Monday 11 March 2013

I really do find all this music writing stuff very difficult...

I have been composing music now for more than 50 years.  I have also been walking, talking, eating, playing the piano and dressing myself for about the same length of time; but in these activities (apart from playing the piano) I have complete mastery.  I can eat whole meals now without forkfuls of food ending up on the floor or sticking to my face.  I can tie my own shoe laces almost without thinking about it.  I can put one foot in front of the other without, generally speaking, falling over and embarrassing myself.  Yes, I am good at these things.  I am a Master.

But composing music is a different matter.  It's hard.  That's worth saying again - it really is very hard indeed.  It wasn't, once, a very long time ago.  When I was seven years old, music poured out of me; pastoral and romantic, energetic and wild, it was all the same to me.  The problem was, of course, that none of that music was any good.  It didn't matter then.  I remember my infants school teacher (a very fetching young woman called Miss Stevenson) asking me a question which baffled me.  "I don't know, Miss Stevenson.  I'm only six!"  So it was okay then to write bad music.  I was never going to be another Mozart and I'm not being engagingly or endearingly modest when I say that none of this music was any good.  It really, truly wasn't.

I was dyslexic, you see, in a time before dyslexia was invented.  I was a bright boy but my lack of reading skills puzzled my teachers (including the estimable Miss Stevenson) and led them to believe that I wasn't really trying hard enough.  Reading music was to be a worse nightmare, but that's jumping ahead a little.  I was a good actor and I was always chosen to play the lead in school plays.  I had a decent voice and I was often selected (much to my chagrin, I have to make public after all these years) to sing a solo in assembly.  And I seemed 'bright'.  But reading troubled me.  In those days we used to read aloud in class, each child taking a paragraph.  I sat 11th in the chain and I used to count off 10 paragraphs and sit trying to make sense of the series of letters which landed on my ever moistening eyes.  Sometimes it may have worked out okay but I don't remember any of those successes.  Sometimes, by luck, mine would be a short paragraph.  But on other occasions fate would play a part in my downfall.  Linda Jennet, 8th in the chain, had an especially weak bladder and she would sometimes ask to be excused with the consequence that I had to negotiate a different and unfamiliar set of words at only a few moments' notice.  This would cause me to panic and panic made me stammer.  'W's were fatal and I would stumble through my painful paragraph, spluttering every time a 'w' occurred, especially at the beginning of a word.  And 'J's.  And 'P's now i come to think of it.  And 'R's.  And especially 'F's!

At about the same time as this torture of a small boy was going on, my Aunt Edith acquired a piano and she encouraged me to play.  On our first date the instrument and I fell in love.  It's been a torrid relationship ever since and if we had married there would have been years spent in relationship counselling.  I was sent to a local piano teacher, Mrs Victor, who pronounced after one whole lesson that I didn't have a musical bone in my body and that my parents, far from well-off, needn't bother to send me any more.

But we were in love and we didn't let little things like total humiliation get in the way.  I started to perform my own little tunes (again, I should remind you, we are not talking Benjamin Britten or Mozart here) which the family and some friends generously applauded.  I was hooked on the idea that I was performing something for the first time - that every time I thought of a new tune, there would be a world premier soon after.  I felt like an inventor.  Something that hadn't existed a few minutes before, now did.  It was as simple as that.

Being so young and having very few musical friends, I suffered from a lack of self censure or constructive criticism. And when I say I 'wrote' lots of music, what I really mean is that I performed my own music frequently.  I didn't have a clue about how to notate what I was creating.

When I was 14 and having decided that composing music was to be my career, I was sent to another piano teacher, a Mr Beckett.  I played him a bit of a Beethoven sonata which I had learned by ear and he seemed satisfied.  I recall him remarking that I showed a real mastery of the pedal - though which one I wasn't sure.  So he sent me off with a Bach prelude, I'm sure expecting a fully assured performance a week later.  This did not happen.  I stared at the music for hours and tried so hard to figure it out but it was gibberish to me.  Mr Beckett, although making the at least consistent conclusion that I was bone idle, didn't give up on me and when he heard a piece I had written some weeks later, I turned to find his head in his hands... "Oh Michael, if only you'd work!"

But I digress.  All this talk about childhood has just been a distraction.  What I need to do now is to go away and write some music.  And I mean write this time because I now own the Sibelius notation software.  It makes notating music simple (once you've waded through the 1103 page handbook) and now all I have to do is to tell it what to write.  This part is called composing.  It's not as easy as it looks, you know.  In fact, it's really difficult.  Did I mention that...?

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