Remembering Fernande Kaeser

Among the many pleasures of Leo Black’s new book, BBC Music in the Glock Era and After, are his short portraits of some of the artists and performers he knew during his years with the Corporation. Meet Luigi Dallapiccola and Hans Eisler, Janet Baker and Norma Burrowes, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and many others. This post, however, remembers someone that Black describes as ‘one of the great musicians in my life’:

The encomium ‘made in Switzerland’ comes my way but rarely, implying as it does the perfect execution of a Martina Hingis or a Roger Federer. Very early in my BBC time William Glock asked me to look in on the Festival Hall rehearsal of an American conductor who’d written to him, and say what I thought. I arrived while an orchestral work was being rehearsed (even a week later I couldn’t have told you what it was, though I seem to remember that the second half consisted of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony). Things changed drastically for the better when a small, dark-haired young woman walked on, sat down at the keyboard, and conjured up the opening chords of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. The rest of the morning was magic. I’d seldom or never heard piano-playing of such concentrated beauty and communicative power; the passion with which this apparent Swiss mouse delivered the fortissimo version of the chords at the first movement’s recapitulation is with me still. For Fernande Kaeser music was, in the immortal words of another William (Bill Shankly, Manager Liverpool Football Club), “not a matter of life and death but more important than that”.

Here, clearly, was an artist I just had to work with. She went on to continue a reasonable career on both sides of the Atlantic, but in the course of time it became a career teaching rather than performing. I discovered much later, after dropping some dismissive remark about competitions, that in the early 1950s she’d won the top piano prize at the Geneva International, one of the relatively few such contests which really counted, long before the time when you absolutely have to have won somewhere, and preferably somewhere else too. That she’d been in good company emerged even later during a brief acquaintanceship with Jennifer Vyvyan’s son: he dug out a programme that showed Fernande as the year’s successful pianist, alongside two major singers, his mother and the American soprano Teresa Stich-Randall. They’d shared the top vocal prize (which must have been too small to reward suitably two such talents): I still remember hearing about it at the time, and the way in which the name Jennifer Vyvyan immediately became one to watch out for. She was in fact one of the greatest singers Britain has produced, and I regret having worked with her only once, in a programme of French songs. Not being British, the piano-prizewinner didn’t get the same attention here. Fernande was the last pupil of Dinu Lipatti and had in her tenderest years received memorable advice from Clara Haskil; but despite Geneva the top agents weren’t interested, which even then was an inhibitor of really widespread success.

Our BBC collaborations were few and far between, for she spent a lot of her time teaching in the USA, but they always produced something of lasting interest. The pearl among them was a programme with two sets of fairly obscure variations, Bach’s Aria variata alla maniera Italiana and Mozart’s on a theme by Duport. I count that as the most beautiful programme for which I was responsible in my twenty-eight BBC years. Basil Lam summed up her special quality when I played him something she’d recorded, saying “Well, it isn’t fair is it, you give her a better piano than anyone else”. Certainly her ability to find the poetry in any given instrument was phenomenal; it came partly from careful preparation, sometimes involving all the spare studio time available for a couple of days before the show, as well as a pianistic talent of rare quality.

Fernande’s career was never glamorous, which is in part attributable to her own total distaste for the kind of ‘glamour’ that attracts attention regardless of talent, and also, perhaps, to that responsible attitude to preparation. On her one and only visit to our house, near the end of her life, she told of playing chamber music with a group. It was a pleasant enough evening, but one that ended in bathos when the chaps said “Right, the concert’s in a fortnight’s time.” “Not with me it isn’t,” said Fernande, and that was the end of the matter.

There was certainly nothing missing on the musical side, as I realized when I discovered in the Austrian Radio’s index of recordings a performance by her of the notoriously difficult Tippett Piano Concerto. Its designated first performer had withdrawn, declaring it unplayable; the veteran virtuoso Louis Kentner had then stepped in and proved him wrong; and here was five-foot two Fernande taking it on! Poor health meant an early end to her work, and she died too young: I count her one of the great musicians in my life.

