have lamented. Much in musical learning involves doing one thing in order to do another – practising a figure very slowly so as to master playing it very fast, for example – and the best way to gain that overview of a composition may be, for example, to conduct those of others, as Mahler and Strauss did, or to play ‘cello in them like the young Schoenberg himself. I am not convinced that it lies in writing exam compositions from a menu of styles and vague, non-musical ‘stimuli’, that are specified like design options.

As I ponder what I do believe in as a composition training, I am aware of a substantial philosophical gulf, one that occurs in disciplines other than music. It lies between the belief in training as practice and belief in practice as training; though a proper study of mankind is man, is a proper study of composition found in ‘just’ composing? There are fields in whose study practice must take precedence – swimming comes to mind, or driving a car. Other areas require study before practice, while becoming a lawyer involves no practical respite from study except for some work-experience.

Am I saying that composition is not part of learning composition? Of course not. For a start, I warmly welcome projects that nurture young composers under tutelage of a professional composer, such as Sound Inventors (7). I am saying that dropping onto students the task of musical organization while surrendering all training in music’s manipulations is madness, as if the mysteries of our subject-material, the inscrutable study of a lifetime, have lately declared themselves to all and sundry.

And yet... the wisdom of curricular composition for children, even without attendant technique, is hard to challenge. For schools composition is so imbued with the status of ‘a good thing’ that any doubt cast on its benefits for one and all, whatever is being done in its name, can easily be shouted down as being ‘elitism’. But what may be agreeable to those youngsters not intending to pursue classical music is now severely impeding those who might.

Even with these reservations, it is not the composing itself but the incoherence and lack of preparation, in a muddled syllabus, that is the scourge. We are routinely told by children visiting our Open Days that “they seem to be no good at composition”, having failed to conform to whatever diktat is imposed on their teachers. I gleefully persuade these students to take composition – for our soothing recruitment message to freshers is that the huge discipline of composing your own music has nothing to do with the composition of their schooling.

The politically toxic truth is that a far more useful grounding for a pathway like mine is a pair of clean ears and a secure training in traditional musical literacy, such as has been surrendered to the agenda of egalitarian self-expression. In the late 1930’s Schoenberg was already lamenting this; writing about teaching (8), he found that the student’s understanding of the historical canon

“offers the aspects of a Swiss cheese – almost more holes than cheese. Then I set the following question: If you wanted to build an aeroplane, would you venture to invent and construct by yourself every detail of which it is composed? or would you not better at first try to find out what all the men did who designed aeroplanes before you? Don’t you think the same idea is correct in music?”

The creators of our GCSE Music Syllabus are among those who do not apparently think the idea is correct. In its Introduction (9), there are set out the same concerns, worthy but generalised, that we found in the Green Paper – matters, about the syllabus being free from bias, reflecting diverse traditions and so on, that I would have thought belonged elsewhere, in a mission statement.

So: we find nothing about music study. Can it be that the new priorities are more helpful to our young musicians? Are we missing something? Well, it is a fact that the modern species of schools´ composition has, by now, been in the curriculum for long enough for its effect to be monitored; has it boosted composition for the new university student? I must say first that what the world needs is a tide of musically literate people, rather than, necessarily, a tide of young composers – so the fact that we have NOT seen sharply increased numbers of career-composers out of Queen’s is not the point (and might in any case be my own fault). And it may be, given the largely non-classical ethos of the syllabus at GCSE, that legions of children are leaving school enriched by an activity that, OK, does not include much serious training for student or amateur but involves the majority. Even that vista can be seen from my Ivory Tower. But my conclusion in looking back over ten, or come to that twenty, years in these walls is that there is no obvious increase in commitment or facility whatever among serious music students who have done composition at school. If that is not a serious indictment of the practice, I am missing something.

We have, certainly, seen an explosion in the enrolment, and our curriculum is bursting with composition output, as it is in the electroacoustic field, but that is chiefly because of what we offer to instil here. I am aware too that it is more in line with government policies today to have 45 students with no prior grounding than 12 students with A level harmony. And it may be more desirable, for political short-haulers. But I would be negligent not to be asking why all this activity in schools has apparently no implications for the development of students as composers, except for producing some discouraged youngsters. The one enduring factor that does count – one to hearten us all here – is the legacy of individual teachers or parents – still the most potent inspiration.

This is from my own experience. When I was six, we were taken from my day-school down the hill to attend the Hallé Orchestra, conducted by Sir John Barbirolli himself. All I remember of the event was sitting next to the girl of my choice while Sir John addressed the audience through the worst p.a. system imaginable. They played Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony, but I do not remember it. The reason I know is that the previous day a teacher had erected a reel-to-reel tape recorder and talked us through the Symphony – an event that has never left me.

Today, when a friend shares with me some piece of art that lights up their life, it is usually attributed to the devotion of a teacher who shared it with them. We all have teachers to thank in this wise: In this context, the words were reported to me lately of a recent senior official to a teacher I know, warning her not to fill a GCSE class with content and ‘scare the children with composers’. If I remember the magic of finding Tchaikovsky when I was six, is it a teensy bit patronising to insulate fourteen-year olds from information? Actually, unless it can be shown that teenagers are suddenly less intelligent that hitherto, I think that insulating children from art is an outrage. 

So I believe that, in art, self-expression cannot launch itself without a foundation, just as we cannot leap from a lying position. Therefore, as one involved in addressing the fall-out of the loss of skills when children become students, and as a parent, I feel justified in putting our syllabus for GCSE music under the microscope, here and now. I must add that I know from reliable sources that much of the material I am about to excoriate is regretted by our local board: elements of this syllabus are imposed across the U.K., and our local authorities are obliged to disseminate this nonsense, along with other Boards who have ceded yet more ground than ours to collapsing standards. 

So. I am concerned that - while its opening section, ‘Rationale’, identifies ‘three mutually supportive areas’, performing, composing and listening/appraising – the learning that would support all of them is, I must say it once more, not mentioned. Yet, in the same sentence, students are advised ‘to have acquired some basic skills in singing and/or playing an instrument’. Why only in performance?

I am aware that there is concern in the syllabus for those who have come to performance without learning musical notation – but I am old-fashioned enough to think that the answer is to give such students the power that is literacy, rather than to enshrine the lack of it. As if no music is written down any more! I hear it widely agreed among teachers that this down-grading of written skills, to attract those who play but do not read, was a cynical mechanism to ensure continued enrolment for such exams, amid a falling market in intellectual capital. I will consider in a minute what would happen if we applied this ‘open door’ to ensure a flow of, say, mildly-trained dentists. To use Schoenberg’s analogy, then, instead of plugging holes in the cheese, the curriculum now charts a course through the holes. But music (Swiss or otherwise) is made of cheese, not of holes.

I think what lies behind this syllabus full of holes for a subject full of cheese is the inclusivity of music. When selectivity, aptitude and training are still extolled in sport and sciences, music’s very universality seems to carry the price of a fall in literacy. Again I hear the question raised ‘why would you not desire that universal belonging? Audiences for live classical music have dwindled enough.’ My answer is, again, that I do, but – to return to my starting-point – the only true access is through understanding. No one gains ‘access’ through being denied information. On the contrary, it is no accident that the audience for live classical music is so alarmingly elderly; older listeners are drawing on seeds sewn in the past, for most of us learn to attend concerts. Education makes a difference to our life-choices: if it did not, why would politicians go on about it?

