October the First Is Too Late

Chapter One: Prelude

I had been invited to compose a piece for the Festival of Contemporary Music, Cologne, 1966. My intention was a set of variations in serial form. I chose the serial formula, partly as a technical exercise, partly because I had a fancy to end each variation with the sound of a farmyard animal.

The first three variations went smoothly enough but I got stuck on the fourth. I decided a change of air was needed to get me out of the rut. My decision to go for a week down to Cornwall was the trifling beginning of a sequence of momentous events. It was as if I had crossed a more or less flat watershed that nevertheless separates rivers flowing to quite different oceans.

I was lying on the clifftops in the sunshine trying to puzzle out exactly how one might imitate the whinny of a horse. I must have dozed off to sleep for perhaps ten minutes. I woke with a tremendous tune, the melody of a lifetime, running in my head. It flowed on and on, statement and response, question and answer, seemingly without end. It began with a series of rocking chords in the bass. Then the first phrase came in the treble. From there on it took off with a momentum that never seemed to die, the kind of perpetuum mobile you get in the first movement of the sixth Brandenburg concerto. Quickly, I scribbled the cascade of notes on a piece of score paper, for this was not a case in which I dare trust to memory. How inevitable a melody is while you have it running in your head, how difficult to recapture once it has gone.

On the way back to my lodging at a local farmhouse I passed several horses grazing but the thought of my fourth variation was gone now. Late into the night I pondered on the ramifications of that tune. It is rare indeed for a long melody to go well with harmony. To produce striking orchestral effects one normally uses a mixture of several scraps of melody, mere fragments. But this case seemed different. Orchestral ideas grew naturally around it. The instruments thundered in my head, their individual qualities, their distinctive tones, became ever more clear, ever sharper. The people of the farm must have thought me a queer fish, I dare say. I sat all day writing for the fever of creation was on me. By the end of the week the piece was essentially finished. There was still routine work to do but nothing more.

I was already on my way back to London before the problem of the Festival recurred to me. It was obvious the variations would never be finished in time. It wasn’t just a week that was lost. In the past few days I had burnt up a couple of months of normal effort. I wondered about using the new piece. Reason told me no, emotion told me yes. I desperately wanted to hear the new sounds from the orchestra. I had given it everything, maximum sonority. Yet this was exactly where I would run into trouble. A considerable quantity of electronic music would quite certainly be played. My piece, coming late in the programme, would unfortunately look like an all-out attack on other composers. When compared with the full blast of the true orchestra, their stuff would inevitably sound thin and wan.

Then there were two points of conscience. I don’t have any rooted objection to the avant garde. While the new fashions have nothing very great to recommend them, they do at least contribute something to music. Classical methods work wonderfully well for the positive emotions, for sentiments of epic proportions. But the less pleasant emotions cannot be described at all in classical terms. It was beyond the resources of even the greatest of the old musicians to display genuine anger for instance. So really I had no quarrel with modern styles as such. My quarrel was with a fashion that claimed those styles to be everything, as if a craftsman were to insist on always working with a single tool.

My second worry was whether my piece could really be described as ‘contemporary’. Of course it was contemporary in the sense that it was recent, not more than a week old, but there is a sense in which the word represents form and technique rather than chronology.

The choice evidently lay between withdrawing and going ahead with the new piece. After something of a struggle with myself I decided to go ahead. There was a lot to be done, parts to be copied, and then mailed away to Germany. The orchestra was to be the Mannheim Symphony.

The journey to Cologne was uneventful. Two rehearsals were scheduled for me. After a few misunderstandings I managed to get the playing into tolerable shape. My time was an evening of the second week. As it came round I was motivated in the following way. My thoughts on the piece had dulled in the intervening weeks but the sound of the orchestra reawakened something of the fury I had felt in that week in Cornwall. This, and the fact that several people had heard my rehearsals and had already spread critical rumours, put me in a combative state of mind by the time I walked on to the platform to conduct.