BBC Music on the Glock Era and After is published by Plumbago Books and is available in both hardcover and paperback from booksellers of repute.

The Man from the BBC

BBC Radio 3 recently introduced a classical chart which has sharply divided critical opinion. On one hand, anything that encourages more people to listen to classical music - and indeed Radio 3 - can only be a good thing. Then again, should the publicly-funded BBC be muscling in on areas more than adequately covered by the likes of Classic FM? Should they instead let the popular fend for itself and focus on the unexpected? Is the whole idea of a classical chart rather ‘like a paunchy middle-aged man squeezing himself into a pair of tight blue jeans, looking a bit silly and terminally uncool’ according to critic Rupert Christiansen?

Long before the days of classical Top 20s came the Glock era (1959-1972), examined in a new memoir by Leo Black published by Plumbago Books. Before he became an author of books on Schubert and Rubbra, Black was a BBC producer with an affinity for singers and Austro-German music. In his 28 years at the Corporation - years that extended well beyond 1972 - Black learnt the system, worked with leading BBC figures and musicians and produced countless programmes. In the first of a number of extracts from this delightful publication, Leo Black sets the scene:

At the end of the 1950s the BBC still enjoyed its monopoly, but a very limited range of stations had to cater for a wide variety of ‘brows’. Culturally, ever since the end of the war it had led the way with its Third Programme, the first European radio network devoted exclusively to music, drama and ‘the spoken word’. BBC Management, perhaps aware that its musical activities were in something of a rut, went in search of a dynamic, forward-looking new Controller for that output. As for me, I had spent two fraught years trying to prove myself in the strange and worldly business of music publishing, after a too-long five years in Oxford’s ivory tower. At the London branch of Universal Edition, Vienna (Alfred A. Kalmus Ltd.), I was feeling as near a nadir as I had with the parent firm in Vienna three years earlier, aware that I was proving ineffective apart from keeping the copyright registrations up to date, and that my social and spiritual lives were going nowhere fast.

With the BBC about to announce its new Controller, I had a pub talk with my closest friend, the composer Hugh Wood, which touched on the two most likely candidates. They were the publisher and notorious practical joker Howard Hartog (who, not that I knew it, had a background in broadcasting from his time with the British occupying forces in Germany) and the pianist, ex-music-critic and organizer of the Bryanston, later Dartington, Summer School, William Glock. Howard, then at the rival firm of Schott’s, had his eye on me and was noticeably friendly. As for Glock, I proclaimed that he was quite unlikely, for some reason or other, to be a viable candidate.

He was duly appointed; Hartog went on to run a top artists’ agency with Joan Ingpen, later a high-up at the Royal Opera House, and her dachshund Williams, whose subsequent life is not a matter of public record though the name survives. I became a small spoke in a large and involuted wheel that rolled waywardly on for a decade and more, until sociology caught up with it and classical music’s place in people’s lives began to change beyond recognition.

For a youngster, it was simply the time to add to his academic knowledge by learning from remarkable colleagues about music and life (an unending process still under way in his later seventies). Certain composers of particular importance to me meant little or nothing to Glock, particularly Franz Schmidt, who most strongly contradicts all the period’s short-lived current assumptions linking ‘progressiveness’ with musical substance. His gradual illumination of my life, from a low-point in a Viennese hospital onward, will emerge in due course. His exact contemporary and opposite-number, Arnold Schoenberg, dominated my existence for a good ten years, a chance conversation after a recording by his literary executor, the pianist Leonard Stein, leading to the first hundred thousand Schoenberg words out of roughly a million that I eventually translated. Post-First-World-War pupils of whom he thought highly were Roberto Gerhard, still a force during my early BBC years, and Hanns Eisler and Nikos Skalkottas, neither of whom I met (Skalkottas, indeed, had been dead for ten years when I joined). A significant figure in my early BBC life was Luigi Dallapiccola, and he is recalled at some length with great affection. Hugh Wood was certainly noticed by Glock, who commissioned more than one of his major early works, but his role for me has always been that of close friend and conscience.