I pointed out just now how theory retains a place in those other fields – sport and sciences – where folk could get hurt. Hence we are still some way from community-based surgery, where, regardless of creed or background, people can pick up a scalpel and have a poke around. But why do intelligent people not expect the same demands of music? It is far from the harmless pussy-cat they imagine.

Well – it seems that some areas of science are now, entangled in the ambivalent embrace of popular culture. Straying bizarrely into our GCSE music syllabus is one such, that of Environment – perhaps filling in those Swiss holes vacated by technique. For in that same section the syllabus offers the startling heading 1.3 – ‘Environmental Issues’ (9) – where it claims that these latter

“can be expressed...through activities related to free composition, where students may choose a brief in response to emotive... development issues, for example pollution of rivers and seas, the clearing of rain-forests...”

One does not have to be complacent about seas and forests, and I am not, to raise an eyebrow about the permission this syllabus gives itself to tell children that their music might be ‘about’ ‘emotive development issues’, and to specify what these are. Apart from the lack we have observed of the technical means of sustained musical development, it is not acceptable to me, for one, to represent music to children as a mere vehicle for ‘addressing issues’. When society construes music merely as a mute cypher for other things, it will be a lost cause. This ‘emotive issues’ approach to music is of course consonant with today’s value-system that everything must have more than merely intrinsic worth if it is to retain its funding. ‘Do we really NEED people like you?’, Mrs Thatcher apparently once asked a Professor of English. And, lo and behold, in this GCSE introduction (9), we read that one of three instances offered of the power of music is

"social, moral and ethical - how thoughts, feelings and actions can be manipulated through the pre-planned and conscious use of music to effect a particular outcome.." I was genuinely shocked to read this: I shall read it again. It appears to exhort the child to approach music merely at the level of some kind of leverage tool. Perhaps that is a misreading - it may be merely pointing to a topic for debate - but when the very next paragraph is ‘1.3. Environment’, exhorting the student ‘to address emotive development issues’, it looks very much as if this whole focus on manipulation in music is no less than a handbook, pointing the way to music as a tool for crude pictorialism, propaganda and, no doubt, 'relevance'. At very least the intent here is amazingly opaque. What is clear is that the chances for a youngster to explore an autonomous world of sound recede further, along with the technique with which to do so. Any Eurosceptics among you may not be the only ones surprised that 1.6 of this GCSE document (9) urges candidates to "develop awareness of the opportunities... presented through membership of the European Union... for example, the music Industry as a transnational and global phenomenon, the issue of human rights and Its Implications for playing loud music In public places and the issue of music copyright." In case you are thinking that you nodded off to dream that you heard a rubric about European human rights and the playing of loud music in a GCSE music syllabus, you were actually awake. When I'm next awakened myself by my student neighbours having a party, I can berate them "Has no one here even read the GCSE music syllabus on European human rights?" Again, the concern is not that ‘awareness is bad' - that it is bad to learn about copyright, or Europe, or rainforests - but that it replaces musical information that bestows real power over music - and I did not mean the volume control. I have the horrible suspicion that behind all this evasion lies, if nothing worse, a middle-aged fear that teenagers find abstract music and its demands 'boring'; that this is vicars strumming guitars again, a craven attempt to align a syllabus with what the constituency likes elsewhere, instead of making the subject interesting. So composition is presented as a fun adjunct to other things. How much more challenging than all this it would be to encourage young people to debate the view clearly expressed by Stravinsky that “music is, by its very nature, powerless to express anything at all” (10). But there I go, scaring them off again. The GCSE document improves in the following section, which mentions 'acquiring the knowledge, skills and understanding' to progress, and also, later, 'analysing and evaluating music using a musical terminology'. But if nothing else in the syllabus actually imparts these, such aspirations are mere wisps of smoke. The most diaphanous of these wisps is under 1.7, Aims (9), which claims that the specification increases candidates' ability "to make judgements about musical quality" !

To acquire critical skills without any theoretical training is indeed asking a lot of the student. Other stated aspirations, about further study, life-skills and aesthetic sensitivity, are all desirable, and all beg the same question: ‘why not actually teach them?’ So if this rubbish is being imposed on our Board, it needs our support. Good work was done in the late 90’s by British university colleagues to re-connect ‘A’ level to university study, but they faced a stampede to turn out the lights - or rather to rip them out – by the porridge-brained authorities responsible for what we have heard.

It is against this background, then, that our composer students are having to be nurtured – and against this picture that I want now to end with a retrospective look at our composition teaching since the 1970s. They were strange times indeed, viewed through the inverted binoculars of hindsight. Composition was, essentially, tolerated. The Oxford Faculty comforted itself that ‘composition could not be taught’, a complacency that was in their case entirely self-fulfilling. I was rescued by an inspiring figure from outside, one who set about standing my every belief on its head and, firstly, giving me modern counterpoint exercises.

This training in ‘species counterpoint’ is an abstract manipulation akin to the fugue I mentioned earlier: it is not rooted in a specific composer’s work, but is more of a mental exercise, almost a meditation-exercise. My tutor had worked it as a student of Nadia Boulanger, the most celebrated composer-maker of the last century – a sign that continental teaching retained a belief in this sort of foundation, even as it crumbled here. Another older colleague has told me how a student of his went to Italy to study with illustrious teacher Goffredo Petrassi, feeling quite the young hopeful, only to be plunged into the same species counterpoint when he arrived. I have, this year, reintroduced this strand into my own composition pathway for undergraduates; as I said earlier, since composing itself has not become any easier, I see no reason why its training should be forfeiting all rigour.

Coming to Queen’s in those days, meanwhile, I found a few lingering traces of the old Oxbridge outlook! In the then four-year course, students were only offered composition in years 3 and 4, but in year 2, every one of the students (numbering c12 per annum then) was required, with no official supervision or assessment, to write a string quartet, for a group of visiting players. No one admitted responsibility for the event – which was quickly shunted in my direction – nor could they tell me its education purpose beyond the general one of ‘composition being a good thing’. One feature in particular could have come out of Oxford, or indeed from Oxford’s own son, Lewis Carroll. In fact this sad hermaphrodite - neither clearly an exercise in a classical style nor an invitation to spread one’s wings – was thus somehow prophetic of the modern GCSE and A Level. Because there was no aesthetic or technical framework, students suffered the same confusion as school composers today about the nature of the exercise. One student offered a legendary critique of this confusion by writing an enormous piece that passed through every historical style, from medieval plainsong to the 1960s –itself a demonstration of that sense of historical awareness now denied to the community of music students.

