London Philharmonic Orchestra under Thomas Beecham and had managed to keep alive for many years a good semipro string orchestra, taking it to audiences of farmers and coal miners in the backblocks, and playing them Bach and Britten, Warlock and Tchaikovsky, as well as pieces by NZ composers who were starting to emerge. National radio later broadcast a suite from my ballet, in an arrangement I had made for full orchestra.
I applied for, and won, a New Zealand government scholarship that would give me two years’ study abroad at five hundred pounds a year, not much even in those days, but with a little copying for the BBC (sweated labor at a shilling and ninepence a page—seven and a half pence in today’s money), I managed to survive.
In those days for us colonials, “abroad” meant England, and I arrived in London in April 1961 with not much idea what I was going to do with my two years of freedom and no one to advise me. I went to the Royal College of Music, where they told me politely that they didn’t want me. I now know that I’d have done better career wise to enroll at, maybe, Cambridge or York University, where I could have done a doctorate full time in the two years, but I didn’t know that then, and so I wrote to Michael Tippett asking for lessons (I thought I might as well start at the top). He politely refused but told me that in his opinion the best teacher in England was Priaulx Rainier, so I wrote to her, made an appointment, and went to see her. She was in her sixties then, a composer of gritty and dissonant though not serial music. She looked through my precious ballet score and one or two other things, finally putting them aside and saying, “Now let’s see what you can really do.”
I was working entirely on my own, living in a bedsitter, with no opportunities for performance, not even a piano, and no acquaintance among musicians in London. It was really more or less hopeless, but I persevered and composed a number of instrumental pieces and songs under Priaulx’s supervision and a large orchestral piece, rather in the manner of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces Opus 16. In August 1962 she sent me to the summer school of music at Dartington in Devon. There I found myself in a new world, the young lions of the avant-garde, whose talk was all about aleatoricism and total serialism, whose heroes were Boulez and Stockhausen, Berio and Cage, none of whom I had then heard of. I enrolled in the composition class, with Luigi Nono as tutor. The young lions (I was thirty-five at that time) excluded me, were deaf to my pleas to tell me what it was they were talking about, made it clear they thought Priaulx Rainier was something out of the ark, and generally treated me and my idols with contempt. Sibelius? What’s that? One bright spot was that I got an eminent clarinetist to look at some duos for clarinets I had written for Priaulx. He liked them and got two of his pupils to play them at an informal afternoon concert. Another was meeting Bernard Rands, fresh from study in Florence with Luciano Berio, and currently a lecturer in the University of North Wales in Bangor. He spent a whole afternoon with me with pencil and manuscript paper explaining the principles of serial composition and other concepts. I shall always be grateful to him for that. We become good friends, and in subsequent years I spent a lot of time at his home in Bangor, and later at York, and through him met Berio and Cathy Berberian and a number of other luminaries of the time. It was also Bernard who introduced me to the idea of music as gesture, though I really didn’t understand it at the time, and in any case he was thinking more in terms of a musical work than of performance. Berio’s series of pieces for solo instrument, called Sequenzas, I found interesting, especially the one for trombone, which I heard at the Queen Elizabeth Hall played by the marvelous jazz trombonist Paul Rutherford. It was wildly applauded and praised by the critics, until Rutherford admitted that he’d played the first measures of the score and improvised the rest. The avant-gardists never forgave him, but Berio didn’t seem to mind too much.
But for all Bernard’s help I never got on with serial composition, Schoenbergian, Webernian, or Boulezian. I just couldn’t make myself believe that what I had written sounded like music. I went to every avant-garde concert I could find in London and enjoyed many of them, while others I couldn’t make head or tail of. I kept writing pieces in the hope that someday they might get performed, but I found myself drifting back into my old tonal habits. When the scholarship ran out I found myself faced with the task of finding a way of making a living. I drifted for a couple of years, doing supply teaching and working for a couple of years for a cheapjack publisher that made pirated versions of Soviet publications on science and technology. They paid quite good money, but I realized one day that this wasn’t what I wanted or ought to be doing with my life, and applied for a teaching post. I had to go right back to a rookie’s job, but that was good for me, and in April 1967 I found myself appointed to a wonderful secondary modern girls’ school in north London.
The first thing I saw when I walked in the place was a play rehearsal going on in the school hall. What were they rehearsing? My god, the Antigone of Sophocles, with a tall, hugely intelligent black girl as the blind seer Tiresias. These were supposed to be the dumb kids! I got stuck in, went to any number of teachers’ courses, and started developing some ideas on how to get the kids composing. All my ideas were of course based on the avant-garde, but I did have some successes, including a twenty-minute Christmas cantata based on New Testament texts, with each class in the school’s first year contributing a section. They did it at the school’s pre-Christmas concert, and it went over like a bomb. The idea that I worked on had come to me fully formed: that all children have the potential to be composers as well as performers. Another idea that came to me very quickly when I attempted to teach recorder to the kids is that recorders are not instruments that children ought to be required to play. They are very difficult, and especially difficult to keep in tune, which makes them very unrewarding for young children. The fact that an instrument is technologically simple doesn’t mean that it’s easy to play. Quite the opposite in fact—the complexities of modern wind instruments come from the need to make them easier, not harder, to play. (I have long suspected that the ubiquity of recorders in schools originated in a very skillful commercial ploy by the Dolmetsch family, playing on the snobbery of the “early music” movement). The other thing about them is the (to me at least) horrible sound they make. After a few months of persevering I bought a set of despised penny whistles and handed them out to one class—instant improvement! They were easier to keep in tune, provided a much pleasanter sound, and gained much more enthusiastic participation from the class.
I didn’t get far with these developments, as I was appointed in 1968 to a teachers’ college in Birmingham, a small (about two hundred students) women’s physical education college. I had hoped to do a lot of music for dance, but to my surprise I received no encouragement from the dance staff. I had so little to do in fact that I offered myself to a local primary school and spent Friday afternoons teaching there. That was a lot of fun, but my superiors didn’t think I ought to be working outside the college and it ended after a term. I also worked weekends with the Schools Outreach section of the Belgrade Theater in nearby Coventry and spent an exhilarating fourteen hours one Saturday with the actors creating and recording music for a play they were touring in schools. It later won a prize. Then there was an adults’ Saturday-afternoon music workshop in the Birmingham and Midland Institute that I ran for a couple of years. I also started getting invitations to talk about and demonstrate my ideas on pupils’ composition around the English Midlands and beyond.
All these engagements helped me in two ways. First was that I got to do work that I never managed to do in London, and the second was that it all helped me little by little to evolve my ideas, which include (1) music is basically performance and (2) all normally endowed human beings are capable of taking an active part in a musical performance. The idea of “musicking” itself came later, around the time when I was writing Music of the Common Tongue in the mideighties.
A landmark in my musical experience was going to the last of the great Isle of Wight rock festivals in July 1970. I could find no one of my age to go with me, so I bought a backpack and a sleeping bag and off I went on my own. I was taken up by a group of young U.S. Air Force conscripts and their wives/girlfriends, who found the old man (I was forty-two) amusing and were nice to me and kept me happily stoned the entire weekend. The experience of sitting out in the (mostly) beautiful weather in the midst of this vast crowd and being immersed in music for nearly twenty-four hours a day