More to follow in the coming weeks. BBC Music in the Glock Era and After by Leo Black is available in hardcover and paperback from Plumbago Books, distributed worldwide by Boydell & Brewer Ltd.

A Farewell to 2009

From Beyond the Stave will take a Christmas break until early January, but before we go we’d like to remind you of some of the books we’ve published this year. We hope that you’ll find at least one or two under your tree on Christmas morning.

It was, as always, our pleasure to turn the spotlight on to some unfairly neglected composers in 2009: Chris Walton’s Othmar Schoeck is an engagingly written portrait of a composer whose reputation is very much in the ascendant after years of comparative neglect; Erik Chisholm is another whose work should really be heard more often than it is, and John Purser’s biography of the man has been well-received; still awaiting Fate’s tap on the shoulder is Dane Rudhyar, whose interests in painting, philosophy, novel writing and astrology have perhaps overshadowed his modernist compositions – hopefully Deniz Ertan’s sympathetic biography will encourage you to investigate his music.

In the field of British music we published a new volume in the Aldeburgh Studies in Music series, Benjamin Britten: New Perspectives, edited by Lucy Walker and including essays by composer Colin Matthews, Piper biographer Frances Spalding, oboist George Caird, writer Claire Seymour and many others. The New Aldeburgh Anthology is a book for those drawn back to Britten’s Aldeburgh year after year for the music, writing and arts - and to all who care for the landscape, the sea and the ongoing life of the Suffolk Coast.

Michael Barlow’s Whom the Gods Love (Toccata Press) told the story of the short but intensely creative life of composer George Butterworth, whose life ended alongside so many others at the Battle of the Somme. Toccata also published two volumes of writings by British composers: William Alwyn’s Composing in Words, edited by Andrew Palmer, and the long-awaited second volume of Havergal Brian on Music (edited by Malcolm MacDonald), where the maverick English composer looks at works by Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg as well as Bartók, Berg, Busoni, Debussy, Dohnányi, Hindemith, Kilpinen, Mahler, Messager, Ravel, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Sousa, Szymanowski, Tailleferre, Varèse and many others.

Collections of essays of this kind provide enormously useful insights into the minds of composers, as does Bálint András Varga’s compelling book of interviews with György Kurtág which also includes his deeply moving homages to his friend and fellow-modernist, Ligeti. No-one with an interest in contemporary music should be without this superb publication.

The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss was the subject of Wayne Heisler Jr’s book, a richly interdisciplinary study of Strauss's collaboration with prominent dance artists of his time as well as his explorations of musical modernism. Ravel is the subject of Stephen Zank’s Irony and Sound: written with insight and flair, it provides a long-needed reconsideration of Ravel's modernity, his teaching, and his place in twentieth-century music and culture.

Sterling Lambert’s Re-reading Poetry looks at Schubert’s multiple settings of Goethe: just as the poet maintained that his work could often be read in more than one way, so Schubert recognised that several of his settings of Goethe’s poems could be rewardingly revisited. A fascinating study of a neglected aspect of a great composer’s work.

Proust, Cocteau, Monet, Diaghilev and Colette were just some of the luminaries of French culture who gathered at the salon of the Princesse de Polignac, and Stravinsky, Satie, Falla and Poulenc all wrote music for her. The glittering world of fin-de-siècle Paris is beautifully evoked in Sylvia Kahan’s Music’s Modern Muse, her acclaimed biography of Winnaretta Singer and her times. Her second husband, Edmond, Prince de Polignac, was a respected composer and music theorist in his own right, and Kahan’s In Search of New Scales details his exploration of the octatonic scale and presents his groundbreaking treatise in English and in the original French.

Composer and critic Bayan Northcott’s collection of essays, The Way We Listen Now, was published to considerable acclaim under the Plumbago imprint earlier this year. Ranging widely over composers from the great European masters to American modernists, Northcott’s collection is a superb volume to sample or to read from cover to cover.