In the tutorial courses, too, lingered some of the prevailing attitude, which I characterize as ‘come and have tea and we’ll look at what you’ve written’. Students without much experience had to produce third- and fourth-year portfolio works. Yet in one respect they were well-catered for already by this School: Professor Thomas’s ground-breaking course in four 20th-century composers was an excellent foundation, one that we still teach. And as I look back on the ambition of some of those student orchestral scores, I am amazed: there was no apparent training for students in handling large-scale works, yet some were most ambitious. I must again conclude that the rigorous skill-base they brought with them for nurture at Queen’s was, as I have claimed, a sure foundation.

Nonetheless, it was for me unsustainable to offer a programme for composers that merely left them fending for themselves, as had been my own experience. I was well aware that the core skills, then still widespread, excluded practice outside the harmonic system we associate with the high Classical era. So I conceived that the student, once given that foundation, might be led into composition earlier, not through daunting portfolio tasks but via a kind of induction. Quite apart from abstract musical matters, two others press the young composer – instrumental properties and notation. These three areas then became the rotating topics of ‘Composition 1’ in 1989, and they remain so today. Some of those students continued the following year, thus inaugurating ‘Composition 2’; and so the Pathway unfolded.

I have always been proud of the induction approach – funnelling students in to sample the transferable skills – by comparison with most institutions, which tended (then at least) to admit students to composition when they could no longer keep them out. If I have a reservation about our approach, it is that we risk in today’s culture reducing the mystery and awe of composition to ‘taking a module’ rather than being impassioned by a vocation: I persist in teaching it as the latter, as best I can, and were this no longer tenable I suppose I should give up.

The undergraduate composition courses do not stand still, though we cling on to our ‘core values’. Just this year Composition 3 has taken a new form, in response to students’ shifting needs, and I am proud that the glimpse of species counterpoint in Year 1 is as it were a spot of curricular ‘up-braining’ – instead of the more familiar ‘down-dummings’ in the face of realities. Reality need not be a story of decline.

If adherence to the solid foundation of training is fogey-ish, then I confess to it, because I tend to trust solid foundations rather than the other sort. In the words of John Gielgud’s irritable Headmaster in the play 40 years On by Alan Bennett (11), “Out of date? Of course my standards are out of date! They wouldn’t be standards if they weren’t!”

Nonetheless, I hope I have outlined the shifting role of composition which, fogey or not, I must embrace. No longer a repository of traditional certainties, it nowadays begs the celebration of the awkward, the unquantifiable – and herein lies its invaluable subversion. Students are, for example, often nonplussed when I cannot specify the ‘outcome’ of a composition project; if they work as I hope, the result will not be anything I expected or could anticipate. That this slaps the face of current political orthodoxy, about the predictability and commodifying of learning, is a deep satisfaction to me, and it is endlessly beneficial to the students, who are being increasingly insulated from the intellectual risk-taking that is supposed to be enshrined in our institutions. As a Trojan Horse that trundles over the niceties of structured practice, all art should be a welcome visitor at the gates – for it bears gifts which, just because they are disruptive and are feared by those threatened by them, have the power to enrich and, even, to overturn our world.

1 Culture and Creativity: The Next Ten Years, Government Green Paper 2001

2 Birtwistle, Sir Harrison, The John Tusa Interview, BBC Radio 3 2001

3 Crotch, W., Elements of Musical Composition (1830), Boethius Press 1991

4 CCEA A Level syllabus for music, www.ccea.org.uk, p.20

5 Personal communication

6 Schoenberg, A., Teaching And Modern Trends in Music in ed Stein, E Style And Idea: selected writings of Arnold Schoenberg, Faber 1975, pp. 376-7 

7 Sound Inventors, www.soundinventors.org.uk

8 Schoenberg, A., Composition With Twelve Tones (1) section VI, in ibid. p. 223

9 CCEA GCSE syllabus for music, www.ccea.org.uk, p.1 foll.

10 Stravinsky, I. Chronicles Of My Life, Gollancz 1936

11 Bennett, A., Forty Years On, Faber & Faber, 1996

A version of this article appeared in the New Statesman on 31 October 2005, in advance of The Battle of Ideas, a conference in the Royal College of Art in which a main theme was cultural education. The published version can be found at http://www.newstatesman.com/

200510310038

Do you want your children empowered to engage with the most enduring works of music? Are you bothered if that life-giving resource is being progressively discarded without consultation? When I was a student, there was a story, probably apocryphal, that Dudley Moore went to Oxford as an organ student not knowing how many symphonies Beethoven wrote; now it is less usual to find a student arriving from school who does know. It is, nonetheless, not opus numbers but experience of art that is the issue - not cataloguing symphonies but acquiring the means to draw upon music as a listener. Someone who loves one such work has the power to discover infinite others, having already been handed the tools with which to unlock amazing things only expressed within the world of sound. It is no shame on our children that the doors of this perception more often remain closed, but I believe it is nonetheless a shameful reflection of our priorities. Listening is an activity, not a passivity – and every audience will admit to much deeper enjoyment of something unfamiliar for being told something about it.

It is fair to ask what social reform and democracy mean, if great art is witheld from the populace instead of being made more available. The ancien regime that confined the artistic canon to a prosperous select few has nothing to offer our culture. Nothing could be more patronising than to make decisions for our young people that some art is ‘too highbrow’ for their lives, perhaps because of their ethnic background or an unpromising urban landscape - yet that is exactly the tenor of recent drives to orientate the GCSE syllabus toward music to which children can, like, ‘relate’. The idea that the Western artistic canon is not ‘relevant’ to today’s multicultural classroom need only be reversed to be ridiculed: imagine decreeing that a class of lippy white teenagers cannot relate to West African drumming. My daughter’s school plays host this week to just such a workshop run by an English master drummer, and the kids can talk of nothing else, because they are being taught the basics; without teaching, the drumming may seem complex or monotonous, but hey, call for education, and suddenly they take ownership. Now reverse the cultures: bring in a string quartet from the outstanding Live Music Now! (Yehudi Menuhin’s charity offering the services of young musicians to prisons, hospitals and schools) and introduce string quartets to a class from a non-Western background. Get a quartet of young string players together, let them try Barber’s Adagio and then tell them it’s not ‘relevant’ to them. They’ll show you the door. Consider how sport makes the same mockery of such prejudices: anyone suggesting that cricket is too protracted and complex to offer our youngsters anything sounds pretty silly in 2005.

A glance at leading curricular materials shows that there is plenty of useful study of the music past on offer in the classroom, but because the totem of the moment is ‘participation’, valuable historical activity is being dislocated from the works and from a sense of progression. The syllabus is a veritable Blue Peter of good things to do and make from historical models, yet this stress on practice needs balancing by a historical overview and by experience of the music. Guided listening to music is mistakenly thought to be passive, with more than a whiff of risky imperialism about it, since Teacher has to decree that Corelli or Copland is worth hearing; as for the raw practicalities, meanwhile, the syllabus business is scared stiff that stroppy 15-year olds will desert the music room in a stampede at the first glimpse of crotchets. 

Most of us animated by music owe our lifeblood to an individual who threw us Stravinsky’s Le Sacre or Zappa’s Hot Rats and said ‘you need this’; yet a teacher I know was warned by an educational advisor to steer clear of discussing actual music lest she ‘scare the kids with composers’. I related this breathtaking story to another music advisor, and had to clutch for the table when she outlined the philosophy to me as ‘trying to hold their interest at GCSE so you can teach them something at A Level’. 