All worries disappeared at the first surge of the music. For the next seventeen minutes I was totally committed to the vision I had had on those faraway Cornish cliffs. In rehearsal I deliberately held the orchestra back. When an orchestra becomes excited with a new work it is good policy to wait until the first actual performance before giving them their full head. I not only gave it them now, I drove them with an intensity I had never shown before. In a sense it comes ill of a composer to speak well of his own work; but it is all so far back now that I think I can be reasonably objective. As the melody surged into the final fanfare I knew I had in no way disgraced myself. I also knew I had contributed little to music except a stirring fifteen minutes or so. The musician’s problem is stated very simply: how to display the more worthwhile aspects of human nature differently from the old masters. Modern styles have concentrated in part on the meaner side of things, as I have already remarked, in part on the purely abstract. Modern styles are no solution to the problem but neither was my piece. It was an extrapolation of the old methods. It faced the challenge of comparison with the composers of the past—for fifteen minutes. It pointed no way to anybody else.

This criticism I would have been entirely willing to accept if the audience had admitted the straightforward merit of what had been done. They didn’t. There was scattered applause mixed with boos and hisses. Momentarily nonplussed I failed to take a quick bow and to make a quick exit. The hissing increased. Suddenly I became coldly angry. With an imperious gesture I turned to the leader and shouted loudly, ‘Bar one!’ Such is the respect of a German orchestra for its conductor that the players all obediently turned back to the beginning. Before anybody in the audience realized what was going to happen the rolling bass chords started again. The shouting behind me held its own for a little while until the orchestra picked up volume. Then as the full chords broke loose the mob amounted to little more than a whisper in a storm. At the end they had their say, or rather their shout. This time it was quite full blooded. I was in no doubt of what to do. I bowed around the hall twice, shook the leader’s hand, patted him on the shoulder, and walked out.

As I made my way back to the hostel I fully intended to quit Cologne the following morning. Yet when morning came I saw no reason to run away like a whipped dog. I found it much easier to behave normally, as if nothing had happened, than I would have expected. My fellow musicians were only meeting me in small numbers at a time now. Perhaps for this reason they had lost something of the confidence of the evening before. Several of the critics went out of their way to tell me, more or less out of the back of the hand, how much they had enjoyed my piece. Well, well. I remembered being told, as a youngster, that if universal approbation represented a hundred per cent on a scale of appreciation, then to be universally well known, but disliked, was already worth fifty per cent. To be entirely unknown corresponded to the zero mark.

I did leave the Festival two days before its end, not under any compulsion, but because I got bored. Two weeks of caterwauling was more than I could take. So midway through the afternoon I found myself at the airport. It chanced that Alex Hamilton had decided to get out too. We travelled back together. Alex is the untypical Scot. He has a remarkable gift for floating through life. His musical style is modern, abstract, technically very good. His great gift, outside music, lies in avoiding doing the things he doesn’t want to do. He couldn’t understand why I had gone so deliberately out of my way to make trouble for myself. He didn’t criticize me directly. We sat together, Alex making lighter conversation than I was able to do myself. Every now and then he would stop talking and begin shaking with silent laughter. I stood it as long as I could and then said, ‘I’m glad you think it funny.’ It wasn’t a very worthwhile remark but it sent him into still more violent contortions. Then he patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘It was marvellous, just marvellous.’

We got into London airport more or less on time. Quickly we were into the reception hall and through immigration. Then came an unconscionably long wait in the customs hall. If the trend towards faster aircraft goes on long enough we shall end up by taking more time to unload the baggage than for the flight, I thought grumpily. A sudden slap on the back caused me to turn sharply, a cross look still on my face. It was a slim dark-haired man in his early thirties. Recognition came in perhaps half a second. ‘Thank goodness it’s you,’ he said, ‘for a second I thought I might have slapped the wrong back.’

It was John Sinclair. We’d been at school together. We had won scholarships to Cambridge in the same year, his in mathe­matics, mine in music. Besides his mathematics Sinclair had a natural liking for music. In our university days I was as much interested in the piano itself as in composition. The larger part of my musical education I got outside the lecture-room, by playing great quantities of music. I developed in those days the habit of riding through a composer’s works totally, symphonies, quartets, as well as straight piano music. John Sinclair used to spend many a spare hour in my rooms.

We were both interested in mountains. Already at school we had been out on one or two walking tours together. We kept it going at university. At the end of our third year we made a great trip to Skye. A party of four of us camped in Glen Brittle. We had a magnificent couple of weeks climbing in the Cuillin. The penultimate day was very wet. We spent it in the tents, cooking and talking. Our talk centred on what we were going to do the following year. Sinclair and I came to the tentative conclusion that we’d make a trip to the remarkable sandstone mountains of the extreme northwest. This plan never came to fruition. I won a scholarship to Italy in the following year. By the time I returned Sinclair was away in the United States. Although we had only met twice in the intervening years I had followed his career with more than a passing interest. The Royal Society just managed to scramble him into its Fellowship, at the age of twenty-nine, in time to forestall the award of a Nobel Prize. I followed what was going on as best I could in magazines like the New Scientist and the Scientific American. I knew he had contributed a decisive step in the physics of elementary particles, something of a highly algebraic nature.

