Roger Smalley: A Case Study of Late Twentieth-Century Composition

Christopher Mark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138261259
• eBook ISBN: 9781317061953
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

How does one go about writing the history of musical composition in the late twentieth century when, on the one hand, so much of it seems impossibly fractured and disassociated, and, on the other, there has been so little certainty about what the notion of 'music history' might entail under the critiques of post-modernism? One of the most productive ways forward is to pursue case studies involving single composers whose music reflects several aspects of recent activity. This enables the discussion of broad issues in a relatively focussed way whilst avoiding the pitfalls of traditional narrative histories and the centrifugal tendencies of the relativistic approach that some have called for. The music of the English-born (1943) and Australia-domiciled composer Roger Smalley is ideal material for such a study, because of his involvement with and response to an unusually large number of the myriad concerns and practices of post-1950s composition, including post-serial constructivism; parody; electro-acoustic composition and the electronic modification of conventionally-produced sound; Moment Form; aleatorism; minimalism; the use of non-Western resources (Aboriginal and South-East Asian sonorities); neo-Romanticism; and, arguably, the 'new classicism', as well as a brief flirtation with rock music in the late '60s. Employing an interview with the composer as a kind of cantus firmus, the book - the first extended single-author study of Smalley's music to be published - incorporates critical commentary on the composer's major works in a chronological narrative that engages with broad issues of central relevance to Smalley's generation, such as the process of learning the craft of composition in the early '60s; the motivation behind the adoption of certain technical and aesthetic positions; the effects on technical and aesthetic orientation of both the changing relationships between composer, performer, and audience and technological change; and the distinction betwe

Chapter 1
Culminating Moments: An Interview with Roger Smalley

CM Perhaps we ought to start at the beginning, with me asking you how you became interested in music.

RS That was, I think, through going to Sunday School, because the only thing that interested me there was the organ playing. I soon found that if I offered to pump the organ – because it was a genuine hand-pumped organ – I could spend the entire time in the organ loft and didn’t have to participate in any of the other activities: bible-study groups and hymn-singing and so on. And it was my desire, expressed to my parents, to learn to play the organ. But they said that before you could play the organ you had to learn the piano – you had to acquire the keyboard skills before you could get onto the pedal bit of it. As it happened there was a piano teacher living literally next door, who in retrospect was a very good one, and I made pretty swift progress there. I was 7 or 8 when I started, and by the time I was 14 or 15 I think I’d outstripped her. I was beginning to take along pieces which were completely baffling to her, like the Berg Sonata and the Copland Piano Variations, which were among the earliest scores that I bought, from Forsyth Brothers in Manchester.

CM What other music was interesting you at this time?

RS There was the orchestral music that I heard at concerts by the Salford Symphony Orchestra, which was an amateur orchestra that played concerts on Sunday afternoons and played mostly popular classical repertoire. And Hallé concerts, which contained some outstanding things which I can remember impressed me greatly – Sibelius’s Second Symphony, for example, and Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto. Then once or twice a year the Hallé combined with the BBC Northern Orchestra (as it was then – it’s the BBC Philharmonic now) to do extra-large works: I can remember hearing The Rite of Spring, and Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony, and Mahler’s Seventh Symphony.

CM What was it about these pieces that was appealing?

RS It was the scale of them. Because when you’re learning the piano you’re playing predominantly little pieces – Clementi sonatinas, all that kind of stuff – and this hardly prepares you for the impact of Mahler 7, or even Sibelius 2nd. But I think what interested me, what gripped me about the Sibelius – and I think this is significant in retrospect – was particularly the slow movement. In little pieces one is used to things starting and going on in pretty much the same vein and then ending, and the thing that gripped me about the slow movement of the Sibelius was this enormous development: it starts with this almost inaudible pizzicato in the cellos followed by a lugubrious bassoon duet, and then at some point it really takes off and then you have that wonderful string section in F sharp major. And the same went for the first part of Nielsen 5, of course. So it was this realization that music could start somewhere and then go somewhere completely different and undergo these enormous transformations and changes within one movement.

CM This must also have been noticeable to you in the Mahler?

RS Yes. Not in The Rite of Spring, of course – the individual movements of that are rather short, and the whole piece is not very long. But of course it packs enormous power from the rhythmic point of view.

CM How did you react to The Rite of Spring?

RS I can’t quite put my finger on that now, actually, though I must have been excited by it. But by then I would have heard much more advanced music as well. Not necessarily in concert: the Hallé didn’t play anything more modern; they might have played pieces that had been written more recently than the Rite, but they would have been things like John Ireland’s Concertino [pastorale] for String Orchestra [1939], or Paul Creston’s Third Symphony [1950] – anodyne kinds of modern music. But by then I was listening to the Thursday Invitation Concerts on the radio.