Another author incapable of writing a dull sentence is Daniel Albright, whose latest collection, Music Speaks, also ranges widely, but rarely strays far from opera. For Albright the opera house is the venue where the performances speak the most intricate and significant language invented by our culture - a language that speaks in music, words, pictures, and light.

Indeed opera lovers would have found much to enjoy from our lists in 2009. We were extremely pleased to be able to respond to readers’ requests to reissue Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp’s classic, Handel’s Operas 1704-1726. This now joins Dean’s volume on the later operas for complete coverage of Handel’s works for the stage, available either separately or as a two-volume set. Another welcome return was John Lucas’s Reggie, available for the first time in an updated paperback under the new title, The Genius of Valhalla. A must for the many fans of the conductor or anyone interested in Wagner and his interpreters.

Gillian Opstad’s acclaimed Debussy's Mélisande is not simply a book about the opera, but looks at the lives of the three early interpreters of the role: Georgette Leblanc, Mary Garden and Maggie Teyte. Many reviewers remarked how convincingly Ms Opstad managed this complex narrative weave. Derek Katz presented an interpretive and critical study of the great Czech composer’s operas in Janáček: Beyond the Borders.

String players will welcome the two-volume set, Intimate Voices: The Twentieth Century String Quartet, edited by Evan Jones. Examining work by 21 composers from 11 countries, this study is a unique examination of a form used by many to confide their most personal thoughts.

Early music has once again been well served by the Boydell Press. Hermann Pötzlinger's Music Book, a study of the St Emmeram Codex by Ian Rumbold with Peter Wright, not only examines the manuscript itself but looks at the culture in which it was compiled. Emma Hornby’s keenly anticipated Medieval Liturgical Chant and Patristic Exegesis examines the relationship between text and melody in medieval music.

In the early 1900s August Halm was widely acknowledged to be one of the most insightful and influential authors of his day, yet today is music theories are less well known than those of his contemporaries such as Hugo Riemann and Heinrich Schenker. Lee A Rothfarb’s recent book looks at his life and the enduring interest of his critical writing. Music historians will also want Bernarr Rainbow’s introductions to the various music manuals he reissued, collected for the first time in Four Centuries of Music Teaching Manuals 1518-1932, edited by Gordon Cox.

Genetic Criticism and the Creative Process, edited by William Kinderman and Joseph E Jones, looks at the process of creative endeavour in an interdisciplinary context, emphasizing literature and drama as well as music.

Finally, where would you have found the most German speakers in the nineteenth century after Berlin and Vienna? Munich, perhaps, or Frankfurt? The answer is surprisingly New York City, and musicologist John Koegel has written a fascinating study of Music in German Immigrant Theater in New York from 1840 until 1940.

All of us at Boydell & Brewer, the University of Rochester Press, Toccata Press and Plumbago wish you the most harmonious Christmas season and a joyous start to 2010, the beginning of another exciting decade of music books from one of the world’s leading independent publishers!

Symphonies and Babies: The Case of Ruth Crawford Seeger

Plumbago Books will shortly publish the latest volume in their ever inventive Poetics of Music series, a collection of Bayan Northcott’s writings called The Way We Listen Now. Chosen largely from his columns in the Independent and BBC Music Magazine, these pieces demonstrate how Northcott moves ‘with enviable ease across the chasm that separates critics from the criticized,’ in the words of Christopher Wintle. ‘Like Keller before him, [he] develops his ideas through an agglomeration of occasional pieces – features, reviews, talks, programme notes and so forth.’ This is a book, as we publishers like to say, that belongs on the shelf of everyone with an interest in music. The following extract from a piece on Ruth Crawford Seeger is typical of his engaging style:

Do we really progress? Reviewing a London concert in The World in 1892, Bernard Shaw recorded: ‘When E. M. Smyth’s heroically brassy overture to Antony and Cleopatra was finished, and the composer called to the platform, it was observed with stupefaction that all that tremendous noise had been made by a lady.’ Even in 1975, Time magazine was evidently capable of proclaiming ‘Men compose symphonies, women compose babies’.