I made the introductions.

‘Where are you in from?’

‘New York. And you?’

‘We’re just back from Cologne. Music Festival.’

Our bags came at last. Alex and I checked them through customs. I said to him, ‘Let’s wait.’ It was some minutes before Sinclair joined us. ‘How about a taxi into town, and having dinner together?’ he said. This was fine by me. I’d been a little shy suggesting it. When you haven’t seen a man for six years, when he’s gone a long way in those six years, you never know exactly where you stand. But it seemed that John hadn’t changed much, in spite of his towering success. He was thinner now than he used to be, and I would have said he’d got a slightly worried look about him. We took a taxi to my place, ostensibly for a drink. We had several drinks.

Dinner began to seem less important. Alex had developed quite a sway. He sat firmly down in the largest chair, gave a flowing gesture, with the hand that was not holding a glass, and said, ‘Music.’

‘What? Any preferences anybody?’

‘Anything, anything you like.’ He turned to John, ‘We don’t have preferences, do we? What we want is, music!’

I had not the slightest idea of what was going to come out as my hands came down on the keyboard. It was a Chopin nocturne, one I couldn’t recall having played for years. True I used to go quite a lot for Chopin in my late teens. Quite a bit has been written on the techniques of seduction. My not very humble submission is that most of such stuff is plain nonsense. For every girl of eighteen who can be broken down by feats of muscle power on the football field there are ten who will swoon into your arms at the sound of a Chopin waltz or mazurka. I have no doubt the same system works just as well at later ages, but for me at least it had come to seem too cheap and easy. Seducing a girl with your own music is all fair and aboveboard. Doing it with someone else’s had come to seem not quite proper, like shooting a sitting bird, or fishing with maggots. Anyway, out came the nocturne, somewhere from my subconscious memory. The alcohol stopped any worries about forgetting the way it went. As the piece glided to its end I had the feeling I had never played Chopin more perfectly. No doubt this was the effect of the alcohol too. Yet it is a mistake to think in terms of absolutes. It’s the way you feel, the way your audience feels, that really counts. Alex was getting quite high now, ‘More Choppy, please. More Choppy.’

They kept me at it for two solid hours. Whenever I tried to leave the stool Alex would have none of it. ‘Keep playing,’ he yodelled. Where the stuff came from I simply couldn’t say. It just seemed to well up in the fingers. There was a great mazurka. I couldn’t even remember its number. The notes came unbidden. I began a piece which at first I couldn’t place. Then I realized this was the calm beginning of the tremendous polonaise-fantaisie. For a while I had fears I could never remember the magnificent second half. Then I began to listen intently to the music itself. I became lost in it. Not until my fingers came down on the final crashing chord was I aware of any passage of time. They were both on my shoulder now. For a moment I thought Alex was going to weep. I jumped up and said firmly, ‘Time for food.’

There were eggs in the refrigerator. Within twenty minutes we had a big omelette all piping hot on the table. John and I ate while Alex talked, his mouth full the whole while. Somehow it sounded very witty. Wit, like love, evidently lies in the ear of the listener. We had some fresh fruit. Then I went off to make coffee.

When I came back Alex was nowhere to be seen.

‘He’s gone, apparently.’

That was Alex all over. He had the gift of appearing out of nowhere and of disappearing without the slightest explanation. He was the nearest human embodiment of the Cheshire cat I had ever met.

‘Has he really gone?’ asked John.

‘Oh yes. He never goes in any other way.’

‘What an odd fellow. Well, Dick, how have you been these last few years?’

Perhaps I should explain that I was christened Richard and that my nose, broken in a boyhood accident, somehow dominates my appearance. With this formality out of the way, let me return to my story.

We settled ourselves comfortably as we drank our coffee. The conversation turned naturally on memories and anecdotes of our earlier years. No third person would have been much interested in the talk. By the time we had done it was half past one. I didn’t know where John had been intending to stay the night but it was obvious that he should occupy my spare room. I got out towels and bed linen. Half an hour later I was asleep, blissfully unaware of the strange events that even the near future was to reveal.