CM How old would you have been at this time?

RS About 16. I remember listening to the first one, which contained the British premiere of Le marteau sans maître [January 1960], the one for which Richard Rodney Bennett played the percussion and Cornelius Cardew learnt the guitar specially, because they couldn’t find a guitarist who could play it. And there was also an organization called MICA – the Manchester Institute of Contemporary Arts – which had monthly meetings. Sometimes they were concerts, sometimes they were talks, to very small audiences. I can remember John Ogdon (who must have been a student then) and others playing the Bartók Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. And Susan Bradshaw gave a talk in which she played a recording of a bit of Gruppen, before the work was performed in England. She had some kind of tape of it, possibly from Cologne or Darmstadt or pirated from German radio (it wasn’t commercially available), and she played it. Those were exciting moments. Also, I did hear the first British performance of Gruppen, which was broadcast – the one with the Scottish National Orchestra [Glasgow 1961].

CM So you were hearing lots of performances on radio; what about performances on disc, on the gramophone?

RS Well, we didn’t have a gramophone, and in fact I didn’t get a gramophone until very late on in the day.¹ When I was at college I had a tape recorder, and I used to record things off the radio – a lot of Thursday Invitation Concerts.² But it wasn’t until much, much later that I got a gramophone, though I think I had some access to one, because I can remember now the first two records that I bought – one was the two electronic studies of Stockhausen [1953, 1954], and the other was Britten’s Missa Brevis [1959]. But I did hear a few things at my grandparents’ on Sunday afternoons, where the two things that gripped me the most were the ‘Enigma’ variations and the Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movements – which was a very strange thing for them to have had!

CM What about reading about music – were you doing much at that time?

RS My big enthusiasm was Tempo, the Boosey & Hawkes magazine:³ I used to devour every issue of that. Particularly I remember that every time that Stravinsky came up with a new work – he was in his serial phase then – they would have an article, usually by Colin Mason, who would go into the serial workings of pieces like Movements, and Threni, and A Sermon, Narrative and a Prayer, etc.⁴ I hadn’t actually heard these pieces or even seen the scores: I only knew the bits that appeared as music examples in these articles. But I was absolutely fascinated by the serial workings. When I applied to the Royal College I sent up a couple of pieces with my application. They were the Three Invocations for tenor and piano, which are 100 per cent Britten, and a prelude to an unwritten opera based on Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, which was a Vaughan Williamsy shifting triads what-have-you. But by the time I went up there for my interview I’d already started trying to write twelve-tone music along the lines of Stravinsky’s Movements. I don’t think I knew very much about Schoenberg, Berg and Webern: I knew much more about Stravinsky because of those articles in Tempo. And I had those Penguin books on The Concerto and The Symphony edited by Ralph Hill [1952, 1949]; and there was a whole chapter on Berg’s Violin Concerto by Mosco Carner that also provided a few clues as to how the twelve-tone thing worked.⁵

CM So when did the urge to compose manifest itself?

RS Oh, much earlier, when I was about 10, I think.

CM As the result of piano lessons?

RS Yes. My first compositions were things like Minuet in G, Minuet in F, Romance in D minor, and so on: the aim was to imitate pieces that I’d be playing; Classical sonatinas were the first influences. Then I moved into a period of being influenced by Bax and John Ireland and Walton, and English music generally, which I played a lot of. So there were quite a few pieces along those lines. There’s an organ sonata which is very Waltonian, and an oboe quintet which is very Baxian, and various Ireland-like piano pieces.

CM And as you heard Stravinsky and Stockhausen, etc., an updating began?

RS Well, yes and no. I was beginning to hear quite a lot of this music, but there was no one to explain how it worked, and there were no books on it in those days. I think that I thought, when I get to the Royal College of Music, there will be people there who will be able to explain all this to me. But as it turned out, in reality, there weren’t. I opted for [Peter Racine] Fricker because I knew that he had actually written some serial music.⁶ But after a while I realized that his use of serialism was of a very simplistic, conventional sort: it was actually writing conventional symphonies with themes that had 12 tones in them – that’s what it seemed to boil down to. Altogether, lessons with him were a big disappointment. During the first few years at college I wrote a lot but I hardly finished any pieces. The only pieces that survive from that time are very small ones, like the Piano Pieces I–V [1962–65], which were written at various times through the College period, and the Walter de la Mare settings [1961]. I would start bigger pieces but wouldn’t be able to continue with them and get to the end, because I just didn’t know how to work with this kind of musical material. I could imitate the gestures of Berio or Stockhausen or Maderna (who was very big in those days), but I couldn’t work through a whole piece.