What a culture of despair! Introducing thrilling and complex works from the canon isn’t snobbery; it’s empowerment. I bless the teacher who played us the ‘Pathetique’ Symphony on tape before taking us to hear Barbirolli conduct it. The idea that children are hostile to exploring things outside their ken is an adult one born of the craven - or commercial - desire to ingratiate oneself. Young people – adventurous, up for new stuff, remember? – don’t expect their tunes to dominate the syllabus; frankly, it ceases to be ‘their’ music once embarrassing adults wrap a syllabus around it. This is vicars strumming guitars all over again. When I was a kid, studying Vergil and Molière at school, I read the Beezer at home – I still do – but that didn’t mean I expected to find it dominating the classroom.

The restrictive, Eurocentric canon of ‘classical’ culture in classrooms of old inhibited our musical thought about much other music in our world; so does today’s reversed trend, which marginalises great art. Schumann’s song-cycles of young love and despair should be there for every teenager, along with Jeff Buckley and Kurt Cobain, for art belongs to everybody.

Composer Piers Hellawell is Professor of Composition at The Queen’s University of Belfast.

Calling all composers! Advice from the professionals.

Piers Hellawell, Professor of Composition at Queen’s, has some words of wisdom for students working on composition projects.

Firstly, your ideas need to be based on what real instruments can do. Forget the computer playback, which will do what you tell it; a player won’t! You need to ask your mate who plays trombone to give you a lesson, so you can write actual trombone music. Instruments are not all the same! Ask a player if your music looks as if it was written by a player – that’s a great compliment if it does.

Secondly, composing is not just about repeating stuff you already heard; we’re all influenced by what we like, but to compose is to try to make your own little space – and this means, sometimes, looking for new harmonies and breaking out of ‘4/4’ rhythmic blocks. Yes, you must be conversant with how tonal harmony works (related keys, inversions etc) but that doesn’t mean it’s the best material for your own piece!

Thirdly, you must devour classical music from the past, to build a platform – no one can compose in a vacuum of ignorance. Don’t be scared of scores, which are a miniaturized world full of know-how by great people. Get a score of a Beethoven symphony and follow a CD with it until you aren’t intimidated by the score any more. Other composers’ scores can tell you how to write down things you hear in your head.

It's very common for young composers to shrug when players point out mistakes, as if to say 'it wasn't me'! That might do for Bart Simpson, but not for you. Notation is a message to players; if it causes problems instead of giving answers, it isn't working - just like handwriting or spelling. Things like bars adding up and notes being playable on your instruments are YOUR responsibility. They waste precious few minutes you could be hearing your music; would you really rather be explaining why your violin has a bar missing? And don't assume computer notation means you don't have to know how to write music down! Programmes deal in raw data; it has to be edited just like a manuscript. You should only use a computer score once you have learned your trade - and that comes from studying other scores.

Finally, remember that composition is a great way to understand more about yourself and the music you hear and perform. You may start out imitating something that made a big impression - whether or not you realise! But if you keep going and are really critical of what you write, there is a good chance that 'the real you' will emerge in your sounds. I am amazed in Queen's University that the more we are surrounded by commercial and 'easy' sounds that we already know, the more students want to compose things we don't know - they want to struggle, want to be heard. Composition offers something new to every generation.

An article first printed in the Scholarships Supplement (Rhinegold Publishing, 2005)

www.rhinegold.co.uk

Like many British composers, I earn my crust teaching in HE music. During my 25 years in the university sector, composition has entered our students’ school experience; much else has vanished, meanwhile. Though I might be expected to laud this, I fear that the reality is anything but rosily ‘progressive’. For me a principal teaching goal remains the wider understanding of art - art that represents subversion resting upon technique; yet the curricular development of recent years shows a diminishing appetite for that technique!

Setting GCSE students to compose without prior literacy in place may be fun but is no basis for development, since they lack expressive tools for what they want to say. A colleague, for example, received a cry for help: ‘I can’t do the bass clef’, a youngster lamented, ‘and I’ve A Level Music tomorrow!’ My colleague need not have worried; the boy still got an ‘A’. Equally serious is the commodifying of compositions brought about, teachers tell me, by pressure to dash for grades and avoid risks – to stick to winning formulae. Nothing could be more alien to composition than avoidance of risk; the result, which I see regularly, is a formulaic GCSE theme and variations, written in a hybrid ‘tonal’ language with regimented phrases that is quite alien to the Classical style.

I told the bass clef story to the music executive from a body providing our children with syllabus and qualifications. The response came: ‘that’s great! He wasn’t burdened by knowledge’! I argued that technique and terminology bestow power; it’s not snobbish but responsible if curriculum designers uphold skills, since students deprived of training now will be shipwrecked in classroom, rehearsal or other workplace, and will not thank us then. No other field is denigrating its own training as are powerful forces in music education, who fear that theory is ‘boring’ – and thus bad for recruitment (ok, ‘participation’). I do not assume all teachers agree with me, but wonder just how much acceptance surrounds this surreptitious earthquake, shifting a belief in training that has supported our culture from Machaut to Birtwistle.

This is closely related to the repertoire debate. Objections to ‘pop’ within the syllabus are ritually caricatured as pro-classical, but they are actually pro-learning - for executives openly admit in the press that increased pop elements relate to recruitment rather than content. I use popular materials in my own teaching, but because they show something rather than to ingratiate my syllabus with students. Materials chosen only for ‘relevance’ today will, alas, be ‘irrelevant’ tomorrow.

I cannot say for sure if teachers feel angry to be recruited as beaters in a pheasant-shoot for large syllabus providers, but I do know many who are unhappy with an imposed orthodoxy, hostile to depth yet obsessed with breadth. In 25 years, victims of this ideology of fluffy betrayal will demand of us ‘why did you let it happen?’ Do we have an answer ready for them?

Piers Hellawell is a composer and is Professor of Composition at The Queen’s University of Belfast.

First printed in the Rhinegold Guide to Music Education (Rhinegold Publishing, 2007)

www.rhinegold.co.uk

Most of us start our composition journey the traditional way – learning the conventions of music through practical music-making, theory exams and exercises. This is a double-edged tool: as a young composer you need to understand the role of this training – that the things you learn are a trampoline to launch your imagination, not a boundary fence around it. Conventional skills, like balancing an eight-bar phrase with another, are fundamental, but they are not in themselves meant to impose limits on how we compose. It is very important to cherish what you learn – musical literacy – but remember that a work of art always involves a leap of imagination.

