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COMPOSING MYSELF

(originally published as 'A midsummer night's dream come true'. Australian Financial Review 24 September 1999)

Imagine the scene: you meet someone at a party, and sooner or later they ask what you do for a living, and you say ‘Oh, I'm a composer' or ‘I write music' and they say ‘What sort of music?' and you say depending on how many beers you've had ‘fabulous music' or ‘contemporary classical music' or ‘nasty modern music'. And they say ‘Who do you write for?' and you say ‘Whoever commissions me: orchestras, chamber ensembles, choirs'. And they say ‘So, can you make a living from that?' and you say ‘Well I do' and they say ‘You're very lucky'. Which, I suppose, is true, in that within the niche market of classical music, contemporary art music is a very niche market indeed. But composers who live substantially from their craft, need a modicum of talent and a capacity for hard work as well as luck in order to make an even modest living.

So why do it? Why spend long hours at a very labour-intensive job which requires a comparable investment in training and experience to many of the more highly paid professions. Just to give you an example: if I am writing an orchestral piece, I need to indicate on a separate line in the manuscript just what every kind of instrument in the band is doing at any given time. A page of music is a kind of graph the horizontal axis represents the time in which the music unfolds, the vertical axis represents the number of instruments taking part. You won't be surprised, therefore, to know that it can take some hours to notate one page of very complex texture for full orchestra (whether you write by hand or use a software package), yet that page might take a mere twelve seconds to play.

A further disincentive might be that there is already much more music in the world than we need, and concert managers know only too well that it would be easier and financially more sound to merely program Beethoven, Mozart and Tchaikovsky no commission fees, no royalties, efficient use of rehearsal time. Some musicians would be only too happy to stick with what they know; some audience members (paradoxically, the same people who wouldn't dream of going to see the same five films over and over again) would certainly feel the same. And, to be fair, some composers need to take part of the blame for this: a significant amount of music written since the early 20th century has been composed according to the real or imagined dictates of historical development, and some composers have gone so far as to blame the audience for its own incomprehension. I am not suggesting that composers can or should ignore the many changes to musical style which have happened this century, or the social and political circumstances in which any art is made. In other words, it would be stupid to pretend that we can write meaningful music in the style of Brahms in 1999. I certainly don't (and I do love Brahms!). But I do think it important that we continue to write music, and to do so with a view to connecting with an audience through performers who are both challenged and rewarded by the experience.

I have been more fortunate than most living composers in having had a number of works commissioned and performed by Australian orchestras in recent years. In fact, those orchestras formerly under the ABC's aegis have a good track record of support for new music, especially when compared with those in other countries. Australia's overall arts budget is, of course, smaller on a per capita basis than many European countries, but governments since the late 1960s have seen the wisdom of a degree of state patronage in view of the lack of a strong philanthropic tradition and the peculiarities of our population density. Very few of the world's major orchestras have a concert series dedicated to new music like Twentieth Century Orchestra, in which the Sydney Symphony will premiere my new piece Such Sweet Thunder next Thursday or a series like Meet the Music where a predominantly school-age audience is regularly introduced to a living composer and his or her work. The orchestra has given three of my pieces in that series (in which each program is given twice to capacity crowds at the Opera House concert hall) in recent years, and the response has always been gratifying: this is a result of at least some of the audience having been prepared for the music by educational kits, but more broadly it reflects the fact that younger listeners are less likely to approach new music with ingrained prejudices.

It also makes a huge difference to an audience to see that a composer is a more or less regular member of its own community; time and time again I have briefly introduced my works to audiences around the country in order to give them some idea of what to expect, and for what to listen out. It's no good saying that music should or can speak for itself; expecting an audience brought up on 19th century music to understand an unfamiliar idiom immediately is like expecting an AFL fan to grasp the subtleties of League at his or her first match. ‘Why don't they just kick the ball?' is by no means a silly question under the circumstances, as is ‘Where are all the tunes?' But the response when an audience senses that the composer is trying to communicate is almost always generous.

Communication is possibly the wrong word, as it implies that I am telling you something that you didn't know. Most composers, I would suggest, hope that their music will create a unique experience for the listener. I am fond of quoting Maynard Solomon on beauty in Mozart: ‘Musical form may serve as a bulwark against extinction, warding off mortality by creating alternative universes in which the powers of inertia are challenged, thwarted and symbolically fought to a standstill by the architectural powers of the imagination ... Beauty heals, comforts, transforms, preserves, remembers, promises, buries the dead and raises them once again, reminds us not only of what we have lost but of what may be ours again, even if only as a symbol. The beauty of Mozart's music is in its refusal to remain quiescent until it has exhausted its possibilities, or at least until it has shown, at least by example, that those possibilities are manifold and endless.'

Solomon's point about the manifold and endless possibilities of music is well made. We need to go on showing ourselves that we are capable of exploring those possibilities, just as we hope that sports stars will continue to beat their own records. I am also fond of a quote from the late English composer Michael Tippett, whose view of the composer's mission was to create ‘images of reconciliation for worlds torn by division. And in an age of mediocrity and shattered dreams, images of abounding, generous, exuberant beauty'.

Such Sweet Thunder was commissioned by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra specifically for next week's concert, which will feature works of the eminent German composer Hans Werner Henze. I was delighted to accept, partly because of the esteem in which I hold Henze for numerous works. His Seventh Symphony, performed by the orchestra some years ago was one of the most exciting things I had heard in years. I was also pleased that the chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony, Markus Stenz, would be conducting: Stenz is Henze's preferred conductor, and his performance of my Variations for orchestra with the MSO last year was just terrific. There was another connection too: Henze's Eighth Symphony is his response to scenes from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. I had wanted to write a piece based on some aspect of that play for some time, so this was an opportunity to pay tribute to Henze, to Shakespeare, and, by the by, to Benjamin Britten, whose opera of the same name is a masterpiece. So the title comes from a speech late in the play where the Amazon Hippolyta describes how the barking of Hercules' hounds created an amazing sound echoing around ’the groves/, The skies, the fountains, every region near'. She goes on to say that she had ‘never heard/ So musical a discord, such sweet thunder'.

I trust this short piece won't be a dog-act, but I did like the image of the natural world being caught up in this mesmeric noise. In fact though, my piece merely uses that as a point of departure, and is more concerned with the experience of being lost in the forest I have exploited the considerable potential of the orchestra for sudden changes of colour and texture, the shimmering of low strings contrasting with glint of high woodwinds and percussion, distant trumpet fanfares, a kind of Mendelssohnian scurrying in the upper strings. Why do it? Well, it does no harm; it might contribute in some small way to the sum of human experience, and to be frank, it's fun!