Behind the social and professional prejudices that made for such suppression, feminists would doubtless detect a more atavistic male fear: that if women should actually succeed in composing both babies and symphonies, what then? How else to explain Mahler’s notorious insistence that his young bride, Alma, should renounce her own compositional aspirations and devote herself to his? Granted, he ultimately relented – chided for his view of women by Sigmund Freud, no less. And one might have thought such attitudes had become rarer in our ostensibly more liberated era. Or has that liberation brought problems of its own? Consider the case of Ruth Crawford Seeger.

Born in 1901, daughter of a Midwest Methodist minister and variously raised in small-town Ohio and Florida, she proved gifted enough to enter the American Conservatory in Chicago in 1920. There she received a traditional training while absorbing more modernist and mystical enthusiasms of her piano teacher Djane Herz, a direct link with Scriabin. But if such early Crawford scores as her Music for Small Orchestra (1926) contain their darkly numinous textures, they also show a leaning towards constructivist schemes and atonal harmony. In due course, this was to attract the attention of that ubiquitous impresario of radical American music, Henry Cowell, who found a patroness to bring her to New York. Soon such pieces as her fiercely rhetorical Suite No. 1 for Five Wind Instruments and Piano (1927) began to be heard among works of Charles Ives, Edgar Varèse, Carl Ruggles and Cowell himself in what was then known as the Ultra-Modern manner. In 1930-31 she became the first woman to receive a Guggenheim fellowship, travelling to Europe to consult Bartόk and Berg and drafting what were to remain her three terse masterpieces: the Three Chants (1930) for women’s chorus, the Three Songs to Poems by Carl Sandburg (1930-32) for contralto and three ensembles, and the extraordinary String Quartet (1931).

For, already, events were in train that would stop her in her tracks. In 1929, Cowell had arranged for her to take some lessons with his own teacher, Charles Seeger. A mind of commanding scope, Seeger had been a conductor and composer until most of his music was lost in a fire, and he was to end up as one of the founding fathers of ethnomusicology. But in the 1920s he was very much the theorist of the Ultra-Moderns, seeking through his concept of ‘dissonant counterpoint’, to establish the basis of an authentically American new music independent of European influence. Initially, Crawford was put through a strict course of permutational schemes and anti-tonal part-writing, which she developed in her four Diaphonic Suites (1930-31) for one or two instruments. Gradually lessons turned into a collaboration on Seeger’s projected treatise, and then into a romance. After Seeger had divorced his first wife, he and Crawford were married in 1932.

In 1936, Seeger was summoned to Washington to serve in the Federal Music Project as part of the New Deal enterprise to create an inclusive and optimistic all-American culture. To this Crawford was to contribute over the next 15 years by collecting, transcribing, editing, arranging and publishing hundreds of American folksongs, while simultaneously pioneering their use in basic musical education – not least, in that of her own children. In marrying Seeger, she had become stepmother of his son Pete, who in due course was to emerge as the leading light of the post-war folk- and protest-song revival. And two of her own four children by Seeger would also make their impact: Mike Seeger as an advocate of Deep South folk music, and Peggy Seeger with her husband, Ewan MacColl, as stars of the British folk revival. Indirectly, Crawford’s selfless work in traditional music was to exert a huge posthumous influence.

What of her own music? In 1938, she revised the String Quartet for publication, also arranging its slow movement for string orchestra. The following year she fulfilled a radio commission with a brief but joyous orchestral folksong fantasia entitled Rissolty, Rossolty – her sole tonal piece. But for the most part, she seems to have reasoned, as many creative women have to, that, with luck there would still be time enough for her more radical music in later life. In 1952 she at last got round to completing a new Suite for Wind Quintet full of implacable ostinatos and hard-edged invention. Might she have gone on to assimilate the still newer innovations of the post-war avant-garde? Alas, within months she was dead from cancer at 52.