If you’ve tried keeping a composition going without knowing how, you’ll know how frustrating it is! That’s why we learn traditional skills: thinking about balancing phrases prepares you to connect event one in your phrase to event two. Without that we just flounder between new ideas. But your composition will be wholly limited in expression if you try to write only within conventions like regular phrasing: many great classical pieces themselves went far beyond such practices. Try taking the idea of balancing without borrowing the actual phrase-structure. Harmony offers the same pitfalls. Learning how keys and chords work opens up understanding but it doesn’t have to limit our creative work; don’t just accept the boundaries of tonal composing but explore new ones. The conventions of harmony, phrasing or metre from the past can help us not because we use them literally, but because we know how to. Composing means being unhappy with what we have: if you’re totally happy with reusing the materials of the past, you need to ask whether you’re really composing something personal. In this way, composition is about going beyond what you think you can do. If composition were just reproducing musical patterns we already know, it would hardly be a discipline. It is normal to have the feeling at the outset of a new piece that you don’t know how to do it, in one sense, and that you do, in another. This is because traditional training should kick in, as you evolve a way to work. Composition includes a sense that you are finding out something new – it’s a puzzle that you both create and resolve yourself. The word most frequently associated with composers – dead ones, at least – is inspiration, but it’s amazing that no one pauses to ask what this means, least of all what it means to young composers. So as a young composer you should be asking what this famous tool is, and what it can do for you. There’s lots of nonsense around the idea of composing, but like most fairy-tales it has a grain of truth. Going for walks in the country like Beethoven is not the whole of composition, but it is, in fact, a good way to think clearly. Inspiration and perspiration are always closely associated with composition: there’s a time to think big thoughts and there’s a time to struggle with the details at the piano. Don’t confuse these! To compose you need to have a plan before you start; never just jump in without first thinking what you are trying to do. Your material will probably develop partly through your artistic dreaming but partly through hard graft at your desk or work space. You will start with a vague idea, which you then need to hone and pin down. So inspiration is only the start, but we shouldn’t knock it. What is certain is that in starting a work you need: the idea. Your piece should be about something the listener can identify, not necessarily a long flowery theme but perhaps a short, nuggety motif or even a sound. No better example of this exists than the opening of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. The pompom- pom POM idea is so chunky you could keep it in your pocket, but it sustains not only the entire first movement but interweaves around the entire work. The more complicated an idea is, the less adaptable it can be. For this reason I prefer the term ‘idea’ to ‘theme’, which suggests long flowing melodies – nice to listen to but hard to develop. So you have an idea. Then what? Even a great composer like Tchaikovsky faced the dilemma we all dread: what do you do with your material? A common pitfall for young composers is to avoid the problem by bringing along something new immediately. This is more fun but is not a recipe for lasting success. Without reaching for those eight-bar phrases, try what Schoenberg called ‘developing variation’ – a continuous chain of expandings, stretchings, distortions, compressions and fragmentations. So, with tactics honed and an idea pinned down, it’s time to go and do it. Scared? You should be. Making something that wasn’t there before is a big ask. A splurge of chaotic ideas without clear thinking is more promising to me than a neat, derivative package that will never be anything more, because art is a search – not finding is a better state than not looking. Take risks and do not expect easy answers from any worthwhile discipline. Oh, and if you are writing instrumental music, keep in mind what real instruments can do – or, better still, collaborate with a player or two. From them you will hear all the things your computer can’t tell you.

A response to an article in The Liberal on the place of new classical music in our society.

Do we get the modern art that we deserve? In a country of over 50 million people, who is to play God about what is and what is not ‘important’? A thoughtful article (Clement Power, The Liberal July 2005) noted the diverse achievements of a few of Britain’s 500 or so classical composers, but went on to prophesy the withering of the current commissioning practice whereby composers like me are paid to write music to be played before audiences. It also foresaw an end to the current major role of the BBC Proms in this process.

The article was well-informed and above polemic, but I wish to challenge its pessimism. The received wisdom is that listeners – our ‘customers’ as it were – are small in number, and that therefore this is a dying activity, perhaps even an anachronism, heading for a quiet extinction. Yet new work is never an anachronism, since it is the output of our own time. The vast body of music and other arts from our past is a key part of our historical view, a store so great that the documentation of this archaeology (in musical terms, performance and recording) still continues, completing tiny squares of the landscape that is our map of our antecedents. The fact that today’s landscape is a delta of proliferating stylistic streams should make it more, not less, important that we tend it for the future. All serious musics in this delta are minorities, meanwhile; the intelligent approach is not to let them wither but to provide education – the only ‘access’ that lasts – so that they can be shared.

I cannot disagree that the serious challenges of art struggle to be heard against the deafening attractions of popular culture, with its mass audiences and feel-good products. Why, though, is new music – rather than new poetry or even art - the whipping boy of the moment? The resources involved in mounting new drama or dance are far from negligible, yet it is today’s classical music that is pilloried for not being something it probably never was – the vernacular of a wider populace. The great flood of Western music evolved largely within a closed elite of institutions, only reaching beyond monastery, church and court to ordinary folk in the 18th century; Birtwistle and Harvey are infinitely more available to listeners with open ears from any background than were Bach or Vivaldi. Yet a fiction holds that our work represents some nerdy laboratory project, worthy of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels. The media that tremble over the uneven efforts of the Turner Prize ignore challenging and, sometimes, beautiful creations in the concert hall. Cultural flagship programmes on television celebrate Seamus Heaney or Rachel Whiteread but limit themselves to a celebrated Country singer or Rap artist from ‘the music business’.

I believe the prejudice among our media against complex musical expression rests not only on modernism’s excesses but upon intolerance of a listenership perceived as educated, elderly and mono-cultural. Such bigotry against middle-class liberalism wraps itself in right-on multiculturalism to marginalize the culture of people who wear ties and believe in ‘learning’, but it is bigotry just the same, picking and chosing its way down the road to cultural fascism. It is also largely misplaced, since the ‘audience in ties’ image is mostly propaganda. Nothing flusters gleeful mourners for classical music more than young, working-class listeners of discernment popping up to testify that serious art changed their lives; no doubt these upstarts should get back to hip-hop where they belong, but still they attend concerts, disproving the prejudice about who supports orchestras and chamber music.

The relentless flow of pessimism, meanwhile, is staggeringly simplistic: it only counts classical music’s bums-on-seats, finding too few by commercial standards, and blames the artists. No one writes articles praising the enduring depth of the concert experience. A piece in The Guardian on 1 February by Martin Kettle put our shrinking audience down to esoteric classical output since 1910; nowhere did he consider the collapse in national music literacy or the massive availability of competing global pop musics as factors. Granted, a hundred years ago even Strauss’s ‘difficult’ opera Salome received massive interest, but there was never a popular base for most experimental music in its day (scandal sold Salome, just as it did Jerry Springer – The Opera). In our mass-communication era we are judged to have ‘lost’ an ownership that never existed in the times of Beethoven or Josquin, whose audience within the educated classes was deep rather than wide; it also had no familiar past favourites on disc, download or radio to prefer, while new work today competes with infinitely available highlights from the past. Social upheavals have had incalculable cultural implications, but it is simpler just to blame poor old Schoenberg.

Of course audiences of a few hundred look small in the Albert Hall, but the Proms are wise enough to recognize that depth, rather than size, of experience is what counts. A vast audience participates, yet this is a complex web of minorities with little in common but their enthusiasm for live music. The Proms do more now to reward such varied enthusiasms than ever before - a trend the article overlooked. Do these minorities really want to collaborate? The ‘new’ cross-cultural formats advocated by the article reminded me of William Glock’s celebrated Proms experiments in the 1960s – but then, it was their authenticity, not their trendiness, that promoted ownership.

