In childhood and student days and occasionally in recent years, I have written very small amounts of music in various styles from twelve-tone to jazz-like. The idea was not to belong to a tribe or to be revolutionary or influential, but simply to experience for myself the organic growth of a piece, to follow where it wanted to go -- a wonderful spiritual exercise -- and to let it become as good-of-its-kind as it could be. That is the only sense in which the music is `serious'. The great composer Leos Janacek spoke of the silence in which `sounds shape themselves', and the great mathematician J.E. Littlewood of `giving the subconscious a chance'. Such exercises were also, in my case, part of a quest to understand the deeply mysterious phenomenon we call music, and the extent of its kinship with mathematics and with our unconscious power of abstraction. That in turn was part of a wider quest to understand lucidity principles. Lucidity is the opening theme of some published essays of mine and of a book in preparation, whose ultimate concerns are the public understanding of science and its power to keep alive an optimist's hope for the future.
The silence in which sounds shape themselves has been a great joy to me. Thanks to the Internet I can share that joy with anyone in the world. No need for acknowledgement; I have no career that depends on it!
This little piece, `Fugue on a Telephone Number' (MP3 file for download, 2.5 Mbyte, duration 5'), is partly in memory of my father and is also for two dear friends, whose telephone number gave me the opening theme. There is a noticeable edit near the end, because after the recording I changed my mind -- or, rather, my mind was changed -- about how the piece wanted to end. (Here are pdf files of the revised score (7 pages, ca. 50 kbyte each), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and the string parts (2 pages each), v1, v2, c1, c2; a few other notes have been changed, since the recording, on page 6 of the score.) The new ending was inspired by a fascinating correspondence with the Israeli composer Yuval Shay-El. From that correspondence arose the idea of ending near the twin tonal centres, E and A, simultaneously -- a bit like the slow movement of Beethoven's op 132 string quartet, the famous hymn to convalescence that Beethoven thought of as being `in the Lydian mode', but which, to my ear, has instead the twin tonal centres C and F.
I happen to think that today's affluent societies are making a colossal mistake in downplaying the spiritual importance of artistic creativity in general, and of music in particular, and in supposing that scientific and mathematical creativity has nothing to do with artistic creativity. Lip service is paid, but the reality shows itself in, for instance, education priorities and education cuts, and above all in the unconscious assumption that if something can't be measured then it can't be important! (That last assumption is also, it seems to me, part of what's leading to other insanities such as the patenting of people.) I happen to think, also, that an understanding of how music works has a great deal to say not only about lucidity principles but also, more generally, about our human nature at its deeper levels.
Vocal music or proto-music could well be more ancient than language, perhaps many millions of years more ancient. It includes the vocal play between mothers and babies. Together with dancing and mimicry it seems to have been part of the emotional intelligence that bound groups of our ancestors together, permitting them to survive as ground-dwellers among large predators. It's no accident, I think, that within us there can be an unconscious `inner game' of music, played by an unconscious inner musician for whom singing and dancing are, and always were, nearly the same thing. Allowing that game to be played, after the removal of technical obstacles, is in my view the most important secret of success in musical performance. It is a game that can join heaven and earth.
There are many musical counterparts to the walking lights above. One is a tiny trombone `sketch' (40 seconds of mild irreverence, including a musical split infinitive somewhat like the emphatic split infinitive in `to boldly go'). The score is available here as a pdf file (20 Kbyte), and a `performance' of sorts is available here, as a computer-generated MP3 file, 1.3 Mbyte. But it's best with a real trombone. Like the walking lights it tellingly illustrates the brain's model-fitting processes, in which internal models are actively fitted to incoming sensory data.