It is tempting to imagine that, had time allowed, she could have come as close as any woman to balancing and fulfilling the demands of creativity and childbearing, of professional achievement and social commitment, of sustaining tradition and advancing the new. But it is not so simple. What of the role of Charles Seeger? In submitting Crawford’s already striking talent to a disciplined fine-tuning, he may have enabled her briefly to realize her most striking pieces; but, in marrying her, did he also subordinate that talent to his own desire for a renewed family life? In any case, how had Crawford managed to establish herself in a notoriously masculine and, in the era of Ives, Varèse and Ruggles, aggressively macho profession? Was it by denying her femininity in pursuing as hard and uncompromising a style as any of them? Back in 1953 when she died, such matters were difficult to determine, since, apart from the String Quartet (already an acknowledged influence on the teeming heterophonies of Elliott Carter’s mighty String Quartet No. 1, 1951), most of her exiguous catalogue remained unpublished and little known.

Only over the last couple of decades has the true quality and stature of her achievement become apparent with the publication of Judith Tick’s detailed and sympathetic biography; the appearance of studies by David Nicholls and Joseph N. Straus revealing the conceptual and technical ingenuities Crawford packed into a surviving catalogue of a mere 15 works; the belated edition of her pioneering monograph The Music of American Folk Song (originally intended as an appendix to Our Singing Country by John and Alan Lomax); and not least the recording of all her music under the devoted supervision of Oliver Knussen and others. By now, it is clear that the half-dozen best of her pieces stand with a handful of scores of Varèse and Ruggles as the essential classics of the Ultra-Modern era. Maybe she lacked a little of their visionary grandeur; but then she never had their chance to get her hands on a large orchestra – let alone to wax passionate and violent with it, as Shaw prophesized. Yet her achievement was arguably more various in its radicalism and more steely in its definition.

The full version of this piece may be found in The Way We Listen Now and Other Writings on Music by Bayan Northcott, edited by Christopher Wintle. Published by Plumbago Books and distributed by Boydell & Brewer, it will soon be available from all good booksellers in cloth and paperback. The book also includes drawings by Milein Cosman and Michael Daley and ranges far and wide across the musical horizon, from Bach to Judith Weir.

Surprising Hans Keller

Having recently published Adrian Wright’s superb biography of William Alwyn, The Innumerable Dance, we thought it might be interesting to see what Hans Keller had to say about his film music. In Film Music and Beyond, published last year by Plumbago, Keller addresses the subject of surprise and speech rhythm in The Ship that Died of Shame:

Measured against its context, the loudest shock we know is probably the one in Haydn’s “Surprise” symphony. But it does not introduce any immediate news; on the contrary, the fortissimo chord and drum tap seem but a jocular variation on the perfect cadence of the period’s first statement. “That will make the ladies jump,” was the composer’s comment.

Keller focuses on the element of surprise in the second half of Alwyn’s music for Ship, a score he found dull until a point where Richard Attenborough, the ship’s evil captain, shouts “Come on out!” to a hidden murderer he was about to help escape. His cry was the exact counterpoint, in both rhythm and intonation, of a new three note motif:

From this surprising juncture onwards the score proved novel and fascinating. Attenborough’s trisyllabic sentence was crucial from the dramatic standpoint: the ship had not behaved all too decently before, but now its real shame had begun, its doom was sealed. By acquiring the rhythm of the dialogue’s most operatic sentence, the score proved able to replace film-musical tautology by genuinely musico-dramatic interpretation.

This impressed Keller so much that he wondered if “I had not missed many a relevant point while drowsing during the first half of the score; unfortunately I had no opportunity of hearing it a second time.”

On what Peter Pears described as "the eternal struggle between song and words, sound and sense," Keller remarks:

Alwyn’s achievement, hardly imaginable outside the cinema, consists in unifying the two belligerent parties at the very stage where their differences are at their acutest, where speech remains speech and music remains wordless; and the incisive contrast between the two sharpens our wits for the understanding of new musico-dramatic unities between them…Thanks to the cinema, Alwyn has been able to go all the way, nor will his shock treatment easily wear off, for the eternal struggle between music and speech is not likely to become any less eternal in future.