Only concerted extension of listeners’ cultural patience will reconnect people with serious music and divert them from the commercial cycle of ‘consume/excrete’. All output in our society is currently judged by the crude dictates of mass culture, but no egalitarian platitudes will change the fact that art is something else. We should support it and should use education to open it up.

An essay, commissioned as a keynote online essay for the Battle of Ideas in October 2007, that assesses the priorities of ëThe Music Manifestoí: please see also www.battleofideas.org.uk.

This essay was also published in the October 2007 issue of the Incorporated Society of Musiciansí ISM Journal.

ëI teach a class called ìEveryone Can Drawîí an American artist once told me glumly. ëIt should be called ìNot Everyone Can Draw Wellîí. His complaint was not, of course, that not everyone can draw well ñ something he already knew, as an artist ñ and nor was he railing at the temerity of the less able in having a go. His target was the crass egalitarianism that minimizes the chasm between exploration and expertise, the prevailing fiction that only the lack of a workshop or two holds every individual back from effortless creativity. This is hard to challenge, since to do so is to be caricatured as advocating selective training in a discipline only for the able few, while the majority go without ëparticipationí ñ a whiff of the bad old days of selection and worse, that triggers every alarm in the missile system of modern social outrage.

Jane Austen, who knew a thing or two about social exclusion, had no scruples in attributing to one of her most hapless satire-targets, the non-musician Lady Catherine de Burgh, the delusion that art is skill-free and is mainly a matter of participation:

ëThere are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient. And so would [my daughter] AnneÖ. I am confident that she would have performed delightfully.í (Pride and Prejudice)

But they did not, being unlucky enough to live outside the era of the ëMusic Manifestoí, and with it the wider spirit of today, of which Lady Catherine was prophetic, that we are all musicians, held back only by ëexclusioní. The nostrum that musical, artistic or literary achievement is but a night-class away is one of todayís most seductive illusions; but it can be destructive, too, a siren hope to adults of the sort that is rightly excoriated in magazines for teenagers that gasp ëYou Can Be Famous!í. Serious artistic achievement is barely more attainable to most people than celebrity, our most popular opiate, and the ëMusic Manifestoí is, to an extent, a participant in this game-show in being so glibly ëcan-doí: this is my first reservation, that a mania for generalised enabling leads it to avoid much sense of, well, learning. In the process it offers a parodic view, in which music is a free-for-all party; such a vision is genial, but the reality is that music is very far from open-handed with its gifts, as every young pianist or apprentice sitar player knows, and as Bart Simpson found when trying to play (without tuition or practice) the electric guitar. Homerís rejoinder to his son, ëremember what television teaches us: if you canít do something straight away, it isnít worth doingí, should alert us to the danger within the breezy insistence on involvement as an end in itself. This danger is perhaps obscured by the sort of glazed New Labour language so mercilessly ridiculed through the Blair years (ëthe right ìpathways for progressionî must be in place ñ and clearly signposted. The pathways must be multiple and flexible, accessible to allÖí ñ www.musicmanifesto.co.uk) that it is amazing to find it emerging, wide-eyed, to graze on the unreal pastures of Planet DCMS.

It would be churlish and, worse, inaccurate to portray the ëMusic Manifestoí as a technique-free zone; the Singposium sounds a wonderful project, while the Practiceathlon, for example, creates fun and fund-raising out of musicís essential maintenance. Even here, though, the impression is that practising is a desirable extra, given the possibility that ëthey'll keep up their practice regime even when they're not being sponsored for it. Well, hopefully.í An initiative like this should be surging ahead with advice on how to practise ñ a much misunderstood art ñ not simpering about if; there is an urgent need to remind youngsters that instruments do not teach themselves. We live in a can-do era, however: one that shudders at anything less than problem-free exhortation to get involved. Basic harmony and, still less palatable, exposure to repertoire and a bit of historical background are deaths-heads at this feast, though indispensable parts of the foundation for real musical ëcan-doí: literacy is the true empowerment, the real deal for ëinclusioní. I give credit to the ëMusic Manifestoí that the first of its five aims includes giving children a ësound foundation in general musicianshipí; but there is no unpacking of what this might be, among the involve-speak. To become a session musician or jazz pianist without serious harmonic understanding is unthinkable, and I would welcome ëManifestoí aims such as ëto encourage teaching of basic harmonic structures to young blues and jazz improvisersí; it doesnít have to wear classical garb (another no-go designation), but it needs to be there. Unwelcome basics like this remind me of the old ladies in Fawlty Towers who are shooed up to their rooms during the Gourmet Evening: ëIíll send you up a menu!í barks Basil as they are hustled away, too frumpy to be seen at the party.

To participate as an amateur is indeed a rich experience, and if the ëMusic Manifestoí were concerned solely with encouraging amateur fun, its positive, enthusiastic approach would suffice; however, since it sets its sights on the jobs ladder, gushing familiar DCMS-speak about music as career opportunity, more focus is needed on the demands embodied in such aspirations. Nor is it kind, though it is depressingly ingrained in todayís world of Music GCSE, to belittle detailed study, as the enemy of enjoyment: a teacher is quoted as praising a conductor because he ëreally enforced the importance of the enjoyment of singing, feeling the music and the vibe, rather than looking too structurally at the music itselfí. It is a sad reflection of how ingrained the hostility to analytical thinking has become in our schools if a teacher can proffer this ludicrous antithesis in all seriousness: the activity has become about itself, about keeping children occupied, rather than about opening ears and minds to inner working through participation. Incidentally, I would be very surprised if the conductor cited on this case, whom I know and admire, was not firmly committed to structural learning through enjoyment, rather than opting for this bogus opposition between analytical learning and (shudder) ëthe vibeí.

The aims of the ëMusic Manifestoí, while genial, remain unfocused. In a way its strength and weakness are the same: a huge shove for music learning is an important initiative, but at the same time there is not, as popular correctness maintains, a single thing to pursue called ëmusicí, nor is there one social function it performs. That playing in a garage band and listening to Indian classical music are both ëlife-enhancingí does not make them the same thing. Music is many things, some of which can be seen to conflict ñ for example, the perennial aesthetic fisticuffs between prevailing oral ëfolkí traditions and the notation-basis of Western classical repertoire. In the ëMusic Manifestoí, meanwhile, music is portrayed as a catch-all social surgery, a huge sonic sand-pit from which our youth might just stomp across into lucrative careers. I suspect the disparity, the awkward refusal of different musics to align, further encourages the ëMusic Manifestoísí thinking away from artefact to process: in this mind-set, music becomes an activity ñ and we all know activities are ëa good thing for kidsí ñ

when in fact it is a result, one of infinite possible results, which the activity generates. Is this distinction important? Oddsbodikins! It most certainly is, because if we concentrate on the activity, the result matters less and less; without an end-result, any music activity becomes as good as any other ñ a means of ëtaking partí, ëgetting involvedí and the whole lexicon of education-as-child-minding ñ when it is not. Any child who has sat in different youth choirs or orchestras with various conductors knows that some activities are enhancing, while others are dire. Their parents tend to forget this as they drink at the well of benign platitude. It is not forgotten by trail-blazing organizations like Contemporary Music for Amateurs (www.coma.org), which has commissioned numerous new works for its non-specialist music ensembles around the UK, in recognition that if the end-product is crafted and stimulating, then the amateur performers will raise their game accordingly.