Somewhat in the same spirit -- and this time I dare to be irreverent to Beethoven and Nielsen -- is this joky little piano piece (MP3, 0.9 Mbyte). It grew out of another friend's telephone number endlessly repeated, which the number seemed to want to do. I call the piece `Half a cup of tea'. I imagine Beethoven pounding away at the piano (perhaps after hearing some bebop for the first time) with the tea forgotten and flying through the air. This is a revised version (2005) with the climax better timed. There is an allusion to some real Beethoven, the mighty Grosse Fuge, the natural and awesome ending to the great opus 130 string quartet. It popped up completely unplanned and unbidden. Make of it what you will. I haven't yet found time to tidy up the score, but will gladly supply it `as is' to anyone interested.
I still find occasional solace in a little six-minute string quartet movement written in spare moments, many years ago (from yet another friend's telephone number). It's a coy little piece about `walking lightly on this Earth'. It can be performed in the manner of Haydn's `Farewell Symphony', the four musicians departing one by one. The Delmé Quartet (Galina Solodchin, John Trusler, John Underwood, and Jonathan Williams) performed it in the Cambridge Summer Music Festival for my 60th birthday. A beautiful recording by them is available here as an MP3 file (6'15", 4.6 Mbyte). The printed score is available here as a gzipped postscript file (0.9 Mbyte), and the parts similarly: violin 1, violin 2, viola, 'cello (about 0.6 Mbyte each). Because of its `walking lightly' character it also works well as a flute quartet, after slight rearrangement. I stole the descending motif in bar 54 from a composition by my cousin Philippa Hemsley.
Another project in spare moments, spread over the last ten years or more, has been a musical `discourse' on the B flat Clarinet Quintet of Franz Schmidt. It's an experiment on the subtleties and ineffabilities of large-scale musical form. (I wonder what Heinrich Schenker would have thought of it.) Franz Schmidt was in my view a wonderful and fascinating composer, whose music has been unjustly neglected. The `discourse', a vast sonata form, seems to come from a parallel universe in which Schmidt lived longer and leaned more toward the classical, as in his last great work, the oratorio The Book with Seven Seals.
I am grateful to Jeff Ginn of Jeffrey Ginn Music Studios for valuable professional help, to the composers Robin Holloway and Yuval Shay-El for helpful comments and correspondence, and to my wife Ruth McIntyre, neé Hecht, for her supreme artistry as a musician, which has inspired me in many ways over the years. Her wonderful ways of using piano sonority inspired, in particular, this little piano piece à la Satie (5'25", score only, pdf, 116 kbyte, also gzipped postscript (106 kbyte), written for a much-loved colleague's Festscrift celebrations. (Guess what: it began with the colleague's telephone number -- though this time it was a tough nut to crack. It's fun to see whether unpromising material can turn itself into something that makes musical sense.) It's only light music and is meant to be played after dinner, in the late evening, while wearing rose-tinted spectacles. The violinist Emma Wragg showed me that it also works beautifully as a violin-piano duet. Together with two deeply musical friends -- one of whom is Vivian Williams, the cellist on our Crighton Memorial CDs -- Ruth inspired me some time ago to a larger effort, a fourteen-minute trio for clarinet, cello and piano with clarinet doubling bass clarinet. It strongly complements existing repertoire. It's called `Frivolity', its opening telephone number is that of a drinking house in Worthing, West Sussex, and it is full of laughter and riotous dancing. Nevertheless, there's a still centre. Where that came from is another mystery. It's been recorded but I haven't yet got round to the editing.
By the way, I should have acknowledged that Ruth and Vivian are the pianist and cellist playing along with me in the little Fugue on a Telephone Number above. (Of course it's not their fault that I changed my mind -- sorry, my mind was changed -- about the notes on page 6.)
And what's that fragment at the top of the page? Not a telephone number that I'm aware of! Just a musical haiku that touches me. It changed itself one or two years ago, and may grow into something more. My aunt, the Australian poet Anne Edgeworth, first showed me such things.
I'm keeping the Note available in case it interests a composer who'd like to shed the cultural baggage about `tonality versus atonality' while respecting our inner nature. I've been encouraged to do so by Roger Scruton's Aesthetics of Music (1997, Oxford) and by Peter Davison's Reviving the Muse: Essays on Music after Modernism (2001, Continuum/Claridge Press).