He concludes:

We must not forget that the instrumental version of “Come on out!” is, after all, a surprise of the most genuinely artistic order, for it is a necessary consequence of the extreme contrast to whose extreme unification it draws our attention.

To read all of Keller’s essay, see Film Music and Beyond, pp.87-89. The book is available in both cloth and paperback from all good booksellers.

Staking Out the Territory

We are pleased to distribute the publications of Plumbago Books whose latest, Hugh Wood’s Staking Out the Territory and Other Writings on Music has just been published in both cloth and paperback editions. Our music editor, Bruce Phillips, attended its launch:

A goodly selection of composers, performers, critics, art lovers and just ordinary chaps like me assembled on Tuesday 26^th February at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Rutland Gate, London to mark the publication of a new book in the Plumbago Poetics of Music series entitled Staking Out the Territory and other Writings on Music by the English composer, teacher and writer Hugh Wood. The book was being launched in combination with an exhibition of drawings and paintings by Milein Cosman, whose instantly recognisable portraits of musicians and artists included one of her late husband Hans Keller, thus neatly encompassing the other sponsoring body behind the publication, the Cosman Keller Art and Music Trust. The speeches were short and witty: Julian Hogg speaking on behalf of the Trust, Christopher Wintle on behalf of Plumbago Books, and Hugh Wood on behalf of himself and of the many individuals who had contributed to the book, not least the William Scott Trust who had enabled the group of eight of the late William Scott’s paintings to be reproduced in colour within the book — Scott having been a favourite artist of Hugh Wood’s. The book itself, edited by Wintle, is a collection of Hugh Wood’s articles, reviews and other writings on music culled from various sources and written at various times over the last 40 or so years.

Wood’s writing is attractively pellucid, clear minded and sane, whether he is writing about the satisfactions of composition, composers and musicians he has known, books he has read, music he has heard. The tone is humane, humorous, witty, civilised, unpretentious and mercifully free of the jargon of music analysis or music theory. The book is full of apt quotations, strong opinions, and insights into musical history. Although Wood quotes with evident approval a couple of scurrilous remarks about publishers, we can all be grateful to Plumbago for bringing forth this happy compilation marking Hugh Wood’s 75^th birthday.

Christopher Wintle’s speech, which can be read in full by clicking on the link here, concluded thus:

Anyone who’s spent time in Hugh’s excellent company knows how happily and tirelessly he dances along the highways and byways of culture: he loves all sorts of books and music; he has an appetite for good stories; and he shows a Krausian relish for the ironies of modern life. Indeed, the sheer scale of the book’s index might almost have impressed Michael Tippett. But as we talk to Hugh, we gradually realize we are being observed. For there, standing in the shades, unmoving and unblinking, is an emissary from the underworld, equipped by Zeus with mighty thunderbolts, ready to punish us for hubris, falsehood and any excursion into phoneydom. No composer to my knowledge has ever walked so tight a rope, or so gone out of his way to make sure that the furies start at home. Hugh startles us with the truth of circumstances that we can all recognize but few can bear to admit. On the very first page of the book, for instance, we meet the undergraduate of New College, Oxford trying to rehearse his music. He describes the

“long-suffering singers or instrumentalists at last convened in one place and now attempting to decipher their manuscript parts as indefatigably as any Foreign Office clerk, while trying to follow the erratic beat and wild grimaces of a nervous composer-conductor; and the final scene – recording session, of course always under-rehearsed, or disastrous performance to a little group of kindly-disposed acquaintances and the freshman who thought it was all the Scandinavian Society [p. 3].”

Later in the book he turns his beady eye on his composing colleagues past and present. How much time did those French composers who embraced Iberian eroticism actually spend in Spain? As little, it seems, as possible. And whatever happed later in life to the young Tippett who had yearned for Hitler to win the war so that he could eradicate the Empire he hated as he ‘hated nothing else’? Why, Companion of Honour, Order of Merit and … Commander of the British Empire. In Hugh’s hands, truth-telling is itself an Aristotelian rite of purgation.