The ëMusic Manifestoí needs to proclaim musicís central truth: art changes your life, and the more you know about it, the more powerfully it does so. It is not primarily a means of making friends or of getting a job, though both of those might occur (more often the former); people like me do not devote our careers to writing, playing or recording music to create drop-in centres or youth employment, but to contribute to the collective imagination. The ëMusic Manifestoí needs to make clear not only that music has a positive social function, but that the goal of all this effort is the blazing power of the art-form itself.

ëSo, What Do You Play?í Down with The Music Business

A Rant

ëSo, What Do You Play?í is what people always ask when I say my day job is teaching Music in a university. Itís an understandable monolith, a view of music as a single thing - a production-line churning out violin students. The conversation comes to a halt soon afterward, when I say Iím a composer rather than a player. ëOhí. Composing is a sure-fire conversation-killer.

However, our western culture commodifies music as a monolithic whole in much more serious ways, every day; let me look at these. A term one hears a great deal on the Today programme is ëthe Music BusinessíÖ. a term from which I always feel excluded. I know only serious money interests the media, but so much music is starved of, never mind serious money, even light-hearted money; think of the composers writing ensemble pieces for small, sometimes non-existent or partially paid, commissions, the folk musicians in pubs, the youth orchestra kids working hard on Saturday mornings, the badly paid freelancers just out of music college doing chamber concerts in the suburbs, or playing in the pit for Christmas pantomimesÖ I donít see these folk as included in that ëbusinessí - musicians who will never fill the O2 or crash the internet with their new download, to be gulped down by millions. Music is not one thing, and it is not even different things with one intent. It is different things with different intents - but weíve lost sight of the question, what is the intent of any music? Itís now assumed that all music is consumable ear-stroking ñ while less obvious, but more durable, agenda donít get air-time.

For example Western art music is a rare bird in being sublimely useless ñ its intent is only to be itself, and even that intent emerged out of the usage of church and of court. Most of its boisterous neighbours, the worldís folk musics, have always been attached to dance, or work practice, or some defined social context. In most of these traditions, the process of notation is secondary, so they differ from the Western canon in the role they place on shared memory. Meanwhile ëfolkí music is not one thing either; these world musics are themselves individuated rather than items on a menu, even when iPods and ëworld musicí festivals make them appear so. Some art is fashioned to last, to slow-release its secrets, while at the other end of this continuum is the music made to be consumed as rapidly as possible for commercial purposes. In between are countless gradations, including popular musics that want to experiment, and art musics that hoped to sell. It is the specific intent of music ñ to be whistled, to absorb and evoke, to be swallowed whole and forgotten, to help pick fruit by ñ that helps to define its identity.

Yet the tendency to limit music to the domain of our own experience is a marked feature of our media, which rings with wonderfully solipsistic claims from within diverse musical worlds. An enthusiast for Scottish accordionists will hail a recording from the dance band circuit as ëone of the all-time greats in musical historyí, while the same accolade is being given, by separate adherents, to Bob Dylanís A Hard Rain, or Jan Garbarekís Belonging, or a recording by Nat King Cole. In the same way a reporter from Glastonbury Festival gushes that ìevery conceivable area of music is here ñ from Hip-hop to Funk and Soul.î Strange, then, to find no viol consort music, no Tuvan throat-singing, nor any work by Helmut Lachenmann, who seems to get into most other festival programmes. We may ask where this leaves the monolithic notion of ëthe music industryí - never mind the great works of Bartok, Ligeti, Stravinsky. Statements like these of course remind us that music is in fact many things at once; itís just funny that they come from people who all think itís one thing, but all have a different conviction about what that one thing is.

Itís usually classical types like me who are portrayed as snobby and hierarchical, but I think art music actually trains us to look out for things that are not ëoursí: to expect diversity, the idea that music will present itself in infinite forms ñ and with different goals. Nothing strikes me as more misguided than those prizes for which different musics are nominated, all thrown in the same hat: what is the common basis for comparison? How can you compare the intent of sustained drama through a one-act opera with a reframed national folk music style using electronic hardware? Would the television prize of ëAll Timeí (a popular quantity in ëthe businessí) go to Family Guy or to Lord Clarkís Civilization? Itís really as daft as thatÖ meanwhile music continues to insist on being more than we ever give it credit for being, because it is bigger than we are. It is not one thing. It is not, though it hold in its embrace numerous separate fields of endeavour, a ëbusinessí.

c 2014 Piers Hellawell

(given in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer, London as part of the Institute of Composing Rants series, during the PRS Foundation for Musicís New Music Biennial)

Questions about studying composition conducted in a questionnaire.

1. Would you say that the profile of composition has changed in the past decade?

Certainly. In the first place, institutions like mine encourage students to try the composition pathway; there are transferable skills even for those who don’t stay the course. In the old days, no one offered progression in composition activity; it suddenly appeared, grandly, as a final-year ‘option’. In today’s courses in the UK, it is an equal partner to musicology and performance. Secondly, the rise of technology facilities has attracted many new students interested in using non-traditional sound sources from the studio to make pieces of their own. Even a studio dunce like me knows that digital technology facilitates the mixing of sounds that used to be a grinding process of tape and scissors.

2. How did you find your way into the field of composing?

I needed no leading, since it was what I wanted to do long before any formal musical training. But many others need help in discovering the discipline, and that is crucial. I was lucky to have encouraging teachers – a support that is very necessary now, as the composition discipline denies the easy rewards that young people are encouraged to seek. My parents took classical music very seriously, while at the same time there was pop and jazz at home; all that was (and continues to be ) crucial for me. I have to say, though, that most of my motivation has always come from somewhere inside.

3. What advice (or more) would you give to a student who is wishing to pursue composition at university level?

*Devour music of the past, in recordings, performances and scores where possible. Composers of the past learned their musical landscape without recordings, so it’s got to be easier now! No one can create in a vacuum *Base your ideas on the reality of what instruments (acoustic or electronic) can do, and gain practical familiarity with their properties. *Study score conventions of how to present your music, since the composer is rightly held responsible by players for everything on the page. It’s no good blaming a computer! Never use one until you are absolutely familiar with notation practice to professional standards. Reliance on software is no substitute for real expertise – a big problem nowadays. *Exert yourself to get players together to play your work. No one will care as much as you do about your work, so don’t expect your opportunities to be dished up by others while you sit and wait. *Stop thinking of listening to music only as entertainment and start approaching it for what you can learn from great composers. It’s possible to learn just as much from a work or composer who does not really light your fire! *Don’t be afraid to ask for help. With standards of technical training under dire threat in our exam curriculum, students with vision are increasingly turning to tuition for those traditional skills forced out by the commodifying of education. These have not suddenly become less important, and there are musicians around who can help you.