Then two other influences came. One of these was John White, who was on the teaching staff. He wasn’t any use from the point of view of explaining how Stockhausen worked because, though he was interested in Stockhausen, he wasn’t interested in writing that kind of music himself. He had enthusiasms for composers that I knew relatively little about – like Alkan, Medtner, Busoni, Szymanowski, Bruckner, Mahler, Satie – and a group of us used to go round to his flat on Sunday afternoons, and he would just play records. He had a big record collection, including what were then the only recordings of pieces like Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and Eighth Symphony. So I got interested in all this music, but there didn’t seem to be any relationship between it and the kind of music that I was trying to compose. So it didn’t help in a direct way. And of course John White’s own music seemed to be a bizarre irrelevance at the time!⁷ But of course from today’s vantage point, there’s obviously been a long-delayed influence of the music from that period, because in the music I’ve written in the last 15 years all these late Romantic, turn-of-the-century composers who were handling the breakdown of tonality in different ways seem very relevant.

The other influence was Sandy Goehr. I think it was Brian Dennis who found out that Sandy was giving evening classes at Morley College, and we started to go along to these. Again we dealt with new music hardly at all: we dealt with the great classics, because he was following Schoenberg’s method of teaching, which was to analyse the classics and to leave it up to individual students to see what they could do with it.

CM It was basically an analysis class?

RS Yes. And what was important to me was the approach he took, which was to try to explain why every single note and musical event was there. This was a tremendous help, because when you’re composing you have to compose every note: generalities are no good; you have to have some way of determining why everything is there.⁸

CM Did he discuss a piece of his own?

RS After a couple of years he gave up the Morley classes, but a group of us continued to go to his house, and then we did look at more recent pieces, and I remember he spent a session on his Suite op. 11 [1961], which was one of the first pieces in which he began to develop his own serial method: he was getting away from ‘classical’ twelve-note serialism, and developing a method which had a kind of rapprochement with tonality because it gave rise to triadic formations. And we looked at Messiaen’s Cantéyodjayâ [1949] and Max Davies’s O Magnum Mysterium Organ Fantasia [1960].⁹

CM Since you’ve mentioned Maxwell Davies: I believe you had contact with him before you went to the Royal College?

RS Yes. We lived about two miles apart, and he’d been to the same school as I had – a very unmusical institution.¹⁰ He read in the local paper that I’d won a composition scholarship to the College and he rang up and came round. This was the first time I had met another composer, so he made a big impression. I think I must have already heard one or two of his works, like the St Michael Sonata [1957], which I heard on the radio. I showed him one of my most recent things, and proudly said, ‘It’s all based on a twelve-tone row’, and he said something like, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry about that too much’ – by which he meant, don’t get bogged down in musical technique for its own sake, and allow the music to go where it wants. I thought this was a very profound observation. And in fact I never really did write any twelve-tone music of the classical Schoenbergian variety that you might have written if you’d followed through that Krenek book, for example [Krenek 1940]. What always worried me about Schoenberg was the harmonic aspect; that it didn’t really have a function, and that one could imagine other harmonies replacing the existing harmonies without substantially changing the music. So I was always looking for ways of controlling the harmony. Of course you do find that in Webern, but he only managed to do it by restricting the number of harmonies very greatly. This worked for him, but obviously wouldn’t necessarily work for anybody else. So I was always interested in this harmonic aspect, and that’s why I started to base pieces on harmonies. They often contained all the 12 notes, but instead of thinking of tone rows and then verticalizing them into harmonies, I started with harmonies and tried to make the horizontal aspect of the music come from them.

CM You were also going to the Dartington Summer Schools around about the time you were at the Royal College. What did you learn there?

RS I probably went four or five times through the early sixties. The people I can remember doing the composition course were Lutosławski, Nono, and Elisabeth Lutyens. I honestly can’t remember learning much from Lutyens or Nono, but I think I did learn something from Lutosławski. He had broken out of … well, he had been allowed to progress beyond the official limits that you find in the Concerto for Orchestra and those earlier works. He’d recently written the Funeral Music for strings [1958] and Jeux Vénitiens [1961] – and I think he also talked about the Trios Poèmes d’Henri Michaux [1963]. So he’d just written the first couple of pieces in which he’d begun to establish his aleatoric counterpoint. And of course he controlled this largely by big harmonies.

CM But a much more obvious influence was Maxwell Davies, especially in the first pieces through which you became recognized – pieces like the Missa Brevis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Music Examples
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1 Culminating Moments: An Interview with Roger Smalley
• 2 A Child of Serialism (1961–65)
• 3 Changing Orientations (1965–74)
• 4 In a New Land (1974–88)
• 5 Back to the Future II (1988–99)
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Appendix 1: A Timeline of Smalley’s Works and his Major Influences
• Appendix 2: Smalley’s Writings
• Appendix 3: List of Works
• Index