4. What do you look for in a potential composition student?

A desire to express and create what was not there before, through the organizing of sound. Means can be developed, but students who merely want to reproduce music that they already know will not be composers, however skilled they may be. Even when young composers get furious with modern music, I know they have a mission and the potential to develop. But a student whose ears and mind are simply closed to artistic issues will never be a creator.

5. How realistic should composition students be when deciding on their future?

They should be realistic – but everyone needs a dream hidden in a corner. Students today are much more hard-nosed and unromantic about what they face, and that rightly deters all but the few from keeping going as ‘composers’; most cannot earn a living from it in the UK, and the trick is to find the richest parallel activity that lets you be a composer. Meanwhile, there’s that dream: some of us in ‘my day’ whom reason should have deterred from composition kept going, while I know of other people that I saw as composers, but whose practical streak soon brushed away that dream.

6. In your opinion, how much would choosing between a conservatoire and a university affect their future career prospects in this competitive field?

There are strengths to be had on both sides, but they relate more to musical development than career prospects: composers prosper from both backgrounds. But why choose? Our students who go on to compose as ‘postgrads’ at conservatoire say they have had the best of all worlds, and feel the better equipped by their degree course for the unique opportunities of a conservatoire.

7. What pressures do young ‘classical’ composers face?

Composing your own music continues to attract youngsters despite the blandishments of other, much more superficially rewarding pursuits. This is amazing: composition offers no easy answers, no guarantees and little material rewards. It is appallingly difficult to get works heard in live concert form and still harder to obtain repeated performances of them; if you do so, meanwhile, there is the continual drip of disdain for anything mysterious, or inscrutable, from a media obsessed with messages of simplistic attraction. We have lost the power to enjoy things we don’t understand, since popular culture is all about consumption. Who comes out of a Hollywood movie or pop concert arguing what on earth it was about, the way we do from a visit to Tate Modern? The commercial consumer digests a product honed for purchase; its commercial value relies on its being unambiguous. Why not measure depth, as well as breadth, of participation? Despite these discouragements, students enrol in buoyant numbers for composition. They are not deterred when I tell them it is not as easy as they thought, for if it were, the world would be even fuller of composers.

‘Who Are You Like?’ – A Blog about Influence

The question of influences in art is paradoxical: any serious artist wishes to carve a personal identity, yet for the public that perceives new art – inasmuch as there is a real public for the modern ‘classical’ arts today – nothing seems to contextualise the artist that people meet like comparison to other artists.

The citing of influence is a veritable lagoon of reefs and shoals, both for the questioner who wades in to ask ‘So - who are you like?’ and for the creative artist who gives in and mumbles a few celebrated names. In the first place, it is humiliating all round, since it is a communal admission that this artist or composer’s work is little known in the public domain. Perhaps since visual artists need only stand in front of their efforts for the question to be laid to rest, it is composers who most often invite this approach, which gets round the cumbersome process of listening to the actual music; novelists and poets seem not to prompt questions of stylistic lineage to the same extent, for no obvious reason.

The ‘who are you like?’ question wounds even as it leads to a reluctant confession of influences, though damage to the creative pride is itself not a disaster when none of us bar a few celebrated names can avoid having our artistic noses rubbed in the hostility, ignorance and indifference of the modern world to most of what we do. Only those few exceptional ‘names’ can expect more – among them a celebrated British artist who was introduced to a friend of mine, only to face her breezy opener ‘so, do you work in music too?’ The rest of us already assume no one’s heard of us, and the stranger who braves any hauteur with such a question does, at least, show a welcome curiosity.

The greater shoal lurking beneath questions of artistic lineage is an aesthetic, not a social sandbank. Even while floundering around for names, the composer is assailed by a sense of how inadequate is the picture they assemble, and there are complex reasons for this. The question of stylistic similarity masks a fatal confusion, between what we love and what we admire, so that while it is absolutely natural to seek a way in to a new composer through other works, the implicit equation, that admiration will lead to identifiable traits, is highly suspect. To listen out for jazz in a composer who listens to jazz is rather like expecting a fisherman to be fond of swimming; we do not necessarily express what we enjoy in direct emulation – nor must we love what we emulate. As a result, the better question would be that more often put to writers, ‘with what is your work concerned?’ – though for a composer the answer to this must always fit uncomfortably into words. The fact is that the composer is really an unconscious predator, on the look-out for technique and handling in a sense that is independent of style and even content – so that in a sense the composer has ears for listening, like the rest of us, but also another set of ears that address a detached process of study.

Though there is little obvious connection between my own sound-world and popular musics, I can acknowledge a texture from a television cop show that translated directly into an ensemble work of mine in 1994. At the same time, though I am of the generation which, if required to run from a burning building containing the sole copies of all rock music since 1959, would snatch up the complete Beatles and Led Zeppelin (and the Doors if I had space), I cannot point to any clear antecedents in my work from the great Jimmy Page, whatever my admiration and however much deeper my connection to what this music does than to a television signature item. It isn’t about love, or about depth of connection.

The corollary of this is that when composers do acknowledge a ‘constructive borrowing’, it rarely appears in anticipated, that is to say obvious or superficial, guises. This is because the composer listening ‘predatorily’ to earlier music is mentally in the zone of his own, rather than of the music being heard (whereas when listening to favourite music as a ‘listener’ the composer is in the realm of that work itself, like any other listener). When Lutoslawski heard John Cage’s Piano Concerto it pointed him to the fertile area of what he was to call his own ‘aleatoric counterpoint’, yet the latter type of music (in works like Jeux Venetiens) is worlds away from Cage, as is the cool controlled elegance of Lutoslawski overall – and I believe the latter admitted that he had hardly ‘heard’ the Cage at all in performance, so absorbed was he in its implications for his own problems. I do not know whether Lutoslawski was an admirer of Cage in the round, or if he enjoyed Cage’s sound world, but this would not matter since the process at work is a cerebral response akin to problem-solving – rather as when the popular detective of fiction leaps breaks into a conversation with a cry of ‘that’s it!’ after some trivial phrase has completed for him a subconscious puzzle. Writing this, I realise that my own composition mentioned above for the television music also has, as its conclusion, a movement that arose directly from the spirit of a set of harpsichord variations by Couperin that I heard performed; I can at least say (since it is my own music) that I have no great affinity to Couperin’s world in itself, but that it was a quality of cumulative reiteration that had its impact upon me – a quality that might be found as powerfully in some quite different area of music.

In short, the aesthetic forces that we do avow do not appear as listeners usually expect, and they would rarely be detected aurally, since something else is at work altogether. If I claim the spirit of Janacek as a prime kinship for me as a musician it does not mean that my music sounds like Janacek but that his sense of unquenchable life-force is to me art’s perfect answer to life. Neither Arvo Part’s processes of isorhythm nor the repetition cycles of Balinese gamelan, upon both of which I have drawn in the past within my own workings, indicates any style connection to those aesthetic worlds. Why would it? Composition is for me a synthesis, a process of absorbtion, while – taking up the other set of ears – it is also a relief to be able ‘just’ to listen to music.